Inverarity is not a Scottish village

The ebook and the print-ready PDF of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment has been updated, now fully illustrated with chapter illustrations by Sam Gabriel. You can download them from the link in the sidebar.

I greatly appreciate any proofreading efforts. Anyone who finds a typo or even the smallest error in the layout or typesetting can request by email the full-size cover image and/or print-ready PDF that goes with the book:



I will soon be ordering my own print copies. I only print a very small number, for a select few folks. However, you can use these files to print your own from a POD service. (Previously I printed using Lulu and Barnes & Noble, but the only POD service that seems able to handle a paperback book over 700 pages long is IngramSpark.)

Epub and print-ready PDF versions of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment are now available in the downloads folder.

These are not final drafts. There are no chapter illustrations yet, and they haven't been thoroughly proofread. That's where you come in! Please let me know if you find any formatting errors or typos.



When the chapter illustrations are complete, I will upload the illustrated versions, and I will be printing copies of AQATDR as I have for the first two books.

The download link in the sidebar is once more active. However, I have removed all my old ebooks, both epubs and PDFs. I am in the process of remastering them, and will be uploading the new versions one by one.

Today, I'm very pleased to make updated versions of Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle available. You can now download AQATTC as either an epub or a print-ready PDF, both featuring chapter illustrations by Sam Gabriel, who besides being an artist is also a professional voice actor who produced the Alexandra Quick audiobooks.



I have learned a lot about creating ebooks over the past few years, and I'm rather proud of these. Frankly, I think they are professional grade. I've definitely bought ebooks that looked like crap compared to mine.

That said, it is possible that errors may exist. Also, no two ereaders display epubs in exactly the same way. For example, some will ignore embedded fonts; others will not display images. I've tested this epub on multiple readers and it's displayed well on every one I've tried, but if you run into a problem or discover an error either in the epub or the PDF, please do let me know.

I'm working on the Alexandra Quick and the Lands Below ebooks next.

Free ebooks on bookish!

Click on the Download my stories! link and you will find that AQATSA ebooks have now been added to my fan fiction folder. The PDF includes all the chapter illustrations I posted here on my LJ. The epub does not include the illustrations, so is a smaller file and formats better for ereaders.

Please do let me know if you find any formatting/display problems or other technical glitches.

Also, bonus peek at the AQATSA cover at the bottom!

( Why DRM sucks and what you can do about it. )

AQATSA Non-Update

Due to completely unrelated issues, I am feeling low-spirited and non-productive and so have not increased my word count in two whole days, which is not good. Sigh.

But! The artist doing the cover for Alexandra Quick and the Stars Above has finished the initial work on the full-color version.

( AQATSA cover and notes )

Most of you are probably aware that there are ever-more 99-cent self-published ebooks being put up on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, and other ebook retailers, since the barriers to entry are practically non-existent. Every wannabe author in the world who can't get past the underpaid interns at publishing houses who are forced to wade through the horrific badness that is the Slush Pile can just "skip the middleman" and publish to the Internet directly. Encouraged by a few outliers like Amanda Hocking, these mostly harmless but deluded souls think they, too, can call themselves "published authors" because their book is for sale on Amazon. (Never mind that the ratio of crap-to-gold is about the same as on fanfiction.net and most of these authors will never sell more than a few dozen copies.)

( Who needs editing, or spellcheckers, or even a firm grasp of English and a plot? )

I read more books in 2010 than I have in years. Two things are responsible for the dramatic increase in my reading:

1. An ereader. This thing seriously increased the number of books I bought and read. The technology is just starting to edge out of the "early adopter" stage, but formats are still in flux and most of the big publishers are still wedded to stupid DRM schemes (I am told this is often demanded by their legal departments, not so much because the publishers themselves like DRM), so reading ebooks isn't quite as hassle-free as it could be (and will be), especially if, like me, you refuse to go Kindle. But I've bought tons of ebooks this year, downloaded many more free ones from Project Gutenberg or Google Books, and being able to carry several hundred books in my pocket means I will never be stuck without something to read.

