Robert’s Roundup #49 (Nov-Dec 2024)

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MAILING LIST: I just started a mailing list for my publishing company. Will mail out every 2 months and will include excerpts from my Robert’s Roundup columns and other random stuff. MASTADON: https://booktoot.club/@nagletx . Bluesky: nagletx.bsky.social .

Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited,  and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.NYP means “Name Your Price” (that’s an option on Smashwords and other booksellers). If you’d like to submit an ebook to me for review or mention in this column, see my instructions here.

This will be a light period for purchases. But I still have been discovering all kinds of great things!

I was reading Summer Abroad, a richly bilingual novel by Ivan Brave (website, YouTube Channel). He just released a multilingual poetry book Lunas и Moons. Turns out Brave lives in Houston and has a Phd in Spanish Creative Writing from University of Houston. I’ll be saying more about his works later.

Making Smashwords Better

Although I wasn’t intending to spend a lot of money anyway, I was disappointed to realize that I wasn’t able to find much from Smashwords (SW) that was worth reading and affordable. That’s a shame because the end-of-the-year SW sale should provide a great opportunity for indie authors. SW distributes ebooks from Draft2Digital, and that’s only about 30-40% of the titles you’d find on Amazon. But Smashwords still ought to have a ton of interesting titles, and authors should be dying to have readers buy them on SW because SW pays higher royalties at the lower price band.

The Smashwords site has some cool things for consumers browsing the site. You can filter by price and word count. Also, you can browse by publisher, which is nice and convenient. The browsing page lets you view a short description of a title, which is also nice.

Here are the problems with the website:

  1. There is no way to filter by language. A lot of SW ebooks are not English, and that is good (but bad for English speakers looking for English ebooks).
  2. A few years ago SW did a site redesign allowing more browsing on the home page. A lot of book covers were featured on the home page and on genre landing pages. Unfortunately that only exposes the reader to maybe 20-50 titles, and dedicated book fans like me want to browse through hundreds. You can use some designated sorting methods, but none of them really help the reader.
  3. The easiest way to browse through SW titles is by publisher or author. That actually is good. (here’s a good list of SW publishers and another collection of SW titles.

Another problem is that prices on Smashwords aren’t particularly low. Perhaps publishers don’t plan sales for smaller platforms like SW. Perhaps publishers don’t believe consumers are that interested in DRM-free titles and are more interested in cloud-based ebooks. So why bother?

Smashwords has pledged not to run ads on ebooks, and that is admirable. On the other hand, it’s sad that it’s so hard to discover writers here. I really don’t like what Amazon has done with the ebook shopping experience (and frankly a 2 trillion dollar company is probably going to be optimized up the wazoo to extract money from people’s pockets).

Under the Radar

Beautiful Assassin: A Novel by Michael C. White (website, and his blog about writing)

I can’t remember if I already mentioned novelist Katherine Noel who wrote 2 distinguished novels and got her writing degrees from JHU and Stanford. (She teaches at JHU — which I attended). Also — unbelievably — is married to Erich Puchner and lives in Baltimore. Wait, they both teach writing there as well. I’ve been meaning to read Puchner’s writings, and I guess I ought to add Noel to this list as well.

Messi@ a Novel by Andrei Codrescu

Voice of America: Stories by E.C. Osondu

When the Plums are Ripe a Novel by Patrice Nganang. 2nd volume in a Cameroon historical trilogy. About WW2 at a time when this colonized country was caught between the Vichy regime and Free France.

In the Cherry Tree a Novel by Dan Pope

Never Drink the Kool-Aid: Essays by Toure.

Shmucks by Seymour Blicker.

Shorts by Alberto Fuguet. Chilean-born U.S. author who formed a literary movement called McOndo (anti-magical realism)

Clem Anderson: A Novel by R.V. Cassill. Well-regarded satirical novel about a professor.

Original 1982 a novel by Lori Carson

Sybille: Life, Love & Art in the Face of Absolute Power by Marion Meade.

Algorithm will See you Now: a Novel by JL Lycette.

