Book Releases
The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman
Released on: April 10 2012
The Calling by Kelley Armstrong
Released on: April 10 2012
Released on: April 10 2012
The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman
Released on: April 10 2012
Released on: April 10 2012
Thou Shalt Not Road Trip by Antony John
Released on: April 12 2012
*As usual, Stories and Sweeties and sweeties is an invaluable tool for compiling this list. I’m taking your lack of response to stop as tacit approval to continue bumming off your list.
Book World News
Lee Low, a book publisher focusing on publishing multicultural stories, has expanded into the Young Adult genre. Last year it printed its first three Young Adult Novels.
Lee & Low Books — founded in 1991 by Low’s father, Tom Low of Irvington, and Philip Lee — is a busy place these days. Last year the company bought the assets of Children’s Book Press, the country’s first specialty publisher of multicultural children’s books, printed its first three young-adult novels and topped off the year in January by winning the Association for Library Service to Children’s 2012 Pura Belpre Author Award for “Under the Mesquite” by Guadalupe Garcia McCall.
“We try to root out people who wouldn’t normally have books written about them. I think that goes par for the course when you’re focusing on minority populations,” said Low.
Source: Lohud.com
Joel Stein wrote a highly controversial article stating that adults should read adult books.
The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.
Teen Librarian’s Toolbox made an excellent rebuttal in their post Why YA? Joel Stein says don’t read this. I say think for yourself. There was also a sizable Twitter backlash to the article.
The BEA Bloggers Conference continues to experience backlash after a series of well-known bloggers are rejected for Press Passes after they’d already paid for them and past the two week benchmark at which the bloggers were supposed to be notified. Some of these include bloggers who have attended as press in previous years.
Dear Author‘s Jane, a blogger of one of the most popular Romance blogs, turned down a spot on the blogger panel and was then rejected for a press pass. The rejection can be viewed here.
There was also some concern over an attorney for rights for writers at a critical review session of the conference.
The Book Blog Unconference was officially scheduled this week for 4th June 2012 in Midtown Manhattan.
Participants at an unconference are expected to take part in running at least one session. No one is going to come around and make sure you did, but this is a give and take experience.
Sessions can take a variety of forms, and it’s up to the session runner(s) to decide which session fits their topic best.
An article came out recently claiming that DRM is crushing indie booksellers.
Publishers told us that if we did not have digital rights management (DRM) technology, they weren’t interested in letting us promote and sell their products. DRM is the set of technologies that encrypt and prevent the reproduction of e-book files. A new bricks and mortar bookstore, even the tiniest one, could have easily opened accounts with all the major distributors. But to sell electronic versions of those exact same books, publishers told us that you have to be a mega corporation. We were confused, and set about finding out why this counterintuitive business practice has taken root.
DRM is supposed to prevent piracy and illegal file sharing. In order to provide DRM, you need at least $10,000 up front to cover software, server, and administration fees, plus ongoing expenses associated with the software. In other words, much bigger operating expenses than a small business can afford. By requiring retailers to encrypt e-books with DRM, big publishers are essentially banning indie retailers from the online marketplace.
The article postulates that publishers know that DRM doesn’t prevent piracy, but that it prevents the casual sharing of media which is more of a problem for the publishers.
Cover Reveals
Revealed on: The Story Siren
Expected Release Date: September 1 2012
A DYING LAND
The Shima Imperium verges on the brink of environmental collapse; decimated by clockwork industrialization and the machine-worshipers of the Lotus Guild. The skies are red as blood, land choked with toxic pollution, wildlife ravaged by mass extinctions.
AN IMPOSSIBLE QUEST
The hunters of Shima’s imperial court are charged by their Shōgun to capture a thunder tiger – a legendary beast, half-eagle, half-tiger. But any fool knows thunder tigers have been extinct for more than a century, and the price of failing the Shōgun is death.
A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL
Yukiko is a child of the Fox clan, possessed of a hidden gift that would see her executed by the Lotus Guild. Accompanying her father on the Shōgun’s hunt, she finds herself stranded: a young woman alone in Shima’s last wilderness, with only a furious, crippled thunder tiger for company. Even though she can hear his thoughts, even though she saved his life, all she knows for certain is he’d rather see her dead than help her.
But together, the pair will form an indomitable friendship, and rise to challenge the might of an empire.
Revealedon: Harlequin TEEN Facebook Page
Expected Release Date: September 25 2012
She won’t resist until she’s sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever.
Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that’s all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone.
Her father was right. The monsters are real….
To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn’t careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies….
I wish I could go back and do a thousand things differently.
I’d tell my sister no.
I’d never beg my mother to talk to my dad.
I’d zip my lips and swallow those hateful words.
Or, barring all of that, I’d hug my sister, my mom and my dad one last time.
I’d tell them I love them.
I wish… Yeah, I wish.
Revealed on: The Story Siren
Expected Publication Date: October 1 2012
Sixteen year-old Lark Ainsley has never seen the sky.
Her world ends at the edge of the vast domed barrier of energy enclosing all that’s left of humanity. For two hundred years the city has sustained this barrier by harvesting its children’s innate magical energy when they reach adolescence. When it’s Lark’s turn to be harvested, she finds herself trapped in a nightmarish web of experiments and learns she is something out of legend itself: a Renewable, able to regenerate her own power after it’s been stripped.
Forced to flee the only home she knows to avoid life as a human battery, Lark must fight her way through the terrible wilderness beyond the edge of the world. With the city’s clockwork creations close on her heels and a strange wild boy stalking her in the countryside, she must move quickly if she is to have any hope of survival. She’s heard the stories that somewhere to the west are others like her, hidden in secret – but can she stay alive long enough to find them?
