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Angela Korra'ti

Faerie Blood

First print drop of Faerie Blood!

Check it out, you guys, I have the first drop of Faerie Blood! Here’s a big box of half-Sidhe fiddle player, ready to rock, and the redoubtable printing machine handing me one of the books too!

The operative word for this being AWESOME.

This is drop #1 of the print run–the rest of them will be finished early next week, I am informed. But this’ll keep me plenty occupied as I begin to mail out copies to Kickstarter backers!

The total run is 70 copies. Of these, 40 are going to backers. Of the 30 remaining, four are compensation copies for userinfosolarbird and for Kiri Moth! Two are reserved for my contest in progress. That leaves me a total of 24 copies available to sell!

So if anybody out there has a hankering to claim one of the books out of this print run for your very own, NOW is the time to let me know! As I call out on the official Faerie Blood page, I ask $15 per copy if I can hand-deliver it to you. If I need to mail it to you, I ask $20 to cover shipping costs and postage. I will be giving priority to anybody who can pay me via Paypal, or who will be attending Westercon and can pay either Dara or myself in person. So if you’d like a copy out of this run, talk to me ASAP! PM/DM me on the usual social networks, email me, whatever works for you, just get in touch and let me know that you want to make arrangements!

Special note to anybody in Toronto, Montreal, Moncton, or St. John’s: if you’re not already getting a copy from me via the Kickstarter and you want one of this print run, I am quite willing to bring you a book directly when Dara and I go on vacation! But you do need to let me know ASAP if you want me to reserve you one, and a Paypal payment will guarantee a copy will be saved for you!

ETA: If you want to fling me moneys and you can’t do Paypal, I will also accept $15 (if I’m personally delivering) or $20 (if I’m mailing the book) in credit anywhere I can buy books or ebooks. Talk to me if you want to pursue that option too. 🙂

July 5, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Announcing a Faerie Blood giveway!

Happy July 4th, (American portion of the) Internets! Because it’s the Day of Things Exploding, and it’s generally a good day for bright shiny things, and because that the second edition of Faerie Blood has been released out into the world, I feel now is an excellent time to run me a contest for the book! I’m going to give away two print copies AND two ebook copies. Yes folks, that’s a total of FOUR. Because this book is mine mine mine, and because I CAN. But y’all are going to have to work for ’em!

Here are the rules!

I will be running this giveaway for the next two weeks, starting today, ending July 18th. Winners of print copies, if local to me, will have their copies hand-delivered to them before I leave on my Canada vacation on July 23rd. Winners of print copies NOT local to me will have them mailed off before that same date. Winners of ebook copies will have the option of any or all of the formats created for my Kickstarter backers (EPUB, PDF, or MOBI).

I will announce winners on July 19th. Winners of print copies not local to me will need to provide me their snailmail addresses at that time. Winners of ebook copies will need to specify what format they want (or if they want all of them), and give me a valid email address to which to send the book. Info will need to be provided within 48 hours of the contest winner announcement, or else I’ll draw a different winner from the contest pool!

Winners of print copies, your print copies WILL be signed. You will need to tell me whether to sign them for you or to someone else, if you want to give the book to a friend or family member! If you want to give an ebook copy to somebody else, you can do that too!

And here’s what you need to do!

At bare minimum, you should drop a comment on this post (either the original post on angelakorrati.com, or its mirrors on LJ or Dreamwidth) and I will add you to the random pool of names from which I’ll draw.

If you do any of the following actions, I will give you an extra entry in the random pool, which will up your chances of winning. If I don’t actually see you doing this because I don’t follow you on the pertinent network, provide me a link or a screenshot by way of evidence! And yes, if you do more than one of these activities, you will get a chance for every activity you do.

