113 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/26/16 Things Scroll Apart, The Pixel Cannot Hold”

1. Ken Josenhans on January 26, 2016 at 9:54 am said:

   @Connie Jo @6:24 am

   Hi, nice to meet you! I was standing not far from you at the Confusion panel on awards.

   Thanks Ken, let’s do it again. I expect to be done with wheelchair and orthotics by April or so, so you might not recognize me!

   Thanks to all of you for the discussion on Confusion. I did have fun, I just felt all alone. The Con did offer me a half price entry fee for my wheel pusher. My wheel chair pusher being my husband who could care less about sf, I felt that it would take way more marriage points than I was willing to spend. If you know what I mean.

   At the Friday night reception I ended up sitting with and having a long conversation with one of the GOHs. Although it took me a while to realize who he was. So I have a giant orthotic foot thing and was in a wheelchair. At one point GOH said “may I ask you about your foot?” Answer: “there’s a trigger warning. It’s really icky.”
   GOH: “well, you look just like my dad right now, and here’s what happened to him.” And went on to tell a story virtually identical to mine. Nice to know that someone else had this very rare thing happen to their foot.

   I am a public library director and found several conversations relevant to my work. Duh, books, etc. I had a very interesting conversation after a panel on independent ebook publishing during which I had said if you want to get your e-books in public libraries you need to get them available through Overdrive. One of the authors told me about trying to get his book into Overdrive. I will also note that if your book is published by one of the big five, libraries are often paying a standard $65.00 price for the e-book. Do you authors get a fair share of that? I have no clue.

   I think I will definitely do Conclave and give it another chance. With a hotel room for that late afternoon rest. And I’ll put a call out to the File770ers for a date.

   Thanks for all your comments. I have been lurking here forever, and while that wasn’t my first ever post it was certainly my longest.

2. Isn’t Claire Wendling a Guest of Honor at Worldcon 75?

   >off to check<

   Yes, she is!

3. Is there a Pixel Scroll compendium? (PS rather than SP which would cause confusion.)

   When Filers were in Glyer’s land:
   Let my Pixels Scroll

4. @Xtifr

   Aha! Another Guns n’ Roses fan!

   Welcome to the Jungle,
   We got scrolls and pix,
   We have everything you want,
   How do you get your fix,

   We are the readers that will find,
   Whatever you may need,
   If you got the puppies, honey,
   We got your disease

   In the jungle, welcome to the jungle,
   Watch it bring books to your kn-kn-kn-kn-knees, knees,
   Oooh, I want to watch you read!

5. Re 2nd (7)

   It’s been fascinating to learn more about what’s behind the pricing of books and e-books. I had originally written off Green’s piece as part of the burgeoning internet sub-genre of “Libertarian Champions of Capitalism Whining About Others Practicing Capitalism On Them”; while I still have that opinion its very nice to learn something about the topic as well.

6. @redheadedfemme

   Gah, I’ve been trying to come up with a variation on that since the poetry killing day!

   fistbump

7. @TheYoungPretender

   “Libertarian Champions of Capitalism Whining About Others Practicing Capitalism On Them”

   Ha, I could have just shortened my response to this, couldn’t I?

8. Speaking as an ex-professional editor, editing costs are distinct from printing & binding costs in any P&L I ever drew up. (And distinct again from overhead, even when the editing is done in-house and not freelance.)

   Note that printing & binding costs per unit drop drastically as your print run goes up: they’ll be nowhere near one-eighth of the cost per book when The Winds of Winter comes out. (Of course, a larger print run generally increases risk on returns, and is frequently correlated with better royalty terms for the author, as it’s usually a known bestselling author.)

   Also, royalties are a true per-unit cost only after the author earns out the advance and starts receiving additional royalties per unit sold. (Note that a publisher can make a profit before the earn-out point: a normal P&L, while tending towards optimistic, tries to assume sales such that actual losses are relatively rare, except for an occasional book published which is expected to be only a succes d’estime.)

