Barnes & Nobles' Paul Goat Allen just sent an email informing us of his upcoming review of Infoquake and interview with author David Louis Edelman. The review & interview will appear in August in the B&N sff newsletter as well as on B&N's Science Fiction/Fantasy homepage, and I will certainly point out a link to it then. But for now, I'm thrilled to report that Paul says:
"Brilliantly blending the cutthroat intrigues of the high-tech business world with revolutionary world building, Edelman could quite possibly be the illegitimate lovechild of Donald Trump and Vernor Vinge. Infoquake is one of the most impressive science fiction debuts to come along in years - highly recommended."
Obviously, we are thrilled with the comparison to Vinge which joins prior comparisons to Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow. Not bad company to keep! Meanwhile, an interview with Edelman is already up at the blog Meme Therapy, where Edelman explains:
"When I started writing Infoquake, I gave myself a challenge. If you had virtually unlimited computing power and a virtually unlimited supply of energy, what could you do? Keep in mind that neither of these things is an impossibility.
Finally, Paula Guran blogs about her humorous encounter with Edelman and Yours Truly at the recent Book Expo America, then goes on to kindly praise Infoquake on her blog Dark Echo:
"It is sf, yes, but sf about cut-throat business practices and competitive programming (a way-cool concept of sorta programming in thin air), with an endearingly sociopathic protagonist, and lotsa, lotsa nifty techno-supposings, and an interesting concept of guild/spiritual family/religion/union groups in a technocracy. Highly imaginative use of the current Zeitgeist."
Monday, July 10, 2006
Future So Bright We're Quaking
I'm back from the 2006 Campbell Conference and Awards Banquet, about which more shortly, but first, some really good news on the Pyr horizon.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
Went looking for Pyr books at B&N last week. They had five, and none of the five were the ones that attracted me on the Pyr web site.
I do hope you head into e-publishing soon. I've bought a *lot* of e-books in the last few years.
Tina
Hey Tina,
First, I hope you gave B&N some grief about it! They can order the books, of course, but I'm curious what they had and what you were looking for.
As to e-books, conversations are in play. Like anything in publishing, "soon" is a relative term, but I'll forward your comment to the powers that be.
Hi,
Finished Infoquake and I enjoyed it quite a lot, more than I even have expected. I will definitely buy the promised sequel(s) so I hope we will see it next year. I am very excited about Crossover too and of course The Blood Debt. I will also check out Sagramanda, it sounds interesting though I cannot say I am a big fan of AD Foster, but the same held true for River of Gods which I truly enjoyed. I own Mappa Mundi and To Hold Infinity and both are the weakest of the corresponding authors work in my opinion, though I enjoyed them but not as much as the Paradox series or Natural History, LNDTGL and Keeping it Real respectively.
If you consider doing ebooks, a good revenue source is doing earcs 4-5 months prepublishing, since that way it makes sense for me and others to buy both a 10-15$ ebook (for the opportunity to read it in advance) and the tp/hc when out 4-5 months later (I have done this with many Baen earcs). If a book generates interest you see reviewers arc's on ebay selling at outrageous prices, so why not benefit by selling earcs...
Liviu
Hey,
First, I am thrilled that you like the book. Dave has been getting a lot of attention lately, with interviews popping up all over the place. What did you think of the appendix, btw?
re: advance e-arcs - this is something we are currently considering. We know we need to do something with ebooks and this, or a possible hardcover/ebook bundle, are proposals on the table. Your input is VERY valuable, thank you.
Hi,
I liked the appendix, though I read it about 20-25 pages into the book and I read the web only essays about the world of infoquake too about then. In general I like extra info about the world of a given book; the trick is to get first involved in the book and then to read the info, since if you start out cold it's hard to make sense of it; after all the author thought about that for a long time.
To me ebooks are the wave of the future but first someone has to figure out how to get "print like" revenue out of them; as long as they go in parallel with print they will produce extra revenue if done smartly like say Baen does it now, the hard part is to think ahead at an e-only model, and that to me is very, very tricky. Right now itunes lose money but Apple makes tons on ipods so they are happy; and similarly elsewhere in digital content (outside ads) even people who are making money, are getting far less revenue than from physical content.
For myself, I want interesting books out, at decent prices and I will buy them and then read whatever strikes my fancy at a given moment. Once I really like a book by an author, I tend to buy almost anything he/she writes (original work not tie ins) at least for a while, even if I am not in the mood to read that when it comes out, because I will probably want to read it sometimes, and even if not, the author has the potential to write something I really like and I should support that.
Liviu
Well, you are an ideal customer. As, by the way, am I. I buy far more books than I will ever read. Right now I have most everything Charles Stross is putting out, even though I've only read Accelerando, Singularity Sky, and Iron Sunrise. But I know I will want them, and in hardcover.
Re: eBooks - I had a really interesting conversation with Robert Sawyer at the 2006 Campbell Conference. He's very opposed to totally free ebooks because he does see the shift to total e as inevitable, and, as he says, "we are training the consumer that the value of digital content is nill." He has a very good point, though currently I still see ebooks as more useful as advertising than revenue source.
Hi,
I agree that ebooks should not be free for many reasons, only they should be DRM free outside of legitimate purposes like libraries. I checked out several ebooks from NYPL and though there are several wrinkles (cannot return them before 3 weeks and you have a 10 item limit), I really like their eservice and it seems that for a reasonable fee it is available for people outside NY. My local library system (Westchester Library System) has only e-audiobooks right now, but I think ebooks will come soon. Incidentally, having access to this 2 great library systems means that I do not really have to buy books to read them, though it is true that I pay a small share towards buying them through my property taxes. For example Infoquake has 3 copies in WLS, Crooked Letter has 2, River of Gods has ~17 copies.
Liviu
17 copies? Now that is interesting, and good to hear.
Hi,
And I did not count the White Plains holdings since they have a separate catalog and I am too lazy to pull it up. I can borrow from there too with a WLS card but it's a separate system; without it there are probably 20 or so libraries in WLS and the request system is very efficient so I get the book in 2-3 days at the library that's near my house; though outside children's items I usually get a book to check it out if there is no online excerpt and I am not set to order it unseen; very rarely I read a book from the library and not order it.
So in one county those 3 books sold decent copies to the libraries, and actually one sold a lot. Actually I see that WLS has 18 copies of River of Gods and 9 are out, 9 are in as of now, so people are reading the book. Considering that there are thousands of counties in the US (3086 as far as I can find out), if you sell ok to the libraries you do well. And I looked at Genetopia, that one has 7 copies though only 2 are out right now.
Liviu
We are selling fairly well to libraries. I'm glad to know Genetopia is out there too - that is a really special book.
Post a Comment