Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood availability update!

With the help of the lovely folks of Book Universe at Norwescon, I sold three copies of the print edition of Faerie Blood in addition to the ones I hand-sold myself.

This means I have a total of eight copies left in my current print run. Previous prices still apply for these copies: $15 if I can hand-deliver them to you, $20 if I need to mail them.

Also, I didn’t sell any of the ebook bundle CDs I had left. Which means, O Internets, that I’m going to make them available TO YOU! What’s on these CDs:

  • EPUB, PDF, and MOBI of the Kickstarter edition of Faerie Blood
  • EPUB and PDF of the Drollerie edition of Faerie Blood
  • EPUB, PDF, and MOBI of the short story “The Blood of the Land”

I’m asking $5 for each CD.

However, I will also cut people a deal if they want a print copy AND one of the CDs! If you buy both together, I will waive the mailing cost, so it’s still $20 straight up for both of them.

If I hand-deliver the items, I will give you a two-dollar discount, so that’ll be $18 for a print copy AND the CD.

This offer will be in effect until I run out of CDs. And if I run out of print editions first, it will apply to however many more copies are applicable in the next print run I do.

Any takers? Talk to me! And if you already have copies of the book, signal-boost to others! Thanks all. 🙂

April 1, 2013 by
Music

Le Vent du Nord Plan B is GO

Because I am damn well going to see some Le Vent du Nord SOMEWHERE this coming weekend, I have now enacted Plan B: going to the Victoria show on Saturday night!

Advantages to this plan:

  • Dara is coming with me so I’ll have oodles more fun anyway
  • Dara and I have never been to Victoria and we’ve kept meaning to go, so this is an excellent excuse
  • We can go up on the ferry and come home on Kenmore Air–not quite practically to our front door, sadly, but Lake Union is still a lot closer to Kenmore than SeaTac so it’s all good
  • Seeing Le Vent at a jazz club as opposed to a symphony venue means WOO audience participation baby!
  • And hopefully also PICTURES, because there will still be the obligatory show report!

So let’s see if THIS plan gets to go through. Susan the Awesome is sending me her tickets, of which there are four–so I’ll have two spares. Hopefully I can find them a home!

April 1, 2013 by
Music

No Le Vent du Nord symphony show after all :(

Y’know, there’s NEVER a good time to find out that your current favorite band has just had the show you were aiming for cancelled out from under them. But “while you are at a science fiction convention trying to a) promote your work and b) assist with the music programming and c) HAVE FUN” is particularly suboptimal.

Because yeah, I’ve found out today that the Le Vent du Nord symphony show has been cancelled. 🙁 This is not quite as devastating to me as having missed the show in Oregon–at least in this case, “the entire show is not happening”, as opposed to “the show is happening but I’m MISSING IT because my car conked out”. But.

I’ve had to cancel my Amtrak train reservations now, because that was after all the entire point of the trip. I’m now scrambling to see if I can arrange plan B: attending the show they’re having in Victoria on 4/6 instead.

Susan the Awesome will not be able to come out from Ontario at all, on the grounds that she HAD been going to attend both shows, but if the cornerstone show has been cancelled, she can no longer justify the expense especially given that the band will be having a show much closer to her a week later. But I’m working with her to see if I can take her tickets off her hands.

I’m hoping to use one and perhaps two of them if Dara wants to join me for a weekend trip to Victoria. Which would mean that Susan would have two tickets left. So if anybody in the Pacific Northwest reading this thinks they might like those other two tickets, talk to me ASAP to make arrangements. I’d REALLY like to see the tickets get into the hands of fellow fans of Le Vent du Nord!

But DAMMIT. I was really hoping for symphonic goodness. Mope.

March 29, 2013 by
About Me, Carina Press, Valor of the Healer

Blogging at Here Be Magic today!

Hey folks! Surfacing from Norwescon long enough to report that my very first contribution to the Here Be Magic blog has gone up today! I’m being relaxed and groovy, and talking a bit about Valor of the Healer as well as Faerie Blood, and mentioning a few of the ways I’m shooting for equality and balance in my work. It’s no accident that both of my heroines of record, to date, are elves who are not white.

And being, well, ME, I also mention a few of the ways I love to geek out!

Come on over and say hi! I AM at Norwescon so I’m only able to pay erratic attention to the comments right now, but I’ll be trying to answer any comments as the weekend progresses and I have time in between convention programming. 🙂

Many thanks to my fellow Here Be Magic authors for spreading the word!

March 29, 2013 by
Faerie Blood

HI NORWESCON!

So! Here I am on my first night of Norwescon, and all, repeat, all of my remaining postcards and posters for Kiri Moth’s awesome Faerie Blood cover art have vanished off the freebie tables where I left ’em. And at least one person appears to have bought Faerie Blood on Amazon today, and I have picked up a couple new followers on Twitter as well.

If you’re coming by because you found those posters and postcards, and you see this before the end of the convention: special offer! Come find me and I’ll sign that postcard or poster for you, and also give you $1 off either the print edition of Faerie Blood OR the CDs of the ebook that I have with me! Blonde chick. Brown hat. Great Big Sea hoodie. Can’t miss me!

Asking $15 for the print editions, and $5 for the ebook CDs–which contain not only the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats of the current edition of the book, but ALSO the EPUB and PDF of the original Drollerie Press edition. And I’ve thrown in the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI editions of the Warder universe short story “The Blood of the Land” as well. I have 17 copies of these discs, and they’re a Norwescon exclusive. Get ’em from me while supplies last!

ALSO: I have arranged with the nice lady who runs the Book Universe table to have four copies of the print edition on consignment for the con! If you can’t find me and you want a copy of the book, look in the dealers’ room for the Book Universe table! I buy books from them every year just because they’re awesome.

