m. c. de marco

I found my way from Dean Wesley Smith’s twitter feed to L. M. May’s posts on learned helplessness and Barry Eisler going indie. I read Barry Eisler’s long two part dialogue with Joe Konrath about self-publishing.

Paramourtal is up for sale in Kindle format and many more at Smashwords, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of editor Kevin Hosey.

The Kindle version of Paramourtal is now up at Amazon, along with the trade paperback:

Via @sfwa and SFScope: Pyr has announced they’re slushing unagented fantasy doorstops—uh, novels.

Pyr is only reading unagented submissions in “the subgenres of epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and contemporary/urban fantasy.” Their needs for horror, science fiction, and slipstream are being met by agented submissions, so they’re not opening up those subgenres to the great, unagented masses.

Via a mailing list: I will just note in passing that the once-reputable romance publishing giant Harlequin Enterprises has become a vanity press, as noted by the RWA. Jackie Kessler has a detailed exegesis of Harlequin’s press release announcing their new vanity imprint.

Via @StanCarey: the Guardian reports on what flies on and off the shelves of Oxfam used book shops.

Brown, who has sold more than 81m copies of The Da Vinci Code worldwide, has been revealed as the most donated author to Oxfam’s 700 high street shops.

Via io9: in a stunning fit of irony, Amazon secretly deleted all copies of 1984 from all Kindles.

An uproar followed, with outraged customers pointing out the irony that Amazon was deleting copies of a novel about a fascist media state that constantly alters history by changing digital records of what has happened.