typhoonmedia

As it turns out, I can't set the prices of the e-books to zero.  Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have a US$0.99 minimum.  Oops.  So I've set that as the price of all three of my previous books (The Concrete Sky, Black Shapes in a Darkened Room, and An Ideal for Living).  HOWEVER.  If you really want to read one of them and haven't gotten around to it yet, I'll make you a deal.  E-mail me (either via the Signal 8 Press website or my personal one, marshallmoore.com) and let me know which book you'd like, and in what format (Kindle, ePub, or PDF), and I'll send it to you for free.  No strings attached... although if you'd be kind enough to post a review (preferably positive) on Amazon and Goodreads, of course I'd be very happy with that.  ;-)

If you'd like to review The Infernal Republic, you can also e-mail me for a free copy.  The physical books will be ready by the end of this week if my proof copy arrives without the usual logistical snafus.  I'll have a small print run done here in Hong Kong by mid-month, as well.  The e-books are ready now, and I'll be happy to provide one if you're interested in reviewing it.

Happy 2012!

The e-book versions of The Infernal Republic are ready.  (In fact, I've already uploaded the Kindle version to Amazon, and will put it on sale shortly before the Feb. 14 paperback pub date.)  If you'd like a review copy, please e-mail me: signal8press at gmail dot com.

The e-book blog eBookAnoid has given BookCyclone a nice write-up:
http://www.ebookanoid.com/?p=7413

I'm very pleased about this, and glad he liked the site and what we're offering.  It's time for us to have a higher profile; with that in mind, I'll be reaching out to more bloggers and journalists in the coming months. 

Authors kvetch about publishers. As an author who started a small press, I would know. Today I learned a lesson from an author whose debut novel we published earlier this year: before we go to contract, we need to have a chat about my expectations around professionalism. In a guest-blog essay, this author had a fair amount to say about her disappointment that fame and fortune haven’t rained down upon her. When I read her account of my press’s failings (or limitations, to be a little more diplomatic), my stomach dropped a couple of inches: we couldn’t support her on a cross-country book tour, hook her up with a publicist, offer compensation to bookstores to offset the cost of readings, nor meet the financial and shipping requirements set by bookstores. (This last bit was factually incorrect but she didn’t bother to fact-check before submitting the piece for publication.) This was not the first time this author had publicly aired her assorted laments, either. And the book only came out this past spring, less than a year ago, which is a big reason why this topic matters. As an author, this is a journey I’ve made several times. Having done a few things right and a lot more wrong when I was a newbie, I hope I’ve picked up a few things along the way; hence, this.

To begin with, before you ever go to contract with a publisher, make sure you find out who they are, what they’ve already published, what other titles they’ve got in the pipeline, and what they’re likely to do for (and to) your book. In other words, do your bloody homework: research the company, ask around, and go into the deal with your eyes wide open. One example of a not-so-intuitive question to ask a small-press publisher early on is whether or not they’re incorporated. If they’re too feeble-minded about business basics to have set up an LLC or some other corporate structure, my strong advice would be to say Thanks but no thanks. Think it over. Try to keep in mind that you are dealing with a business and not a social services organization (a distinction often lost on many in the industry). Make a list of questions: the stupid ones, the smart ones, whatever. Ask, and get answers.

If you like what you hear (or think you can deal with it), and you do sign on the dotted line, this also requires you to be adult enough to live with the results of your decisions. This is one I didn’t do so well with, the first time around. My first book was published by a now-defunct independent press. I got a break when the editor of an anthology I’d submitted a short story to not only liked the work but called to ask if I’d written a novel. The timing was sublime: I had just finished the first draft of the book I would later call The Concrete Sky. We discussed the plot and the edits I wanted to make before submitting it. I holed up in a hotel room in New Orleans (as you do), did a lot of rewriting (no comment on any other activities I might have indulged in), and sent him the finished product, which he liked, accepted, and published.

