State Of The Rugosa Series: Last Chance To Buy, Maybe For Some Time

[dr_pretentious]

In theory, Drollerie Press has thirty days in which to keep selling Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply. As I explained in my last post, the press is in a state of collapse due to the publisher's health crisis. With profoundest regret and with abiding good will toward everyone at Drollerie, I have found it necessary to terminate my contracts with them.

That means you may only have thirty days to buy copies. If you've been thinking you'd like to and just haven't gotten around to it, you can find them at Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and at Drollerie Press's own site, and most other reputable places where ebooks are sold.

In actuality, the same health crisis that is slowing down all of the press's key processes may slow the takedown of books they no longer have the rights to. Also Amazon and B&N are slow to respond to small publishers, so even if Drollerie does everything properly from here on out, there may be delays. You might have longer than thirty days. But please don't bet on it. My odds of getting my tiny sliver of payment are much better for sales that happen legally.

The word on the street is that Drollerie Press may be sold. I hope so, because that looks right now to be the only way the press will survive. If it sells to someone reputable who has a credible plan for the press, I may offer the Rugosa series to the new management. Certainly, I'll give the situation a little time to settle before I seek to publish the series elsewhere.

That said, I am researching my options, and one way or another, these stories will be available again someday soon. The series will continue.

As a side note, Drollerie Press also published the e-zine that hosts my one venture into podcasting: How the Grail Came to the Fisher King. I don't know how much longer that zine has before it evaporates into 404 Not Found. The podcast itself is under a Creative Commons license, so it's legally a trivial matter for me to post it in other places. I'm not sure exactly when I'll get around to doing so, though. If you want to download the story, that's probably worth doing soon, too.

Comments

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity, once the contract terminates, is selling the ebook under the table directly a legally viable option for you? You'll own the stories and the rights to distribute them; would they still own the PDF formatting or anything? (Because *that* would certainly be an easy problem to solve. :-)

I mean, I get why you would want it at a publisher in the long term, but would it be an option for cashflow in the meantime?

I still re-read Closing Arguments semi-regularly, I just love it. I need to re-read Atlantis Cranks sometime soon, I've only read that a couple of times. (I enjoyed it just as much overall, but it doesn't have quite as many "must read that scene again right now" moments for me as the first one. All those delightful little in-jokes. >:-)

[showingup.livejournal.com]

I find myself wondering about you selling direct from an author's website. Perhaps you and your fellow Drollerie authors could get together and pool resources to create a decent website selling your own eBooks? It might be something that would give you breathing space while you shop around other publishers. Also, it might give you the option of affiliate marketing with other authors and small presses. Just a thought. However it goes, I hope it goes well.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that my odds of finding these books a new publisher will be much better if I don't sell them in the interim. Some presses will not consider them because they've been published elsewhere before. The remaining presses would probably prefer not to feel that they'd be competing with me for sales.

The sales I could get without a publisher's backing are probably few enough in number, I'd just as soon wait to see the books back into print to get them. What I definitely wouldn't want to do is, say, saturate my circle of friends and family with print copies from Lulu, and then not have anyone left to count on for an initial boost in sales if a publisher picked it up.

In keeping with the general classiness Drollerie Press has shown in coping with the situation, Deena's releasing the formatting and cover art to anyone who wants a reversion of rights. Normally, the press retains rights to the art and formatting. If the big New York houses were interested in novellas, they'd probably want to do their own design and art direction, but novellas are pretty much the province of small press these days. In the world of small press, it might well be an advantage to be able to hand over a book that offers the option of bypassing the costs of production almost altogether.

(Thanks for the offer, though, onyxtwilight! You were the first person I thought of when I wondered whether to add Lulu to my list of options, and I may well take you up on it later if I strike out with the folks on my short list.)

One of the cool things about my experience with Drollerie is that the authors who have published there really formed a community online. Whatever happens with our books, we'll have one another's good will to draw on for the long haul. I'll be posting about some of their books in the next few days.)

[sleepymaggie.livejournal.com]

Done. Did not realize they were available for kindle. Is there an order to read them in?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yay! Enjoy them!

Either order has its advantages. Closing Arguments is set two years earlier than Atlantis Cranks. On the other hand, Atlantis Cranks is the one I wrote first, when I didn't know if I'd be seeing these characters again. Both stories were written to stand alone.

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

Amazon is very slow responding to emails. However removing an ebook is pretty simple process that doesn't involve Amazon staff. It may take up to 4 days to hit all their servers, shouldn't go outside the 30 days.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That is very useful to know. I don't foresee getting to the point of issuing takedown notices, but especially if the press changes hands and the new management is clueless or not so scrupulous, it could come to that. Everyone at Drollerie has tried to take the high road so far, so I'm trying to take the high road out.

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I am still holding out hope for a nice hardcover or trade paperback omnibus of *three* Rugosa stories... someday... if only because it would make such a fabulous gift.

Sorry to hear about Drollerie.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, I'm making progress on Ria again, now that I don't have my ambivalence about my non-performing publisher hanging over my creative process.

That book will happen, one way or another. I've got a flow chart of publishers to try, and if none of them work out, when I run out of prospects I can actually be enthusiastic about, I'll do it myself through lulu.com.

Meanwhile, I'm back to thinking about doing them as a serialized audiobook podcast. There are sf/f podcasts that do serials, and I have the equipment (though rarely the quiet) to do it at home if none of them pick it up.

Mostly, though, I'm concentrating on the anthology right now. Those authors have been waiting two years for their stories to come out. A few of the initial delays were due to my pregnancy and Conrad's birth, most of delays overall were due to my publisher's illness. None of them were the fault of the authors. David and I are trying to do as well by them as we would want an editor to do by us. Turns out, that's a whole lot more work than we ever imagined.