Getting your books pirated can be the best thing to ever happen to you in a particular market. Like what happened to Neil Gaiman:

In 2007, Terry Pratchett (and if you haven’t heard of Terry, you really have no business calling yourself a fantasy reader) was diagnosed with PCA, a form of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 59 years old at the time, making it an early onset dementia.

Choosing to battle it, he made a public announcement a few months later, and agreed to have a BBC camera crew follow him every day for a year to show how living with Alzheimer’s could be.

Here’s the first part of the documentary:

Great article from Tim Grahl of Booklaunch.com on how we view piracy, especially ebook piracy, in the wrong way.

It’s summed up nicely in this quote by Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media:

“The problem with writers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

Read the entire thing here: Ebook Piracy = Sell More Books by Tim Grahl

TLDR: In the bleak future of humanity, there is only eat, and perhaps, being eaten alive in this combat-heavy but well-written Warhammer 40k novel.

Triskellian is a tech priest, a machine-worshiping half-cyborg. He’s also the runt of the litter of tech-priesthood, with everyone from the Grand Fabricator to your junior acolyte looking down on his fascination with bio-engineering. And his only friends are a comic duo of misshapen tech-Igors.

Davien is a spy, the vanguard of a proletariat revolution that never comes. She’s also the last guardian of a sick brother, and a more-or-less fanatic follower of a cult of murderous, bio-engineered aliens. And if that isn’t bleak enough, the pair of them live on an Adeptus Mechanicus forge world, a hollowed out shell of poisoned planet where everything is either a smoking factory, an open pit mine, or a tenement crawling with filthy, starving, diseased humanity.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Warhammer 40k, which puts the “grim” in “grimdark”. (more…)

In 1934 a man named Powys Mathers published a novel. A crime novel.

Nothing strange with that. Except that it’s not a novel as such. It’s a novel-puzzle. The pages, all 100-some of them, are printed out of order. It’s up to the reader to figure out the order, and solve the puzzle.

Fiendishly clever. And you need to be fiendishly clever to solve it – only a handful of people have…

Link: Cain’s Jawbone: how crime novel’s puzzling plot still keeps us guessing

Yes, that’s Brandon Sanderson. Check out this interview with him on CBS:

TLDR: a psychopathic, psychotic spy/killer/extreme artist/harbinger of Armageddon wants to save/kill/fuck/all of the above humanity. Strange, cold, bloody, and strangely sympathetic.

Warning: Triggers galore!

I have no idea how to classify Border Crosser. By rights, it should be horrible, a 2020’s psychological equivalent of the 1970’s blaxploitation movies. A psycsploitation. Or weirdsploitation.

Even so, it works because… I have no idea why, but it does. (more…)

TLDR: The ultimate war memoir, very real, very historical, very visceral. If you’re disturbed by the image of throwing yourself down into maggot-infested corpses to save yourself from enemy artillery, this is not for you.

Eugene B Sledge, fresh recruit with the 5th Marines. That’s the 1st Marine Divisions, 5th Marine Regiment, 3rd Battalion. He’s the Sledgehammer, not because his big, or strong, or dangerous, but because his name is Sledge and they are gung-ho marines. Ergo, Sledgehammer.

Sledghammer’s first-person memoir is one of the best depictions of infantry warfare in WWII. That’s not my opinion, that’s the consensus of the war-journalist, WWII historian crowd. In my opinion, With the Old Breed is the best war memoir ever, period. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read (the other one being Educated by Tara Westover). It’s one of the most engrossing. Once I picked it up, I couldn’t stop reading. (more…)

TLDR: Magic outcast girl goes to military Flight School to save humanity and also the universe. It’s great!

On a desert planet that is totally not Arrakis, lives Spensa Nighshade, feisty orphan with super-human skills.

And a temper.

Spensa’s temper often gets her into trouble, in big part due to the fact that in her hyper-militarized society (think Starship Troopers on steroids, under constant threat of alien attack), starship pilots and their families are worshiped. As the daughter of a pilot, Spensa should have it all, especially access to the flight academy.

Only problem: everyone thinks her father was a coward, abandoning his flight mates at the worst possible moment.

Everyone except Spensa, that is… (more…)

I’m guessing that most of you have already seen this, but if not, Brandon Sanderson has a new, 4-book Kickstarter out.

It’s broken all manner of records, in fact, it might become the most funded Kickstarter ever, and is already the most funded one in publishing (all publishing, not just books,) only being beaten out by the Pebble Watch for most funded KS ever.

What does this mean? Well, for us as readers, it means that we’ll be seeing more established writers Kickstarting their books.

Brandon’s last KS, for the limited edition of Way of Kings, brought in $6 700 000. The Four Secret Novels has already tripled that – and proven that WoK wasn’t a fluke.

It’s likely scaring traditional publishers like crazy.

Why?

Because it proves that a single writer, with a small, dedicated staff, can bring in a lot of money. No need for massive publishing houses. No need for the one advantage which the big publishers have held, the trade channels (i.e. the ability to get books into bookstores.)

Yes, Brandon is a superstar. Yes, he’s got a huge, dedicated fanbase.

But he’s not unique. And more, his lowest tier is ebook only, and it’s gotten over 12 000 buyers, which is on par with the audiobook, and the premium hardcover.

That’s a punch in the gut for traditional publishing and their attempts to bury ebooks. It’s also a punch in the gut for their ebook pricing models – a superstar writer charging $10 per book.

Now, this is only the first 24 hours, and we haven’t seen the reactions of the publishing world and the reading world, but I imagine that for writers, this is a huge boost, and even more so for indie writers.

Luck and Persistence!