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Month: March 2011

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost (1915)

This week in the publishing world brought the stories of 3 authors: Amanda Hocking, Barry Eisler and Connie Brockway. All are taking different paths and I wish all of them well. But looking at them raises interesting questions and yes, it did remind me oh-so-much of the poem by Robert Frost. Mr. Frost's poem is one of my all-time-faves, and any time I'm in a position of "choosing" - first I consider myself lucky - and then, I reflect on Mr. Frost's words. I wonder if these words went through Amanda's, Barry's and Connie's minds over the past few weeks?

...continue reading "The Roads To Publication"

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Let's talk about the Castle. You know, the one that used to exist and house the publishing elite? It now lies in ruins. Indies don't even have to seige it anymore. You know why? The Royals are destroying it from the inside. It's so nice when an enemy takes care of destroying themselves. It lets all the indie writers just smile as we press forward with our WIPs.

 Two pieces of news inspired this post. More recently - just this week - e-book sales figures for January, 2011 were announced. Sales for January, 2011 more than doubled over numbers for January, 2010. In January of this year, sales were 115% better than they were just a year earlier.  E-books outsold hardcovers and mass market paperbacks in January. 

 While news of e-books outselling traditional books just made it to the public's eyes, industry insiders would've had these figures for quite a while now. If they didn't have the hard numbers, the Royals had enough data by late February to see that this whole e-book thing that they'd ignored and underrated, well, maybe it deserved more of their attention. So they gave it - in the wrong way, of course.  

In late February HarperCollins proved that the stupidity of a publishing house can not be overstated. HC announced on 2/25/11 that new titles of ebooks licensed by public libraries could only be checked out 26 times before the license would expire. The company's move shows the snobbery of the literary elite and its utter lack of concern for the plight of millions of Americans. HC couldn't have made it any clearer if they'd rented a billboard in Times Square and displayed the message in flashing neon: The type of people who use public libraries aren't the type of customers we want anyway.

...continue reading "Indies Don’t Have to Seige the Castle Anymore"

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That's right pardners.  'Tis once again time to boogle over to All Day, All Night ... Romance Divas - The Marianne's Blog.  Yours truly posted about secondary characters. 

Belly on up to the ADAN bar and tell us how you like your romance served!

http://alldayallnightromancedivas.blogspot.com/2011/03/do-you-like-your-romance-neat-straight.html

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Hello my chitterlings, it's the Mad Fat Guy, updating the blog while the Crazy Duck Lady keeps chugging on the last installment of The Duke of Eden, among other duties.

I just wanted to draw your attention once again to the fact that Mary Anne's faerie romances are now available as an e-book bundle. When you purchase these 3 books in her Forever series, you're getting one of them for FREE!

The bundle is now available for your Kindle, and we've recently uploaded it to Smashwords where it soon will be ready for download. I've added the bundle to our sidebar on the right and, of course, to the book list page. As other sales venues open up to our bundle, I will be updating that page so keep watching.

And for those of you who've already purchased one or more of Mary Anne's books, THANK YOU! We hope to see more of you in the near future.

Fat Guy out.

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Earlier, I'd blogged that Quacking Alone's romance books would be at 25% Off for Smashwords Read An Ebook Week Promo. Then, I checked and couldn't find the books listed so I updated the blog.

SW founder Mark Coker has now advised that QA's books are in the promo.

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Go to Smashwords quick before you miss out. Grab QA Romance's full line of books and then pick up a bunch of other fine books.

Read An Ebook Week only comes once a year. Fill up your ereader while the deals last!!!

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For some reason, it doesn't look like SW has ever applied the 25% discount to my books for this week. I listed them for the Read An E-book promo at that price, so I don't know why they wouldn't be enrolled.

Possibly the SW site is having problems, the staff is sick, etc. (There is some of that going round at my house too).

Either way I wanted to update my readers. I listed my stuff for the promo at 25% off - I'd never quack out the wrong info to my peeps.

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Visit Smashwords & Fill Your E-Reader
All Quacking Alone Romances 25% Off

This week, March 6-12th, is International Read An E-book Week (RAE Week) and e-tailers all over the web are celebrating with special deals and give aways. If you own an e-reader this is the week when you can snag more free e-books than at any time in the year. If you miss this week's steals and deals you'll pay for it - literally - all year long. But as the week begins, lets take a moment and look back at the history of the e-book.

This is lucky year seven for the RAE Week celebration, which began in 2004. However, a lot of folks don't realize that while this week is the 7th birthday of the RAE Week celebration, it's the 40th birthday of the e-book. The e-book was born in 1971 when Michael Hart used a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer to create the first e-book - The Declaration of Independence. Fitting choice, wasn't it?

Mr. Hart believed that "the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries."  The creation of that first e-book was the beginning of what became Project Gutenberg. It hosts 20,000 free texts on its site and over 100,000 are available through its partners and today over 3 million e-books are downloaded each month.

...continue reading "March 6-12 – Read an E-Book Week"