Revealed on: I Am A Reader Not A Writer Blog
Expected Publication Date: October 14 2012
It’s been over six months since the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying with Alex’s relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the primitive world so vividly portrayed in Ashfall, the first book in this series. It’s also been six months of waiting for Alex’s parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla decide they can wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find and bring back Alex’s parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But the landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with life-and-death battles for food and power between the remaining communities. When the unthinkable happens, Alex must find new reserves of strength and determination to survive.
Scandalous Scandals
Yesterday an indie author blogged about her experience with a negative review. The blog post linked to the review, named the reviewer and suggested the reviewer needed to take medication.
She mentioned having friends and family write reviews for her:
Then suggested her readers could down vote the review, which soon disappeared after the post went up:
This serves as a good example. Authors, please don’t link to negative reviews in tweets and blogs. This encourages the bullying of those reviewers. The author in question here apologized and admitted that she was unaware that asking for downvotes on Amazon reviews, requesting family and friends to review her book, linking to the reviews, and commenting on negative reviews was not acceptable behaviour. Her apology was to those replying on her post – which was appreciated. But there is a reviewer out there whose review was deleted and who was attacked and we currently have no way of confirming if that reviewer ever received an apology for this behaviour.
Bloggers, however, were fairly understanding of the incident. Originally several shelved it as Do Not Read and had some harsh words for the author, but after the author’s apology, unshelved it or even put it on a To Be Read shelf.
Last week’s post about Rebecca Hamilton sparked controversy with several blog posts, tweets and comments on other blogs about being bullied. It resulted in a discussion here that, for a while, turned confrontational and left some Goodread’s commenters defensive and angry. Thankfully, the drama is mostly over now.
Annie
I posted my own response to Joel Stein’s article, which is the only reason I’m not reiterating all of my thoughts again here: http://numinous-notes.blogspot.com/2012/04/im-one-thats-cool.html
I also read the response you linked to at Teen Librarian’s Toolbox and found it thoughtful and really interesting. Especially the section on Quality Control. I find YA fiction can be much more poignant and relevant than adult books.
Kate C.
I got to read that blog entry, but it looks like the author deleted her blog. Tried to leave a comment and now the blog no longer exists.
Kate C.
I HATE HATE HATE DRM. In all forms. It is useless against piracy and only harms the people who want to read the books. If I buy a book on Amazon, I want to be able to convert into something other than mobi, if I need to.
I never put DRM on my books. I also hate it when publishers/authors don’t let you lend the book. It sucks, because I feel like both these things contribute to piracy, which only hurts authors.
Mireya
I am not trying to be obnoxious, but I have to say that it puzzles me that people are concerned about the attorney blogger. BEA is an industry event, the attendees are not the general public, but rather publishers and authors, etc. so it makes sense to have someone with his qualifications as a speaker in an industry blogger conference. It’s not a blogger conference any longer, it’s now an INDUSTRY blogger conference.
Stephanie Sinclair
@Kate C.:
I think she deleted because it started to get heated with the last commenter getting nasty towards the regulars. She was calling people “nutso” and pretty much driving the thread down a very dark road.
I hate DMR too. I really don’t see the use in pubs saying you can’t share. People can rip DMRs off anyway. The people who do want to share responsibly, would probably only share with a friend or two. The ones doing it illegally are ALREADY doing it illegally.
@Mireya:
Well, it’s not so much that he’s there in general, but he’s a speaker for the Critical Reviews panel. Why that particular panel? It raises an eyebrow, IMO.
Lexie B.
Okay, first off: The Book of Blood and Shadow an Kill Me Softly. So excited. So. Excited.
The BEA drama was all over Twitter a few days ago, and for the first time, I was glad I couldn’t go. I’m sorry, but that was a serious dick move on their part. If they turned down the bloggers within the two-week period? That would’ve been disappointing, yeah, but not a major issue. When people have already paid for their transport and hotels, though, that’s ridiculous. They sent out the refusals in short, completely impersonal messages, and then, in a few cases where they apologized, they messed up the bloggers’ names. Just . . . ugh.
At least we have pretty covers to comfort us? I cannot get over the badassery of Stormdancer’s cover. I’m just praying that the US cover can live up to the UK version. Honestly, I like all of the covers here; Skylark’s is lovely and eye-catching, but fairly simple, Alice in Zombieland is gorgeous, girl-in-a-dress or no, and Ashen Winter’s is awesomely creepy.
Also, for some reason it amuses me that the drama which started up again because of the Buzz Worthy News is on it again. What if she decided to hold a shit fit about drama on Buzz Worthy News that stemmed from her drama on a previous Buzz Worthy News? I wouldn’t be able to decide whether to facepalm or laugh hysterically.
Kat Kennedy
@Mireya:
Well, the seminar is actually for bloggers and entitled Critical Reviews: Fine Tuning Your Craft.
If I were and attendee, I too would be concerned that a panel aimed at bloggers had an author advocate as opposed to a blogger advocate.
Kat Kennedy
@Annie:
That’s and excellent response, Annie!
@Kate C.:
Same. DRM is extremely annoying. Especially as it is very easy to crack and, as the article explains, doesn’t stop piracy – just innocent sharing.
Consider this. Publishers GIVE ME BOOKS FOR FREE. They give me eARCs and print ARCs. I STILL go out and buy the ones that are my favourite. Even though the publisher has shared them with me.