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Angela Korra'ti

Books

Christmas Eve book roundup

This is likely to be my last book roundup before the end of the year, so here goes!

Picked up electronically from Barnes and Noble:

  • White Tiger, by Kylie Chan. Grabbed this because it’s on sale for .99, and for that price, I’m willing to try Book 1 of quite a few things. This is urban fantasy purporting to be heavy on the Chinese mythos, though the protagonist is an Australian woman, and reviews indicate I should probably expect some Mary-Sue-ism going in. Specifically, this one was reviewed over at Smart Bitches, since there tends to be overlap between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. We’ll see where on the UF/PR spectrum this one falls.
  • Phoenix Rising, by Philippa Ballantine and Tee Morris. Steampunk, #1 of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series. I actually already have this one in mass market paperback, but I grabbed it electronically because again, .99 price point.
  • Napoleon’s Pyramids, by William Dietrich. Adventure/suspense, it looks like, of the “find the mysterious historical artifact” variety. Grabbed this one since it was a NOOK freebie.
  • Kitemaster and Other Stories, by Jim C. Hines. Short story collection. Grabbed this one because Jim Hines is generally awesome, and because there’s also a preview in here of his forthcoming Libriomancer novel.

And, picked up electronically from Kobo, since they sent me a 20 percent off coupon for a purchase because of being a customer there for a year:

  • Kit’s Law: A Novel, by Donna Morrissey. Re-buy of a book previously owned in print, a story set in Newfoundland.

247 for the year.

December 24, 2011 by
Bone Walker, Faerie Blood

I need your help on initial Kickstarter thoughts!

So let’s get this show on the road, people. I want to start planning the Kickstarter project to get Bone Walker finished and purchasable, but as Phase 1 of this, I’d like your feedback on potential incentives!

I want to hear from you if you fall into any of the following categories:

  1. You’ve run a successful Kickstarter campaign (what incentives worked to get you supporters?)
  2. You’ve supported a successful Kickstarter campaign (what incentives got you to support the campaign?)
  3. You are a prior reader of Faerie Blood and you want more in the same universe (what would get you to support this campaign?)
  4. You haven’t read anything in the Warder universe yet and you want to (same question as previous)

Note that the overall point of this Kickstarter would be to get Bone Walker finished and purchasable in electronic and print formats, with the side bonus of doing a second edition release of Faerie Blood. Thus the things I’d need to pay for would include:

  1. Commission of cover art for both books (cost TDB, I have a query out to a potential cover artist)
  2. A proper edit pass over Bone Walker (estimated cost $700), since it absolutely must be edited by someone who isn’t me; a query is out to a potential editor
  3. Initial setup cost with either Third Place or the University Book Store, depending on who has better rates, to get both books printable on the Espresso Book Machine (estimated cost $150 to set up both books)
  4. Cost per book and per page of printing individual copies of both books (cost TDB, as Bone Walker isn’t finished yet, but Faerie Blood would probably run me $2 per book and $.03 per page)

Look behind the fold for my thoughts on potential incentives. I want your feedback on order of incentive levels, combinations of potential incentives, and viable pledge levels for them! Also, if you can think of any really nifty incentives I don’t include here, do please let me know!

Continue Reading

December 20, 2011 by
Faerie Blood

Would you buy a print edition of Faerie Blood?

So, Carina Press has said no on Faerie Blood. This leaves before me the question of what to do with it next, and at this point, I have three problems with this novel when it comes to pitching it in the current market:

  1. There are already a whole lot of urban fantasy novels out there;
  2. I’m not romance-y enough for the paranormal romance end of the spectrum, read, I have no sex in this novel, and there’s barely any kissing;
  3. I’m also not dark/gritty/apocalyptic enough for the urban fantasy end of the spectrum. There’s not much actual violence in this book, and my heroine isn’t a badass, she’s a fiddle-playing geek who only just finds out about her fey heritage and the magic she’s inherited from her mother–she doesn’t have much time in the story to actually do anything seriously badassed with it.

Given these things, I am extremely dubious about my ability to pitch the novel to any further big pubs or agents. For one thing, I’ve already pitched it to most of the big pubs, with the exception of DAW, and the main reason I haven’t sent it to them at this point is my aforementioned wariness of the current urban fantasy market. For another thing, I’ve also already pitched it to the agents in which I’m actively interested. Part of me is still nagging that the couple dozen agents I’ve pitched it to isn’t enough work on pitching it–but on the other hand, a lot of the agents out there seem to have gotten slammed with so many queries now that their slush piles are crazytalk and their response times have accordingly increased dramatically. There are some agents whose response time has gotten to be over a year, and that’s assuming you get back a response at all.

So given all this, I’m seriously tempted to go the self-pub route with Faerie Blood and any further related stories, and focus other energies on newer things to be pitched to the big pubs.

My question for you therefore, O Internets, is this: if I were to do a limited run of print copies of Faerie Blood, would you buy one? I’m thinking about it because there are two Espresso book machines right here in Seattle, and one of them is right down the hill from my house at Third Place Books. I have two books (by other people) that are the output of this machine, and while it had trouble with the thicker one which is over 500 pages, the shorter one, which is comparable to Faerie Blood in length, is not badly assembled at all. If I were to get new, cover-quality art for the novel, it’s conceivable that I could therefore do a small set of print copies.