From the get-go, I had concerns. Like many small presses, this one did certain things well but also had its limitations. When I was writing the book, I didn’t give much thought to genre and its ramifications; mainly I wanted to tell the story. Although it’s a Thelma and Louise kind of thing with two gay guys as main characters, or a literary The Living End without the HIV, I had literary aspirations (read: delusions of grandeur) and had never envisioned the repercussions of buying real estate in the pink ghetto. By publishing with a gay press, that’s exactly what I was doing. Then perhaps more so than now, gay-interest titles were marginalized: shelved separately in bookstores, or not stocked at all; not reviewed by mainstream venues; unlikely to be picked up by major houses. As if that weren’t enough, this publisher’s attitude toward marketing books was what I later termed the Mandatory Flesh Policy: the cover had to feature a hunky male torso -- or a set of well-developed biceps and deltoids, or at least some enticing ass cleavage. The sex-it-up mindset didn’t stop there, either: the cover synopsis had to feature the word gay as many times as it could be inserted into the text. Just attaching the gay fiction genre tag wasn’t, well, gay enough. And in the months leading up to the book’s release, I literally lost sleep from anxiety over what the book would look like and how it would affect my future career. I also vented my concerns in my blog, more or less nonstop, and probably alienated more people with my kvetching than I attracted to the book.

Were the concerns legitimate? Yes, I thought so then, and, more than a decade later, I still do. However, there’s a time and a place for airing concerns like these. When your book is in the publication pipeline, or has been out for less than a year, it’s better for everyone concerned to keep your public remarks as positive as possible. However justified your frustration may be, the top priority needs to be promoting the book, because these other issues are not problems that your public grief will resolve.

As a subset of these pre-contract negotiation questions, you ought to ask what the publisher can offer. In many cases, it may not seem like much: help with arranging tours or individual readings, promotional postcards, a certain number of review copies sent to a list of regular reviewers, nomination for awards (plus the requisite number of copies for judges), etc. This is actually a lot; it’s not an insignificant investment for a small press (especially the kind run by people working around day jobs) to dispatch copies, pay to have cards printed up, and so on. Also talk to other authors about their own experiences, the financial perks in particular. What did your friends’ publishers pay for? What did your friends pay for? Don’t assume that the major publishers send every single author from coast to coast and pole to pole signing books. They don’t.

If you arm yourself with information ahead of time, you may avoid disappointment. Back to the case of my first book, I went in knowing more or less what to expect. Granted, to find this out, I went to extremes (as I am occasionally known to do), flying to Paris to talk to the author of the book my publisher was releasing just ahead of mine. And I had long talks with my editor. This company had managed to put itself on the gay bookstores’ radar, which meant finding copies there wouldn’t be a problem. Chain stores in more civilized urban areas also sometimes had the books, too. But was it on every new-release table in every Borders (RIP) and Barnes & Noble? It was not. Nor did I expect it to be. I’d been told up front that distribution would be limited, and that most sales would come through Amazon. And guess what? My editor was right: distribution was limited, and most sales came through Amazon. Did the press have the funds to send me on a book tour? No, I organized that myself, travelling to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, DC, Chicago, Durham, and Vancouver on my own dime. The book did reasonably well for a debut by an unknown author, despite its genre and distribution constraints. But I was informed, I kept my expectations more or less realistic, and this part of the process ignited little trauma in my psyche.

My next recommendation would be to check your magical thinking at the door. So what if you’ve always imagined book tours, publicists, three-martini lunches in New York, standing-room-only book launches, and/or oral favors from articulate groupies. These are not uncommon author fantasies. They are not, however, common author entitlements. If you’re with a small press, these things will probably only happen if you can organize them on your own. If you feel you are owed fame and opulence because of how good your book is and/or how fabulous you are, perhaps you’d be better off holding out for that big fat book deal… until either it eventuates or you grow up, whichever comes first. Just by virtue of publishing the book and getting a few good reviews, it is not necessarily going to set the world on fire, no matter who publishes it and how many stores are selling it.

At some point reality will set in. Actually, I believe this happens in stages. One dose of reality arrives once you’ve signed the contract and sent it back in. Another comes when you get the edits back. Still another shows up in the form of the proofs. Then there’s the cover art. The blurbs. And so on. If you’re keeping up with what’s going on in the publishing industry, you will know that only a few authors get treated like rock stars, or the literary version thereof. Even if you’ve signed a modest deal with a major house, it’s going to fall to you to do the publicity. And, for the sake of argument, let’s say you do luck out and get the rock-star treatment. Book tours are exhausting. Whether the money is coming out of your pocket or somebody else’s, tours are a lot of travel and a lot of stress. No matter which angle you approach the process from, here’s the reality: you’re going to work, not go on vacation.

