Juno Books

Need a rhyme for a riddle, a magic spell, an ancient tome, cryptic clues, or some other use? Considering a career as a rapper? Try http://www.rhymer.com/. Rhymer offers six types of rhyming:

1. End Rhymes (blue/shoe, marigold/buttonholed)

2. Last Syllable Rhymes (timber/harbor, pleat/complete)

3. Double Rhymes (conviction/prediction, walking/talking)

4. Beginning Rhymes (physics/fizzle, scenery/cedar)
(This isn’t really a rhyme— it’s the same initial consonant sound(s) and the same first vowel sound.

5. First Syllable Rhymes (carrot/caring, tulip/twosome)

There’s also a free downloadable desktop version of this online rhyming dictionary with more features.

Have you ever noticed how much coffee drinking goes on in novels?

In the book I’m editing right now, the heroine definitely needs caffeine to get her through a lengthy ordeal after a near-sleepless night. Integral to the plot. Drink or die!

Okay, I confess, I realize it may be cpnsidered un-American, but I’m not much of a coffee drinker. I drink tea. My daughter gave me a nice coffeemaker Christmas before last and I’ve used it maybe ten times. I do drink coffee on occasion—if someone else makes it…or if I want something hot or with dessert in (non-Chinese) restaurants.

I’m also addicted to Dr Pepper (although I recently switched to Diet Dr Pepper and have not suffered withdrawal.)

I don’t know about the role of Dr Pepper in literature, but tea-drinking plays an important role in classic English novels. English majors have written essays—probably dissertations—on its meaning and use.

And where would Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple have been without tea? (Hercule Poirot also enjoyed his tisanes—herbal teas—and hot chocolate.)

But coffee now seems to spill forth from fiction most frequently.

Brewing, drinking, sharing coffee, taking a break for coffee, fortifying oneself with coffee…coffee pervades modern fiction even more than cigarette smoking once did film.

Aside from using coffee as a device in writing, I wonder if writers are reflecting their own love for the stuff?

Of course, there’s a lot of alcohol drinking in fiction, too…

Uh. I get busy?

Forgot to mention this last week. Very nicely done review!

Katherine Petersen on SFSite:

Readers often approach second books in series with a bit of trepidation: they’re excited to find out what happens next but wary that the second book might not live up to the excellence of the first. Well, have no fear when picking up Maria Lima’s Blood Bargain, she has created an even more riveting novel in her follow-up to Matters of the Blood….Maria Lima captures the essence of urban fantasy, mystery and romantic elements in Blood Bargain.

(Katherine also reviewed Matters of the Blood on SFSite as previously blogged.)

Although both books are racking up great reviews, we know folks may be frustrated because they can’t find copies. And there’s confusion over why they are listed as being published in September and October of this year. Here’s the history:

1. When Juno was doing trade paperbacks only, we published Matters in that format.

2.  When we switched to mass market paperbacks, we decided to reissue Matters in mmp and, of course, publish Blood Bargain as mmp.

3. For various reasons, neither book received a very big first printing. By that time, too, we were in negotiations with Pocket and knew our future probably was there. Our distributor filled all the orders and we had no more books, but we really couldn’t reprint at that point.

4. When we became part of Pocket, it was decided to republish both books and do so in sequential months followed by the third book, Blood Kin.

5. So, there may be random copies of the mass market editions of Matters of the Blood and Blood Bargain here and there, but stores have not been able to get them since last they first came out.

6. Pocket/Juno will release Matters of the Blood in August, Blood Bargain in September, and Blood Kin in October. They weill be easy to find

7. Meanwhile, yes, you can get e-book versions of Matters and Bargain…however, I’m not sure how long that will be true. At some point the current e-editions will be replaced with the new editions. I don’t know if there will be an e-bookless gap in there or not.

Got it?

Gifted Devoti adds urban fantasy to her growing list of genres with the launch of a gritty first-person series featuring modern-day Amazons. Secrets and stubbornness impact all the major players in this dark drama/murder mystery. If this book is any indication, Devoti has a brilliant future ahead in this genre!” (4.5 Stars)

Lori Devoti’s AMAZON QUEEN, sequel to AMAZON INK (June 2010), in which the queen of the Amazons must work together with a human to ensure her safety and that of her people, while coming to grips with the modern world and the changing nature of her tribe. Publication Date: May 2010.