  • Tweet the contest link on Twitter
  • Share the contest link on Facebook or Google+
  • Reblog the contest post on Tumblr
  • Post about the giveaway on your own blog or journal
  • Post a review of Faerie Blood on your own blog or journal
  • Rate and/or review Faerie Blood on any of the following: Amazon, B&N, the iBookstore, Smashwords, Goodreads

For extra bonus chances to win, if you do anything creative pertaining to Faerie Blood and this contest, that will win you FIVE extra entries in the draw! ‘Anything creative’ includes but is not limited to:

  • Comments on contest posts that eloquently pitch why you MUST have a copy of this book, even if you already have one. But you have to be extremely eloquent. Make your argument count!
  • Sketches/artwork of any characters in the cast or situation in the book!
  • Filk lyrics pertinent to any character or situation in the cast, or the Warder universe in general!
  • Poetry! I am partial to haikus and sonnets.
  • Fic of any length clearly set in the Warder universe–does not need to involve the Faerie Blood cast! (Note: keep it rated PG-13, please, in keeping with the overall style of the novel.)
  • Surprise me! But remember, it’s GOT to be an creative activity. Sculpture in LEGOS! Cake! Knitting! Whatever it is, you have to make something, and it’s got to be pertinent to Faerie Blood and/or the Warder universe.

Any act of creativity must be posted somewhere I can see it, and you will need to provide me a link to it in the comments of the contest post or of its mirrors. And since the creative activities are harder and require more effort, and also because they are worth more chances in the random pool, limit one per entrant, please!

Also, I will specifically showcase the awesomeness of any creative activity, even if you don’t win, in future posts on this blog. If you’re somebody engaged in your own creative work, consider this an opportunity to promote yourself! I will link you RIGHT UP and tell people to go check you out!

Any questions, just give me a shout! And again, happy 4th to all who are celebrating today!

July 4, 2012 by
Music

Une chose merveilleuse

On my way home tonight I was listening to tracks off the album À la grâce de Dieu by the Charbonniers, and in particular, the song “Allons vidons”. Jean-Claude Mirandette was just getting started on the first verse when I had that delightful double-take reaction of HEY HEY STOP I UNDERSTOOD THAT! I backed up, played that bit again, and sure enough, the sentence “C’est dans notre village / Il y a un p’tit moulin” popped right out at me. “In our village there is a little mill”. It’s a tiny sentence to be sure, but I was inordinately proud of comprehending it.

It’s weird and wonderful to hear a whole sentence in another language, only to understand it just like it’s the language I grew up with. I’m still getting bits and pieces of songs piecemeal, but that I’m getting them in general gives me ridiculous amounts of glee. My main goal is still musical, i.e., to be able to understand the lyrics of all these awesome songs and therefore appreciate them more. Anything I get out of it for conversational purposes is really icing on the cake.

But that said, I was also very pleased to be able to construct this whole sentence all by myself when posting to Facebook: “Je lire les paroles en anglais et français, j’écoute les chansons en français, je peu à peu comprends plus et plus!” Which means, “I read the lyrics in English and French, I listen to the songs in French, bit by bit I understand more and more!”

A good chunk of that sentence did in fact come to me either straight out of songs or else from poking around on band websites. “Les paroles” I know as “the lyrics” from looking at the French edition of leventdunord.com. “J’écoute”, “I listen”, I swiped right out of the lyrics to “Écris-moi”. “Chansons”, “songs”, is all over the place in all the songs in my collection. “Plus et plus” I got out of the lyrics to “Le dragon de Chimay”.

I’m still also heavily using Google Translate–but sometimes I only have to use it to doublecheck gender of nouns or verb conjugation spellings, because some of the words are starting to actually pop into my brain on my own and I just need to doublecheck them. As opposed to having no idea what the words actually are. Progress! I has it!

So yeah! Plan to learn all the Quebecois trad by slow osmosis: proceeding nicely. 😀

ETA: userinfodesperance, who is a wise and clever wordsmith apparently in more than one language, advises me that the proper first person singular conjugation for “lire” is “je lis”. This, children, is why you always ask for language help from people who either speak the language or who have studied it better than you have! Also, this is an extremely important verb for a writer and book geek to know!

