Swan Tower

The one bright spot is, people are starting to notice.

In 2008, Amazon got into a pissing contest with Hachette, the smallest of the large publishers (and owners of Orbit, who published my first four novels). In 2010, it was Macmillan (owners of Tor, my current publisher). In 2012, Penguin. And now, in 2014, we’ve wrapped back around to Hachette. Books published by subsidaries of Hachette are currently shipping “in 2 to 5 weeks” — including Warrior, Witch, Midnight Never Come, and In Ashes Lie. Is it because there’s a problem with Hachette? Are they not supplying stock to Amazon in a timely fashion?

Nope. It’s because Amazon is trying, once again, to use its market share to strong-arm publishers into accepting unfavorable terms. Unfavorable for the publishers, unfavorable for writers — and ultimately, unfavorable for readers.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior. It’s something people have been warning about for years, but the response has usually been that Amazon is your friend. They sell things cheaply and ship really fast (just don’t think about how they treat their employees), and hey, 70% royalties on ebooks! Except that Amazon is demonstrably willing to tank the customer experience if it will help them gain more power in the marketplace. And the more they control, the less friendly they become. They are the abusive boyfriend who systematically isolates you from everybody in your life and then, once you have nowhere else to turn, shows his true colors.

If we had better anti-trust legislation in this country, Amazon would have been stopped long before this. But we don’t, and they haven’t been.

Back when they pulled the buy buttons off Macmillan books as a “negotiating tool,” I removed the Amazon links from my website. (Mostly. Scanning the pages, I see I left the Book Depository there; I don’t know if they hadn’t yet been bought by Amazon at the time.) I’m going to go through and scrub the remainder, with two exceptions: Audible (also owned by Amazon, but they are the publisher of my audio editions) and Kindle Direct Publishing (for the BVC-published ebooks). Notice a pattern there? I’m leaving up the links where Amazon has enough power over me that I can’t just walk away from them. I don’t like it, but I don’t feel I can choose differently. More than half of my ebook sales come via Amazon, and there is no way to buy the audiobooks that doesn’t put money in their pocket.

But they don’t control everything, at least not yet. You can get my books from Barnes and Noble — ebook and print alike. They aren’t perfect, but they’re Amazon’s main competitor. Or you can buy from Powell’s. Or from IndieBound. Or Books-a-Million. Or Indigo, if you’re Canadian. You can also get my ebooks from Book View Cafe or Kobo (and by the way, if you’re the sort of person who’s motivated by Amazon’s “author-friendly” habit of paying a 70% royalty, note that Kobo pays the same, while BVC pays me a 95% royalty instead). Maybe it won’t be as convenient as Amazon; you won’t get free two-day shipping. But that convenience is the bait: they use it to shift more and more business into their hands, and then they use what they hold to change the market to benefit them.

It isn’t illegal. But it also isn’t something I care to support. There are alternatives, and I encourage you to use them.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I've posted four more stories of mine up at AnthologyBuilder. The new additions include "Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood," which (just between you and me) is one of my personal favorites.

It does occur to me (now that I'm starting to get my brain back -- I'll be home this evening, yay!) that street dates are normally Tuesdays, but hey, Amazon swears blind that mine is today, and they're never wrong, right?

Since I'm not a big enough name for bookstores to put me on the special "don't shelve this too early or we'll get sued" list, it doesn't matter much one way or another. Happy Street Date for In Ashes Lie! Unless you're in the UK, in which case I believe you have to wait just a couple of weeks longer.

Comments and questions on the book are welcome here (and you don't need an LJ account to post). If you haven't read the book yet -- which most of you, I expect, have not -- just come back later; I'll link to this from my site so you can find it again.

(Previous discussion threads for Midnight Never Come and Deeds of Men are still open, too.)

Today's report will again be more limited, as it was mostly spent in a museum, and my notes are filled with riveting narrative material such as "Britannia standard, 1697, ^ prop of pure silver" and "no hard-paste until late 1760s."

( I pity the future literary researcher who has to read that scrawl. )

Final thoughts? Coming here on the back end of a month of travel was not my brightest idea ever. I don't think I regret the choice -- there were good reasons for making it, and I stand by them -- but I've noticed a distinct difference in my ability to keep running all day long, and a fair bit of homesickness. (I want a real bed, dammit, and different shirts, and a kniedzw.) I can make it through New York, but then I will be very glad to go home.

