Amazon KDP vs. IngramSpark Hardcovers

Depicted at the top of this post is the author copy of the hardcover edition of Rags and Muffin, which I received from Amazon KDP before the book went live (hence the “Not for Resale” stripe across the middle). My initial thought was that it looked really good, very professional and well put-together. The cover art is printed directly onto the case, and it came out crisp.

Recently, my wife, unaware that I could order additional copies at cost, ordered a few of these from Amazon in order to give them as Christmas gifts. When her copies arrived, I immediately noticed that they looked markedly different from what I had originally received from Amazon. Here is a side-by-side comparison:

Amazon and IngramSpark hardcovers.
The two hardcovers, compared.

My author copy is a thicker book, and a little better looking. You can also see that, in the copies my wife ordered, the title is not quite centered but shifted to the right. Even more baffling, if you look closely, you can see that my name overlaps Rags’s sneaker in the author copy but not in the ordered copy. I at first had no idea how that was even possible since I uploaded the cover as a single PDF file.

My first thought was that I had inadvertently uploaded the wrong cover image to Amazon KDP at some point. I have been shuffling a lot of files around to get this book published, so that would be likely—except the book should have failed to publish if that were the case, since Amazon has exact specifications for covers and will automatically reject anything that doesn’t fit.

After hunting through my files, I finally found the answer: The cover art on my wife’s copies is the cover for IngramSpark, the print-on-demand service that more or less holds a monopoly on distribution to libraries and brick-and-mortar stores.

Since Amazon KDP has only just recently begun offering hardcovers as an option, this may be a new discovery: Apparently, Amazon shipped IngramSpark hardcovers to my wife instead of its own hardcovers. That may indicate that Amazon outsources printing whenever possible. I have not tested if this is also true of paperbacks.

I’m not entirely happy with this. Amazon appears to be turning out a better product, as their version of the hardcover looks better in every significant way, including the binding (both are glued, but Amazon’s at least has a cloth backing). Not only that, but I can correct the contents of the Amazon version instantly and for free if necessary, whereas the contents of the IngramSpark printing are locked in by IngramSpark’s prohibitive pricing.

This has got me to thinking—is IngramSpark actually worth it? Their distribution is better, but since I’m small fry, my chance of being picked up by booksellers is remote anyway, especially since I can’t afford to buy back unsold copies. Almost all of my sales are certain to come from Amazon anyway, and if Amazon is willing to sell an inferior product in lieu of its own better product … maybe I should just kill the IngramSpark version and sell exclusively on Amazon. For this reason, I am already enrolled in Kindle Unlimited: It forces me to offer eBook versions on Amazon exclusively, but I know from indie authors with much greater reach than I have that eBook sales on other platforms are negligible.

Rags Says Preorder Her Book or She’ll Sic Muffin on You

PREORDER TODAY

My latest novel, Rags and Muffin is now available for predorder! This is a rough, tough vision of the magical-girl concept that brings together a wide range of influences from the kumari veneration of Nepal to the film noir tradition of American cinema. Bone-crunching action blends with a brooding meditation on the concept of the child hero. Rags and Muffin is Fancy Nancy as written by Rudyard Kipling after binging on mecha anime while tripping on acid.

And I have to give a special shout-out to the team at MiblArt, which knocked it out of the park with the book’s cover art. This is an incredible interpretation of Rags and Muffin, compelling enough to change my own vision of the characters. I’ll likely review their services in the near future.

Since I just got the cover art near the end of October, I’ve decided to push the release date back to early December because I want to run some promotions that require a preorder window. But I recommend ordering now to lock in the low preorder price.

This post contains affiliate links.

‘Dead 2 Rites’ Now on Sale

BUY NOW

It’s finally here: Dead 2 Rites, the long-awaited sequel to Jake and the Dynamo, is now available in paperback, Kindle eBook, and Kindle Unlimited. As always, the eBook version is DRM-free and lending-enabled.

In honor of this new release, you can once again, for a limited time, get Jake and the Dynamo for 99 cents.

For the time being, this is an Amazon exclusive. Other buying options for both books are forthcoming; I’m currently arm-wrestling IngramSpark to convince them that, yes, I really own the ISBN.

I hope you enjoy. And please consider rating and leaving an honest review. Every review is an enormous help to a new author!

