Quacking Alone

It looks like the Kindle will win the Christmas, 2009 E-War amongst the readers.  

From all reports, B&N’s Nook has been selling well, but it looks like the company rushed the device to market before it had a good supply of the devices.  Nooks ordered now for Christmas gifts will arrive long after Santa’s sleigh has returned to the North Pole.   Holiday sales do account for a large percentage of a retailer’s sales.  Additionally, B&N likely felt that not getting its device out for the Yule season would mean the company surrendered the battle without fielding an army.  B&N didn’t want to give Amazon more of an advantage than the company already had.

I haven’t held a Nook, but I’ve held a Kindle.  The device is amazing.  It’s like the keys to the kingdom for a life-long bookworm (like me).  The 3G wireless connection means a reader can order a new book anytime, anywhere.  No bookstore required.  And Amazon has had the device out for a couple of generations so it has had some time to work out those kinks.  My computer programmer hubby would, I think, always hesitate a couple of years before buying a Nook.  Hubby says that the first generation of a program is bound to have bugs that will get worked out later, and he doesn’t like to play guinea pig.  (He also feels that if he writes a computer program that compiles on the first try that disaster looms ahead, but that’s another story.) 

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Hello again kiddies! Now that we’ve moved to a fully-functional website, the big, old, and ugly AOFM has been busy putting little things up here and there in our little abode on the webbernets.

I can’t show you what I’ve done behind the scenes, because really those things are boringly technogeek and hair-tearingly frustrating. What I can show you, though, is over in the sidebar. You will now find Google News headlines about e-books, publishers, and the literary industry in general.

Try it out and see what you think!

As usual, I am open to suggestions that you, the reader and our customer, may have about improving the website, so by all means e-mail us if that’s the case. Or even if you want to just shoot the breeze or ask about Mr. Brick’s humble origins or whatevs, we’d be happy to hear from you.

Peace, AOFM.

This week one of the bigs broke ranks and insiders have gone postal. 

Harlequin, one of the biggest category romance publishers on the planet, announced a new publishing arm.  For a fee that varies by package, a writer can publish a book that Harlequin will distribute. The pay-to-play arm of the company was originally named “Harlequin Horizons.”  All over the blogosphere, writer’s associations went ballistic.  RWA, Romance Writers of America, issued a special announcement which basically tossed Harlequin out of the club, decreeing that Harlequin had become a non-eligible publisher and was no longer eligible for RWA-provided conference resources.

Harlequin responded by noting the extent to which its company has supported the RWA and has provided resources to the RWA.  However, because of the furor over the whole business, Harlequin took the unfortunate (and rather cowardly) step of saying it would change the name of its pay-to-play arm and that “Harlequin” would not appear in the name of the new division.

Harlequin didn’t cancel the new venture and so far as I have been able to determine, RWA hasn’t responded to the name change or welcomed Harlequin back into the fold. 

The whole debacle shows how terrified traditional bastions of publishing are over the future.  Many websites criticized Harlequin by calling it a “vanity press.”  Vanity press is a prejudicial and demeaning term that carries a boatload of implied criticism.  The term basically means – or it used to mean – a place an author pays to be published. It was different from a subsidy press, which is one where the author participates in the costs of publication in any manner. The terms were created or endorsed by associations like RWA to differentiate “real authors” from “fake authors.”   You’re only a real author if you’ve played their game their way – you queried until you found a “worthy citizen” or agent to sell your work to the Royals in the big publishing castles.  Fake authors are allowed to be members of RWA, and fake publishers can associate with the real authors, but they don’t get all the benefits. RWA hopes that because it deigns to allow them to belong to the group, the fake authors and fake publishers will see the error of their ways. 

RWA endorses or advocates only one path to publication – the sacred path.

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I held a Kindle.

Yes, I actually had a real, live, working Kindle in my very own hands. My hands shook, my palms sweated, my fingers gripped it tight, so very, very tight. My brown eyes glistened with lust that turned to love at first grasp. But then came the time of horror, of desolation, of pain. My hubby, my own ever-loving hubby looked at me and said, “You have to give it back now.”

My fingers held it tighter and I shook my head no, no, NO. And John said, “It’s not yours. You have to give it back.” He held out his hands, very carefully, like a cop trying to talk a deranged psycho holding a gun into giving it up. I could have made him fight me for it. I could have forced him to pry it out of my clinging hands. But then, the Kindle might have been hurt. I couldn’t hurt the precious little device. So I untangled my fingers, and handed it back.

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My muse is either very fickle or very smart.  Or, perhaps, I’m either exceptionally stubborn or exceptionally stupid.  More likely, it’s all of the above.

I had a plan.  I blogged about my plan last time.  I was working on a new historical romance.  Once it was done or (at least) well underway, about the beginning of next year, I was going to stop and do an edit of Griffin’s Law.  The next to be published Griffin’s is complete and has been resting pending an edit.  Griffin’s is a contemporary romance set in a law school and is sort of a crossover between E-mail Enticement and a historical.  Okay – if you insist- think of Griffin’s  as the Grey’s Anatomy of the legal profession.

Anyway, I’ve been hard at work writing my new historical.  Rather, I’ve been trying to be hard at work on the historical.  I’ve been coming home after work and opening the computer to the MS every night.  I’ve been opening it faithfully every Saturday and Sunday morning for the past few weekends.  Sometimes, I’ve even written a few lines on it.  But inevitably, after a line or two, the story leaves me and I start sneaking over to my desktop to play Snood or Solitaire.  Or flipping over to check sales on Amazon, Createspace, Scribd, Smashwords, etc.  Or getting sucked into something on Google News that I keep in customized form as my homepage for Internet Explorer.

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Hubby The Magnificent blogged recently that E-Mail Enticement would be available in paperback on Amazon and Createspace soon. Well, soon is now.

E-Mail was written much earlier and had been out and available on Kindle and in e-book form. But sales figures for the book didn’t show much interest, so we didn’t hurry to make it available in paperback. The lack of interest sort of echoed the reaction from literary agents when I queried the book initially, which was quite a few years ago. Of late, interest in and sales of E-mail have risen dramatically. Perhaps E-mail’s time has come. I hope so.

Unlike the other books I have published to date, E-mail is a contemporary. I have written one other contemporary in the vein of E-mail, but it hasn’t gone through the editorial wringer yet.  I’ll slot the final edit of the new one (Griffin’s Law) for early next year, when my WIP – a new historical romance- is well along the road towards completion, if not actually complete.  But, like I said above before I started rambling, E-mail is different from the other work readers have seen to date.

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