Every day should be a holiday. Preferably Halloween.
Meet Henry and Winthrop: friends since forever, manga and anime fans, and dead sick of the daily grind. Henry's girlfriend of four years just walked out on him after a dumb argument about salad dressing and Cowboy Bebop. Winthrop's burned out on his comic store -- paradise when you're nineteen, but maybe not when you're thirty-six.
What's left but to rent a car and a hotel room, gather some friends together, get dressed up as video-game characters and head south to drink in the biggest fan convention this side of the Missouri? That's the plan for the four-day weekend, anyway -- but every time they've tried to "get away from it all", they've wound up taking most of it with them.
And life has a funny way of happening when you've got plans, or even just a schedule. Into both of their lives comes crashing Diane, who's never seen an episode of Dragonball Z in her life and neither reads nor can spell Shonen Jump. A "mundane". And as it turns out, she might need someone like them just as much as they need someone like her.
Turns out the product IDs that I linked to for both Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend were wrong. I've since fixed the issue. My apologies to anyone who was cross-directed. (I also didn't need to create entirely new versions of the...
Turns out the product IDs that I linked to for both Summerworldand The Four-Day Weekend were wrong. I've since fixed the issue. My apologies to anyone who was cross-directed. (I also didn't need to create entirely new versions of the products anyway, just revise the existing ones.)
It's done! The new 5.5 × 8.5 versions of my books Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend are available for purchase NOW. Both are available for $11.99 -- down from $15! -- and are available signed by the author for $20. You can...
It's done! The new 5.5 × 8.5 versions of my books Summerworldand The Four-Day Weekendare available for purchase NOW. Both are available for $11.99 -- down from $15! — and are available signed by the author for $20.
You can visit the links to learn about each of these books, but here are the blurbs as I've traditionally given them to others:
Summerworld: Neil Gaiman meets Hayao Miyazaki, or so one of my readers put it. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good synopsis. My version was "a story of high adventure and deep insight in a world where desire reshapes the face of reality". Not nearly as sound-bite-y, though.
The Four-Day Weekend: Formerly The New Golden Age, it's my love letter to the convention-going scene, drawn from years of rubbing elbows with other fans. But did I mention it's also a love-and-brotherhood story? And a riotous comedy?
The cover art is still the same for each, however:
Coming in spring: reissues of my earlier novels Casual Users and Another Worldly Device!
I've made the needed corrections to Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend for their new 5.5 × 8.5 trim size editions. The changes were minor but there were a lot of them, collectively: a misaligned spine image here, some typographical inconsistencies...
I've made the needed corrections to Summerworldand The Four-Day Weekendfor their new 5.5 × 8.5 trim size editions. The changes were minor but there were a lot of them, collectively: a misaligned spine image here, some typographical inconsistencies there, and so on. But the resulting product has been really heartening. I love the new publisher-grade paper, and the print quality of the cover is if anything even better than before.
I don't know how many copies of each I'll be bringing with me to WickedFaire this year, but I ought to be able to start soliciting orders for the new editions by the end of this week. Once that happens, the old editions will be phased out and you'll be directed towards the new ones exclusively. Those of you who bought an earlier edition, you now have a collector's item!
Sadly, Lulu doesn't yet offer ISBN distribution for this new trim size, but once that happens I will be making everything available through all the most popular channels (Amazon, etc.). Once that happens, I'll have all the more incentive to start reissuing the older books — Casual Users, Another Worldly Device and maybe one or two other things — in that format.
The single hardest part about this whole thing has been making sure everything is consistent. Having templates and style sheets and the like is a big boon, but after a certain point you have to start tweaking everything manually for each individual product. That's where, I suspect, people with dozens of different books begin to go a little nuts. (Of course, in a more conventional publishing house, they don't have to keep every single one of those things in print at once — that's probably a big boon for them, not having to worry about the way things look across every single title in their library.)
I'm also impressed at how much of this stuff I've been able to do with software that costs nothing. The cover layout and typesetting: Scribus. The vector art: Inkscape. The two big proprietary apps I'm still using are Photoshop and Word, but only because everything I've found to try and replace them hasn't really worked out well for me. OpenOffice isn't bad, but I already bought and paid for a copy of Word 2007, and dang it all, I like Word 2007. Maybe I'll try producing the next book with OpenOffice, but for now Word it is.
My long-term plan has been to produce and offer about one book a year, and at this rate I have enough current and future projects to keep me going for a long time:
Tokyo Inferno, 2009
Vajra / The Mapmaker / other as-yet-undetermined title, 2010
Four-Day Weekend sequel, 2011
The Destroyed Room, 2012 (oh noez, end of teh worldz!!1)
Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope, TBD (my stab at horror-comedy, and yes the title is a lift from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed album)
The as-yet-untitled "hero story", TBD
Four-Day Weekend pt. 3, TBD (I need to visit Japan before I can even think about beginning this one)
Apparently the links to the Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend samplers were out of whack due to me moving some directories around. It should be fixed now....
Apparently the links to the Summerworldand The Four-Day Weekendsamplers were out of whack due to me moving some directories around. It should be fixed now.
That's right! The first new copies of The Four-Day Weekend are back in-house and ready to be signed, sealed, delivered and sent your merry way! Signed copies are $25 (includes shipping and any applicable sales tax). Unsigned copies ordered directly from...
The Four-Day Weekend is now available for sale from Lulu.com. Price: $14.99 (paperback, plus tax/shipping). Credit cards and PayPal are accepted directly from the site. The copies I've ordered (which I'll be signing and sending out) should be in sometime...
The Four-Day Weekend is now available for sale from Lulu.com. Price: $14.99 (paperback, plus tax/shipping). Credit cards and PayPal are accepted directly from the site.
The copies I've ordered (which I'll be signing and sending out) should be in sometime next week. Sorry to keep everyone waiting, but I wanted to make sure everything was right.
UPDATE: For those of you who wanted signed copies, I'll eventually have a PayPal link directly from the book page. Look for that in the coming week or so.
Note: To all those who replied, thank you -- I haven't forgotten about you. I've just been dealing with a horrid case of the flu for the past two days. I'm hoping to have all the pending orders fulfilled by...
Note: To all those who replied, thank you — I haven't forgotten about you. I've just been dealing with a horrid case of the flu for the past two days. I'm hoping to have all the pending orders fulfilled by this weekend. Thanks for being patient — I'll have some extra goodies in it for you!
If you came by the Genji Press table at AnimeFest 2008, some of you got a coupon code — a six-character code redeemable for a signed copy of either Summerworld or The Four-Day Weekendat the convention price of $15 (instead of the usual price of $25 for a signed copy).
Here's what you need to do to redeem your code:
Reply to this post using the comment form below. (Or, click the "comments" link if you're reading this from the homepage.)
Provide a valid email address in the email field that you use for PayPal.
In the comment body, type the six-digit code I gave you.
Wait for a reply from me. You should hear back from me in email before long.
All comments will be screened here and will not be published, so don't worry about leaving additional personal information. If want to leave me a note about another subject — a thank you, etc. — reply to this post instead.
