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Keep the money in the family

Today I’m here to sell books—not mine but books by other SF writers you know. Books available from online booksellers built by and for the SF community. This is essentially a commercial for a purely SFnal book-buying ecosystem: books by SF writers, published by SF writers, and sold by SF writers, with as much of the proceeds as humanly possible going to the creators. You can buy—without DRM—novels and short stories, collections and anthologies and magazines, stuff that you might actually want to read, and read anywhere, on any device.

Queen of this trio of innovative booksellers is Book View Cafe. BVC is a publishing collective initially formed in 2008 around a core group of SF writers who wanted to use the internet to sell their work. Six years later, they have a spiffy website with a daily blog and a formidable catalogue, both new and back-list. They sell in many formats—EPUB and MOBI, of course, but also a few in PDF, and a handful as audio and/or paper (these two last mainly, I think, through third-party retailers).

Book View Cafe is where you’ll find Nebula- and Hugo-winning novels and stories by Vonda N. McIntyre. She does much of the coding that makes the books you buy render beautifully, and she’ll be a Guest of Honour at next year’s Worldcon. I’ve been a fan of her work since reading The Exile Waiting, then Dreamsnake, then Superluminal. (Even her Star Trek novels are good.) Her Nebula-winning The Moon and the Sun will be a film starring Pierce Brosnan, Bingbing Fan, Kaya Scodilario, and William Hurt next year.

There’s a new blog post up on BVC every day. One of the bloggers—who, like McIntyre, is one of the collective’s founders—is Ursula K. le Guin. No doubt you’re familiar with her stories (novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea trilogy; shorter work like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”) but you might be less familiar with her non-fiction. Le Guin is never afraid to say what must be said, often with compassion, sometimes with scathing wit. I still grin when I think about her review in the Guardian of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, more particularly her opinion of Atwood’s squirming away from the Science Fiction label.

Book View Cafe is where Linda Nagata publishes her novels, new and old. Try The Bohr Maker or her recent, Nebula-nominated Red: First Light. This is hard SF, military SF, and a bloody good read. I enjoyed it immensely.

As I’ve said, Book View Cafe began with SF writers but now they also sell historical, romance, and mainstream fiction. In the US you can find their books in your local library thanks to a clever deal with Overdrive. About 95% of their revenues go directly to authors. For more info than I could possibly give you here, see their FAQ. I think you might be particularly interested in how the collective works. And buy a book while you’re there; they’re not expensive.

I’m also inordinately fond of Wizards Tower Books, the sales arm of Wizards’ Tower Press. Formed by Hugo Award-winning fan Cheryl Morgan four years ago to sell both the books of other independent presses and their own WTP list, they’ve lately had a rethink and are now selling only their own books. Their list is small and interesting, with writers such as Lyda Morehouse and Ben Jeapes. Again, they’re available DRM-free, in just about any format. And you don’t have to choose which one: you get all formats included in one low price. For multi-platform folk, this is a great deal. The storefront is a bit sparse at the moment, as it’s just reopened, but I have no doubt this will change. Meanwhile, go take a look and see if there’s anything you fancy.

And finally there’s Weightless Books. This is the one with, possibly, the most varied selection. They have books by Kelley Eskridge, my wife: her novel, Solitaire, and the truly amazing collection, Dangerous Space. (Yes, of course I’m biased. I’m her wife. But take my word for it: if you want your conceptions about gender forcibly rearranged and your heart squeezed by truly fine fiction, then this is the collection for you.) They have work by another Kelly, Kelly Link. Lin’s husband, Gavin Grant, founded Weightless (and runs it with Michael J DeLuca) to sell Small Beer Press books. The works they sell now number in the zillions (it’s a technical term), work by everyone from Kelley to Kelly to Peter Dickinson to Lavie Tidhar, as well as anthologies such as Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best, and magazines like Lightspeed and Clarkesworld. All in a variety of formats and DRM-free. You can read them on anything, anywhere, anytime.

These three online book shops—Book View Cafe, Wizard’s Tower Books, and Weightless—are all worth your time. And money. They are enterprises built by SF readers and writers for SF readers and writers. The money stays in the community and supports the creation of more good books. Go buy something.

31 Comments

1:

Ah, I think that post needs re-checking and editing. You're repeating yourself a bit. And the list of URLs at the end looks odd. I'm guessing you tried to do something with Markdown or similar and it didn't quite work.

