As I reported yesterday, author Brandon Sanderson was in Seattle on November 18th for The Gathering Storm tour.

I took pictures of his stop at The Signed Page, the dinner afterward, and the actual event at the University Bookstore.

I also filmed video of Brandon talking, reading from The Gathering Storm, and answering questions from the fans!

The event was a lot of fun. Brandon is very enthusiastic about his role finishing what he considers the best epic fantasy of all time. He has been a fan since his early teenage years and when the opportunity to finish the Wheel of Time series presented itself, he could not imagine another person doing it. As he says in the video, the main characters in Jordan’s opus were Brandon’s best friends during high school. Before Harriet even approached him, Brandon had read and re-read the books numerous times.

I have no doubt after listening to him that he is the right person for the job.

Continue on, watch the videos, and enjoy this time to revisit the Wheel of Time:

Part I of V: How and why Brandon became involved in the Wheel of Time

More videos! There are five altogether. Continue on for the reading and Q&A!

THE LAST UNIFORM (Saigo no Seifuku, “The Last (School) Uniform”) （最後の制服） • Mera Hakamada • Seven Seas Entertainment (2007-suspended) • Houbunsha (Manga Time Kirara Carat/Manga Time Kirara Max, 2004-2006) • 2 volumes (3 volumes in Japan, suspended) • Yuri Romance • 16+(brief mild language, brief mild violence, sexual situations)
Willowy, wispy big-headed girls fall in secret love with each other at a girls’ dorm in this distinctively drawn romance anthology. As the five main characters—some of them roommates—spend time together, talking smack and complaining about guys (who, of course, are either offscreen or creeps), their separate relationships brew into a stew of repressed loves, secret friend-crushes and heart-pounding close encounters. Although the characters are drawn like little children, their slice-of-life dialogue is sharp and quirky and elevates the series above purely juvenile gaze-into-the-girls-world stuff like Strawberry Marshmallow. (“But I want Tsumugi’s body!” “Just for that, you have to write a sex story about me, Kisaragi Asagi and that girl! A really juicy one, too!” “Hey, write a story where Beniko jumps me!”) In short: tasteful lesbian-themed thrills set on a background of red, melancholy sunsets. The third volume is on hold as of November 2009.

Today’s winner is Carolyn T. of Delaware. Congratulations, Carolyn! I’ll be sending you some manga ASAP!

Killing was easy if you had the stomach for it. Killing quickly and efficiently, with only minor cleanup required, took effort and training. Judging by the sixteen countable pieces of goblin strewn around the row home’s dilapidated living room, as well as the congealing puddle of fuchsia blood and effluvia, the effort had not been made and training had gone sorely to waste. The Rookie was trouble, she thought. Trouble, plain and simple.

Ash Bedford surveyed the gruesome scene, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she contemplated the mess. Goblins were small, never taller than five feet and always gangly-thin, making their bodies somewhat simple to dispose of—as long as they remained intact. But if Ash hadn’t been certain of their destroyer, she’d have thought several wild dogs had done the damage.

Triad Rookie. Wild dog. She was beginning to lose sight of the difference between the two.

Evangeline Stone had been assigned to their Triad almost two months ago, and she had yet to earn any title other than Rookie. She continued to fight with her heart and her anger instead of her brain, and it was going to get her killed. In the four years she’d Hunted, Ash had seen it happen time and again in other Triads—hot-headed Rookies who succumbed to their own stupidity and lack of self-control.

Ash had just lost a friend of many years. He’d been reliable and steadfast and impossible to replace. She had no interest in attaching herself to a tempestuous blond waif who had yet to master the finer points of Dreg execution. The trio of goblins had been Stone’s first solo assignment. She’d killed them, yes, but Ash still considered it a botched job.

….Or, McLovin is finally in a superhero movie.

