Publishing Industry News

Whoo-hoo, we're back on schedule! Another 3-week post broken into two shorter posts (because I have to sleep sometime!). Today we'll cover publishing news from 2/15-3/7.

Publishing News

Since Apple appealed the court-ordered monitor and tried quite a few tactics to remove him, Judge Cote ruled that Apple should to go a magistrate to referee any future disputes. Apple said they'd only provide the monitor with documents that fit within their understanding of the ruling, but Cote then ordered them to give the monitor anything requested; and anything they want to be withheld must be filed with paperwork. In a turn of events that falls somewhere between "absolutely expected" and "duh," Apple asks the U.S. appeals court to overturn Judge Cote's ruling on the DoJ vs Apple lawsuit, under the claim that Judge Cote based her decision on primarily circumstantial evidence and ruled poorly.And just to be on the safe side, also because Apple thinks Judge Cote didn't even have jurisdiction, and also they consider her to be bringing her biases into her decisions and therefore she should not be allowed to decide the damages. (Gotta give it to Apple's lawyers--they're certainly giving Apple their money's worth!)

Lately there's been a lot in the news about how much authors make. Several studies have been going around. Hugh Howey releases an earnings report for the 7000 best-selling e-books. Digital Book World shares (and by "shares" I mean "offers for sale for $295") the results of a survey from self-published authors with various levels of earnings, and Dana Weinburg analyzes it in terms of the authors' attitudes towards publishing vs income. Note that both surveys have their limitations.

Hugh Howey's advocating for more transparency in actual sales earnings of self-published authors, including for Amazon and other retailers to disclose actual sales, on the grounds that withholding the information is preventing writers from making a good judgement when choosing whether to self or traditionally publish. (Retailers currently do not disclose self-published authors' earnings, and most contracts include confidentiality clauses forbidding self-published authors from disclosing their actual sales except by specific permission.)

Vook, a digital publishing and distribution platform, releases a program allowing authors to track digital sales across all platforms. It's called Author Control and is free for your first 10 books.

Amazon's Audible is lowering the royalty rate on its self-published audio books. Exclusive distribution now nets authors an across-the-board 40%, as compared to the previous 50-90%; non-exclusive sales are now 25%. Getting a new reader to sign up does now earn authors $50, double the previous $25.

According to the latest VIDA account, reviews of books by female authors are still lagging far behind those for male-authored books.

Interested in living on a train while writing your next book? Amtrak's offering writer's residencies.

Victoria Strauss on Writer Beware updates us: The Bookseller will no longer be accepting advertising from vanity publisher Author Solutions, Inc. Now Strauss is asking readers and writers to ask other major publishing industry organizations to do the same. Jane Dowary Agency, run by Jane Dowary, doesn't have experience but does have a lot of name-changing. The authors of 2 Moons Press, stuck in a legal limbo while their publishing house went into bankruptcy, are trying to gain the funds to sue for their rights back. And there are some concerns over Simon451's contest, in terms of how many rights it gives over.


What publishing news have you encountered in the past two weeks?

The Feline Feed

Sonnet: *wandering in* I'm not toothless. I still have two teeth, thank-you-very-much. And my claws are perfectly functional, so watch your tone.

Bard: I can't. It's noise. My vision isn't acute enough to see the vibrations in air caused by normal feline speech.

Sonnet: Normal feline speech? The fact that we can talk isn't precisely normal.

Bard: I thought the super-spy training was supposed to stay secret. Don't talk about it!

Sonnet: Our handlers didn't say we shouldn't blog. 

Bard: Your handlers were llamas. They couldn't talk.

Sonnet: Well, it's not my fault the experiments on them failed. Or that they then went rogue and decided to try experimenting on cats without human supervision.

Bard: Great, just let everything out, why don't you? You never know who's listening.

Sonnet: The only thing in the room is the computer. Both the humans are gone for the day. And the dog won't share; he's not going to risk losing your portion of the canned cat food.

Bard: Like you've never hacked a webcam before, yourself. For all we know, the human's getting suspicious and left it running.

Sonnet: Seriously? She's clueless. She didn't even notice the bugs we planted, or the death ray I'm constructing from hairballs.

