Free eBook: Casting the Runes

Casting the Runes by M.R. James

A gift from us this week before Halloween, the story that Olivia Laing recently called, “Scariest story ever, so horrifying that to this day I can’t keep it in my house”[.]

It’s a PDF file available at that post.

— via Twitter from Hello Kitty terrorist KatMeyer (who now also owns a Triffid, so you better Follow her — at a distance)

Book Tours 1.0: Endangered Species

Writer Tess Gerritsen:

How book tours have changed over the years

But even as my sales were growing, the tours themselves were getting less bang for the effort.

The media was harder to get. Even if I had some cool new nonfiction hook (corpses who wake up in morgues in VANISH. Or the how-to of shrinking human heads in THE KEEPSAKE) the TV and radio spots weren’t there as they used to be. I’m not the only novelist who faces this dwindling of interest; it seems to be a problem for all of us. The publisher pays to fly you into a new town, puts you up in a hotel, all to speak at a bookstore where you end up selling maybe thirty hardcovers. Without any TV or radio or print coverage, does that make economic sense?

Emphasis added by me.

No. It doesn’t.

That’s why I see Blog Book Tours as one wave of the future.

Another wave is Mini Book Expo for Bloggers.

The third wave is How Our Future Does Things.

And the fourth: eBook Signings: The Postcard Solution?

As the reading world moves towards eBooks, a shift in the culture will happen too.

eBooks = Internet. Thus the Internet should become the primary pipeline and meeting place for eBook readers.

With no physical copies to sell — except maybe some POD done for the leftovers and retrogrades — an author having to be physically present somewhere becomes pointless.

And economically nonsensical.

One More Sony Reader Sold

Via Twitter from top_book came a link to The Book is Dead site, where I also saw this goodie of a post:

Click = big

This is a big one. Sony better pay attention!

It’s Still October

Poster from the American Memory project.

October is also the favorite month of writer M. Dylan Raskin.

So whether you have print or e — break them out and read!

Modified poster from the American Memory project.