Today I read a bit of the new book to an unselected audience for the first time: a scene with as much interest and as few spoilers as I could find.\u00a0 This was at ArmadilloCon.<\/p>\n
The audience liked it, but you have to understand it was Sunday at a science fiction convention and everyone was looking a bit (some more than a bit) glazed.\u00a0 All except one soul who apparently thought this was a critique group and not the reading of something finished, and explained what she thought needed to be changed.\u00a0 (Hint: don’t do this.\u00a0 It’s like the old joke about trying to teach a pig to sing–you can’t, and it only annoys the pig.\u00a0 The book’s in production, as I told her with as much gentleness as I could muster.\u00a0 No changes at this point.\u00a0 But, ahem.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Due to the problems with my printer, which produced a hideous *pink* version of the Oath of Fealty<\/em>‘s gorgeous cover art at first try–then grayscale–and only finally the correct color–I did not have time to print out the UK Paks omnibus cover to take along.\u00a0 I figured there wouldn’t be many, if any, UK fans at a regional SF convention in central Texas.\u00a0 Um.\u00a0 Wrong.\u00a0 Sorry.\u00a0 But the gorgeous Oath of Fealty cover was universally admired and the [unmentionable more than once] wrong-colored one universally scorned, except for the few people who said, “It would make a really nice romance cover…”\u00a0 (writer runs away shrieking, fingers in ears.)<\/p>\n I may have mentioned that my editor (US editor this is) prodded very firmly for me to add to my list of “buy now” links this past week.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve had Barnes & Noble and Borders and Amazon links up, like, forever on the sites–which I pointed out–but I didn’t have the other two they wanted.<\/p>\n I have had word just today (because I’ve been gone since Friday morning) that Barnes & Noble has changed their corporate policy to keep individual stores from pre-ordering (or any special ordering) books that aren’t a) in their system and b) specifically ordered by a customer.\u00a0\u00a0 What this means is that if a customer wants a book ordered that B&N doesn’t consider to be “in the system”, the local store cannot order it.\u00a0\u00a0 And if a local store’s manager knows that a particular book would sell like hotcakes in that store–but it’s not in the national formulary (borrowing the term from medicine)–then she\/he can’t order it.\u00a0\u00a0 I think this is bad for book-buyers and they should probably say something to B&N about it (through the local store or direct to corporate headquarters.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Do I like to annoy large corporations?\u00a0 Only when they’ve annoyed me.)<\/p>\n The convention was fun, even more than usual, because of a little red crossbow and a supply of goldfish crackers.\u00a0 I’m afraid that somewhere on the ‘web,\u00a0 pictures may show up.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t take those pictures, but the fact is that if you go around with a little red crossbow and a cup full of goldfish crackers…it’s probably inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today I read a bit of the new book to an unselected audience for the first time: a scene with as much interest and as few spoilers as I could find.\u00a0 This was at ArmadilloCon. The audience liked it, but you have to understand it was Sunday at a science fiction convention and everyone was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,38,5],"tags":[40,107,16],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artwork","category-marketing","category-the-writing-life","tag-artwork","tag-the-writing-life","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":374,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}