Juno Books

If you were wondering about NIGHTS OF SIN — it is shipping now. I have copies and as soon as the office gets some we’ll send out review copies and have them for sale directly. Be about two weeks before they hit stores.

I’m behind on posting covers, so, a twofer:

I’m back.

As epic fantasy Seaborn is imaginative and flush with mythological detail. The ocean dwelling Seaborn culture is fascinating. The action sequences well visualized. But I found it curious that Howard placed the story against a contemporary setting. It takes a fairly large suspension of disbelief to accept that the Seaborn could hide so effectively from modern technology given their significant presence and activities….Nevertheless this is a fresh and entertaining read and I fully expect we will be hearing more from Chris Howard in the future.

SCIFIGUY

A…fresh and unique debut book by Chris Howard. With some darkness, a lot of depth and some fantastic characters this is a must read for any fantasy fans who like the sea aspect or who just want to try something a little different. Sometimes a little complicated to follow, the author has woven a tale that needs to be taken in slowly to understand all the delights it holds. Seaborn was interesting and has left me wanting more. Hopefully there will be more on offer soon because even though I don’t like swimming in the sea I certainly like reading about it and the treasures it holds.

Amberkatze

…and I don’t understand how Chris has TIME to actually hold down a real job — what with writing, art, photography,his kids, and so much more– but he does. Here’s a short Q&A with him in his role as principal software engineer for the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)

I probably won’t have access to a computer much for a couple of days.

I don’t know when this went up: Editor Interview: Paula Guran by by J. Blackmore over at Circlet Press. I dunno, I think it comes out more about horror than I intended. Still, full of my opinions I probably should shut up about. I just answered the questions, m’am.

In an article in BussinessWeek, Sarah Lacy makes some good points, she also seems less than well informed about publishing reality. What is upsetting about this sort of article is that it is in a highly reputable magazine that would never publish advice from anyone so under-informed in almost any other industry. Only publishing.

Read the entire article, but here are her basic points and some brief comment:

Make it social: “There has to be a way … to meet the ongoing need for building community around books. Every publisher should at a minimum build a Facebook app. around its titles. The limitation with book clubs is time- and space-related. Not everyone can get their schedules (and geography) to mesh, and not everyone can read a book in the same time frame. But social networking could do for book clubs what Scrabulous did for fans of Scrabble—it let them play games together online, whenever they want”

Me: There already are numerous initiatives in this direction from forums to discussion groups to networking sites.

Take book tours out of the stores…

Me: Hasn’t she heard of blog tours and newsletters?

Create stars—don’t just exploit existing ones: “Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

“Sure, publishers would have to spend more on promotion. But because they’re spending less on an advance—say, $50,000 for a lesser-known writer than the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) they’d spend on a star—they can afford the bigger promotional budget….

“Even better: Tie that rising star to a multi-book deal from the beginning. Then any promotion is an investment in those next two books. It’s basically the record-label model, made cheaper and easier via the branding-power of the social Web.”

Me: This is where she needs to take the reality pill. I have way too much to say on this one.

Go electronic from the get-go.
“You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version… Many publishing houses just don’t think about digital versions…”

Me: Yeah, I would be stunned — because it isn’t true. Dose #2 of previously prescribed medication, please.

Make e-commerce even easier.
“…through one-click widgets appended to blogs, Facebook pages, and other sites across the Web. Link these tools directly to PayPal and Google Checkout (GOOG). Think: one-click purchase, not one click takes you to Amazon.”

Me: Hello? What publisher doesn’t do something similar to this at least with direct sales (which sometimes are actually fulfilled by someone else)? Although many are careful to link to everyone in order to be “fair”. Some people are offended if you don’t link to Amazon, BookSense, B&N, WorldCat, Alibris BookFinder, AbeBooks…etc.

everywhere for the last quarter, albeit most mavens are pointing out there was no “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” this summer as there was last. This quote from Barnes & Noble Chief Executive Steve Riggio via the Wall Street Journal is worth noting, however: “People have been painting apocalyptic scenarios for the last 10 years, but in the midst of a horrible [economic] environment, we sold more books than last year.”

According to THE BOOKSELLER:

Penguin [Books] is launching a dating website aimed at book readers in conjunction with online dating giant Match.com. The service goes live this week and can be accessed via the Penguin home page and at www.penguindating.co.uk.

Penguin said the site would offer readers “a place to meet and indulge in the age-old art of writing love letters”. Members will be asked to write in their profile about the last book they read and will also be able to search through the site’s other profiles for mentions of their favourite book. Penguin authors including Julia Llewellyn and Adele Parks will write articles for the site, as will Match.com’s relationship expert Kate Taylor.

