AJLR speaks further
So, last night . . . er, this morning . . . I had FINALLY got to bed, late even for me, and I have this really terrible habit of lying there as I’m drifting off to sleep, running through the day just past and looking for, you know, holes. There always are holes. And every time I hit a hole, of course, I trip, and wake up again. Sigh. Here follows a yesterday’s hole. I almost got out of bed again to post it and then I thought Go to sleep, McKinley, it’ll be freaking dawn in about half an hour. So I did. But I meant to get this up about twelve hours ago. . . .
Btw, update on the survey results - 19 people have, in the last 48 hours, indicated their enthusiastic wish to come to a London signing or publicity event. I’ve written to the Transworld email address myself and if others of the potential Londonites could do the same…(perhaps mentioning the positive cloud of book-buying friends and relations slavering to come along too) ?
Nineteen people are not, obviously, going to make balance-sheet logic for a signing (although you’re already sixteen and a half more readers than I believed I had in Britain) but I would have thought that nineteen emails would at least be annoying, and nineteen emails promising enormous extended families and friendship networks of people with vast disposable incomes, a mysterious, unslakeable desire for literary blood, and the habit of popping in to London to see if there are any authors signing books in town that day. . .might rouse a flicker of interest.
I’ve written to Merrilee, to see if she has any advice about bringing off this unlikely achievement we’re aiming at.
Blog housekeeping
Item one: I mention this in the comments occasionally but the message is failing to percolate and furthermore people forget. Hey! Forgetting is my job! I don’t read or answer comments from the front end, at the bottoms of their entries, but in one long combined list at the back end of site admin. This is faster for me to deal with and I’m afraid it’s all about faster. I don’t have time to answer comments as it is, I just enjoy it.* But from there I can’t easily track back to previous comments on a thread; you’re supposed to be able to click through to ‘view all’ but it doesn’t work–and I don’t have time to hunt around. Therefore would you please copy and paste some hint what we’re talking about if you’re continuing a conversation? (Even if it’s a conversation with someone else . . . It’s a public blog, and I like to eavesdrop.)
Item two: please remember that I haven’t a clue about site running, maintenance, adjustment, blah. I can barely copy and paste entries, load photos** and answer comments. All such remarks and queries should go to Blogmom. Something like the counter clock it makes sense to ask me because I might not want one for some reason . . . but generally speaking please feel free to leave me out of the tech loop. I occasionally get emails from people who want to make helpful suggestions and I sit there staring at this stuff thinking ‘you have mistaken me for someone who runs her own blog. Permit me to disillusion you’.
Item three: It really bothers me that Anonymous is still putting in so regular an appearance in the comments. I’m aware that there’s some wrinkle in WordPress that means this happens more easily than it should, and again, people forget or are away from home or on a new computer.*** There are still far too many anonymice. This may be a bit deranged, but anonymous to me is anti-community, and this is, for better or sillier, a community.† Please feel free to create an alternative personality with a name borrowed from your favourite novel–as long as you read books and are nice to the rest of us you’re welcome here. While the Robin McKinley you see here is certainly familiar to anyone who knows me in three dimensions, I would be the first to declare she’s had a certain amount of spin put on her.†† And I don’t care if you belong officially or not: but if WordPress isn’t providing you with a name automagically please think of a unique identifying glob of symbols that suits/amuses you and sign it at the bottom.
Item four: And, speaking of the iniquities of WordPress, it eats comments occasionally. I’ve written maybe half a dozen that simply never appeared. Sometimes I get that confounded ‘slow down, you’re posting too fast’ message. Sometimes a comment . . . just doesn’t appear. What happens a good deal oftener is that something I’ve unscreened rescreens itself again. I do take a quick troll through and look for these, but inevitably I’m not catching all of them. If you’ve posted something, ahem, innocuous, and it’s never materialised . . . send it again. The only ones I delete are . . . um . . . rude. Or hilariously over-personal.††† But remember also that I usually only burn through here and do the unscreening once a day. If you posted just as I was checking out the night/morning before, you’ll have twenty-four hours till it emerges blinking into the computer ether.
PS: I was reading the summer issue of BRITISH HORSE over supper. There was a review of a book on riding that ended like this: Would I advise you to buy it? Yes and no. Yes, because . . . it would be a useful book for the newcomer to riding . . . and a worthwhile read for the student instructor. No because it’s an e-book–I do like a book I can pull off the shelf and refer to at a moment’s notice. Perhaps the author can be persuaded to publish the book in a more traditional form?
Hmmm.
And has anyone been to Baen’s Bar recently? Several of you–including Ithilien in her magisterial post on e-books–have mentioned it as an example of what on line bookishness can do, so I tried to go investigate. The opening page says they’ve moved the furniture and everyone has to re-login. I’m new anyway, so I created an account, dutifully responded to the official email . . . and it wouldn’t let me in. It denied the password I had been told I could choose, and reenter to confirm . . . and when I gave up and asked them to send it to me‡, it was one of those automated-gibberish collections of letters and numbers. . . and it wouldn’t accept that one either. Whereupon the noise level around here increased abruptly.
Right. I’m going back to a nice paper book right now.
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* Mostly. Occasionally, at 2 am . . .
