ARCs: the quest for perfection
Today, after altogether too much time waiting for the boxes to arrive from the printer, I took delivery of several cases of ARCs of Leona Wisoker’s Secrets of the Sands. (ARCs, just in case you have forgotten, are Advance Reading Copies. I’ve heard other interpretations of those letters, but they all boil down to the same thing: copies of the initial design of a book, printed for distribution to reviewers and other members of the book trade. In ARCs, the content of the book is stable, but the design may be tweaked during the review period: errors, design choices that didn’t work

Death, Inc. by Edward Morris: Installment 3 live
If things are getting weird in Powersburg, we’re going to have to come up with a new word for what’s coming into the County Morgue. But the Assistant Coroner tells it better than I do: The end of the goddamn Jordan kid’s tattoo, this one, just breaks off. There should have been a Chapter Two. I mean, yeah, yeah, Roger Zelazny said that every good short story is like the first chapter of a novel that’s never been completed, and that’s true, but … My God up in Heaven, am I criticizing these things? Like they’re stories? Like they’re Art? I’m thinking some kind of consensu

Death, Inc. by Edward Morris: Installment 2 Live
He was trudging the last mile to the tall glass doors at 7:32 AM, dreading homeroom, when a lowrider pickup truck full of coked-out football players pulped his midsection and shattered his skull. His last thoughts were that he wouldn’t be able to make up the SAT’s, and that he’d forgotten to take out the trash before his hasty exit and grateful Marlboro. He couldn’t die. He had finals. The thought kept slipping away and coming back. His will to power rose slowly, morgue scenes and darkness in between strobing across the backs of his eyelids. His teachers were always telling him that he could move mountains if he just buckled do

The Times, They Are…Well, you know.
Like everybody else in the book business, I spend a lot of time thinking about its future. It’s impossible to predict how books, the way we buy them, and the way they are published will change, though a lot of us never tire of trying. Comparisons to the music industry are inevitable: like the music industry, the book business is increasingly a Long Tail business, though the Big Names in the business continue to focu

Live on the Interwebs: Leona Wisoker on ‘net radio tonight
Mercury Retrograde author Leona Wisoker, whose debut novel Secrets of the Sands comes out in March, will be on Artist First Radio tonight, talking about her work and the road to publication. The show is at 7 pm EST (8 pm CST). Stop by and listen! We’ll be gathered around the computers here… http://www.perceptivemarketing.com/