So I’m putting hard thought into this. I am looking at Third Place’s posted rates for their printing services, and pondering the possibility of doing a Kickstarter to raise the money.

Talk to me, Internets. Would you be interested? Because if I get enough people going hell yeah, I will move forward with this.

ETA: It has now been suggested to me on Google+ that I should consider a Kickstarter not for Faerie Blood specifically, but rather, for finishing Book 2, Bone Walker–and offering print copies of Faerie Blood as a potential incentive! I like this idea quite a bit and am going to be thinking about it very hard. If any of you out there would like this too, I really want to know about it!

December 14, 2011 by
Book Log

Book Log #33: Married With Zombies, by Jesse Petersen

Married with Zombies

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m a sucker for zombie novels, as y’all know. I’ll take them in all stripes: hardcore creep factor like Sarah Langan, spectacular worldbuilding like Mira Grant, or over the top steampunky goodness like Cherie Priest. I’ll also happily read any zombie novel that aims for funny and/or lighthearted, and I was pleased to see that Jesse Petersen’s Married With Zombies filled that bill nicely.

Our protagonists, Sarah and David, are in the middle of couples counseling when the zombie apocalypse hits–as they discover when they show up for a therapy appointment to find their therapist eating a previous client. Oops. From there, they quickly discover that a zombie outbreak has completely overrun Seattle, and that they are going to have to figure out fast how to not only survive the situation, but put aside their own marital issues while they’re doing it. This is an excellent setup, and it didn’t hurt either that the action started in Seattle, since I’m always a sucker for books set here. (Especially ones involving zombies.) We soon go into a general road trip, though, as Sarah is desperate to find out what happened to her family, and she and David meet the obligatory other parties along the way, all of whom are also struggling to deal with the outbreak–some effectively, some with outright fail, some with genuinely creepy fanaticism.

The book hits all the high points you want in a good ol’ fashioned zombie adventure, though I could have liked a bit more character development for our protagonists–I never got any real feel for why they were having issues to begin with. But then, given that this is pretty much a romantic comedy with zombies, you don’t really need much more than what you get, and I certainly liked this well enough that I’ll be reading more in the series. Three stars.

December 7, 2011 by
Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer

Faerie Blood and Lament of the Dove status report

As of this writing, Faerie Blood has finally vanished off of Fictionwise–and by extension, ereader.com, since Fictionwise owns that site and to the best of my knowledge, they use the same database. This means now that the novel shouldn’t be available for sale anywhere at all.

It’s a bit weird, being back to square one with this book, even if at a smaller scale than several traditionally published authors I know who’ve had a series fold out from underneath them. At the same time, though, it’s also a bit of a relief.

Faerie Blood is now in the queue at Carina Press, for all the same general reasons I was interested in them before: i.e., they’re queer-friendly, they’re digital and therefore appealing to me as a tech geek, they’re taking all genres and do a lot of ‘other genres with heavy romantic elements’ stuff in particular, they now have a solid and established track record. In this specific case, though, I’ve also noted that they’ve published at least a couple of authors who’d been previously published elsewhere–at least one author for example who was previously published through Dorchester. So I’m hoping that this’ll mean they’ll be receptive to my work.

Relatedly, I am one, count it, one single chapter away from finishing the sixth draft of Lament of the Dove. Once that happens, I will be putting out a call for beta readers. (I’m cognizant that we’re moving into the Christmas/Solstice season, though, so I will be trying to schedule around that, and targeting sending Lament off in early January.) Watch this space for further details on that, people!

December 6, 2011 by
Books

The Harlequin had a 50 percent off ebook sale book roundup

So um yeah Harlequin has a coupon up today, for 50 percent off of any purchase on their ebook store. I was going to stoically refrain until I remembered OH HEY Luna is an imprint of Harlequin–and there were quite a few Luna books I wanted to look at.

Therefore, picked up electronically from Harlequin today:

  • Urban Shaman, Thunderbird Falls, and Coyote Dreams, by userinfomizkit. The first three books of the Walker Papers, which I didn’t have electronically yet.
  • Hammer of the Earth and Shield of the Sky, by Susan Krinard. Fantasy, with what appears to be a Neolithic-like setting.
  • Aftertime, Survivors, and Rebirth, by Sophie Littlefield. Post-apocalyptic SF, with zombies. Promises to be grim, but I liked the idea of the heroine having actually recovered from a previous zombiefied state, and being on the hunt for her stolen daughter. (NOTE: Survivors is a novella set after Book 1, and Harlequin currently has it for free on their site.)
  • Cast in Shadow, by Michelle Sagara West. Fantasy. Book 1 of the Chronicles of Elantra, which I keep hearing about. I’ve read older books by her and kept meaning to check this series out.
  • The Morcai Battalion, The Morcai Battalion: The Recruit, and The Morcai Battalion: Invictus, by Susan Kyle. SF of the space opera/military variety, and I snurched these since I’m not used to seeing the Luna imprint doing SF and I wish to support this with my moneys!

242 for the year.

December 4, 2011 by