Update on the Facebook site: the Three Of Us of Closed Circle would be very grateful if all of you who do have Facebook accounts would make a brief sortie up to Facebook, do a search for Closed Circle (you’ll know the logo)—which is at the moment waaaay down the list of things that come up under that name and quickly “like” it. A mass of you could do a lot for our prominence in the Facebook engine, and a lot of “likes” and even some suggestions to friends could help us out. If you want to visit our Discussion page and leave some felicitous statements on Closed Circle’s new Facebook-page, that would be nice, too. We are shamelessly dedicated to selling books, and we are about to greet our first autumn-season of operation with a modest flurry of offerings, so right now is a very opportune time. No few of the users of Facebook just don’t come to the blogs, so this is one more way we can reach people.
Closed Circle now has a Facebook site.
by CJ | Sep 23, 2010 | Journal | 36 comments
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Facebook is being wonky right now, at least for me – I’ll be back this evening with likes, friend suggestions and some “felicitous statements” I will probably also boost the signal at LiveJournal, Dreamwidth and LibraryThing.
It’s wonderful to see you, Jane, Lynn and Closed Circle finally engaging in the self-promotion you deserve!
We have apparently blown Facebook off the air. Amazin’. This has never happened. 😆 You’d know it’d be on Our Launch…
I didn’t know we’re related – you must know my cousin, Murphy!
Intimately!
But I have to say, it’s up now, and CC is buzzing!
We are being ‘liked’ all over! Scoot on up there, dear people, and make us rise in the FB search engines! Plus let your friends know!
…..annnnnnnndd…they’re down again!
…annnnnnnnd they’re up again! The weight of all of Closed Circle descending upon them must be testing their servers, eh?
I’ve been trying to hop over to Jane’s blog off and on since this morning, and I’ve had faster banana slug races; it stalls about 2/3 of the way to loading. Is something ‘up’ over there?
I went right through. Could some others test it?
She did change her theme [too many glitches since a software upgrade] and if you haven’t been there in a few weeks that could take a while to load the graphics for the first time—but the whole internet’s been wonky. Facebook’s been down, Twitter was down a day or so ago, and Cheezeburger’s been slower than Christmas. Dunno if the web’s under some kind of attack, or if the servers are just wheezing under the weight of Farmville…but I’ll tell Jane.
Y’know, she did set her page to echo to Facebook. I wonder if that could be the hangup?
I got a clean load of Cap’n & Lime.
CJ, you are prominently mentioned here:
http://io9.com/5644628/read-science-fiction-to-understand-the-things-that-mainstream-media-wont-talk-about
I don’t know what their policy is about commercial links in comments, but I expect you could link if you created a profile.
That’s rather nice, Walt. I just echoed that to my Facebook page…since the thing is up and running again. 😉
Isn’t it nice? You can, BTW, also comment by just giving an email address, if you don’t want the trouble of an account. I use a throw-away Yahoo address there. Oddly, you comment in the box to the left of the purple (sometimes black) Share button.
What fun! I got in as number 72. I’ll definitely pass the word around. I really think you are all on the forefront of something major with publishing your own ebooks. The sort of coverage that can happen with the social network stuff could really take off. You all did link your regular ‘pages’ to Closed Circle, didn’t you?
Yes. We have it in the ‘info’. Hopefully people will poke buttons and investigate.
OK, I’m not a big FB fan, but now I keep looking for the “Like” button on this blog 😉
Every so often the brain kicks in and works…. I was thinking this morning about ads in con program books, followed by the brain kicking in and saying too expensive. One thought would be to get some of the conventions to have a page or link to a listing of author run ebooks. Even if it’s just the FB group.
Just think of the advertising if some of the larger regional conventions would be willing to add this sort of thing. Adding a link is not a lot of work. I’m nost suggesting they add an extra page on their site. It could make an interesting discussion topic “How long till you must use the computer to read a new novel?”
Everyone in unison now, “About four weeks.”
(As of 9-24-10.)
