News from a less productive weekend than usual

I’ve had a busy weekend, with the Readercon 21 Debriefing committee meeting yesterday afternoon and and Full Moon ritual followed by some quality time with Dad today.

Good publishing news: book sales are continuing to increase on a daily basis. The first thing I do every day when I sit down at the computer is go around and check book sales for the past 24 hours. Exciting news: as of today, all of BLUM’s print editions are listed with Borders.com. That means that they’re now listed with Baker & Taylor, which means Baker & Taylor accepted all the metadata and cover images I uploaded last weekend. I’ve got to order a couple of short runs from Lightning Source because you just know the first order I’ll get from Baker & Taylor is for one of the editions I’ve nearly sold out.

I tried out the ePub conversion in Adobe InDesign CS5. CS4 was supposed to export to ePub but I never could get it to work. I tried out CS5 a couple of days ago, and then had to find, download and install an add-on for Firefox to read the resulting file. But it looks great! Now I can create my own ePub editions–I’ll need to tweak the InDesign files a little to make them come out just right, and add the proper copyright and edition information–and this is timely because Google just asked for ePub files for Google Editions “by August.” (Why are these requests always so last-minute? That was like Smashwords giving us about three days’ notice to update our titles for Apple.)

Less exciting publishing news, or more accurately, non-news: Kobobooks.com still only lists our first three titles. Borders.com has not picked up even those titles from Kobo for its ebook store, and I am now applying to Kobo to supply them with ePub editions directly, since there seems to be an irreparable kink in the Smashwords supply line. Alas, Sony won’t let me do that and they’re still listing just two of our titles. Sony is quite simply an unsolvable problem. If they won’t take BLUM’s books, they won’t, I’m helpless to do a thing about it. I updated prices for the Kindle editions and I’m waiting for those to change over, I’m waiting for replies from several people, including Locus magazine, and all I hear is crickets chirping, still waiting to see if Blood Justice gets pre-pub reviews…*sigh* Publishing is not a career for the impatient.

BUT…Christina Martine has been doing guest blogs and two giveaways to promote her YA novel, Cat the Vamp. David Burton promoted Blood Justice at Comic-Con in San Diego and reported back to me that all the flyers and post cards I sent him to put on the freebie racks were gone within hours. I’ve never had that many flyers and cards taken from the freebie racks at conventions, not even at World Fantasy and Worldcon, so I obviously erred way on the side of caution. At Comic-Con, they want their freebies! Next year, we’ll send a lot more! Meanwhile, Erwin Strauss (aka “Filthy Pierre”) has taken all the leftover BLUM flyers from the Readercon racks down to this year’s NASFiC, ReConStruction, which is a very generous thing for him to do! Thanks, Erwin!

Dad and I went to see Inception this afternoon. I really hadn’t heard much about this movie at all before I started seeing all the raves about it on my various flists. I didn’t even see a trailer. Normally, I’d wait for the DVD, but Dad likes to go to the movies, and he’s the only person I’ll break my no-more-cinemas rule for (and not even for Dad will I set foot in the Gardner cinema, ever again). Dad is a huge Fringe fan and I thought maybe he’d like Inception. Then Dad told me that he’d been talking to my sister and brother-in-law about it, and they had mixed feelings about the movie but he wanted to see it. Well…he loved it. Totally blown-away loved it, can’t wait for the DVD! And I thought it was pretty damn good, myself, I really enjoyed it. That’s not to say I don’t have some minor criticisms, but I thought it was very well done and the cast was terrific. (Did they really resist working that Edgar Allen Poe quotation in there, or did I just miss it?)

Dad’s been complaining bitterly about missing Fringe–he hasn’t seen Season Two yet and he’s got the DVD on pre-order. It’s not coming out until September 14, and I’ve offered many times to run it for him on iTunes, since I have the whole second season in my iTunes library. But I can’t convince him to come down here to watch it! I feel all snubbed. 🙁

I’ve been officially added as a programming participant at Albacon in October, don’t have a clue yet what I’ll actually be doing! But Albacon news should be ramping up soon because I helped their prog chair unsnarl a sticky database problem, and she is now set to go with that. Sometimes it’s good to be geek! 🙂 Anyone who’s attending, or interested in attending, Albacon, give me a shout-out! Broad Universe will be doing a Rapid Fire Reading and I’ll be coordinating and MCing that.

And last but not least: now that it’s been voted on and is official, I can announce that I am the new Con Chair for Readercon 22. My first job is scheduling the first committee meeting, and I need to find a venue for those which allows distant committee members to join via conference call. I’m juggling various possibilities right now and hopefully solutions will settle in the next day or two.

It’s a beautiful night and the Full Moon. Think I’ll take a walk!