My first novel, PENNTERRA, published in hardcover in 1987 by Congdon & Weed, has gone through more editions than any of my eleven books, including my three other novels. There was the 1988 mass-market paperback from Worldwide, and the second mass-market paperback from Ballentine/Del Rey in 1993. There were also foreign sales, to England and Italy. And now there's this new trade paperback edition from Fantastic Books. Check out editorial and customer reviews, if you care to, at http://www.amazon.com/PENNTERRA-Judith-Moffett/dp/1604597291

I blogged here in April and May about Warren Lapine's venture into reprinting backlist titles in POD trade editions. Without seeing how the final product was going to turn out, I was reluctant to sign over reprint rights to THE RAGGED WORLD and TIME, LIKE AN EVER-ROLLING STREAM--Volumes I and II of what I'm now calling the Holy Ground Trilogy. (Volume III, THE BIRD SHAMAN, came out a year ago.) I thought of PENNTERRA as a trial balloon; if I liked the looks and quality of that one, I meant to let Fantastic Books reissue RAGGED and TIME as well.

I promised to report back when I had a finished copy in hand, and now I've got one--ten of them, actually--and I'll say right away that I'm more than pleased. The book is unapologetically POD; there are no blank pages and the cover illustration is a doctored photo. That conceded, it's an attractive book. The photo fits the story pretty well and has nice bright colors (see userpic, bearing in mind that it looks less dark at full size), the paper is cream-colored and of a reasonable weight, the font is appealing, and the print, though small, is no smaller than many a commercially printed book. While this edition is not as comfortable to read as the 1987 hardcover edition, which had margins, spacing, paper, and a font size that strike me at this remove as verging upon decadent, it's less heavy; and it fits the hand much more agreeably than the mass market editions do and isn't nearly as taxing to keep open!

Best of all, this edition is the most accurate that's ever been published. Marty Halpern, who acquired and copy-edited the book, is far and away the best copy editor who has ever worked on any manuscript of mine. No backward-facing apostrophe or incorrect em-dash escapes his eagle eye. This was not a particularly easy book to copy-edit; for one thing the electronic version had to be created by scanning, and for another Part Two is full of charts and diagrams that the scanner made mincemeat of. We had a PDF file to work with, not a Word document, so the corrections had to be, not made, but DESCRIBED in such a way that Warren would know how to enter them himself. (That approach won't be tried again!) It was a lot of work for both of us, but especially for Marty, as I've explained before. But we caught, not only the inevitable mistakes from the scanning process, but a surprising number of errors that had crept into the first edition, copy-edited by someone much less eagle-eyed than Marty, whose work had then been corrected by a very inexperienced me.

So that's the report. You can still get a copy of one of the other editions--from Amazon, or David Hartwell's dealer's table, or me--but I'm happy to recommend this one.

Two and a half weeks ago I got an email from Warren Lapine with a PDF of the scanned Pennterra attached (please refer to my blog entries of April 9 and 23 if this isn't ringing a bell). Marty Halpern, who acquired the novel for Fantastic Books, and whose job it is to copyedit the file, also got the PDF and immediately made a printout he could mark up. I live in Darkest East Central Kentucky, a rural area innocent of copy shops, so I drove to Frankfort and paid $15 to make my own copy. Four eyes are better than two.

The print is pretty small, and the scan is pretty flawed in the usual ways of scanned documents: reversed single and double quote marks, m scanned as rn and a forward slash as 1, hyphens in the middle of words that had been broken at the ends of lines in the original hardcover, paragraphs run together, missing line feeds, italics rendered as Roman and vice versa, and so on. My aliens' names came out in a variety of funny ways. There are several poems in the book, all scrambled entertainingly. The file comes to 283 pages, very few of which were clean and many of which had several copyedits scribbled in the margins. Marty is a professional copyeditor and caught a lot more of the glitches than I did, but I feel the time I put in was justified, since I found maybe a dozen errors he had missed. I also took the opportunity to correct some mistakes that got by us in the earlier editions, and to change the word Amerindian--a PC term of the early and mid-80s, when the book was written--to Native American. ( Read more... )

I am a fully credentialed Trekker from all the way back: Old Trek in syndication, Next Gen, DS9, Voyager, everything but Enterprise, which I thought started strong but lost momentum and then got tedious. Unlike many, I really loved DS9. I once pitched two Next Gen stories to Ron Moore over the phone, and was told that were the series not in its final season he would have passed one of them the line--the most painful near-miss of my life in SF! I've seen all the movies, and agree with those who think the even-numbered ones outclass the odd-numbered ones by a mile (favorites: The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home). There's no way a Trek movie could be made and I wouldn't drive 45 miles to see it if necessary (which it was).

