For your viewing pleasure I’ve brought along my top choices for the Ravenheart. There were many spectacular works of art and design, several of which I thoroughly enjoyed and would have caused me to pause and pick them up were I to see them in the store. These five do something better: they catch my eye and hold my attention here online. They make me look up the book information, the artist’s portfolio, and reviews by folks I rely upon. Here, in no particular order, are my favorite four:

and here is the cover with the art that most closely matches its title:

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Only thing saving me from being neck deep into this

is that I don’t own a PlayStation. I haven’t played a video game of any sort in over 3 years, but this! This takes the cake. I walked into a Blockbuster Saturday night and they had this demo of God of War III playing…next thing I know I was picking my jaw (and tongue) up off the floor and I’d watched the demo cycle through three times. Sweetness! Now to figure out how to get RBE’s titles to generate that same intense rush of desire and entertainment!

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Congrats Nathan!

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From Book to Bestseller:

What it Takes to Crack the List (and why you might not want to)

In the past 15 months, we’ve had 10 books on the bestseller list. When I say “bestseller” I mean major lists: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, et al. Still, even after numerous books and a variety of lists, the “list” itself still confounded me, so I decided to do a little research to find out what it really takes to hit a list.

First off, the term “hit a list” can mean hitting a bestseller list at any point of entry. This can even be the bottom 100. Many books that hit a list are never viewed by consumers, they land there, stay for a week, maybe longer or shorter and then vanish. The numbers and metric for this can be tricky and in fact, not entirely accurate. If you’ve ever tried to hit a list and found yourself disgusted with the odds, I hope this article sheds some light on the ins and outs of how the process works. I do recommend though that you do some research on your own, there are some excellent blog posts out there that look at the finite pieces of these lists and how they are constructed.

Let’s look at the facts. Bestseller lists vary by season, market, and genre. We’ll start with seasons.

Surprisingly enough, how many copies you need to sell of your book will often depend on when you release it. Pre-Christmas releases, for example, require bigger numbers than a release that happens in May. Why is this? Well, the holiday should speak for itself and the same is true for key Fall months like September. The hotter the month (not in temperature but in publishing releases) the harder it is to get onto a list.

The next piece of this is reporting. It might surprise you to learn that not all reporting is accurate. Never mind the fact that reporting can be slow; you could hit 20,000 sales of your book in October but not see this reporting until November, for example, but they can also be inaccurate – and there’s a whole market share that’s never reported on. Technical, scholarly, law-related books can make up over 2/3 of the book market and are never reported on. Christian titles are also not reported on. You might say, “Well, what about The Shack?” This Christian title hit a list because it was sold en masse in retail outlets and not sequestered to Christian retailers that don’t get the benefit of reporting to the lists.

Finally, let’s look at list structure. Each list pulls book data differently, meaning that the New York Times does not pull trade book data whereas the USA Today list does. USA Today also pulls these titles onto a single list whereas the New York Times divides these lists up by genre.

A friend of mine who spent years in publishing once told me that publishing is all about perception, and this is very true. What she meant by this is that print runs (publishers refer to these as “advance print runs”) as well as any and all advance buzz a book is getting will also help it land on a list. Generally a book that is just “born” into the publishing world with no buzz, advanced reviews, etc. won’t capture the attention of a big list. The author might hit it well locally, but generally not nationally unless (like in the case of The Shack) there is some online viral buzz that builds. There is also the consideration of sales surge. This surge often happens during a very short period of time and doesn’t always have to equate to huge numbers, it’s the velocity of the push that matters. An associate of mine in publishing once told me that a book she was working with only sold 4,000 copies before it landed on a major list. The smallness of the number is staggering when you think about it. Keep in mind that this book hit a list during a slow period, too, so that also worked in its favor.

Also, lists aren’t always based on sales. The New York Times, for instance, is known for a non-sale list, meaning that they circulate to 37 reporting (book) stores to find out whether a book is doing well. If it’s being talked about by the stores, it will often make the list.

When you do the research, you realize that there is no way *anyone* can “rig” a list and promise you bestseller status. Well, there is one way: by buying up a lot of copies of a book within a short period of time. There have been companies promising bestseller status that do this, but once their warehouses are uncovered the companies often fold. Also, these books at some point will flood the system yet again, usually as used copies on Amazon, which will compete for sales attention with their newly printed counterparts. Any way you slice it, buying up your own books with the hope of getting on a list should be the last thing on your marketing agenda.

Marketing your book with an eye on the bestseller list is great, but much like waiting for Oprah to call, it’s not a preferred way to gain or keep your marketing stride. Instead, focus on things you can actually control that will benefit you, perhaps regional promotion or an aggressive Internet campaign. Or how about reading groups both online and off? Slanting your campaign to hit a list isn’t a great idea, in fact it’s often the worst thing you can do. Yes, there are books that publishers know will hit a list right out of the gate. These titles are generally celeb or news driven, but for the most part 99.9% of all bestseller status is unpredictable. Gather your marketing chips and put them on a bet that is more likely to pay off. I know authors we’ve worked with who get the word from their publisher that their book just hit a list and they’ll often call me elated and excited. Now that’s a wonderful surprise.

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I agree with Brian Azzarello when he says that he ‘never bought into the idea that Batman would be in the Justice League of America.’ Even before Wolverine – today’s iconic rough-and-tumble loner – ever posed and growled his way onto a team, The Dark Knight wasn’t mixing well with others. Pull Batman and Bruce Wayne out of the JLA and away from ever interacting with Clark Kent, and what would we be left with?

Azzarello is the lead man on DC Comics’ First Wave, “a combination of two sturdy adventure concepts: classic pulp icons … and hardboiled superheroes…” Sounds right up a pulp, S&S guy’s alley. Dark alley

A few other informative articles regarding:

• http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=23294
• http://docsavagetales.blogspot.com/2009/07/dc-first-wave-pulp-comics.html
• http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/tag/first-wave/

Enjoy!

