And she shouldn’t. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales — and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it’s usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.
I haven’t read any of Hocking’s books, but I have enjoyed a number of .99 cent books from Thomas DePrima, C.V. Larsen, John Locke, and Nathan Lowell. Although, as I progress through some of their series, their prices rise as they get picked up by publishers. Good business, I guess, and they still cost well below one of the crap “established” authors putting out pulp.
For instance, the $10 bucks I spent on Brad Thor’s recent crap, or one I tried from A.J. Tata ($7), proves that Publishers can pick books about as well as Producers pick movies. In a word… terribly.
Amazon user reviews and Amazon recommendations have become like RottenTomatoes or Movies.Yahoo.Com for me – I can find books that I like but that have no publisher.
Can Amazon keep this up? I don’t see why not. Unlike Apple, or Sony, for instance, Amazon consistently and always puts its consumers first. As long as they keep doing that, they should continue to thrive.
Just so you know…. the trailer is a fan trailer made from other movies but following the story of Ender’s Game – one of the best scifi novels ever written.
I read constantly. But I hardly ever read the same book twice. Some books, however, rise to the occasion and I pick them up and find them fresh and enjoyable a decade or so later:
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller takes the horror of war and somehow makes it funny.
Exodus – Leon’s Uris covers the creation of Israel.
Battle Cry – Leon Uris’s Semi auto-biographical account of Marines in WWII.
Centennial – James Michner takes a piece of ground in Colorado and weaves a thousand+ page story from stone age to modern times.
Starship Troopers – Kill the Bugs! Heinlen casts a libertarian epic in a SciFi war setting.
Ender’s Game – THE BEST SCIFI BOOK EVER
Casino Royale – I’ve read all the James Bond books multiple times, as a kid. I’ve never had a martini,shaken not stirred, but I do intend to get a Walther PPK someday…
History of the USMC in WWII – I had the book in three parts as a kid and read it cover to cover. Given my interest in the Marines I can’t account for my later decision to join the Army. The Forgotten Soldier – Guy Sager, a Frenchman of German descent fights in Russia and then Germany. A vivid, true, account of the war from the German Soldier perspective.
I’m sure there are others, but the list isn’t much bigger than this. Anyway, if I read it twice, you know it’s good!
Commenter Carl sent this list of the best 60 books of the last 60 years (as compiled by the Times of UK). I’ve read a bunch of them. Comments follow interspersed with the books.
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell – clearly applicable in 2009. I loved it.
1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis – tried twice, hated them. My wife loves them.
1951 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger – loved it.
In my review of Assassin’s Apprentice I mentioned I’d mainly read historical fiction prior to being introduced to Science Fiction. If you want to be introduced to the genre, you could do no better than to read Leon Uris.
Want to know what happens when a narcissistic but hypnotic leader entrances a nation? Try QB VII (set in a courtroom, Queens Bench 7, where a libel suit is used as a vehicle to show the horrors of the concentration camps) or Mila 18 (an address in the WWII Warsaw Jewish ghetto). Want to learn how Israel started, from a Jewish view – read Exodus. From the Arab view, try the Haj. His book, Trinity, poignantly explained the North Ireland mess and is one of 5 or so books I’ve read twice.
But the book I enjoyed the most was his quasi auto-biographical tale “Battle Cry” –drawn from his experiences as a Marine in World War II (Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and New Zealand).
I read the books from age 13 on or so. And I still have them. Brian has noticed them them in our library and I think he’s ready to read them.
Summary: Good read. Content suitable for strong early readers.
This book was my first read on the Kindle since I sort of “misplaced” it a few months ago. After a bit of mental adjustment, I started flipping the pages like I would a printed book.
The author creates characters you care about doing things you feel matter. I enjoyed the book and will read the rest of the series and also look for more stories by Robin Hobb.
BTW: When I say “suitable for strong early readers” I mean there is no gratuitous sex or other adult themes. But… characters you care about die and bad, scary, things happen. So lets call it “PG-13”.
Next up… The first of the D.J MacHale’s Pendragon series “The Merchant of Death”. Also on the Kindle.
By speculating on alien nature, SF taught me that there is such thing as human nature, that it is biologically grounded and rooted in the evolutionary history of our species. When sociobiology and evolutionary psychology began to emerge from the scientific study of human and animal behavior, only a few details surprised me; SF had already trained me to think in that direction years before.
I read my first hard SciFi far away from home on some long forgotten Army trek. I’d never read SciFi, in spite of being a computer geek in my teens. I’d read mainly historical fiction like Michener and Leon Uris. Stuck in the barracks with no car somebody handed me the “Last Starfighter”, which is sort of classic “boy comes of age and saves the galaxy” SciFi. Next up… Starship Troopers, and then I was hooked!
