Miscellaneous thoughts on ebooks and Amazon/Macmillan

After posting the piece on agency selling the other day, I’ve watched the twittering and blogging on this run amok. I have some further thoughts (of course, cause I’m opinionated that way), but nothing really worth writing at length about. At least until all of them are added up. So here you go with a mostly unordered list of thoughts, opinions, etc about the whole mess.

  • Most authors seem to be coming down on the side of Macmillan on this. A lot of readers seem surprised in their comments that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Macmillan is asking for higher prices on their behalf for stuff. And Amazon has cut off money for them. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. Readers should not assume that an author’s interests are equal to their own interests.
  • Many readers (though I have no idea what the percentage is) seem to be siding with Amazon. A lot of authors seem surprised that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Amazon is selling items to them at lower prices. Macmillan is asking them to either pay more money or wait longer. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. The increased money they might get comes out of the readers wallets, even if a billion people along the supply chain take their cut.
  • Capitalism does not mean you sell at the cost of production plus a fair markup. I read an ostensible economist assert that readers who say they should get books at a price they are willing to pay is not capitalism. No, that’s exactly what capitalism is, if you add in that the seller has to agree to the price too. Cost of production has an impact on whether the producer agrees to the price, but even then it’s not determinative. If I spent $10 to make something but can only get $5, I may sell it at $5 just because it’s better than not selling it and getting $0.
  • Because of the latter, I tend to skip all the scribblings about how much it costs to produce an ebook. I’m not basing whether I will pay $X for a book based on whether someone else makes a profit. I’m basing it on the utility to me.

  • An ebook’s utility is very different than a regular book’s utility. I get the same story. I think, I’ve never compared any of the ebooks I’ve acquired with the paper copies. I get space saving and portability. But there’s a lot I don’t get: the ability to loan, sell or give away the book. I don’t get protection from book loss, computer problems being much more common than fires, floods. I don’t get the ability to signal like a paper book gives me. When you step into my apartment, you know I am a reader as well as whatever you can glean from my collection. There’s no equivalent with ebooks. I also don’t get to be a collector. I’m not as much a books as fetish object kind of guy as many, but I still like to have a few signed copies and I keep a few books around just for their artwork. What I’m willing to pay depends on what priorities I give to each of these utilities, not how much it cost someone else to make the damn thing.
  • I give a lot more importance to the change in retailing models than most others do. I don’t know a single retailer that has achieved dominance in a market when they are unable to set their own prices, unless they’ve done it through means that are unavailable to Amazon. Tobias Buckell countered with Apple is an agent in their iPhone app market, where they are dominant. But that’s because they are a true monopoly there at the moment. Amazon can’t do that with ebooks.
  • A lot of people, including myself, have been reading tea leaves inappropriately. So far, we have a couple of statements from Macmillan and a buried post from Amazon. Both of these entities have strong incentives to lie to us.
  • Amazon is a recognized place for books. Every other place plays second fiddle to them. I include Powells links in my reviews, but I’ve seen less than 5 clicks and no sales from them. People reading my backwater blog click through to Amazon on the order of one or two hundred every month, and I usually see one or two purchases from every month.
  • The user experience and blogging tools for Amazon put every other site to shame. For book information, really only LibraryThing even comes close. Only Amazon offers product previews for bloggers (if you don’t have Adblock, hover over an Amazon link on my site to see). Only Amazon offers detailed reporting. Only Amazon offers Site Stripe for bloggers. Only Amazon offers quality recommendations for users.
  • Authors and anti-Amazon people pushing alternative sites to link to should coalesce around one alternative. Places I’ve seen pushed include The Book Depository, bn.com, Indiebound, and Powells as well as a slew of local bookstores. The promotion is too spread out to get any of them critical mass to be a viable alternative for bloggers linking.
  • Why the hell hasn’t any of these sites or others offered extra incentives to sign up as affiliates right now? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to me.
  • A lot of author commentary comes across like celebrities who work all their lives to be famous and well recognized and then complain about how they don’t have any privacy. Authors work hard to get Amazon to sell lots of their books, and now complain that Amazon is so dominant.
  • Amazon is not a monopoly. They have no more than 43% of the book market. They are dominant.
  • To tea leaf this, I wonder if the solution will result in something along the lines of Macmillan’s pricing model but Amazon’s retailing model. Merchant model is kept so Amazon can price as they want generally. But they also agree to limitations on pricing items, particularly a time-based price lowering.