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I’m brand new to Ben Thompson’s Badass of the Week site – and I love it! With  a fine mixture of fact and fiction heroes, this is a must-read site of awesomeness! I’m off to order his book BADASS: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters and Military Commanders to Ever Live right now!

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I have but two quibbles: The first could have been addressed by more thorough editing. Story and author suffer huge disservice by the numerous typos that unfortunately knock a reader out of sorts. If experienced often enough, a reader can be soured to the entire tale; at the very least discombobulated. Competition for consumer entertainment time is fierce already; no author can afford to defeat him/herself in such a manner.

There was also a wee let-down at the conclusion. After delighting in the rollicking and roaring action from the start, the story seemed to settle into more of an ‘Ooh-ahh’ bystander’s view of the fireworks and explosions come tale’s end. After decidedly NOT playing nice throughout events, the protagonist’s decision to do so at the close was also somewhat surprising.

All in all, The Inheritance is a fine read, and I am delighted to add it to my library. Would I recommend The Inheritance by Christopher Stires to my friends? Yes I would.

You can also find this review on the SFReader.com.

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Zoran Živković finds the meaning of life seven times in this collection of ’speculation fiction.’ Too bad it was not seven multiplied by six times. Billed in the marketing material as a ‘story suite,’ Seven Touches of Music is a seven-story examination of the fantastic via the interventions, images, and impacts of music. It is a book of expectations and hopes, about being blind to what arrives when it is not what we expect. It is about being fixated upon a single, specific result, and unsatisfied with the results that truly transpire. It is a book that aspires to creating literary fantasy.

“The Whisperer” is a very well-written, very engrossing, opening story. It was easy to live the events detailed across its pages – and easy to become incensed and disgusted by the defeatism and disbelief of the doctor at its conclusion.

“The Fire” built upon my frustration by delivering a librarian dissatisfied with her incomplete, disconsolate life, who remains unfinished, incapable of more, by story’s end. It left me with a very disturbing image of incompleteness, of a wasted life.

“The Cat” continued to play my emotions by being a very sweet and touching read. The extremely powerful prose of the first half of the tale read so smoothly and irresistibly, I felt as if I were read it, eyes closed, similar to a Garrison Keillor radio story only delivered in person. A lovely experience.

“The Waiting Room” is a series of vignettes, snippets in the lives of others seen through the eyes of another. While simultaneously damning our narrator, music and visions freed her. Not as touching as the previous tales, yet somehow offering something deeper.

“The Puzzle” read like a breeze, a swift, short, fresh breath, despite its length. It was an exploration of purpose and contentment…and the lack of faith.

“The Violinist”…Oh, so much painfulness here, so much unnecessary futility. So much ‘what-could-be-if-only’ – and all of it, all of it!, sundered, stolen away.

“The Violin-Maker” is the longest, most thorough tale – yet it left the most unanswered. I thought it led a certain way, only to be led another: nowhere and incomplete, leaving me cheated and disappointed.

(An unusual characteristic common to all the tales and one I am not sure I understand, is the forced formality of Mr./Mrs. preceding the first name of most all the characters. Nor am I clever enough to distinguish what, outside age possibly, precisely sets apart the very few who are not so painstakingly codified.)

Seven Touches of Music is a book about music and the hopes it creates, the futilities it delivers. It tells a melancholy tale. It is, perhaps, a glimpse into the reasons Beethoven slammed his head upon the piano and his fingers upon the keys. Filled with so much that is senseless, even pointless, it is a book of sadness which, often not, is the ingredient that makes literary possible. A thought voiced on page 96 offers possible explanation for it all: This at least gave a semblance of meaning to everything. And one could not live without some meaning, however illusory.

Yet this too is untrue. As a book of individual hope and short-sightedness coupled with universal ignorance and futility, it is ultimately depressing. It offers no escapism, no illusion; nothing but a slap in the face and a forced facing of reality rather than idealism, viewed via a fixated blindness rather than boundless vision. As an attempt at ‘literary fantasy’ it fails miserably, for there is little of the speculatively fantastical beyond its trappings. An often breathtakingly admirable attempt it most certainly is, but each story removes itself further and further from the realm of fiction until the whole is nothing more than a series of incomplete speculations upon the nature of music and what it triggers in the human psyche. Such speculations are more clinical analysis than exploratory contemplation; more fact-finding than fun-filled. Inspired it may be, but it is more about the fiction than the fantasy of speculation. Why is it that what is literary is so often so bleak? Would I recommend Seven Touches of Music by Zoran Živković to my friends? No, I cannot recommend it for the enjoyment of my friends. At least, not my kind of friends. On a scale of 1-10, I shall grade it a 9.5 in terms of the quality of writing and storytelling, a 2.5 in terms of the speculative.

You can also find this review on the SFReader.com.

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Superstars they are. Market master Kevin J. Anderson and his CEO wife Rebecca Moesta are joined by phenom Brandon Sanderson, popular Eric Flint, and the respected David Farland. It does sound like an amazing seminar, though it is the accolades listed upon the right-hand side of the website that impress me most.

I sat beneath the tutelage of Anderson and Moesta during a two hour session on the business of being a professional writer at Dragon*Con ‘09. It was a powerful session delivered by determined professionals. I can imagine what three days of that atmosphere could do for a writer’s mindset and career. I’d be highly interested in hearing from anyone who’s attended one of these, or other like sessions by any of the listed superstars. Shoot, who am I kidding? I’d be extremely agreeable to hearing from anyone who’d like to sign me up and send me off to it. I think I can make room in my schedule.

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