Bard: I said, shush!

*Pounce*

*Small feet charge up and down the stairs*

The Five Best Teas for Reading Fantasy

You probably know by now that I drink tea and read (and write) fantasy.

So obviously, it's time to combine them! What teas would I recommend for a evening with a fantasy book?

Since there are different kinds of fantasy, I've pulled out 3 well-loved subgenres. Here are my recommendations for teas to pair with each.

Swords and Sorcery Fantasy:

Magic, adventure, elves and monsters, in a world with little to no modern technology--you'll want the spice of adventure and twist of sweetness of exploring a new and fantastical world, something with a touch of caffeine to get your heart racing and your mind ready for anything. But you'll also want something mellow and down-to-Earth when you're ready to return to reality, such as nice black tea. That's why I'd say an orange spice black tea, such as Constant Comment or another similar tea, would be perfect for this read.


Urban Fantasy:

Urban fantasy is known for it's noir or dark fantasy feel. Whether it's a detective investigating the most elegant members of the seediest sides of town, or a vampire just trying to be human when his enclave is trying to take over the world, it's usually the darker parts of town where the characters edge out an existence. You'll want something dark and rich and smokey, and for that you'll find lapsang souchong, a Chinese smoked black tea, perfect with its mellow but smoky flavor.


Contemporary Fantasy:

Today's world is a quick-paced, action-filled place, and a reader will want something chic and modern. But contemporary fantasy is lighter than traditional urban fantasy, and so a hint of something sweet and pleasant is welcome. Therefore a jasmine green tea is the way to: green tea, fashionable for the on-the-go, business-minded modern person with an eye for health; and jasmine, for the sweet fragrance and reminder that not everything is cut-throat in the world.

Science Fantasy:

Think Star Wars--science fiction blended with fantasy. For this genre, the tone is adventure, speculation, what-if.

It's Earl Grey, all the way, the traditional tea of all things science fiction. Picard would proud. But more to the point, a rousing cup of Earl Grey is the perfect way to start an adventure, bracing you for anything that might come your way. With the logic of science and the endless possibility of fantasy, you'll need a hearty cup under your belt!


Paranormal Romance:

 Romance, magic, and usually the modern world: sweet with love and spicy with the touch of magic. This calls for a vanilla chai, with a healthy does of cream and sugar. The exotic spice of the chai will make magic in an ordinary world plausible, plus pair well with a zesty courtship; and the sweetness of vanilla will fill your heart like the story's inevitable happily-ever-after.


What kinds of teas would you recommend for different kinds of reading?

Over at Suzanne Johnson's blog Prenatura today!

I'm over on Prenatura today!

Many Worlds, Many Magics:

If you’re a fan of fantasy, you know magic works by different rules in almost every world. Fantasy’s the genre I grew up in, as a young geek girl, and one of my own favorite things, be it in a novel, movie, or video game, was discovering how the magic of that universe worked.

Today on Prenatura I’m going to explain the unique magic systems of four classic worlds, and give you a sneak peek at the magic in my own book, Into the Tides.

Come check it out!

(Remember, next Publishing Industry News will be next Friday, March 7, to help me get back on schedule. See you then!)

Dream Vacations: What would you choose?

Even better than drinking it
at my home: drinking tea at
the tea's home!

Over the weekend my friends and I talked about dream vacations. We decided we'd love to do a group tea tour, trying teas in Japan, China, India, and Morocco. In our dream vacation, we'd stay 3-4 days in each country and go from place to place to try the most excellent of teas, in their home locations.

Green tea, oolong tea, white tea, chai, herbals... an array of the tastiest of tasty.

If you and your friends were to come up with a dream vacation, what would you choose? Where would you go and what would you see or do?

Creating a Fantasy Language: Choosing words

You may remember the posts I've done on creating your own fantasy language a while back. Recently someone asked me an interesting question that I thought I'd share with you.

(Creating a fantasy language: (Lesson 1, Rationale, Lesson 2, Lesson 3, Lesson 4, Choosing words, Creating an Alphabet)

How do I choose my words?

