Chapter Thirteen is up.
Chapter Fourteen is paid for, and will be posted on Wednesday, December 13; there’s a small start on Chapter Fifteen.
I’m midway through writing Chapter Sixteen.
There’s a long discussion of technicalities of magic in the comments on the post “Chapter Five Revised,” for those of you who hadn’t already noticed it.
Any new news (oxymoronic) on TSM? If they haven’t started the print run, are they out of time for christmas? If not, when would the dead line be?
Nothing new; I don’t have an exact ship date yet. It’s at the printer and in the queue, I’ve asked Wildside to give me a date, and they haven’t gotten back to me yet.
How long does it actual take to print, bind, and ship an intial print run? I thought they did these things weeks or months before. I mean, you have, what, 10 days (and that includes today) to get it on the bookshelves? And that only gives you a week before christmas. I realize that there is nothing that you can do now (and I should shut up), but might this could affect future publishing contracts. “Give me another percent or I’ll take my business elsewhere!”
There are a lot of factors that go into that. In this case it’s a relatively small print-run, and I’ll be getting my shipment directly from the printer instead of through the warehouse, so the lead time is fairly short.
For all I know, it’s actually been printed, and we’re now waiting for the packing and shipping. I don’t get a lot of details.
I was told, though, that from the time it actually goes to the printer and the time the printer ships the finished copies to the publisher’s warehouse, this particular printer usually takes between two and three weeks.
Bigger printers have a much larger backlog; mass market titles are usually scheduled months in advance.
My thoughts are not about you sending the books, I am thinking about having your name on a book in the “New Fantasy” section in time for the christmas sales. Has it been reviewed? It strikes me that if you can get an article printed about the evolution of this book in a major mag, it could really help sales.
BTW, my intention is NOT to buy the book in the stores, but to order it from you. It is fun to have a few autographed books.
Oh, that’s not happening. It’s a small press book that the chains bought in low numbers; it isn’t going to get any real push, reviews, whatever.
I don’t know if you need to be right about that. You know professionally the editors of the major mags and you must know a FEW writers there. Call them up and pitch the idea of an article about this. Its a good story about a known author. And it has a sequel, so it has a topical hook. Heck, SlashDot may be interested.
Do you have a old nom-de-plume you could use? (Actually, I think that was a seperate circle in Dante’s Inferno for self-service of that magnitude.)
I just looked at Amazon it it has you on pre-order with a release date of January 15, 2007
It does? I hadn’t checked lately.
January 15th, huh? I’d hoped for a few weeks sooner than that. We’ll see.
As for reviewing myself, the only person I know who ever got away with that was James Blish writing as William Atheling.
Oooooooooh… I feel dirty.
But I don’t mean a review of the book, I mean an article on the process by which it was created.
Oh! Well, yeah, I could maybe do that, but I’d rather spend my time on other stuff.
Ideally, you would only need to pitch the idea to a publisher. He would get someone to write it (or write an editorial). The more I think of it, just a blurb in slashdot would be real money. Get an article in Entertainment Weekly (they like that kind of stuff), and you could have your top seller.
As a side note, I actually submitted information to slashdot about the Spriggan Mirror serialization, while that was current. I had the same thought, that the whole reader-supported non-publisher power-to-the-people thing would be appealing to that crowd. Like 90% of submissions, though, it never went anywhere.
With the /. submission process, it’s hard to say what will be posted and what will be ignored.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Do you know how much the shipping charges to the UK will be yet?
I don’t mind waiting for surface mail (now I’m reconciled to it not getting here for Christmas) – it might get here for my birthday in February (I know how long surface mail can take from the US!), so I’d take the cheapest option.
Do you know how much the shipping charges to the UK will be yet?
No, because I don’t know what the book weighs.
Magic 8-ball!
Darn you Jim Henry! You beat me to it! The reply was HAZY!
ROTFLMAO!
“…Mostly the Spell of the Eighth Sphere.”
“What’s that do?”
“It makes runes appear in a black crystal sphere,” Lar said. “But it can only answer yes-or-no questions, and not all of those. It did tell us that strong magic was interfering with Fendel’s Divination, that it wasn’t anything Kolar did wrong, but any time we tried to ask it a question about… about the hum itself, rather than about Kolar’s spell, the reply was so hazy we couldn’t read it. The magic was interfering again.”
Fantasy comedy gold!