C. J. Cherryh has a new blog

[geoffthomas]

For those of you who are fans this is the best.
Her web site www.cherryh.com has been only mildly updated in recent years.
Part of this is because she develops/maintains it herself.
But now she has upgraded/updated and put on an interactive blog - wow you can realtime conversations with a fabulous Hugo-winning author. And Yes I REALLY like her work. And from reading her online journal for several years I really like her.
This woman has won two Hugos. Published well over 50 books.
She writes both hard Science Fiction and Fantasy.
And she is my favorite author - right there with Asimov, Heinlein and Steinbeck.
I kinda didn't want to publicize this because I wanted to keep it to myself. But you deserve to have the opportunity, if you want it.
I like you guys a lot too.

So if you want to it is at www.cherryh.com and the blog is titled Wave Without A Shore.....enjoy.

[sirbruce]

I posted about it here but no one commented:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45312

[wallcraft]

The blog has good posts on ebooks. Also, from Look At Books:

We're about to offer downloadable books from this site....it's nearly impossible to get backlist back into print these days, with publishers struggling for survival. The mega-oil-companies that have bought up publishers don't want to print 'old books'. They clearly don't understand that science fiction and fantasy are highly dependent on backlist so that new readers can get caught up. So we've gotten rights back for those of our books that are out of print and we're going to do it ourselves.

This is something any successful SF author should consider. Baen (always ahead of the curve) has been doing this for a few authors. For example, I bought all their Jerry Pournelle bundles even though I had read them as paper books.

[sirbruce]

Thank you for posting the very thing I was posting about in the post before yours when I said I'd posted it before and people didn't say anything. :P

[wallcraft]

I don't know why I did not respond to your CJ Cherryh, Lynn Rosen, Jane Fancher ebooks in the works thread a couple of days ago, but it might have been that the link was to the blog main page rather than the ebook part. I actually spent time reading the blog this time because of geoffthomas's recommendation. I probably should have posted in your thread today, but I was reading this one.

[sirbruce]

Sorry if I sounded crabby. Tough day.

[rhadin]

I just sent Cherryh an email applauding the forthcoming sale of ebooks from her site but suggesting that limiting the formats to Kindle and mobi will limit her audience. I suggested she consider adding at least ePub to the available formats. It will be interesting to see what response, if any, she makes.

[wayspooled]

Originally Posted by geoffthomas

This woman has won two Hugos. Published well over 50 books.
She writes both hard Science Fiction and Fantasy.
And she is my favorite author - right there with Asimov, Heinlein and Steinbeck.

Yah, she's probably my favorite sci-fi author too. She just gets the whole thing about how aliens might see us and as I mentioned in another thread - mankind's more realistic potential future in space.

Just fyi, she's won 2 Hugos for novels and 1 for a short story, so 3 Hugo awards and she's had a few other novels nominated. I think Pride of Chanur lost out to Asimov's Foundations Edge. And Faded Sun: Kesrith was nominated one year and maybe some others (also a Fav heh).

Thanks for the linkie. I also missed the other thread. Lots of good info on that site. I found this tidbit I never knew..

"I'm told it was actually Jerry Pournelle who coined the phrase TANSTAAFL...which many people (including myself, thank you to the reader who wrote me pointing this out) mistakenly attribute to Robert Heinlein. TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) means that the universe at large doesn't give you a freebie pass on what comes due, including the laws of physics, the behavior of human beings, or longterm economics."

And that in a nutshell is much of what I love about her fiction (the sci-fi anyway, she's not nearly my fav fantasy author). That's what is behind the fiction she weaves. She uses science and some would consider her a hard core sci-fi writer, but she does it without being bone-crushingly boring. Just like Vernor Vinge does. For example, the "gravity well" thing. The first time I read that, I had no idea what she was talking about. What the heck was a gravity well? And then I realized - that's exactly how someone who was born in space and has never set foot on a planet, would consider a planet.

Devil to the Belt (Heavy Time & Hellburner), Cyteen, The Faded Sun: Kesrith, The Pride of Chanur, Merchanter's Luck, Tripoint, Finity's End, Cuckoo's Egg, Foreigner, Defender, .... Some of the best sci-fi I've ever read and all by the same author..

[JSWolf]

I've left a comment suggesting that CJ takes a wonder over to MR for help on converting her eBooks. I do hope she comes.

[rhadin]

Kudos to Cherryh for quickly responding to my e-mail regarding the formats that the Closed Circle books will be offered in. Her response was:

Closed Circle is non-DRM. Thanks. We will offer in Mobi and EPub. We agree with you! --j

My original e-mail, whcih I sent this morning, was:

I'm pleased that you will soon be offering your books as ebooks through your website. However, unless they are offered without DRM (so that the mobi version can be converted to a more usable format), you will be excluding many readers from purchasing them by offering only Kindle-compatible formats. A lot of us do not buy -- ever -- from Amazon (in my case because I am opposed to Amazon's attempts to monopolize the book selling and publishing industries) and do not own a Kindle . . . . A more universal format is ePub, which many ebook reading devices can read, and which is rapidly becoming the industry standard, except for Amazon, which so far has refused to enable ePub on the Kindle. . . .

[Greg Anos]

The one drawback is the fragmentation that's going on. Several writers have a site, such as C.J. Cherryh, but so do other small blocs of writers, such as Vonda McIntyre. These blocs need to come together and form a common site, to provide the reader (i.e. the customer) more of a one-stop shopping experience....

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

The one drawback is the fragmentation that's going on. Several writers have a site, such as C.J. Cherryh, but so do other small blocs of writers, such as Vonda McIntyre. These blocs need to come together and form a common site, to provide the reader (i.e. the customer) more of a one-stop shopping experience....

That would be nice if it could happen.

[Greg Anos]

I'll try to get around to mentioning it on her blog tommorrow. The beauty of the idea is it would be author to author negotiations and agreements. Joint advertizing...

[nekokami]

Glad I happened to see this. I just finished re-reading Wave Without a Shore (which is actually available through Fictionwise). Finity's End is another favorite, though really most of her books are in the "re-read" category for me. (The "Faded Sun" books didn't really grab me when I read them 20 years ago, but I might give them another try.)

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by wayspooled

Thanks for the linkie. I also missed the other thread. Lots of good info on that site. I found this tidbit I never knew..

"I'm told it was actually Jerry Pournelle who coined the phrase TANSTAAFL...which many people (including myself, thank you to the reader who wrote me pointing this out) mistakenly attribute to Robert Heinlein. TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) means that the universe at large doesn't give you a freebie pass on what comes due, including the laws of physics, the behavior of human beings, or longterm economics."

Someone needs to tell Jerry and CJ that Wikipedia disagrees:

The earliest usage of the precise phrase and acronym for this concept is first seen in two 1949 sources; an article by Walter Morrow in the San Francisco News for 1st June 1949 and Pierre Dos Utt's monograph, "TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order"[6] which describes an oligarchic political system based on his conclusions from "no free lunch" principles.
Both sources relate to a fable of a king (Nebuchadrezzar in Dos Utt's retelling) seeking advice from his economic advisors. Morrow's retelling, which is claimed to have derived from an earlier editorial that research has found to be non-existent[7], differs from Dos Utt's in that the ruler asks for ever-simplified advice following their original "eighty-seven volumes of six hundred pages" as opposed to a simple failure to agree on "any major remedy". In both cases, the last surviving economist advises that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

Now, Heinlein may easily have heard it from Jerry, but it seems unlikely that Pournelle invented it.