kirbycrow.com Blog

She wore snow for lace
ice for slippers
a shawl of sleet and bone.

She broke her neck on the steps
a proud-eyed nothing
on her mountain of ten thousand ghosts.

(Photography c.2010 by Kirby Crow. Larger image here)

She’s as green as the back of a snake
A whipcord wound with jute and copper
Her heart shot with ironweed.
Once her lovers wore brown and blue.
They came and spun her honey into gold.
They put a rusty spike through her palm
Where they built the railroads.
Now she’s in a cottage with peeling paint
Her hair strung with telegraph wire
Breathing a sky poured from smoke,
Swallowing her emeralds one by one.

(Photography c.2009 by Kirby Crow. Larger image here)

Some of you may have noticed that none of the main pages work on this blog today. I don’t know how long it’s been broken, and I only found because I was trying to make a (very long overdue) post on here and I realized all of the paths to the sub pages are broken. This is a server-side issue so they will hopefully have it resolved by tomorrow.

So that I can make that post that I didn’t make just now.

Not that it was going to be great or anything… I haven’t won the lottery… nope, not an alien either. Too bad.  I think I would look nice with antennae.

In this image released by NASA/JPL showing a large impact on Jupiter’s south polar region captured on Monday, July 20, 2009, by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Astronomers say Jupiter has apparently been struck by an object…

Yup. Seen it.

I, for one, welcome our new galaxy-building overlords. 1×4x9!

A cool (read: fascinating, neato-o, Iwantitgimme!) new e-reader called Plastic Logic looks like the real digital-paper thing the industry has been shooting for all along. All that remains is for all publishers of digital content to adopt an industry standardization of the ebook format, and we know why some publishers don’t want to do that. I mean if there were no proprietary ebook formats, why would anyone pay $400 for a Kindle reader when a Plastic Logic or Sony ereader was $100-$150 less?

When there’s a reason behind a platform difference – say Wii vs Playstation 3 – I can support that. But a book is a book is a book. A story isn’t going to magically improve if you read it on a Kindle. The only thing readers really care about with ebooks is ease of readability (which means no weird formatting errors), storage space, access to their stored files, and if the text is legible and scalable. They don’t want to have to work to find their place, and paging back or forward should be simple and quick. These days, all new ereaders have those basic capabilities.

So, Kindle, Sony, Adobe, and all you other bigwigs out there; stop asking us what we want in an ebook reader. What we need is a standard format for all ebooks, so when a new book is released it will be universally available to all ereaders across the board without a lot of annoying fiddling, cracking, and converting. Asking us if we’d like the buttons in cornflower blue instead of gray is like offering us a cupholder for our new car when what we really need is an airbag. Less style, more substance, please

Speaking of substance, Mel Keegan has stepped forward and developed a completely awesome and far-reaching wiki for GLBT books. With well over a thousand pages, the GLBT Bookshelf wiki is fast becoming the most informative place on the web to find the books you really want to read. Go forth and marvel, and if you’re an author of books with GLBT characters, think about joining up and contributing to this great project.

Angels of the Deep -5 stars

This is a dark fantasy, so uniquely beautiful in its horror and alluring in its pain that you’ll be unable to put this book down. The world Crow has created from the brilliant sun to the depths of empty darkness combine with the fantasy and history of Gods, Angels, Demons, and the ultimate balance of good and evil. The subtle and nuanced writing with beautifully lyrical prose read like a fantasy, yet the tangible evil and fear within almost mock the lovely, moving and descriptive writing of such deeds. This is an incredible story that I read twice before even attempting to write a review and will likely read many more times in the future.

 Complete article here.

Now that’s what I call a review. Mojitos for everyone!

In all the furor over AmazonFail (and how they completely trashed my successful sales rankings over the weekend), I never got around to cross-posting my announcement here. Angels of the Deep is on sale at these outlets:

Ebook:
Mobipocket
All Romance Ebooks

Paperback
Barnes & Noble

I refuse to post the Amazon sales links until they stop delisting Gay and Lesbian books, and Fictionwise is lagging a little, but they will be up within a week. If they are your preferred seller, be patient. I will definitely post here when they go on sale. I’ve posted an excerpt link below (PDF format), and if you buy the book and enjoy it, how ’bout telling someone about it?
Read an excerpt

Easter weekend was a big one for me. Not only was I not going to have to do any cooking (my sister threw the Easter bash this year), but my new gay paranormal novel Angels of the Deep was being released by MLR Press. I had been keeping close tabs on my Amazon sales rankings and category bestseller listings for the past few months, and I knew that my previous novels were doing pretty well in sales. Their ranks were finally dipping regularly into the eight and nine thousand marks (which with 7 million+ titles on Amazon, is pretty darn good, they tell me),  and Angels of the Deep was on bookshelf lists, wish lists, blogs, and recommended reading lists for a month before it came out.