So I did that last Friday, and I came away feeling disturbed. I'll put the cut here, so if you haven't seen it yet you needn't have your first impressions interfered with by mine. ( Read more... )

The vet clinic is closed on Saturday afternoons and the vet on call is sick in bed himself (sinus infection), but I had to haul him out anyway. My nine-year-old standard poodle, Fleece, was attacked by a coyote this afternoon. She was bleeding impressively from two deep punctures where the coyote's jaws had closed on her left hind leg, and I didn't know how to evaluate that kind of injury well enough to wait till Monday.

I live on a hundred acres of recovering farmland in Anderson County, Kentucky. The place is teeming with wildlife, including coyotes. I'm happy to have them here. They're the only large predators around, and the ecosystem needs them. The farmers shoot them as vermin, but I'm not a farmer. I do, however, have two dogs (see userpic), and I've been aware since we moved here that the dogs could not be allowed to run loose without supervision because of the coyote presence. Even a fairly large domestic dog is no match for one of these big eastern coyotes; they're the size of German shepherds and grimly serious hunters, especially this time of year, when there are pups to be fed. Pets get taken all the time.

I'm still happy to have them here, but we've all had a scare. What happened was this. The dogs and I walk every day to the end of a ridge path about three-fifths of a mile long, that I keep mowed with my trusty DR Field and Brush Mower, one pass up and one pass back. ( Read more... )

A couple of postings back, I wrote that when Mill City Press was no long fulfilling orders for me, I was going to supply Amazon with copies of The Bird Shaman through their Amazon Advantage program. This is the program my friend the jazz violinist belongs to, and it's worked out fine for him. But after running the numbers, I discovered that it wasn't going to work out fine for me, owing to the steep cost of manufacturing each copy of the book ($7.80) and the 55% discount Amazon takes off the cover price, which is $21.95. Add in Amazon's commission and I'm losing a couple of bucks per sale through the Advantage program.

Okay, been there, done that. I was losing money on sales through Mill City too before they restickered the books, which put me into positive territory, just barely. Not understanding how all this worked, and hence not cramming more type onto each page, to reduce the number of pages and consequently the cost to make each book, is the single biggest mistake I made in the entire error-fraught self-publishing process; but what's done is done.

Long story short, I've gone instead with Amazon Marketplace. I've become one of those people offering new or used copies of books that you can link to on every book page on the site. By setting the price at $15 (lower than some, higher than others), and fulfilling orders myself (Amazon gives you a credit for doing that, which lets you break even on S&H or just about), I make on the order of $2 per sale. It ain't much, but you gotta admit it's better than losing $2 per sale.

My gimmick, if you want to call it that, is to identify myself as the author and offer inscriptions. You can check it out at http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Shaman-Holy-Ground-Trilogy/dp/0980245540/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217259849&sr=1-3

I have between now and July to decide whether to spend another forty bucks and buy the page Mill City owns at present, so everything still looks like it looks now, except that The Bird Shaman will never be In Stock.

If you're interested in the progress of Warren Lapine's Fantastic Books reprint line--out-of-print titles reissued in POD editions, as described in more detail in my LJ entry of April 9--I refer you to his own LJ posting from yesterday http://warrenlapine.livejournal.com/21043.html. This list will give you an idea of who else has committed to taking the plunge, and I know there are quite a few more in the pipeline.

My 1987 novel Pennterra is supposed to be released pretty soon. I promise to report on the quality of the product, how the cover turned out, and anything else I think people might like to know, as soon as I get my mitts on a copy.

Up to now, Mill City Press has been fulfilling orders for The Bird Shaman as they come in, charging me for the service, the freight, and also a "1st item picked" fee, whatever that is. But pretty soon my fulfillment agreement with the press will expire, so I'll have to find other ways of making copies available to people.

Amazon should be easy enough. A friend of mine plays in a band that has recorded a couple of CD's; he sends them directly to Amazon, and Amazon sells them and pays him. (Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Peach-Pie-Band/dp/B000KG5HX4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid My friend, a jazz violinist, is the one with the beard.) He can tell me how to set that up.

But I also want people to be able to buy copies from me directly. To that end Marty Halpern, who manages my website, suggested putting a PayPal button on the site. Marty also figured out how to add a menu box where the buyer can specify whether s/he wants the book inscribed. While we were at it, we made me an Amazon Associate and switched out Mill City's Amazon button to one supplied by Amazon to its associate members, complete with a little customizable graphic of the cover. You probably know this, but being an associate means you get paid a little bit when somebody buys the book through the website link.

