[Madness]

It's time to do what web-comic authors do - stick books on your site for free and sell t-shirts, hats and stickers.  Circumfix bumper stickers will out-number Jesus fish in a few years.  Or instead of Calvin peeing decals, we can have Aurang ejaculating.  The possibilities are endless.

This!

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I'm sure we can facilitate this without Cû'jara-Cinmoi giving up on traditional backing or those sweet advance checks .

[CondYoke]

If I ever saw a "the logos has no beginning or end..." bumper sticker, I might have to rear- end that car just to talk about the books. 

[Callan S.]

I think you buy books to be a patron. I'm not supporting stealing in saying this, just instead of mentioning the stick, I'm mentioning the carrot - you buy books in order to be a patron. That's a carrot. Someone who supports - ie, something a Dunyain wouldn't do... > Buying stickers and t-shirts - then you're a patron of stickers and t-shirts, not books.

We had friends over a few nights ago who laughed that I would be so stupid to buy Bluerays for things that were free. Its got to the point where I'm apologizing for taking intellectual property seriously.

Free as in it's genuinely in the public domain? Otherwise it's not free?

If it was something in the public domain, I think it's valid to talk about getting it for free...since it's free.

[jurble]

There's no money in books Callan.  It's all in shirts and stickers.  You think it was the book sales or even her movie cut that made Rowling a billionaire?  Nope, it was the swag.

[MisterGuyMan]

At the risk of alienating my favorite author, I'm firmly believe piracy is a bogeyman used by large media companies.

I've read a lot of studies on the issue and if you throw out the media sponsored ones and the ones that equate each pirated copy to a lost sale, the actual effect of piracy isn't bad and even has positive benefits.

The simplest way to understand it is to examine consumers.  The limiting variable in how many books, movies or songs people buy is simply income.  People simply do not have enough money to buy it all the media they want.  Piracy is generally a supplementary activity in conjunction with legitimate spending.  A more accurate way to view this is by looking at pirates as fans and multiple studies actually confirm that the most prolific pirates are also usually the biggest spenders of legitimate media.

[obstinate]

1. Do you have a Patreon? I am aware of other mid and even A-list writers who are using these as a means of securing a stable income between books. It's also an interesting way to let your readers invest in you, as opposed to only consuming that which you produce (I'm not sure if this distinction makes the idea more or less attractive). But I would certainly contribute a few dollars a month if you had one.

2. Something I have to relearn painfully from time to time: there's a medium for writing where the most you can ever lose is the last few letters you typed. Its name is Google Docs. If it takes more than a minute or two to compose just about anything, I create a document to host the work in progress.

[Baztek]

thanks for writing such a riveting series, fantastic work, and if there was a couple hundred million behind a series of films it'd go down in history

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

At the risk of alienating my favorite author, I'm firmly believe piracy is a bogeyman used by large media companies.

I've read a lot of studies on the issue and if you throw out the media sponsored ones and the ones that equate each pirated copy to a lost sale, the actual effect of piracy isn't bad and even has positive benefits.

In other words, big media are skewing results in order to minimize their profits... The only universe in which this argument could have bite is one where humans are hardwired to rationalize guilt.

The more time people spend consuming free media, the less time they spend consuming purchased media, the less money they spend. You can spike your samples any which way (the way IP foes do), cherry-pick countless happy scenarios, but it all comes down to this: people spending less, and content producers struggling more.

Being a Yar is bad enough. Being one who thinks they're actually doing good, on the other hand...

 

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

Is Meppa going to show up in the next series or is his story over?

Also, can you confirm that Kellhus actually failed in the end and didn't pull off some trick to fool Ajokli and the Consult?

Sorry to be cryptic, but I can say Meppa is not dead, but Kellhus is.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

I just wanted to say thank you all once again. I appreciate all kind words - if I don't quote or respond to them directly it's simply for the sake of getting to as many questions as I can.

I wish I had a meaningful question, but beyond the title, I don't want to spoil the story for myself, so I will only ask that perpetually annoying reader question... how long?  Have you inked a deal yet?  Will it grow from 2 to 3 books, or are you set on 2?
Also, you mentioned on TPB that the film/TV rights were optioned. Have you heard of any movement on that project?  And if it moves forward, how much creative control will you retain?

Amazon welched on the TV deal. In fact, they sacked everyone involved in it and several other deals with several other authors. Typically, a letter of agreement is as good as a contract in the biz. Once again they have proven themselves innovators.

A deal for the next books is in the works, but quite a bit depends on how well things go with TUC and the degree to which it bootstraps the backlist. Even if that happens, I'll keep on writing. The innovative folks over at Amazon have developed a great platform for authors to go it alone.

And yes, the world really is that crazy.

[H]

Amazon welched on the TV deal. In fact, they sacked everyone involved in it and several other deals with several other authors. Typically, a letter of agreement is as good as a contract in the biz. Once again they have proven themselves innovators.

A deal for the next books is in the works, but quite a bit depends on how well things go with TUC and the degree to which it bootstraps the backlist. Even if that happens, I'll keep on writing. The innovative folks over at Amazon have developed a great platform for authors to go it alone.

And yes, the world really is that crazy.

Damn.  Well, I am not exactly super knowledgeable on it, but there are also things like https://www.patreon.com/ that can allow you to establish something on your own too.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

"...but hindsight is a motherfucker when it comes to threading those kinds of needles."  Perfect answer! 

Can you please clarify the meaning or symbolism of the "head on the pole behind you" imagery?

How did Serwa overcome the effects of the Agonic collar that she had on in Ishterebinth?

As I said, I have a million of them!  ;^)

The image itself comes from a curious optical illusion I continually experienced while writing in this particular coffee shop. Whenever I sat in this one chair, I saw the silhouette of a severed head on a pole over my shoulder - and it just so happened that I was writing the first draft of these Kellhus sections at the time. It creeped me out, and given my old Derridean obsession with the paradoxes of the time of telling versus the time told, I thought it a cool way to evoke the omnipresence of the infernal eternal, as well as to provide yet another clue regarding the unclean entity residing within.

Serwa had been prepared by her father... it was another Metagnostic tool.

[Woden]

Best white-luck with all of that stuff!

Another mad desire: the saga could be a terrific franchise for games, as Project Red made with Sapkowski's The Witcher. That's the future.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

A lot of the questions have been put forward and even answered already. Something I was wondering about, what was the ultimate point of the Serwa vs the Dragon scene? The Ordeal's fight to enter the Ark seemed futile, considering the context of the Golden Room, and I don't quite see what the Serwa scene does for the narrative. Serwa's feats had been legendary already, I did not feel or understand the necessity of this setpiece.

I'm not sure I get the question, even if it were the case that the battle lacked downstream consequences. To the extent that war is generally pointless, all war stories are mountains of futility with peaks of 'closure' here and there. I can't tell a realistic story without including dead ends. The Glossary is literally packed with them!

[Wilshire]

Best white-luck with all of that stuff!

Another mad desire: the saga could be a terrific franchise for games, as Project Red made with Sapkowski's The Witcher. That's the future.

THere's a TPB post somewhere where Scott mentions he wanted to turn it into a Total War esque game, had a bidder or something(?), but it fell through.


Scott, have you ever considered a a-typical medium for your not-so-typical books? I think anime is a great place for books to be translated to a different audiance in a different medium. Much more creative freedom - but much less money for it I'd imagine.