Myriad tributes have flooded cyberspace since Iain M. Banks, one of Scotland’s greatest modern writers, finally succumbed in his heroic losing battle against cancer. I want to spotlight one small aspect of all the work and life he crammed into his 59 years: his perspective on e-books and the state of publishing. Banks was a great if idiosyncratic futurologist, besides a model writer, and both are represented here. In his 2010 interview with SciFiNow, Banks agreed that digital books would eventually supplant physical books—but definitely from a perspective born of the 1950s. “I can imagine, I suppose, having bought a book and not having...

In light of the recent discussion about selling Amazon-exclusive versus cross-platform, I reached out to my friend, small-press published author Phil Geusz, to ask him about his sales experiences with Amazon versus other platforms. Geusz’s most successful novels to date have been his David Birkenhead series, a space-navall retelling of the Biblical story of King David. (I had mistakenly been under the impression that Geusz self-published, a gaffe I’ve made before with our founder David Rothman’s novel. Amazon has done so much in the way of making self-publishing feasible that it’s sometimes hard to remember there’s a level between...

Dear Jim, When I wrote to you the other day by email with a brief note asking if Publishers Weekly might want to link to the recent news on NPR and at the Christian Science Monitor in the U.S., and in The Guardian and the Financial Times in London, about a new literary genre called "cli-fi", you replied with a terse note sent from your iPhone that read: "not interested." Jim, you seem like a very likable fellow. You're editorial director of PW, the most prestigious print magazine in the book trade industry. I've been a PW reader since I was in college....

No sooner had NPR aired a story nationwide about the emerging 'cli-fi' literary genre than a California literature professor named Stephanie LeMenager announced she would be teaching a winter 2014 seminar titled ''The Cultures of Climate Change.'' LeMenager (photo at right), who got her PhD from Harvard in 1999, teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara where she is an associate professor in the English department, and where her interests include 20th century U.S. literature, environmental criticism and cultural geography. When I emailed her for a course description, LeMengager told me: "This course will take global anthropogenic climate change (AGW) as a case study through which to explore the interdisciplinary...

By Dan Bloom TAIPEI -- In a recent Guardian commentary published in late May, British writer Rodge Glass issued a "global warning" about what he termed "the rise of 'cli-fi'" -- noting that ''unlike most science fiction, novels about climate change focus on an immediate and intense threat rather than discovery." His piece about the rise of cli-fi as a literary term in English -- in both the U.S. and in the UK -- was well-received among his newspaper's readership, with over 100 comments joining the post-publication online discussion. National Public Radio aired a story about cli-fi in April, which was followed by a second story by the Christian Science...

Just in case you missed it, we ran a post last Tuesday, May 28, by Dan Bloom, a freelance journalist based in Taiwan who's also an occasional TeleRead contributor. Bloom's post centered around a relatively recent literary term—'cli-fi,' short for 'climate fiction'—which Bloom himself claims to have coined back in 2007. The term refers to a subgenre of science fiction in which horrific futures are imagined as a result of environmental disasters. Bloom has written about the climate fiction subgenre for TeleRead in the past, and his posts always seem to attract their fair share of detractors and ridicule. So we were...

By Dan Bloom A little more than a year ago, I wrote a piece for TeleRead that was headlined, ''Cli-fi ebook to launch on Earth Day in April." The article was about a cli-fi novel by Tulsa writer Jim Laughter titled Polar City Red, which I produced and packaged from far away in Taiwan—although every word in the novel belongs to Mr. Laughter, and all the royalties go to his bank account. In the year since his novel hit the book-ordering sites, it sold 271 copies nationwide, which just goes to show that selling e-books, especially dystopian novels about polar cities in...

From Boing Boing comes news of this year's Locus nominees, shared there because one of its editors, Cory Doctorow, is nominated. I am not a huge SF reader, so most of these have stayed off my radar. But if you go for that stuff, enjoy this list of good books! SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL • The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen) • Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz) FANTASY NOVEL • The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan...

For many years, author Ray Bradbury didn’t want his books digitized. But he finally relented before his death in 2011, and allowed arguably his most famous book, Fahrenheit 451, to become an e-book. But fans of Bradbury—old and those yet to be made—will be happy to hear that several of his books will in fact be released as e-books starting this Tuesday. There will be 16 backlist titles in the month of April going digital, with several other coming later this year, MediaBistro's GalleyCat blog reported. It seems his family is behind the project as well. His daughter Alexandra Bradbury released a...

We've all heard by now about the success of the latest e-book indie darling, Hugh Howey—when his self-published Kindle series became a Kindle best-seller, he made a deal with the big publishers—but in a ground-breaking twist, the deal included only the print rights, and Howey continues to sell the e-books himself. Howey is also notoriously anti-DRM and I dig that, so I finally picked up the Wool Omnibus to see if it was worth the hype. And for the most part? It is. The book is split into five novellas, each taking place in an apocalyptic future where the remains of humanity survive in an elaborate community...

Self-publishing has a lot of advantages and just as many countervailing drawbacks. The biggest advantage is, of course, you get to be your own boss and can publish whatever you want to, without some publisher taking a cut of the money. But the dark side of this freedom is that it can leave you vulnerable if some big company with money and lawyers decides it doesn’t like what you’re doing. And even if their claims are completely outlandish, it will cost you money you don’t have—more money than your book will ever make—to fight them, and you don’t have any guarantee...

Sometimes a book comes along that is so good you know it'll stay with you forever. Tears in Rain is one of those books for me. I found it by accident. It showed up on my Kindle with Special Offers earlier this month. I saw it was about replicants and was Prime Lending eligible. I wasn't expecting much, but hey: Free! Now I intend to go back and buy it. It's that good. The story is a thriller. The main character is a replicant private detective who has been hired to investigate some gruesome murders. Bruna Husky is well drawn and three-dimensional. She's...