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Hiro Protagonist posted:Is The Powder Mage trilogy/series of books any good? There's a Kickstarter for an RPG of it, and I'm curious after seeing that. It's nothing profound or exceptional, but I enjoyed reading every volume of it and look forward to the author's next release.
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# ? Oct 20, 2016 21:47 |
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# ? Jun 1, 2024 05:35 |
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Is The Powder Mage trilogy/series of books any good? There's a Kickstarter for an RPG of it, and I'm curious after seeing that. If you're looking for guns and magic I'd recommend Django Wexler's Shadow Campaigns, I think he just finished the last book - I've been waiting for it with bated breath for like 8 months. I think it even passes the Bechdel test - barely.
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# ? Oct 20, 2016 21:51 |
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Is The Powder Mage trilogy/series of books any good? There's a Kickstarter for an RPG of it, and I'm curious after seeing that. Powder Mages as a concept, are absolutely fantastic. The mechanics of the magic (in short - detonate gunpowder with your mind and redirect the explosion) are fantastically elegant, are integrated incredibly well into the fight scenes, and give all sorts of variety to different character's fighting styles. The different methods of the Powder Mages and traditional wizards sets up such a great conflict - magic's all about class and privilege and all sorts of juicy ideas. It's not quite Malazan levels of metaphor, but it's close. Powder Mage the series, however, is staggeringly disappointing. The later books aren't especially bad by the standards of schlock fantasy, but the first book sets out so many great ideas and concepts that are completely tossed aside in favour of battles against an enemy that is somehow more faceless than Dragon Age's Not-Orcs. It goes from "holy crap this is genius" to "ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"
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# ? Oct 20, 2016 22:00 |
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Powder Mage felt so much like an early Sanderson book that I was completely unsurprised to find that the author was a friend and student of Brandon. The whole series was a fun read but I agree with everyone above that the first book promised a lot of things that the second and third couldn't pay off. The magic system is really well done but never explored in-depth like a cosmere one, but it had the same paper thin characters and ridiculous power creep that Sanderson's stuff tends to be riddled with. I can handle Sanderson's really ridiculously powerful characters because they're the result of taking core concepts of the magic system and mixing them up in ways that other characters didn't expect and can't counter, so there's that cool element of creativity in there that keeps me turning the pages even if everyone is a really flat stereotype. Powder Mage takes a lot of cool stuff and then just continues amplifying it throughout the series, there's no trickery or twist to it so much as characters getting better and better with gunpowder magic. The sniper just gets more and more precise until he can headshot deities, the burners burn higher quantities of powder and turn into the Hulk. I think the basic concepts are loving amazing and I wish I could have seen those books in the hands of a better writer, though. Working class versus aristocratic mages with incompatible skillsets, the latter of which being born with their hands acting as portals to the elemental planes? A setting where the divine right of kings if actually real and killing a corrupt monarch results in angry space jesus coming down and wrecking your country because a sacred pact has been broken? The glimmers of that in the first book really, really hooked me even if the latter two turned into dully written military thrillers featuring the amazing god-sniper and his noble savage sidekick. Mandragora fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Oct 21, 2016 |
# ? Oct 20, 2016 22:21 |
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I finished the Land Fit for Heroes trilogy by Richard K. Morgan. While overall I enjoyed the series, I felt the ending was really flat. Ringil just getting stuck in the Grey Places was a really unsatisfying ending in general. I guess it's implied he dies fighting the dwenda, either way his role in the ending events was confusing and imo didn't resolve much. Archeth's ending is basically a cliffhanger where I suppose it's implied she will go take revenge and overthrow Jhiral. In general it didn't feel like the ending to a trilogy, felt more like the setup to another book. I would still recommend the series overall, but imo the Kovacs books were a lot stronger.
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# ? Oct 20, 2016 22:37 |
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Mandragora posted:Spoilers abound You should really spoiler pretty much all of this post.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 00:18 |
coyo7e posted:If you're looking for guns and magic I'd recommend Django Wexler's Shadow Campaigns, I think he just finished the last book - I've been waiting for it with bated breath for like 8 months. I think it even passes the Bechdel test - barely. I believe there's one more, due out next year.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 00:38 |
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Telsa Cola posted:You should really spoiler pretty much all of this post. Yeah, my bad, I thought I'd hit the spoiler tags key and posted it on my way out. Fixed now. In non Powder Mage stuff I finally picked up Peter Newman's The Vagrant earlier this week and just finished it. I dug the hell out of it, it's almost like... Lone Wolf and Cub meets the best aspects of China Mieville, with a nameless and mute paladin trekking across a post apocalyptic wasteland with a sick baby in one hand and a malevolent singing sword in the other. I remember wanting to snap it up when it came out the other year but there was a screwup on the publisher's part and the kindle release wasn't for several months after the hardcover came out, so it fell to the bottom of my reading list for awhile. I saw the second book had come out recently so I grabbed the first one, went to buy the second one and they did it again, hardcover came out the start of this year and no kindle edition until March 2017.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 00:48 |
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Mandragora posted:Yeah, my bad, I thought I'd hit the spoiler tags key and posted it on my way out. Fixed now. If I had to guess, I'd guess that they're doing this in the hopes of getting as many hardcopy sales out the door as they can before releasing a version that's trivial to pirate.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 01:03 |
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ToxicFrog posted:If I had to guess, I'd guess that they're doing this in the hopes of getting as many hardcopy sales out the door as they can before releasing a version that's trivial to pirate. This is probably going to be the way of things in the future. It's effective, and really, isn't that big a detriment to ANYBODY, not even fans. If you NEED the book right now, then you buy a physical copy. It would be nice to have companies include a coupon for some large percentage off the ebook version once that's released, at the very least, however. I still have huge issues with ebook pricing as it is currently.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 04:30 |
Drifter posted:This is probably going to be the way of things in the future. It's effective, and really, isn't that big a detriment to ANYBODY, not even fans. If you NEED the book right now, then you buy a physical copy. They don't advertise it that openly, but there are instances of that on Amazon. I can't remember what it was I bought recently, but I got an email said I could get the ebook version at a decent discount because I bought the physical copy. And yeah, it still boggles my mind that there are a ton of titles out there where the ebook version is like $1-2 more than a new physical copy.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 05:08 |
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Coldforge posted:It's nothing profound or exceptional, but I enjoyed reading every volume of it and look forward to the author's next release. I'd agree with this. I enjoyed it and yeah it's obvious he was a student of Sanderson and there are a lot of weak characters. It starts off really cool and sort of doesn't go much further with it, but I did like all three books. But I file it under the "airport thriller fantasy" section (along with Night Angel trilogy ) which is guilty-ish pleasure fun reads that I plowed through them quickly and then never thought twice about after but I liked during the moment. I wouldn't necessarily toss it out as a recommendation but I wouldn't actively discourage people from reading them either. Xaris fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Oct 21, 2016 |
# ? Oct 21, 2016 05:59 |
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The Ninth Layer posted:I finished the Land Fit for Heroes trilogy by Richard K. Morgan. While overall I enjoyed the series, I felt the ending was really flat. Ringil just getting stuck in the Grey Places was a really unsatisfying ending in general. I guess it's implied he dies fighting the dwenda, either way his role in the ending events was confusing and imo didn't resolve much. Archeth's ending is basically a cliffhanger where I suppose it's implied she will go take revenge and overthrow Jhiral. In general it didn't feel like the ending to a trilogy, felt more like the setup to another book. My reading of the Land ending all that talk of Ravensfriend having awoken? And the Changeling having been stored in his sword? Then what happens with Dakovash and baby Hjel with Ravensfriend, and the gypsies mishearing 'Gil' when they ask what to call the baby? Hjel is Ringil brought up by not awful people. Which unfortunately means Gil was loving himself. I thought the ending was really unsatisfying too. I wanted to know more about the Dark Court and the interdimensional aliens.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 06:53 |
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Just finished reading The Blade Itself and it was great, can't wait to read the rest. However currently I am reading The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and I am really enjoying. Really fun read. I can't remember if I got the recommendation in here or not but it's really good.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 07:45 |
