Booklist Review of Agent to the Stars
Posted on June 4, 2005 Posted by John Scalzi 6 Comments
The first Agent to the Stars review is in, from Booklist, the American Library Association’s magazine, and it’s a positive one. Here’s the fun part (for me, at least):
With a plot that starts out as the rough life of a young agent in Hollywood and rapidly metamorphoses into B-movie territory as a remarkably intelligent first-contact yarn, this book is absurd, funny, and satirically perceptive.
Nifty.
I also have word from Subterranean Press that based on pre-orders, they’ve gone with a print run of 1,500 copies for the signed edition. This is 50% more than the estimated initial print run of 1,000, so that’s excellent. I’m also somewhat selfishly pleased we’re not going to go to 2,000 copies, which was an amount bandied about, because that means 500 fewer books to sign. It does mean that my promise to contribute $500 to the Child’s Play charity if a print run of 2,000 sells out won’t work, though. So: If we sell out the entire run of 1,500 copies before the end of 2005, I’ll contribute $350. That’s slightly more than proportional to the original promise.
I’ll also mention again that if you pre-order the book through the Subterranean Press site, 10% of the cover price will also be contributed to Child’s Play, which is a charity that provides video games and toys to kids awaiting or recovering from treatment in childrens’ hospitals all over the US. So, naturally, I think you should pre-order it from there. But you can also pre-order from Amazon and BN.com. Subterranean tells me the pre-orders are moving briskly (recent nice notes from Instapundit and Vodkapundit helped that, you can be sure), and at the moment there are no plans to do an alternate book version. So if you do want a physical copy of your own (remember you can read it online), you may want to consider pre-ordering if you’ve not done so already.
Anyway, a good start. I’m happy.
Congrats!
Nicely done :)
And I may have missed it in a prior post, but… Gabe did your cover art?
David, if you want to see the original post on the cover art, you can find it here.
(I love Google Desktop…)
Looking at the artwork, I get the feeling that any movie version of the book would have to be done at Pixar as an animated masterpiece with the original cover artist’s input, of course) to make it feel right. Doncha think?
I mean, c’mon. The story has Pixar-treatment all over it.
Yay! I’ve been wondering when the darn thing would arrive… Rather looking forward to it. I stopped reading the story electronically so as not to spoil the paper-book experience!