Dana Volt, eleven-year-old powerhouse, and Jake Blatowski, befuddled teenager, are back for more in the action-packed sequel to Jake and the Dynamo!

Just when Jake thinks he might finally get a break, he has to face down a murderous kaiju with a skin condition and join the city’s hardest-rocking magical girl in an underground battle against an army of bloodthirsty pastry chefs. As if that weren’t enough, he also has to deal with Pretty Dynamo’s newest rival, a human Swiss Army knife who revels in rule-breaking.

But behind the chaos of these latest threats to mankind’s existence looms a greater evil, for Lord Shadow’s baleful eye has again fallen upon the Earth. Now a conspiracy of monsters may awaken a mad god from the sea of uncreation outside the cosmos—and the only girl who could unite humanity’s defenders for a final stand is slowly succumbing to madness.

Social Credit, Dystopia, and the ‘Spirit Flyer’ Series

As the world goes on and history continues to be one damn thing after another, I often hear people comparing present events and circumstances to various dystopian novels—1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World being constant favorites. However, on the rare occasions that I make the mistake of turning on the news, I am reminded most of an obscure series of children’s chapter books called the Spirit Flyer series, by John Bibee.

I had not read these books since I was a small child, and they were intended for a niche readership, so when I recently went looking for them, I expected to have to dredge up informational tidbits from dark corners of the internet. However, it turns out that the books have their fans, and three of them (there are eight in total) are currently available on Kindle.*

The Magic Bicycle

The first of these books, The Magic Bicycle, was published in . Written from an explicitly Evangelical Christian perspective, The Magic Bicycle is an early example of what came to be known as “CBA fiction” (CBA stands for Christian Booksellers’ Association). It also comes from the era of the so-called “Satanic Panic,” which informs much of its imagery. It is a precursor to the most successful, or at least best-known, CBA novel, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness (), which it somewhat resembles, albeit without Peretti’s stylistic finesse.

Peretti’s work is largely responsible for popularizing a movement within Pentecostal Christianity called “Spiritual Warfare,” which involves finding out the names of “Territorial Spirits” who control various places and things, and presuming to command them. (Older Christian sects would consider such activities superstitious, dangerous, or both.) In any case, at least one site sees a link between the Spirit Flyer books and the Spiritual Warfare movement, which may or may not be accurate.

Although an adult reader will immediately notice their shortcomings, the Spirit Flyer books stuck in my mind after I read a handful of them as a child. They contain exceptionally weird imagery and a set of villains capable of terrifying the youngest readers; indeed, I recall that I attempted to read one of these books (I think it was book 3, The Only Game in Town), and quit because I found some of the content too disturbing.

Continue reading “Social Credit, Dystopia, and the ‘Spirit Flyer’ Series”

Double Book Review: ‘Bambi’ vs. ‘Watership Down’

Sometimes, when I’ve had a bad day, I just want to watch some cuddly talking animals bleed to death.

This is, again, an old review salvaged from my previous, now-defunct blog and subsequently edited. Were I to write it today, I’d probably give fewer spoilers, so considered yourself warned. In any case, these are still two of my all-time favorite novels, so I think this review belongs over here. I can relate it to magical girls by pointing out that both these books are about talking animals, and magical girls are usually accompanied by talking animals. Or something.

Bambi by Felix Salten. Translated by Whittaker Chambers. Grosset and Dunlap (New York): 1929. 293 pages.

Watership Down by Richard Adams. Scribner (New York): 2005 (Reprint). 499 pages.

There’s an old joke, dating back to the 1960s, about what would happen if Bambi fought Godzilla.  The correct answer, known to anyone who’s read the original novel Bambi by Felix Salten, is that Godzilla would get his ass kicked, at least if he made the mistake of standing between Bambi and a doe in rut.

Felix Salten’s classic novel, an often dark and brutal story originally published in , has been eclipsed in most people’s minds by the Disneyfied version, though since I originally wrote this review, a number of lavishly illustrated productions of the book have come into print. I can vouch for none because I read this book in a 1929 printing, but some of the new editions are beautiful at least at first glance—though I have been warned that some contain an abridged text, so I pass that warning on.

In any case, Godzilla would also likely meet his demise if he made the mistake of harassing the lady friends of the bunny rabbits from Watership Down, except the rabbits would most likely coerce somebody else into delivering the beat-down for them—maybe Bambi, in fact.