** And this rarely does not involve screaming
*** I hadn’t realised that I hadn’t checked in here from my newest littlest cutest knapsackiest computer and I was using it at the mews while the usual mews laptop was at the Computer Spa having mudpacks and saunas, and I signed on and it wouldn’t let me in. Paaaaanic.
† I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll probably say it again. I was so not expecting this when I took this blog schtick on. Community? On line? With a bunch of people you’ve never met? Come on. I am not a character in funny font in a Douglas Coupland novel.
†† Sometimes I can hear fairy laughter echoing through the ether when I post.
††† Do you really think I’m going to list everyone I’ve been to bed with, ages, genders, and success levels? I was laughing for days after that one. –It might be worth noting that obtrusiveness about my private life will mostly make me laugh. Obtrusiveness about my books . . . it’s a rare reader who truly gets alongside the author of a book. This is the source of my answer to the question ‘What single thing would improve the quality of your life most?’ which is ‘That readers would learn the difference between ‘this book didn’t work for me’ and ‘this book sucks dead bears’. ’ This is in the Imaginary Interview on the old web site, and will no doubt reappear on the new one.
‡ I know I’m middle-aged, crumbly, and forgetful, but even I would find it challenging to forget the password I had only just chosen ten seconds ago
AJLR gets serious.
OK, campaign starts now…:)
Just so it is possible to get some idea re what size of audience there might be, could any of your readers who would attend a publicity or signing event in London, sometime in the next few months, please go here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xnULTPtfKkUiadr9hdr1Tg_3d_3d and fill in the (very brief) details asked for, please? The only required field is name/blog name, just so there’s less possibility of a mistake in potential numbers. :)
The survey will be open until - well, whenever you say. I’ve put it to close in a week’s time (17 August) at the moment but that can be changed to whatever you feel appropriate.
I/we might as well get hung as sheep than lambs. And as I just said in answer to some other comment, the action plan to persuade my UK publisher to arrange a bookstore signing or equivalent in London is an experiment in the practical application of a blog. Go for it.
Publicity
That’s the good news. Now here’s the bad news. Southdowner, I think it was,* suggested that I tour over here for it, since after all the UK is small, and I said it’s not that small and I have this little hellhound digestive issue that keeps me on a short leash, but that I could come up to London for half a day if she wanted to harass my publisher into setting it up. And she** wrote back and said to get her an address to direct her harassment at.
I wrote to my editor who said she’d look into it. And this is what I got back:
info@transworld-publishers.co.uk
Any request will automatically get forwarded to the publicity department.
This is not hopeful. What we wanted was a name and preferably a title, like Minor Marketing Gnome in Charge of Dubious Projects. So if all three and a half of you British readers out there want to make a dent, I’m afraid you’ll have to get organised as well as strident. One or two polite emails isn’t going to wake anybody up, let alone grab their attention. I have no idea how many emails and how many signatures you’d need–anybody out there know more about this than I do?–but, you know, more than several. And don’t worry, I’m more than happy not to come up to London to do a signing where the only two people who show up are the two people who wrote all those emails/letters on all those different computers/from different e-addresses. Well, no, if it’s southdowner it will be one person and a dog. ***
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* One of you unnervingly frisky types
** friskily
*** Or possibly eleven dogs.
Sunshine
I had a terrible time trying to take a photo without the flash reflecting blindingly off the shiny cover, so please don’t point out that it’s not in perfect focus or that it’s at a funny angle: it’s the best I could manage. (And the yellow in the upper lefthand corner is part of the illustration.) And it was supposed to go up yesterday when the book arrived, and I was at the mews for supper . . . and the camera battery died about three dazzle-glare attempts in. ARRRRRRGH. The battery charger being back at the cottage, of course, not to mention that it takes about three hours to recharge and I didn’t have three hours. But that does explain why I was blogging late last night, even for me: I had planned writing a nice little short entry, buttressed by a photograph. But noooooo.
Anyway. Here she is, in her reissued glory, although this is another sneaky advance copy, and she’s not available till September either. This is the UK edition; I assume the US will be identical, barring the odd tag line* and choice of quote.** I like it better than I thought I was going to. In fact it’s pretty cool, in spite of the babe. It’s also–which you can’t see from the photo–a nice trim size and a nice heft in the hand, and it has a good legible typeface. Big hurrah.
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* Can’t remember what the official publishing lingo is for it, but tag line will do. Publishing loves tag lines. I think they’re idiotic, myself, but some of them are more grotesque than others. This one is fairly inoffensive, as these things go, although it still makes me want to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you do know that the earth orbits around the sun and allowing for a little seasonal variation it gets dark every night? I was spared a really epicly inappropriate tag line once that I’d even seen in roughs of the jacket–I don’t always see everything: I didn’t see this one for SUNSHINE–and had kicked and screamed, and they just raised their voices and told me they knew best. And then at the last minute someone noticed that Disney had already used it and if they did too they’d get their butts sued off. They were all so demoralised by this that my book and I escaped with no tag line whatsoever. Hee hee hee hee hee hee.
** ‘SF horror romance’?? Okay, we’re going for inclusive here. What about ‘with baked goods’?