July 2, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood live on Smashwords, and what that was like

To follow up on my last post about comparing the experiences of putting the book up on Amazon, B&N, and Apple, here’s the news that Faerie Blood is now live and for sale on Smashwords!

I was relieved that reformatting my manuscript for Smashword’s automatic conversion wasn’t nearly as much of a chore as I expected. It helped considerably that I always write in manuscript format anyway, and what styling I use is very simple indeed. I had to do only a few minimal changes that are easy to do for anyone familiar with Word. The Smashwords Style Guide was quite helpful with this, spelling out in extensive detail what the best practices are for manuscript formatting on their site.

Here’s the thing, though–if you want to deploy to Smashwords, be prepared for the output to be bare-bones, minimally styled, in order to maximize compatibility across all the formats and readers that Smashwords supports. Which means in turn that the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI versions you can download from Smashwords aren’t nearly as prettily styled as the ones I’ve deployed to my Kickstarter backers, or for that matter, that I’ve uploaded directly to the other sites for sale there. Now, I probably could have gotten a little fancier, and tried to make the Smashwords edition of the book closer to the versions on the other sites. But the Style Guide hammers home, over and over and over, how you don’t want to get too crazytalk with the styling or else their automated system will reject your book. So I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

Overall I’d say that even if it means I have multiple sites to keep track off, I’m glad I did my own formatting for the Amazon, B&N, and Apple releases. And I suspect that once Kobo’s self-pub system goes live, I’ll take that site off the list on Smashwords–but we’ll see. Meanwhile, Smashwords should also be deploying me to Sony, Diesel, Baker & Taylor, and Page Foundry. The latter three of whom I had to look up, since I’d only vaguely heard of Diesel, and hadn’t heard of Baker & Taylor or Page Foundry at all. But I have to clear their review to get onto the other sites. So for now, I’m just on Smashwords itself.

More bulletins as events warrant!

July 2, 2012 by
Faerie Blood, Publishing

Experiences with self-pub so far

So now that I’ve put Faerie Blood out on three different self-publishing platforms, I thought I’d take a moment to do a summary post of my experiences with those platforms so far. Granted, this is only across a week or so, but it’s at least enough to give me an initial impression. And I figured it’d be nice to share that with y’all so you can get an idea of what self-pubbing is like.

I’ve put the book out on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the Apple iTunes store so far. Here are my thoughts on each in a few different areas:

Speed of book deployment: Amazon wins here, with their promise of roughly a 12-hour window between when you deploy your book and when it shows up on the site. This is not entirely accurate; while my book did start showing up on Amazon sites around the end of that twelve hours, it started showing up on the sites in the Eurozone first (i.e., DE, ES, FR, and IT). It took until the next day before the book had fully deployed to the US and UK stores, and the next day before that before pricing information was available in Canada.

That said? Actually going through Amazon’s process of book deployment was still fastest. Barnes and Noble took a few days before they even approved my account for posting content. Apple took nearly a week for similar approval. Once I was actually cleared to post content to B&N, that did take only about a 24-hour turnaround time, but there was that buffer of approval time first. Ditto for Apple; once I was cleared with them, I had to go through another day or so before my book cleared “quality assurance” and went live on the four iBooks sites I deployed it to.

Ease of book deployment: Amazon and B&N are tied here. I’d already generated MOBI and EPUB files for my Kickstarter backers, so it was pretty much just a question of uploading each to the respective platforms. Amazon gets points for providing a Kindle simulator to let you sanity check how your book will look on different devices–that’s super-helpful. But both Amazon and B&N basically let me upload to them with only minimal conversion.