On a related note, remember that interviews, guest blogging appearances, virtual book tours, and meatspace book tours are opportunities to promote the book. Apart from family and friends, no one cares that you’re sad because you ended up with a small press and not at one of the Big Six (after a bidding war and a seven-figure advance). If you keep mooing about what a let-down your small-press experience has been, you do not come across as a person with an interesting, engaging story to tell. You also do not endear yourself to your publisher. You may also repel any potential future publishers savvy enough to google authors whose books they are considering. Negativity doesn’t sell.

The publication of my own first two books somewhat predated social media. In 2003 - 2004, blogs were still kind of an exhibitionistic novelty, Facebook was still in Mark Zuckerberg’s silicon nut sack, MySpace might still have mattered, and Twitter was still just a verb. As social media have proliferated, so have opportunities to promote one’s own work. To be fair, the author whose essay put this issue on my radar has done a very good job of tracking down critics to review her work, and has undertaken a respectable amount of publicity on her own. I’m not complaining about that; in fact, I’m quite happy with that aspect of the publishing relationship. Unfortunately, I also think that in her (multiple) writings about what a let-down this experience has turned out to be, she has undermined her own efforts at promotion. Having been through something similar with our first author -- who experienced some kind of identity crisis after we published his book, decided he wasn’t sure he wanted to be an author after all, and said so in an interview I found later -- I think authors really need to think about what they’re broadcasting. Looking back, I know I pooped out way too much despairing verborrhea about my first publisher and What It All Meant. Bottom line: no one is telling you not to feel what you feel. But when you’re doing publicity for the book, it’s not a session with your therapist. It’s not about you; it’s about the book. At the very least, embargo your angst until the book isn’t so new anymore (like, a year), and until you have enough industry experience to know what you’re talking about.

If you’ve gotten this far, and you’ve gone to contract with your hypothetical interested small press, you need to take realistic stock of what you can do to promote the book. Most small presses are understaffed and short on resources. You are the book’s best ally once the publisher brings it into print. It’s irresponsible to the publisher, and to your own work, to let the entire year-or-more of pre-production go by without concocting a rudimentary marketing plan. If you want to make sure bookstores know about your book, do some research. Go on the IndieBound website, identify bookstores in cities you’d like to target, visit their websites, and try to find out who their buyers are. Contact them, introduce yourself, and send promotional materials for the book. If your publisher will support it, have them send a review copy. Or send it in e-book format, if the buyer has an e-reader and is willing. These don’t have to be time-consuming tasks.

You’re also responsible for following through on your promotional commitments. If you’re in doubt about whether you want to be an author when you grow up, don’t sign a contract with a publisher. Full stop. And when the book comes out, don’t go into hiding. Get out there and promote the damn book. If you’re having major, soul-shaking second thoughts now that you’ve gone and had a book published, don’t voice them in interviews. As I mentioned before, the author whose debut book we published first did exactly this, and I almost had an aneurysm when I found the interview. We’d been counting on him to make use of his potentially hugely effective author platform to get behind the book, and he wasn’t doing it. Apoplexy threatened. So I googled him, and voila: angst, inertia, and a sort of professional implosion. I probably don’t need to point out that sales of the book have been abysmal, do I? Does anybody actually want to know how much money we lost on this book?

Extenuating circumstances do happen, and people tend to understand this. (Sometimes they don’t, which makes them assholes. It’s a distinction worth knowing.) Case in point: when my second book was released, I had to cancel some of my planned readings due to bankruptcy and imminent homelessness. I couldn’t afford to pay my rent, much less schlep around the country pimping the book. My publisher understood, and was gracious. (On the other hand, one bookstore owner was rather petty and gave me a hard time over a cancellation. To this day, I’m appalled when I think back on it; my then-partner and I had almost ended up on the street!) And I was eyeball-deep in grad school when -- after being delayed for years -- my third book came out, so I didn’t do such a great job there, either. (I did get excellent grades in my master’s courses, though.) Now that I’m on the other side of the virtual desk, publishing books as well as writing them, this is not a mistake I will repeat, provided the circumstances are within my control.

My final point is that yes, horror stories abound in this industry. I’ve got several of my own, which I hope I have learned to keep to myself in public… at least while the wounds are still fresh. I know other authors with plenty to be angry about, too. Knowing when to call a publisher out because of malfeasance or gross incompetence is one thing. If your publisher has, say, reneged on their contractual obligations, or done such a piss-poor job with the book design or cover that you would be embarrassed by the finished product, then you need to protect your intellectual property, your financial interests, and your professional reputation. If, however, you feel moved to grumble because distribution isn’t ubiquitous and you’re not the rock star that you dreamt of being when you signed on the dotted line, just... save it. You’re not doing yourself or your book any favors by grumbling.

