After some date-wrangling, number-crunching and budget-scrunching, it looks like I have my convention schedule for the rest of the year.

I'm going to be busier than I thought.

• AnimeNext (June 18-20, central NJ).
• Otakon (July 30-August 1, Baltimore, MD).
• AnimeFest! (Sept 3-6, Dallas, TX)
• NYAF (New York Anime Festival) (Oct 8-10, NYC)

I'm working on setting up sales tables for each event under the Genji Press banner. No guarantees of anything except perhaps the first two, but Otakon by itself would be a massive step in the right direction. NYAF, a nice cherry on top of an already-tasty cake.

I'm also hoping to have CreateSpace / Amazon.com editions of all my books by the second half of the year. I've seen plenty of good reasons to go with them, and to wind down my involvement with Lulu. The purchasing links on the site should not change anytime soon; there will be plenty of advanced warning before that happens.

I'll have more word on each event as the dates draw closer.

Right now I'm auctioning one copy of each of my books currently in print — Tokyo Inferno, Summerworld, The Four-Day Weekend — for Deb's Liver Lovers. If you want a shot at helping someone out, and a shot at getting my books for a fair percentage off the normal price, go check it out.

Additional notes about the auction:

...a fandom auction to benefit Deb Mensinger and her wife, Laurie J. Marks (author of the Elemental Logic series, the Children of the Triad series, The Watcher's Mask, and Dancing Jack, and guest of honor at WisCon 31). This auction is to raise money for the medical and incidental expenses related to Deb Mensinger's liver transplant. Deb and Laurie will have a number of expenses that are not covered by insurance, including the costs related to getting the potential live donor to Massachusetts for testing and, if all goes well, the surgery.

blem, n. 1. abbreviation for "blemish" 2. merchandise with cosmetic damage but which is otherwise intact

Self-publishing brings with it any number of hazards and peculiar conditions. One of them, as I've discovered, is how you can end up with an amazing array of slightly inconsistent product.

Back when I first launched Genji Press, I experimented with a couple of different book formatting options. I eventually settled on the closest thing to a trade paperback edition, both in size and paper quality — but by that time I'd already ordered, and sold, a number of books in other sizes and configurations. Also, by that time, I'd ended up fixing a number of small problems with the texts themselves — typos, dropped lines, switched phrases, etc.

To that end, I've got a few leftovers — blems, if you will. These are older copies of my books which are remnants of that experimental period, in a variety of sizes and with a variety of defects. Right now all I have are copies of Summerworld, but others may turn up from time to time.

What I thought I'd do is pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes sell these "blems" as special collector's items — but not at exorbitant prices. Instead, I'm selling them for a flat $10 (+$2 post) each — along with a CD-ROM that includes the full and most recent text of the book in PDF format. So think of it as buying an e-text version of the book, with an accompanying paper copy!

Because quantities are limited, I can't guarantee which copy you'll receive from the above picture. It's first-come, first-serve.

Click here to order.

As of RIGHT NOW, all my books are back in stock! Tokyo Inferno, The Four-Day Weekend and Summerworld all have signed copies and are immediately available. All books are $20 + $3 domestic S/H.

Due to a screwup on my part, the PayPal "Buy Now" buttons that I had on this site were not rendering correctly. I've re-implemented how they show up, so they should appear correctly now. Click on any of the above links to go to a page where the proper "Buy Now" button appears.

(If you still have trouble finding anything or making it work, holler at me in the comments and I'll fix it.)

Sometime in the coming year I may end up getting back to work on a project I never finished. Tentatively titled Vajra, it was my NaNo project for 2007; it fell short of the needed word count for the month and I ended up shelving it and turning attention to other things. But once it's finished and retitled, it'll be the third book I've written, more or less in a row, that deals with a kind of "Tokyo of mystery" or "enchanted Tokyo".

The first one you already know well: Summerworld. (And if you don't know about it, then by all means educate yourselves.) The second is currently being written: Tokyo Inferno. I hadn't been consciously trying to create a trilogy — past, present, future (sort of) — but that's what came out.

