Juno Books

Unless I find something I absolutely *must* say/post, I’ll leave the blog alone for a few days. Probably for the rest of the year.

RIVERSEND, by the way, will become the 33rd book (we did “Matters of the Blood” twice) Juno has published since September 2006.

Publishing as a whole has taken a downturn with the rest of the economy. Sales have (in general) slowed, Borders is troubled, several major publishers have announced layoffs and/or consolidations or both. But, despite the conglomerates and the bean counters, publishing is still a unique and creative industry. As for the genre portion of it — hey, we are all about supernatural powers, aren’t we? Just when everything gets it bleakest, we always find new magic.

Personally, this has been a challenging year for me. Ever seen one of those lists of 50 or so “stress factors” where you check off each stressful event that you experienced in the last 12 months? I took one recently. People with sustained stress above 300 had an 80% chance of developing a serious illness within two years. My score was 657. I think that means I died from all the tsuris already. I must be either a zombie or one of the undead.

But I am currently looking forward to the holidays and having my not-so-small-anymore offspring around some. I’m already involved in new challenges for Juno — but I’ll have more news about that after the first of the year.

Art by Catherine Somerlot

Fictionwise released Carole Nelson Douglas’s BRIMSTONE KISS on Monday and I forgot all about it! (Go here for it. As a new title it is 25% off for the first seven days of release. So I guess you can get the discount through Sunday…

I’ll update the Web site here with the links when I can.

Okay — first off, I thought it was clear that the numbers I was mentioning yesterday were compiled from the only the lists of the top fifty bestselling books for the week (in whatever the category and whatever week) on Bookscan — not ALL the books sold. Evidently, that was not clear — especially when taken out of context elsewhere.

Second, I evidently was not supposed to put those figures “out into the media” at all. I didn’t put them “out into the media”. The media picked up a public posting. To me, there’s a difference, but evidently there is none to Bookscan and I see their point.

So, wipe your minds! You never saw it!

Weather permitting you may be seeing (or feeling the effects of) the biggest and brightest full moon of 2008 tonight. According to Wired, the “biggest full moon in 15 years is set to grace the Northern Hemisphere tonight.”

As scientists at NASA explain, since the moon orbits along an ellipse, its distance from the Earth changes. Tonight, in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, the moon is approaching its nearest point to Earth (the perigee), so it should look about 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than this year’s other full moons. Tonight’s moon will also become full just four hours after perigee. The next time these two events will coincide will be in 2016.

With the unusually close perigee happening during a full moon, the Earth’s tides will also be affected.

National Geographic (which also has the best explanations of all this) quotes an astronomer who gives this advice,” If you are charmed by the idea of seeing the biggest and brightest full moon visible in 15 years, be ready to go outside at sunset and watch for the rising moon in the east or stay up all night and watch as the moon rides through the overhead skies—either way it will be a beautiful sight.”

in an essay that will appear in this Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, Paul Greenberg proposes how the US government could eliminate “overcapacity” in the writing industry. Quoting Ann Beattie ( who “mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in ‘being a writer’ than in writing itself. ‘There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost’…”), Bowker (”about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year”), and the National Endowment for the Arts, (”approximately 185,000 people in the United States … support themselves primarily as writers of books, plays, poetry, speeches and other literary matter”), Greenberg suggests eliminating half of the titles published each year. “Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.”

Of course, he admits, that wouldn’t be enough for some writers, but even $400,000 times 92,500 — half of the 185,000 Americans the N.E.A. identifies as “authors and writers” — would be a bailout cost of $37 billion. As Greeberg points out, “That’s about half of what the government paid for the first installment of the A.I.G. rescue. Should you still find that number too big to swallow, let me ask point blank: Whom would you rather bail out, a writer or an insurance executive?”

;-)

We are very proud that Sylvia Kelso’s AMBERLIGHT has been shortlisted as the Best Australian Fantasy novel of 2008!. The book, which garnered high critical praise, is certainly deserving of such recognition. Sylvia’s The Moving Water was shortlisted for the 2007 Aurealis Awards and its “Judge’s Report” read: “This book was very close to the top of our list — the plot was engaging and intricate, the characters were endearing and complex, the humour was wry and fun, the language was simply gorgeous and the nature of this novel produced strong reactions from the judges. The author is to be congratulated on such a compelling read.”