But, thanks for the links, I'm always interested in new places I can give money to in exchange for DRM-non-infested epubs or HTML novels. (Baen Books has got most of my money spent in that area over the years.)

As for DRM-infested rubbish, I don't spend money on it. But that doesn't stop me reading whatever I want. Umm, I guess DRM doesn't work.

2:

Second what Michael said -- you need to edit that post.

I have long been a fan of Book View Cafe but wasn't aware of Wizard's Tower Books and Weightless Books. Thanks for giving us a heads up.

3:

Thank you very much, Charlie. I ( & I suspect a lot of other people ) will be taking careful notes for future use. Also, that explains where Vonda Macintyre "went to", so to speak. I will be looking for dead tree editions, of course, but even so, very useful.

4:

Likewise; I just can't find an e-reader I can get on with (all too heavy, too bulky to hold one-handed, too small, can't display the right amount of text, can't do the right font size, don't allow easy scroll back a page or 3...) {NB, not every reader has all these problems at once}

5:

Thanks for this post. I've gotten rather attached to ereaders but have been finding the recent actions of my corporate neighbor here in the Pacific Northwest pretty disturbing. I appreciate reading about good alternatives. I'd also been wondering what had happened to Vonda McIntyre, so this is doubly appreciated!

6:

Formatting fixed (by me -- Charlie). The blog CMS can be a bit of a beast at first, especially when writing long entries with multiple links and a below-the-fold section ...

7:

While I appreciate the advertisement, I'm a little wary of the "keep the money in the family"- and "95% of the revenue goes to the authors"-tags. As Charlie likes to remind us every now and then, traditional publishers don't take their share of the revenue for nothing, but perform an important service, namely quality control (that's my short term for the various stages of editing, for the details see Charlie's essays on Common Misconceptions About Publishing). How is this service substituted for in the "all in the family"- and "no money for anybody but the author"-model?

(Am I falling for a red herring here? If so, then I'm sorry for the outburst. But the "95% for the author" is clearly rubbing me in some wrong way.)

8:

Likewise; I just can't find an e-reader I can get on with

As far as eReaders are concerned, I tend to go with an Android tablet (Nexus 7).

Can display about a paperback's page worth of text in one go, with whatever font size you like, at 300+dpi, weighing 290g, held in one hand, and you can run either amazon's reader, or google's, or a third party.

And you can use it for so much more.

And the illuminated page is perfectly OK on the eyes (auto adjusts to light level) - provided you aren't out in direct sunlight.

9:

I can also recommend Closed Circle, representing C.J. Cherryh, her wife Jane Fancher, and Lynn Abbey. Here's the link: http://www.closed-circle.net/

10:

Note: Closed Circle sells works by the authors where the rights have reverted or that were originally self-published.

11:

I'm really enjoying Hild—thanks for talking it up. I am frustrated by Book View Cafe: it needs a better organizational model. E.g., I went looking for Vonda McIntyre because I like her stuff, and the first book to show up was an anthology, and then a couple of books by other authors, and then books by her. And the book listings don't show publication date, which makes it hard to see what's new. I would very much like for this web site to succeed, and it's improved a lot since Linda Nagata sent me there a half a year or so ago, but it still isn't quite done. Sigh.

BTW, do you care whether your book is purchased through Amazon or Google? Those are my easy choices, and Google is about five bucks more expensive than Amazon. Amazon's software is better, so I went with them, but I don't mind going with Google in the future if they give you a better deal—if you get a significant portion of that $5.

12:

@MSB Members of BVC do all their own design and editing work. From About Us: "Book View Café is a cooperative publisher. Our members are authors across all genres, from science fiction to romance to historical to mainstream. We function as editors, copyeditors, ebook formatters, cover artists, website maintainers and more. We offer both reprints and new titles, currently in ebook form, but we’re looking at expanding to print. At BVC, 95% of the cover price goes to the author. That’s more than at any other online bookseller (Amazon, B&N, iTunes)."

13:

@Ted Lemon I'm delighted you're enjoying it!

I get the same royalty no matter which retailer sells the book--assuming we're comparing ebooks. I get more for a hardcover than an ebook.

I go into more detail in this post:

http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-best-way-to-buy-hild.html

14:

@Ted again

Interesting. When I go to Vonda's link

http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/bvc-author/vonda-n-mcintyre/

I get a list of her novels first. I see your point about pub. date, though. I'll pass the info along.

