If you glance over at the sidebar, you’ll see that “Running” clocked in at about 7,000 words.  A thousand more than I’d initially planned, but I think they’re pretty decent words all the same.  Now comes the shopping it around part, which induces nail-biting and hair pulling.  I’m not happy with the title, but brain-wracking hasn’t supplied me with anything better so far, sadly.  Thus, it goes out with its working-title, and we’ll see what happens.

You’ll also notice that the status bar on Night Owls hasn’t really moved.  I’m trying something a wee bit different this go-round:  the loosest of outlines.  Nothing terribly set in stone, just a sort of “this happens, then this happens, then this happens.”  We’ll see where it takes me, if anywhere.

Because, well, I have a little something else nibbling away in the back of my head, and I’m getting ready to poke it with a stick.  There’s what I might call a recurring character in some of my dabbles — none of which have really seen the light of day — and I think I might have figured out who she is and what she’s up to.  But this one’s going to take a wee bit of research before I get writing.  And when I figure out whether it’s a novel or a short story, I’ll give it a status bar.

I’ve been working at making Ye Olde Writing Space a little more mine. Which is sort of silly — my computer’s been in the same room for probably two years now.  But it was originally Greg’s office, so there’s still some of his stuff on the walls (not that I mind the swords, exactly.  If the zombie apocalypse comes, I’m well-armed) and there was this big curio cabinet thing looming over me.  The reason for that is simple:  we don’t have anywhere else to put this stuff right now, so it made more sense just to leave it where it was.

And yet…

Last weekend, in celebration of Massachusetts’ tax-free holiday, we went out and Bought Stuff.  I got a laser printer, since my Little Deskjet That Could was only printing about 230 pages per ink cartridge.  When “Running” is 32 pages long, that’s 14% of my ink right there.  If I wanted to print out, say, Nin, I’d need two or three cartridges.  So!  New printer!  And a new ladder-style bookshelf thing!

Which of course made the room look too crowded.  So I measured.  And plotted.

And wandered out to where poor Greg was trying to play some Starcraft II and said, “So if the cabinet technically fits in the other room…”

Bless his heart, he helped me move it.  Now, my printer table/filing cabinet is on the wall where the curio cabinet once was, and as soon as I hang a picture or something to cover the empty wall space, it’ll look pretty keen.  The walls themselves are a neutral beige color.  The new debate is whether I leave ‘em the hell alone and just redecorate with new accessories — hang up some of the stuff that’s been gathering dust, get new curtains, maybe paint the trim on the doors and windows — or whether or not I find a new color of paint to smear on the walls.

Decisions, decisions.

I know, it probably sounds a bit like cat vacuuming:  if I’m fixing up my space, I’m not writing.  To a point, it absolutely is.  But it’s also a bit of mental gynmastics.  If the room makes me happy, writing in it will, too.

Hill: I have a request
for l’esprit d’escalier

me: What’s up?

Hill: that you outline what the process IS we’re going through,
from writing to editing to query letter to partials to fulls and to representation
so I can link it to people
and go
HERE THIS EXPLAINS IT

—

Ask and ye shall receive.

Note: this is the third time I’ve tried writing this post. I keep veering off into tangents that, while they’re pretty relevant, take their sweet-ass time actually answering the above request.  So let’s see if I can stop trying to explain the whole of the book industry and just, y’know, explain what we’re up to over here.

As you know, Bob, Hill and I wrote a book. It’s a young adult fantasy novel.  It doesn’t suck. We went back and forth over the course of about a year and a half, writing 1,000-2,000 words before passing it back to the other.  Every now and then we’d get together and rehash what was left to write.  We wrote until it was done.

We had what I call our zero draft. It was a completed manuscript, yes, but it wasn’t ready to go out into the world.  We handed it over to a few people for a read-through, to help us catch inconsistencies and glaring errors, and then we edited the hell out of it. We took a look and got rid of scenes that didn’t advance the plot, cliches that didn’t spice up the writing, and put that bad cat into standard manuscript format.