For this language, it uses a basic English alphabet, so I chose random short letter combinations as word roots. Some I just nab parts off words I see around me; others I pull out of nowhere. I rarely run out of ideas since there's so many basic combinations, but being random can be harder if you like working with a system. It's fun, though, because if you end up with two similar words you can start making puns in your language, and sometimes I do things with it like say the words are considered associated in the culture (so if "hoskon" also meant "colorful," I might say having lots of furniture is considered a sign of being a cheerful person).

It was actually easier in a language I made with a character alphabet that had 56 characters, each either a single letter or a pair of letters (similar to Japanese hiragana). The first 50 characters I each assigned to be a word on their own, and I chose a set of fundamental concepts that I thought would be most important to an evolving society --“ti”=life; “so”=I/self; “fa”=water; “ku”=eat; “da”=first; “sho”=after; etc. Then, whenever I needed a new word, I chose which of those 50 concepts it was most related to and combined the characters. So, “sotifa” would be “blood” and so on. The last 6 concepts I used for conjugating verbs, making plurals, making adjectives, etc.

Another method, if you want to sound similar to a certain language without being that language, is to find a word in the target language that means the same and changing it to sound similar to the words you already have (if you have a language without o’s, for example, and you want to create something vaguely close to german, the word for week might be “vak” instead of “Woche”; and you don’t want it to be too close, so “bahn” for train might be “bina”).

If you don't have a language you want to sound like, and you're not interested in creating a system of characters, you can still use a system to create thematic words. Choose what sounds your language uses and make a chart lining them up along the top. With this method, I write 4-5 "words" for each starting letter, using different verbs for each. These words are associated with basic concepts.

In general, short words will be your basic concepts. So choose 2-4 letters from your sound system to form a large set of basic concepts (I'd go with at least 40-50, including numbers, some basic time/space prepositions, concepts of self, affirmations and negations, and survival-related words like eating, water, fire, home, love, etc). I usually try to make opposing concepts (fire and water, for example) to sound as diametrically opposite each other as possible (sosa and bitu might be a good pair, with different consonants that have very different sounds, and different vowels), but you might prefer to make them similar or inverses.

Then, as with root words, you can use these concepts to combine into new words, or form words that sound similar to existing concepts.


Choosing the basic concepts for my societies is one of the most influential pieces in coming up with the culture. After all, what we say reflects how we think. So it tells me what that society considers most important.

How do you choose words for your languages?

Random links for the fun of it

I'm trying to get back on schedule, so the next publishing news will be not next week but the week after.

In the meantime, it's Friday. Let's celebrate with some just-for-fun links this time!

Speaking of cute stuff.

Emergency Cute Stuff: Tumblr of cute animals when you really need them.

Herding Cats and Burning Soup: Cat Thursday for, well, cats; and the rest of the time for romance book reviews and recipes.

Random pretty landscape
(by Matthew Hunt)

Dogs' brains respond to voices like humans: Because you always suspected your dog know how you were feeling from what you were saying.

World of Leathercraft Etsy shop: For all your Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and other geek-themed leather gear.

ThinkGeek: Where I buy a good half of my Christmas and birthday gifts. Yes, including gifts for other people...

Steampunk Tendencies G+ page: I follow them. They put pictures of pretty steampunk stuff in my feed. Fair deal.

It's a seal pup in the sand.
You looked like you needed a seal pup
 to brighten your day.

If Star Wars existed in a 1980s high school: Pictures of what it would be like.

Girl Genius: But I'm sure you already read this webcomic. (If you somehow missed it, it starts slow but is one of my all-time favorite webcomics.)

Order of the Stick: Another webcomic you're probably already reading. If not, it will make you laugh. Makes fun of D&D and roleplaying while diving full-tilt into them.

I've always thought clouded leopards
were pretty.
(by Kellinahandbasket)

GoodReads "What's Your Love Story" infographic: To help you choose which classic romance your life may resemble.

Top Ten Sci-Fi movie earners infographic: Adjusting for inflation for true fairness, the top ten sci-fi movie earners of all times.

Earnest Hemmingway's Burger Recipe: If you're going to eat a burger, eat it like Hemmingway.