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February 2018 ebook roundup

Binti: The Night Masquerade

And now: the February 2018 ebook roundup!

This might wind up being my last one involving Barnes and Noble, after news this week that they’ve instituted some brutal layoffs. The Digital Reader talks about this story here, and there’s a similar and more in-depth post on tumblr here.

It’s very telling that the only ebooks I’ve bought from B&N in the last couple years have been due to ebook settlement credit or gift cards to spend. Most of the B&N purchases in this post were because I got my yearly VISA gift card from work. And I blew half of that on a B&N card because Kobo doesn’t sell gift cards here in the States, or at least not anywhere I’m likely to shop.

A few of these are ebook rebuys, for things I’d already bought on the iBooks store but which I wanted in a more accessible form. And getting B&N books into my master library in Calibre is slightly less irritating than doing iBooks.

The Amazon purchases are also because I had credit to spend. (In this case, from returning a gifted CD that I had already.)

Anyway, here’s the list!

From Amazon

Under the Empyrean Sky, Blightborn, and The Harvest, by Chuck Wendig. This is a YA dystopian trilogy by Wendig, and I got ’em all because they were on sale for 99 cents each.

From B&N

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, by Lindy West. I don’t normally read non-fiction, but this came recommended to me. And since Dara and I got to see Lindy West as the Not My Job guest at the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me show in Seattle this past December, where she was quite awesome, I went ahead and picked this up.
Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer. This must have gotten recommended to me at some point? It’s a middle grade series about a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind, with fairies involved, and probably other supernatural hijinx as well. It seems like fun along the lines of Phineas and Ferb. We’ll see!
Rebels and Lovers, by Linnea Sinclair. SFR.
The Hobbit, which of course needs no introduction. This ebook edition is the special enhanced version that has additional art and audio embedded in it.
Semiosis, by Sue Burke. SF. This one has been getting talked up a lot on Tor.com and I thought it sounded intriguing, so I snapped it up. Liz Bourke reviews it for Tor.com here.
Binti: The Night Masquerade, by Nnedi Okorafor. SF. The final book of Okorafor’s Binti series, which so far I have enjoyed quite a bit.
It Devours!, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. The second Night Vale novel!
Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz. SF. Another book I’ve seen talked up on Tor.com in the last several months, and which I’ve picked up out of interest in the samples and reviews I’ve read there. Notably, this review by Brit Mandelo.
Wind From a Foreign Sky, by Katya Reimann. Fantasy. This is an ebook rebuy of a book I meant to read a very long time ago.
The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin. Fantasy. I’ve received multiple recommendations for this. And on general grounds of “this won a Hugo” and “why yes I do want to read more things by women and by WoC in particular”, this clearly needs to be in my library.

But wait there’s more

I do also have one more book to mention, which I didn’t pick up from a bookstore. This is Capricious: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue, a special issue of the magazine called Capricious. I supported their Indiegogo to do this special issue, and received it in both ebook and print form.

If this sounds like a neat thing to you, you can find out more about the special issue right over here! They’re selling the print edition through Amazon as well as B&N, although in light of the news I mentioned at the top of the post, if you want the print copy, Amazon is probably your best bet. (I can however say that the print copy is nice. It’s shaped like a book, not a magazine at all.)

17 for the year.

February 15, 2018 by Angela Korra'ti

Site Updates

Some items of interest, including a crowdfund!

Some of y’all may have noticed that I’ve rearranged the look of the main book pages for Faerie Blood, Bone Walker, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter, and Victory of the Hawk–not only the individual novel pages, but also the overall Books and Rebels of Adalonia landing pages. This is to finally take advantage of some functionality I brought in with my current theme, but also some plugins I’ve installed to get some Bootstrap fun going on.

You’ll see this new functionality in the various buttons on these pages. This all lets me clean the pages up considerably, make them shorter and better organized, and less of a “huge collection of links”. Plus, I get to better emphasize the various blurbs and immediate calls to action at the tops of each page.

I also removed the sidebar from those pages, since the sidebar is something I wanted to keep specifically for the blog section of the site. This change is for two reasons: one, to make the book pages less busy, and two, to make them render more nicely on phone-sized screens.

I may continue to tweak the layouts of things, so if you see something suddenly start to look different, don’t be surprised by that! And if you see anything that actually looks broken, please let me know.