Based on the comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., Kick-Ass already looks like its going to live up to its name. It certainly isn’t the first comedy to feature superheroes with no super powers, Mystery Men comes immediately to mind, but it may be the most epic. Come on, how can watching fail-tastic teenagers beat up hardened criminals not be entertaining?

Oh, and the man in the red cape at the beginning of the trailer? He’s my new hero.

Publishing, and subsequently writers, are in the middle of a revolution.

Not only do we finally have practical ebook reading hardware, there’s an infrastructure for ebook delivery that is not only up and running but rapidly expanding. Which means that there are now more books available from more outlets than there have ever been.

This is a good thing. Frankly, even the best publishing houses and editors (Hi, David), can only shepherd so many books to market. And even the best stores can only stock so much on their shelves. The ebook outlets can get long out of print books back into circulation. It provides a way for quirky, hard-to-classify authors or books to try their wings and maybe generate a little buzz for themselves.

Full disclosure: In case you don’t know, I’m a member of the online cooperative Book View Cafe, which is doing this exact thing, so, of course I think it’ a good thing.

And I’m telling you, it’s a sign of how much things have changed that I’d actually suggest publishing with an e-press, or even self-publishing with an outfit like the Kindle store as a route for an aspiring writer. But these days it can be a boost. If you’re careful, if you’re realistic and if you’re able and willing to get out there and push your work. When I was on an award jury a few years back, we found a book that had originally been e-published, and it was phenomenal. We all loved it for its fresh style and creative approach.

But all this expansion has also made for some new gray areas in the world of publishing, and thanks to the publishing giant Harlequin, it’s about to become even easier for new writers to get lost in the fog.

You see, Harlequin has just set up a vanity press.

This is very different from a traditional publishing house which pays the author a set amount up front in return for their work. It is different from an e-press where an editor goes over your work and the publisher puts it up for sale, giving you a percentage of the cover price for a contractually agreed-upon time frame. It is also different from a self-publishing situation where the writer themselves does the work of formatting and uploading your own book online with someone who is renting out out virtual shelf-space. A vanity press requires the aspiring author to pay up-front, in the case of Harlequin’s new venture between $600 to $1,600. In return, Harlequin will create an electronic file, and put a couple of lines in a large online catalogue.

In the old days, they would have shipped the author a carton of books, and a bill for purchasing additional copies of their own book.

This is not publishing. It is not even self-publishing where the author only pays a cut of their actual sales income once they’ve received it. It’s printing, pure and simple, and the only entity that will profit from it is Harlequin.

In short, it’s a scam. Pure and simple.

What does it mean when a book that seems to be almost universally dismissed as drivel by many in the publishing industry is probably the greatest driving force in the hottest genre on the market today?

I’m no expert, but I’m guessing it means that, somewhere, all those smart industry people are kicking themselves.

If you’re not sure which book I’m referring to (I know—there’s so many that could fall into this description, no?), than I’ll give you some hints:

• It’s about vampires.
• It’s set in a high school in the Pacific Northwest.
• If you have a teenage daughter, granddaughter, or niece, chances are they expect you to get them to the movie theater on November 20th—with gaggles of their giggling friends.
• If you have a middle-aged wife, girlfriend, or sister—ditto.
• If you’re a twenty-something young professional woman—ditto.

If you haven’t guessed by now, then I suggest you lift your hands high up over your head, as that’s the best way to get out from under the rock you’re living beneath.

Hot on the heels of his New York Times #1 bestselling placement that knocked The Lost Symbol from its perch, Brandon Sanderson stopped by my place yesterday to sign several hundred copies of The Gathering Storm for Wheel of Time fans all over the world.

Even after passing through airports and sleeping in a different hotel bed every night for weeks, Brandon was still in great spirits when he arrived.

We talked for a few minutes about fun, geeky stuff like who is painting his The Way of Kings cover art, if he should buck up and buy the original painting of that cover, the Michael Whelan Dark Tower framed art I have on my walls, and the premise of the book I am currently rewriting.