Paul Di Filippo story collections: Lost Among the Stars: Eleven Tales and Infinite Fantastika 12 Stories.

Orientation and other stories by Daniel Orozco

Peaceable Kingdom: Stories by Francine Prose.

One Day’s Perfect Weather: More Twice Told Tales by Daniel Stern.

Circling the Drain: Stories by Amanda Davis (W). Davis died at 32 in 2003 in a plane crash, but she wrote a story collection and a novel. Michael Chabon wrote this tribute here. Another tribute here.

Referred Pain: Stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Latin Love Lessons: Put a Little Ovid in Your Life by Charlotte Higgins (W).

Mr. Bones: 20 Stories by Paul Theroux.

Temporary Shelter: Stories by Mary Gordon. It’s on the NYT, but I really like this annotated list of Gordon’s books.

Writers in America: Four Seasons of Success by Budd Schulberg. (W) Hollywood scriptwriter writes about authors who worked for Hollywood. Probably a minor work, but Schulberg was around during the McCarthy Red Scare, so probably has a unique perspective.

Personal Effects a Novel by Francesco Durante. 1993 novel about an Italian woman abandoned by her husband and goes to E. Europe to interview an author.

Dream of Wolves a Novel by Michael C. White.

Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life in the Southwest by Sharman Apt Russell.

Edisto Revisited by Padgett Powell. Sequel to a quirky first novel. Also a Woman Named Drown Novel.

Savage Girl by Alex Shakar. (W, author website) “… an incredible (somewhat Pynchon-esqe) trip into a slightly alternate world – to a city just strange enough to separate it from any real city on earth, with high-rises on a volcano called the Black Tower, with a museum of Post-moden Art, and neighborhoods like Hipsterville. ” Shakar’s later novel Luminarium won a major literary prize. Here’s the author’s 2011 lookback about the publication of Savage Girl.

Post-Poems by Wayne Miller.

Stranger Poems by Adam Clay.

Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story by Douglas Vigliotti. (author website) He hosts the Books for Men podcast and has written a few self-help kind of essays on his website.

A Year and a day (Novel) by Leslie Pietrzyk. (W), Website, 28 min YT of her reading .) 15 year old growing up in a small town. “With impressive attention to detail, Pietrzyk successfully re-creates life in the seventies in a small Iowa town.” Wow, she has been doing short interviews with all kinds of authors. I just love browsing through this list and learning about all kinds of new authors. Her 2015 Angel on my chest won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Here’s a 2018 interview: Pietrzyk has written several times about losing her husband early in life. Here’s a powerful piece about when your spouse dies.

A call from Jersey: A novel by P.F. Kluge.

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone by Stanislao G. Pugliese. Biography of the author of Bread and Wine who lived from 1900-1978,

Book Reviews

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Library Purchases/ Printed Books

Love Affair as a Work of Art by Dan Hofstadter.

Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. (1st book in a series I loved as a kid).

Creative Commons/Public Domain/Freebies

Robert Silverberg’s Lists. I came across two wonderful essays about childhood reading by sci fi author Robert Silverberg (which are included in his must-read Reflections and Refractions essay collection). A summary can’t do justice to these essays. But he mentioned several titles from PG: The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths by Padraic ColumSilvio and Bruno by Lewis Caroll (“It was Lewis Carroll’s rigorous, orderly, and logical exploration of the utterly incomprehensible, I think, that helped me to understand what science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) is all about”). The Three Mulla-mulgars by Walter De la Mare (W). I should mention in passing another beloved but obscure De La Mare title for children, Memoir of a Midget. (W)

Literary Articles and Essays

Nice annotated list of Russian short stories.

Celebrating the fiction of Jean Stafford by Mary Gordon.

Personville Press Deals

I run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. Prices normally appear highest on Amazon, Apple, Kobo and BN, somewhat lower on Google Play Books and lower on the two DRM-free stores which are Smashwords and Payhip. Personville Press is committed to selling DRM-free ebooks and audio files directly from the Personville Press payhip store or from SmashwordsThe prices listed here are the non-discounted price on Amazon. Check the links to see if they are discounted at the moment (it happens often).


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