Those of you who purchase ebooks from Amazon need to be aware of the following:
a. The Kindle edition of omnibus The Crystal Variation, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, including the novels Crystal Soldier, Crystal Dragon, and Balance of Trade — has been taken off-sale by Amazon pending correction of “serious quality issues.” These issues are “misspellings.” Amazon forwarded the list of 144 instances of misspelled words to Baen, which forwarded it to us. More than a dozen of those “misspelled” words are “cermacrete.” We also have “ISBN” identified as a “misspelled” word. Also, cantra, kais, qwint, Iloheen, aetherium, autoshout — you get the idea. Steve and I have each made a pass down the list and have so far identified three Actual Misspelled Words, and one that I need to research, but believe to be a spacing problem. The process from here goes like this: We tell Baen which words are Actually Misspelled. A Baen editor will fix those errors. The Baen Ebook Team will then recompile the omnibus and shuffle it into its various formats, including forwarding a “clean copy” to Amazon. Amazon will then, at some point, put the book back on sale.
If you would like to purchase an electronic copy of The Crystal Variation in the immediate future, your best choice of vendor would be Baen Ebooks, which offers the book for sale in All Formats Known to Man or Clutch. Here’s the link.
b. Amazon has also stopped selling Courier Run, an echapbook containing two Liaden stories by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, for Serious Quality Issues. In a Surprising Plot Twist, this title shows as being Live and On Sale from my publisher’s dashboard. KDP support is Researching the Issue and promises an answer by August 18 — next Thursday.
If you would like to purchase this echapbook before next Thursday, please seek it elsewhere — BN, Kobo, iBooks still offer it for sale.
c. Sleeping with the Enemy was also briefly off-sale at Amazon, but its honor has been redeemed and it is now on-sale in the Kindle store, as well as at the rest of the Usual Suspects.
d. Spell Bound, an echapbook collecting “Will-o’-the-wisp” and “The Wolf’s Bride,” two Archers Beach stories previously published on Splinter Universe, is now for sale at the Amazon Kindle store (after a brief tussle in which Amazon insisted that the content was available “freely on the web” and therefore I had no right to publish the compilation), and! at Kobo, and iBooks. BN will presumably get around to publishing sometime soon.
A related note: Since these stories have been collected, they have been removed from Splinter Universe.
Today, it is rainy and cool at the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory. I plan a quiet, working day. I realize that we are very fortunate in our weather. All of you who labor under Dangerous Heat Advisories — please be alert and take good care of yourselves.
C and d both now purchased. Thank you for the heads up.
Thank you!
thanks for the info. On a related (sorta) topic, would you know where I can purchase “Low Port”. As best as I can recall it is a collection of your short stories and I am sure I originally read it in print format from my local library. I cannot seem to find even a reference to it anywhere. thanks in advance.
Low Port was a collection of original stories by other authors, which were written to a scenario that Steve and I, as editors, proposed to them.
I imagine it’s long out of print. You might try White Unicorn Books, or go onto ABEbooks and see if you can find it there. Patty, at Annie’s Book Stop in Worcester does want lists, and so does Don Blyly at Uncle Hugo’s.
Good luck.
FYI – If you don’t find a copy, let me know, as I know I had a spare copy – some place – that I could hunt for.
can contact me at Kilgorekid[at]yahoo[dot]com
I just bought Sleeping with the Enemy.
I had an assignment in high school English to write a fiction short story. I wrote a sci-fi story. When it was returned I had been marked down for inventing words. I was told I couldn’t just “invent words”. I’m sure she hadn’t ever read a science fiction story in her life.
Just checked and it looks like I bought my copy of Crystal Variations from Barnes and Noble, so I guess I won’t get the new and improved version after all hoops are jumped through. And I missed the fact that “Spellbound” was on sale until you announced it was available at B&N so I bought that one there too. Which is unusual because I usually buy your books directly from Baen. And I did manage to grab “Sleeping with the Enemy” from Amazon before they pulled it.
Of course you can just invent words. People invent words all the time. If they stick around long enough, they get formalized into dictionaries. If they don’t — well, one assumes that they served their purpose while in use.