Writing is intensely personal, and publishing is an odd marriage of art and commerce. Authors (or the ones who matter, anyway) pour heart and soul into our books, and when they are published, we want the presses to do right by them. We also tend to have our own ideas about what that should look like. These things may not be feasible when business considerations are factored in. What it all boils down to is that when you sign with a small press, there are benefits like direct access to your editors and publishers, and more input into things like the cover art. You may not see the book in every store you visit, or any store you visit (at first), and you will probably have to keep your day job. But you’ve signed a contract with a small company whose principals are going to invest a lot (relatively speaking) of their time and money in your work, which by extension is an investment in you. However strongly you may feel that your frustrations need to be aired, ask yourself whether doing so is truly in the service of the book. However matter-of-fact you may feel you’re being about how your small-press endeavor just hasn’t lived up to your dreams, negativity doesn’t sell books.

Our Pushcart nominations:

Philip Huang: "Pineola Inn" and "The Chair"
Xu Xi: "Iron Light" and "Servitude"
Donna Miscolta: "A Month in the Tropics" (epilogue to When the de la Cruz Family Danced)
Chris Tharp: "Neon Crosses" (chapter 1 from Dispatches from the Peninsula)

I'll be putting these in the mail in the next couple of days.

Jesus, has it been 2 months since I last updated this?  Apparently so.  Hello new-job inundation!

1. We've published Xu Xi's new short story collection Access: Thirteen Tales.  The paperback is available via Amazon, B&N, and pretty much everybody else.  The e-book is available via the Kindle and Nook stores, and I'll be sending it to Omnilit soon.  Given the persistence of the backlog, the backlogged e-retailers' lack of market share, and my own lack of time, I will not be sending it elsewhere.  (Well, other than BookCyclone, of course.)  If you've looked at the Amazon page, you may have noticed the lack of a cover image.  That's always the last thing to appear on Amazon, for reasons I cannot fathom.  It took a couple of weeks with Dispatches from the Peninsula as well.  In any event, the book is out and selling and you should buy it if you haven't already.



2. The first reviews for Access are out, as well.  Bloggers have gotten there first:

The Reading Life

Access: Thirteen Tales  is an amazing collection of short stories by Xu Xi.   Set in Hong Kong and among those in the vast Chinese diaspora,  the stories are mostly about women, the ties of family, the inescapable consequences  of deep enculturation, the pervasive power of money, sex and loneliness.   Some of the women are highly educated and successful and some barely eke out a living.

The collection  is also very much about what it means to be a Hong Kong Chinese in the opening decades of the 21th century.   The people in the stories are very real.   Xu Xi makes them come alive for us in just a few pages.  We understand the people in these stories and how they got to where they are in their lives.   Xu Xi's stories show literature can also help us understand how we got to where we are in our own lives.   Xu Xi helps us see the universal in the very particularized people in her stories.

I will spotlight two of the thirteen short stories in the collection so readers can get a feel for her work.  Most of the stories are between ten and twenty pages long.


"Space" is a brilliant short story about a never married sixty seven year old woman with no children living by herself in Hong  Kong.   Her brother has recently died and her nephew and his wife want her to move to America to live with them.   As the story opens, it was exciting and very interesting to learn the aunt has a close near intimate Internet relationship with a seventy year old American living in New York City who is a self taught Sinologist.   Her nephew Francis and his wife are in Hong Kong for a visit.   They are doing all they can to persuade Aunt Kar-Li to move to America.   They tell her they have a big room for her and also mention a retirement community. Kar-Li suspects their motives may be impure as she thinks they want her to sell her apartment in Hong Kong to invest in the three restaurants they own.    There is a great deal in this story.   It deals in a very subtle fashion with the conflicts between older Chinese and their younger relatives in terms of adherence to Confucian values.     The aunt knows that she is in part going to be used by her nephew and his wife once she moves but the family ties are just too powerful for anyone to really try to throw away.   

"Lady Day" is a really amazing story about a post operative transsexual prostitute.   The story line is very interesting and kept my attention level very high.    This is a story about deception of the self and the other.   About the power of sex to dominate and the reverse side of this when a person transforms  into  a commodity.   All swords seem to be two sided in the world of Xi Xu.   "Lady Day" is fairly explicit in its descriptions of what the clients want her to do.   It is in a way a woman's fantasy story about how the life of prostitute works out when  things goes very well.  Of course the story ends before Lady Day's looks begin to fade and we know the dark side of this fantasy world will take over soon.   