To that end, I'm thinking of bundling all three of them into one volume when they're done — or, at the very least, selling all three together as a single $30 set (perhaps as a convention-only special). The three are linked by many other things other than locale, so it only makes sense. This would be a long way off, of course, but it's something I find myself coming back to as a nice way to wrap up the package with a bow.

Oh, and I'm back from AnimeNext! (Photos here.)

For all of those who came by my table and bought Summerworld and Four-Day Weekend: Thank you. I hope you enjoy both of them immensely. I'll be back next year with more books (like the still-in-progress Tokyo Inferno) ... and a bigger table, to boot.

What, more good news!? Yes.

As of right now, thanks to the good graces of the folks at Lulu.com, I now have all of my books currently in print available on Amazon.com. Summerworld, The Four-Day Weekend and the older works Another Worldly Device and Casual Users are all available directly from Amazon.com via the above links!

[Taped applause]

How did this happen? Apparently, Lulu.com periodically offers Amazon.com placement for certain select authors and books. I'm still trying to find out if this means future books from me will also be automatically eligible for Amazon distribution, but I intend to make that possible even if they don't give it to me as an automatic option. (I also plan to fine-tune the prices as best I can to make sure I can offer the Amazon books at costs that are commensurate with the other distribution channels.)

Obviously, I'm thrilled. I now have the chance to connect directly with a massive number of people without having to go through a publisher.

It also means I need your help, dear fans, more than ever.

Here's what you can do.

1. Order some of my books. If you've been going back and forth about picking up a copy, and have only hesitated because you trust Amazon.com more than Lulu (or me), or because you have credit with Amazon that you can't use anywhere else, then go buy one of the books at Amazon and make me happy.

2. If you've already bought my books, write a review. Log onto Amazon.com, go to one of the above listings, and contribute a review so that other people will know that this thing was actually read and (gasp, shock) enjoyed by others.

3. Promote within Amazon. Add the book to your Wish Lists, your So You'd Like To ... guides and your Listmania! lists.

4. Promote outside of Amazon. Link back to my site, link back to my books (use the direct links above, they're the shortest), and just go nuts getting the word out.

A reminder: I'm going to be at WickedFaire this coming weekend, with books for sale and at least one panel discussion appearance. Everything I have will be available signed at the cover price ($12), as opposed to the $20 I normally charge for Internet sales. If you can make it out there, this is a great way to pick up everything I have in stock, cheap!

My next convention appearance (where I'm actually in a selling capacity) won't be until the end of August, when I turn up at AnimeFest with Tokyo Inferno in tow. There is also the chance I'll be selling at NYAF, but that has not yet been nailed down, and the cost may simply be too prohibitive right now for that. I'm also considering I-CON, although I haven't been there in ages and my experiences with it were, to put it mildly, not positive. I hope things have improved since.

Turns out the product IDs that I linked to for both Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend were wrong. I've since fixed the issue. My apologies to anyone who was cross-directed. (I also didn't need to create entirely new versions of the products anyway, just revise the existing ones.)

It's done! The new 5.5 × 8.5 versions of my books Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend are available for purchase NOW. Both are available for $11.99 — down from $15! — and are available signed by the author for $20.

You can visit the links to learn about each of these books, but here are the blurbs as I've traditionally given them to others:

• Summerworld: Neil Gaiman meets Hayao Miyazaki, or so one of my readers put it. Come to think of it, that's a pretty good synopsis. My version was "a story of high adventure and deep insight in a world where desire reshapes the face of reality". Not nearly as sound-bite-y, though.
• The Four-Day Weekend: Formerly The New Golden Age, it's my love letter to the convention-going scene, drawn from years of rubbing elbows with other fans. But did I mention it's also a love-and-brotherhood story? And a riotous comedy?

The cover art is still the same for each, however:

Coming in spring: reissues of my earlier novels Casual Users and Another Worldly Device!