vulturesrow posted:However currently I am reading The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden and I am really enjoying. Really fun read. I can't remember if I got the recommendation in here or not but it's really good.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 10:15 |
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Drifter posted:This is probably going to be the way of things in the future. It's effective, and really, isn't that big a detriment to ANYBODY, not even fans. If you NEED the book right now, then you buy a physical copy. Amazon have had plans to launch Matchbook for years, a system like Autorip where you buy a physical copy and get the ebook free. They've been stifled by the different sales taxes on books and digital objects.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 15:45 |
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Echoing Powder Mage as good concept, okay at best execution. I've heard the novellas are similar to the first book and focus on smaller stakes, which I think is McClellan's strong suit. I plan to check them out. He also announced a new trilogy in the setting, beginning next year. I would prefer smaller scale action rather than going for the geopolitical thing again but I hope he took some notes from Wexler to improve his ability to write larger scope, because I do enjoy the setting and I think he has good potential as a writer.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 16:35 |
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coyo7e posted:Glad you've been enjoying them, I hope my summary in the westworld thread was tempting. I've heard that his Star Wars stuff is pretty good as well - the author's way way into some harsh martial art like krava maga or something, so his combat scenes are pretty fun and accurate, and I'd imagine it translates well into Jedi moves. Yeah, thanks for mentioning them over there. The first two books were super loving uncomfortable (but in a 'good' way - like the I don't think I've gotten to the 'horse-witch' in Caine Black Knife yet but I'm loving how basically everyone is figuring out "If Caine is in town, poo poo is about to go bad"
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 16:35 |
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Today's Kindle US Daily Deal is Central Station by Lavie Tidhar for $1.99. I've had this on my wishlist ever since it was announced and a couple of days ago, it was also in a list from Tor.com, Five Mosaic Novels You Should Read quote:A mosaic novel, you say? What’s that when it’s at home? How’s it differ from a common or garden novel? Well, my favourite explanation is from the inimitable Jo Walton: “A normal novel tells a story by going straightforwardly at it, maybe with different points of view, maybe braided, but clearly going down one road of story. A mosaic novel builds up a picture of a world and a story obliquely, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.” I also absolutely love the cover art.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 18:54 |
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MockingQuantum posted:They don't advertise it that openly, but there are instances of that on Amazon. I can't remember what it was I bought recently, but I got an email said I could get the ebook version at a decent discount because I bought the physical copy. Well amazon has an incentive to get rid of physical copies for inventory purposes. As Amazon has made abundantly clear, e-book prices are set by the publisher and there is no incentive to make them less expensive and actually have a disincentive to do so since the e-book sales help offset the costs of producing physical books.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 19:28 |
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vulturesrow posted:there is no incentive to make them less expensive more sales would be the incentive
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 19:33 |
Jedit posted:Amazon have had plans to launch Matchbook for years, a system like Autorip where you buy a physical copy and get the ebook free. They've been stifled by the different sales taxes on books and digital objects. Matchbook is a thing that currently exists. I've gotten a number of free ebooks due to buying physical copies from Amazon, though to be fair most qualifying books have reduced prices rather than being free.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 20:05 |
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less laughter posted:more sales would be the incentive More sales doesn't always equal more profit. I'd be pretty shocked if those publishers weren't doing projections based on how much they think they could make with keeping the price as it is vice lowering it.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 20:23 |
RoboCicero posted:I tried out A Darker Shade of Magic and it was underwhelming -- I'm a sucker for fish out of water / urban fantasy stories, but the conceit of "four magical londons, all connected" is less interesting when it's "Boring London, Clearly The Best London, Evil London, and Even Evil London's Scared Of This London London". I didn't feel like the characters got a lot of time to breath and everything felt kind of straightforward, plot-wise. I hear the second book is better, but I have enough books to read already. Why is it always London Someone write a novel about a magical alternate Kansas City Or even New York or Paris or Leningrad Leningrad would be perfect because St. Petersburg, two names
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 20:24 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
Kinda sorta Deathless by Catherynne Valente. Which is loving awesome. (I need to read more of her stuff.)