9. Being a very amatuer economist, I appreciate the continuing education on publishing economics.

   A couple quick thoughts.

   1) Marketing may influence purchasing patterns, but it isn’t economics. The creation of perceived value is not the same thing as actual value.

   which leads to….

   2) Based on a hyper-localized sample of one, Ms. Green has a point about ebook readers being price sensitive relative to physical books. As an example, I recently went looking for a 2015 book. The hard cover copy was selling for ~US$22-23 from Amazon, B&N, etc. The ebook was priced at $20. I found the same hard cover available from smaller retailers for $20 (including S&H).

   I thoroughly enjoyed the copy that was at the library and will be hitting the author’s tip jar presently. But I would have paid good hard cash if the ebook had been available at a price point that reflected the modestly lower production costs (no ink, paper, and hard cover) and acknowledged the actual value of the book as determined by the market (~US$20 vs US$23).

   This is particularly true when they will be presently be selling paperback versions in a few months priced at US$15 but actually selling for something closer to US$10. I’d have coughed up $16-17 even knowing that the price would drop further in a few months. I had read and enjoyed the first few chapters as a preview on my Nook.

   There is a difference between buying a license to read an electronic book and buying and actual physical book. That difference exists as a matter of production costs and as perceived value to the reader. Pricing schemes that attempt to obfuscate those issues generally do not last very long.

   Regards,
   Dann

10. @Cat:

    In PPPB, do editing and typesetting costs get rolled into “printing” or are they separate? Specifically I am wondering if PPPB costs include parts that apply to e-books (as editing obviously would and typesetting probably would) or if they are unique to paper.

    Best practice separates those out. Typesetting and editing are step costs – “fixed costs” within reason: you incur those whether you sell 1 copy or 1 million copies and they don’t vary with the volume. PPPB is a variable cost – it’s components of manufacturing whose expense you incur with each new copy you roll out.

    Also it seems reasonable to me that retailer costs would be lower with e-books than p-books (don’t need to dust the stock; inventory would (I think) become a more automated process; the store doesn’t need vacuuming as often, etc.) Retailer costs + profit appear to be 50% of the hardback price (for large chain retailers) and I’m wondering how that would be affected by e versus p. If you have any rule-of-thumb estimates on that I would be very interested to read them.

    Oh sure. I don’t have a model handy, but this is a reason, beyond purchase volume discounts, why etailers can offer the discounts they do. Now, what can happen for ecommerce is that other costs expand to fill the “gap” – for instance, your marketing budget (pay-per-click, SEO, display) may end up bigger than a brick & mortar retailer. Depends on the business.

11. @James:

    Note that printing & binding costs per unit drop drastically as your print run goes up: they’ll be nowhere near one-eighth of the cost per book when The Winds of Winter comes out. (Of course, a larger print run generally increases risk on returns, and is frequently correlated with better royalty terms for the author, as it’s usually a known bestselling author.)

    Also, royalties are a true per-unit cost only after the author earns out the advance and starts receiving additional royalties per unit sold. (Note that a publisher can make a profit before the earn-out point: a normal P&L, while tending towards optimistic, tries to assume sales such that actual losses are relatively rare, except for an occasional book published which is expected to be only a succes d’estime.)

    These are good points. Thanks. I think I’d alluded to the advance/royalty complication at one point, but I didn’t emphasize it, and I certainly didn’t call out your caution about the relationship between PPPB and print volume.

12. That JMS interview was fantastic. While Babylon 5 and Sense8 both have their problems, they remain two of my favourite SF shows.

13. There was a panel at Sasquan (I forget which one) where they talked about traditional vs. self publishing. After it ended, I went up to talk to a panelist who represented one of the big publishing companies. She had made the point that these days you can buy all the services that a top publisher offers (e.g. proofreading) a la carte, and I wanted to know what that would cost.

    “If I wanted to self-publish an e-book, but I wanted it edited and such to the same high standard as a professionally published book, what would that cost?”

