From The Wall Street Journal:

It’s hard to kill a vampire.

Five years ago, Charlaine Harris tried to kill Bill Compton, a handsome, brooding vampire in her best-selling supernatural mystery series. She fatally wounded him with a sword in book nine. But her editor fought back. HBO was launching “True Blood,” a TV show based on Ms. Harris’s books. Killing off a main character and romantic lead could damage the franchise at a moment when millions of new readers were discovering it. Ms. Harris rewrote the scene. Bill got bitten and poisoned, but stayed undead for four more books.

It paid off. The books, which had sold some two million copies before the show, went on to sell 30 million more copies in 35 countries. Ms. Harris’s rabid fan base gobbled up “True Blood”-themed comic books, graphic novels, cook books, and other quirky merchandise, from “I Bill” T-shirts to nail polish, jewelry, candles and bottles of a fake-blood beverage.

But after more than a decade, Ms. Harris, a cheerful 61-year-old grandmother, grew tired of the characters, even as her hyper-dedicated followers lusted for more. She ran out of fresh story lines about her bubbly blond protagonist, Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who tangles with an ever-expanding supernatural cast of vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, demons, goblins, elves, witches and fairies.

. . . .

So Ms. Harris decided to shut down the lucrative franchise she created. When the 13th book, “Dead Ever After,” hits bookstores next week, it will mark the end of the Sookie Stackhouse series.

Many of her fans, however, aren’t close to satiated. Thousands of readers have written her and begged her to keep the story going. Some have taken to taunting Ms. Harris in emails and online forums, saying she’ll regret her decision. One fan threatened to commit suicide if the ending doesn’t meet her expectations.

. . . .

Ms. Harris is under pressure to deliver a dramatic and satisfying ending to a story that readers have been following for more than a decade. When she was working on “Dead Ever After,” she found herself juggling seven story lines. She kept track of the dangling narrative threads by sticking Post-it Notes around her computer monitor. The sprawling plot unfolds as Sookie is pursued by demonic forces and framed for murder, while several supernatural suitors vie for her affection.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire) and thanks to Barb for the tip.

Thanks to Suzan for the tip.

From Galleycat:

16 classic Ray Bradbury books are coming to digital booksellers for the very first time.

. . . .

[T]he list of new eBook releases includes beloved books likeDandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes andThe Illustrated Man.

. . . .

Just Published
Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars
Death Is a Lonely Business
A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities
Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan ’99
One More for the Road
Green Shadows, White Whale

Dandelion Wine
Something Wicked This Way Comes
We’ll Always Have Paris

April 30th
The Illustrated Man
Quicker Than the Eye
Driving Blind
The October Country
The Cat’s Pajamas
Let’s All Kill Constance
A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

Link to the rest at Galleycat

From The Huffington Post:

So, life was creeping on in its steady pace from day to day. I was about to turn 40, and I was in a pretty terrible mood. For no real reason: things were fine. I’m an English professor at Bryn Mawr College, I live in Philadelphia, it’s a good life. Philly’s great, I love my students, I like thinking deep thoughts about 19th century literature for pay. But my birthday was looming and my mood just got worse and worse…

One morning I woke up and instead of heading down the rickety old stairs in my little Philly row house to make a cup of coffee, I headed up the rickety old stairs to my study. I sat down at the computer and opened a new Word document. I stared at the screen for a second, and then I started typing.

I wrote for fourteen hours straight.

. . . .

I was writing a time travel novel.

. . . .

But… I’m an academic, a literary critic and an historian. My novel carries its action from the present back to the past, and even though time travel is a fantasy, I wanted the past that my characters encountered to be accurate. I wanted it to look and smell and feel right. Luckily my field is the 19th century; luckily I’ve spent several years living in London. I already knew the broad political and social flavor of the time I was trying to evoke, I knew the general look of the city I was writing about. But fiction hungers for the detail, for the strange little scrap, the forgotten ingredient that made the past something more than just a collation of war and peace.

My novel wasn’t just hungry, it was ravenous, and with each sentence its demand grew stronger — it wouldn’t wait.

I’m used to a slow, contemplative pace to writing. A day in the library, a day taking notes, a day writing, a week off to teach, and repeat. Now I had the devil on my back, my fingers twitched to get back to the keyboard whenever I took a break, I dreamed about writing every night. I didn’t have time to go sauntering through real stacks, and even the virtual stacks on the web are Byzantine. I spent a whole day lost in speeches given in the House of Commons on a single day in 1815; by the end of that day my characters were ready to stage a revolt. They made me stay up all night writing. My time travel novel had its spurs in me and I was galloping full tilt.

