Monday, June 9, 2008

Updates on Melinda Snodgrass and Walter Jon Williams

I've been so scattered this last week, doing odds and ends for the romance novel and writing two short stories and a novel at once. Okay, let me catch up here.



Melinda Snodgrass's book, The Edge of Reason, is out. This book is a response to the Left Behind franchise and other similar works, much as Phillip Pullman's was a response to the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Is it strange to find me posting about this given my own religious slant? Yes it is. Melinda and I believe very different things about religion, for the most part. On one matter we agree, though, and that is that religion ought not take the place of science (I'll go further and say that science ought not take the place of religion either.) Her book explores a world where bogus superstition in its various guises plunges the world into a very dangerous kind of chaos.

Some not so great news for new writers. The Borders Bookstores have been having problems. This means Melinda's books are being distributed through Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. The book distribution market seems to be getting more concentrated, which is going to cause us a lot of headaches. The fewer stores there are buying books, the more control they have to dictate prices. They'll want to buy them cheap. Publishers don't make huge profit margins. What will give will be author advances and maybe even royalties. Ouch.

On a similar note:



Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams has yet to appear on Amazon, despite it's April 1 release date. So... all of that publicity and all of those good reviews it was getting around release time? They still apply. Let's hope the publisher gets the book out before people have forgotten the buzz altogether.

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