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 20:35 |
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Definitely check out Deathless. I loved it to pieces. Awesome blending of russian fairy tales with the fall of the soviet union that moves between the mythic and the real effortlessly. As far as I can tell it's London because people speak English and there's enough history to have The Monarchy And poo poo. I think in A Darker Shade of Magic they allude to the fact that other major cities around the world also have parallel versions but we don't get to see them at all. A similar novel set in Kansas City or something would be awesome. Anything that isn't the same faeries / arthurian myth / leyline stuff. Oh, ~Jack The Ripper~
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 21:10 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Why is it always London Sean Stewart's Galveston. Also Resurrection Man and The Night Watch. But Galveston is the most explicit "magical alternate city" of the 3.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 21:40 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Why is it always London Three official names, actually, Leningrad, St. Petersburg and Petrograd. It's also usually shortened to Piter. So, like, four dimensions right there.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 22:02 |
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neongrey posted:Didn't Nisi Shawl just release a book like this only about the Belgian Congo? Like, within the past month? To skip back to non-London steampunk, I just finished this. Alt-history/Steampunk in the Congo. Socialists buy a bunch of land and start up Everfair, a society for repatriated African Americans and refugees from Leopold's rubber works. It tells the story of the various crises faced by the young not-quite-country in the struggle against Leopold, in WW1, and eventually with itself. This was a really interesting book, and a pretty good story. A comparison to Foundation jumps to mind with the way the story is told in vignettes focused around important historical events for Everfair. I felt the style there left it a little scattered and the frequent (often 3-5 pages) shifts in time and POV could be a little disorienting. Just as an example starting on page 147 in August of 1899, 20 pages later I'm on my 5th POV and it's 1903. I think it could have been tightened up and been a more emotionally involving story by ditching some POV and focusing more heavily on the evolving relationship of the two main characters. In the end, I'd recommend if it sounds interesting to you. It's probably 3.5 stars, but I'd give it a bump because there aren't often stories told about this time and place.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 22:48 |
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vulturesrow posted:More sales doesn't always equal more profit. I'd be pretty shocked if those publishers weren't doing projections based on how much they think they could make with keeping the price as it is vice lowering it. With ebooks the product is more or less pure profit though. Amazon's chunk is certainly smaller than production costs. What I've heard is simply that they're still attached to the hardcover as a central selling point, and ebook sales themselves often still aren't as high as dead trees, even though they keep rising. They just don't want to incentivize the format any more than they do, and they don't want to give Amazon any more power than it has (yes yes you can buy ebooks from other platforms, go right ahead) so ebook pricing remains at a weird level for many titles.
