I'll be going mostly DRM-free next year. I've been thinking for awhile about this. I balked because I worried that books would simply not be available without DRM, and that I would be missing out on the good stuff just to make a point. But then I realized that it's been ages since I actually anticipated a book purchase. Sure, I would buy stuff when something interesting came my way and the price was right. But these were impulse buys. It wasn't like there were a ton of new releases I was counting down the days toward. And I realized, too, that...

Want to help raise money for UNICEF and read a fun, spooky story? Diane Duane is again offering the 14,000-word Young Wizards short story "Not On My Patch"as a Halloween fundraiser for $3.99, with half of all proceeds going to UNICEF. Duane writes that the sale last year raised more than $1,100 for the campaign, and she would like to beat that record this year. While $3.99 might be a bit of a hefty price for a short story, it’s for a good cause, and Halloween comes but once a year. As with all other books from Duane’s e-bookstore, it is...

I wrote earlier for TeleRead about an unexpected—and very welcome—sub-group of indie book: the backlist re-publication. One of the complaints people most frequently have about indie books is that it's hard to tell the dross from the gold: So many self-published indie titles are one-man or one-woman shops, and people value the notion that with traditionally published books, a pair of eyes besides the author's has seen the book, approved of it and polished it to its most refined state. Backlist re-publications are the best of both worlds: a publisher has seen it, approved it and polished it—and then the...

Diane Duane is running a Summer Solstice sale on her DRM-free multiformat e-book store, featuring her own and husband Peter Morwood’s works (including the Young Wizards International Edition and the revised version of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses). The discount is 50% off, obtained by use of the discount code SOLSTICE in the checkout, and lasts until 23:59 Hawaiian time on June 21 (4:59 a.m. Eastern time June 22). Duane adds: In case you're curious, this sale is partly in aid of the upcoming addition to our household of two wee new female Kittens of Doom...

I know I mention Diane Duane’s e-book store sales a lot, but I figure that she’s one of very few excellent examples I know of authors who run their own DRM-free multi-format e-book stores and offer frequent discounts to boot. She’s a shining example of how to do things right, and I think that kind of example needs all the exposure it can get. And speaking of frequent discounts, Duane is currently offering a 60% discount on everything in her e-book store through 23:59 Hawaiian time, Tuesday March 27th. Use the coupon code FLASHSALE during the checkout process. Among...

ATM fraud can strike the best of us. In this case, it’s struck Diane Duane, whose bank account has been suddenly cleaned out by someone who apparently skimmed her ATM card. The bank will compensate her for the fraudulent charges, but it will take a few days, leaving her without money at the moment to pay the bills that are coming due. As a result, she is running a store-wide 20%-off sale on her already-reasonably-priced DRM-free multi-format e-books to encourage a quick influx of cash on which she can get by until the bank comes through. Use the discount code DDGOTSKIMMED...

Diane Duane has revised and relaunched another of her backlist as an e-book. This one, Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, takes CSI-style forensic drama (though it was first published in 2002, the same year as the original CSI launched) and puts it into an SF/fantasy setting. It’s one of the few Duane books I haven’t gotten around to reading yet—but now I have a good excuse! Duane writes that she took the opportunity to fix a few issues she’d noticed in the book over the last ten years, including restoring some material that had previously been cut and rewriting the...

Happy Halloween! Raising money for UNICEF has been a traditional part of trick-or-treating over the last few decades, and Diane Duane is marking its 60th anniversary by offering e-reading access to “Not On My Patch,” a new novelette in the Young Wizards universe, as a reward to anyone who contributes more than $5 through UNICEF’s website before the end of Halloween in the USA (at 12:01 a.m. Hawaiian time November 1st). Donors forward a copy of their donation confirmation e-mail to youngwizards4unicef@gmail.com and will get a link to where they can read the work. Through the month of November,...

On FutureBook, Steve Emecz wonders why Barnes & Noble still hasn’t made the Nook devices, Nook Reader apps, or Nook e-books available outside the US and Canada. Amazon and Kobo, he points out, have readers and software available in the UK. Why not B&N? An excited author of mine downloaded the Nook PC app and bought a copy of his e-enhanced book this weekend and was hugely impressed (The London of Sherlock Holmes hyperlinking to Google Maps). I tried to do the same, and indeed also tried to download the exciting new Nook iPad app too...

For “absolutely no reason”, Diane Duane is running a 50%-off sale on every e-book in her on-line store, good today, October 10th, only. Use the coupon code NOREASON to get the discount. Duane’s e-books are available DRM-free in both mobi (Kindle) and EPUB (Nook, Kobo) formats, and are already quite reasonably priced. 50% off that is quite a deal!...

A couple more e-book-related news items from Diane Duane’s blog that hit in recent days: First, Duane is now able to make available multi-format bundles, including both EPUB and Kindle/MOBI, for all the DRM-free e-books in her store. (And .LIT will be added to these bundles as well, over the next month.) To celebrate, she’s running a week-long 20%-off sale using the coupon code BUNDLE. (When you place the order, you will enter the code on the very last screen after you verify your PayPal information.) Second, Duane has added a package deal where all nine volumes of...

A number of authors have as-yet-unwritten books that are the subject of inquiries. (I mentioned George R.R. Martin’s experiences of that nature last year.) For Diane Duane, it’s the last book of the “Middle Kingdoms” series, The Door into Starlight. Though it has been thirty years since the first book in the series, Duane has not yet managed to write the fourth—though she gets asked about it a great deal. The release of updated e-book versions of the first three books in the series a few days ago has prompted another wave of inquiries into when Duane will write...