The conventions are peculiar in this regard: some of them are aggressively not happy about e-books, possibly because bookstores are their supporters: we ask if we can do programming related to the e-book market—nope. Others are pricing their ads at 50.00, and we just cannot possibly afford that. They have been willing for us to put up our fliers or hand them out, which is nice. But in general I think organized fandom is not quite as receptive to e-books and small presses as we would have thought. I think for one thing the newer members of organized fandom are still able to get used copies of, say, Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore or H. Beam Piper. Or a more recent writer like Andre Norton or Gordon Dickson or Clifford Simak or Fred Saberhagen. But those books are getting fragile. They were always paperback, but that paper is not going to last another century in any readable form. The books get scarcer, the price goes up, the readers get fewer, and what they’re left with is the latest thing on the stands—but with none of those background-books to the whole sf body of knowledge. Knowing the sf field well is not a matter of seeing Predator, Firefly and Avatar: it’s a matter of reading those foundational books, some of which were, say, heavily borrowed from for those items. The Community of Ideas is about being well-read in the literature as well as the current offerings—and I’m not talking about, well, the field changes. The field should get broader, deeper, and more abundant, NOT just a veneer of new-new-new whiz-bang thinly skinned over a thinner and thinner body of reference.
End rant.
Well, that’s certainly surprising about organized fandom and conventions not being happy about e-books.
It certainly isn’t true of all of them. But I think it’s handwriting on the wall that some convention organizers had just rather not think about. I don’t think it’s against us, far from it, and some conventions have been extraordinarily helpful, but when your ad copy goes missing and your requested panel doesn’t happen, maybe I just get the notion the concept was not too welcome. And I may be over-reacting. But I’ve seen concepts like virtual reality and worldbuilding just take off like wildfire, often with the loosest concept what the panel should actually focus on; and the whole e-book and publishing situation and backlist availability thing just has not been popular. Not only with the concoms, and for this I can’t blame them. The readers don’t necessarily want to hear it either.
Reverting to Walt’s link above, I just finished reading The Tatja Grimm World by Vernor Vinge. It was in some ways less than satisfactory but one of the themes was a publishing house that traveled the world on an ocean going barge, buying stories and selling magazines and books everywhere. Because the most popular magazine published the equivalent of science fiction, eventually the fiction became science and technological developments began to explode all over the world. I liked that.
And ditto Sandor. And ditto mmberry. What you are doing with your own ebooks, and letting us all know where to find other writers’ ebooks, is a huge service and I would think the cons would see that as a real draw. You, Jane and Lynn should run a panel at the next con you go to on ebooks.
Try two. Ragweed has me teh stooopid today.
First, ditto Kokipy, Sandor and MMBerry. You and Jane could give a lot of information about ebook publishing and self-promotion (always a hot topic). It’s a natural outgrowth of your willingness to share and network. Second, on the fragility of paper books: I bought an ebook copy of Daughter of the Bright Moon recently. I’ve had a copy on my bookshelf since the early 80’s; but when I picked it up for a re-read, it started to fall apart in my hands.
I think of books as “permanent”, but of course they’re not. When I worked in a bookstore long ago, I literally cried the first time I had to “remainder” paperbacks by tearing off the front cover. (My boss wasn’t mean, but thought it was hysterically funny – she laughed until *she* cried.)
Woo hoo! The FB Closed Circle page has 128 people who “Like” it in only 24 hours.
CJ & Jane presented an eBook panel at Spocon (Spokane WA) late this summer that was very well attended by a variety of people with very different backgrounds and foci — but all with the love of reading. It was clear CJ & Jane could have talked for hours — and the attendees wanted them to, but the room was needed for the next panel.
Jane made the excellent point that as the paradigm shifts to epublishing, editors will become increasingly important, but in different ways than in the past. Otherwise, we will each end up with our own personal slush piles, with few ways to discern quality. Jane proposed editors “transform” themselves & take advantage of this new opportunity: an editor’s so-called “stamp of approval” would mean the book had been vetted.
Jane can discuss this FAR better than I could, but that was simply one thing that came up during this very interesting panel. MORE-MORE-MORE!
Yet a sizeable number of the people in that audience were other writers—not the population of readers you’d think or hope for, and not that well-attended over all, which was disappointing. True—people did want to hear more. But there weren’t enough of them, and the younger members of the convention were way under-represented.
I think there’s still a lot of resistence to the idea out there. Writers who sniff and say, “Huh. Self-published.” Readers who say, “I love paper books.” Well, so do we all. But what about the CONTENT that’s going away? I’m going to do a new post—this one on How Many Do You Have In Your Library.
