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Scott Lynch's THORN OF EMBERLAIN


Werthead

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11 minutes ago, banjax451 said:

Yeah...that line "next major publication slot." That's the consequence of missing the September slot. I wonder if the calendar is full for 2016 and since Gollancz and Del Rey have already announced their schedules for Winter/Spring...it wouldn't shock me if we don't see this book before April/May/June. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course.

It'd be nice if we could get a prologue or snippet, but i'm selfish that way - totally understand that this is not in his control and there are all kinds of reasons to hold on to those until closer to publication.

He did mention April. So yes, I'm guessing the rest of 2016 is full for the publishers.

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I went to Amazon, and it estimated that Scott was currently making baked ziti, should take it out of the oven in ten minutes, and that it had emailed his wife to remind him of the deadline(s) it made. Google then pinned her location to a nearby Lowe's, where facebook tagged her, and uber sent a 10% off SUV coupon to her for assistance getting their new backyard grill home. My google calendar than auto-updated due to the slight delay, and sent out a Google plus notification to my cousin that her wedding next year has been moved up to next week as a result. Enough of her instagram followers re-tweeted their displeasure with Scott and his bedamned ziti, causing him to throw the burned ziti dish to the ground in frustration. His carefully organized outline of the finale of the Gentleman Bastard series finale was splattered by bubbling cheese, and he's had to push the deadline back again.

Writing is complicated these days.

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I really wish the publisher had someone, even a lowly intern, to vet their forthcoming book catalog they have submitted to Amazon.  Amazon isn't going to take down a book the publisher had scheduled unless the publisher tells them to and submits as changed listing.  At least for the US there is a lot less duplicated and long out of date entries.  I forget how many different ways Melanie Rawn's Captal's Tower would show up.  On the UK site I notice Gollancz still has a penchant for cluttering up the their forthcoming catalog on Amazon with the whole "untitled" by such and such and even "untitled book 3 of 4" stuff.  Amazon has shown down a better job of vetting their catalogs but they still have shown it is not a huge priority as a whole and that they aren't going to vet their prior catalog and just input the new one as it is given.  Which makes sense dollar wise.  amazon only puts in what the publisher gives them and only takes down what the publisher tells them.  They aren't going to hire someone to do what is essentially a publisher's job.  But it is frustrating that they are still slow on finding a program that cross vets and that they have told Gollancz (and the other publishers guilty of this) that they will no longer just let fill their catalog with hypothetical books. 

I get that things like this happen with books scheduled.  I have no real problem with that.  But I would like the publishers to stop listing books that have to wait for a prior book to be published before they are even written.  Everything I have read says that the novella discussed above was not going to be written until at least this book was finished.  So why list it and give it a publication date?  Yes it might create interest but it also creates disappointment and greater annoyance among the consumers and I can't think that is good business at the end of the day.

 

Looking through the US site is seems that much of the better vetting is due to a stronger and more active response to customers submitting entry reports.  So that's good of Amazon to be a bit more active in that regard.  But it is funny that once again it is the customer essentially doing the work for the marketplace that the marketplace should be doing as simple customer service. 

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Everything I've read about this online over the years indicates that this isn't the publisher's fault in most cases. Rather, it's the fault of various listing databases and aggressive attempts by Amazon to find entries and have them listed.  In this particular case, Scott has made it clear that this was some sort of monumental DB mess up that happened long ago and apparently, getting it purged from the system is near impossible.  From his own page:

http://scottlynch78.tumblr.com/post/75055250072/lunechanteur-so-ive-been-searching-around-for

" The Bastards and the Knives does not exist yet. All of the release dates on the internet are bullshit entirely beyond the control of me or my publishers. If we could simply make them vanish we would have, long ago. Erroneous information was accidentally leaked to Amazon.co.uk and other bookseller databases, years ago, and once that crap was loose in the wild it seems we couldn’t eradicate it merely because it’s entirely fictional. The weird propensity of people to review unpublished books at places like Goodreads hasn’t helped. -SL "

The Goodreads thing is what bugs me.  There should be some system in place that prevents people from reviewing books that don't exist. For crying out loud...The Winds of Winter has 291 "reviews" and 2800 "ratings."

 

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12 minutes ago, End of Disc One said:

I don't care about ratings for books on Goodreads that aren't out yet.  What does bother me is those stupid lists users vote on like "Most anticipated fantasy book of 201X."  Doors of Stone and The Winds of Winter are always near the top.

Oh, I'd go a bit further and say that I don't care about Goodreads ratings anyway. Same for Amazon. Too many organized campaigns against decent authors for political reasons have more or less proven how they can be gamed.

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Oh man, those goodreads lists are HILARIOUS. You can remove TDOS and TWOW all day and someone will keep adding them, convinced that they are coming out whenever they think they are. You have never experienced read entitlement til you've gotten into a goodreads list scuffle!

Also hilarious are what I call author bots, who just add thier self published dreck to any ist they find, whether it fits the list or no.

Oh, and there was a group of Card fans who kept adding Ender's Game to a best fantasy of 2014 list. No joke.

 

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19 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Oh, and there was a group of Card fans who kept adding Ender's Game to a best fantasy of 2014 list. No joke.

 

Oh FFS...you have got to be kidding me...  Ender's Game?  SIGH.

I fought a war with io9 in the comments of a post years ago when they posted in their "all of the books coming out this fall" posts because the editor posted an entry for something that didn't exist and he eventually admitted he'd simply looked at dates on Amazon.  That's how lazy some site editors are.  This stuff drives me nuts. I think it only encourages fans to get belligerent since "X website said it was coming out."

I'm pretty glad I've more or less given up on Goodreads for awhile now.

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On 8/31/2016 at 10:41 PM, Argonath Diver said:

I went to Amazon, and it estimated that Scott was currently making baked ziti, should take it out of the oven in ten minutes, and that it had emailed his wife to remind him of the deadline(s) it made. Google then pinned her location to a nearby Lowe's, where facebook tagged her, and uber sent a 10% off SUV coupon to her for assistance getting their new backyard grill home. My google calendar than auto-updated due to the slight delay, and sent out a Google plus notification to my cousin that her wedding next year has been moved up to next week as a result. Enough of her instagram followers re-tweeted their displeasure with Scott and his bedamned ziti, causing him to throw the burned ziti dish to the ground in frustration. His carefully organized outline of the finale of the Gentleman Bastard series finale was splattered by bubbling cheese, and he's had to push the deadline back again.

Writing is complicated these days.

It's official: you win at life. You win so very, very hard. You win all the things! 

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