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# ? Oct 21, 2016 23:10 |
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As a self-publisher (lol) I can tell you why the ebook prices being high in this genre makes pretty good sense. Amazon is the only market that really matters, first of all. A book needs to be AT LEAST $2.99 for the publisher to get a 70% cut. If you price at $2.98 or lower, Amazon keeps 70%. So for a $0.99 sale, Amazon keeps 67 cents and the publisher gets 33 cents...now ask yourself how much the author will get for that. There are exceptions to this like those $1.99 daily deals allow the publisher to keep the larger split for that limited sale window. If a book is in Kindle Unlimited, and if the sales volume at $0.99 is really high to drive KU reads, the publisher could actually make a lot of money through KU reads even though they are making awful money off the sales. For a big fantasy book, if you read the whole thing, the publisher is getting $3 plus. They get MORE for a read-through in KU than they do for a sale at $0.99 How many of you actually have KU though? How many fantasy/sci-fi books that you want to read are actually in KU? Not a lot. KU doesn't really make a lot of sense for markets with smaller volume of readers. You really do need to basically give the book away at $0.99 to hit a high enough sales rank for the KU reads to come through in enough volume to offset Amazon keeping all of your profit AND to offset the fact that you are selling your book for 99 pennies rather than a reasonable price. In a market like romance, where the reader base is HUGE, and where it's normal for a romance reader to read a new book every single day, the cheap price and KU thing works. Romance readers love KU because every single romance book is in KU. For $10/month and they can read more than 10 $0.99 books every month, and they can read book prices at $2.99 and up for free as well. Most romance book that hit $2.99 a month or so after initial release are also in KU. So back to scifi/fantasy. How many sci-fi/fantasy books do you guys read per month? More than one? I'm guessing it's kind of rare for the average sci-fi/fantasy reader to read more than three books in a month, though I'm just kind of pulling that out of my rear end. Either way, the market is much smaller than stuff like romance, thrillers, etc., and even though it's "Just an ebook," it's taking the author a lot of work to write it. The publisher is going to take a shitload of the money away as well, and they are going to spend a lot of money promoting the book. I personally only read like 1-2 books per month, and even if the ebook costs $12.99, I don't actually care. If it's a book I want to read, I'll pay whatever the price is as long as it's under $20, simply because it usually entertains me for many many hours. Death's End just came out a month ago, and it's at rank 2,149 as of right now. Rank ~2,000 is roughly 50 sales per day. At $12.99, the publisher is probably only making around $500/day on this ebook a month after release. Likely they are making a good chunk off paper books also. If they dropped the price to like $6.99 or something, I don't think the reader numbers are really there to get the rank significantly higher, and the number of people who want to read hard sci-fi written by Chinese dude is low enough that they probably want to get the max price they can out of every sale. This also helps make it so that even after the book's rank has dropped a lot, the trickle sales over time from people who didn't get around to reading it right away will still be a few hundred dollars a day. When you go for lower price at higher volume, you're relying a lot on the increased visibility of the book on the store automatically turning into more people buying it, but for a smaller genre like hard sci-fi from foreign country, it's smarter to bank on the fact that the people who want to read it due to word of mouth and critical acclaim etc. will pay higher for it rather than trying to reach a broader audience with it. I don't really know how paper books factor into everything as I don't even bother selling them, but it makes sense that keeping the ebook price very close to the paperback price is a smart move so that you don't cannibalize your paperback sales. How many people will just buy the paperback if the ebook isn't significantly cheaper than the paperback? It's really not even "greedy." Most of the authors you read are probably not making huge money off of these books that take a very long time to write. I'm sure Brandon Sanderson and a few others in the genre are pulling some serious money, but smaller authors are not making a killing, and ebook or not, you're paying for the work the author did, and you're paying for how niche of a market you are.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 00:01 |
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vulturesrow posted:More sales doesn't always equal more profit. I'd be pretty shocked if those publishers weren't doing projections based on how much they think they could make with keeping the price as it is vice lowering it. Are these projections actually rooted in reality, though, or are they just pulled wholesale out of the rear end of someone who hates digital publishing? Like, a recurring theme in gaming lately is small developers that make niche games selling them at prices that compete with recent mainstream AAA releases, and justifying this as "but our target audience is so tiny that we get so few sales that we can't lower our prices, we're barely staying afloat as it is!" Then someone convinces them to cut the price to somewhere in the $15-$20 range and their revenue -- not their sales volume, but actual incoming cash -- quintuples overnight, because it turns out that when you have no distribution costs and are getting 70% of each sale rather than 10%, and your tiny niche audience can buy the game by clicking a button and waiting ten minutes rather than mail-ordering a CD from bumfuck nowhere, the optimal place for the price per unit/volume of sales tradeoff is very different than it is for low-margin, high-distribution-cost physical goods. It feels like the book industry is still figuring that out, in much the same way that they are still having trouble with the idea that making books easy to purchase and read does more to drive sales than making them slightly more difficult to pirate (and harder to buy) does -- although some publishers like Tor and Baen seem to have gotten the memo. (Although holy poo poo, could Tor's ebook storefront be harder to find? It's not liked anywhere from the tor.com website, and you need to search for "tor/forge ebook store" to get it on google.)