Then it was time to find an agent. There are several steps to this, so let’s break out the bullet points:

• First, we did our research. Would you ask  your vegetarian friend to taste your bacon-wrapped-in-bacon recipe and recommend it to other people?  Nope.  For that same reason, you need to find agents that represent the genre in which you’re writing.  You don’t submit, say, contemporary YA fantasy to someone who only represents non-fiction.
• Then, we worked on our query letter. Queries are nerve-wracking.  You have about a page — really just a few paragraphs — to explain why your book kicks ass, and why that particular agent would be right for you.  I’ve spent a lot of time at Query Shark, looking to see what other people got right and wrong, learning how to write something that should stand out.  In addition to the query letter, a lot of agencies ask to see the first 5-10 pages.  So, we have dual nail-biting going on there: the query is mostly me; the first few pages are mostly Hill.  Fortunately, the combination of the two seem to have garnered us some interest. Win!
• If an agent likes the query and sample pages, he or she requests a partial. “Partials” are pretty much exactly what they sound like: part of the manuscript.  The amount an agent will want to see varies.  For the most part, it’s been a request for the first 30 pages or first 3 chapters.  Others have asked for 50 pages/first 5 chapters.  It depends on how much of the story that particular agent needs to get a good feel for the story.
• If an agent likes the partial, he or she requests the full. “Full” is just like it sounds, too:  someone wants to see the whole gorram thing.  Hill and I have had a few requests for fulls so far.   If queries and partials were nerve-wracking, waiting on responses for fulls are even more so.  Because…
• If an agent likes the full, he or she offers representation. This is where, when it finally happens, we will run around in circles screaming and generally embarrassing ourselves.

Of course, having representation doesn’t mean we’re published yet, does it?

Once we have an agent, that agent will show the books to editors. And we start the whole damned process over again, only this time, we have someone who has the trust of editors and publishers on our side, being enthusiastic about our work and getting it on publishers’ desks.

If an editor likes our book, they will make an offer.  At that point, the agent would present the offer to us, go over the contract with us, and advocate for us so we get the best deal we can.  (Those two sentences alone could spiral into so many digressions.  Understand I’m oversimplifying here.  I’ll eventually post a little more in-depth about how offers get made — it’s not just “Hey, I like your book, have a wad of cash” — and why agents are so damned essential to the process.)

Once we’ve signed with a publisher (which is when you’d say our book has been aquired), we’ll go through rounds of revisions.  Editors make your book better.  They help with plot and pacing and turn your book from pretty awesome into wicked awesome.

When the revisions are done, and probably a thousand other things I’m glossing over, the book will be scheduled for release. It’s honestly probably about a year-long process, maybe even two, from when the book is bought to when it hits bookstore shelves.

Think of it this way:  right now, people here are working on books that will be in bookstores in the spring/summer of 2011.  They were probably acquired in the fall of 2009 or very early in 2010.  So, even if an agent were to offer us representation tomorrow and we had a deal by the end of the summer, chances are, Nin wouldn’t be on bookshelves until the fall of 2011 at the earliest.  More likely, spring of 2012.

Couple of things about all of the above, as if I haven’t thrown enough at you:

–Every agent is different.  Some have requested fulls right off of the query letter.  Some have online forms to fill out instead of the queries.  Some of them want a synopsis, too, which makes me weep copious tears.**

–Agents’ response times vary.  Some get back to us in a day or less.  Others take weeks.  Still others take months.  There are more than a few who state that if we don’t receive a response, we can assume they’re passing on the work.  That gets pretty frustrating, figuring out at what point we move the agent off of the “query response pending” part of the spreadsheet and stick it on the page I’ve named “Rejections “

–BEA was about three weeks ago.  It’s the big publishing industry trade show, where publishers, editors, agents, authors and booksellers go and gorge themselves on books for three days.  It also means everyone falls behind on what comes into their inboxes.  Some agents receive hundreds of queries a day, so imagine the overflow they came back to.  Which means when we’re going, “But Agent Awesome’s website says she’ll get back to us in three weeks and it’s been four,” we have to sigh at the calendar and remind ourselves she’s probably still clawing her way out of everything that came in during BEA.

Anyway. The TL;DR version of the post is this:

1. Write book
   
2. Revise manuscript
   
3. Query agents
4. Get partial requests
5. Get full requests
6. Get agent OMFG YAY!
7. Agent sends manuscript to editors
8. Editor makes offer
9. Happydance
10. A year-ish later, see our book on actual bookstore shelves.

So.  Questions?  Comments?  Anything I can clarify?  Any parts of this process you want me to go into in further detail?  Have at it!

**A synopsis is a two or three page outline of your book, from start to finish.  Where a query letter presents the central problem without revealing the resolution, the synopsis wants the spoilers.  Query letters let you inject a little humor and your own voice.  A synopsis is just the facts, ma’am, or, as I put it to Hill: “It’s like watching the boring dude in the office explain the plot of last night’s Awesome TV Show.  It’s hard not to go, ‘but funny shit happens in here, I SWEAR!’“

It wasn’t until years later, when I was in college, that I understood precisely what those bags were for.