The people in these stores are often defined by their jobs.   Almost everyone works hard and is very money driven.   I was glad to see that many of the women in the stories are very high achievers both in commerce and education.   

Xu Xi is from Hong Kong.   She has published nine books.   She won an O Henry prize for best short story. (It is included in the collection.)  She has been a distinguished visiting writer at the University of Iowa.   She teaches at the City University of Hong Kong as well as the Vermont College of Fine Arts.   

Access Thirteen Tales will be published on November 25, 2011. There will be a book launch party November 25 at 630PM at the  City University of Hong Kong to which all readers are invited.   

(There are additional details about the launch event and about the very interesting and highly impressive  career of Xi Xu on her web site.)

I was provided a complementary e-book of this work.   

Readers of the stories of Jhuma Lahiri will relate very well to these stories.    I am very glad I had the opportunity to read the work of Xi Xu and endorse her work without reservation.   

Here is a link to the publisher's web page.

And Susan B. Kason

November 15th marks the print release of Access (Signal 8 Press, 2011), Xu Xi’s new collection of thirteen stories. It came out as an e-book on November 1, so that’s what I read last week.

Each story is unique, but they all have one common theme–desire. Most feature a strong female protagonist, although two of my favorites center around men. The stories take place all over the world, from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Sweden to New York, with characters from an even wider mix of backgrounds.

It’s difficult to choose a few of the stories to summarize here because they are all so engaging and memorable. The following three stand out the most to me.

Servitude is one of my favorites. It’s an endearing story of a devoted Hong Kong office worker and his aging boss. At first glance, their relationship appears to be a standard employee-employer one. But as the story progresses, we learn there’s more at stake–for both the employee Chung and the boss Mr. Suen. I really like how Xu Xi is not afraid to end on a sad note.

And then there’s Access, the charming tale of a woman named Elna who deposits $1500 into a new account while worrying about her aging mother. Part Portuguese, part Lebanese, and part Chinese, Elna notices that her balance grows exponentially each time she checks the account. After many days, when she tries to withdraw her money, she learns the meaning of want and appreciates what she already has.

The last piece in the collection is so haunting that I couldn’t end my review without mentioning it. Lady Day is the story of a boy who is bullied in boarding school. Years later he plans the ultimate revenge on his unsuspecting tormenters.

The thirteen stories are organized into five sections: tall tales, circular tales, fairy tales, old wives’ tales, and beastly tales. Servitude is a circular tale, Access a fairy tale, and Lady Day a beastly tale. I highly recommend the entire collection and all of its tales.

Also look for reviews in the South China Morning Post (this coming Sunday, Nov. 20) and Time Out HK (I assume it'll be in the next issue).  Reviews are forthcoming in quite a few other places as well.  I probably won't reprint them all here but will at least provide links when they are available.

3. The Access book launch is being held at CityU on Friday, Nov. 25:

http://www.english.cityu.edu.hk/en/events/event111125.jsp

If you'd like to attend (and you should), please go to this site and register online.  Although you won't be turned away at the door, of course, registration will help the organizers prepare adequate seating, refreshments, and so on.

Yours truly will hold an interview/Q&A kind of thing, and I promise I will do my best not to sound like a dork.

4. Xu Xi will also be appearing at quite a few conferences and literary festivals.  Visit this link for the full itinerary:

http://www.xuxiwriter.com/events.htm

I'm hoping to make it to a couple of these things, myself, including Shanghai and Makassar.  We'll see.

5. We have also reprinted seven of Australian author Brian Castro's books via BookCyclone.  They're currently available via Amazon and B&N, and we'll have them on BC soon.  Here's the list of the books you can now buy as e-books:

Shanghai Dancing
Stepper
The Garden Book
Looking for Estrellita
The Bath Fugues
Drift
After China

6. The Infernal Republic is finally undergoing e-book conversion. 
The paperback production files should be ready soon.
And isn't the cover fantastic?