Google Image became my best friend. A single example. I’m writing along, everything’s fine, when suddenly my main female character, Julia, storms into her evil cousin’s study. He’s in there, but she controls him with her secret power (I’m not giving anything away!). Why is she in his study? She’s looking for Johnson’s Dictionary. She’s in a rage, she needs a definition and she needs it now. I know all about Johnson’s Dictionary and its importance for literature, for the consolidation of culture… but what the hell did the thing actually look like? Type it into Google Image. Two volumes. OK, two volumes, bound in brown leather: she can pull them both off the shelf at once, her index and middle fingers hooked over the headbands. She’s looking up the word “talisman.”

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to John for the tip. The novel is The River of No Return.

From BookRiot:

There’s something special about the men of YA fantasy. They’re charming, well-intentioned, earnest, and usually attractive. They’re also often good with a sword, frequently able to do magic, and almost always prone to heroic acts.

. . . .

Whatever the reason, there ain’t no man like a YA fantasy man. But with so many fictional Prince Charmings out there, how is a lady (or gentleman) to pick just one?

. . . .

Candidate	Occupation	Pros	Cons
Prince Charmont “Char” (Ella Enchanted)	Prince.	Articulate, smart, thoughtful, useful in fights against giants, fond of sliding down banisters.	Cavalier with fine clothing, especially when it comes to buttons.
Ron Weasley (Harry Potter)	Sidekick.	Entertaining. Considerate towards house elves in siege situations. Likes smart women.	Family history of extreme fertility (more of a consideration than a con).

Link to the rest at BookRiot

From Giant Freakin Robot:

Republican Delegate Ray Canterbury, of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, has [introduced a bill in the state legislature that would require] “grade-appropriate science fiction literature” be added to the state’s middle-school and high-school curriculum. He’s actually introduced the proposal once before, but he’s resurrecting the bill again in hopes it will either pass outright or at least convince the Board to consider the merits of adding science fiction to schools.

Canterbury is a lifelong science fiction fan, but his reasoning for wanting it introduced to the school system is tied to a problem that’s facing our nation as a whole: namely, that we’re falling behind in the fields of math and science. Many modern scientists cite influences such as Star Trek as inspiring them to pursue a career in the sciences, and Canterbury believes that can happen again if kids are exposed to science fiction early on.

Canterbury told Blastr:

In Southern West Virginia, there’s a bit of a Calvinistic attitude toward life—this is how things are and they’ll never be any different. One of the things about science fiction is that it gives you this perspective that as long as you have an imagination and it’s grounded in some sort of practical knowledge, you can do anything you wanted to. So it serves as a kind of antidote to that fatalistic kind of thinking.

Link to the rest at Giant Freakin Robot

From io9:

Prompted by a recent article in Aeon Magazine warning of the threat posed by advanced artificial intelligence, Kristin Centorcelli of SF Signalput together an impressive panel of renowned science fiction authors to get their opinions on the subject.

. . . .

As the Future of Humanity Institute’s David Dewey noted in the piece, “If you had a machine that was designed specifically to make inferences about the world, instead of a machine like the human brain, you could make discoveries…much faster,” but an AI “might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels.”

. . . .

Wesley Chu:

Yes, future apocalyptic extinction sucks and sounds pretty unpleasant, but if I may, when was the last time any futurist’s prediction actually came true? They predicted flying cars in every family’s garage back in the 1920s. Nearly a hundred years later, cars aren’t drastically different than they were since the days of the Model T. We still don’t have a moon base, and my cleaning lady is composed of skin, bones, and blood, albeit I admit she sounds like a robot when she talks. Hell, we can’t even get a guy to Mars let alone the next solar system. We can’t even cure the common cold. Basically, the track record for futurists kind of suck. And the further out we get in the predictions, the less likely any of them will hit their mark.

. . . .

James K. Decker:

If we’re talking about a true intelligence, some kind of self-aware network of synthetic neurons and not some kind of ‘human simulation’, I don’t see how we could have the slightest idea what it might do once it became conscious. We’d be interacting with a completely inhuman intelligence, free of empathy, or even an understanding of what life and death are. The things that are core to us as humans would mean nothing to a being like that and so given the chance to act in our world, we could have no way of guessing what it might decide to do. Even if it were somehow keyed to be beneficial to us, taking the “maximizing human happiness” example from the original question, a machine intelligence might decide the optimal way to do this would be to keep every human immobilized, and hooked up to a feeding tube with a wire running current to our pleasure centers. That would make every human happy for their entire lives, and without the ability to understand why that would be horrible it might seem like the most efficient course of action.

