Cover Cage Match: The Night Circus
Welcome to the second installment in my Cover Cage Match series! From Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora to Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.
Exhibit A, in the left corner: UK hardcover–going head to head with the US hardcover, a.k.a. Exhibit B.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I adore my copy of The Night Circus as a physical object. It has a lovely cover, stylish black-and-white-striped endpapers, and silver foil-stamped lettering under the dust jacket, which is important when you take off dust jackets to read, which I do.
Yet I’m pretty torn on this cover match-up! They’re both rather stylish. On the one hand, those white silhouettes on the British cover are a good match for the book: chic but whimsical. On the other hand, the British title treatment leans a little too far toward whimsy. It comes across as too childish. For me, the American cover more than wins on title treatment. But for some strange reason, instead of reading as a clock and tents, that cover image always seems like a creepy marionette sitting with its strings cut. (To me, at least–not that the creepy marionette image doesn’t also suit the book!)
Overall, I have to say I’m leaning toward the US version. It’s a touch crisper and cleaner than its UK counterpart.
Thoughts? Let me know!
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The Preorder Threshold
Been a while since I posted, as work has been exceptionally busy for the past few weeks. Sorry! This week saw the release of (among a frankly ridiculous number of other fabulous and long-awaited books) Veronica Roth’s Insurgent. Accordingly, the office was a bit mad in all the best ways.
So I’m going to bring work into this post more than I usually do. We ran what turned out to be a highly successful preorder campaign for Insurgent, which got me thinking about preorder campaigns across books and other media, and my personal relationship with preordering.
That is, I don’t tend to. There are quite a few personal reasons for this–e.g. I’m usually well behind on my to-be-read and to-be-watched media queues, or I try to avoid ordering things online because it’s a hassle to have packages delivered to my apartment. But there are more general reasons, too. And these, which I think apply just as well to people who aren’t me, have two main themes: logistics, and incentives.
The Insurgent campaign focused on incentives. We put out a goal number and offered a reward to fans, which they’d get once we achieved that number: a brand-new piece from the author. Veronica Roth re-wrote a scene from her first book, Divergent, from the perspective of the series’ male lead, Four. Once we got to our preorder goal and could “Free Four,” we posted the scene on the series’ Facebook fan page. Fans loved it. We loved it, both because it’s a great scene and because our awesome fans, a.k.a. the Divergent Nation, were helping us spread the word.
In other words, good times were had! But personally? I’m not sure I would preorder a book for that kind of reward: aggregate, available to both those who preordered and those who didn’t. In the past, I have preordered books and video games, but only in one of two cases: (1) when I was actually worried about stores selling out on release day, or (2) if preordering got me something extra that I couldn’t get anywhere else, and that I wouldn’t get if I didn’t preorder the item myself. For a recent example from a much smaller-scale book preorder campaign, take Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone, which you can preorder from Books of Wonder in New York to get a signed copy and a limited-edition map of the book’s world. As for option 1, well, that’s almost a dead concern in an era of online shopping, instant video streaming, and ebooks.
Isn’t it? Online retail giants like Amazon might not be likely to run out of inventory on release day, and they certainly won’t be “running out” of ebooks, but they pose a different logistical problem. If I preorder an ebook from them, sure, I’ll get it on release day–probably in the wee hours of the morning. But if I order the print book, I sure won’t be getting it delivered to my door at midnight. In fact, I might not get it on release day at all. Granted, Amazon itself is probably pleased at the way this incentivizes an ebook purchase. But say I’m a stubborn Luddite, which I am, a bit, when it comes to print books. (Especially good-looking shelf-candy items like The Night Circus–or second and third books in series of which I already own hardcover print copies, like The Wise Man’s Fear, which I bought very near to release day last year.) Stubborn Luddite that I am, I do still shop online–but not if I can get my long-awaited sequel today in a bookstore.
What about you? Allergic to preordering, the way I apparently am? A fan of the process? What kind of incentive does it take for you to preorder a book, movie, or game? Let me know in the comments.
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Review: The Song of Achilles
In the interest of full disclosure, this review is of a book that comes from my publishing house (albeit from the adult division). Hang it all, the book is so beautiful that I can’t help reviewing it anyway. Hope you enjoy!
Title: The Song of Achilles
Author: Madeline Miller
Read this: because it’s stunningly gorgeous. (Or because you enjoyed Troy, but thought there wasn’t nearly enough guy-in-skirt-on-guy-in-skirt action between Patroclus and Achilles. Hint: yours truly did!)
The short version: A moving, elegiac reimagining of an ancient epic. If you hated the ancient Greek poets in school, The Song of Achilles will change your mind.