    “So editing, proofing, and cover art, but no marketing, right?”

    “Yeah.”

    “About $20,000. Give or take.”

    I suppose I could browse web sites that give advice on self-publishing and see how that compares, but I haven’t done that. (I suspect they’ll have lower estimates.) What struck me, though, was how low this was. If that’s really all it costs, then publishers only deserve a royalty for their marketing efforts–not the work involved in actually turning a manuscript into a book.

14. @Greg Hullender: I think “deserve” is a tricky term there. But I’ll just note that one part of the value proposition is that the publisher is absorbing the risk for you. Leave aside that half of all Americans could not lay hands on $400 in an emergency, per a recent survey. A trad pub sinks those production costs into your book and if your book bombs that money is gone. But you personally haven’t spent it.

15. for wordpress users inflicted with formatting issues from copied text (usually PR emails, but not always).

    Usually the problem affects spacing/layout/font size and appearance. Since one (usually) wants to preserve as much of the original formatting as possible, saving the file or converting it to *.txt is often counter-productive.

    My work around is as follows:
    1. paste the copied document into wordpress while in TEXT mode. This will reveal all of the markup code
    2. copy the text from WordPress and paste it into a blank notepad file
    3. use notepad’s native find and replace tool to find formatting code (always within arrow brackets “”””
    I usually just copy the opening code (not ending code – />) as wordpress will ignore and delete markup it doesn’t recognize automatically
    (put nothing in the “replace with” field)
    4. copy the cleaned up document back into your wordpress document

    It won’t take long to recognize the code that causes problems.

    Note that copying the original document into wordpress when it is in “VISUAL” editing mode will strip ALL of the (hidden) formatting code from the document.

    Note also that individual wordpress installations may have different values for markup tags. “XXX” may cause problems in one installation and not in another. (This is because the tags can be customized).

    Note also that tabular formatted information copied into wordpress usually uses HTML code to format the table (TR, TL, etc), while WordPress finds “ordered list” cost more friendly. If you are playing with the formatting of tabular info, you may want to retain a copy of the original as you hunt and peck through which code to remove…and there are other quirks I am sure you will have many fun-filled frustrating hours investigating as well.

    Final note: this comment, because it is in wordpress, will not display examples of markup code. They use the brackets that are above the comma and period punctuation on a keyboard. There’s a trick to getting them to display, but I forget it at the moment

16. Rather appropriately as publishing seems to be the topic of the day, here are some strong words from Kameron Hurley on the subject of contracts.

    The non-compete clauses she talks about sound like a terrible deal for authors.

17. A big chunk of being a professional author, ever since Pope (effectively the first not-for-hire professional author, as distinguished from Grub Street hacks, playwrights publishing already produced plays, amateurs publishing works written for other reasons, independently wealthy / noble authors, etc., etc.) published the translation of the Iliad by subscription, is getting some form of upfront payment plus reduction to the author’s risk in devoting him/herself to full-time writing. This has been managed in various ways — patronage and serialization are two alternatives to the current general trade publishing advance + royalties model — but it’s a big part of the value provided by a traditional publisher, combined with the marketing infrastructure they have which can greatly increase sales and exposure.

    Every so often somebody in either accounting or higher management at a large publisher comes up with the bright idea of improving profits by publishing only popular books, and / or avoiding publishing at least the dogs. To which the inevitable response is, from experience, that this can’t be determined beforehand any better than they’re currently doing. The public buys, and ignores, the weirdest things.

    If an author wants to spend 20,000 publishing an e-book themselves at pro levels of quality, or doing the equivalent at a vanity press, that’s fine. If Florence Foster Jenkins wants to rent Carnegie Hall, that’s fine as well. But for most authors who actually work for a living — and for the readers who want a reasonably steady flow of work from those authors — the most important piece of value added by the publisher is the existence of the books in the first place, made possible by a royalties system which protects the author from up-front expenditures and ensures an advance to cover the writing period.

