I will be signing at the following book stores.

 

Tuesday, October 27, 2015       Minneapolis, MN        Uncle Hugo

 

Wednesday, October 28, 2015        Albany, NY         Flights of Fantasy

 

Thursday, October 29, 2015     Milford, NH       Toadstool

 

Friday, October 30, 2015    Worcester, MA       Annie’s

 

Saturday, October 31, 2015     Cambridge, MA         Pandemonium

 

Sunday, November 01, 2015      Burlington, MA      Barnes & Noble

 

Tuesday, November 03, 2015   Seattle         University Bookstore

 

Wednesday, November 04, 2015     Portland       Powell’s

 

Thursday, November 05, 2015      San Diego     Mysterious Galaxy

 

Friday, November 06, 2015      Scottsdale     Poisoned Pen

 

Saturday, November 07, 2015    Salt Lake City/Layton   Barnes & Noble

 

I will also be a guest at DragonCon, SLC ComicCon, and ALA.

Here is the book trailer for Son of the Black Sword, coming out at the end of October.

I got back from Book Expo this weekend and have a lot of catching up to do. If you are waiting for an email I will be spending today trying to get through all of those. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on.

Book Expo was interesting. This was my second BEA. It isn’t a convention. It’s a trade show for the entire publishing industry. Sci-fi and fantasy make up one tiny fraction of this thing. I gave away ARCs for Son of the Black Sword, met with buyers, vendors, and sales reps, basically lots of schmoozing, then Baen has a little reception/gathering, and then we do a nice dinner.

There are a few people that I get to meet with whenever I go to New York who are just wonderful folks. I don’t just mean to work with, but to hang out with too. Baen’s marketing wizard, Corinda, is the best. I love working with Barnes & Noble, Audible, and Simon & Schuster.

I had some very interesting business conversations, many of which I can’t post about in public. I was worried that I’d catch flack because of all the negative media attention related to Sad Puppies, and the many CHORFs screaming about how I’ve ruined my career, will never work in this town again, blah, blah, blah. Basically, most of the publishing industry hasn’t heard or doesn’t care about the Hugos, it is a non-issue to them, and those who did talk to me about it were either on my side, or weren’t on my side but thought the stagnant little pond still needed a rock thrown in it.

There were also some interesting political conversations. The vast majority of the publishing folks live around and work in New York and are usually politically liberal. Everybody is nice, but at party conversations, people like me are a weird fly-over, red state curiosity. No, really, I do own like that many guns. 🙂 I had a fascinating and too brief conversation about how Simon & Schuster realized after Bush’s reelection that there were actually lots of people in America who are not liberal and did not think that way, and maybe they should start some imprints to publish conservative political books, and New York publishing was all like no way, nobody believes that stuff. But S&S started some imprints aimed at conservative audiences and shockingly enough, made buckets of money.

I know all of you guys in the rest of America are like, well, yeah, obviously the other half of us like to read too… But it is hard to explain. It’s like for many of them most of us who live/believe differently don’t even register. It isn’t malicious at all. It is just a cultural blind spot of an industry that overwhelmingly swings one way and lives in one region. Sharp business people, regardless of their personal beliefs, see that market exists and realize that there is money to be made by providing products aimed at it, or at least offering products that don’t actively insult that market.

I always enjoy visiting NYC, but I’m a country boy at heart. My tolerance for crowded cities is measured in days. Everything is loud. Everybody is up in each other’s business. However, the food is amazing. So for a few days I eat like a king, and when I’m not going to meetings, I play tourist. After a few days, my brain is fried and I just want to go back to my home county that has more cows than people, not a single stop light, which Manhattan would fit into one corner of, and not hear sirens or honking every second.

Now for the updates. First off, the new website is looking pretty good. Thanks for all your hard work, Jack. I know he’s been making tweaks all week based upon you guys’ feedback. If you guys have any issues with the website, Jack reads the comments and has been working on them.

The next Book Bomb is going to be for Peter Orulian’s Trial of Intentions. After that it will be Peter Grant’s latest, War to the Knife. Dates to follow as soon as I figure out when exactly I’m around.

I owe you a calendar of tour stop dates. I’m going to ALA and DragonCon this summer, and then I’ve got 3 weeks worth of stops in October and November around the country. I’ll get that posted soon.

Baen made a book trailer for Son of the Black Sword, I’ll get that posted too. It is pretty nifty. I have had a book trailer before this, but it was for the Czech version of Monster Hunter, and it was SO METAL. Man, I love the Czechs. But anyway, American book trailer for Son of the Black Sword coming soon.