So if Bambi teamed up with the Watership Down rabbits to open a can of whoopass on Godzilla, especially if they maybe, I dunno, used some powered mecha armor that somebody left in the woods or something, that would be kick-awesome.  Or maybe the rabbits could all drive armored vehicles that look like giant rabbits that shoot lasers out of their ears, and then Bambi could drive a vehicle that looks like a giant stag, and then they could combine together into a super giant robot that maybe looks like a jackalope.  I would totally watch this Bambi vs. Godzilla movie in the theater.

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Book Review: ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’

The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson. Wingbow Press, 1969. 268 pages. ISBN 0-914728-28-8.

Colin Wilson was a weird character. Prolific and obviously intelligent, he wrote one well-respected work of literary criticism and also wrote less influential works in other fields before he mostly turned to parapsychology and became a crank. At one point, he made disparaging comments about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which brought him to the attention of Lovecraft’s biggest fanboy, August Derleth.

Derleth is not well-liked by Lovecraft’s admirers, ironically, because he is largely responsible for creating what we now call the “Cthulhu mythos.” Lovecraft, though he borrowed from himself frequently, never envisioned a unified, overarching “mythos” for his work (though he came close in At the Mountains of Madness). It was Derleth who went back over Lovecraft’s work and tried to harmonize it, though he in the process rejected Lovecraft’s misanthropy and Nietzscheanism and replaced them with a more conventional good-and-evil battle. Today’s Lovecraft fans disparage Derleth for this and have largely jettisoned his contributions, but like it or not, he founded the publishing company Arkham House, which is largely responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s work and making it generally well known.

Derleth took offense at Wilson’s dismissal of Lovecraft and challenged him to write his own Lovecraftian fiction. Wilson obliged, first producing The Mind Parasites and following it up with the novel before us, The Philosopher’s Stone.

Wilson, as he explains in his foreword, sincerely believed he could do Lovecraft better than Lovecraft did. However, there is a reason you’ve heard of Lovecraft and (in all likelihood) haven’t heard of Wilson.

The reason is, this book sucks.

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Book Review: ‘The Night Land’

Featured artwork: “Attack of the Abhumans” by Jeremiah Humphries.

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. . Published by various, but available through Project Gutenberg.

Around the turn of the century, the Englishman William Hope Hodgson spent several years as a seaman before he attempted to make a living as a personal trainer, during which time he led a colorful life and even had a controversial run-in with Houdini. When making money from exercise didn’t pan out, he in 1904 turned to writing fiction in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe and ultimately produced a large body of work.

Recently, I read my way through the most famous of his writings, including The House on the Borderland, the stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and The Ghost Pirates. Then, with much trepidation yet determination, I turned to the most gargantuan and formidable of his works, his novel The Night Land.

Twice before, I have tried to get through The Night Land. Twice before, I failed. But this time, I grit my teeth and slogged my way through, though I believe the effort took me almost a year (I read a lot of other things in the meantime, of course). Hodgson was never a great writer by any standard, but he could spin a good yarn from time to time; some of his stories set at sea show both a genuine knowledge of seamanship and skill at adventure-writing, and certain scenes in The House on the Borderland show him to be a competent action writer as well. But The Night Land is simultaneously a breathtaking work of imagination and a nigh unreadable act of self-indulgence and pretentiousness. It is Hodgson’s magnum opus—but the problem is that he knew it was his magnum opus, so he wrote like a middle-schooler picking up a pen for the first time, convinced that he was crafting a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

I likely would not have read this book if it did not come highly recommended by John C. Wright, the husband of my editor, who has produced a series of frightening and beautiful novelettes based on it (collected in Awake in the Night Land) and who insists that its fantastic elements are so important that its glaring flaws deserve to be overlooked.

Having read the novel, I haven’t decided whether to agree with him or not. On the one hand, yes, Hodgson forged a new path in the world of fantasy and deserves credit for such bold inventions, but on the other hand … the book is just awful. I mean it’s really, really bad.

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Book Review: ‘Krampus: The Yule Lord’

If you hate Christmas, then I have a book for you.

Krampus: The Yule Lord, written and illustrated by Brom. HarperCollins, 2011. 368 pages. ISBN: 0062095668.