    When you pay an extra margin ( compared to an MMPB price) for a newly-published book (HC or e-book), that’s supporting the ability of the publisher to provide that sort of service to the author, in a commercially viable manner, i.e. one which doesn’t encourage the publisher’s owners and directors to drop publishing and put their money into some higher-margin enterprise instead, like producing toothpaste. And for every HC out there, the publisher, based on some form of market research and previous experience, has made a calculation that even if you aren’t willing to pay the margin, there are enough people who are to make a profit on it; and that there are also people who are willing to pay nearly that much (or at least more than they would later) for the e-book and the convenience it gives over a hardcover. (By the way, the discount on e-books can be significant even for new books: consider Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky: HC is 29.99, Amazon.ca has it discounted to 26.69, and the e-book (DRM-free) is 13.99 (all in CAD)).

18. Greg Hullender –

    I suppose I could browse web sites that give advice on self-publishing and see how that compares, but I haven’t done that. (I suspect they’ll have lower estimates.) What struck me, though, was how low this was. If that’s really all it costs, then publishers only deserve a royalty for their marketing efforts–not the work involved in actually turning a manuscript into a book

    I suspect you’d get higher and lower estimates that would vary wildly depending on the amount of work involved and the quality of the final product. There are some ala carte vanity publishing services that exist where you can pay for that work upfront instead of having the publisher invest the risk, if you can afford to do so. Regardless if the author invests the money for professional level services or the publisher does, it’s still work that certainly deserves to be compensated.

    Green’s article sounds a little too much like anecdotal evidence seeking confirmation bias in order to instruct a company on how they should or shouldn’t be making money without trying to assess any other factors than what they’ve already determined the root cause to be. Like if a smaller number of people buying at a higher price is more profitable than a larger number buying at a smaller price, if there are outside factors such as the decline of eBook reader sales affecting eBooks sales, or what the impact of services such as Kindle Unlimited might have on the market. I don’t think publishers really need to read the financial advice of someone whose entire word of caution is based off of a conclusion is based off of looking at eBook prices and grasping at the closest straw anymore than climate scientists should listen to those who point out that climate change is obviously linked to the lack of pirates.

19. @Mark

    Why thank you. Not joking about it being a burgeoning sub-genre. The benefit of having once had libertarian beliefs is that one gets a fantastic view of the unacknowledged privilege of such beliefs as you ease out of them.

20. Since Mike already brought off the “Vanilla Isis” stand-off the other day (I believe it was a letter from Ursula k. LeGuin?) I guess it won’t be too bad for me to drop this controversial item here. The dead protester? The one who whined because he made most of his income from revolving-door fostering children as free labor on his ranch? It appears that he was a novelist:

    http://www.amazon.com/Only-Blood-Suffering-LAVOY-FINICUM/dp/193773594X

    http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26145748-only-by-blood-and-suffering

    And it seems to be more-or-less science fiction, too–a post-nuclear war distopia.

21. @Kyra: Woo, Paul Cornell review! I admit, I differed slightly from you on this one–I liked the fact that it was structured a bit less like a police investigation and a bit more like a magician’s initiation. Everyone was essentially undergoing an ordeal of some sort to prove themselves worthy of further progress along their chosen path, and I thought the choices some of them made for what to sacrifice were highly interesting and very dramatic. (Vaguing it up, of course.) But I can see where you’d derive a little less enjoyment from this one.

    Are you reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Folly books? Similar patch. (in fact, Cornell and Aaronovitch, who’ve known each other for ages, met before they started to hash out what they wanted to do and what they didn’t want the other one touching. Cornell assumed he’d be well ahead of Aaronovitch because Ben was notoriously late with his Who books, only to get lapped repeatedly. Fun story from a con.) And the Folly is heavy on the police procedure stuff. If you haven’t, you might like them.

22. I generally agree with Kyra about Paul Cornell’s The Severed Streets; however I wasn’t much amused by the presence of the well known fantasy author.

