Greetings all:<\/p>\n
It’s Friday! That’s big news for most of you. For us it’s the day before we fly back to Billings, and two days before we retrieve Shannon and Jake from grandma’s house, go home, and fall on our noses. Book Tour for us–and most authors–is a love-hate sort of thing. Two weeks of hotels, rental cars, taxis, different cities, restaurants, and, oh yes, the airplane travel. Terrorists, irascible security personnel, technology, and the economy have pooled their resources to make the experience dreadful. We fly in economy just like real people–which, we’re pretty sure, is almost everybody else. These days we look forward to air travel with the same anticipation that we do a colonoscopy. Neither is fun, both are necessary evils, and the level of invasive indignity is about on par.<\/p>\n
But the airplanes are for tomorrow. Since our last post we’ve enjoyed good meetings with our Simon and Schuster publisher, editor, and publicist. We rehashed the tour and were informed that COMING OF THE STORM will be released in mass market (paperback) in September with the sequel to STORM coming in February. Book two is in, the working title is FIRES OF MABILA. We don’t know if S&S will stick to it. We’re still too early to know how the book is selling. Hopefully, if you’re reading this entry, you’re already a Black Shell fan and have enjoyed his adventures so far.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the good folks at Tor\/Forge are planning an April sell-in tour for PEOPLE OF THE LONGHOUSE which will have us driving around New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and New Hampshire, visiting independent bookstores and various Barnes & Noble and Borders stores to shake hands with staff and give presentations on the Iroquois and how they changed world civilization. LONGHOUSE will be released in July, so mark your calendars. <\/p>\n
The meetings were energetic and productive, which in the current world of publishing, comes as a relief. Everyone in the industry is trying to figure out what to do about ebooks. So are we. Talking to different people in publishing, estimates are that within the next ten years ebooks may make up around 15 to 20% of the book market. At the same time, no one believes that paper books are going away. Nationwide, however, the numbers of readers are decreasing, fewer copies are printed, and bookshelf space–actual book racks–at retail stores gets smaller and smaller to sell fewer and fewer copies with an ever diminished selection of titles and authors. <\/p>\n
What happens when people stop reading? Where does a nation or society go? How does it change? Movies and television are great, and have expanded and enriched our imaginative horizons. But what sort of society will we have if the number of people who read drops to a couple of percent of the whole? <\/p>\n
We solicit your thoughts.<\/p>\n
Best Regards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Greetings all: It’s Friday! That’s big news for most of you. For us it’s the day before we fly back to Billings, and two days before we retrieve Shannon and Jake from grandma’s house, go home, and fall on our noses. Book Tour for us–and most authors–is a love-hate sort of thing. Two weeks of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}