  • I’m not so sure that cheap ebooks will cannibalize physical copy sales early on. The price conscious already have the option of waiting and getting the books used or in paperback. The price conscious folks aren’t generally buying the expensive early editions.
  • The primary value to a reader from a publisher is in signalling. The publisher communicates to the reader that this book is worth reading because they’ve sunk money into it. I seriously doubt a self-publishing model will be generally workable even in a world of cheaper production for everyone. If nothing else, the publisher of quality work will command bigger prices for their time, and won’t work for less. So their books will cost more.
  • In an ebook world, I wonder if a stock exchange marketplace model would work or is where the agency model would end up. Purchasers won’t want to go to different destinations for each publisher for their books. They want to go to one place to purchase multiple books. The retailer and their web site acts much like a broker does for stocks. The retailer places orders for their customers on ebook exchanges, of which there really are only a handful. People can sell their used ebooks there too. And publishers can control the price by releasing copies into the market at the going rate. (i.e., the distribution right in copyright law becomes the right to release new copies into the exchange) Just musing…
  • Really only tangentially related to all of this but I’m gonna throw this out there too in this post. I don’t owe independent stores my money just because they are local or independent. I shop at stores that provide services that are of value to me. Either they have good prices, or good selection (broad or focused both are possibilities), or other amenities to make it worth my time, money and effort. I don’t owe an author, publisher, or retailer money or allegiance either.

I’m not really siding with Amazon in the whole matter, though I have taken somewhat of an anti-Macmillan tone. Basically in my mind, it’s all a business dispute and not really about morals or fairness so much as a negotiation about who gets what. Authors took risks by getting into the business, and there’s no guarantee that they succeed. There’s not even a promise that their work not be held hostage to outside interests. That’s just the way business works. On the other hand I think they should rail against Amazon for business reasons (even using the language of fairness). It would be dumb not to. It would be dumb to send traffic to Amazon when Amazon ain’t selling the authors’ product. Amazon has no right to continue to make money either, or to continue to be a dominant player. I’ll shed no tears for Amazon should they lose this battle. Nor does Macmillan have any hold on me either. There’s no right or wrong, just the market. Now I sound like a goddamn libertarian.

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By King Rat
— 4 February 2010 at 3:35 pm

1632 / Eric Flint

Cover of 1632 (Larry Elmore)
Amazon Logo
Powells Logo

1632 is Eric Flint’s attempt to answer/explore a scenario that has intrigued a fair number of science fiction writers and fans for years: just how well would the modern world stack up if put in the middle of older times? I’ve read a few stories along these lines over the years, though this may be the most grandiose in scale of all of them. The basic plot of these tales drops a time traveler or two in the 1880s or the U.S. War of Independence or some such period where they use a superior knowledge to amaze ancient rubes and assume an exalted place in a previous time. Flint’s version does something similar, but 1632 drops the entire town of Grantville, West Virginia in the middle of Europe’s 30 Years’ War. And while the town’s technology and know-how do amaze the locals, most are savvy enough to assimilate the newfound knowledge from the future into their lives.

Unknown to the residents of Grantville, extraterrestrial art causes an circle of land around the town to be transported to the middle of Thuringia, Germany, in 1631. Nearby soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire have just finished sacking Magdeburg, killing tens of thousands of people. Now some are attacking farmhouses in the countryside just outside the ring of fire boundary between transported United States land and rural Germany.

Inside the town, the residents see smoke from these burning houses and head out to investigate, finding men with flintlocks and sabers raping a farmgirl and torturing the farmer. Being red-blooded American members of the United Mine Workers Association (U.M.W.A.), they intervene to save them. Their superior guns allow them to prevail easily.

Quickly, Grantville decides to establish a new United States and export a modified American law to as much of the countryside as it can convince to join them. 500 pages of the story then details the political and military adventures of the new United States as it challenges the Holy Roman Empire and makes alliances with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (already in Germany opposing the Catholic armies). In addition, Flint writes about the personal lives of some of the key residents of Grantville, both those who were transported with the ring of fire as well as some of the earliest recruits to the new nation.

The book is a very easy read. Flint includes lots of descriptions of everything: historical details, settings, action, people, and more. So you get lots and lots of information, though mostly it doesn’t feel too much like an info-dump. The pieces of information build on each other, but in a fairly sequential fashion. I didn’t have to refer pages back to integrate previous information with new revelations. The characters and their motivation are written about at the surface. Flint tells you who they are, what they look like, what they are doing, and what their motivations are. This isn’t a knock; it means that a reader can follow the story without having to read between the lines.