The buttons just went live today and I think they look very cool--indeed, all but irresistible: http://www.judithmoffett.com

Waiting now for the orders to come pouring in . . .

Today, April 15, is the 21st anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis. My 1986 novelette "Surviving" is about a girl raised by chimps; my 1988 novella "Tiny Tango" (written in August 1987) is about a woman's struggle to survive AIDS; yet both strike me now--and have for a long time--as fearfully prescient. Especially "Tiny Tango," which I began while nearly crippled with sourceless-seeming anxiety, a few months before finding the lump under my left arm.

After the diagnosis came the usual: mastectomy and six brutal months of chemo. I was Stage II Breast CA; the tumor had been concealed by a mass of fibrocystic tissue and was both impalpable and invisible to mammography until it had grown and begun to spread. By the time it was detected, six axillary lymph nodes were involved, and the prognosis was, to put it mildly, not good. ( Read more... )

You've probably read about Warren Lapine's return to publishing (if not, check it out at http://sfscope.com/2009/01/warren-lapine-returns-to-sf-wi.html). One of his projects (he's got several) is . . .
well, I'll let Marty Halpern, who is (inter alia) a freelance acquisitions editor for Lapine's new genre imprint, Fantastic Books, tell about it. This is from Marty's blog, More Red Ink http://martyhalpern.blogspot.com/2009/02/warren-lapine-and-fantastic-books.html:

. . . So what does this mean for you, the author? I am currently acquiring out-of-print backlist titles -- sf, fantasy, horror, slipstream, etc. If you have an oop book that you would like to make available to today's readers, so that they don't have to search the used bookstores for a copy (the purchase of which doesn't make you, the author, any money), then please do contact me. My email addy is marty dot halpern at gmail dot com.

While I think the world of Marty, I was initially skeptical about what he's proposing here. The reprints will all be POD, and I know all too well (some of) what that means, after spending a year self-publishing The Bird Shaman. On the other hand, Lapine isn't asking authors to pay a cent, which certainly makes a refreshing change. He's even scanning titles that aren't already in electronic form, cleaning up the scans, and providing the author with a copy of the file. The royalty is 10% of cover price. Unless you think somebody is about to beat down your door with a better offer, this is a way of getting your OP titles back in print, and as such it might well be worth considering.

I decided to test the waters by allowing Marty to acquire my 1987 novel Pennterra for Fantastic Books. Pennterra is my "Quaker novel" and the only one of my novels set offworld. It's been out of print for a long time, though copies are available from online bookstores and sometimes even in physical used book ones, I'm told (thank you, mmaresca!), and also from my attic if anybody wants to know.

This is by way of being a trial balloon, but if I like the result, and in the highly probable event that no better offer turns up, I expect to let Marty acquire my trilogy too. And I'm sure he would love to acquire yours, and to provide more info if you want more.

No doubt we would all prefer new hardcover edition from commercial presses, but so far I've been happy enough with what I've seen. I'll let you know how it turns out.

I really couldn't afford to go this year, but I wanted to do this one last thing to help The Bird Shaman into the world. And besides, I really, really like ICFA. I would say it's my favorite con, except that it's not a con-vention but rather an academic con-ference. College professors with Ph D's come to Orlando from around the western world, and maybe two dozen writers turn up as well. The profs, who teach fantastic literature in college classrooms, and publish scholarly articles and books on these subjects, do papers and panels at ICFA. The writers give readings, attend the odd scholarly event, mingle with the academics, go out to lunch and dinner with each other, do very little work and have a great time. If you're not familiar with ICFA, you can get an idea of what goes on there from the 2009 program, still up on the IAFA website at http://www.iafa.org.

I like this conference so much because I'm at home on both sides of the divide that unites the attendees, and respect and admire both groups on their own terms. After finishing my doctorate at Penn, I taught for years at the Universities of Iowa and Pennsylvania, courses in American literature and creative writing workshops in poetry. Then I introduced a course called The American Novel of Science Fiction, and you know what happened: after a while I started thinking "I bet I could do that!" and it turned out that I could. For me, being at ICFA feels like those parties I used to go to when I lived in Sweden, where you chat in English with one group of friends, then turn to another and switch languages as naturally as if they were so many hats. I enjoyed being at home in two cultures then, and I enjoy it still. I spend six months in rural Kentucky every year and the other six in sophisticated Swarthmore PA, so you could truthfully say that my basic living situation now is a version of that metaphorical party, except that I will never, ever find Lawrenceburg Kay Wye and Swarthmore in the same big room, talking animatedly with one another. I would be so tickled if they could.