That’s when I met Greg and was invited to sit in on a few gaming sessions with his group.  Someone pulled out a Crown Royal bag full of dice.

Finally, I understood what those velvety purple bags were truly destined to hold.  Not whiskey, but dice.

When *cough*-edyteen years later** Gameplaywright announced they’d be publishing a book about gamers and their dice, I knew I’d have to have it.

Last week, I finally got my grimy little paws on The Bones: Us and Our Dice.  And lo, it is awesome.  If you’ll pardon my clumsy attempt at a review, I’m going to ramble a bit about it here.

There’s a little something for every gamer geek in The Bones. Want a history of dice and ancient games?  It’s there.  Prefer the same in comic form?  John Kovalic of Dork Tower delivers, and shows us how little our relationships with the dice have changed over the millennia.  In every article and essay, I found myself nodding and grinning along in the spirit of shared experience (as Will Hindmarch says in his introduction, “Welcome home, nerd.”)

I read the interview with GamesByEmail’s  Scott Nesin on the train ride home, and within five minutes of walking in the door, had the video of his Dice-O-Matic up so I could see it in action.  

In his essay “The Unrollable,” Pat Harrigan puts voice to all the anxieties I’ve had as a GM, and makes me feel like maybe I was doing it right, after all, when it came to my relationship with dice.  I was never a very dice-heavy GM because, well, my dice hated me. Remind me to tell you the story of how I had to suddenly pull the hidden villain out of the shadows several sessions early because a player’s lucky (really lucky.  Like, a handful of d10s coming up 10s lucky) roll killed off his right-hand man mid-dramatic escape arrrrgh.

But I’m not bitter.

Geekery abounds in the pages of The Bones. The contributors’ tales about the games and gamers in their lives make you feel like you’re sitting around at a gathering of roleplayers, swapping stories about those unforgettable moments of badass.  But these men and women have worked behind-the-scenes, too, developing some of the games we’ve loved, and working in several aspects of the game industry.  

The Bones is about more than just the clatter of dice on the table and that time you really needed a 20 and the polyhedral gods smiled down upon you (or turned their angled, carved-ivory faces away).  The essayists explore deeper questions, too — how dice reflect the randomness of life, how we might know, rationally, that there’s a statistical element to the rolls, but we go through our luck-drawing rituals anyway, and why we do those things.

Orders for the limited hardcover edition are open through the end of this week.  After that, orders for The Bones will be for the paperback edition.  Hie thee to Gameplaywright and order it. It’ll have you digging into your own Crown Royal bag and tossing out some rolls.

**I just did the math and realized that soon, I’ll have been gaming for more years than I haven’t.  I know, I know, some of you are well past that point.  What can I say?  I came to it later than a lot of other fellow geeks.

Go ahead, WoW geeks, you can say it: my hair is epic.

I’ve been told that in this and the other shot I took, I look pissed off.  I swear, I’m not.  I must have taken about 50 pictures, and only kept two.  The ones where I actually smiled for the camera?  Eek.  I couldn’t hit the delete button fast enough.  I’m one of those people who can’t smile on demand, especially for pictures.  So, neutral-face it is.

GUYS MY HAIR IS PURPLE AND I LOVE IT OMG.

(Also, because I know she’s waiting for it: yes, Hill, you were right. I should’ve done this ages ago.)

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while and put on your Sherlock hat, you might’ve sussed it out already; it’s not something I’ve been trying to hide, exactly.  More something I’ve simply left out.

And, truly, it’s not an earth-shattering confession.  I’m certainly not a Name anywhere.  You’re not going to sit back from your keyboard, stunned and shocked and jaw-dropped when you read it.  However, I’d like to get it out of the way so I can feel comfortable talking about some of the things I’d like to chat about around here, but haven’t, because I wasn’t fully disclosing.  So.  Onward.

It’s no secret that I work for a publisher.  I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned at least once that I’m in sales, and if I went digging, I’m also pretty sure I’ve mentioned my company is one of the Big Six.  But I’ve left the publisher’s name out because, well, this is a personal blog, and while I’ll happily spout forth about the book industry in general, I’m not going to go into specifics about what I do during the day.  Because that would get me fired, and I’m kind of keen on that whole having-a-job thing.

The problem with that, though, is when I’m jumping up and down going “OMG I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH,” if it’s one of ours, I feel weird not saying, “oh, and by the way, I work for the publisher.”  Which means I’ve talked about books in the past, but left out ours, and… well, I dunno.  The bookseller in me thinks that’s really bloody unfair.

