Fanatical Pupil

From Charlie Stross’ blog: Why books are the length they are. An interesting read on why the coming ebook revolution will set authors free – provided that it happens soon enough that people actually still read things besides blogs and status updates.

Hope for the Hopeless. Or Clueless.

Jim Macdonald posted a letter from Publish America over on the Making Light blog. According to this letter, authors “published” by Publish America can now have up to 5 copies of their book sent to Random House (for the mere cost of 10 copies of the author’s book).

For those who might actually think this sounds like a good idea, here’s another idea you can do at much lower cost: Finish your novel, order a copy from a POD (Print On Demand) company, and mail it to Random House yourself. A brief check tells me that it would cost $7 to print a 200 page book on Lulu. Add another $3 to mail it yourself, and another $3 to mail it to Random House for a total of $13.

The cheapest sci-fi book I see on Publish America is $12.95. If you order 10 books (the minimum order to get the extra copies sent to Random House) at 50% off (they provide a coupon code) + $1.99 shipping per book, that’s $64.75 + $19.90 = $84.65.

Do-it-yourselfers save about $70 and probably have the same chance to get their book published by Random House as the PA authors.

I mean, in this post about getting her latest book published (DarkShip Thieves which is available now and sounds pretty cool) she talks about how she went through at least 4 agents in order to get stuff published that publishers actually wanted to publish. Each one has a distinctly terrifying personality, and the story (even slapped together for a blog post as it is) will probably scare anyone who is even thinking about trying to become a writer.

I’m glad she persevered though, and not just because it gives me hope, but because it’s a fascinating story that is probably a good read for any aspiring novelist… and because Darkship Thieves sounds like it’s a lot more like something I’d like than her other books (no offense, since I haven’t actually read any of them, of course).