Appearing in NYC
June 29th, 2010An update on my whereabouts as I roam the East Coast. I’m in NYC for the next few days, and will be doing some readings and signings around town.
July 1, 7pm, I’ll be at McNally Jackson reading and signing SHIP BREAKER and WINDUP GIRL with Scott Westerfeld, author of LEVIATHAN (and so many other cool titles), and Jon Armstrong, author of GREY.
July 3, I’ll be appearing on WBAI’s Hour of the Wolf from 5am-7am (yes, *am*, bring coffee, please, bring coffee). Should be a good time on 99.5 FM.
July 6, 7pm, I’ll be reading with Nebula-nominated author Saladin Ahmed at the NYRSF Reading Series at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art. The full press release is below. Looking forward to it very much.
WINDUP GIRL wins a Locus Award
June 29th, 2010Thanks so much to the Locus readers who put it in the winners circle for Best First Novel and congratulations to all the other winners, and nominees as well. It was a great list this year. http://www.locusmag.com/News/2010/06/2010-locus-awards-winners/
Also of note, I know that I’ve Facebooked and Twittered about it, but WINDUP GIRL has also won the Nebula Award, and the Compton Crook Award, and it’s currently a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award and the Hugo. It’s been an amazing year.
SHIP BREAKER released
May 2nd, 2010SHIP BREAKER, my debut YA novel is out in the wild. I heard that it’s been popping up in stores over the last week, but now it’s officially released. Here’s the book, with my son doing the heavy lifting:
SHIP BREAKER was a chance for me to write a high-octane adventure story while still touching on themes like peak oil and global warming that fascinate me. It focuses on Nailer, a boy working scavenge on a ship breaking operation, tearing apart the last oil tankers and freighters of the Accelerated Age. It’s dirty, deadly work, and he and the rest of his crew are always one failed quota away from being kicked back to the beaches to starve. But out on the ocean, Nailer can see beautiful high-tech clipper ships sailing past–a new life, fast and clean and free. If only he can find a way to get out to it.
The book just picked up a Starred Review in Publishers Weekly and it’s been made a selection of the Junior Library Guild.
W00t!
THE WINDUP GIRL for Kindle (and every other eBook reader, too)
April 9th, 2010I’ve been getting enough questions about a Kindle/eBook version of THE WINDUP GIRL that I thought I’d post this here:
THE WINDUP GIRL *does indeed* have a Kindle version available, but not through Amazon. Webscriptions.net sells the eBook of WINDUP GIRL and it’s compatible with everything from Kindle and iPad/iPhone/Touch/ to Nook and Sony. You can get it for just $6 and it’s DRM-free:
Purchase THE WINDUP GIRL in eBook format.
Also, PUMP SIX AND OTHER STORIES has completely sold out in hardcover (except one last signed copy lurking in my local bookstore here in Paonia, hee hee). A trade paperback will be released in December, but for those of you who read eBooks, there’s no need to wait. The eBook edition is available at Webscriptions.net, same deal as above: $6, DRM-free.
Purchase PUMP SIX AND OTHER STORIES as an eBook.
So if you’ve got a Kindle or a Nook or an iPhone or an iPad or whatever your digital reader of choice might be, yes, you *can* get digital versions of my books.
Enjoy!
WINDUP GIRL nominated for the Hugo Award
April 9th, 2010Just like the headline says, THE WINDUP GIRL has made the final ballot for the Hugo Award, along with a very strong slate of other works.
It’s been a wild ride with TWG, and I want to thank everyone who read the book and liked it enough to vote for it. When we launched it at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, I didn’t dream it would be a candidate for this sort of attention.
So, again, thank you thank you thank you, and congratulations to all the other nominees. It’s an honor to be in such fine company.
WINDUP GIRL and “The Gambler” nominated for the Nebula Award
April 3rd, 2010Once again, behind on blog updates:
THE WINDUP GIRL has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and to top it off, my novelette, “The Gambler,” is also a nominee. You can read “The Gambler” free over at PYR Books’ website. It’s a great honor to be nominated, made doubly so by the high quality of the novels and stories that are in competition for the award.
In other WINDUP GIRL news, a couple of other rave reviews have come in:
Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow: “…an exciting story about industrial espionage, civil war, and political struggle, filled with heart-thudding action sequences, sordid sex, and enough technical speculation for two lesser novels.”