Add Apple to the list of backlogged e-booksellers.  I just learned that a couple of our earlier e-books were rejected by Apple.  (There's always something, when you're dealing with Apple.)  I wouldn't be as annoyed if I hadn't uploaded these to Omnilit (which we use as our iBookstore gateway) MONTHS ago.  The official reply from our contact at Omnilit is that it takes them "a couple of weeks" (translate: upwards of a month, and sometimes longer) to inspect new e-books and distribute them to Apple, and that Apple may take several more months to inspect the books before putting them on sale.  But we're talking about at least one book I uploaded back in February or March.

I already knew that Kobo, Google Editions, and Books on Board were backlogged.  Kobo has been giving us the runaround for almost as long as we've been dealing with them, constantly attributing our technical issues to our lack of FTP experience, which would be credible if FTPing were actually difficult.  I mean, come on: you enter the FTP address and account login info, you drag and drop the files you need to send, and you click.  This is 2011, not 1991.  Books on Board's people can't seem to reply to an e-mail without repeated prompting over a period of months.  Which leads me to believe they're drowning, as well.  And although I did a huge upload to Google a couple of months ago, the last time I checked, a whopping one new book had shown up in our list.

We're committed to making our e-books as widely available as possible, while serving as an alternative to troublesome, overpriced aggregators.  We'll continue to do our best with that.  At the same time, what I see happening is probably a stampede to get into this supposedly lucrative market.  This mad ramp-up, if it's what I think it is, and I'm usually right about things like this, will probably continue until later in the year, if not beyond.  In the meantime, here is how we will deal with this:

Kobo: on hold until they sort themselves out
Apple: we will continue uploading the books via Omnilit, but the issue of setting up a direct relationship just leapt toward the top of the to-do list
Google: they make batch uploading easy, so I'll do it in groups of 20+
Books on Board: one day, they'll send us FTP info... *cue soundtrack music*

The good:

1. The biggest news is no surprise to anyone following my personal writing blog (msminpdx) or Facebook: I've accepted a faculty position at the Hong Kong campus of Savannah College of Art and Design.  This is quite cool, to say the least.  I start Monday.  This will be a great fit, allowing me to combine the teaching I've been doing with the writing and editing experience I have.  I'm looking forward to it.  So far I'm enjoying getting to know my new colleagues, and the campus is gorgeous.  There's one caveat, of course: I will be busier in the coming months.  I'd say something about things not happening as quickly as usual, but that would sound silly, given how long it took us to get the BookCyclone site up and running.

2. It is up and running, by the way, and we're even selling books there.  There's still some work to do, though.

3. Dispatches from the Peninsula is selling, even though we're two weeks away from the pub date.  The e-book has been selling, and I think people are even getting physical copies.

4. Xu Xi is quite happy with the typesetting for Access, I'm pleased to say.  We (or rather, our book designers) did our first three Signal 8 Press titles in Garamond, which looked striking.  Xu Xi had always wanted a book set up in Caslon.  We were happy to oblige.  I mean, why wouldn't we?  So in addition to a really spectacular cover (to be revealed as soon as Justin Kowalczuk finishes the page file), we're rocking a terrific classic-cool font.  Caslon's great, kind of like the dapper/dowdy hipster who wears granny glasses but gives great head.  We're doing pretty well on time with this one: the pub date's in late November, but it'll be ready to go well before then.  There will be HK events at City U, the Asia Society, and the Tongzhi Literary Group (the latter will be a joint event with me, to coincide with the release of The Infernal Republic).  Xu Xi will also be presenting at the Makassar Literary Festival in Indonesia.  (I'll probably go as well.  How many other occasions will I have to go to Makassar?)

5. I've sent The Infernal Republic to the book designers, too.  One word: Palatino.  Still no cover treatment yet, which is beginning to worry me a little.

6. I'm deep in edits on our summer 2012 release, Justin Nicholes's River Dragon Sky.  I'd be getting more done if there were more hours in the day.

7. We've just gone to contract with the prominent Australian author Brian Castro to release his backlist via BookCyclone.  Among the titles will be Shanghai Dancing, which I think sold quite well in a number of places.  This is great, because I think it'll make all of his books more easily available outside of Australia and New Zealand for the first time.  Look for these in another three or four weeks.

The neutral:

8. We're going to start paying royalties and reporting sales twice a year, not quarterly.  Given how complex the royalty rates are by some of the e-retailers we work with (Amazon in particular), it's a more time-consuming process than we'd counted on.  We have a total of about 50 books between our imprints, so we're just not big enough to stick with a more ambitious schedule than this.  Once Jerome finishes the current round of reports and payments, we'll be sending out an announcement to our writer and publisher partners, and will modify the language in our contracts accordingly.