Link to the rest at io9

From io9:

Night Shade Books has published some of the coolest books of the past several years, but it’s also run into financial difficulties. Now Night Shade is trying to sell out to two other entities, in a deal that authors and agents have criticized. We talked to the prospective buyers, and they explained their side of things.

“We’re the good guys,” insists Jarred Weisfeld with Start Publishing. “We’re the ones who are coming in and trying to save something.”

In our half-hour phone interview with Weisfeld and his partner in this buyout, Tony Lyons with Skyhorse Publishing, that theme came up several times: Weisfeld and Lyons see themselves as rescuing a sinking ship, and they’re not thrilled about being painted as the bad guys on the internet because they want to offer what they see as realistic terms to Night Shade’s authors.

. . . .

In Lyons and Weisfeld’s view, Night Shade was shockingly unprofitable, and a big reason for this was its high royalty rate. “Night Shade was losing like 25 percent per year,” says Lyons. “They were losing more than almost any publishing company I’ve ever heard of.” And a big reason for this was the fact that “they were paying royalties which really nobody else pays.”

“If you went to Knopf and you were a bestselling author, you would negotiate the kinds of royalties they have” for all authors, adds Lyons. Night Shade’s royalties escalated from 8 to 10 to 12 percent of retail price for paperbacks. “I don’t believe that New York Times bestselling authors get that from the best and biggest publishers,” says Lyons. “Those are not realistic royalties in the kind of print publishing environment we have now.”

. . . .

 Start will be handling the ebook side of things, and Weisfeld says that the deal only makes sense if they drop the ebook royalty, from between 30 and 50 percent to 25 percent. That original, higher royalty rate is just another sign that “bad decisions were being made by editors and business people,” says Weisfeld, adding: “We’re not bad guys, we’re here to turn a profit and at the same time keep our end of the deal and make sure all our authors get paid.”

. . . .

Lyons says that the bloggers and other people who have been weighing in on the deal, and posting on the Skyhorse Facebook page, seem to believe that “everybody ought to get the most that anybody’s getting.” So he fears that if they offer a better deal to someone who’s a successful author, “then before you know it, that contract is going to be up on the Internet, and people are going to say, ‘Why are you giving this person what you’re not giving to that person?’”

So he sounds like he’s loath to negotiate, lest he wind up giving away concessions that he’ll end up being pressured to give to everybody.

. . . .

 Rather, they want to do with Night Shade what Skyhorse has done with other failing companies it’s bought in the six and a half years since Lyons founded it: turn it around, make it profitable, and massively boost its output. Case in point: Two years ago, Skyhorse bought Arcade Publishing, a literary imprint whose authors include Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan. Before it was bought, Arcade was publishing 20-25 books a year — now it does 50-60 per season, or over 100 per year.

. . . .

 ”This is a huge mess, and we’re trying to clean it up,” says Weisfeld. Authors “have to understand that we’re not the past, we’re the future — the potential future — and I understand their frustrations and concerns, but they shouldn’t be directed at us. Basically, we’re trying to do a good thing here. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

Link to the rest at io9 and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

PG has not been familiar with Nightshade, but it appears we have an example of how a publisher that is releasing good books can still go broke. As usual, with the wrong contracts, authors can still get taken along for the ride.

From Hugh Howey on The Huffington Post:

As someone who writes apocalyptic fiction, it comes quite naturally for me to announce that tomorrow should never happen. Tomorrow is an impossibility. And yet somehow, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and find that a story I wrote while working as a bookseller–a story that blossomed into a novel one serialized piece at a time–is now being released into bookstores far and wide.

How this came about has been a story unto itself. The deal I signed with Simon & Schuster is quite unusual and made some noise when it was announced, but even stranger are the events behind the deal.

. . . .

When Kristin Nelson first contacted me about representing WOOL, I warned her that I didn’t think I’d ever sell the rights to a publisher. My series of stories were doing well enough for me to quit my day job, and I didn’t think it would be advantageous to alter course. Other agents had been in touch already, and I’d passed up their offerings of representation by explaining that a deal was unlikely, but Kristin got my attention by saying, “I’m not sure you should sell the rights.” She went on to explain that it might not be in my best interest to change what I was doing, but wouldn’t it be fun to feel publishers out? To see what they were willing to do?

. . . .

