Having read the climactic eleventh volume before the Hugos, I have been catching up with the volumes in between.
Again a decent romp, mostly about Litte Boy Blue’s solo raid deep into the Adversary’s domain, with the final revelation of who the Adversary actually is.
This was not so bad, though again I found the politics rather dodgy and it seems to be getting easier and easier to penetrate the Adversary’s domain. Lots of quite good character moments, rather stalling on plot. Also rather thin – only four issues of the comic here, bulked out by maps and the script for one of the issues.
So I’ll probably stick with these, but the earlier volumes were better.
I’ve been paying attention to both Bookscan, which lists sales including Amazon sales, and Amazon sales rank, and it is quite apparent that the Amazon sales rank means absolutely nothing.
My novel Lifelode has sold zero copies in 2011 through Amazon and Bookscan associated bookstores. Zero. (It has sold some directly through NESFA, but those don’t show up.) So, in a year with zero sales, what has the Amazon sales rank done? Bounced up and down, varying between 68,000 and below 1,000,000. Zero sales! Anyone looking at the week when it was 68,000 would think it had sold a copy that week, but no, somebody had linked to Amazon’s site from a review.
Among Others Amazon rank has skyrocketed in the last few days as people link to it from Nebula lists. This undoubtedly holds true for the other Nebula nominees, so it’s probably a reasonable comparison of… something…. but it doesn’t represent sales in any useful way.
The Librarything and Goodreads figures, on the other hand, are meaningful. And wow, Embassytown! It’s a New York Times Bestseller, too.
How many voters are there in SFWA anyway?