It looks like I’m going to be doing some book signings in Europe pretty soon too. More to come on that. I’ve got to renew my passport. The last time I did that was when I applied for that accounting job in Baghdad. Yes, you can tell how much I enjoy travel. 🙂

This is CorreiaTech’s Marketing Daiymo Jack Wylder. The ILOH is traveling out of town this week so our CFO Wendell has asked me to take this opportunity to make some adjustments on the Monster Hunter Nation website. Do not adjust your internet- the entire process shouldn’t take that long and should be relatively painless. If you experience any tingling or numbness, see your doctor. Thank you.

edited to add:
Due to multiple requests we have now implemented an edit feature on comments. Once you post, if you refresh the page you should see an ‘edit’ button by your post along with a 5 minute timer counting down; once it hits 0, that’s it. (That way typos can be fixed, but people can’t go back and change what they said after they get called out on it.)

I’m going to post the changes here so you don’t have to scroll through all the comments to keep up. I can’t guarantee this will stay here forever, but at least until Larry returns…

THE List and progress

-Preview button ((resolved with the 5 minute edit ability))
-That too big space up top (menu) ((resolved))
-Menu is hard to read and not centered ((resolved))
-That whole ‘on phone you have to see the books first’ thing. ((I’ve had a lot of back and forth with the theme developer and he agrees it’s a problem. He’s coded a fix and it will be included in the next update.))
-I understand wanting the comments on the left as that’s the “prime” real estate. Might swap them back. ((Switched back.))
-Am planning on reducing the font size on the sidebars((resolved))
-‘Post Comment’ is unreadable white on white ((resolved)
-Some pages (An Opinion on Gun Control for example) are slow to load. ((Comments will now be split into multiple pages of 50 top level posts. This will speed up the site overall (I know it can be annoying. There’s a balancing act required…)))
-Building off the above, currently it is oldest comments on top and works down from there. ((Larry will advise which way he prefers upon his return.))
-Member requested ability to post YouTube videos in comments ((Resolved, although it seems to only work from desktop/full addresses and not mobile ones))
-Request for Twitter feed to move to side bar ((Until we get the ‘what comes up first on phones’ issue resolved, it’s staying down there so it’s out of the way)
-Font ((changed to a different one, but I’m not seeing what other are seeing. If you have a problem with the font, PLEASE send me a screen shot to correiatech1911 at gmail dot com- I can’t fix what I can’t reproduce!))
-A few folks had a problem reading the font selected. ((This is going to be a fine tuning thing- a couple of hunters sent me screen shots (which helps). I’m trying another one today and can tweak this on the fly until I find one that only a couple of people complain about. Ultimately it will come down to the font Larry likes best…)) ((Update 2: the people who sent me screenshots are much happier with this one so as long as Larry likes it, we’ll keep it on this one…))

The ALL NEW Monster Hunter Nation! Now with 76% MORE Hate! New Package- Same Great Taste!!

I will be at Book Expo in New York City next week. This is an industry show, I don’t think there is anything open to the public, and I’m booked up with business stuff the whole time. So I won’t be doing any regular events or even playing tourist while I’m there.

I’ll have the full calender of my tour stops and cons for the rest of the year posted as soon as I get back. I just needed to figure a few things out schedule wise before posting. People have been asking, yes, I will be at DragonCon. I’m going to ALA too, but that is causing me to miss LibertyCon. I’ve got about a month of tour around the release of Son of the Black Sword, and I’ll post all those soon.

Speaking of which, Jim Butcher read it and loved it. He wrote a blurb for the cover. Jim is a very talented author, I’ve been a fan of his for a long time, so that was pretty neat. Beyond the blurb he gave me a bunch of feedback on the plot. Jim got what I was trying to do and what I’m working towards. He’s a perceptive guy. 🙂

Some of you have noticed that on the eARC for Son of the Black Sword the cover has changed.
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-2688-son-of-the-black-sword-earc.aspx

The basic black cover is now the cover for the hard back. The Larry Elmore painting is now a full color art page in the front with the maps. This was one of those marketing decisions that the author didn’t have much to do with. There was a bunch of discussion. I trust my marketing people, so if that’s what they say to do, that’s what we’ll do.

People ask me how much say an author has over their cover. At first? Zip. And by the time you are successful enough that your opinion actually does count, that means you’ve sold enough books that you trust the people who sell them for you.

That said, this picture is still totally bad ass, and I’m glad it is in there as a glossy art page. (I’m also putting it on my wall in a nice frame).