With the help of Jenny Meyer, Kristin’s fantastic co-agent, we began signing what would eventually amount to twenty-four foreign publishing deals. The film rights were shopped around and went to Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian due to an ambitious push from Kassie Evashevski, our film co-agent.

. . . .

Kristin, acting the role of proud parent and matchmaker, informed me that we now had four major publishers to meet with. I won’t name any except to say that Simon & Schuster wasn’t among them. I point this out because we did end up meeting with Simon & Schuster, but only through a strange confluence of events and coincidences, events that would lead us directly to Jon Karp’s office, the head of Simon & Schuster, where we would discuss a book he’d only sampled that morning. Joining this discussion by speakerphone would be an editor, Marysue, who had discovered WOOL quite on her own.

. . . .

I explained, just as I had to four other publishers that week, that it wasn’t about the money for me. I was making more than I needed to live on already. What I was looking for was something fair in other ways. I wanted a contract that saw this union as a business partnership rather than an acquisition. I was excited about the prospect of getting physical books into bookstores, but I didn’t relish the idea of selling my soul to achieve that. I was always thinking about how this would affect readers. The idea that my ebook prices would shoot up, possibly double, didn’t sit well with me. And would I be limited in what I wrote and how often I published? I had a lot of worries that dollar signs couldn’t salve.

. . . .

The problem was that publishers were willing to pay a lot of money to take all of my rights forever, but nobody wanted to do a print-only deal. Even major publishers (especially major publishers) could see in their balance sheets where the industry was heading. But there will always be a place for bookstores and great print editions, and I wanted to form that partnership without giving up a known living wage for an unknown jackpot. I just don’t have that ability to gamble (I never have).

It made it easy to say no, even though it was life-altering amounts of money being offered. The stability of a monthly income was more important, as was knowing that I would be miserable to sign my life away like that. I floated one final option, which gained zero traction. This was the idea of licensing the rights to the book for a finite period of time. This is how my foreign deals are structured. It seemed to me that this would eventually be the future of US publishing. But it wasn’t to be. A second round of interesting talks came and went.

. . . .

When I first Skyped with Kristin and agreed to partner up with her, we discussed the infinitesimal chances that I would ever go with a major publisher. We both understood from the beginning that it would likely be against my best interests to take the sort of deal that would be offered, but we also dreamed of a future where publishers and authors had a different sort of relationship. We discussed the fact that it would take quite a few of these conversations with various agents and prospective clients before boilerplate contracts began to bend or crack. Kristin was just as eager as I was to have these conversations, as fruitless as we imagined they would be.

And so we pursued an impossible dream hoping that the strangeness of our demands might pave the way for future demands from other authors. Kristin and I constantly rallied ourselves by saying that this was important, what we were doing. It wouldn’t happen for WOOL, but it would get everyone involved used to the fact that large advances couldn’t wash away sour terms now that self-published authors could pay the bills on their own. Yes, it was hopelessly naive and ambitious, but we both believed it. We continue to believe it. And then the third round began.

. . . .

Things kept going up and up. Most people in my situation (rightly, perhaps) had stepped off this ride long before this point. E.L. James did the correct thing by taking the millions and then making tens or hundreds of more millions on top of this. I wasn’t after the millions, though. I wanted a contract that, when read, made me feel like a human being.

. . . .

When they came at us with a 7-figure offer five months after their last major offer, I had to really think about it. We went back with our same demands of no non-compete clauses, no digital rights, terms of license, all the impossible deal breakers that we dreamt about and didn’t expect to ever get.

This time, there was progress on some of these fronts. I was nearly swayed.

. . . .

It was about the partnership. It was about fair contracts for these unusual times in which we now find ourselves. It isn’t always a manuscript that an author brings to the table. More and more often, it can be a bestseller, an established brand, a gaggle of rabid fans, a proven readership, and a mature author platform.

. . . .

In the end, it was Simon & Schuster who crafted a deal specifically to my needs, a deal for the print rights that would augment the success I was having on my own by doing what they do best: bringing out a book and getting it in the hands of booksellers.

Link to much more at HuffPo and thanks to Patrice for the tip.

PG will note that agents are bashed from time to time on TPV, often by using the agents’ own words.

Hugh’s story reminds us that judging each individual in a group by the actions of other members of that group is both irrational and foolish. His essay documents that his agent, Kristin Nelson, provided valuable services for him and avoided the flim-flam that some authors experience when dealing with agents.

PG hopes that Hugh’s situation may be a harbinger of things to come with major publishers realizing that fairer contract terms can be a competitive advantage and poor contracts can be deal-killers.