Publishing

You Can Have WEIRD Things

May 13, 2015 by Jon Frater 1 Comment

(I know, I owe you a post about imagining the “death of the library.” But this is a big deal.)

I recently got into a Facebook thread with a former (now grown up) student over e-book pricing decisions. She’s an avid reader but refuses to buy any e-book that’s more than a dollar or two in price. It was nothing against the authors, or the books themselves, she explained. She just didn’t see why she should ever pay more than that for a book. Neither did her friends.

It’s a fair point, especially if all you’ve ever known about the experience of acquiring books is looking at price lists on Amazon and clicking a button. From the producer’s side of the transaction, it’s more complicated.

There’s the author, who creates a labor of love until the minute someone decides to click that yellow button that says “Buy”. There’s the editor, who toils over the manuscript to make it readable. Some editors will carve out whole chunks of text to achieve that, others will simply correct the grammar, spacing, and spelling, but the effort is the same.

There is the cover artist who brings a point of story from inside the pages of the manuscript into blazing life.

The point, as Kevin G. Summers makes clear here, is that books cost money to make. Considerable amounts of money. In the case of indie publishing, everyone except the author makes money, at least until he or she sells enough copies to recover the costs of the book in question. Speaking as someone who has just started down this road, it’s a steep learning curve.

Indy authors Nick Cole and Michael Bunker, and ThirdScribe creator Rob McClellan have made a thing, called Apocalypse Weird. I’ve mentioned it on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve reviewed a bunch of the books they’ve released.

To be blunt, they need money to keep the ball rolling, and have built an Indiegogo project to raise it. Three greats ways of donating stand out:

First, just drop a buck into the bucket. It makes no dent in your budget and still helps us out.

Second, you can drop a fiver into the bucket and get a neat perk.

Third–and my favorite option–$20 buys you the first eight AW novels, which have been getting rave reviews across the board for months. Or, for the same $20, you can pre-order the next eight AW novels in the series, which are sure to be every bit as good.

Sixteen outstanding works of End of the World fiction for $40. It doesn’t get better than that.

Actually–it does get better. There are plenty of awesome perks to choose from. But, the sale ends in 8 days, so check out the fund raiser to donate now!

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Reader Advisory: AW: The Dark Knight

February 25, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

There are many things that annoy me as a reader. Authors who insert horrific scenes about the abuse of children or animals as a quick way to move the plot forward is one of them. Nick Cole, however is not one of those authors, and his latest contribution to the Apocalypse Weird universe is proof of that.

AW: The Dark Night is Cole’s second solo AW book, which immediately follows the action in AW: The Red King. In AW: TRK we read about the fall of civilization in southern California. About Holiday, a depressed drunk with repressed memories of boot camp; about Ash, a Spetznaz trained M.D. with a heart of gold; about Frank, an older guy with a taste for fine Italian cuisine and disturbing marksmanship skills; Ritter, a skinny white guy who badly wants to be a gangsta; and Braddock, a special forces soldier with orders to revenge the U.S. government against its enemies, “whatever it takes.” Over the course of the book, these folks learn to deal with the appearance of zombies, the breakdown of civilization, and the secrets that they dole out with eyedroppers to each other.

In this follow-up novel, we see that Frank, Ash, Ritter and a few others have built themselves a fortress out of the remains of their suburban housing complex, no thanks to Holiday who nearly got them all overrun in the previous book. In a self-conscious attempt to get back into Frank and Ash’s good graces, Holiday comes upon the idea of surrounding the complex with shipping containers. It works well enough to impress the others but Frank and Ash are not so easily placated.

Into this environment comes Cory, a special needs teen who has lost the only world he’s known and is not well adapted to the one he finds himself in. He has one survival technique which is adapted for the new world: he puts on a cape and gloves and mask and becomes Batman. Batman can go out at night. Batman can defend himself against the undead hordes (“stranger danger” in Cory-speak) and Batman is never scared, even as Cory is quaking in his shoes.