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Win a Trip to BEA!
A bit of fun news today for book bloggers: Goodreads and the AAP have teamed up to offer a contest that will send 4 bloggers who write primarily about books and/or the book business to NYC for this year’s Book Expo America! You can enter in one of various categories (which include separate divisions for fantasy, paranormal, and sci-fi). Entries include a list of sample articles and a bite-sized summary of your blog; Goodreads visitors can then vote for their favorites.
For more info, or to enter the contest, check out the Independent Book Blogger Awards page on Goodreads! Voting opens April 10th, so you can also check back in a couple of weeks and give your favorite bloggers a boost.
Even if you’re not interested in entering, this looks like it’ll be a good forum for discovering new blogs to read! I’m impressed with the genre breakdown in particular–it looks like Goodreads knows their bloggin’ audience well.
I’d love to see one of you in NYC this June, so turn on your contest mojo!
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You No Longer Have an Excuse Not to Read Terry Pratchett
Not that you did before–but now you especially don’t have an excuse.
I learned a bunch of pretty awesome things the day I discovered this link.
1. There’s a Discworld fansite called “Discworld Fanatics”;
2. There are short stories set in the Discworld that I haven’t read (shocking!); and
3. The lovely folks over at aforementioned Discworld Fanatics have made a beautiful color-coded flowchart (flowchart! AND TERRY PRATCHETT!) to guide you through the various arcs and timelines of the Disc.
They provide several solid jumping-off points, which work equally well for newcomers to the whole series and newcomers to a particular story arc. The chart also covers a bunch of rather non-linear associations among various novels, the non-linearity and squiggly arcing about of which suit the spirit of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld perfectly. I would try to recommend a preferred starting point of my own, in case you decide to start reading the series from scratch–but the moral of this post is, if you couldn’t tell, that I don’t particularly care where you start, as long as you do.
Here’s a small version of the chart, so you can see how pretty and colorful it is. (You’ll have to head over to Discworld Fanatics for the–huge!–full version.)
Discworld is a much looser amalgamation than your average fantasy series; the vast majority of the novels stand quite well on their own. But with scads of inside jokes, recurring characters, and the like, the books improve exponentially as you read more and more of them. So what are you waiting for?
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Cover Cage Match: The Lies of Locke Lamora
In honor of Suvudu’s hilarious and utterly kickass SF&F character cage match, whose 2012 iteration started today, this is the first part in what I hope will be an ongoing series: Cover Cage Match. Only, instead of mashing up different book covers and pitting them against one another, we’ll be looking at two different iterations of the same cover. The best part? You get to vote.
Aside from my personal geekery over graphic design and typefaces, I’ve got a serious and (gasp!) potentially educational reason for this. Book design is changing in today’s market, with increasing emphasis being placed on a cover’s legibility as a tiny thumbnail, at etailers or on a color ereader. Likewise, publishers outside the US have their own concerns, and may want to convey something different to readers than their American counterparts. Not to mention repackaging of books between editions from the same publisher. But I could go on about this forever, and that would be boring.
So! Tonight’s guest: Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Exhibit A: US hardcover, vs. Exhibit B: US mass-market paperback.
Does a lot change in a year, or what? I’ve always been a huge fan of the title treatment from Lies, so I’m glad they kept it on the mass-market cover. And the new version is colorful; I’ll give it that.
But it also, in my opinion, misses the elegant simplicity of the hardcover version. Together, the title treatment and the suggestion of a castle are more than enough to suggest “medieval-era fantasy world”–as if the blurb from GRRM didn’t do that all by its lonesome–without defaulting to the “long-haired guy in period dress with sword” type. By contrast, the mass-market version feels cluttered. The title gets lost a bit in those rainbow-colored spires, the yellow/white combo of the lettering does it no favors, and why oh why that font for GRRM’s quote?
But that’s just my opinion. Fire away with yours below!
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Welcome to the latest epic fantasy series for which I’ve become a whole-hearted evangelist. Ordinarily I would review each book separately, but I couldn’t be bothered to put them down long enough to do that. So here’s my review of Brent Weeks’ Night Angel Trilogy.
Title: The Way of Shadows, Shadows Edge, and Beyond the Shadows
Author: Brent Weeks
Read this: because you need to do something other than mope about the elusive, migrating release date for Scott Lynch’s Republic of Thieves
The short version: A genuinely fresh take on the so-called “gritty” epic fantasy trend, complete with assassins, spies, war, death, and intrigue. These books have both brains and heart, and you don’t want to miss them.