Here’s your last chance for sleuthing: click that link and start eliminating publishers.  You can also knock Macmillan off the list, since I gushed about The Gathering Storm, and Simon & Schuster, since I wouldn’t shut up about Under the Dome last fall.  So, with the rest of that list, you can cross off Houghton Mifflin* (Life as We Knew It) Penguin (The Warrior-Prophet, The Name of the Wind), S&S again (Uglies), and Random House (Iron Angel).  That still leaves three big ones.  I’m too lazy to look back and see if I talked up any Harper books (though I did post pictures of my ARC of Fool).

I’ve talked about working in Boston.  Scholastic doesn’t have offices here that I’m aware of.

Which means, if you know your Big Six, you can see who’s missing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I work for Hachette Book Group.

Pick yourselves up off the floor, please, it’s unbecoming.

Now, like I said above, I’m neither a mover nor a shaker.  Not in the company, not in the industry.  If you said my name to someone (unless they’re one of my booksellers) they’d stare at you blankly and say “Who?“

I’m a sales rep, but I always feel like I need to put on the qualifier that I’m in telephone sales.  This doesn’t mean I call you while you’re having dinner and try to sell you stuff you don’t want.  I have an established territory.  I call booksellers whose stores might be smaller, or in out of the way places, or who just don’t need a rep coming out to visit them but still want someone they can call and talk to when they have questions.  I do the same things a field rep does, with the exception of selling face-to-face.

I talk to booksellers about books all day.  It is the best job ever.

It’s also the best company ever.  I’m not saying this to cover my ass in case someone at HBG sees this post.  I’m saying it because every day, something happens that reminds me I work with some of the smartest, savviest, most passionate people in the publishing industry.  From the top down, we have an amazing crew.  There are a lot of unsung heroes at any publisher.  They do jobs that, if you don’t know all the intricacies that go into getting a book on the shelf, you might not even realize existed.  I get to work with many of them, and they keep things running smoothly.

Did I mention the part where I get to talk to booksellers about books?  My buyers are amazing.  I’ve been talking to some of them for eight years now, and a week doesn’t go by that I don’t learn something from them.

I have several buyers who will geek out with me over sf/f books.  We’ll call or email one another and say “Have you read this yet?  Remember the part where…?”  Most of these are Orbit titles.  My booksellers get to go out and handsell them.  I’d like to gush to you lot about those same titles, but I’ve refrained since, well, they’re books I get paid to sell.  It didn’t seem right telling you to go buy a book without the disclaimer that I work for the publisher, so I just kind of self-censored.

Except… except that means I haven’t been talking about some of the books that I’ve absolutely loved, and the books I’m super crazy excited about, and that’s just anathema to me.  Yes, I’m a sales rep, but as I’ve said before, I still consider myself a bookseller at heart.  Booksellers spread the word about the books and authors that they feel strongly about because, well, we’re book lovers.  And if you’re here, reading this, I’m guessing you’re a book lover, too.

Which means, god damn it, we should be talking about books regardless of the ISBN prefix and the little symbol on the spine.

The official stuff, to satisfy my own personal ethics and for our official blogging policy:  the views and opinions expressed on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the views or opinions of Hachette Book Group.  If I say something stupid, it’s me, not the company.

And, to satisfy the FTC thinger, you can assume that if I’m writing about a book published by HBG, I have received a free ARC or have the manuscript on my shiny little Sony eReader.  (Though, more often than not, if I love a book, when it comes out I’m either buying a copy for myself or buying one for a friend who I think will love it, too.  Because I like it when authors get paid for their books, since that means they get to write more books for me to read.  I also like it when bookstores get to sell books, which keeps them open so I can go shopping in them.  I like bookstores being open.  I’m totally selfish like that.)

Understand, too, that I don’t get any kickback from anyone or anywhere if you lot go out and buy the books I recommend.  The only people who benefit monetarily from you buying books I recommend are the authors and the bookstores.  If you look, I don’t have any ads on here, and I don’t have any affiliation with bookstores that’d earn me money if you bought books through a link on my site.  I do encourage you to buy books through independent bookstores, thus the link to IndieBound over on the side.  But that’s because I like independent bookstores (see above paragraph), not because they’re slipping me twenties through the interwebs.

