Rosemary Kirstein

The price drop that started on Sunday is still going on, and the $.99 price for The Steerswoman is in place across all the retailers now.

Kindle, of course, had the sale price immediately.  They always respond to changes fast.  And Smashwords, who are my conduit to the other ebook sellers, so iBooks and Kobo had the change within a day.

Barnes & Noble lagged… but if you’re a dedicated Nooker, you can now get your fix.

And watch out for the pirates!   If you’re ever offered a download for a price lower than the one you see on Amazon — it’s a pirated copy.   Please don’t buy from the pirates.  Also, anytime you see my books offered for free — that’s the pirates again.  I’ve never offered them for free (yet; I might do a promo sometime next year…).

My thanks to all who are helping spread the word.  And welcome, to all my new readers!

Yes, that’s the jewel…

Well.

On the very first day of the sale, Sunday,  I sold 1,682 copies of The Steerswoman.

So…looks like BookBub has done pretty well for me.

I also sold 85 copies of The Outskirter’s Secret, 66 copies of The Lost Steersman, and 62 copies of The Language of Power that day, making 1,895 total ebooks sold that day.

Which is… a lot.   A whole lot.

So, my thanks to all the new readers, and if you found your way here:  Hello!   Feel free to browse around the older entries.   There’s some interesting stuff back there.  Also, sample chapters under “Free Reads,” above.  And don’t forget the comments: some cool people hang out here.

Naturally, Sunday was the best day for the sale, being the very day that all the subscribers got their email from BookBub.  But Monday and Tuesday were still pretty good.  Things seem to be calming down a bit now.

Of course, the next thing to watch for is the (possible) echo, as some number of people who finished reading The Steerswoman, decide they want some more, and go for the rest of the series.   And books 2-4 have a higher rate of royalty for me, while still being reasonably priced.  So I’ll make more from fewer copies.

As I keep saying (in the comment section), it’s all going into the Quit-the-Day-Job-and-Finish-Writing-the-Series Fund.  Just sayin’.

Must go now: I’m stealth-blogging from the Day Job.  (Whistles nonchalantly whilst strolling away, nothing to see here, carry on..)

For clever marketing reasons, The Steerswoman is currently priced at $0.99.

Obviously, it’s a ploy to tempt new readers, on the assumption that if they read the first book, they’ll be hooked, and snap up the rest.

Of course, you’re here, reading this blog, because you’ve already read the Steerswoman series — so, actually, this information is not all that useful to you…

Unless — aha!  Perhaps you have friends, who you know would love reading about Rowan’s adventures, but who have so far been reluctant to shell out hard-earned bucks merely on your say-so.  But at less than one dollar, what have they got to lose?

Perhaps you might mention it to them?  That’d be swell!

But actually, the main way people are going to hear about the sale is through an email marketing service called BookBub.  They have a huge list of subscribers who get daily emails about discounted ebooks.   Many of the ebooks on BookBub are self-published, but you’ll also find books that were previously on the New York Times bestseller list, and lesser-known works by established writers, as the publishers try to squeeze out one last bit of income on behalf of their authors (and themselves).

BookBub is no fly-by-night operation; it’s well-known and has a great track record.  I heard about it first from SF writer and pal Jeff Carver.   Apparently it’s not easy to get your book listed by them — they do have standards!  But they let me in first try… So I guess I meet the standards.

The price drop is in effect on Amazon, iBooks Smashwords and Kobo.  Barnes & Noble are lagging behind, so if you’re a dedicated Nooker, you might not see the lowered price until later in the week.

Also: I slightly lowered the price on other books in the series.  Just to make things even more enticing.

So, there you go: my foray into email marketing, which started today, and runs for a week.  I’ll keep you posted on the results…

(By the way, sometimes publishers and authors use BookBub to offer their ebooks for free, and this has led some people to think that the books are pirated!  This is not true!  If a book is offered free through BookBub, it’s because the publisher or writer decided to do that.   Nothing on BookBub is stolen or pirated!)

I quite enjoyed being at the Hugo ceremony.   It’s been a long time.

You can watch the stream of the ceremony online and see it for yourself.

People had been worried that there might be some public fuss, prompted by the Sad/Rabid Puppies controversy, but there was none.   Audience members were civilized and mostly pleasant (one attempt at booing was shut down rapidly from on stage by co-host David Gerrold).

As for the controversy itself… much has been said elsewhere, by many.  You don’t need me to synopsize  it for you, do you?    If you need background, Here’s an article in Wired Magazine that covers the whole deal.  Also, on Mike Glyer’s File770 site, there’s a collection of posts covering the the Puppies issues as they unfolded.