Flint pushes a union-left (I just made that term up, I think) version of the American psyche. Grantsville residents believe in America and the U.M.W.A. They brook no version of royalty nor elitism. Good old boy workers (mostly white) are just as capable as anyone else. They are upstanding, protecting the downtrodden and each other. Who better to bring the Bill of Rights to the peasants of central Germany?

Flint’s Grantsville has mostly moved past such things as racism. The men in charge don’t quite yet believe in women as equals, but they are open to the idea in select cases (the crack shot cheerleader, the smart Jewish refugee, the German prostitute with a steely heart). Everyone has a can-do attitude. Sometimes people disagree, but in Grantsville someone in an argument always backs off so that the disagreement can be resolved amicably, even if they still think they are right. Everyone in Grantsville has the good of the town at heart.

Flint writes in the afterword that he wrote the novel for a couple of reasons (in addition to the obvious ones). One is that he is tired of pervasive cynicism. Thus the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of Grantsville’s West Virginians and of their allies in the Thirty Years’ War, including Gustavus Adolphus. You can think, but his writing isn’t going to leave the reader with any substantially mixed messages. There are plenty of bad guys, but few of them get the privilege of having their perspective shown and none get shown as having rational reasons for what they do. Most of them get slaughtered in gory fashion. Flint also writes that he had to hold himself back from giving too many characters their just desserts. I have mixed feelings about all this, but more on that later.

The other stated reason he wrote the book agrees with my sensibilities more unambiguously. He didn’t think blue-collar workers get their due in literature today. The decision-makers in 1632 consist mostly of mine-workers, enlisted veterans of Viet Nam, teachers, and even students. While occasionally kings and generals make appearances, the scale of much of the battles described is such that captains and the like arre in charge. I think Flint is right, though I’m not sure how well anyone would really do in such a fish out of water scenario as is portrayed. You don’t become a seasoned military leader overnight, as happens in 1632.

And while I appreciate Flint’s attempt to be positive, I think that makes for an inaccurate picture. Would Americans really be so accepting of blacks and foreigners? I don’t think we’re there. Would American imperialism be so altruistic? Our history says no. And even when I accept those as given, would our can-do attitude really have such a smooth ride in a hostile environment? I’m skeptical. See, Grantsville never faces anything that even appears to actually threaten them until well after page 500. Armies of thousands? Easily dispatched. Lack of food stores for the winter? Surrounding countryside gladly supplies it. These Americans succeed like no others.

I was able to ignore my qualms for the duration of the story though. The narrative moves everything along fast and well enough that qualms can be dismissed for a time. But even if having a mixed picture of people is cynical, I think I prefer that generally speaking. Sometimes a person needs a little bit of escapism though. This version is harmless enough and fun reading.

Title: 1632
Author: Eric Flint
Cover creator: Larry Elmore
Series: The Ring of Fire; 1
Imprint / publisher: Baen
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 592 p.
Publication date: February 2008 (originally 2000)
ISBN-10: 0-671-31972-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-671-31972-4

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By King Rat
— 3 February 2010 at 7:21 pm

Four New Yorker podcasts

I’ve still been listening to fiction podcasts, but my schedule has been upended about 4 times in the last few weeks, so I haven’t found the time to write about the stories. This time, rather than review each story podcast individually, I’m going to lump them together. Mostly for saving time on my schedule, but if this works out format-wise, I may keep doing this in the future.

The podcasts I’ve previously written about consisted mostly of an introduction, possibly some ads, and then the story. The New Yorker constructs their format a bit differently. First, in who the magazine has select the stories: other writers. Each episode has a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker select another story from the archives. Second, each podcast begins and ends with a discussion of the story between the editor and writer performing the reading. So you get something that amounts to literary criticism light along with the narrative. And I have to say that in the case of these stories, I’m glad this has been included. Otherwise I think I’d find many of these pretty boring. Gives me both an education as well as a guide.

Also, all four of the stories are well narrated. The readers are good verbal performers. In Orhan Pamuk’s case, an outstanding performer.

My Russian Education by Vladimir Nabokov

For October 2009, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk selected and read the Nabokov story My Russian Education. It’s an odd piece of fiction, because Nabokov later included a version in a memoir (Speak, Memory). But he sold it to the New Yorker as fiction. It reads much more like memoir than fiction, for there is little plot.