2. Audiobooks. Ever since I subscribed to Audible.com, I've been going through audiobooks at an average of about one a week, on top of my regular reading. An iPod full of audiobooks means any spare moment where my hands are busy but my brain isn't (walking, cooking, doing chores, exercising, driving) can be turned into extra reading time.

I also made a concerted effort to change my reading habits, trying to get back to the days when I was younger and read voraciously, multiple books per week.

So, how did I do in 2010? Not counting technical and academic books, I read 72 books and over 16,000 pages. (Audiobooks aren't counted in the page counts.) Also excluded from this: short stories, novellas, way too many blogs, crappy self-published ebooks, and fan fiction.

( Inverarity's 2010 book list )

My goal for 2011 is to hit the 100 books mark. Which is looking doubtful already, because several of the books in my TBR queue are real doorstoppers.

But of course I cannot end this list without yet another plug for my books1001 challenge. We, the community, are going to collectively attempt to read and review 1001 books in 2011. Part of the challenge is that you will be assigned a book randomly, and it will very likely be something you would not have chosen on your own. I don't even know yet myself which book I will be assigned -- I will be running my random book script tomorrow (January 1). Please come and sign up! The only requirement is that you read one book in 2011, though of course more is encouraged! At this moment, we have 61 signups -- I think we'll need some more help to get through 1001 books... (And of course you can sign up at any time: January 1 is not a deadline, just the day we'll start.)

It's kind of funny that Strategic Publishing has to send people to defend them on my l'il LiveJournal with less than a hundred readers. I'm not likely to start a meme that takes off across the internet.

Cory Doctorow says all complex ecosystems have parasites. The growing ease of epublishing, combined with the ongoing difficulties of the traditional publishing industry, are certainly creating an increase in the number of parasites in that ecosystem.

One of those parasites is James Frey (yes, the same James Frey who wrote a fabricated "memoir" and got spanked by Oprah). Now he's started a publishing company called Full Fathom Five which is basically a YA novel assembly line. Despite the fact that professional authors are weighing in to point out that Frey's contract is rapacious and predatory, evidently he's had no trouble reeling in desperate suckers with freshly-minted MFAs in creative writing and dreams of Hollywood lucre.

You come up with a pitch Frey likes, you write the book, you get paid... wait for it.... $250. Yes, that's three measly digits before the decimal point. And a 30%-40% share in any revenues generated by it, which means in theory you get 40% of the take if your $250 idea becomes the next Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Hunger Games. Which is, you know, kind of unlikely, because if you can do that, what the fuck do you need James Frey for? Oh, right, his name and industry connections will give you an edge in putting your work in front of editors and producers. Unfortunately, what it won't do is put your name in front of them, since one of the terms of the contract is that you don't control the use of your name and can't even admit your involvement in the project.

Not only is this exploiting authors, it's an insulting and cynical exploitation of the YA market. Frey is as much as saying "These dumb kids will read assembly line product if it's packaged nicely enough."

(Okay, actually, he's right. But every genre is full of extruded product -- YA just happens to be the most profitable right now so the crap ratio is even higher.)

With this in mind, I was not happy to go to Borders.com and find this.

Basically, it's Borders putting their name on a Smashwords-type venture, except BookBrewer charges more than Smashwords, takes a larger cut, and is less up-front about how publishing works. You pay $80 for them to turn whatever you fling online into an auto-formatted ebook which they then put on Borders, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, etc. But those big names might lead you to believe that you're actually being published by Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc., and that your books will appear alongside those of real authors.

It's kind of interesting watching these ecosystems develop. Just like when the web started to really take off (circa late 90s), the parasites are swarming and finding their niches. I'll really be kind of interested to see what publishing looks like in ten or twenty years.