Stormwolf.com

Actually, it’s a bit more than a week. Things started at Stellarcon last week. It was great fun and a great convention. I got to spend a lot of time with Aaron Allston and Timothy Zahn, which is always a pleasure. Not only do I love their writing, but both men are very sharp, and […]

As Publishers and Bookstore chains fight for their lives and even just their relevancy, there seems to be some frustration with the public’s apparent desire for lower prices on books—especially ebooks. Ebook readers have protested the raising of prices, occasionally and erroneously targeting authors as being “greedy,” when authors have no control over the prices […]

A recent article in the New York Times takes a swipe at explaining ebook pricing. The analysis breaks down poorly, in my opinion, by ignoring the elephant in the room. That elephant is this: publishers have yet to control their own overhead. If they were to reduce their overhead, by moving out of Manhattan and […]

As often happens when I have a lousy and stressful week, I usually decide that I need to do *something.* Never sure what it is, of course, but it certainly needs doing. And since on March 27 I will be doing a book signing at the Arizona Renaissance Festival along with Robert Vardeman, I thought […]

It has been one of those weeks. For reasons I cannot share publicly, I’ve been decidedly stressed. Nope, nothing to do with health or writing, save that part of the frustration is that I’ve not been able to get as much writing done as I wanted this week. Certain events and forces beyond my control […]

One of the major laments that comes up whenever the discussion about the transition from the traditional publishing model to the new digital publishing model commences, goes like this: “It’s all well and good for you to advocate going direct, but you’re an established author. Of course this will work for you! What about me? […]

I want to take one more stab at explaining how the publishing business works, primarily because an insight came to me this morning. In the past I’ve pointed out that because publishers had the means of creating product at a reasonable price (economy of scale in printing) and they had the distribution network (that allowed […]