Basically, it’s Nabokov describing some of his school-related life during his formative years. However, it’s less about his actual schooling and more about his life, St. Petersburg, and especially his relationship with his father. School isn’t absent, but it’s just a part of the life described. It’s full of detailed, precise (sometimes down to street addresses) descriptions of what his life was like.

This is one piece that I think works better as audio than in print. I’d have stopped reading this, but Pamuk’s narration imparts feeling to the work that I would have missed in black and white. Nevertheless, still not my kind of story. When the editor and Pamuk talk about how lively the story is, I thought really, that was extremely staid, not lively. Or how the ending is so shocking after the description of a beautiful scene just prior, a scene I found not particularly beautiful and a turn of events that wasn’t so shocking.

The Wine Breath by John McGahern

Chinese author Yiyun Li reads a story by Irish author John McGahern from November 2009. This one is all about a priest who reminisces, at length, about a period of time 30 years before. Particularly his relationship with Micheal Bruen and the man’s funeral. The entire thing is a reminisce. If there was a point, I’ve forgotten it because it took too long for the story to get to it.

Water Child by Edwidge Danticat

December’s podcast had Junot Díaz read this story from 2000. I liked this story. Nadine Osnac is a Haitian immigrant working as a nurse in New York City. She sends half of each paycheck home to her parents in Haiti; they’d sacrificed greatly to pay for her school so she could become the family’s success. They write every week and hope for phone calls. But Nadine is not able to interact normally with other people. She lets her parents’ phone calls go to the answering machine, as well as that of her former lover. She doesn’t chat with other nurses at lunch.

It’s a portrait of a deeply scarred woman. She’s undergone a tragedy and doesn’t feel able to talk to anyone about it, instead setting up shrine in her condominium which she maintains faithfully. One particular patient has just undergone a laryngectomy and is unable to talk. The emotionally unable to talk and physically unable to talk find a bond of a sort in their lack.

The Jockey by Carson McCullers

I also really liked this story selected and read by Karen Russell from January’s episode. It appeals to the pissed off person in me. A short scene where a table full of horse-racing figures in a restaurant deal with a drunk pissed off jockey who used to ride for them. The jockey’s buddy was injured in a race and months later he’s still pissed off about it. Whether anyone is responsible for the injury is left unsaid. None of the characters get an actual name. The focus is entirely on the palpable resentment the jockey feels toward these people. Every attempt they make to mollify the jockey fails. He wants to be pissed. It makes him feel better than being reasonable would.

Every picked a fight just because you are in a pissy mood and want to get into it with someone, anyone? It’s not so much that you think the person deserves the fight, but goddammit it feels good and your antagonist did do something even if your reaction is out of proportion. Everything is raw, emotions magnified. The littlest thing serves as a pretext to get the release from a good drag-out argument.

That’s this story. And frankly, I’m impressed that the author is a woman. I know women who do this fight-picking just as I have. But it doesn’t seem like something that a woman would use at the core of a story. Maybe because I expect women to stick to reasonable anger, while the actions described are pretty unreasonable. One prejudice of mine chipped away just a little bit. I kind of wonder if the story would resonate with me as much if the protagonist were a woman. How strong is my prejudice? Would I think of her as shrill instead of identify with her anger, as I did with the jockey’s?

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Categories: Short Fiction Reviews.

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By King Rat
— 3 February 2010 at 12:37 am

Macmillan vs. Amazon and agency

Maybe this has gotten written about somewhere about the Macmillan/Amazon mess, but I haven’t seen it, so I am going to throw something out there that affects my opinion of the matter a lot.

Here’s the quote from the Macmillan letter:

I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March.

And then later a couple more paragraphs:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short-term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

What do you see in that letter? Almost everyone commenting on this seems to be focusing in on the pricing. And while it’s ultimately about pricing, there’s something very important in there. The term agency model. That’s very important.

Currently most booksellers operate under a merchant model. Macmillan’s letter rhetorically leaves this little bit out while extolling how great the agency model is for a retailer. As a retailer, the agency model could be very very ugly. Macmillan has left that part out. (Not surprising, they are interested in their own P.R., not providing accurate analysis and facts. Amazon won’t do any better.)

Under the agency model, the manufacturer (in this case Macmillan) owns the inventory that a retailer sells. It determines the pricing, as well as a whole lot of other things like which items will be sold by which retailers. The retailer makes money get getting a percentage of sales. Perhaps it has some complications like higher percentages with higher sales, but that’s the basic idea.