ALSO #2: Special shoutout to Tiger Gray and Vivien Weaver at the Hard Limits Press table in the dealers’ room, who turn out to know my most EXCELLENT editor at Carina, Deb Nemeth! I bought the two books they were selling on the grounds of that, and we had an awesome conversation about each other’s book covers, and publishing under pen names. Note also: Hard Limits Press is taking submissions. Fellow writers, go look ’em up.

March 28, 2013 by
Publishing

Amazon buys Goodreads, forms GIGANTOBABY

Yeah. If you pay any attention at all to news in the publishing realm, and if you’re on the social networks, you’ve probably already heard about Amazon buying Goodreads. If you haven’t heard yet, here are some pertinent links:

Goodreads’ CEO’s announcement

Publisher’s Weekly article

PaidContent.org interviews Goodreads GEO

Article on Wired.com

Smart Bitches Trashy Books’s pithy commentary

And as I pretty much just commented over on SBTB, man, I have concerns about this big time.

Like a lot of voracious readers, I’ve valued the general caliber of reviews on Goodreads way more than I have the ones on Amazon, even if the Amazon ones get more visibility. I’ve preferred the Goodreads reviews because they’ve historically been less prone to manipulation (not entirely immune, but at least somewhat less, anyway). Goodreads doesn’t have people dropping one star on something just because they don’t like the price it’s selling for on the Kindle, or because the release date isn’t what they want, or for any host of other biased reasons. Because of this, I pay way, way more attention to reviews on Goodreads when it comes to deciding whether or not I’m going to buy a book.

But just as important as the caliber of reviews is that up till now, Goodreads has been neutral. They’ve not been tied to any specific book vendor or any specific device. This has meant that as a site, they’re naturally more focused on the community of readers.

I’m a Goodreads librarian, and I’ve gotten the email that they’ve sent around to all the librarians that pretty much says what the press releases are saying—i.e., that they intend to keep all the ratings and reviews intact, that they will continue to link off to other retailers, that they will continue to maintain general neutrality. I’m hoping that’s true. But I’m also remembering that this isn’t the first time Amazon’s bought a previously independent property that’s since fallen by the wayside.

Goodreads is saying they’re going to grow the company, but I can’t help but think that shiny new employees they’re bringing in are going to be way more invested in developing shiny new features to integrate with the Kindle. And I have a real hard time buying that Amazon’s going to put up with them making it easy for Goodreads users to go off and buy books anywhere else but on Amazon.

And let’s not even get into how this influx of user data is marketing gold. God-DAMN, Amazon, didn’t you people have enough marketing data on me already? Did you really need my massive Goodreads account library, too?

That property being Stanza. Y’all remember Stanza, yes? Independent reading app? I’m just sayin’, I haven’t seen ANY development on that thing in ages, either on the mobile app OR on the ancient desktop edition thereof.

Now, I’m not going to go deleting my Goodreads account. As a newbie author just starting out building her audience, the site’s still too valuable a tool for me to disregard just because I’m cranky at the people who manage it. But as a reader, and specifically as a reader who does her electronic reading on things that aren’t Kindles…

Yeah. I have concerns.

March 28, 2013 by
Other People's Books

About Bridget Zinn and Poison

The other day I heard about an author by the name of Bridget Zinn, whose first book, a YA Fantasy novel called Poison, has just been released.

Thing is, it’s been released posthumously–because Bridget died of cancer in 2011. Now, her book’s finally seeing the light of day. And her loved ones are asking people to spread the word about it, particularly asking that authors post about their first releases, or that non-authors post about other momentous firsts in their lives.

I could post about my own cancer diagnosis and how, even with the reasonably low-impact scenario I went through, hearing about Bridget dying before she could see her own book published really hit home with me. Instead, though, I’m going to focus upon what the Help post I linked to asked for, and talk about my first book.

As y’all know, Valor of the Healer is about to drop in another couple of weeks. But it’s NOT the first book I professionally released. That of course was Faerie Blood, my urban fantasy, which was originally published by Drollerie Press in 2009 and which I resurrected via Kickstarter last year. While I am extremely proud of Valor of the Healer, and am secure in proclaiming that it’s a more complex and mature work, in many ways Faerie Blood is the book of my heart.

I wrote the bulk of it in 2003 for Nanowrimo, and kept going until I had a full novel’s worth of words. I threw everything I loved into it: music, magic, elves, Seattle, biking, computers, and all sorts of geeky references to things like Linux and Nethack and Calvin and Hobbes. My love of the music of Elvis Presley AND the folk music of Newfoundland influenced two major characters in the cast. It is, after all, no accident at all that Faerie Blood‘s hero is a bouzouki player from Newfoundland!

I wasn’t diagnosed with my breast cancer until 2007, by which point I’d gone through several query cycles with the book. And it wasn’t until 2008 that Drollerie agreed to publish me. The book finally was deployed for sale in 2009, and by then, I’d gone through radiation treatment, a mastectomy, and reconstruction surgery. I’m in good condition now, and am immensely grateful that Evergreen Medical Center has looked after me so well, and that I am in fact here to see my next book about to be released into the digital wilds.

So yeah, very much feeling for Bridget’s loved ones. And I’d like to encourage you all to consider going to check out the site that remains up in honor of her and of her novel. If you’d like to help spread the word about her and do something in her memory, check out her family is asking for folks to do over here.

And if the book sounds like fun to you, buy it! And review it! It certainly sounds like fun to me–and since it’s described as being full of “adventure and romance and fun”, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate its author than to indulge in what the book’s got to offer. Go check it out. For Bridget.

Thanks all.

March 25, 2013 by