The Price is Wrong

PublishAmerica’s royalty checks – or lack thereof – went out at the start of September, and most writers received a reality check as a result. While their shocked and disillusioned reactions are painful even to witness, they’re also predictable. Without exception, PublishAmerica’s books are priced so highly that they’re not likely to sell except to the author's family and friends. Some Kindle ebooks are priced at well over $20 (after the author has paid $49 for the book to be uploaded to the Kindle).

That made me think of book pricing in general, though.

Writers can directly control the prices of their books only when self-publishing, and even then a self-publishing service such as CreateSpace won’t take a loss on a book, so there's a minimum price which needs to be set. There’s more flexibility with ebooks, though. Self-published ebooks tend to be between $0.99 and $2.99 on the Kindle, and some are even offered for free.

There’s some debate about this – does a cost of $0.99 devalue the book and scream “self-published”? A number of readers will still take a chance on any book which costs only a dollar, so would that make up for the readers who’ll automatically avoid it? I’m not sure what to think about this, perhaps because I don’t have an ereader of any kind, and I generally don’t take chances on print books unless they’re free.

Still, if I were selling a self-published ebook I’d probably go for $1.99 no matter how long the book was. That seems like a safe compromise.

In general, readers won’t pay more than $5 for an ebook unless the author is a household name. And even if they do pay $10 or more, which some publishers charge, they won’t enjoy it. Many one-star reviews for highly-priced ebooks on Amazon are complaints about the price rather than about the quality of the book.

That’s self-publishing. What about trade publishing?

The longer the book, the more the publisher needs to charge, and there’s a threshold above which readers won’t go. Usually that’s around $30 for a hardback, $10 for a mass market paperback and so on. Even Susanna Clarke’s debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an 800-page doorstopper in hardcover, sells for $27.95 – and was backed up by an "imaginative (and aggressive) marketing campaign" from Bloomsbury.

Too high and the reading public simply won't buy. Too low and there won't be much reward for the writer's hard work, unless the sheer number of copies sold makes up for that. It's a balancing act.

Finally, editor Anna Genoese wrote a great article on how publishers determine profit and loss – and how a book can fail to make the former. Check it out. I especially like the article because it blows a hole in the myth that if your book doesn’t earn out, you have to return the advance.

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Horses in fantasy

Horses are common in fantasy, and have as much of a mystical appeal as swords. When I was a kid, I loved reading horse books – My Friend Flicka and The Black Stallion. Horses feature prominently in mythology as well – the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are often identified by the colors of their mounts, and Odin was said to ride the eight-legged horse Sleipnir.

The most well-known horse in fantasy may be Shadowfax from The Lord of the Rings, but there are dozens of others, such as the white horses in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books. The horses are telepathic beings called Companions that choose certain humans.

But because horses are so often haloed in this way, I enjoy seeing them hostile and dangerous. The Keplians in Andre Norton’s Witch World are red-eyed beasts that lure humans to their deaths, though even they were civilized in The Key of the Keplian, when a girl saved a Keplian mare and her foal.

I’d love to see ugly horses as well. With horns or tusks, maybe, or natural bridles in the form of tendrils sprouting from their heads. Said tendrils would sink into the flesh of a rider, linking the two creatures via nervous system and meaning that commands could be given mentally and instantaneously.

They could have sharp, slashing blades growing from their bodies – like the Hippae in Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass. When people ride these horses, they’re forced to sit perfectly upright so they don’t get impaled on the spikes jutting from the back of each horse’s neck. As for the Hippae themselves, they’re intelligent and vicious – one review described them as being “velociraptor-like”.

Armored horses are also an option. They might grow flat close-fitting plates of keratin along their backs and sides for protection – though that would also reduce their speed and they might have broader hooves to carry the excess weight. They just wouldn’t have the “champagne-glass ankles” of thoroughbreds.

In the world of Eden, I like to characterize lands by the different types of horses they use. Dagre, in Before the Storm, is the closest to what we’d consider normal, so their horses are ordinary too, but the only breed of horse in Iternum is the palomino.

And Lunacy has intelligent but wild horses, which prey on people. Natives of Lunacy ride anything but horses, because there’s too much of a risk of the wild horses trying to impersonate tame ones, or even breed with them.

In Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a humorous parody of the cliches of fantasy, she mentions horses being treated as living motorbikes. That’s something a writer needs to take into account if the horses are covering miles and miles of rough terrain without rest or food. And if they’re a different breed of horse which is capable of this – like the sandsteeds in A Feast for Crows – it might be more realistic to give them a weakness too.

What are your favorite horses or horse stories?