    Interesting discussion of publishing economics.

    My most recent genre reading has been Touch by Claire North, A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias, and The Curse of Chalion. I found Touch interesting. The author seems to have taken the fantastic premise of her action/suspense story a little more seriously than many would have done, and explored it in some depth. It’s not just a stripped down thriller. I will be reading North’s well received “Harry August” novel. I really liked A Darkling Sea, and I’m halfway through The Curse of Chalion. Bujold sure can tell a story.

    I am away from home in a smallish city with evenings free, so I may well see the new Star Wars movie this week.

23. John Seavey —

    I’ve read Rivers of London / Midnight Riot, but not any of the subsequent books in Aaronovitch’s series. (Maureen Johnson also has a more YA “Magical Police Force In London” series, and I enjoyed the first two books of that but the third one had me rolling my eyes a bit.)

    I see what you’re saying about the magician’s initiation aspect, and that is interesting, but I felt in general the book was a little less tightly plotted than the first, with more relying on coincidence or information that happens to get dropped in their laps. It hasn’t put me off the series, though!

24. StephenFromOttawa —

    I wasn’t much amused by the presence of the well known fantasy author.

    I wasn’t at first, when it seemed like it was just going to be, “Look! A WKFA is a character! You will find it interesting because it is a reference to someone you are familiar with!” But I was mollified by where Cornell went with it, giving WKFA an unexpected role in the unfolding plot. I figured if he was going to do it at all, defying character expectations was a decent way to go about it.

25. @Kyra: Good, because the next one sounds amazing!

    http://www.tor.com/2015/11/26/who-killed-sherlock-holmes-paul-cornell-cover-reveal/

    @StephenFromOttowa: I’ve heard a lot of people who said that–me, I thought it was hilarious. I mean, it wouldn’t have been if it had been without permission, but honestly, that second-act twist works so much better because of who it involves. (Again, vaguebooking it for spoilers.)

26. As a hybrid author (who is currently putting off finishing a book because then it will be done and I will have to figure out what I’m doing with my life when not writing it) I certainly do not believe that publishers only deserve a “royalty” for what they do.

    I’ve self-published a few times, and still do. I enjoy it, I have a system that works for me, and I make money on it. I pay for editing (and am damn lucky to be able to barter my art skills for a discount from a pro-editor) and I have the skills to make a competent, if not brilliant cover.

    And it is a LOT of damn work. And if I didn’t have a very particular skillset, it would be a LOT of expense. (I’ve priced out better cover artists than me. They are worth the money, but I won’t spend it any time soon.) And that doesn’t even get into distribution.

    The greatest sales I’ve ever had on a self-published novel, where I was getting 70%, barely equaled the advance alone on the first book in a new series where I was getting 12% (with 13.5 elevator after 20K sold) minus my agent’s cut. By the time that book had been out a year, it had swamped anything I’ve achieved in self-pub. And that’s because of all the things a Big Five publisher can do that I, as self-publisher, can’t.

    So I am actually quite okay with my slice of the pie, and I think they earn it. It’s better to be a small part of something huge than the largest part of nothing much. I’d be very frustrated, perhaps, if it was my only outlet, but in this glorious hybrid world, I get my cake and get to publish it too.

27. Yes; my thanks to Ms Green for her inadvertent evocation of some very happy memories.

    On the other hand, if she wants to be taken seriously it would help if she didn’t make egregious errors like what she did.

28. @Kyra

    I’m broadly with you on Severed Streets being a little under par compared to London Falling. WKFA was a bit left-field, but I think references are going to keep on coming, because no 3 is titled “Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?” The first two have been good enough for me to pre-order it.
    I do think Aaronovitch’s series is marginally better, and they’re easy reads to boot.

    ETA: has anyone tried the RIvers of London comics? Any good?