With the merchant model, the retailer owns what they have and gets to make the decisions, particularly the pricing decisions. The retailer pays the manufacturer whatever price the two parties can agree on. In some industries, this is a standard price (wholesale) but in Amazon’s case they are pretty big so they have a lot of influence in dictating what prices they want to pay. After paying wholesale and receiving their merchandise, it’s the merchant who sets the prices. They can sell at a retail price that is more or less than the wholesale price, and they do not have to price uniformly with respect to other retailers.

The agency model would be horrible for a large retailer like Amazon. Horrible. Let me give you some scenarios:

It’s summer time. There’s a new blockbuster movie out starring some pretty young Hollywood star (think Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston). That celebrity wrote a memoir several years ago that Amazon has in stock. They could use the opportunity to offer those books at a discount in order to move them or as an incentive to sell the official movie novelization and other movie crap (“three for the price of two!”). Except under the agency model, they can’t do this. They would have to sell at the price set by the publisher.

Or try this. An Amazon competitor has a book selling at $1 less than theirs. They cannot price match under the agency model.

Or even the example that’s at the heart of the current dispute: publisher wants to sell at $15.99 and reduce the price over three years from that price to $5.99. After Christmas, the hardcover version (sold under the merchant model) of the book goes into the bargain bins and is selling for $7, but the publisher is stuck on their three year schedule for the ebook version (under the agency model). Amazon is now selling the ebook for more than the hardcover.

Basically, the problem is who controls the pricing, not the specific prices. It’s not that the pricing under agency would be monolithic exactly. Agency model eliminates loss leaders. It’s all about different interests. As a seller of books from different publishers, as well as millions of other products, Amazon’s interests differ from the publishers’ interests. The agency model means that Amazon’s interests would be lower than the publisher interests. All the commentary touches on this part a bit. Amazon is interested in establishing the Kindle as the dominant ereader platform. Macmillan is not. Amazon want the flexibility to set prices for that, irrespective of whatever wholesale price they negotiated.

If it was specific prices, Amazon would never have used their nuclear option. I’m pretty sure of that. They’d just haggle away until they came to an agreement. But to switch to agency model? They have to nip that in the bud. If they’d agreed to the agency model, publishers would have pushed to switch everything to agency model, killing Amazon’s business.

Why am I sure of that? Way back when, I used to work at Expedia as a developer. I didn’t make the business decisions, but I had to understand them pretty well to implement the web site to carry those decisions out. Some of the things that Expedia sells are agency model (a lot of flights, but not all), and some are merchant model (a lot of hotels, but not all). Agency model is why all the online travel agents started charging $5 to book a flight in the early 2000s. The manufacturers, the airlines, cut the commission down to nothing in a lot of cases. Since Expedia couldn’t be flexible on price, they tacked their own charge on top so they could cover costs. That’s also why customers didn’t pay the $5 booking fee when they bought a flight in conjunction with a hotel. Expedia bought hotel room-nights up in bulk and then set their own prices. The company set their own prices and it didn’t need the booking fee to make money.

I spent my entire time at Expedia watching the business side try to switch from the agency model to the merchant model. Travel was dominated by the agency model for its entire existence. Expedia was trying (and sometimes failing) to convert to a merchant model, because that’s where the money would be for them. It allowed them to create packages that airlines and hotels couldn’t or wouldn’t at prices that weren’t available under agency rules.

Now, whether this is good for the consumer (the reader in the case of books), remains to be seen. In some ways it’s two behemoths on one end of the supply chain duking it out over who gets to pillage the consumer. But I am pretty sure I don’t want my neighborhood bookseller to work under the agency model. So if this keeps publishers from adopting that way of selling universally, then I have to side with Amazon. Saving the neighborhood bookstore is not their goal, but as a side effect it helps.

Edited to add: Charles Stross’ take on Amazon vs. Macmillan covers a lot of the same ground as my post. So I’m not the only one focusing on agency model. He doesn’t talk about packaging and price matching that a merchant could do, but covers some other things.

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Categories: Opinion.

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By King Rat
— 31 January 2010 at 12:05 pm

The Poison Eaters and Other Stories / Holly Black

Cover of The Poison Eaters
Amazon Logo
Powells Logo

In a few weeks, Big Mouth Press (aka Small Beer Press) releases Holly Black’s collection of short stories, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. It’s a mix of fantasy and horror, most featuring adolescent or college age characters. These well-written stories aren’t light, happy reading. But then, you should expect dark and complex with a title like The Poison Eaters.