I checked my stats on Friday night and noticed something odd: the sales rankings for two of my print books had vanished. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Or if I did it was like: “Oi, where are they?” I never once thought that something as unfair and unashamedly discriminatory as removing my sales ranks and stripping my various place ranks in the (gay and lesbian) category bestsellers had happened. I put it down to temporary database issues.

By Sunday afternoon, when I attempted to show off my book links on Amazon to friends and family and my stats had failed to return, I started to feel a little uneasy. This wasn’t right. Again – the same as two years ago when Amazon abruptly wiped every digital ebook title from their shelves prior to implementing their proprietary Kindle format – Amazon had done something.

Early Sunday night, a quick check of my blogroll informed me that Amazon.com was removing gay and lesbian- themed books from bestselling lists and erasing sales rankings. All of my print novels on Amazon had been delisted. A search of my name on Amazon now only returned my novels that were available in Kindle format. To find my print novels, you had to click on my name to specifically request to see what else I had written. This was definitely not normal.

At that time, a glitch was not being blamed. Amazon was sending out form letters explaining that delisting and stripping sales ranks was the new policy for “adult” material.  In other words: “gay = adult, now leave us alone, thanks.”
It went like this:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage

I was pretty dismayed. No, scratch that: I was downright upset and mad. I’d been waiting and working on this novel for a long time, so you can imagine how I felt when I found out that – as far as Amazon.com was concerned- no matter how well it sold, neither its author nor its readership were ever going to be correctly represented by Amazon. The results would be fudged and hidden. I felt cheated, and certain words like blacklist began to circulate the ‘net.

And now, even though Amazon has sent out a press release claiming a “database glitch” is responsible for the delisting of gay and lesbian titles, I note that they’re only apologizing to the big name authors and the powerful publishing houses. Not a word has been said about whether or not small and independent presses are going to be including in this sweeping “glitch reversal”, and as yet I’ve seen no reversals on my Amazon pages. When it comes to backing down, I believe it all boils down to who a corporation thinks they can and cannot bully, and since bullies tend to pick on the smaller guys, I’m feeling pretty cynical at the moment.

It really is possible to find the category best seller lists for Gay & Lesbian fiction, but it takes some manual search and a lot of clicking to get there: Gay & Lesbian, Literature and Fiction, Fiction, Romance

When it comes to internet sales, the last thing you want is for your customers to get frustrated before they get to where they want to be on your site. More clicks = less sales. Amazon was the first major bookseller who touted one-click sales. It was the home of one-click sales. I have to wonder just how much prejudice went into this decision to make themselves the home of jumping through hoops to get to the homosexual fiction.
Image credit: Bill T

Amazon Rank

In case you haven’t heard: Amazon.com is excluding Gay, Lesbian, Bi & Transgendered books and materials from searches, best selling lists and sales rankings based on “adult” content (but really it’s only the gay stuff).

details at http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/amazon-rank/

The comment I’m most in agreement with? “As always, fuckwittery should not go unrewarded.”

Face it, most of us are glued to our sales rankings, because it’s proof not only of sales, but of simply being read. When it’s a good rank, it means that somebody out there is reading your work in numbers. With 7 million+ Amazon titles, you’d think if you were an author with an average ranking of 100k, that would be rather good, no? Actually, the answer is no. And to reiterate, no. Here’s a quote from a site that explains what all those confusing numbers mean:

Nobody outside of Amazon knows EXACTLY how many copies of a given title are sold in a given time period, and since ranks are relative to each other, it’s a constantly moving target. The idea behind my reverse-engineering the ranking system was always to give rough idea of how a title was selling, not an exact number. So, don’t read an average rank of 10,000 to mean you sold exactly 60 books that week, or a rank of 100,000 to mean you sold ten and a half copies – Amazon doesn’t sell half copies. Read an average rank of 1,000 to mean you have a seriously successful title, an average rank of 10,000 to mean your doing pretty good for a book that’s no bestseller, an average rank of 100,000 to mean it’s not going to contribute significantly to your income, and an average rank of 1,000,000 to mean you need to take a break from checking sales ranks.

Linked.

And the capped screen that led to to more gleeful happy clappy fun for moi…