29. I have the “Body Work” sequence in the RoL comics; my assessment would be “fun but slight”.

30. And it seems to be more-or-less science fiction, too–a post-nuclear war distopia.

    When I first heard about it, a week or so back, the reports were that it’s gun pr0n disguised as an apocalyptic dystopia. Very graphic, very bad.

31. In case anyone is all done with their 2015 Dramatic Presentation evaluations and looking for 2016 works, the anime reviewer community is as close to unanimous as I’ve ever seen that ERASED is the best new show of the year so far.

    (Depending on where you are, you may be able to watch it online at Crunchyroll, Anime Lab, Wakanim, peppermint anime, or Daisuki.)

32. @Darren Garrison

    And it seems to be more-or-less science fiction, too–a post-nuclear war distopia.

    Sounds from the Goodreads reviews like a more… PC… version of The Turner Diaries. Hopefully it’s better-written.

    Reading-wise – just finished Planetfall. Read it almost entirely in one sitting. It’s another one up there on the shortlist. Googling for filer discussion on it, my recollection that a lot of folk here agree with that is correct.

33. Check out Hampus Eckerman’s new post Stalking Chernobyl.

34. What RedWombat said. There *may* be some stuff I self-publish in the future, either because of length or genre or whatever. But I’d really prefer to find a publisher, even at standard PB royalty rates. Probably more so: *she* is an awesome artist and can put together a cover on her own, whereas *I* can maybe draw stick figures if the day is right.

    But more to the point: distribution. You could not pay me *enough* to network and PR and do all the stuff involved in marketing a book. Even on official blog tours, my best sales pitch is…not exactly polished. (I’m a very stereotypical New England girl, and I was not raised to brag about stuff, so I always end up with some variant of “here I wrote a thing check it out if you want or you know not whatever I’m over here” and then running off into the metaphorical woods.) And if I had to maintain a whole website? Noooooope.

    As a reader, moreover, I prefer tradpub unless I already like the author or an author I do know (or a friend, etc) has given a thumbs-up. The publication board/editor/agent/etc gatekeeping process doesn’t prevent me from running into total crap (*cough*Fifty Shades *cough*) and I’m sure there are undiscovered gems in self-publishing, but life is short and I have many books to read, I hope. Knowing that a book has made it past at least three to five skeptically-inclined professionals before it reaches me at least narrows the odds somewhat.

35. I’m definitely in the camp that thinks a professional publisher earns their cut. (I could wish that I had a larger publisher, or one who had a better clue how to market my particular books, but that’s a separate matter.) On the other hand, I’m going to be entering the swamps of hybrid nature this year with a book that would be extremely unlikely to exist by any other path. It’s a collection of the series I sold to the Sword and Sorceress anthologies, capped off by a not-previously-published novella in the same world. I tried unsuccessfully to interest my publisher in it, and I don’t have a big enough name to interest anyone else in it. I thought for a while I’d try to sell the novella as a stand-alone first and then do the collection, but the novella market is rather dire and in the end I decided the advantage of having brand new material in the collection was more important.

    I’m quaking in my boots at the prospect of lining up an editor, cover artist and designer, possibly someone else to handle the packaging aspect as well (probably only going for e-book), and working out distribution. But on the other hand, except for the concluding novella, it’s all material I’ve already sold once which makes me feel a little less nervous about possibly botching the whole thing. I’m going into the project with the expectation that I most likely won’t even make back expenses. But it will be a useful learning experience. (And I can afford the loss for the sake of the education.)

36. godstalk

37. Late to the party I know, and I can’t bring myself to work out which thread from two or three days ago I should be saying it on, but that was a very fine story Red Wombat.

38. Oh dear; me too for the Mea Culpa on RedWombat’s story. I read it, and thoroughly enjoyed it, since it had interesting paths which I wandered down so far that I completely forgot the origin of said paths. So, thank you for the story.

    This is not of direct relevance, but much of English folk lore was made up by very keen people in the last couple of centuries. However, there are times when fact is stranger than fiction, and I commend to you the works of Professor Ronald Hutton, who is an acknowledged expert in the origins and history of paganism in Britain.