15:

Wow! Thank you so much, Nicola! As BVC treasurer and a founding member, I can answer a few questions regarding the cooperative.

Book View Cafe has been operating for six years now, and we incorporated last year. We have approximately 40 members and the tasks of the corporation are performed by members. We launch one new member a month and are presently publishing one or more titles a week. We have a number of experienced professional editors who are also writers as members. As Nicola mentioned, as one example of other professional services, Vonda contributes her skills in formatting many of our books.

BVC is the largest and most-successful (to my knowledge) of author publishing cooperatives. The business has inherent economies of scale and advantages in business structure which enable it to provide 95% of sales to authors.

16:

in response to MSB-- I've been a member of BVC for the last few years. (I'm romance/urban fantasy, not sf, we cover a lot of ground) I'm a multi-pubbed author with over 30 years experience, 60 published books, the whole awards thing, yadda yadda.

And I cannot begin to express my gratitude for the talent and quality control of BVC members. They all have extensive backgrounds in publishing, in all facets. I've had dozens of editors over the years, but the BVC people are the best.

What you do get with BVC is originality. No holds barred, this is what we want to write, creativity. We do not pigeon hole for market purposes. So yes, our books are better formatted and better edited than most NYC books--we just don't always cater to expectations.

And more and more of the books are available in print. Take a look when you have time.

17:

Thanks for posting, Charlie. Publishing cooperatives seem like a fantastic addition to the e-publishing/e-distribution mix... I am now on the hunt for more... not just sci-fi... I think academic publishing (humanities not just natural sciences, different worlds) would be perfect for this model, especially for more experimental writing, must talk to my colleagues...

18:

Ok, I'm not going to buy a whole lot of ePubs, but the ordering of books in a catalogue I find most personally convenient is:- Key1 - $author Key2 - $series. Treat "standalone novels" as a series title for this purpose. Key3 - place in series. This may or may not be very similar to dateoffirst_publication.

19:

Am I falling for a red herring here?

Yes. That's because in most cases these operations amount to self-publishing -- not by amateurs but by long-standing professional authors (some of whom, like Linda Nagata, are past Hugo and Nebula winners) who are bringing their older work back into print themselves, or publishing newer work that larger publishers don't see a market for. The work that the publishers would pay for out of their cut of the cake is here being paid for by the authors -- employing editors, typesetters, and book designers directly (or doing the jobs themselves).

The major difference between these and the Amazon self-pub model is that (a) Amazon isn't taking 30-70% of the revenue if you buy from these sites, and (b) the authors in question have some reputation (seriously, with people like Linda Nagata, C. J. Cherryh and Walter Jon Williams self-publishing, self-pub is no longer a guarantee of poor quality, as it was a decade or more ago).

20:

Charlie, the first time I went to an Eastercon, a couple of Editors were the TAFF delegates from North America.

I am inclined to think that sums up the nature of SF fandom. There is still room for us and them, but there is a shared passion. And that is partly why Amazon feels different.

And while ten years later the Internet was exploding across the country, a lot of the social structures had evolved already, in the SF magazines and in the fanzines, and in the APAs.

I have just started feeling horribly old.

21:

Talking of money & both spending & keeping it ... I've finally got hold of a copy of "The Rhesus Chart" (!). Now, to look for a copy of "Hild"...

23:

Amazon are trying to sell me cut-price creative writing courses.

I would expect a flood of how-to-publish-with-Kindle courses to follow.

It all looks so obvious.

24:

.” It all looks so obvious.”

Ho Hum..Really? And extending from that on Amazon... the thing is that Big A is easy to use, almost oni-present, if not quite omnipotent, and ..Feed in any given title and the chances are you'd get the book of choice and a route to purchase that is easy to follow.

As for ... " BVC is the largest and most-successful (to my knowledge) of author publishing cooperatives. The business has inherent economies of scale and advantages in business structure which enable it to provide 95% of sales to authors."

Well first you have had to have to have heard of it! I hadn't and I've been about in Fandom ever such a long time - err, actually a bit longer than our Gracious Host...yes, I am that OLD ..Oh the horror of it all!