Krampus: The Yule Lord, a Santa Claus novel for people who hate Santa Claus, is undeniably entertaining, but someone would have to be a serious Scrooge to embrace it unreservedly.

This is, so I understand, the second novel by Brom, an illustrator and game designer who made his debut as a novelist with The Child Thief, a subversion of Peter Pan. He followed that up by taking on the jolly saint of Christmas, reimagining him as a brawny, sword-wielding Norse god locked in a mortal duel with a devil-like Krampus in a continuation of the ancient rivalry between Loki and everyone else in the Norse pantheon.

Since Brom’s first talent is drawing, the book is lavishly illustrated. Both the cover and the illustrations throughout are by the author.

A nude, dancing fairy from Krampus: The Yule Lord
I can hear feminists screaming, “Where are her organs?!?”

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Goodreads Review: ‘The House on the Borderland’

William Hodgson's Horror Trilogy: The House on the BorderlandWilliam Hodgson’s Horror Trilogy: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a pioneer of horror writing in the early part of the twentieth century, what Hodgson lacked in skill, he made up for in imagination.

I must confess, I have twice tried to read through Hodgson’s masterwork THE NIGHT LAND and failed both times. It’s a tough slog full of brilliant, hair-raising concepts weighed down by turgid, overwrought, and deliberately anachronistic prose.

By contrast, his “trilogy” of unrelated short novels, including THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG,’ and ‘THE GHOST PIRATES’ are surprisingly readable even if they could have benefited from additional editorial work.

In these novels, Hodgson reveals that, in spite of his tendency to fall into both irrelevant and monotonous detail as well as an amateurishly purple style, he has a real talent for action and adventure writing.

THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, easily the weirdest of these works, becomes genuinely exciting as its lone, beleaguered narrator struggles to defend his supernaturally-infused house from an invading race of pig-faced and claw-handed invaders. By contrast, the book drags during a sequence in which the narrator has a vision of the end of the world that is analogous to passages in Wells’s THE TIME MACHINE, but considerably more monotonous. What these passages lack in excitement, however, they more than make up for in scope of vision, as Hodgson describes our sun growing dark and decrepit and ultimately falling into a gigantic super-star the size of a galaxy.

THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’ is a more straightforward adventure story. Starting in medias res, it depicts a group of harried sailors, after their ship has foundered, trying to make it home as they encounter weird and dangerous oddities such as an island of carnivorous plants and a continent of seaweed inhabited by giant octopuses and murderous mermen. The story drags as Hodgson narrates extraneous details (he describes each day, in succession, of the men’s making rope, instead of summarizing all with “We spent several days making rope.”) Like THE NIGHT LAND, the book becomes particularly insipid when Hodgson adds a romantic element. Nonetheless, it is a fun yarn overall.

The novel that works best as horror is THE GHOST PIRATES, and it also shows Hodgson’s skill as a writer of speculative fiction. The story’s narrator has the misfortune to take work on a ghost ship, but not any ordinary ghost ship: in some mysterious way unhallowed, this boat is open to the invasion of creatures from an alternate dimension, creatures bent on killing the crew members one at a time. Hodgson steadily ratchets up the tension with a skill unusual for him. It is genuinely frightening, and unlike his other novels, this one kept me reading far into the night.

Hodgson was a pioneer of speculative fiction and horror. His work is in some senses ahead of its time, particularly his use of science fiction elements such as alternate worlds and speculation about the final fate of the solar system. He deserves to be read most of all because of the writers he influenced, particularly H. P. Lovecraft.

Nonetheless, in these three works (unlike, sadly, THE NIGHT LAND), he can be read for enjoyment, for his own sake, and not merely because of his importance in the history of genre fiction.

View all my reviews

‘Jake and the Dynamo’ Book Launch!

The long-awaited day has arrived. Book one of the Jake and the Dynamo saga, The Wattage of Justice, the first American light novel from Superversive Press, is now available.

Here’s the link.

And here’s the book trailer:

The Kindle version is currently available. The paperback will come available within a few days.

This book features:

  • Revised text
  • New chapter
  • Full-color illustrations by Roffles Lowell
  • Bonus short story, “Eye of Fire: From the Casefiles of the Ragamuffin”

Read about it on the Superversive Blog, where Ben Zwycky describes the novel as a “gloriously over-the-top satire.”

And visit my new Amazon author’s page.