And the things that make us roll our eyes:

9. Kobo is backlogged.  I've done some research into WTF is the problem with them.  Now I know what's going on.  It's not just us: apparently they're months behind schedule and over capacity, and this has been going on since at least spring (which means it's probably been longer, but it didn't become semi-public knowledge until recently).  We already knew that their uploading system is buggy.  This might explain it.  It may be that it simply cannot accommodate the volume of e-books being piped into that site.  In any event, we do have an account with them.  Once we have ascertained that Kobo has sorted itself out and set up a more reliable, user-friendly means of uploading books, we'll resume distributing to them.  In the meantime, the moratorium will continue.

10. Books on Board.  We've got everything but an FTP account with them.  Why we don't have that, I have no idea.  They're not big on replying to e-mail.  One of these days, honest, we will get this one going

Big news.

First of all, Chris Tharp's Dispatches from the Peninsula: Six Years in South Korea is now on sale as an e-book.  In keeping with our (new, still evolving) policy on the e-books preceding paper release dates by a few weeks, I went on and uploaded the files to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Omnilit.  Amazon has been taking as much as a week (even longer a few times, when the spam e-books problem was at its peak) for books to appear, so I didn't expect a fast turnaround.  And voila, less than 24 hours later, there it was.  Didn't see that one coming.  In any event, if you've been chomping at the bit in anticipation of reading this book, it's now available for your delectation.

Amazon: http://amzn.to/qKOUWV
Omnilit: http://bit.ly/r6QLC6
Barnes & Noble:  (still waiting)

In the coming weeks, we'll upload it to Weightless Books, Google, and various other places... and, of course, the BookCyclone site.

For some mysterious reason, the metadata for Dispatches has not yet made its way through Ingram's distribution network, so if you're looking for the paper edition online, it's not there yet.  The official pub date isn't until Sept. 27, so we're not panicking yet.

I should point out that the concept of the pub date is evolving.  None of the e-retail dashboards I'm currently familiar with does a very good job of letting you set up future pub dates, and restricting availability until then.  With Amazon, you can't set up a future pub date at all: the day you upload it, the clock starts ticking.  It'll take a day or two, or a week, or whatever, to wend its way through their system.  Something similar happens with B&N.  With Omnilit, the uploading process generates a new page for the book, so it goes on sale immediately.  We use Omnilit as our Apple gateway, and they take FOREVER to pipe their books to the iBookstore.  Did I mention they were quite slow (even taking Apple's six-week processing time into account)?  In case I didn't mention this, just be aware: we do eventually get our books into the Apple store, but our present method of delivery could be a bit swifter.  This is something we will deal with.  Back to the point, publishers bigger than we are (which is most of them, I think) have better tools for regulating dates that the various forms of their books go on sale, and can therefore set the date and time with precision.  Smaller presses don't have access to the same tools, which means things go on sale at various times.  In the future, taking this into account, we expect to have longer gaps between e and paper release dates.  As I said, though, our thoughts on how this should work are still evolving, because the market itself is still evolving.

The next big thing also pertains to evolution: the BookCyclone site finally has tag clouds!  This feature went live a couple of days ago.  It was one we wanted all along, but... you know.  Things happened.  The benefit of this is the granularity that tags bring.  The categories we've set up are relatively broad and should stay that way.  Tags will be appropriate for things like countries, gay/lesbian interest, specific religions (we've published some interesting books on Islam, for example), and so on.  (I'm generally against having a gay/lesbian category, treating it as a genre unto itself, because it's not -- it could be fiction, non-fiction, self-help, biography, etc.  For pretty much my entire career as an author, I've been opposed to lumping everything gay-related together and isolating it on the pink bookshelf in the most deserted corner of the store!)  Now that the tag cloud has been set up, obviously we have to go in and do some tagging.  We're also behind on adding new books (mainly because Jerome has been doing sales/royalty reports and updating our catalog, and I've been editing books and dealing with my day job), so we'll get to that in the near future as well.

Our developers have also fixed a bug in the way metadata displays: we needed the ability to display multiple authors (because, you know, sometimes people do collaborate on books), and there was something else I'm drawing a blank on in the moment.  The next fix will be the addition of Google Checkout.  Not everyone's keen on PayPal (or can even use it at all), so there needs to be at least one more option.  These two make it possible for most of the world to buy from our site, even though neither is in itself a conventional payment gateway.