The Price Increase That Wasn’t, or, “How the Hell Did *I* Get Blamed for This?”

So all of a sudden I was being asked from various sources about a price increase for “X-Factor.” I knew nothing about it. Eventually I traced the source of the rumor to a thread on Comic Book Resources, the website that I’d put in my rearview over a year ago because of the frequently toxic environment. There I discovered a lengthy thread keying off some sort of early solicit material that declared the price was now $3.99.

Fan/Pro Interactions

digresssmlOriginally published October 25, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1197

“That’s all I can stands ’cause I can’t stands no more.”

Popeye the Sailor

How much is one supposed to take? And, when one has taken as much as he thinks he should, how does one fire back and to what degree? And where does the demarcation between fans and pros lie, and is there one, and should there be one?

My best Gary Carter story

I was at Shea Stadium at 1987. It was a beautiful day for baseball, and it was policy that they let everyone attending the game, no matter where their seats were, to come down to field level and watch the Mets take batting practice. So there I was, standing at the railing, with dozens of fans of various ages all around me. My favorite player, Gary Carter–the guy who started off the rally that salvaged Game 6–was just finishing up batting practice.

Had a chance to test my Madonna theory

Back when I was live-blogging the Super Bowl, I opined that teenagers today had no idea who the people she named in “Vogue” were. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Bette Davis: all these and more had no meaning.

Well, I was at the supermarket yesterday, and the cashier seemed quite young. And at a supermarket checking out groceries is pretty much the only circumstance under which some random middle aged guy can idly chat with a teen girl (she turned out to be seventeen) and not have it come across as creepy. As she ran the items across the scanner, I said, “Hey…you know the Madonna song, ‘Vogue?'”

“No.”

THE CHALLENGE OF PUBLISHING “HIDDEN EARTH CHRONICLES, BOOK 2” (UPDATED)

UPDATED 4:41 PM–Okay. Because a lot of fans on various sites were disappointed having to wait another month, we’ve decided not to go with B&N exclusively and instead are releasing it on Amazon simultaneously. Here you go. Paperback should be available next week.


For years, people have been asking me, “Where’s Book 2 of ‘The Hidden Earth?”

I had no ready answer. I had turned in the contracted manuscript years earlier, and it simply languished, untouched, on someone’s desk.

They had eighteen months to publish it, and after all that time, we’d reached the promised pub date and it had not even entered the production system. And I said, “This is not how you treat authors. This is not how you do business.” (And believe me, I wasn’t the only author in that situation. I encountered quite a few bemoaning their manuscript being in limbo.)

So when Mike Friedman suggested that a group of us take our destinies in our own hands and form Crazy 8 Press, this was the book that prompted me to join up.

I basically torched my relationship with that publisher–and quite possibly crippled my career, because book publishers don’t like troublemakers–to get back this book and the one before it (which was out of print). So that people could read it.

Book 1, “Darkness of the Light,” is on both Amazon and B&N. Book 2 is out right now for the Nook and will be out on Amazon and in paperback next month.

You can order “Heights of the Depths” here.

Please help send a pro-author message to certain publishers by supporting this and other endeavors at Crazy 8 Press. Thank you for your attention.

PAD

PS–I’ve noticed that no matter what format we put something out with, people immediately say, “Oh, I don’t have that; can you put it out in (fill in the blank).” Yeah, not this time. Nook (and Kindle, for that matter) have made it so dámņëd easy to have their platform available that you’re out of E-xcuses. To get the Nook app for just about anything electronic you’ve got, go here.