I hope all of you out there are enjoying your holidays. Hope you had a great Christmas, or Solstice, or Hanukah, or Kwanzaa, or whatever you celebrate. We had a wonderful Christmas here, with family and friends visiting. Which is just one reason I am, typically, offering Christmas greetings a few days after the fact. (I’ve hardly been online at all in the last few days, much less writing blog entries.)
One of my favorite comic strip discoveries of last year was Sheldon, which I started reading on comics.com, then subscribed to after it moved to its own web site. The last couple of days, Sheldon has been doing a riff on Battlestar Galactica, which has been very funny—and accurate. If you’d like to read it, start here and move forward. (Sheldon is the kid; the talking duck is Arthur.)
We’re actually a few episodes behind in watching Galactica, so I don’t know yet exactly what’s happened in the mid-season cliffhanger (though I glimpsed a bit of it while recording from free On Demand on our Comcast cable). But in general the writing on the show this season has been superb—the best yet. I wish I could say that sales of the book have been equally superb, but it would be a lie. There have been various screwups in distribution, including a long delay in getting the mass market paperback
listed on Amazon.com and into bookstores. (Borders still doesn’t seem to be carrying it in most stores.) If you don’t see it, by all means ask for it.
I feel a cold coming on (people around me have been dropping left and right with colds and flu), so this might be my last entry before the new year. If I don’t see you before then, have a great one!
Jeff
Anonymous
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Hope the cold bug doesn’t detract from the fun at all.
http://www.jrvogt.com
Kitty
I bought the lone copy that they had at our Borders last week. They’re not really promoting it- I had to go down on the bottom shelf past the whole shelf of multiple copies of Orson Scott Card books. Your stuff is waaay better than his any day. Harumph.
(P.S. don’t tell me how BSG turns out- we are about 7 weeks behind on our tv watching.)
Anonymous
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen it at two of my three local Borders in the last two weeks (and haven’t been to the third recently). Placed where you’d expect it, at the end of the SFF section with the other BSG novels. [Didn’t pick it up, since I already have the hardcover. 😉
Jeffrey A. Carver
I’m glad some of you have found BSG at Borders. Was it the (large) trade paperback or the (small) mass market paperback? The Borders near here had one trade paperback, but the cheaper mass market pb was listed as special order only. Ditto when I checked a few other stores in the area online. Someone looking in the L.A. area reported no luck.
I don’t know if the slow sales generally indicate a problem in packaging and marketing, or if the market for media tie-in books is fading. There may simply be less interest in such books because there are now so many other ways to relive the experience–DVDs, web sites, etc.
Charlza
I got 11 days off work this Christmas and only have 2 days left now 🙁 It’s going to be so hard to go back to work!
I’ve seen your BSG book in the following Borders: Athens GA, Buckhead GA, and I *think* at the Mall of Georgia in Buford.
Admittedly, I’ve gotten away from tie in novels several years ago.
We both had colds the week before Christmas, but mine was much worse. Didn’t keep us from visiting Charleston, SC though, hehe. Love that city.
Andrew Timson
(I’m the second anonymous comment above—don’t know why Blogger didn’t post as me, even though I was logged in…)
Both of the copies that I saw of your book were the mass-market versions; the other two were the trade paperbacks. I have yet to see any of the three hardcovers just on the shelf; I had to special order my copy.
My guess is that it has to do less with the market, as other tie-in lines seem to be going full steam ahead. Could be packaging; I’m not a big fan of the cover art, for any of the four to date. (But then, I wasn’t overly impressed with the art commissioned by the same editor for the Andromeda novels either. Cliff Neilson does great photomanips; too bad David Hartwell didn’t bring him back from the Earth: Final Conflict line. The BSG covers seem like they were slapped together in Photoshop in fifteen minutes.)
Could also be the marketing—I haven’t seen, well, any. But that’s also par for the course with tie-ins, as far as I can tell; they’re basically expected to sell themselves. The closest I’ve seen to advertising is articles about the Star Wars ones in the official magazine. (Hopefully Tor’s working with Titan to do something similar.) I’m not sure how much of that’s exposing them to an audience, and how much is just preaching to the choir, though.
But I’d say it’s more likely your point about other ways to relive the experience. Even within other popular tie-in lines like Star Trek, there’s been a downward trend in the number of novelizations recently. Also, yours first came out nearly two years after the miniseries aired, the mass-market version closer to three. By then not only did the DVD come out, but the series had moved on from where the book was.
Jeffrey A. Carver
Just a quick comment about the cover art: I don’t much like it, either. But the problem isn’t that the publisher can’t do good art, it’s that the studio hands them preexisting art and says, use this. They don’t really have much choice.
In this case, the art was originally designed for a poster advertising the series (not the miniseries). I would have much preferred the art used on the DVD, myself.
tsmacro
I live in an area where the “largest” town in our county is about 30,000 w/ maybe a total of 50,000 overall in the county i’d guess. So not very big. So in our not very big mall we have a not very big Waldenbooks w/ a pathetic sci-fi selection. As sad as I am to report it i’m not sure i’ve ever seen any of your books there Jeff, BSG or otherwise. This is why I pretty much rely on Amazon.