Tara Maya's Tales

The explanation I had always heard for the term "Black Friday" that this was the time of the year that retailers were finally "in the black" (making a profit) rather than "in the red" (still paying off their investments and overhead). Let's just think about that for a moment. From January to November, that's eleven months spent in the red. Even if your fiscal year starts in March or June (as some do), that's still quite a few months in the red. I don't know if this is accurate or not. But it does make me feel a little better about still being "in the red" myself vis-a-vis my book. My fiscal year, so to speak, only started at the end of October. If you'd like a good Thanksgiving read, or something to enjoy while waiting in line with your kindle on Black Friday, you can click on my anthology Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction or one of the other great books on the side of my page. I'm still trying to reach my ...

Orson Scott Card. What can I say? The name is pretty much the sell here, isn't it? So the trailer is smooth and professional, and though it has motion, mostly stays out of the way of just letting you know the author of Ender's Game has a new book out.

I've been reading Dean Wesley Smith's blog about publishing, and the Velocity of Sales vs The Long Tail. Traditionally, your book was sold as though it were a banana : Now, understand, in a grocery store, produce is put out to be sold quickly and then is replaced before it spoils. Over the last twenty plus years publishers and bookstores put out books and then yanked them quickly as if a book would spoil in a week or two. They treated books exactly the same as produce. And guess what, just as with produce in a grocery story, if a book didn’t sell, it was tossed away, destroyed. This practice has become so bad that often a book will be deemed out of print within a month of the release date because it didn’t have the orders the sales force was expecting. Or it didn’t have the number of projected sales in the first week or so. Of course, it won’t officially go out of print until all the warehouse stock is gone, but it will have a do-not-reprint order on the book from almost week o...

Hey, you can get the ebook Writing For Dummies for free on Amazon.

Does NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) encourage a glut of crappy books that would be better off unwritten? Laura Miller wrote a now infamous article at Salon: Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it's likely to produce more novels I'd want to read. (That said, it has generated one hit, and a big one: "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, who apparently took the part about revision to heart.) The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced. Here's why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it's largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. "Write Your Novel Here" was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was...

Amazon sells the Nook -- one of the lead rivals for their own Kindle. For $223. New from Barnes & Noble, the Nook is $149. What is going on here? Is it a sneaky way for Amazon to suggest to casual searchers that the Nook is a lot more expensive than the Kindle? Or is it just because it's from a third party vendor? But why does a third party vendor thing they can sell the Nook for so much? Weird.

Hardcover Fiction Sales, 2009 1. The Lost Symbol: A Novel. Dan Brown. Doubleday (5,543,643). 2. *The Associate: A Novel. John Grisham. Doubleday. 3. The Help. Kathryn Stockett. Putnam/Amy Einhorn (1,104,617). 4. I, Alex Cross. James Patterson. Little, Brown (1,040,976). 5. The Last Song. Nicholas Sparks. Grand Central (1,032,829). 6. *Ford County. John Grisham. Doubleday. 7. Finger Lickin' Fifteen. Janet Evanovich. St. Martin's (977,178). 8. The Host: A Novel. Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown (912,165). 9. *Under the Dome. Stephen King. Scribner 10. Pirate Latitudes. Michael Crichton. Harper (855,638). 11. Scarpetta. Patricia Cornwell. Putnam (800,000). 12. U Is for Undertow. Sue Grafton. Putnam (706,154). 13. The Scarpetta Factor. Patricia Cornwell. Putnam (705,000). 14. Shadowland. Alyson Noel. St. Martin's (609,355). 15. The 8th Confession. James Patterson. Little, Brown (606,097). 16. Arctic Drift. Clive Cussler with Dirk Cussler. Putnam (588,247). 17. South of Broad: A N...

I haven't done a book trailer in a while, so here you go! Yay! Raising Rebellion The Rys Chronicles is an epic fantasy by Tracy Falbe, one book of a quartet. You can download the first book for free, which is a nice touch. It's also available as a trade paperback. This is a simple trailer. There is a solid soundtrack, a few strong images and logical, enticing content that gives enough information to provide some idea of the worldbuidling without overwhelming us with details. I like that the theme is a strong component of the hook. Can good overcome evil without becoming evil? It may be objected that this is not an original theme. I have yet to meet a good theme that was "original." The best themes are not original; they are eternal.

Proponents of the Singularity believe that humans will one day transcend biology. There are different versions, but one theory is that humans will all become uploaded into digitally stored data strings, existing in a purely virtual environment. I'm skeptical about that. But another Singularity Event does appear to be nigh. The Book Singularity. Books will transcend their traditional physical form, and become not just different, but more than they were. Is the Book Singularity at hand? Libroid thinks so, and has some alternatives for the hyper-book future: Enter Libroid, which creator Neffe -- a veteran journalist for Germany's Der Spiegel magazine and author of a best-selling book on Charles Darwin -- hopes will beat its own path to success. The program, which currently runs only on Apple's iPad tablet computer, splits the traditional book page into three columns, allowing authors space to annotate their text with footnotes, images, maps, videos and web links. Libroid d...