I'd like to think that Publishing Co-Ops represent a challenge to Amazon type " all the market will bear in the way of profit " type avaricious capitalism but such co-ops won’t work as as a serious alternative to Amazon until they develop from Very Specialist publications that appeal to - just say Lesbian, Gay, or Transgender folk ..Or indeed science fiction /fantasy enthusiasts- and develop towards a much broader readership who know of the existence of the co-operative and can be persuaded to give a damn where they buy their e books from...or for that matter where they borrow their public library books from.

Hereabouts in the U.K. public branch libraries have been downsized into non-existence in many cities and thus the first rung of the ladder for many readers in the U.K. has ceased to exist...people who borrow public library books in childhood may latter buy books. I did and Do continue to do so whilst the current generation of Video Game playing Audio Visual Media consuming buyers may not experience these BOOK things past their school days.

The problem is more than just that of head butting Amazon.

The thing is that Amazon as a commercial organisation has NO emotional commitment to BOOKS...None Whatsoever. Amazon is just the latest incarnation of the Department Store, so, from Wikipedia...

“The origins of the department store lay in the growth of the conspicuous consumer society at the turn of the 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution accelerated economy expansion, the affluent middle-class grew in size and wealth. This urbanized social group, sharing a culture of consumption and changing fashion, was the catalyst for the retail revolution. As rising prosperity and social mobility increased the number of people with disposable income in the late Georgian period, window shopping was transformed into a leisure activity and entrepreneurs, like the potter Josiah Wedgwood, pioneered the use of marketing techniques to influence the prevailing tastes and preferences of society. [1]

One of the first department stores may have been Bennett's in Derby, first established as an ironmongers in 1734. [2] It still stands to this day, trading in the same building. However, the first reliably dated department store to be established, was Harding, Howell & Co, which opened in 1796 on Pall Mall, London.[3] An observer writing in Ackermann's Repository, a British periodical on contemporary taste and fashion, described the enterprise in 1809 as follows:

The house is one hundred and fifty feet in length from front to back, and of proportionate width. It is fitted up with great taste, and is divided by glazed partitions into four departments, for the various branches of the extensive business, which is there carried on. Immediately at the entrance is the first department, which is exclusively appropriated to the sale of furs and fans. The second contains articles of haberdashery of every description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves, &etc. In the third shop, on the right, you meet with a rich assortment of jewelry, ornamental articles in ormolu, french clocks, &etc.; and on the left, with all the different kinds of perfumery necessary for the toilette. The fourth is set apart for millinery and dresses; so that there is no article of female attire or decoration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion. This concern has been conducted for the last twelve years by the present proprietors who have spared neither trouble nor expense to ensure the establishment of a superiority over every other in Europe, and to render it perfectly unique in it's kind. "

Amazon is " perfectly unique in its kind " and it will dump books in an instant if the Book Department isn't making enough money.

Nor is it alone in this. The Local version of Harrods - the very famous London store - is Fenwick’s Of Newcastle and Fenwick’s used to have a really good bakery that supplied my favourite - SOB!!! - Rye bread. A year or three ago they discovered that they could downsize their bread and cakes and stuff section and replace it with a kind of giant sweet section and still make loads a money ..They just didn't make enough money from people like me.

Sound familiar?

" self-pub is no longer a guarantee of poor quality, as it was a decade or more ago "

Absolutely true enough. BUT, Amazon is a Giant Department Store that can employ leverage across the entire field of printed literature and not care too much if they don’t succeed in being entirely successful in a minor campaign against any given publisher. Oh, they do care about sales and profit but they are terribly good in their chosen publishing model and can afford to fail, step back, and renew their attack with added public relations sauce...wots so very wrong with an e book standard price of ..Insert price...for WE are on the side of The Readers!

And if they decide that selling books and other such old fashioned printed stuff at their chosen price level isn’t making enough money? Well then their option is that of the Fenwicks Bread counter and they will dump books in a heart beat.

We care about books and they don’t and that is the way that it is, but the problem is that they are Very, Very, Large and hugely influential and so, baring the French approach to Amazon ? And serious large scale, multi publisher, multi national players...? Chance will be a fine thing ..