Most of the stories feature characters who are somewhat outcast. They fight themselves more than they do anyone or anything else. Sometimes that sort of inner conflict bores me to yawns, but each of these characters have personality that makes them interesting.

One side note, just to get my opinion out there. Nominally targeted at the young adult market, this collection contains dark stories that include sex (not graphic) and that glorify drinking and partying. These stories don’t teach lessons about how it’s better to behave like an adult. These things are by no means foreign to young adult stories, so my opinion isn’t unusual. My opinion: kids can handle anything and everything thrown at them in a book. I’ve never once met a teen that needed to be protected from anything in any book I’ve ever read. Stuff like this book is the antidote that adults get to counteract the bullshit sheltering they received when they were younger. Worries about what kids can handle are really worries about what the adults can handle.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
This story made a couple of Year’s Best anthologies for good reason. Vampires have the coolness factor that they do in Twilight, eternal life (undeath) and eternal parties, though they are quarantined off in Coldtowns in most cities because of how infectious they are. Matilda has been bitten, but is trying to sweat out the incubation period rather than give in to the blood lust that would turn her. She doesn’t want to be a vampire. Her ex-boyfriend who she’s still in love with and his new girl want to become vampires though. One of the few vampire tales I’ve read in a while that really engaged me.
A Reversal of Fortune
A teen signs a pact with the devil to save her dog. If she beats the devil in a contest, the dog is saved. If she loses, she loses her soul. The contest she chooses is an eating competition, and she gets her overweight brother to train her. I think what makes the story is the set-up where Nikki meets the devil on the bus and then spend the day working at the mall, which isn’t the fun time she imagined when she took the job.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
This story was left out of the review copy I received.
The Night Market
A second deal with the devil kind of story. Set in the Philippines, Tomasa’s sister Eva has been snared by an enkanto, a faery of some sort, and lies wasting at home. Tomasa tries to get the enkanto to make her better, and when it refuses ventures into the faery night market looking for someone who can. A little more confusing than the previous story though.
The Dog King
Intelligent wolves terrorize the countryside, but the residents of the stone-walled city are safe inside until people mysteriously start dying. The king promises his throne to the knight who can kill the wolf causing all the havoc. Of course, it can’t be the king’s tamed wolf, can it? This one had me rooting for the wolf.
Virgin
Jen has a thing for Zachary, a homeless teenage junkie. He’s got the looks that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. But Zachary tells a wild tale about watching his mom die in the woods after which a unicorn befriends him. Messed up kids have messed up lives, and this ends up messed up for everyone.
In Vodka Veritas
The lightest story in the collection. The king of the prep school nerds gets stood up by his fellow outcast best buddy Danny on prom night. The friend actually got asked to prom. Our hero’s plan is to get dressed in a tux, break into the old abandoned home of the school on the edge of campus with a bottle of vodka, and get drunk. I’ve had similar plans before when I was young and lonely. His plan is foiled by the Latin club. No one expects the Latin club.
The Coat of Stars
Semi-closeted gay costume designer makes costumes for faeries to try and bring back is youthful crush. Good story, but a little too much clothes-whoring for me to get into it. I dress up as a means to an end, not an end to itself. So I don’t get costume-lust like other people do.
Paper Cuts Scissors
Really liked this one! Justin’s girlfriend Linda knows how to put things in stories. As in, the book in your hand is now changed to include the things Linda wants in it, and those things are no longer in the real world. It doesn’t change the book for other people who have it; just that copy. After an argument between the two, Linda puts herself into a classic Russian novel. Justin, heartbroken, goes to library school to get her out of the story. I mostly don’t like stories written for other writers, but I go ga-ga over stories like this that are written for readers. Perfect.
Going Ironside
A loopy story of faeries attempting to get people to impregnate them. Not my thing.
Untitled (A Modern Faerie Tale Story)
The second story not included in this review copy.
The Poison Eaters
Inventive story of three sisters. They are poison. Touch them and die. It’s hard to explain this story without getting into spoiler territory. Well worth the read.

Four of the stories are must-read: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, A Reversal of Fortune, Paper Cuts Scissors, and The Poison Eaters. All the rest were well-written too. Can’t go wrong buying this one.

One other blogged review:

Title: The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
Author: Holly Black
Imprint / publisher: Big Mouth House / Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced reading copy
Length: 156 p. (published version will have 256 p.)
Publication date: Feb 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-63-8

Small Beer Press provided me with an advance review copy of this book. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $12.14 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

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By King Rat
— 25 January 2010 at 8:30 am