Zery Kostovska is a reigning Amazon queen. It was an easy enough position until her old friend who’d turned her back on the tribe, Melanippe (Mel) Sarka, discovered the Amazons weren’t alone—that the abandoned sons of the Amazons still lived and had the same powers as their female counterparts. Now everything the Amazons have believed for millennia is being questioned. Some even want to make themselves known to normal humans. As if this isn’t enough to deal with, someone seems to be stalking Zery, causing little problems that quickly escalate to the point that flying under the human radar is almost impossible. The police are at her door and the Amazons are rattled. Zery is forced to go deeper into the human world than she ever has before, teaming up with a man who has his own problems with the law. Soon she has no idea who she can trust. Is it as simple as one of her own deciding to take advantage of the disarray in the group to take power…or is it something far more sinister? Despite knowing tribal rules better than most, she finds herself confiding in a man, of all things. Will this be her salvation or just make her a new even more dangerous set of enemies when the Amazons find out?

New York Times:

Author J.G. Ballard, a survivor of a Japanese prison camp whose vision was so dark and distinctive it was labeled “Ballardian” and who reached a wide audience with the autobiographical “Empire Of The Sun,” died Sunday, his agent said. He was 78…Ballard focused heavily in his work on what he saw as the negative effect on mankind of advancing technology and rejected the belief that humans can constantly improve themselves.

Ballard often portrayed social and technological developments as adding to a sense of human worthlessness, rather than aiding the progression of mankind.

“The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not,” Ballard said in a 2003 interview with Australian newspaper The Age.

The Guardian:

… But the label of science fiction writer still stuck, much to Ballard’s irritation, partly as a way of “defusing the threat”. “By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don’t think about what it is,” he explained.

There’s also an excellent Ballard site.

From now through the end of April, WildsidePress.com is offering a 25% discount on every purchase of two or more books!

That means everything: Juno Books novels and anthologies, Prime Books novels, collections, and anthologies; old and new issues of the Hugo-nominated Weird Tales..if you can find it at WildsidePress.com (or the backlist site, WildsideBooks.com), it’s on sale from now through April 30.

Yes, that means any Juno Book (in stock) with a link on THIS site is on sale–because those links go straight to the Wildside site. (Check the “About” page for a complete list.) Considering stock on a lot of the “original” Juno Books are dwindling, this is great opportunity to grab copies while you still can.

Just enter the coupon code “april” at checkout.

And no — I have no idea at all if certain books are in stock or not nor do I have any way of checking, so no use in asking me

Cinders Embers, first of a series by Laura Bickle for publication in April 2010, and its as yet untitled sequel for publication fall 2010.

EMBERS

Truth burns. Unemployment, despair, anger—visible and invisible unrest feed the undercurrent of Detroit’s unease. Homes and businesses are increasingly invaded by phantoms and now, with the annual destruction of Devil’s Night approaching, a supernatural arsonist is setting blazes to summon a fiery ancient power that will leave the city in ashes. A sizzling debut from a red-hot new author.

By day, Anya Kalinczyk is an arson investigator in the Detroit Fire Department. At night—accompanied by her elemental familiar, a salamander named Sparky, and an eccentric group of ghost hunters—Anya pursues malicious spirits. The rarest form of psychic medium, a “Lantern,” Anya doesn’t allow spirits to communicate through her with the physical world like most mediums, she devours restless harmful souls and incinerates them. She’d like to get closer to Brian, a ghost-hunting techno-wiz, but a lifetime of those she loves getting hurt makes her hold back. Her two roles mesh when, on the trail of a serial firebug, she discovers an arsonist is attempting to use the fires to rouse Sirrush, a supremely powerful elemental, from the salt mine beneath the city of Detroit. Anya must capture the arsonist before Devil’s Night, when the spell will be complete and Sirrush will rise to raze the city.

[More news on spring books soon! — PRLG]

[Note: Well, uh, see, after a discussion today of the cover, someone mentioned “Cinders” might be associated with Cinderella, so how about Embers for the first title…we’re still thinking on #2…no one likes my suggestion of Briquettes ]

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style,'’ perhaps the best-known guide to writing in the English language.

E.B. White, author of children’s classics “Charlotte’s Web'’ (1952) and “Stuart Little” (1945) brought William Strunk Jr’s concise guide,“The Elements of Style”, to the general public’s attention in 1957. Strunk, a professor at Cornell and had self-published his guide in 1918 and White had purchased and used it while a student there. After Strunk’s death, White wrote an essay about his professor and his “Elements” for The New Yorker in 1957.

Publisher Macmillan, asked White to revise Strunk’s “little book” for commercial publication. It went on to sell 10 million copies after its in 1959.

A fancy new edition has been released to mark the anniversary. It includes this comment by Dorothy Parker: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style’. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

(See the NPR story for more.)