    And thus it came to pass that Professor Ronald Hutton prepared a witness statement for the trial at Southwark Crown Court of Arthur Pendragon regarding his right to carry the ritual dagger Excalibur as an expression of his sincerely held religious beliefs.

    It was a very good witness statement, which had the desired effect; Excalibur was returned to Arthur Pendragon.

39. The Witness Statement can be found at:

    http://www.warband.org.uk/-statement.html

    ETA
    Pagans may induce frothing at the mouth in non- pagans but I propose to ignore that.

40. Stevie, that’s giving me a 404

41. Belated thanks from me, too, first to Johan P for pointing me in the direction of the Send to Kindle extension, and also to Red Wombat for providing a most excellent way to try it out.

42. @nickpheas,

    This?

43. Nickpheas

    I haven’t a clue why; I cut and pasted the Url, and that’s the limits on my cyber skills. If you can bear running a Google search on Ronald Hutton Witness Statement Arthur Pendragon it should be top of the list.

    And Ninja’d by Soon Lee!

44. @redheadedfemme: Wow! I bow to the master. That’s excellent!

45. (2) Those Terra magazines (because they were digest-sized magazines rather than paperbacks) were a common sight on German fleamarkets well into the 1990s. There was a stall at our local riverside fleamarket that always had a stack of Terra Utopische Romane.

    (7) That post is very typical of the whole indie versus trade publishing pseudo-conflict. I’ve read similar statements from strident self-publishing proponents a hundred times before. They don’t get any more convincing with repetition

    As for how much it costs to self-publish, that’s a wide range, depending on the self-publisher’s skill-set, available funds and priorities (e.g. custom cover art or make do with stock art and premade covers). I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any self-publisher who paid 20000 USD, though I’m sure there are some. I know a couple of self-publishers who pay four figure sums for per novel (including one who went into debt to afford a fancy custom cover) and also a few who pay very little and do pretty much everything themselves. Most fall somewhere inbetween those two extremes.

46. Still reading on Chuck’s “Heartland” series (I got less read last night than the previous one, as my insomnia was much less. Win-win, either way).

    I like Paul Cornell, but due to my current mental state and weltanschauung (or some similar German word), I’m not wanting to go that dark. So I stick with the (by comparison) lighter Aaronovich. I adore and devour those, though the comic book Does Not Do It for me. The artwork just doesn’t look like the description of the characters — not just my image of them, but the actual book words. And the plotting and dialogue just aren’t even close. Not worth your dollars, pounds, or euros.

    I’m all for druids, but you can’t just go around calling yourself “Arthur Pendragon” unless you’re the real thing. (Wanders off into “Holy Grail” quotes) However, if Sikhs can carry a dagger, so can druids.

    Like I said “It’s called capitalism, Amanda”. And YES, there are so many glibertarians who love capitalism when they’re the ones making money and hate it when it works as designed. And then they have to whine-screed about it.

47. Heather Rose Jones, can I ask which short stories were yours from Sword & Sorceress? There were a couple that I would love to read more about…

48. RedWombat: Heather Rose Jones, can I ask which short stories were yours from Sword & Sorceress? There were a couple that I would love to read more about.

    Heather Rose Jones’ credits on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

    If you click on the individual Short Fiction titles, it will tell you in what volumes of Sword and Sorceress (and/or any other publications) they were published.

49. So I finished The Great Way trilogy by Harry Connolly in under a week and made a start on The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley a couple of days ago.

    I enjoyed The Great Way but it seemed a much more standard kind of fantasy than The Mirror Empire. In fact, I’d say the latter blew my socks off, and very nearly my feet with them. Even this early on (around ~150 pages in, I think) it seems extremely dark, though.

50. Even this early on (around ~150 pages in, I think) it seems extremely dark, though.

    You haven’t seen dark yet.

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