Batman gets Cory through the ruined landscape one step at a time: from the house where he hides with the sitter to the local pharmacy, to escaping with Heather the stock girl, to accidentally plunging into a horrific blasted wasteland populated by killer robots and malevolent computers, to his own shattered world of zombies, to the suburban castle where he finally finds refuge.

Frankly, the only way you can not be sick with worry over Cory’s plight is if you either A) have no heart, or B) have been dead for six weeks. And this gets to what I wrote about earlier: there is no sign of cheap emotional manipulation by Cole at any point in the narrative. He writes succinctly, getting deep into Cory’s head, letting us experience where the boy is coming from on every step of his adventure and it never feels overdone or sentimental. It is merely authentic story telling.

Just about the only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it was over way too soon. But that’s fine, because Wonderment Media has a lot more material in the pipe and it’s a very big world.

Reader Advisory: Reversal

February 23, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Have you ever had one of those days where things go wrong, and then instead of straightening out, they just go wronger and wronger until everything you know is just completely screwed up? Sasha has one of those. She’s the heroine in Reversal, Jennifer Ellis’s contribution to the Apocalypse Weird universe. And boy, does she have problems.

Sasha Wood, a twenty-something meteorologist, has just landed her dream job as a research assistant at the International Polar Research Station. There are the usual pitfalls of dealing with new situations: co-workers who run the gamut from friendly to hostile, the painful isolation of living at the top of the world, and the weird fact that climate change seems to be, well, reversing itself. Her workplace crush on Soren Anderson, the station’s caretaker and survival expert, does not help. But after six months of dealing with the hostile environment, she feels that she’s managed well enough.

Then the arctic literally explodes as meteors rain down, blasting open methane pockets in the permafrost. Planes streak overhead to crash into nearby mountains while an apparently worldwide episode of mass blindness causes panic all over the globe and wreaks havoc inside the research station. Sasha and her co-workers manage to cope in the face of ice storms, but at the loss of half her team to the elements. As if that’s not enough, there are strange fog banks rising up from the methane craters which twist time and space to create passageways between the arctic and antarctic circles. To add to the fun, the magnetic poles are wonky, all communications with the outside world are down, and the only voice Sasha can get on the radio is a crazy woman who chatters about the imminent arrival of The Dragon. We won’t even discuss the supposedly dead volcano that’s violently erupting in the south pole.

If all this sounds confusing, it’s because confusion is the name of the game in Reversal. Jennifer Ellis has created a scenario that manages to be both claustrophobic and agoraphobic simultaneously. As we follow Sasha through her attempts to make sense of what’s going on around her, Ellis gives us small pieces of a massive puzzle one by one and trusts her readers to put them together in their heads. Some of Sasha’s co-workers are Black Hands either by design or last minute recruitment, and allies and enemies appear from the wastelands and disappear right back into them. (The penguins are relatively benign but the polar bears are literally out for blood.) There is one fixed point in the narrative: when the member of the 88 who goes by the name “Paul” (short for “Pollution”) lets her know that the world is ending and she has a chance to work for him. She refuses and navigates Hell on Ice in an attempt to save her life and Soren’s. As Ellis describes it, think The Thing meets The Core.

There are times when the narrative bogs down between the snowmobile chases and the blind treks through ice blizzards, especially as we’re constantly trying to figure who is working for which side (and I would have liked more polar bears). There are a few details that never get resolved–is the Dragon real or not, and where the heck is he, was one of my personal nitpicks–but the final result is a thoroughly enjoyable romp through Ellis’s environmental nightmares.

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Hachette Discovers DRM Is A Bad Idea

June 20, 2014 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Hachette insisted that Amazon sell its books with “Digital Rights Management” that only Amazon is allowed to remove, and now Hachette can’t afford to pull its books from Amazon, because its customers can only read their books with Amazon’s technology. So now, Hachette has reduced itself to a commodity supplier to Amazon, and has frittered away all its market power. The other four major publishers are headed into the same place with Amazon, and unless they dump DRM quick, they’re going to suffer the same fate.

The subject is more fully covered in Doctorow’s article for The Guardian. (You can read the entire thing here.) But the point he makes is valid, and will remain valid for the foreseeable future: the only beneficiaries of DRM are the ones selling the e-readers.

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