***

I’ve been working on an updated version of the short story “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen”, since the version currently on the site is out of date now that the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is complete. The new version will have an editing pass, and some tweaks to correct details that were specifically mentioned in Victory of the Hawk.

I’m hoping to do the same thing with this story that I did with “The Blood of the Land”, and release it as a standalone download to the various places I sell my titles. But first, I’ve got to get it some proper cover art. More bulletins on this as events warrant!

***

After seeing one of the best-selling Carina authors post results of a survey of her readers, and specifically noting how a bunch of them reported that Facebook is a source of data for them about finding new books, I’ve been doing an experiment this month. Namely, I’m running ads on Facebook to promote the Rebels books as well as Faerie Blood.

I know, I know–I wince at the idea of actually throwing money at Facebook, but it is important to note that I have had a significant uptick in daily traffic around here with these ads being live. And a notable, if small, uptick in sales as well. So far, this experiment does appear to be valuable. And if Facebook actually can result in me selling books to people who haven’t previously discovered me, hey, I’ll get over any willies about throwing money at them!

ALSO: if anyone reading this did in fact come over because of finding me at Facebook, hi there! Do please feel free to say hi.

***

Last but not least, I’ve just thrown a contribution to this IndieGogo campaign for an anthology to celebrate ten years of The Future Fire. I follow their Twitter account, and moreover, my pal Su J. Sokol, who I’ve featured on Boosting the Signal, will appear in this anthology.

So consider checking this out, won’t you? Thank you!

(Speaking of Su, I owe her book a review. I hope to get that posted soon, so keep an eye out for that!)

August 17, 2015 by Angela Korra'ti

Boosting the Signal

Boosting the Signal: Raven’s Wing, by Shawna Reppert

I meant to get this posted a few days ago, for which I apologize–this is what happens when I’m flattened by dental surgery! But that said, this is another book with a crowdfunding campaign to which I’d like to draw your all’s attention, especially as the Indiegogo campaign is down to its final hours.

Shawna Reppert is a fellow Carina author, and like me, she’s got some self-pubbed work as well. She’s gotten some high praise for her first solo effort, Ravensblood. Now she’s looking to publish the sequel, and is calling on potential supporters to back her up right over here. Hours are counting down, so go give her a look, won’t you?

And in the meantime, here’s a Boosting the Signal piece that Shawna sent me! Of this piece, Shawna says: “Since Raven’s Wing is written with three POV characters—Raven, Cass and the villain (not gonna tell you who it is, you have to read the book) I thought it would be interesting to let one of the secondary characters have a say. Mick MacLean volunteered.”

Raven’s Wing

Mick sat at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of rewarmed coffee, listening to Raven’s soulful piano-playing in the next room. The boy was good, not quite concert-pianist quality, but only an educated ear could hear the difference. If Raven had devoted himself to music instead of the Art…but may as well say that if a sheep had gills, it’d be a fish. The Three Communities, and likely the rest of the world as well, had reason to be glad that Raven had devoted himself to the study of magic, whether they chose to acknowledge it or not.

Even in his younger days, Mick would have been no match for him, and he’d been formidable in time. Back in the day when he’d left his outback home and traveled to another continent to help the Three Communities bring down William’s father. Much as his boy had helped to bring down William himself.

Only Zack had never come back.

Raven still looked at him as though he expected to be blamed for Zack’s death, or maybe just for surviving when Zack had not.

Life had taught Raven to expect unfairness. Mick was determined to teach him to trust in kindness, as well. Ana had started the lesson. Cass, he knew, tried, but it was different with lovers, more complicated.

He liked the man. At first, for the sake of Zack, who had befriended him, and for Ana, who had mentored him and worried over him. Later, on his own merits.

Oh, there were bigger-scale reasons to offer the man sanctuary. Whoever had stolen the Ravensblood was powerful, cunning, and surely up to no good. Mick would do anything in his power to head off another William.

Or William himself, returning. They never had found the body.

But if the last Mage Wars had taught Mick anything, it taught him that if you lost sight of the small stuff, the human stuff, while focusing on the big picture, then you risked becoming the thing you fought.

He still wondered if Giles would be alive today if he hadn’t pressured him harder to get out. If he’d made more of an effort to be a friend to the man instead of a handler, maybe Giles would have taken his pleas more seriously. He asked himself if his failure to do so came from holding the life of a dark mage more lightly than he would have another source’s.

In all these years, he hadn’t been able to answer that question.

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October 20, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti