ANNEALED news! and: I coulda been a contender...

(This post first ran, in an ever-so-slightly edited form, at www.indiesunlimited.com this past Friday.)

Man, I was so sure I was going to win. I was so close to the semifinal circle in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards that I could taste it. My Tarot cards even said good news was coming! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, Seized could fail to be a semifinalist. That’s what could go wrong. And did, this past Tuesday.

If you’ve been playing this game of life for long enough, you’ve entered some contest or another, and unless you’re an extraordinary individual (and if so, I’d like to stand very close to you so the magic rubs off), you’ve lost at least once. So you know what it’s like: the sinking feeling in your gut; the denial; the rage; the desire to put the whole episode into your next novel and savage all those rotten writers whose books made the cut, because God knows nobody’s – NOBODY’S – was better than yours!

Oh, right. Sorry.

The rage and denial, at least, have been clinically documented. Years ago, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously wrote a book about the stages of grieving, and those two emotions are in there, along with three others. Here, then, as a way of helping my own healing along (and with apologies to Ms. Kubler-Ross), I offer the Five Stages of Grief for the Writing Contest Loser:

1. Denial. “There must be some mistake!” For me, this was exacerbated by Amazon’s server issues on Tuesday, the day the semifinalists were announced. I couldn’t get to the page and had to rely on the Minion Brigade to check the list for me. So I had that niggling sense that maybe somebody had looked at it funny, and my book really was there, after all, and it was all a big mistake.
2. Anger. See “the desire to put the whole episode in your WIP” above.
3. Bargaining. This stage is marked by sacrifices to one’s deity of choice: “I’ll do anything You ask, if You’ll just make their site go down long enough for them to put up the corrected list of winners!” This is also known as the “if only” stage: “If only I’d tweaked the book a little more, or edited it one more time, or spent more time beefing up the section on X, I just know would have won.”
4. Depression. Unfortunately, and particularly for writers with fragile egos, the “if only” stage can send them right into a spiral of despair of the “I’ll never be good enough” variety. Sadness is a normal, and even healthy, reaction to losing something you value. Make a date with your coping mechanism of choice (alcohol, ice cream, bubble baths, movies that make you cry) and get on with it. But if if you find yourself wallowing in grief, please go talk to somebody who can help you get over it – a friend, a family member, other writers, the dog you kicked in stage 2, or a mental health professional.*
5. Acceptance. There comes a day when you find that while the world is not the place it was, all shiny and full of promise, you have the strength to go on. As for me, I said all along that I was only in the ABNA for the Quarter-finalist prize – the Publishers Weekly review (which you can read at the tab up top). And I got this blog post out of it, too. So really, by my own measure of success, I won.

Although I wouldn’t have turned down the cash.

*A lot of this post has been tongue-in-cheek, but I’m dead serious about this. Depression is an illness caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and long-standing feelings of sadness and worthlessness are among its symptoms. If you have felt this way for a long time, please get checked out. 

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In happier news: This morning, I finished the first draft of Annealed.  Whoo hoo!  I think I tied up all the loose ends (although I'm sure y'all will let me know if I overlooked something...).  I'm planning to let it ferment...uh, that is, ripen...for a bit, then do a first editing pass, and then send it to my editor.  Still hoping for publication in mid to late May.  Stay tuned....

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 This moment of rollercoaster-emotion-fueled blogginess is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

News roundup, a PSA, and a quandary.

First, some news.

News item #1:  Seized got a terrific 5-star review this week at Big Al's Books and Pals.  The reviewer even said I might be her new favorite fantasy author -- which is gratifying, humbling, and squee-inducing, all at once.

News item #2: Also in the gratifying, humbling, etc., department, my buddies over at kevinswatch.com picked Seized as the inaugural book for our new book club.  Maybe I should write a book club study guide....

News item #3:  I sat down yesterday and drafted a rough outline for the final Pipe Woman Chronicles book.  The majority of the research is also done.  So I should be starting to write the first draft, oh, maybe next weekend.  Although I also need to finish that sweater; all that's left to do is the neckline edging (picking up stitches, oh goody) and sewing the side seams.  And I still haven't made myself a scrapbook of the Danube cruise.  So many projects, so little time....

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We pause now for the following public service announcement. 

My daughter Amy, who works for a Barnes & Noble store, would like to remind everyone that Barnes & Noble is, in fact, NOT GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.  Yes, B&N is closing some stores, BUT NOT ALL OF THEM.  And she would really like to stop having to explain this to people who call her store to find out the latest discount on DVD boxed sets and whether they've started selling their bookcases yet.  Got it?  Good.  Let's move on.

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Now, the quandary.

Publishers Weekly put a curious item on its website this week.  Amazon Technologies -- a division of Amazon.com -- has been granted a patent by the U.S. government for a system to re-sell used e-books and used audio books.

Indie authors have been scratching their heads since the article was released on Thursday, and the brevity of the piece makes me think PW couldn't make heads or tails of the announcement, either.  After all, you don't really own the books on your Kindle -- or the songs on your iPod, for that matter.  What you have purchased is a long-term lease of copies of these digital files.  Amazon made that abundantly clear in 2009, when it yanked copies of George Orwell's 1984 from users' Kindle libraries because the third party who uploaded the book to Kindle Direct Publishing didn't own the rights.  (Amazon settled a lawsuit over the incident later that year.)  And last year, Bruce Willis reportedly was thinking of suing Apple to find out whether he could leave his iTunes music collection to his kids in his will -- a report that later turned out to be false. 

When the latest news came out, I did a quick Google check of tech industry websites, and learned from Wired.com that the Amazon patent covers resale of the lease on the content, not a resale of the content itself -- so the Zon isn't changing its business model to let us buy e-books outright.  Basically, the patented system would cut off the seller's access to the content as soon as the buyer paid for it.  Also, there would be a limit on the number of times a file could be resold.  

Speculation is that Amazon might allow re-selling in order to get the content out from under publishers' control.  It occurred to me today that this could be particularly lucrative in the digital textbook market.  Students who buy dead-tree texts pay through the nose for them, but at least they can sell them back at the end of the semester -- an avenue denied to those who buy digital editions of the same texts.  An Amazon-controlled used textbook marketplace could give e-textbook buyers this option -- and as a plus, it could erode Barnes & Noble's lock on textbook sales through its campus bookstore operations.

The Zon could also use used e-book sales as a carrot to attract authors to its own publishing division; authors who sign with an Amazon imprint could conceivably be granted a cut of any resale proceeds of their Kindle books -- a perk trad publishers can't offer.

Other industry wags think Amazon locked up the patent to lock out resales of digital content altogether.  Just because someone holds a patent, these experts say, doesn't mean it will ever be implemented.

It's still unclear what effect, if any, this system will have on indie authors.  As many of us have observed, it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference between a new or used digital file.  It's not like you can dogear an e-book, or break its spine.  And many indie books are already so cheap that the cost savings on a used file would probably be minimal.  Maybe Amazon would grant a cut of any resales to indies who publish on KDP?  Who knows?  Maybe it won't affect us at all.  Time, I guess, will tell.

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This moment of bloggy celebration and speculation is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.