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 00:49 |
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angel opportunity posted:How many people will just buy the paperback if the ebook isn't significantly cheaper than the paperback? I'm the other way around. gently caress paperbacks and gently caress hardbacks. I am only interested in buying an ebook and I will gladly pay a few bucks extra as a convenience fee for it. No storage issues. No lugging around a giant Neal Stephenson doorstopper. No spines to break or pages to tear. Searching by word. Easy highlights and bookmarks. The ability to easily copy/paste excerpts. The ability to read in bed at night without a lamp. The ability to read a giant doorstopper with one hand. The ability to increase the text size so I can read without my glasses. Ebooks are better than physical books in pretty much every possible way, and I am much happier now that I don't have to deal with the logistics of owning several hundred physical books
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 02:36 |
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Completely agreed, I had a giant physical collection and feel zero nostalgia for it a few years later. It's super weird too to delay the eBooks because the piracy community still seems to just love scanning and uploading books anytime that happens.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 04:06 |
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Yeah, I'm the same. I don't think ebooks should be the same price/more expensive than a hardback (printing/distribution costs etc.), but at the same time I don't mind paying those prices because, for me, an ebook is simply better.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 12:28 |
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Yeah. I've been a voracious reader since preschool age, and had a couple of decades of at least some disposable income before the ebook era began... way too loving many books. Have spent the last five years trying to get rid of most of them (keeping only ones I'm pretty sure I'll want to reread, or a few special sentimental favourites) but I still have too many goddamn books. Probably down into triple figures now, at least.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 17:57 |
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angel opportunity posted:So back to scifi/fantasy. How many sci-fi/fantasy books do you guys read per month? More than one? I'm guessing it's kind of rare for the average sci-fi/fantasy reader to read more than three books in a month, though I'm just kind of pulling that out of my rear end. I just read the first 3 Caine books in... a week? And that was in-between doing all the other poo poo I have to do day to day. If I have like a week off and nothing to do I can probably go through a 500-page SFF book in a day or two. I've definitely had lazy summers where I would just lounge around all day and knock out 12-15 books over the course of a month when not playing video games. No idea how representative I am though.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 17:59 |
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WarLocke posted:I just read the first 3 Caine books in... a week? And that was in-between doing all the other poo poo I have to do day to day. If I have like a week off and nothing to do I can probably go through a 500-page SFF book in a day or two. I've definitely had lazy summers where I would just lounge around all day and knock out 12-15 books over the course of a month when not playing video games. Back when I was in school and had lots of free time that I should have been spending studying, I would routinely read a book every day or two, unless I was getting into gigantic doorstoppers like Malazan or Wheel of Time. Even now, with a full-time job and a kid, I'm managing to read about 100 books a year; 80-90 of those are typically fiction and most of those will be SF/F. One book a month seems like an unreasonably low estimate.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 18:09 |
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Soooo after getting pushed back to like March of next year, the release date for the new Rivers of London book has been changed to November 3rd. Looks like it might actually be coming out this time as it seems like people have gotten ARCs that they posted reviews on.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 19:06 |
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# ? Jun 1, 2024 05:35 |
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Groke posted:Yeah. I've been a voracious reader since preschool age, and had a couple of decades of at least some disposable income before the ebook era began... way too loving many books. Have spent the last five years trying to get rid of most of them (keeping only ones I'm pretty sure I'll want to reread, or a few special sentimental favourites) but I still have too many goddamn books. Probably down into triple figures now, at least. You say like it's a bad thing? There is no such thing as too many books.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 19:23 |