I’m just glad that part is over.

For the record, here’s what I did:

As a Worldcon member this year, I could cast my votes for the Hugos, so I availed myself of the Hugo Voter’s Packet, which contains e-versions of most of the nominated works (or excerpts from them).   In most cases, it turned out that I had not read the work before.

I read them… or as much of each work as was needed to determine whether or not, in my opinion, the work in question deserved to even be on the ballot.

Some of the items were borderline unreadable, just in terms of quality (those were the ones where I had to stop reading after a while).   Some were perfectly fine, but just nowhere near award-worthy — or even nomination-worthy.  Others were good enough to be nominated.

When you vote, you don’t just vote for the one you want to win — instead you list the nominated works in order, from 1 to whatever, based on how much you think each work deserves the award.  (The ranking below #1 does have an effect on the outcome — It’s called  “Instant Runoff” voting.  You can read about the Hugo process here.)

For each category, I ranked only the ones that were Hugo-worthy, based entirely on my evaluation of the quality of the work.

Sometimes, there was only one Hugo-worthy work.  In some categories, nothing nominated was of sufficient quality, and did not even belong on the ballot.

So I used the “No Award” option.  I ranked the ones I thought deserved to be on the ballot, then gave No Award the next place in the ranking, and shut up about the rest.

Based entirely on quality.   Not politics.

And there were some categories (“Fan artist.”  “Best Fancast”) about which I knew not enough to hazard an opinion.  So I left them blank, which has no negative effect on final numbers.

That’s it.  You can read the official list of winners, and how they ranked, on the Hugo Awards website.

Going forward, I shall be certain to participate not only in the voting, but in the nomination process.   I want it to be difficult to choose between the nominees next year– they should all be that excellent.

Next Year: Worldcon will be in Kansas City Missouri, which will at least be a lot less expensive to get to.   I’m glad I went to Spokane this year, but it was officially Not Cheap.

More about my time at the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane: this time, the panels (I only attended as part of the audience, and was not on the program myself).

(Normally I’d have link on each person’s name, connecting to their website — but I’m just too beat tonight.  There are lots of names!  Maybe I’ll come back later.  Until then, there’s Google.)

The “Comfort Reading” Panel (with Louise Marley, Lawrence Schoen, Christie Meierz, Jason Hough and Jo Walton), suffered from a bit of confusion as to what the panel was supposed to be about — whether it was what you read to relax, or what you turn to when you actually need comfort or reassurance.   Regardless, the discussion was interesting in both directions.   Jason Hough admitted that James Bond is a nice relaxing read for him; Lawrence Schoen turns to Bujold’s Miles Vorkasigan series.   Jo reached way back to Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” as an important work in her early life.   Someone brought up Dune as a book one rereads over and over; and of course Lord of the Rings.   (For me, it’s hard to separate relaxing reading from exciting reading, because I find  newness and weirdness inherently refreshing.  But for comfort and reassurance, it’s YA.  I’ve been known to go all the way back to the Heinlein juveniles.  Recent favorites: anything by Scott Westerfeld, and Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series.)

Brother Guy Consolmagno, of the Vatican Observatory, won the Carl Sagan Sagan Medal this year, which is awarded for outstanding communication to the general public by a working planetary scientist.  One of the duties that come with that is to present a speech to the general public, as part of his acceptance of the award.  And he chose to have Sasquan be the place he would give that speech, a nice touch I think.  Brother Guy is an excellent science communicator, and very enthusiastic, geekily charming and scientifically inspiring. (Not religiously inspiring, for me: atheist, here.)  I was glad to hear his talk, which was about “Discarded Worlds” — all the different views of cosmology that almost got it right, and how they worked, up to a point, until each was superseded by a better explanation.

The Star Party, which was supposed to happen right after the speech, with telescopes and amateur astronomers arrayed all through the adjacent park, was a washout.  Due to a) clouds and b) smoke.

I mentioned the smoke, right?  Wildfires in Washington state.

James C Glass did a  solo presentation on Australian Aboriginal views of Astronomy, which was a bit difficult to follow, as his slides were missing!  They showed up later, but then were rushed.

Brother Guy did a solo presentation as well, on Vesta and what the New Dawn mission’s info suggests about the early formation of the solar system.  Some nice crunchy science, there.