Lastly, if you have questions about what I do, it’s totally fine to ask, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.  I reserve the right not to answer certain questions, especially if you’re asking me for proprietary information, or for specifics that I’m not comfortable putting out there on ye olde internet (see: not wanting to get fired).  But I’ll let you know if that’s the case.

Okay?  Okay.

*Houghton-Mifflin isn’t one of the Big Six, but they are one of the last big publishers in Boston, and they’re pretty damned awesome.

This was not a pleasant discovery to happen upon between 3:30 and 7:00 AM Wednesday.

Anyway.  After some very positive feedback, Nin is going out into the world FOR REAL.  Hill and I have been putting together a list of agents to query, trying to find the ones that are looking for books like ours, and I think we have a pretty solid set to start with.  So… wish us luck!

Some of them are questions I can answer!

1. what’s the counting crows song that goes ba da ba da da

That’s an easy one.  “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues,” based on the play Geography of a Horsedreamer by Sam Shepard.  Here, give it a listen:

2. what to say to a valued publisher when the price is too high

Uh.  Okay, this question is kind of vague to me.  I’m assuming this is someone upset over the price of a book or eBook.  It appears that by calling them a “valued” publisher, you have some respect for their other work and have purchased their titles in the past.  So, first of all, approach them respectfully.  Most publishers will have an address you can write to with concerns.  It might appear to be a generic customer service email address, but it will get filtered on to the appropriate people.  When you write to them, lay out the reasons that you believe a price is too high:  is the binding falling apart, or the paper quality poor?  Are they charging $25 for a 50-page book with lots of blank white space on every page?

Be honest, but be polite.  And, also, do  your research.  Do you think eBooks shouldn’t cost more than $9.99 or less?  Why?  If your answer is “because they don’t cost anything to make,” close your email program right now, do not press send, come here while I smite you. Someone finally talked about the cost of books, both e- and print, in the New York Times.  Go read that.  And go read Tobias Buckell, who posted about this a while back.  Also, Charlie Stross, who’s taking us step by step through how books are made.

Now, if you dropped $400 on a Kindle and don’t feel like shelling out $10 for an eBook because it’s too expensive omg, I’ll give you a running start.  Would you whine about buying a car and then having to pay to put gas in it?  Or buying a refrigerator and having to buy food to put in it?  No?  Then stop crying about having to pay for books to read on the device you bought for the purpose of reading books.

Another context for this question that occurred to me:  are you an author who feels that the price your publisher has set on your book is too high?  Do you have a literary agent going to bat for you?  Talk it over with your agent, first.  If you’re unagented, ask your editor (again, politely and respectfully) how the publisher came to that pricing decision, and if there’s any wriggle room with it.

3.  tales from the kitchen cannibal

I… what?  Okay, I can’t answer this one, but I feel like it has the potential to be a hilarious zombie story.  Someone write it and entertain me with it. GO!  In the meantime, there’s an episode of The I.T. Crowd entitled “Moss and the German” that might give you a giggle.

4. how to say roy in french

I believe that would be kind of like roo-wah.  Though, the way you say roi, meaning king, is more like rwah.  I could also be completely wrong, since it’s been something ridiculous like fifteen years since I took French.

5. stuff of legends ian gibson

Needs to come out NOW.  But, alas, unless I can scrounge an ARC out of someone at Ace Books, I’m stuck waiting six more months for it just like the rest of you.  However, in the meantime (and through some googling of my own), I see that fellow Feathermooninite Ian Gibson has a blog.  To which you should go.

6. all royalties are based on net amount received by publisher (wholesale price achieved)

I don’t get what the parenthetical statment at the end means, and I’m neither an agent nor a lawyer, but your standard royalties for print books from a commercial publisher should be based off of your book’s cover price, not the net.  I can’t really speak to ebooks, since the times, they are a-changin’ in that regard.

That’s about all the wisdom I have for today, though if you have any other burning questions for me, go ahead and leave ‘em in the comments.  I’ll see what I can do!

I’ve come up with a big ol’ yes to that.  While I can take the monster that is the Alienware with me on trips, it’s also, well, a monster.  It’s big and heavy, which makes it Not Fun to lug around an airport.  Also, since most of my travel is business travel, chances are I don’t really have time to do much more than poke around the internet when I boot it up.  If my choices between meetings come down to “nap or play WoW,” I’m going to nap.  So, while a machine with an internet connection and a word processing program is pretty vital to me during those days, my sweet gaming rig isn’t.

