WWW Wednesdays

[starlady]

What I'm reading: I got Alaya Dawn Johnson's first novel Racing the Dark when it was available as a free e-book on Amazon, and I started it on the BART home from SFO yesterday. It's really good! But why does Kindle hate page numbers? 

This is the first e-book I've ever read, unless you count PDFs from Google Books.

What I've just read: I read Guadalupe Garcia McCall's Summer of the Mariposas on the plane yesterday. McCall has potential--it's very readable, certainly, and I really liked some parts of it--but others I had problems with. Sigh. I wanted to like it more than I actually did, but other people may not have the same complaints about it. I also finished Railsea very early on Monday morning. IT WAS GREAT.

What I'll read next: With any luck, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, since the friend I borrowed it from is moving away soon. :(

Comments

[holyschist]

I liked the sequel to Racing the Dark even more, but argh, the third book is likely never to appear. >:-(

[starlady]

I'm a little further now, and I suspect part of the problem is that it was marketed as an adult book but really, really reads like YA.

One of the things I want to ask her at Sirens is whether she's considered self-publishing and/or crowd-funding publishing the last book.

[holyschist]

Huh. I'm not sure the second book reads like YA--either way, if it is YA, it's old-school YA that's not truly romance-driven, and the plot gets a bit sprawly and complex for the current genre. I'm not sure it would have fit comfortable into YA, either.

IIRC, Racing the Dark got shelved by major booksellers in African-American Fiction, where possibly SFF fans didn't see it? I don't think The Burning City got picked up by major booksellers at all, so I think 'lack of marketing, period,' may have been a major factor.

One of the things I want to ask her at Sirens is whether she's considered self-publishing and/or crowd-funding publishing the last book.

Oooh, crowd-funding. I wish she would. I'd chip in.

[starlady]

IIRC, Racing the Dark got shelved by major booksellers in African-American Fiction, where possibly SFF fans didn't see it?

What even. No wonder the third book got nixed. And people want me to cry about publishers not making money.

[holyschist]

I might be confusing it with another book! But I definitely don't remember seeing either in the SFF section of the big chain bookstores, which is pretty much the kiss of death (her vampire suffragette books did hit them, and have done much better--of course, vampires are also trendy, I guess).

But either way, there was some major marketing failure.