Apple by comparison was more difficult. For one thing, there’s an added layer of complexity with how you’re required to download a whole extra app in order to prepare your book for deployment to the iTunes store; Amazon and B&N have UI to do that right on their sites. For another, once I actually pulled down the app, it wouldn’t take the EPUB I’d already prepared and threw me several mysterious error messages. I had to Google to figure out why it was complaining, and eventually discovered that Calibre treated my blockquotes on the very first page of the book in a non-standard way. B&N didn’t care about this, but Apple did. Fixing the problem was easy–but finding the solution took some work. It didn’t help that the error messages were entirely non-intuitive, and that I had to spend some time debugging the EPUB file in a third program, the EPUB editor Sigil.

Ease of use of self-pub login: Amazon and B&N are tied for me here too. Both have very clean, very straightforward sites for self-pub authors to log into, and it’s very easy to find the data Most Relevant to Your Interests, i.e., how many books have you sold and how much money are you due? Apple’s site strikes me as cluttered and overly complex in comparison, to levels I historically have seen only out of Microsoft.

Actual sales: And now for that data that is, indeed, Most Relevant to My Interests. Amazon, with ten sales for me on the US site and one on the ES, is the clear winner here. For the small portion of June 2012 I’ve been live, this means I’ve made $39.45 in royalties from the US site and €3.28 from the ES one, which is about $4.15 in USD right now. So that gives me a total of $43.60 or so I’ll be expecting out of Amazon in 60 days.

Barnes and Noble has given me three sales so far, for a total due of $11.67. Again, I should see that in 60 days.

Nothing out of Apple yet.

So that means I should be seeing $55.27 at some point in September. Which is not a terribly impressive number by itself, but given that the book’s only been live for a week and that I’ve done minimal promotion on it, that’s not bad, I think! I could go out to sushi on that, or start the Buy Anna a Real Irish Flute Fund. 😀 Or maybe the Buy Anna a Macbook Air Fund. I dunno yet. Regardless, it’ll eventually buy me something shiny!

It’ll be interesting to see how the numbers behave the longer Faerie Blood is live, and what happens as well once I deploy Bone Walker and the other, shorter pieces involved with the Kickstarter.

Any questions? Anybody else out there want to share their self-pub experiences? Do so in the comments!

July 1, 2012 by
Books

End of a long week book roundup

Because even though working on my own words lately has put a big dent in the rate at which I’m reading other people’s words, I am still also BUYING other people’s words, so here ya go.

Picked up in print from Third Place Books, bought new even though they had a delicious 40 percent off Used Books sale going on at the time:

  • Mechanique, by Genevieve Valentine. Steampunk. Picked up pretty much because Kiri Moth did the cover art, and hey, she’s MY cover artist, so we’re talking cover artist solidarity here. Also, the book sounded like fun and I’d been meaning to get it for some time regardless.
  • The Inimitable Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse. Bought because the Murkworks loves us some Jeeves and Wooster, and the original stories were heartily recommended to me!

Picked up in electronic form from Barnes and Noble:

  • A Kiss at Midnight, by Eloisa James. Grabbed because B&N had it available for .99, and Eloisa James has been spoken well of on the Smart Bitches site. Also because this story’s influenced by fairy tales and I’m a sucker for that, and interested in seeing how a historical romance plays off of fairy tale tropes.
  • Canadian French for Better Travel. Grabbed this since it was available in ebook form for cheap, and because I’m interested in Canadian/Quebecois French, and hey, because I’m going to Montreal for a weekend soon!

75 for the year.

June 29, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood now live on iBooks sites!

Faerie Blood has now gone live on four iBooks stores: the US, Canada, UK, and Australian stores! So if you’re an iDevice owner in any of those markets and you don’t have the book already, there’s another way for you to get it! If you’re an iDevice owner in other markets and you’d like to see me deploy to your home iBooks store, let me know! I’m certainly going to look at the iBooks stores for countries in the Eurozone at minimum–but feedback on this would be great nonetheless. 🙂

Direct links off to the US, Canada, UK, and Australian iBooks pages are now added to the official Faerie Blood page. Clickie!

June 29, 2012 by