As for more local usage, I can absolutely see myself using a netbook during my commute to and from work.  On the train yesterday, the beginning of a story started clicking into place.  I’d managed, in cleaning out my bag o’tricks, to take my college-ruled notebook out, but never put it back in, so the writing down of thoughts had to wait another half hour until I could get to my desk and some scrap paper.  What’s there on the page isn’t exactly what was in my head originally.  Still decent, but I feel like I’ve forgotten some turn of phrase I’d really liked.

It’ll also be good to have if the weather here ever gets nicer.  Not just for getting outside and writing during lunches, but taking advantage of our backyard in the summer, as well.

Now, there’s still a little voice hollering at me that I can do all this with pen and paper, and that’s very true.  But I type faster than I write, and have already discovered during NaNo that pen-and-paper writing on the train is an exercise in frustration — awkward position, holy ow my wrists, and handwriting made illegible by the movement of the train.

So, there it is.  It’s going to take a couple of weeks before it’s in my grimy little paws, but I’m pretty excited about it.

A note on the story that I mentioned above.  See poor, neglected Night Owls over there on the sidebar?  I think this new tale might be set in the same universe.  The good thing is, the tone of the new thing is much closer to the tone I wanted with Night Owls from the start.  I’m hoping the time I’ll be spending with the short story will help me figure out what I need to do to bring that voice to the novel.

Onward!

My flash fiction story, “Pomegranate,” is in the Spring 2010 edition of flashquake.

Go!  See!  And take a peek at all the stories there.  If you’ll pardon me, I’ll be over here /happydancing.

So, my tweet from last night (upon reading that Hachette will also move to an agency model for ebooks) not only got quoted by GalleyCat, it also became the post’s headline.

Um, hi, GalleyCat readers!
/shy wave

Before I send more links at you with Yet Another Update, I figure I ought to state this for the record (even though it’s probably kind of obvious anyway, and I know you’re a smart lot, but just in case):

I do not actually think Amazon should pull the buy buttons from any books, no matter how big or small the publisher, or how well any particular book or author is selling or not selling.

This hurts the authors. I don’t like hurting authors. I think pulling the buy buttons sucks, and that there had to be ways Amazon could have communicated their disagreement to Macmillan without kicking authors in the teeth.

The tweet was my smartassed, bravado-laden way of saying I’m so gorram proud of Hachette right now I could dance. True story: when I read the original GalleyCat post about it, I crowed “HA!” so loudly I scared a cat. (I did not, however, actually burst into dance, as I have no rhythm and the poor cat was already freaked out enough.)

Anyway, links to people far smarter than your hostess:

A new statement from Macmillan’s CEO. (For those of you keeping score at home: Macmillan 2, Amazon 0 on that. Still not a word from Jeff Bezos.)

Over at the Whatever, John Scalzi tells us why publishing isn’t going away anytime soon. In the form of a three-act play. With ass-kicking. He also interviews himself about the ongoing Amazon/Macmillan situation. He is truly a man of many talents.

Via GalleyCat, a picture of the New York Times ad for The Checklist Manifesto which lets readers know that the book is “available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.” (Dear Macmillan marketing and/or publicity departments: /fangirl. Love, falconesse.)

Jackie Kessler gives us a one-week update and some thoughts on eBook pricing.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden responds to and expands upon Susan Pivar’s HuffPo piece.

Cat Valente talks about what would happen in a future in which everyone self-published. (Spoiler: it’s not filled with rainbows and ponies and frolicking.)  Also, look at her comments on what the people at her publisher do. A quote!  For pony awesome!

If I hear one more person toss off editors like their completely irrelevant to the process, I’m going to have to smack an internet. This is not an auteur kind of gig. It is a team effort, and that is a good thing. What happens when one person has all the power to make artistic decisions without input from anyone else? The Phantom Menace, that’s what happens.

Blake Charlton, whose book Spellwright is coming out from Macmillan this week, has a conversation with the universe about What Happens to a Debut Author’s Brain on #Amazonfail

Also, my order filled with Macmillan-author goodness has shipped from Porter Square Books. /happydance. My offer from the other day still stands! Go forth and purchase books, o ye readers!

(And one more update, filed under “holy crap, the internets are full of win today:”  The Authors Guild launches Who Moved My Button? since y’know, Amazon doesn’t notify you themselves. h/t to the ever-awesome Lilith Saintcrow.)

Update #2:  First, Tobias Buckell does math for us, wondering why people want more expensive backlist titles.

And, according to PW, the buy buttons are starting to come back on Macmillan titles.  No word yet on what the terms of the agreement were, though I suspect it’ll be Macmillan who steps up and fills us in, not Amazon.