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[celestialtales]

Auron I've been writing posts off and on all year, but still haven't actually published any of those drafts.

[celestialtales]

The Game

The year was 1981. Portland Oregon was just beginning to come out of its infancy and move towards becoming the metropolitan epicenter of “weird” it’s come to be known as today. Despite the lack of oddity, something strange still happened in the cities popular arcades. A new game was introduced, carted in by men in startched black suits. This secret service vibe alone made all the young arcade…

[celestialtales]

Grandma

Sunday was St. Patrick’s Day. It also happened to be my Grandma’s birthday (her name is Patricia). She would’ve been 95 years old. Unfortunately, she passed away several years ago on September 23rd in 2013. This was just a little over a year before Dan and I got married. I still wish she could’ve made it to that wedding. I’ve been thinking about her a lot with the recent changes that have been…

[celestialtales]

Concert Memories

I remember when I was in middle school and high school, my parent’s and I had this ridiculous game. I don’t remember where it started or how, but if we were across a distance from one another, could see each other but not hear each other; we would close one eye, raise a hand with the index finger and thumb extended and make a pinching motion. We would pretend to squish the other person’s head…

[celestialtales]

Holiday Update

Hello everyone!

I apologize for my long hiatus. It was a busy holiday season for me and I plan to give you the details here and now. I like to try and update some of these ramblings with personal events so that I myself don’t forget them and can look back on them with nostalgia.

We were a little low on funds this year, so I decided to make gifts for my family and some of my friends. This started…

[celestialtales]

Otome

A strange name to some of you but not so unfamiliar to others. For those of you unaware of the term, it is a Japanese word without a direct translation (like many Japanese words). They are visual novel games targeted toward a female audience and have a goal of romantic relationship between the female main character and one of the male characters. They are heavily story driven with low graphics…

[celestialtales]

Thanksgiving

Okay, so I’ve been very lax in posting. I have an inordinate number of excuses I can give, but the truth is that I’ve just been busy. It’s not a good excuse, it is what it is. I’ve still been writing in my own way, just not publicly. I’ve kept up my practice in some manner, since I do love the craft.

So, today we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving. I go back to my parent’s house for the holidays…

[celestialtales]

Figaro

To the observant, you will realize this is the name of my cat. We got him in July of 2014 and he was either 2 or 3 at the time (his paperwork has conflicting information). 2014 was a good year for Dan and I. We brought Figaro home in July and got married in October. It was a fairly amazing year. But, this post is all about Figaro.

At the time, Dan had just come back from Tennessee visiting family…

[celestialtales]

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story. 

[celestialtales]

It should surprise no one who knows me that I am a great fan of anime.  My first real anime was Inuyasha. I remember staying up late one night while staying with my older sister when I was probably only 10 or 11 and I watched it with my brother-in-law. My parent’s didn’t have cable, so I could never really watch the entire series in any kind of order. But I would watch it every night I stayed at my sister’s house, staying up way past my bed time to do so.

I remember being so obsessed, I would spend hours on the internet watching the intro and ending movies, and it really did take hours to download them back on a 56k modem. I would watch AMV’s and read so much about what would happen and all the things I’d missed. Not to mention the pages and pages of fan fiction I read, since I didn’t have much access to the real thing. I read some very terrible fiction, and some fairly decent pieces as well. I could go on an entire side tangent about the fan fiction I used to read, but that’s probably best for another day.

I can’t tell you what I started watching after that. Of course, I watched Dragonball Z. Again, without cable I didn’t have easy access to it. But, my grandma would record the episodes for me so I could watch them later and that was how I managed to get through most of the Maijin Buu saga. It’s really crazy to think back on how desperate I was for anime when it wasn’t readily available. I lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have easy access to cable. What would I have done without the internet!

I remember Escaflowne being on Fox Kids and how that was absolutely amazing. I watched Pokemon and Digimon, too of course. I was more fond of Digimon when everyone else seemed so obsessed with Pokemon. That isn’t to say I wasn’t a fan. I remember my brother taking me to see the Pokemon Movie. They handed out a fancy “Ancient Mew” card and that was the coolest thing. I dressed up in my blue vest and baseball cap. I clipped Burger King Pokeballs to my jean belt loops. Looking back, it was probably my earliest attempt at cosplay, too.

I’m thinking about all of this because I recently rewatched Escaflowne, Funimation did an anniversary dub that was probably much better than the original. My husband and I are working our way through the seemingly endless saga that is Inuyasha (though I’m aware there are much longer anime out there, most of which I’ve started and given up on at some point). I even tried to watch Digimon now that I’m an adult and I have to say my sister was a saint for putting up with that one when I was a child.

Anime has brought me many of my closest friends through conventions. It gave me a place for my creativity to grow and it is a constantly changing and evolving media. It’s fascinating watching the shift in the industry as the way media is consumed changes. I’ve seen anime from the most ridiculous, upbeat silliness to the darkest, most haunting parts of the human psyche. Not all anime is made equal, and it’s more of an art form than it is a genre.

Credit: https://www.facebook.com/artbyUta/

Credit: https://www.facebook.com/artbyUta/

Anime It should surprise no one who knows me that I am a great fan of anime.  My first real anime was Inuyasha.