'Okay, we'll charge one cent' Amazon thumbed its nose at a French ban on free shipping of book orders, agreeing to raise the shipping price to exactly $0.01 Euros, or a single penny. France24 reports that Amazon’s move comes one month after the ban sailed through France’s National Assembly. Lawmakers argued that the nation’s roughly 3,500 bookstores needed protection from online competitors, whom they accused of “dumping” books on the market at a loss. '

http://time.com/2976723/amazon-france-free-shipping/

Ah well, maybe I’m being too glum and pessimistic .. did I mention that I’m even older and, now and then, even more cynical that Our Gratuitous Host ? .. No Doubt Something Will Turn Up!

There Must be a Lone Ranger who will turn up to save us at the last minute .. and who will look a bit like Santa Claus ...” Ho Ho Ho Silver Away!! “

25:

Hereabouts in the U.K. public branch libraries have been downsized into non-existence in many cities Everywhere. The "Carnegie" library, down the road from here, was a favourite haunt of mine, ages 10-18 It now has signigicantly fewer books ( I estimate several thousand fewer ) than in 1964/5. Why? Open spaces, samller shelves, all sorts of fancy gimmicks, but no BOOKS. The local council were lambasted for pulping about 20 000 volumes over the whole borough ....

Education, leaning, reading? Can't have those, they're ELITIST!

The same arrogant morons wanted to close the William Morris Museum, until stopped by very loud shrieks.

26:

Back when there were only 3/4 channels of TV and no Net I used to read a book a day, mostly borrowed from the local library. It has been years since I was there because I can find everything I want via the computer. [As I tell the TV licence man - I have no TV because I can pirate anything I like, when I like - no need to pay the BBC tax. When one crime trumps another and gives you a get out of jail card free]

27:

It's all part of letting the financial markets run everything.

What, you haven't heard of the Loan Arranger?

28:

I'm putting this here because I don't want to clag up the newer threads. Anyway, something I received from Azazon this morning:

Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

29:

Ah, so...Big River is endevering to build up support on the basis of...from my post up-stream a bit...

" Absolutely true enough. BUT, Amazon is a Giant Department Store that can employ leverage across the entire field of printed literature and not care too much if they don’t succeed in being entirely successful in a minor campaign against any given publisher. Oh, they do care about sales and profit but they are terribly good in their chosen publishing model and can afford to fail, step back, and renew their attack with added public relations sauce...wots so very wrong with an e book standard price of ..Insert price...for WE are on the side of The Readers!"

It’s blindingly fucking obvious what their spin would be...

" Oh, they do care about sales and profit but they are terribly good in their chosen publishing model and can afford to fail, step back, and renew their attack with added public relations sauce...wots so very wrong with an e book standard price of ..Insert price...for WE are on the side of The Readers!"

Oh GHODS the Guilt of it all, for way back before Spin was SPIN, in a political sense, and I was supporting Business Management Exercises before the HEAT of Studio Lights in my Business Schools T.V. Studios- for quite modest pay, though I did get free lunches - the students would protest at my, err, philosophy - which was,basicaly, "Train Hard Fight Easy! -- and say that," .. its all very well for you for YOU are at the other side of the cameras! You wouldn’t be so clever if YOU were at the sharp end " And so on, and so forth, until the day when I tired of such stuff and ,seizing the interview candidates briefing documentation and memorising the same, would do the sharp end for the entire session.I would lie...err that is to say freely interpret the situation in a manner adventagious to the interview candidate, which was me, for a dozen or so candidates.I would always be offered the job on fictional offer.

After I had done this - it was such FUN, but then I don’t...what is this Stage Fright thing of which you speak? The people who would be leading the session - at one time " Business Consultants " wasn't a term of vituperation - would point to me and ask the poor sods who would have given me the job whether I was faintly even OLD enough to have been plausible as a candidate for the jobs as described, and they would blink, and come down to reality.

Did I mention that I suffer from Light Triggered Dermatitis - other people suffer from sun burn but I am more sensitive...but, O.G.H s Vampires? Oh come Now...there's no such thing as Vampires...No, not even Tony Blair. We all Know that now don't we?

30:

Dissecting Propaganda for Fun & Profit: The Amazon Letter

Meanwhile: Dear Amazon, Some of us don't read ebooks. Please stop trying to kill bookstores.

31:

He is wrong about one thing. Books do compete against other media. My book reading has dropped from maybe 100 per year down to about 3 per year since I got on the Net. In fact, my only fiction purchase this year will be the new Laundry novel.

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This page contains a single entry by Nicola Griffith published on July 29, 2014 12:11 AM.

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