Penguin online marketing manager Anna Rafferty said the creation of the dating site was part of her overall mission to “develop meaningful relationships directly with readers”, fitting alongside initiatives such as teen site Spinebreakers, which has attacted 50,000 unique visitors, and Penguin’s 100,000-strong digital newsletter subscription list.

She added: “At Penguin we believe that the books we cherish and read over and over, those that we feel a deep emotional connection with, say something defining about us and the type of people we are.” Asked if soured romances could work against the brand, Rafferty said: “I really hope any romances are happy ones, but hopefully our readers are fully aware of what can go wrong as that’s the kind of thing our Penguin Classics are full of.”

. . .but as it it is based in the UK, we poor bookish lonelyhearts here in the states can’t look to finding love (at least easily) there!

Chris Howard is giving away a few copies of Seaborn and Seaborn Schwag for those who’ve already bought a copy. No book? Comment on his post and you may win one. If you already have you can win Seaborn Schwag with art, bookmarks, preview chapters, and a couple cool surprises. (Yes, you will be surprised!). Yes, you are allowed to buy Seaborn and jump right to the Schwag line.

There are also new Seaborn wallpapers online! (Here’s one, to the right.)

And Chris will be on a panel at the Concord Festival of Authors in October around Halloween.

BTW — If you are having problems finding SEABORN on the store shelves, you can always order from Mysterious Galaxy, an indie that has been very supportive of Juno Books…
Powells, another indie supporter — even if for some unknown reason they have it listed as a “paranormal romance”…
Directly from us…or…
Amazon.com.

Our very own STACIA KANE has sold her dark urban fantasy “Unholy Ghosts” to Liz Scheier at Del Rey in a three-book deal! Her husband described it as “Ghostbusters meets Escape From New York”, set in a post-apocalyptic world where ghosts rose from the grave and killed a huge chunk of the population, and now they’re kept under control by the iron-willed (in more ways than one) Church of Truth, which is government and secular religion all in one. Here’s her brief description:

Sometimes addictions are more trouble than they’re worth…

Chess’s dealer offers her a choice. She can catch the mastermind behind the fake haunting of an abandoned airport so he can smuggle drugs into it, or spend weeks in the hospital after his enforcer breaks her habit for her—along with most of her bones. Chess picks the airport, but when a rotting corpse turns up with a soul still trapped inside and it looks as if the person responsible is one of her co-workers, she realizes the airport’s ghosts are real and this case is far more dangerous than a beating. Hey, who said downer-addicted loners made good choices?

Read her full squee on her blog!

In Seaborn, Chris Howard explores a new dimension of urban fantasy. Rather than keeping to the city as the genre would imply, Howard delves into an undersea world….Chris Howards first installation of this epic fantasy takes fantasy readers in a new direction. His passages are densely packed with detail and each chapter reads smoothly. His characters appeal to all readers, whether they are familiar with the genre or not. In particular, despite her inhuman characteristics, Kassandra is every bit as real as Corina, the Californian student whose main preoccupation until her possession was her latest break-up…. I would strongly suggest that fantasy lovers who are tired of vampire novels check this book out….
Rating:7 out of 10
Reviewer Age:19

The winner of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing is Garrison Spik, who penned this opening sentence to an imaginary (thank goodness!) novel: “Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’ ”

The winner of the fantasy division was Alex Hall of Greeley CO with: ‘ “Toads of glory, slugs of joy,” sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words.’

The award is sponsored by the English Department at San Jose State University in honor of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

According to (based on a research report), “texts, widely regarded as anachronistic remnants of a time before television, [may be] just as vivid as video.” Dutch neuroscientists placed “participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short 3s movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted….Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

Okay, so they were measuring disgust. Gross. But as Wired’s Brandon Keim put it: “Being a writer and avid reader, I’d like to believe [text is as vivid as video] — though I’d also like to see the study conducted across a range of emotional responses, involving both the presentation and evaluation of metrics more subtle and comprehensive than isolated disgust. Love, in particular, is an intriguing subject of study: might the participatory imaginativeness required of reading make the textual experience more powerful than than its on-screen analogue?” [Italics mine ]

Hey, that’s right. Chris REVEALS ALL . . . even about the . . . peanut butter! Read it at FantasyLiterature Net!

Seaborn is well written with dense prose and excellent description. It is also downright creepy in spots. The scene where we are introduced to Aleximor’s familiar was a prime example of this. I admit I was somewhat squicked out while reading it and that doesn’t happen to me very often. Mr. Howard’s description of both surface life and the expansive undersea world were detailed and vivid. His knowledge of Greek mythology and battle lore are formidable. The scenes with Corina and Aleximor are particularly interesting as control shifts back and forth between them.