I see my post re cons was out of date! Having read what you’ve said, let me just say that I think cons and readers are extremely shortsighted not to find this interesting and important. It may be that the younger readers have found ebook readers to be beyond their financial means, especially these days, but then you make the point that they all have computers :). And the newest Kindle is quite reasonably priced.
Is your post going to be about how many books we have, or how many ebooks? I know exactly how many of both because of compulsive librarythinging.
I have noted elsewhere that I am increasingly reliant on my kindle because we recently moved to a small house with NO ROOM FOR THE BOOKS. All I have room for is the TBR pile. All the books I’ve read are offsite. And as to fragility, my paperback Dickens, purchased back in the 80s along with my earliest CJCs, are falling apart and cannot be read,and the Faulkner isn’t far behind. So I bought Dickens’ complete works on the Kindle for 99 cents. If they were still under copyright I’d have spent what it took to get the ebooks. I recently got all of Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolai in ebook format, although I have all of them, also, in paper, because the paper editions are, again, offsite. I would LOVE to have a kindle that had all of my favorite books on it. Of course, then, the Kindle would be too precious to carry around with me casually 🙁
One of the big potential problems with the Amazon model of business is that heaven help you if you lose your Kindle, as I understand it. Would they replace your books free if you bought another Kindle? Do they keep records of what you’ve bought, so you can get a re-download? I certainly hope they do!
With ours, we have a record, and thus far we have been able to help people out who had a problem, but records-keeping is really very difficult, dependent, well, not on our computer, but on the online database keeping our records. That’s why we so urge everybody who buys our books to put them in more than one place, put them on DVD, and when the storage media mutates into something else, keep them backed up onto new media. Some DVDs break down fast. Economy in that department is not a good thing…
One thing you can say: an e-library is certainly easier to alphabetize, and to carry upstairs in a house move.
CJ: You lose your Kindle you call Amazon and have it de-registered. Your account at Amazon still knows what e-books you have bought and once you have registered your new Kindle your library is available. And if you decide to read on your ipad, download their ipad app and register it with them.
Yes, Amazon is good on this. We have two kindles, an iphone and two itouches and we can put anything we own on any of the equipment, simultaneously. When I bought my husband a kindle for his birthday last year, all of the books I had already bought were available to his kindle as well as to mine. My account at Amazon lists all of my ebooks, like a library, and all of the equipment in a drop down menu and I can download as often as i want. When I run out of room on my kindle, which was the first one out and has inadequate storage space, I can delete it from the kindle but can download it again from Amazon if I want it and have room. On the Iphone, all of the books I’ve bought are archived and I can get to any of them I want. Also, if I ever try to buy an ebook a second time, Amazon reminds me I already own it. I know Amazon is not good to the authors and I wish to goodness they’d pay you for your books. But apart from that, which is not a small issue and I dont mean to trivialize it, I have been delighted with the Amazon kindle/ebook service. Having said that, I also moved all of the books to an external hard drive along with my CC books, just in case.
@kokipy: I was looking at the new releases for mysteries on Amazon, pulled up the Kindle edition and found that the cost of the e-book was about $3 more than the PB and close to the HB in price. This pricing was set by the publisher and I, for one, won’t be buying it until the price drops to about that of the PB. Amazon now has a link on the Kindle pages to public domain collections and this page has links to where you can get out of copyright ebooks inexpensively. It seems they’ve started marketing this as an alternative to the agency model pricing.
(Drat! can’t find the link)
that’s interesting, tulrose. I’ll look for that link as well. This sounds a bit like Miracle on 34th Street 🙂
Here’s what I found: http://www.archive.org/details/texts
Amazon says it is a place where you can get 1.8 million out of copyright books. Maybe some of the ones we’ve been discussing in the next thread up are available there. I think this is a link you ought to put in your left column, CJ. I’m off to explore it.
Done, Kokipy. There’s now a link to it called The Archive Project: similar to Project Gutenberg. Some of these are really obscure historical items, reference materials, things from the 1700’s, etc, plus books in various languages.
The nice thing about these archive sites as reader-feeders is that you can snatch up a book, look at it, keep it if you love it, dump it off, or store it on a DVD, and know that you can always get it back from the same source if you want it again or want to recommend it to a friend.