SF Reviews.net (Four Stars): “Grimy post-ecocrunch near-future dystopia in which peak oil peaked ages ago, and the most cherished source of energy is measured in the tightly regulated calories… If you like worldbuilding, this novel’s vision… makes Blade Runner look like it was shot on plywood backdrops in someone’s garage”
Awesome.
THE WINDUP GIRL named by TIME Magazine as a best book of the year
February 18th, 2010I meant to post this earlier, like, two months ago, when it happened. But I always get distracted. In any case, yes, TIME Magazine named THE WINDUP GIRL as one of the top ten fiction books of the year. Not just science fiction, mind, but fiction, generally. Which feels pretty good. Some other fabulous reviews below:
TIME Magazine: “Bacigalupi is a worthy successor to William Gibson: this is cyberpunk without computers.”
Techland: “It’s ridiculous how good this book is.”
Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2009: “Bacigalupi’s powerful debut warns of dire ecological collapse and the evils of colonialism in an eerily plausible near future Thailand.”
Library Journal, Best Books of 2009: “Postmodern Bangkok springs to life in Bacigalupi’s brilliant dystopian tale of culture clash, recalling the best of China Miéville and Neal Stephenson.”
Barnes & Nobles Book Club – Unabashedly Bookish: “Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut novel The Windup Girl is nothing short of an instant dystopian classic – replete with genetically engineered elephants, clipper ships and dirigibles.”
Winner, ALA 2010 Reading List Awards: “Bacigalupi constructs a sobering and nuanced of future Bangkok teetering on the edge of disaster. In this inhospitable environment, a disparate group of characters calculates how to survive. The novel’s gritty tone, provocative story line, and sympathetic characters evoke a world that is frightening real.”
A roundup of Amazon vs. Macmillan. And thank you for the lost weekend.
February 1st, 2010Tobias Buckell talks about the economics of ebooks in the post: Why my Books are no longer for sale via Amazon.
Charles Stross describes some strategic aspects in the fight. Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight
And Scott Westerfeld sums up the battle in clean clear prose, so anyone can understand how–if not exactly why–it came to this: Zinc blinked.
Update 11:26pm: Scalzi analyzes Amazon’s media strategy… and finds it hilariously wanting. All the many ways Amazon so very failed the weekend.
Lots and lots of other smarts and fun via the twitter trend #amazonfail
Amazon, Kindle and Windup Girl in ebook
January 30th, 2010With Amazon blocking Kindle editions of all Macmillan books, particularly my friends who are Tor authors, I’d like to log a couple thoughts about ebooks.
First, some blatant pimpage: The Windup Girl is available for $6, DRM-free, at Webscriptions.net. http://www.webscription.net/p-1121-the-windup-girl.aspx. If you’re into ebooks, it’s pretty much the best deal going. It’s a fair price, and both I and my publisher make some money from it. We all win.
In the past, I’ve had differences with Night Shade over whether we should also sell ebooks directly through Amazon or not. I’ve always figured that consumers should have a choice of where they shop, and if they want to spend more for a DRM’d version of my book–while I wouldn’t do it–I argued that we should certainly be willing to accommodate.
That said, selling ebooks on Amazon looks less tasty these days. I sympathise with Amazon’s interest in keeping ebook prices relatively low so they can sell Kindles, but they also clearly want to dominate the ebook market, and every ebook sold through Amazon solidifies that monopoly. Long term, they’re not interested in serving consumers, or making books affordable, they’re interested in control. Monopolies, even if they’re nice in the short term, always turn predatory in the long term, and more and more Amazon seems intent on demonstrating that.
Maybe Macmillan can’t sell ebooks for $15. Personally, I think it’s high. But that shouldn’t be for Amazon to decide. That should be for readers to decide. Macmillan can figure it out on their own, with the help of market pressures that should push their prices downward over time. Instead, Amazon wants to use its market share and retail power to force Macmillan to price its product to Amazon’s specifications, and in the process it’s using a bunch of my friends’ books to make its point.
While I’d love to have an ebook sitting on Amazon’s shelves in front of all its traffic, I’m pretty certain that without competition, that Amazon will never learn to behave any better. So I’m happy to host The Windup Girl with webscriptions.net, and very happy to see new products rolling out from Apple. Maybe when there’s more competition in the ebook sphere, we’ll make The Windup Girl available on Amazon, too. But for the moment, webscriptions.net feels like the right place to be.