Having said that -- man, I love coming here year after year, and I love the fact that for the first time, I have a fair certainty (barring something going very wrong) that I'll be back next year. My view of the city changes every time, expanding and growing deeper. This year, the big differences were the addition of Westminster, and a new eye for architecture: I never bothered to pay much attention to it before, since 99.95% of the city around me post-dated my period, but the abundance of Georgian buildings means that for the first time, I actually looked at them. There are so many bizarre juxtapositions of old and new I never truly considered before, like the chunk of office building squatting on top of the brick of the Steelyard, flanked by its towers on either side.

I'm going to have to think about what I do next year. The Victorian period is so huge and complex, I may need more than a week . . . but if so, I'm going to have to rethink the pace at which I do this work, and the logistics of how I structure it all. I can't do this kind of trip for two weeks; I'll fall apart.

No falling apart yet, though. Airport tomorrow, and New York, and then home. I'll see you all again when I'm not paying by the minute for my internet access.

Last night Irrith handed me the question I need to ask about her. She didn't hand me the answer, mind you, but that's okay. I'll pry that out of her soon enough.

On less of a cheerful note, last night featured a different set of idiot roommates, in this case ones who apparently don't grasp the concept that the last one to bed should turn off the lights. I woke up at 4 a.m. to find them all still blazing away, and me in the top bunk (of three), unwilling to risk my sleepy neck just to turn them off. So less than perfect sleep, and it's a chilly grey morning when I get up. I'm happy to enjoy the comforts of the cabin this time as I head downriver again.


( This route is getting familiar. )

We'll see how the sleep thing goes, given that I attempted to buy a can of Cherry Coke from the hostel vending machine and got a bottle of Dr. Pepper instead. I should have known better than to reach for caffeine anyway. But whether I sleep or not, tomorrow morning is the Monument basement, and then a jaunt out of London . . . .

Last night's bedtime wasn't quite as early as I intended, owing to the sudden brainstorm I had while getting ready for bed, regarding how I could fix some of the problems with Part One of the comet book. I should have known better than to think I was going to accomplish anything on that front before 10 p.m. . . .

But it was a good night's sleep nonetheless, and thus fortified, I follow the plan and head out to Westminster.

( Where I do encounter certain difficulties. )

One of the places I'm visiting tomorrow is nearby; the other is most easily reachable via boat. The tough part will be convincing myself not to attempt to fill the odd gaps of time that lie between those plans, because I need to stay off my feet as much as possible. The Orbit folk were commenting on the breakneck pace of my research, but it's not just because of my limited time in London; it's because I don't know what to do with myself here other than research. The kind of procrastination I do at home just doesn't work.

Three days down, four to go. I can make it, right?

I don't know if Mercury's in retrograde or I spat in the Cheerios of the travel faeries or what, but every step of this trip so far has been plagued with problems: delayed flights, car rental difficulties, wrong turns, and so on. The only saving grace is that so far, none of them have reached the level of "detained for two hours by Israeli airport security." <knocks on wood> But the unanticipated closure of Blackfriars station, coupled with my ill-considered decision to come in late on a Sunday night, left me stranded only partway to my hostel, with a rather expensive cab ride my only option for getting the rest of the way there.

Oh, and as of writing these notes, I have no money. Figuring out what's wrong with my ATM card has been added to today's schedule.

( But I soldier on. )

Fortunately for my feet, that's pretty much it for the day. Not that it was a lazy day or anything, mind you. This trip, however, is much less firmly scheduled than the previous ones (mostly because people keep not answering my e-mails). So a lot of what I do over the next few days will be more catch-as-catch-can. That's okay, I think, even though I'm frustrated by my difficulties contacting places. I'll adapt.

If I find myself with time to fill, I could always go learn the streets north of the Tower.

The plan is to give away one signed set of both Midnight Never Come and (in advance of publication) In Ashes Lie each week between now and the book release, and the first winner has been drawn. If you've already signed up, you're still in the running; if you haven't, head on over to the page for Deeds of Men and provide your e-mail address, and you too could get an early copy.

Since I posted the excerpt late, and since the schedule would have had me posting this one on a weekend, I decided to wait until today. But now you can head on over to Flickr and see my photos from my research trip last year.

The Ashes pics are fewer in number than the Midnight ones because I inadvertently left my camera cable at home when I went to London; this mean I couldn't download my photos to my laptop, which meant I was limited to the capacity of my (rather small) SD card. I kept having to delete my poorer or less important shots to make room for new ones. But you can see several of the locations that will be appearing in the novel, or at least whatever's currently standing on their sites now, plus other things representative of the period.

They are also pegged onto a map, if you want to know where those things are.

It seems that Midnight Never Come has been longlisted for the British Fantasy Award.

Mind you, it is a long list. I'm keeping company with no less than forty-two other novels. But it means at least one member of the British Fantasy Society and/or FantasyCon decided to recommend it, which is kind of neat.