Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut had a fantastic signing yesterday! This was the latest stop on the Big Summer Road Trip Tour with four of Tor's authors: Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Bear, Brian Staveley, and James Cambias.


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Happy New Year! It's been some time since I posted; it was a busy year at Casa Abbott for non-writing reasons. We've welcomed baby Fish into our family, joining his sister Bug, Three-stripe, cats Jack and Tollers, and I as members of our household. But while I'm behind on many things, I've continued to read a lot! Since I posted last year and the ( Read more... )

What a wacky month it's been! We had a great family vacation, a fantastic visit from my mother, and then a not-so-terrific summer-cold-gone-feral that the house is still fighting off. (Bug manages with a few coughs here and there, while Threestripe and I have been dealing with what my friend Jess calls the "Peruvian Death Cough." It's an evocative ( Read more... )

This has been a big week for e-book news, most of it coming from the old price-fixing suit (discussed here and here) about the agency model is now down to Apple. According to Andrew Albanese at PW, "Penguin Finally Settles Price-Fixing Charges, Will Avoid Trial." Apparently, since Penguin was the largest publisher involved in the suit, their ( Read more... )

These links have been keeping tabs open in my browser until I wrote about them, so here's me clearing off my desktop:

• My review of Grave Dance by Kalayna Price is up over at Black Gate. Spoiler: I loved it.
• Target has decided that selling Amazon's kindle is a conflict of interest, Bryan Bishop reported over at The Verge. So, what's going on between ( Read more... )

Discussion on yesterday's post has been fun -- I need to go reply -- and thus I wanted to follow up just a little bit with some thoughts on the currently-under-fire agency model. To begin: writer buddy Max Gladstone (you can preorder his book here) confirmed that ebook royalty percentage is higher, but that doesn't mean that the royalty payout is ( Read more... )

I had a great conversation the other night with my sister about e-books and pricing and the agency model mess and why e-books cost more at some online stores than at others. Given how much time I spend thinking about these things, it's nice to lay out the "here's what I think is happening in the industry" to someone who I go to for advice in her ( Read more... )

If I used my blog like I use my history column on Branford Patch, I'd create a feature called the "E-book Minute," in which I'd post all the e-book news I've been collecting. Because there seems to be a lot of it these days ( Read more... )

I was going to write up something about the SFWA's removal of Amazon links from their Web site due to the current IPG/Amazon throwdown, but then I realized that a lot of people have had a lot more intelligent things to say about the whole situation, including the SFWA itself. UK publishers are also getting into the mix, and my favorite article, by ( Read more... )

Just a couple of links today. PW blogger Peter Brantley wrote up what I think is an excellent entry about the problem with leaving libraries out of the e-book revolution. Brantley's assessment is that by making e-books unavailable through libraries, a whole class of Americans is denied access to those resources. If the market does shift so that ( Read more... )