Not everyone approves of the “little book”. Geoffrey K. Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language” calls it “the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst” in a snarky review, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, in “The Chronicle of Higher Education”.

As for me, I still recommend the “little book”. It is easy to understand and gives good advice for the beginning writer. Neither Strunk nor White presented the “elements” as fast and hard rules, just a guide to clear and concise writing.

As Strunk said in in 1918 “Introductory”:

This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature. It aims to give in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention…on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated… The book covers only a small portion of the field of English style, but the experience of its writer has been that once past the essentials, students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work, and that each instructor has his own body of theory, which he prefers to that offered by any textbook.

As Galleycat reports the Amazon flap was nothing more than someone screwing up somewhere. Is anyone who got their panties bunched up over this chagrined? Probably not.

Weird thing about folks: we seem to resent success as much as they crave it. Maybe it’s that old Puritan ethic coming out: you must have sold yourself to Satan is be a success? And, yes, Amazon is successful: In a report from Barron’s Online “could be responsible for close to a third of all U.S. e-commerce transactions”.

Of course, any entity with the power Amazon wields is scary. Not denying it.

That being said, Amazon spokespeople, by pointing out that 57,000 titles were affected, demonstrate just how disinclined the corporation is towards censorship. How many of those books would even be widely available without Amazon?

So, I went to Chicago and visited the pups below and my son and daughter-in-law (to whom the pups belong) and had a wonderful visit — although my first attempt with “Guitar Hero” was sad indeed. Now, of course, I have mucho work to catch up on.

Meanwhile back in the publishing world, USAToday says: “Twilight author Stephenie Meyer continues to dominate USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. Sales of her novels accounted for about 16% of all book sales tracked by the list in the first quarter of 2009. That’s about one in seven books.”

Of course, numerous authors have been told since 1976: “Vampires are out. Nobody wants vampire novels, etc.” Whatever.

And then there is the Amazon furor over unranking books with gay content. Hey folks. Amazon ain’t dumb. Do you *really* think they would have done something as stupid as to intentionally anger people? Somebody, somewhere screwed up. This is a stupidity problem, not bigotry. As Mitch Wagner of Information Week stated: “If I’m wrong and Amazon is singling out gay-themed books for penalties? Well, I’ll boycott them. But I’d like to wait for all the facts to come in before making a judgment. The cause of gay rights and equality will not be significantly harmed if we hold off the Amazon boycott until, say, Wednesday.”

One more tidbit: An essay in the NYTimes on authorial advances once again reminds me to remind you aspiring authors that the average sf/f advance is lower than the “average” (”most publishers I talked to cited $30,000 as a rough average”) cited in such articles. Don’t quit the day job.

Grandpup Dewie (left) just celebrated her first birthday! Malcolm does mind that she’s taller than him. Much

In an article by Motoko Rich thus headlined, the New York Times waxes rhapsodic over romance sales and somehow equates them with Depression-era sales of “Gone With the Wind”, which would be what we today call a blockbuster bestseller

According to Rich, “In a recession, what people want is a happy ending.” (Yeah, like in “Gone with he Wind” where, at the end, Scarlett has lost Rhett, goes back to the ruins of Tara, and proclaims: “After all, tomorrow is another day!” Not exactly HEA.)

In the mishmash of statistics offered Rich mentions “Harlequin Enterprises…reported that fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier.” True enough, but as Publishers Lunch points out, once you factor in the impact of foreign exchange on the Canadian-based publisher, the increase is less than 1.5 percent for 2008.

Any increase is, of course, better than a decrease, especially nowadays.

Rich also offers up this…

Such escapist urges are also fueling sales of science fiction and fantasy, said Bob Wietrak, a vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble. Mr. Wietrak said sales of novels with vampires, shape shifters, werewolves and other paranormal creatures were “exploding,” whether they were found in the romance, fantasy or young-adult aisles, where Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series continues to dominate and inspire look-alike books like the House of Night teen novels by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast.

…before going back to some generalities about romance and romance buying.

I won’t even comment on whether or not “escapism” fuels sales of sf/f.

Rich also touches on the popularity of romance with e-book buyers” “Whereas most publishers say that about 1 percent of sales come from e-books, Harlequin says that digital editions make up about 3.4 percent of its sales.” As Publishers Lunch points out, “that is a percentage of total worldwide sales, which were $473 million CA last year; if that rate maintains or grows during the year, that would equal roughly $16 million Canadian, or $12.85 million US.”