Image from: http://www.jupiterimages.com/Image/royaltyFree/114359805


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Rotten Reviews and Rejections

A lot of writers have read Pushcart Press’s Rotten Reviews and Rejections… or if they haven’t, they might like to. If literary greats like Emily Dickinson and John le Carre could receive rejection letters, it could take the sting off the polite refusals in a hopeful writer’s inbox.

So I enjoyed reading most of the entries. Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth was turned down with the comment,

Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China.

“The what Luck Club?”

Then then there are the rejections that just don’t make sense, such as the one which seems to mistake George Orwell’s Animal Farm for a story about animals. I once did that too, but I was eleven at the time.

On the other hand, some of the rejections are understandable. If a book is 350,000 words long, it’s very unlikely to be published (and if it is, it'll need a marketing push to make up for the higher price). Many of the entries are also rejections or reviews of older books and classics. So this book is still well worth a look, but I wouldn’t take it as evidence that the publishing industry is dying, that editors don’t know a good book when they see one, etc.

Finally, my favorite rejection was the one for Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere's Fan.

My dear sir,

I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.


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Five kinds of houses in fantasy

From fairytales to epic fantasies, this genre has some of the most mind-stretching concepts when it comes to houses. Children’s stories have the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, which uses an easily adapted concept – use one’s living quarters to attract prey. Then there’s the chicken-footed cottage of Baba Yaga, and it only gets better from here…

1. Living houses

One of my favorite paintings in The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe depicts a Villar, which looks like a gigantic human hundreds of feet tall… from the waist down. Its torso is a castle, complete with turrets and battlements (it has no head, adding to the alien look), and inside the torso, the Dwellers ride the nomadic Villar.

What I like most about living houses is that they take care of waste management and food supplies. Living in the fruiting body of a giant fungus, for instance, means breaking off a chunk of the wall whenever it’s time to eat.

2. Organic houses

Huge seashells come to mind, especially if they have many coils and turns within. Or what about the exoskeletons of giant insects or the skulls of ancient creatures? One of the most memorable things about China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station is Bonetown, which sprang up around the Ribs that are part of a giant skeleton. If the body of a dragon was preserved, people might only need to hollow out the interior.

3. Moving houses

Going a step beyond houseboats, houses might drift through the sky – either built on something which already floats (such as rocks in the Edge Chronicles) or soaring on their own power. People might never need to descend from a skyhouse if it has some means of catching food, perhaps trapping birds or snaring prey on the ground. And in an arid land, this would be a good way to follow the seasonal rains.

4. Segregated houses

Especially in cultures which practice polygamy, each wife may have her own house which the husband visits – though I wouldn’t mind seeing it done the other way around.

5. Sentient houses

In Ray Bradbury’s “There Shall Come Soft Rains”, a fully automated house goes on cleaning itself, cooking breakfast and running hot bathwater long after its inhabitants have died in a nuclear holocaust. I would love to have an apartment that cleaned itself. And a house which could communicate with me might be very convenient, not to mention excellent for security.

Unless intruders managed to foil its defences somehow, perhaps turning the house against its owners. Then it would not be so good.

And while the Bradbury story is SF, it could be easily adapted to a fantasy or horror setting, as the characters slowly realize their house is sentient or as they and the house work together against a common threat.

Which kind of house is your favorite?





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First day

Today was my first day in Clinical Placement.

Technically that started yesterday but that was mainly orientation, meeting with Human Resources and so on. The real work, in the labs, began today and I was in Histology.

Histology is the study of tissues. So if you find a lump somewhere a lump should not be, and if the doctors do a biopsy of it, the little bit they take out is sent to the histology department (or pathology department, as it's sometimes called). We get to process the little bit into such a form that the pathologist can look at it under a microscope and tell whether the lump is a bad lump that needs to be removed before it makes any more lumps.

One thing I always liked about medical laboratory technology was the distance it maintained between the lab and the patients, because while empathy is important, a certain degree of detachment is also necessary to go about your work. You can't start feeling for everyone, or you'll burn out. In medical laboratory technology, samples are delivered to the lab in labeled containers and results go out in printed or digital reports, which is fine by me... but in histology, some of those samples are very recognizable as once having been on people.

And sometimes they are people. There is a chance I may see an autopsy. Not quite sure what to think or feel about this, although the staff at the hospital are very kind and would understand if I had to leave halfway through the procedure. Actually, they'd probably prefer that to my keeling over and needing to be carried out.

Anyway, that was my first day. I wasn't rushed off my feet, but there's a lot to know and study about the discipline. And future jobs depend on this first impression, so I have to work hard.

Wish me luck, everyone. :)

Image from: http://www.jupiterimages.com/Image/royaltyFree/81934798
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The Skin Map

Kit has a difficult enough time navigating the London Underground, but he soon finds out that making his way through a network of ley lines is infinitely harder. An old man calling himself Cosimo Livingstone – and claiming to be Kit’s great-grandfather – shows him one of the lines, but Kit declines to help with Cosimo’s mysterious “project”. That is, until Kit’s skeptical girlfriend Wilhelmina decides to check the ley lines out herself and vanishes.