Here’s hoping AMBERLIGHT *is* the top of the list this time! Winners will be announced at the Aurealis Awards ceremony at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane on Saturday 24 January 2009.

BTW, we have AMBERLIGHT available direct from the publisher in hardcover and in mass market paperback.

And remember, the sequel to AMBERLIGHT — RIVERSEND — will be out shortly in trade paperback and hard cover.

Chris Howard has posted some thoughts on reading and books

He also has another eight pages of his graphic novel SALTWATER WITCH. It’s all here from the first page. The events in Saltwater Witch take place about five years before the events in SEABORN.

Chris is looking for feedback. This is his first attempt at creating a graphic version of one of his existing stories, so let him know what you think!

I haven’t blogged about last week’s “Black Wednesday” and lingering gray Thursday and Friday for publishing, but I thought I’d mention one staff writer who dealt with the news her services would no longer be required in a creative and probably lucrative way.

According to NBCSanDiego, Sheila McClear, one of Gawker.com’s three staff writers, was informed last week that her services would no longer be required as her pageviews weren’t up to snuff. Since she’ll get paid by the pageview through the end of the month, McClear decided to gain the benefit of as many pageviews as possible by posting a couple of shots of herself from her art modeling days…not quite showing her undies.

So help a (currently-non-)working grrl out and click through to her “My Underwear Is the Future of the Internet Economy” post!

We all knew Forrie. You couldn’t be involved in sf/fantasy/horror for long without making his acquaintance. As Bruce Webber wrote in the New York Times, his “obsessive devotion to science fiction and horror stories was so fierce that he helped propel their popularity.”

• NYTimes Obit
• LATimes Obit
• SFWA Obit

Even though it is long past Halloween, folks are still downloading Five Classic Ghost Stories: A Halloween Treat from Juno Books — over 1100 of you so far. So, I’ll just leave it up. Maybe we’ll have Winter Solstice/Hannukkah/Christmas treat for you…

Okay, so I missed posting this yesterday, but I think you can still do the “live” Q & A part…
EXCLUSIVE BITTEN BY BOOKS INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR STACIA KANE
…so, you should like go bug her with questions or whatever

“…Lima has served up a braided tale of several plot lines that converge and twist about each other enough that a reader is kept solidly invested in finding the clues and hoping to reach the conclusion before Keira. However, while Lima plays fair, there’s a number of puzzle pieces that may or may not fit in this puzzle. Once you finish the book, it’s a satisfying end that leaves you waiting for the next book.

Part of what makes this series so interesting, is that Lima uses well known tropes of the fantasy genre, yet gives them enough of a spin to make the recognizable to readers but keep them wondering if things will play out as expected. The differences are slight but make for the feeling that you’re entering new territory. For not only are the shapeshifters, vampires, and magic systems just a bit different, but the whole series takes place in Texas — a vast land that is new to most readers of fantasy. The mystery of the central plot is solidly constructed and doesn’t necessarily depend upon the fantastical elements, though they are involved. Fantasy adds flavor to the story while human greed and villainy manage to keep it grounded in the here and now.”

GUMSHOE

SFREVU

If you are looking for an a science fiction, fantasy or horror workshop, the 2009 Odyssey Writing Workshop will be held from June 8th to July 17th at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Odyssey is a great opportunity to improve writing and meet editors and authors. More information can be found on the workshop Web site www.odysseyworkshop.org or through the director, Jeanne Cavelos, at jcavelos@sff.net.

Odyssey’s 2009 writer-in-residence is Carrie Vaughn, New York Times bestselling author and Odyssey 1998 graduate. Carrie is the author of the popular “Kitty” novels. Other authors for this year include: Jeffrey A. Carver, Melissa Scott, Patricia Bray, and Jack Ketchum, and Editor-in-Chief of the Ace and Roc science fiction/fantasy imprints, Ginjer Buchanan.