The panel on “Medieval Science and Engineering” was fun, too.  Bradford Lyau moderated, with (again!) Brother Guy, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton and Eric Swedin, talking about how the supposedly Dark Ages had a lot more science going on than the general public realizes.

Also, a presentation about the Book View Cafe, a cooperative of self-published authors (all of whom have a track record in traditional publishing — it’s a prerequisite for membership).  The talked about what they are, what they do, and how they help each other do it.  The members present: Brenda Clough, Jeffrey A. Carver (that man is everywhere!), Vonda McIntyre, Nancy Jane Moore and Pat Nagle.

The Rare Books panel, with Jo Walton, Ada Palmer, Fred Lerner, and Lauren Schiller,  was taken over by the visual aids: actual books hundreds of years old, passed around hand to hand.

Not actually by Aristotle.

Students will get bored, inevitably. Result: cartoonery.

And as mentioned before: Kate Elliot’s solo presentation on Narrative Structure and Expectation.

And that covers it: panels I attended at Worldcon.    I don’t think I left any out…

Okay, I really have to turn in now: workday tomorrow!

You remember Mary Alexandra Agner, right?  I’ve mentioned her before:  Science writer and poet — I signed up as a buck-a-month patron of hers on Patreon. 

Mary sent out an email recently to her Patreon patrons, alerting us to the fact that she had two poems in the January issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone.   CSZ is a print-form (as opposed to online) literary quarterly, with reviews and essays and poems, with a particular interest in the works of women writers.  Although the physical version costs physical money, CSZ is nice enough to put PDF copies online for free, six months after the original publication.

So naturally, I clicked over and started scrolling down to find Mary’s poems.  But before I got there:  a review of the Steerswoman series, by none other than SFF author Kate Elliot.

Not to keep you in suspense: she likes it!

I found it a really interesting analysis, bringing up aspects I hadn’t thought of before, while highlighting some of the things that I especially do try to accomplish with the series.   I’m so pleased.   Kate is an intelligent, deep-thinking person.  I was most recently impressed with her one-person presentation at Worldcon this year on Narrative Structure and Expectation (alas, I came in late, about when she was talking about the example of modern society’s ingrained expectations of what Cleopatra was like, as opposed to what she was really like…).

So, surprise!  A review  I didn’t know about.   You can pop over and read it, and take a look at Mary’s poems, as well.    (Kate is page 6, Mary is page 15.)

This was the first Worldcon I’ve gone to in — wait while I look it up — Yikes, 11 years.  The last one I attended was Noreascon  4 in Boston in 2004.  (Plenty of other smaller conventions between now and then, of course.)

I wasn’t able to wrangle any spots on the program this year, so I was in pure attendee mode.  Yes, entertain and inspire me, pros!   I’ll sit right here.

One thing I was looking forward to was the readings.

I heard Pat Cadigan, who I’ve been following on Facebook lately.   She’s doing the whole cancer-treatment deal, so of course there’s a certain amount of fellow-feeling on my part.  She looked amazingly good!  And from her posts, it seems she’s doing a lot, so I think she has a lot more energy than I did during my treatment.   Or a lot more feisty-ness, at least.   I quite enjoyed her story “Cancer Dancer,” a fantasy in which A Way Out is offered…  They put her in the Big Room, expecting a big crowd, and there were a good number of people there.  Oh, and did I mention: She won a Hugo this year (Correction: No, that was two years ago — I don’t know why I mixed that up, I was right in the audience this year watching her as she accepted a Hugo on behalf of Thomas Olde Heuvelt, who couldn’t be there, for his novelette, “The Day The World Turned Upside-Down.”  Thanks for catching my mistake, Pat!)

I also heard John Scalzi, the first time I’ve ever been in his audience, I think.  This is a guy who’s a real natural onstage.   There was a story, some general audience interaction, a little ukulele (at a fan’s request), a phone call from his wife,  all good fun.  The story was an not-yet-published urban fantasy, and was quite a neat idea.   About it, Scalzi said (quoting from memory here): “When most writers do urban fantasy, they do chain-smoking elves.  I do actuarial tables.”

I heard Jo Walton do a bit from her upcoming book, Neccessity, the third of her  books based on Plato’s republic.  No spoilers, sorry!   But I did so like the character in the section she read.  He has, shall we say,  a unique point of view.  Also, Socrates was present, so of course: dialog!

I’ve known E.C. Ambrose (alias Elaine Isaak) for ages, and yet this was the first time I’d ever heard her read.   She read a section from a prequel to her Dark Apostle series, and when she was done, I said, out loud, before any applause: “Wow!”   It was quite exciting!  Elaine  reads really well, and the prose was strong, the characters were very clear, the scenes were filled with tension, and later, action –  really a good performance of good work.