But, after quoting Steve Pendergast–”about 50 percent of sales are romance books” at Fictionwise, the reporter then smacks the unknowing reader with: “The growing market for digital romance novels has attracted several newcomers, including tiny independent publishers like Ellora’s Cave, Samhain Publishing and Ravenous Romance.”

Whoa. Rich really mixes the apples and the oranges with that one. Sure, there is crossover readership, but the publishers mentioned are founded on e-erotica rather than romance. In the case of Ellora’s Cave: EC, for all intents and purposes, established the e-erotica market to start with and still leads it. When I’m on those “future of books” panels at cons and the like, it’s always fun to stun folks with EC’s numbers: over 50,000 ebooks sold a month direct to readers.

How impressive is that?

Fictionwise, recently purchased by B&N for $15.7 million, has bragged they’ve sold around five million digital books in the last eight years. All sorts of books from all sorts of publishers.

Now, obviously, you can’t just divide 5 mil by eight and have a realistic statistic. I remember when Fictionwise first started up and they sure weren’t selling 650,000 books a year back then. Conversely, they are, no doubt, selling more than 650K a year now.

Still…Ellora’s Cave is a single publisher with a niche product. They are selling more than 600,000 books a year. And those are direct sales. No splitting the fee with Fictionwise or Sony or Amazon.

Anyway…

Whatever the urge let’s hope sales of novels with vampires, shape shifters, werewolves and other paranormal creatures continue to “explode”.

With Sookie on the small screen and Mercy at least optioned for film, rights to Laurell Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, have been sold to to IFC (The Independent Film Channel) to create their first original TV movie. (Or rather: “telefilm”.) The IFC blog says the movie based on the “paranormal fantasy novels” is to be produced by Lionsgate and After Dark Films. Adapted by Glen Morgan (”X-Files,” “Final Destination”), who also serves as executive producer. The movie is slated to begin production this summer.

So the other day John Shirley is cleaning out his files and he finds a two-page movie proposal written by William Gibson and him from *1987* printed DOT MATRIX! Two pages–written in William Gibson’s distinctive style and, oddly enough titled Mall Rats. (Nope nothing to do with the movies that came out of that name. But, even more interesting than the dot matrix days of these two fathers of cyberpunk — it was subtitled…”an urban fantasy”.

Good grief, Shirley, sez I, don’t throw that out! (He didn’t.)

But it just goes to show, people have used the term “urban fantasy” to describe a lot of things. Shirley, who has “circa 2009 meaning of urban fantasy” novel coming out in August, Bleak House, said as far as he recalled they called the proposal an urban fantasy because it was, well, a fantasy set in an urban locale.

April 1, 2009

For Immediate Release

In a pioneering effort to serve a niche market – male readers – Prime Books will be introducing a new imprint: Jupiter. Publisher Sean Wallace, who was integral in developing Wildside Press’s female protagonist-focused fantasy line, Juno Books (now an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books), said of the venture, “I see ‘male fiction’ as a small but vital market. Besides, in times of economic crisis, you try all sorts of otherwise insane ideas.”

Industry statistics consistently show that women read more and buy far more books than men. Modern innovations have only strengthened the female purchasing demographic. “When ebooks were still an untried idea, the predictions were that ebooks would appeal more to men than women. Of course that was stereotypical ‘men like tech/women write of parchment’ thinking. What actually happened was that romance and women’s erotica became the biggest sellers in electronic books. Men are obviously not finding enough product that appeals to them.”

In keeping with his background in fantasy and science fiction, Wallace’s Jupiter imprint will stick to genre. “We did the research. It was that or NASCAR, football, and beer. We just didn’t find a lot of quality writing with those themes,” said Wallace. “With sf/f, we can always build on the pre-established tropes: racing to the stars, big strong men battling other big strong men for no reason, mind-altering…well, you know, NASCAR, football, and beer for people who can read. And, of course, we will keep to the tradition of underdressed, busty, mindless women characters kept to the sidelines.”

Stephen Segal, managing editor of Weird Tales, will head up the design of the books. “With Juno, we got a lot of criticism that we were putting attractive women on the covers. Oddly, the negativity came exclusively from men. We then realized this was based on the fact that ‘manly’ books often featured oversize, overcompensatingly large typeface on the covers; massive vertical towering structures; or scientifically impossible machinery. In other words, men really want attractive women on covers, too. They were just jealous. So, we are using a lot of women on the covers—we’re just making sure their swords aren’t bigger than the guys’.”

Both Wallace and Segal are currently nominated for the Hugo, the physical award for which has frequently been described as a “phallic symbol.”

“Sheer coincidence,” said Segal.

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;-)