A Brighton resident was robbed at gunpoint on Alewife Brook Parkway Jan. 25, according to a police report.
[...]
The victim said he took his wallet out of his jacket pocket and gave it to the suspect who ran off in an unknown direction. He also threw "The Great Hunt," a fantasy book he had, at the suspect and ran towards the mall.
Police searched the area but did not find anyone. The wallet was found in some bushes but $40 in cash was missing, according to the report.
Genreville reader Stephanie Ponder introduced her Domo-kun to Nancy Pearl, with predictable results.
Note the other Domo-kun being, um, stealthy in the background.
The publishing industry is run on hunches. Market data exists but is generally too old to be much use. It's nearly impossible to know whether a book's sales would be boosted by an investment in an ad campaign or an author tour. Any polling of reader tastes will be out of date by the time a book can actually be brought to market. Hunches are primarily responsible for deciding which books come out in mass market or trade paperback or hardcover, and which hardcovers are priced at $21.99 versus $33.99. The connections of author to agent, of agent to publisher, of publisher to market owe a great deal to intuition, subconscious institutional knowledge, and sheer chance.
Part of the problem is that books are infinitely variable. Even in a fairly standardized genre like the cozy mystery, it's hard to know whether the sales of a donut mystery series will be similar to the sales of ...Read More
If you're an author whose book is getting held up by Amazon, and this happens to be your release week, it's not a minor issue. John Scalzi put up a post entitled A Call For Author Support on his popular site Whatever. And whatever your take on the issue is, John is right, the authors caught in the middle need support because of the de-listing.
So, please support an author who's been hit by the blackout, and buy books from places where they can be bought. If you have suggestions for authors who could use the help, please leave them in comments.
In other news, Rose and I spent last Friday night at Irene Gallo's birthday party. Irene is the art director at Tor Books and an all-around winderful person. The party was at the Society of Illustrators, which is a location we're familiar with from SFWA Mill and Swill events, as well as the Spectrum Literay Awards. Quite a few big name artists were there, such as Boris Vallejo, Dan Dos Santos, and Donato Giancola. It's always an honor to mingle in such esteemed company.
Irene blogs over at The Art Department. If you're interested in hearing about the ins and outs of book covers, genre art, and other related topics, she's a good source.
Also, Genreville finds its self without a featured artist for February, but we're looking for one for March. if you or someone you know has illustrated fantasy or science fiction book covers, please comment here with an email address, and we'll get in touch.
First, web exclusives! These are November 2009 titles, so no commentary from me, as it's been something like six months since I edited the reviews and I've entirely forgotten everything about them.
Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes Edited by J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec. Edge (SPD, dist.), $16.95 paper (336p) ISBN 9781894063319
Overall, the quality of the 13 new Holmes stories in this volume is superior to those in 2008’s similarly-themed Gaslight Grimoire, despite that book’s better-known roster of contributors. Once again, Barbara Roden’s (Northwest Passages) exceptional story “Of the Origin of the Hound of the Baskervilles” is on a level of its own. Roden takes advantage of a lacuna in Doyle’s classic—the missing pages from a letter Watson to Holmes&mdash...Read More
This past Friday, Amazon.com, in response to a dispute with Macmillan publishing over e-book pricing, removed the "buy now" option from Amazon's e-book and physical book listings for all of Macmillan's products. Both Amazon and Macmillan had differnt takes on what happened. Though they've been posted all over, I thought it would be educational to have them both reproduced in the same place for comparison.
Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to
Today is the big day for the Apple iPad, or iSlate, or iwhatever iit iis ithey're icalling iit. Science fiction, being science fiction, has a history of running almost ahead of the curve on this. SF authors have been putting out books where characters have what were at the time reading devices. But even the Kindle is more useful to me than the reading devices used by Gospodin Manuel Garcia O'Kelly-Davis or Miles Vorkosigan.
A Kindle has wireless. A Kindle has internal storage. A Kindle is portable and easy to use. In Komarr, Miles Vorkosigan schleps off a data-library of an accident victim instead of downloading it instantly via super SF wireless. No mention of encryption or DRM is made, so one presumes you buy data disks at the local data disk/book store.
Who comes close to getting it right? People l...Read More
Laura Haywood-Cory is soliciting contributions to A Change of Heart, a fanzine by and for fans with heart problems and other cardiovascular issues. What a great way to raise awareness! The call for submissions is here. Please pass it along to anyone you know who might be interested.
Are there other health-related fanzines out there? This is the first one I've heard of, but I don't keep up with the fanzine world.