The pacing was a bit slow in places, mostly because of the extensive description. There was also a lot of history and backstory to introduce the complexities of the world of the Seaborn.

Rating: A-

Mr. Howard has created an epic fantasy world and story in his debut novel Seaborn.

Urbanfantasyland

Filled with fantasy overtones Wind Follower is a story of ancient African [Paula’s Note: the book is not set in Africa and is not about ancient African culture] cultures and their mores, ethnicity and way of life in which the thesis of ancestor and spirit veneration are entwined with a compelling Christian message. Writer McDonnell does not shy from issues religion, class or of race. The setting of the narrative coming in the form of fantasy; serves to cause the tale to be even more out of the ordinary.

First person accounts can be thorny to pull off with integrity. Not only does Writer McDonnell employ first person as her protocol for getting this narrative chronicled, but…she interweaves the separate stories of the two main characters: Loic and Satha and manages to use first person effectively not once but twice. Loic and Satha each recount their own portion of the narrative. That McDonnell is a capable writer and master storyteller is obvious as she adroitly manages to give each character their own unique voice.

The various societies, settings and characters as portrayed by writer McDonnell are credible. Wind Follower is a chronicle that attracts the reader, draws the reader right into the striking, fully developed and even at times catastrophic setting of Ibeni, Doreni, Thesini.

Wind Follower is a sociologist’s dream novel. The book sets down cultures, with all their qualities and persona in a compelling read that brings the reader to understanding more of social more and importance of taboo and cultural dictates without sounding preachy or causing the reader to feel overwhelmed in the minutiae.

Not for everyone, happy to recommend for those who enjoy a novel that brings about some thinking as well as reading.

Midwest Book Review

Seaborn is a unique fantasy; it’s unlike anything else I’ve read. Chris Howard tells a compelling story of merpeople and of two women who struggle to become their own woman (or mermaid) in the face of opposition…. the prose is evocative and strange in a way that serves to highlight the alien nature of the Seaborn’s realm. I could almost smell the sea….These small gripes aside, I thoroughly enjoyed Seaborn. As I mentioned before, it’s unique, and never feels like a warmed-over version of anything else. It’s for anyone who loves the sea, and anyone who likes stories about young women striving for independence and their own power.

— Fantasy Literature

Two “reviews” at BookFetish:

One reviewer disliked the book because he’d “been told” it was a “gorefest” and it wasn’t and the cover model looked liked his ex-wife. Oh man, soooo sorry.

The other liked it and looked forward to more from the author: “Seaborn is a mix of “The Little Mermaid” tossed with one or two zombie limbs and enhanced with a crimson droplet of “I see dead people.” It is a refreshing step away from the cliché vampire or werewolf book. After all, who really writes about things that go bump in the sea?…I now wait in anxious glee for the next volume from Chris Howard because there are just enough character goodies that make me search for a cookie jar to stick my nosy hand into.”

Well, like totally “duh” — I forgot to post this interview with Chris Howard over at Fangs, Fur & Fey.

Blackness Tower by Lillian Stewart Carl is a Reviewers Top Pick for the month.

Quoting the PNR review by Clover Autry:

Lillian Stewart Carl’s writing is at once intelligent, captivating, and romantic, caressed by light fingers of poetic description. In no way am I going to give anything away about the mystery itself except to say that I pride myself on usually being able to figure them out. This one kept me intrigued and guessing until the end. In fact, she had so many clues and details involving the present and not one, but two time lines from the past, I was a little worried that Carl wouldn’t be able to pull off a satisfying ending. But I worried for nothing, because the ending blew me away.

Blackness Tower is definitely a keeper, a book meaty enough to inspire hours and hours of discussion for the most tenacious book club.

The back cover is slightly different & has a barcode and all…

Thanks to GalleyCat for this tip: “As a teaser for their forthcoming instructional DVD, Book Cover Illustration with Dan Dos Santos, San Francisco’s Massive Black studio has released a video that condenses the time and effort spent into creating the cover for Brandon Sanderson’s new fantasy novel, Warbreaker, into five-and-a-half minutes.”

I have no idea how much time actually was involved, but just watching this is astonishing. [I’ve removed the embedded video and just left the link as the vid was slowing the page load down: Link to Dos Santos video.

Here’s the finished art from the Dos Santos site:

(Click image for a larger view.)

Now, if this were a Juno cover, we’d probably be told it was “too soft and female” and that “no man would be caught dead reading it in public”.