Let the news be spread

[kinzel]

This is, alas, not happy news, but people ought to know it -- that is readers of our work ought to know it. It appears that Embiid is closing down the <http://www.embiid.net>Ebook publishing arm of the Embiid operation. Right, say again, our long time seller of electronic books is closing up the sales part of the shop at the end of May and closing down the "bookshelf" part at the end of the year.

We hear these tidings from a posting Richard Michaels made on the Embiid newsgroup over on sff.net. We've not yet received reversion letters... but golly, there are 11 or 12 of our novels and many chapbooks over there, so if they decide they need to send us a letter for each contract that'd be 20 or thirty of the things! Sigh....

So... we're looking at our options; I've sent email off to a couple of possible publishers to make sure that the work stays out and available. If you're on a newsgroup or mailing list where our work gets talked about, feel free to let them know. Baen's bar, rec.arts.sf.written, the romance newsgroups, Locus, SFC, .... wherever...

I'm very sorry about this turn of events. Embiid has worked hard in a difficult economy these last six years and I'm sure we won't be the only ones to miss them. No, I don't think this is proof that ebooks are a bad idea. I think it's a sign that the US economy needs work.

Meanwhile, words on a story, a new sign for the Friends of Liad Park over in Second Life.

Other bits: lunch on this very cool and gray day was a cold-chicken picnic with potato salad and baked beans, chased with rye bread. This was thrown together very quickly when Rolanni returned from the printer with chapbook reprints after driving 70 plus miles in the rain that made the day gray.

Yesterday's lunch I should have mentioned but was distracted -- Rolanni's home-made fish chowder. You see why working at home isn't all bad...

Comments

[not-croaker.livejournal.com]

Damn... that really sucks to hear.

Hoping you can make arrangements with someone, preferably Baen... I'd buy them all over again to get them there. Every single one, including all the individual chapbooks... (Sorry, feeling a bit fanboy!ranty and all...)

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

As far as I know Baen only sells ebooks of the works they have paper rights to. They don't have our paper books -- certainly they don't do chapbooks -- so I think Baen's not a likely choice. We're looking into several possibilities, including SRM moving into ebooks.

[oberon.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'd wondered why you guys don't work with Baen. Is it a sales volume / short run issue? On the electronic front as far as I'm aware, they request but don't require that authors make available one book of a series to be offered freely in an electronic form. I'm not CERTAIN of that, you understand. They're also binding an electronic copy of the books into their hardcovers these days. I confess that when I actually went through and indexed, I found that of 1500 or so books that I own at least a quarter or so were published by Baen in one era or another. Their marketing, from a consumer / reader standpoint, seems to have been quite effective.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Baen had the opportunity to do the Liaden Universe(R) some years back but let it pass by; now the print rights to the novels are pretty well encumbered -- hardcover to tradepaper to mass market between Meisha Merlin and Ace. For 11 years or so we've been doing the chapbooks though SRM Publisher and are slowly collecting them into hardcover and tradepaper ourselves. The Liaden Universe Companion Vol 1 was sold out in hardcover before it was printed and the trade edition may need to be reprinted by Christmas...so I guess we're good on that side if we can find someone who is an electronic publisher and not a paper publisher with a sideline.

Wrong info

[(Anonymous)]

A month or so ago Baen was going to put some of TOR books out as e-books. Then somebody from TOR's parent company Holtzbrinck got scared and suspended the deal. A number of books were actually up for a week.

Thomas Monaghan

[missingvolume.livejournal.com]

Well I hope where ever the etexts find a new home you make lots of money off of it. ;-)

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Getting paid for our work is good, yes...

Aw, nuts

[bonkabonka.livejournal.com]

That's quite unfortunate. =( I've bought all of y'all's (is that how that's punctuated?) stuff and a couple of other titles from Embiid but after their move and subsequent drive crash, they never seemed to quite recover. I'd wondered, based on the frequency of updates, whether they were planning to shutter things and move on. I guess so. Le sigh.