This is the start of Stephen R. Lawhead’s The Skin Map, a fantasy that hooked me from the start. For some reason I’ve always been fascinated by ley lines, ever since I first read about them in Graham Masterton’s horror novel Walkers. Given that this book was likely to be a great deal less scary, I requested it from Thomas Nelson as part of their Booksneeze program and dived in as soon as it arrived.

Since ley lines can take people “anywhere or anywhen”, Kit and Cosimo have their work cut out to find Wilhelmina. They also have avoid the Burley Men, who are searching for the titular map, a guide to the secrets of the ley lines. The map was once tattooed on a man’s skin and is now parchment.

The story goes from Merrie Olde England to a sojourn in Egypt where the antagonist, Lord Burleigh, meets Howard Carter and helps excavate a tomb. Meanwhile, Wilhelmina – who is nothing if not adaptable – ends up in Prague in 1606, where she earns her keep by working for a baker and opening the city’s first coffeehouse.

Some suspension of disbelief is required to buy a modern woman not only doing all this but happily managing without hot water on tap, electricity, etc. But what kept me interested despite this niggling doubt were the descriptions. Lawhead does these extremely well, whether it comes to depictions of characters or of historical details such as apostle spoons. I especially liked the alchemist’s laboratory with its granite mortars and “prehistoric insects in lambent lumps of Baltic amber”.

One problem, though, were the said-bookisms. Characters rarely just say something. Instead they declare, venture, assert, prod, echo, offer, object, declaim, prompt, allow, wonder, counter and even yip. This is the first book I’ve read where people yipped. Finally, although the different threads converge at the end, the plot is by no means resolved—this is the first in the Bright Empires series—so it’s not for anyone who wants a self-contained book.

For what it is, though, it was an entertaining read. I’ll probably check out the sequel, if Thomas Nelson offers that as well.




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Shields in fantasy

The first memorable shield I ever read about was Athena’s, which bore the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Continuing the Greek motif, the movie Troy had the Greeks using shields in a testudo formation, plus Brad Pitt Achilles made good use of his during fights.

But there weren’t too many famous shields in fantasy, which is understandable. Swords are offensive weapons; shields are defensive. You can barely read classic or heroic fantasy without tripping over a sword that’s special in some way; not so for shields. When I started thinking of shields, though, numerous ideas came to mind.

Design

On a battlefield where combatants had their faces covered, shields could be used as an identifying device, hence the practice of painting them with a knight’s coat of arms. Of course, they don’t necessarily have to sport such a crest. They might simply be designed in such a way as to strike fear into their opponents – worked with a snarling face, for instance, or constructed of human bones.

That being said, keep the environment and the technological level of the society in mind. Not to mention the strength of whoever’s lifting the shield; a slab of granite studded with diamonds may turn aside any weapon, but it’s also completely impractical.

Purpose

Highly polished shields could be mirrors. Prince Oberyn Martell makes good use of such a shield in a climactic battle in George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords. Although he had to wait for the sun to emerge. Maybe someone with a spelled shield might be able to make it glow so fiercely that opponents would be forced to look away – if the shield bore the image of a sun, perhaps?

A shield could also have a design that produces the opposite effect. Say, a hypnotic swirl that mesmerizes opponents, or at least gives them a splitting headache. Or what if it’s a featureless blank that takes on the image of whatever most affected an enemy?

Enchantments

This is the best part, because almost anything can be done to make shields dangerous. Maybe they attract the enemy’s weapon as if it’s magnetized – meaning it’s all but yanked out of his hand. Or they could repel weapons instead.

They could be enchanted so that their wielder can see them, but the enemy can’t. They could suddenly (and scarily) sprout long clawed tendrils or chains when an enemy is within arm’s-length, trying to grab him.

They might be the portals to abysses that are terrifying and yet compelling at the same time. You can’t look away from the black nothingness before you, and yet you know that whatever goes into it – whether it’s your weapon or your arm – won’t be coming out again.

That was fun to write.



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Swag Bucks : a review

As a college student (though not for much longer!) I'm always looking for ways to save money. So I mentioned earlier that I had signed up with Swag Bucks, and I thought a post about the results thereof would be in order. Here's a list of the things I've paid for with SB, from May 2011 on.

1. DVD of The Full Monty. I love British comedies, so I've always wanted to watch this.

2. Lynn Price's The Writer's Essential Tackle Box. To join my collection of books on writing and publication. I'll do a review of it later.

3. William Rehder's Where the Money Is. The subtitle of this is "True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World", and it's by a former FBI agent. It's an incredibly fun read - not only did the information make me feel like an insider on both sides of the law, but the style is breezy and amusing. I especially liked the story of the Hole in the Ground Gang.

4. Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand. Talk about a life less ordinary.

How does Swag Bucks work? Basically, you get points awarded (on a random basis) for using Swag Bucks' search engine, and it's possible to win three or more times a day. There are also a set number of points that can be earned daily for voting in a poll, clicking on a toolbar, playing games and so on, plus Swag Bucks gives out daily codes which can be entered for more points. Points can then be traded for gift cards, such as PayPal or Barnes and Noble. I always order the $5 Amazon.ca gift card, and I earn 5 of those a month (it's possible to earn more, but IMO you have to be pretty dedicated for that).

An extra $25/month comes in very handy. Especially since even third-party sellers on Amazon can be paid with gift cards, meaning I can buy some of the out-of-print books I've wanted for years.

So I recommend Swag Bucks as a great way to earn a little extra cash that (for me at least) can only be spent on books and DVDs. Before, I had a list of books I wanted for my collection, but because of my budget I would only cross off one or two every year, usually for Christmas. Now the list is shrinking. I feel thoroughly self-indulgent.

And here's my referral link. :)

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Which keys have you lost?

So two months of writing and editing that had me chained to my computer are over.

There were entire days I didn't leave my apartment, and since I live in a basement I like emerging occasionally, just to remind myself that the World Above still exists. Well, now I'll get more than enough of that, with clinical placement starting in just over a week's time. But I made a self-imposed deadline so I'm pleased about that.

I also noticed that several of the keys on my keyboard are worn away. The O is a semicircle and the I has vanished completely. A, S and T do not exist from the waist down. Both E and H are reduced to a single lonely angle and L is now |.

I mentioned that to a friend who said her Backspace key was worn away. Mine still looks new. Perhaps I should do more editing.

If you've lost any keys, which are they?

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A Dance with Dragons

Contains spoilers for A Dance with Dragons.

Short review : Better than A Feast for Crows, not as good as A Storm of Swords.

Long review : Where to start?

With the good, mostly Jon Snow’s chapters. Developments at the Wall are fascinating, and they tie together well with the return of Roose Bolton plus fake-Arya. Towards the end, though, Jon alienates some of his own men, pens up his direwolf and is then backstabbed by said men - in other words, Robb Stark errors and a Jeor Mormont ending. But at least he’s not likely to be as dead as either of them.

Another interesting character was a complete scum, but he’s captured and maimed by someone even worse. This results in a redemption of sorts and he saves an innocent woman who’s similarly a captive. He’s called Jaime Lannister or Theon Greyjoy, but despite the déjà vu, Theon’s chapters were gripping. His terror and degradation came through vividly, and Ramsay Bolton vies with Joffrey for the Most Hated Character award, though I could have done without the endless “Reek, Reek, it rhymes with…”

Tyrion and Dany fare less well. Tyrion’s chapters are a travelogue wherein he meets many, many people, at least one of whom was previously thought dead. And although he’s heading for Meereen, he doesn’t get to meet Dany.

Though perhaps that’s for the best. Dany was amazing in previous novels, but here she’s trying to recapture all her tweenage years, especially with Daario. She also marries one of the Ghiscari (which means he’s dead meat one way or another), vacillates endlessly about whether to open the fighting pits and takes dozens of hostages whom she cannot bear to harm, so they end up being much safer with her than with their own people. Finally she imprisons two of her dragons because they’re growing wild, which naturally makes them even wilder. Her story does end on a more promising note, though, and I still want to see how she eventually conquers Slaver’s Bay.

Not to mention Westeros, because Cersei’s days as queen there seem to be coming to a well-deserved end. The High Holy Septon makes her pay dearly for what she did… and that’s only the start of her troubles. I don’t think even FrankenGregor (who makes an appearance) can get her out of this.

Minor characters fare as can be expected. Victarion Greyjoy is still en route to Dany, Davos Seaworth is still the universe’s whipping boy and Melisandre is still mistaken. But Wyman Manderly and his pies were shocking and delightful.

All in all, though, there’s no way this series can be concluded in only two more books, not even if Martin tightens the prose to the squeaking-point and every character refrains from their favorite catchphrase forever. There are simply too many characters – for each one killed off, three new walk-ons are introduced and someone else rises from the dead.

And there’s too much description – granted, it’s usually well-written, imaginative description, but it’s only padding the book. In A Storm of Swords, what happened in Tywin Lannister’s privy was a darkly ironic joke that finished the chapter with a snap. In this book, what is achieved by describing the results of Daenerys taking a squat? The story’s realistic enough without all the body fluids.

I’ll still buy The Winds of Winter, but I’m not likely to shell out for a hardcover again. If you've read ADwD, what did you think of it?




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