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By Lynn, on March 21st, 2010%
I’ve added new photo galleries at my Picasa niche – two galleries to be precise: one of the Emerald Princess where Elaine and my parents and I stayed for a week and the other with some pictures of the places we visited. I think I’ve got the album-creation and picture-upload processes figured out now, so there shouldn’t be as much of a delay. I’ll put together an Emerald Princess post to give the pictures some context (at least, I hope I will…write the post, that is. I’ve somehow wound up with two not-my-computers to lay hands on in the next twenty-four hours and much will be depend on how troublesome they prove to be.)
I’ve also gotten my GoodReads page back up-to-date with my recent and current reading. (I should probably list my Daughter of the Bright Moon and Wooden Sword in the read and currently reading shelf lists. I’m truly on a tour of memory lane these days).
And, speaking of Wooden Sword….if the storm brewing outside doesn’t evolve into “severe weather,” I should finish digitizing that novel today…then on to proofreading. Few things are quite as futile as proof-reading my own prose. Elaine’s already spotted a dozen or so typos and worse that I missed in the Daughter files I put up last week, so there’ll be file revisions coming there. OTOH, when I last checked, Samuel Delany is still finding typos in Dahlgren, three decades after the fact.
By Lynn, on March 20th, 2010%
I think I’ve figured out how to take advantage of Wordpress’s “Category” function to create discussion pages for my books…
Just make a comment to this message….I’ll turn the comment into a post which will magically reappear below this post and stay here and serve as an anchor for an open-ended discussion thread.
Sort of an interactive FAQ
By Lynn, on March 16th, 2010%
Having spoken with quite a few Kindle users in the last few weeks, I’ve come to recognize the importance of downloadable FREE samples of books offered for sale.
There’s no way that I can replicate the seductive power of Kindle’s WhisperNet, but I have prepped a free sample of Daughter of the Bright Moon. I’ve uploaded it to Box.com and you can download it from them by following this link. I’ve added the same link to by product page at Closed Circle — (here’s the product-page link ) and I’ve added it to my Biblography/1st Chapters page here on the blog (1st chapter link)
The box.com file is a zip file that contains the PDF, PRC, and EPUB versions of the first chapter, since these are by far the most popular formats….not to mention the easiest ones to create.
I make no rash promises, but it’s my short-term goal (now that I’ve written three pages of notes on the eBook-file-creation process) to create samples for all the books in the Bibliography/1st Chapters page, even those that are not likely to show up on Closed Circle (I’ve done a fair amount of “work for hire” over the years and getting the rights to produce ebooks of those novels is going to be a challenge. Better, I think, to concentrate on the books I do have the rights to, at least until I’ve run out of them 
By Lynn, on March 16th, 2010%
I make these pacts with myself, like no blogging or knitting until I finish re-editing Daughter of the Bright Moon and get it uploaded to Closed Circle. Then life happens, Daughter lingers, and Face of Chaos languishes.
No more!
Just before midnight EDT (and sometimes I think I’m the only living soul who isn’t just thrilled that Daylight Savings Time starts so early now and last so very long….like we need more summer in Florida) and with Jane’s inestimable help, Daughter of the Bright Moon magically appeared on the virtual shelves of Closed Circle. It’s for sale…here!
It’s even got a new cover that I assembled myself
Assembled being the operative word. Unlike Jane and CJ, I’m not much of a visual artist. My new cover started with an image that had been the chapter heading for Daughter’s original ACE edition. Usually authors don’t have the rights to any of the artwork associated with their books, but the chapter heading is an exception….and a story in itself.
I was living in Ann Arbor, MI when I sold Daughter to Jim Baen at ACE, but I hadn’t been living there long and before that I’d lived in New York City. In NYC, I worked in the home office of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., located at 1 Madison Ave. The ACE offices were right around the corner, on E25th St, as I recall. (Like many new authors, I made the ritual pilgrimage to visit my editor in his office once the contracts had been signed and he took me out for the ritual editorial dinner at a very nice restaurant near the ACE offices, which went somewhat awry when the maitre’d recognized me from my MetLife days but didn’t recognize Jim at all….but I digress.)
Anyway, I worked for MetLife largely because my dad worked for MetLife. He wasn’t based in the home office, but he knew his way around 1 Madison Ave. and when he learned where his daughter’s publisher was located, he paid them a visit. The first, and perhaps only, time that an author’s father paid a surprise visit to the ACE offices. He asked lots of questions and, remarkably, got a good many answers, including the name of the artist who’d be doing the interior illustrations.
I don’t think anyone expected that he and my mom would drive to New Jersey to visit Steve Fabian to see how those illustrations were progressing…then, again, they didn’t know my dad all that well. Steve flat-out confessed that he’d never had an author visit his studio, much less an author’s parents. Fortunately for all concerned, by the time of the visit, the ACE art department had returned the illustrations. My dad bought two of them, framed them, and gave them to me for Christmas; they hang on the wall not ten feet from where I’m sitting right now. But Steve gave my dad the chapter illo, with reproduction rights included. I’ve used it on my business cards and stationery every since, and I’m very happy to see it, at long last, on Daughter’s cover.
By Lynn, on February 4th, 2010%
The kerfluffle has gone another round. John Sargent, CEO at Macmillan, has penned an open letter to Macmillan authors and illustrators, with a CC to literary agents.
Already I’m confused. All agents? Just those agents with clients at Macmillan? There is a difference. But, since I’m definitely a Macmillan author, whose Amazon buttons have yet to reappear, I kept reading…
Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced. In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.
About that “we,” Mr. Sargent…. Exactly who are the “we” who’ve been deeply concerned, who’ve moved from a standing start to a new business model in just three weeks!? I assumed, through the first four sentences, that “we” was “you”—corporate Macmillan—rather than “us”—because why else would you be sending me a letter.
Then I hit the fifth sentence: …”our intellectual property”…
I checked, just to make certain, but there it is on the title page verso – copyright 2006 / Lynn Abbey. Rifkind’s Challenge is MY intellectual property. It is licensed to Macmillan/TOR under a contract that sometimes feels like indentured servitude (or maybe like the old Hollywood studio/contract system). License is not quite the same as ownership.
But, by golly, they’re going to be fair to “those who create.”
These are the good guys?
Is it any wonder I’m confused…and just a teeny bit skeptical?
Back in the Dark Ages—the mid 70s, the post Star-Wars period when Hollywood started optioning SF—the wise words were: Get all your money up front; and if that doesn’t work never, ever take a share of net anything, especially profits.
So, now I’m back to thinking about that Wall Street Journal article I linked to few days back. Macmillan’s got the same problem…a problem they can partially solve by sweetening current/future contracts and then offering to sprinkle the same sweetner on old contracts…all in the name of fairness….toward the creators of their intellectual property.
Yeah, there are going to be problems. Somebody’s going to have to come up with the publishing equivalent of United Artists. UA didn’t change the game because they won an anti-trust suit against the system; they did it by beating the system at its own game
By Lynn, on February 2nd, 2010%
As I sit here prepping Daughter of the Bright Moon for its ascent into Closed Circle, I’ve realized that the dialog I wrote for Rifkind and Ejord in 1980 would be perfect for NCIS’ Ziva David and Tony DiNozzo.
I think that’s a good thing….maybe
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What I'm working on these days
Exiled on Main St.
Short Story
Status: Active
Word count: 5500
as of: 7-12-2010
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Look Who’s Talking…