I was also looking forward to Daryl Gregory’s reading — you know how I much I like his stuff.

Daryl Gregory’s reading. Not shown: Daryl Gregory

We were there!  He was not.

I used Twitter to good effect, tweeting him the photo above, captioned: “@darylwriterguy Daryl Gregory where RU? (snf).”  Sabine commented that perhaps he hadn’t recovered from the Afterparty (a name of one of his books, how do you not know that?).   A fan nearby overheard her and tweeted to Gregory: “There was too much Pandemonium at the Afterparty, so @darylwriterguy missed his reading but We Are All Completely Fine.”   Shortly thereafter, Gregory scurried in, all apologies.  He had mixed up the times on his reading and the one after (Jack Skillingstead, who was sitting right there in the audience with us).  There was no time left to read, but Gregory proceeded to charm us, and amuse us and gave away some books.  It worked!  He’s a hard guy not to like.

And since we were right there, we just stayed for Jack Skillingstead‘s reading.  I had never read anything of his before, and it was quite worth hearing.  I might look him up now.

I’ve been reading Kay Kenyon lately — Sabine recently turned me on to her stuff, and I quite enjoy what I’ve read so far.   So, we caught her reading as well.   The excerpt she read didn’t quite grab me — but I’m definitely going to keep digging in to her work.

But for me, star of the show: Ada Palmer, who read from her upcoming first novel Too Like the Lightning, a story set centuries from now, but told with the tone and style and language of an 18th-century memoir.   It sounds like it should be a gimmick, but it’s not –  it’s a brilliant move, and the execution was spot-on.  I was utterly fascinated, and then frustrated that it won’t be released until next year!  I shall pre-order, needless to say.

Well, you wanted to hear about more than the readings, didn’t you?  But alas: out of time!   I’ll  talk about the other stuff later…

If you wanted an update on the whole Hugo awards vs. Puppies business — there are plenty of sources.  You don’t need me to repeat it right?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about there, here’s an article in the Chicago Tribune on the subject.

Also, you can watch the streaming of the whole ceremony at this link.

Back from Worldcon, having arrived home at an ungodly hour on Monday night while needing to get up mere hours later for the Day Job, at which I had a full week of work already waiting for me, while the current week’s work did not pause in rolling in.  I have not been able to catch up at all, in tasks or in sleep.

Well: hooray weekend.   (I intended to put an exclamation point at the end of that, but I’m too tired to back-arrow and fix it.)  I plan to sleep lots, enabling me to be up at the peculiar hours of the night that coincide with my best writing time.

I’ll say more tomorrow…

Preview:

Hugos: very interesting indeed, and well worth being there.

Readings attended: Jo Walton, Ada Palmer, Pat Cadigan, & more.

Panels: glad I went.

Music at Jo Walton’s party: So much fun, with Ada Palmer and Lauren Schiller of Sassafrass there, plus Patrick Neilsen Hayden, with surprise performance by me.

Music not at Jo Walton’s party: Astonishing stuff onstage from Ada and Lauren and Patrick.

Spokane: lots of smoke.  Lovely town, not usually this smoky (all those wildfires you hear about on TV?  Yeah.  There were very nearby).

Loved the park.

Statue in the park by the river, right outside the doors of the convention center, where we passed it every day.

Well, I said I’d find a bit of time to be available to meet and chat, since I’m not on the program this year — but alas, the time I found is 2PM today, Sunday.  Possibly most of you are leaving already…

But if you’re not gone, I’ll be at Guinan’s Place (that cafe in the exhibit hall) from 2 to 3PM.

Meanwhile, I’m sure I’m not your only source for Hugo News, so you probably already know what happened.  But if you didn’t, here’s an article in The Wall Street Journal on the subject.

Hope your convention (or day otherwise spent) was fun…

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane Washington, and too busy to post — But I’m tweetin’!  Because it’s easy.

Just random pix, mostly.   Like this:

This life-size lioness is a lamp for next month’s Chinese Lantern Festival

And this:

Tiny author. I could squash him if I wanted.

I’ll put up a bunch of these when I get home.  Meanwhile, you can get ’em fresh on Twitter, where I am: @rkirstein.

More soon…

… oh, okay, here’s another:

Found in a Starbuck’s. Yes, I said Starbuck’s.  Click to enbiggen, because it’s stained glass worth seeing..