Posted on March 23, 2022 42 Comments
How is Kaiju a bestseller? Let’s add it up! New York Times: #10 (Combined Print & eBook) USA Today: #19 (This list covers all books sold in the US) Audible: #6 (Audiobook Fiction) Los Angeles Times: #4 (Hardcover Fiction) Indie Booksellers: #10 (Hardcover Fiction) Amazon: #15 (Fiction, across all formats) You know what? This is […]
Posted on November 15, 2022 12 Comments
The headline pretty much sums it up. I’m pleased on both counts. It’s nice to be appreciated here in the bottom half of 2022. That said, if you would like to vote for Kaiju for in the Goodreads Choice Awards (or for any other nominee, if in fact you prefer them better, although if you […]
Posted on August 11, 2022 13 Comments
And, well, that’s pretty damn cool. Here’s the whole ballot of finalists, and at the bottom of that I’ll put in a link so you can go vote for whomever you like. 1. Best Science Fiction NovelLeviathan Falls by James S.A. CoreyThe Kaiju Preservation Society by John ScalziGoliath: A Novel by Tochi OnyebuchiYou Sexy Thing by Cat RamboShards of […]
Posted on January 24, 2023 43 Comments
I, like many others, have been watching The Last of Us on HBO Max. I have also been watching it with subtitles, and I’m shocked at how garbage they are. You would think that such a huge, expensive, and widely-anticipated show would cater better to its subtitle-using audience, but you’d be severely disappointed. What do I […]
Posted on November 28, 2022 95 Comments
Welcome to the first day of the Whatever Shopping Guide 2022 — Our way of helping you folks learn about cool creative gifts for the holidays, straight from the folks who have created them. Today’s featured products are traditionally published books (including graphic novels and audiobooks); that is, books put out by publishers who ship books to stores […]
Posted on November 3, 2022
Another year, another anthology: doesn’t editor and author Lavie Tidhar have other things to do with his time? No! (Well, maybe, but not to the exclusion of this.) Turns out, he’s on a mission, and that mission has resulted in The Best of World SF: Volume 2. Here’s Tidhar to explain. LAVIE TIDHAR: The Best […]
Posted on October 19, 2022 4 Comments
There are many ways in which small indie presses and large traditional presses differ, and in this Big Idea for the anthology Farther Reefs, co-editor J.S. Fields identifies one that you might not expect. What’s this difference? Read on! J. S. FIELDS: Lesbians. Okay wait. Hear me out. As someone who writes in both traditional […]
Posted on November 29, 2021 94 Comments
Welcome to the first day of the Whatever Shopping Guide 2021 — Our way of helping you folks learn about cool creative gifts for the holidays, straight from the folks who have created them. Today’s featured products are traditionally published books (including graphic novels and audiobooks); that is, books put out by publishers who ship books to stores […]
Posted on March 15, 2022 34 Comments
Finally! My newest book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, is out and in the world (or at least, in the US and Canada, the UK edition comes out on Thursday). It’s available in Hardcover and eBook, and also in Audio, read by Wil Wheaton. You can get it at your local bookseller, or online: Amazon|Barnes & […]
Posted on July 18, 2022 6 Comments
I was curious about getting my musical compositions onto streaming services, and I was recommended DistroKid to do this — for a flat annual fee they will get your music up onto just about every service that streams music. I went ahead and used my most recent musical track (now subtitled “The Vince Clarke Fan […]
Posted on June 6, 2022 2 Comments
Today’s Big Idea is Super-Sized, because author Dave Creek has not just one, but two, new books out in the world, released simultaneously. How did this happen and how do his books — Watcher of the Skies and Chanda’s Homecoming — relate to each other? Dave is here to give you all the details about […]
Posted on December 1, 2022 9 Comments
Author Leah Vernon knows something about persistence, as this Big Idea about the years-long struggle to publish the story that would become The Union tells you. What is the story that motivated her through all this time? Read on to discover. LEAH VERNON: What would you do with boundless privilege? The kind of privilege that […]
Posted on November 15, 2022 2 Comments
We all know Albert Einstein — he’s the personification of “scientist” in the minds of most of us — but as always, there’s more to the icon (and the man!) than we expect. Jim Ottaviani explains what this means in this Big Idea for his (with artist Jerel Dye) graphic novel retelling of the life […]
Posted on March 29, 2022 1 Comment
William Faulkner once said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s a sentiment that Jess Montgomery can certainly appreciate, since her new novel, The Echoes, deals with something very close to that idea. Here she is to explain further. JESS MONTGOMERY: Can we ever outrun our pasts? I think the answer is… […]
Posted on June 15, 2022
How do you write a book that reaches past its target audience, to readers that have never tried your genre before? According to author Stephen Cox, you have to lean into the things that make it genre defying in the first place. Follow along in his Big Idea to see how he does this in […]
Posted on October 12, 2022 1 Comment
Author Jason Denzel knows the challenge of enticing readers to one book — but what about an entire trilogy. With this Big Idea about the final installment in his Mystic Trilogy, Mystic Skies, Denzel is going to give it a shot… and be sure to check out the book trailer at the end. JASON DENZEL: […]
Posted on May 19, 2022 2 Comments
Punching billionaires: Can it be done? Should it be done? In this Big Idea for Glitterati, author Oliver K. Langmead offers a mechanism for it that is (probably) unlikely to get one landed in jail for it. OLIVER K. LANGMEAD: Capitalism isn’t working too well right now, and one of the most grotesque symptoms of […]
Posted on December 2, 2020 12 Comments
But still lovely to see: A big ‘ol advertisement for The Last Emperox in NYC, through the good graces of Amazon, which included the book in its annual Best Books of 2020 list, along with, of course, many other very worthy tomes. You can see the science fiction and fantasy selections here, if you have […]
Posted on February 1, 2023
It’s been said that fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Author Dan Rice is exploring the topic of unwanted notoriety in his newest novel, and the second installment in his Allison Lee Chronicles, The Blood of Faeries. DAN RICE: Allison Lee, the eponymous protagonist of The Allison Lee Chronicles, has her first brush with […]
Posted on November 29, 2022 2 Comments
It’s no surprise that today’s generation of authors might also be gamers… but the influence of gaming on their writing may be more substantial that you might suspect. Kayleigh Nicol, who co-wrote Crystal Awakening with Andrew Rowe, speaks to this integration of writing and gaming, and how the latter informed the former with this novel. […]
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