It was then time for work. We knew we were crunched for time.

The first order of business was to get Brandon in touch with two podcast/video interviewers via Skype on my Mac. After a few minutes of getting things set up, Brandon was answering questions about his own reading habits (Terry Pratchett being foremost among them), who wrote the first fantasy book he read (Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly), and how he was chosen to write The Gathering Storm (one fateful voice message on his phone):

After the interview was completed, he had a lot more work to finish before the night wrapped up! Here is last night, in pictures.

SCRIPT DOWNERS （SCRIPT ダウナーズ) • Ryu-tmr • CPM (2007) • Wani Books (Comic Gum, 2002-2003) • 1 volume, suspended (2 volumes in Japan) • Otaku Science Fiction Comedy • 13+ (mild violence, mild sexual situations)
Sometime in the future, the Internet has evolved into a massive virtual reality network, where Hina Matsuki—a short-skirted, teenage Network Security agent— downloads bootleg ROMs, finds missing virtual girlfriends, and fights cute animal icons run amok. A combination of Ghost in the Shell/The Matrix-type science fiction with otaku in-jokes (Akihabara etc.), Script Downers is a pleasant but forgettable story-gag manga. The art is nicely clean-looking and angular, although the weird-eyed faces are awkward.

Central Park Media… a name from the past. When I got into the anime and manga business in 1996, they were one of the big shots. They had published super-fan-favorites like Project A-Ko and the Genocyber series, and a few lesser-known anime which were truly stunning, notably the beautiful and philosophical art film (with a cast of anthropomorphic cats!) Night on the Galactic Railroad. Around 1997 they started publishing manga, starting with some fairly blah fanservice titles like the… er, topheavy… work of Satoshi Urushihara, and numerous Slayers adaptations, but then taking some interesting risks, such as in 2003 when they became a pioneer in publishing Boy’s Love/yaoi manga. I remember that in 2004 John O’ Donnell, the CEO of Central Park Media, visited the VIZ offices in San Francisco. We had lunch with him and we joked about how VIZ’s family-friendly image would never permit us to publish yaoi manga. “You take the kid’s stuff, and we’ll take the porn,” he laughed. At the same time, they were also acquiring the rights to some very interesting non-porn manga, like Kiriko Nananan’s “Sweet Cream and Strawberries,” and several other fascinating books.

Unfortunately, many of these books never came out. Even “Script Downers” is so hard to find that I could only find a decent-sized image of the Japanese cover. CPM was hit by the same financial problems which affected every company in the anime and manga publishing industry, but they also had a serious P.R. problem. In 2007 Biblos, the primary licensee of CPM’s yaoi manga up to that point, went out of business and was bought out by Libre, another Japanese publisher. CPM had already signed and paid contracts with Biblos to publish certain yaoi in English, so they — perhaps foolishly — forged ahead with their publishing plans, despite Biblos’ dissolution. Libre became angered that CPM hadn’t gotten in contact with them (and perhaps renegotiated the rights, possibly paid them more money, etc.), so Libre put up an open letter on their Japanese website, calling on yaoi fans to boycott CPM. A large number of fans did, and CPM’s image was seriously damaged.

Things started to fall apart. At the end of one anime convention in New York (rumor has it), the CPM folks didn’t want to pay for the shipping it would have cost to send their unsold graphic novels and anime back to their warehouse. John O’Donnell promised that he was going to make an important announcement at a panel at the very end of the last day of the convention. At the panel he gave every audience member a bag, and then said “Now take that bag, go back to the CPM table, and take all the anime and manga you want. It’s all free.” The table was cleaned out in minutes. Such grandiose gestures were very much in the CPM style. When CPM finally, irrevocably went out of business in 2009, after two years of languishing on life support, they bought a full-page ad in the Anime Expo program book saying to all their fans: goodbye and thanks for the support.

And so vanished one of the giants of anime and manga. So long, CPM. I’ll miss them, even if they did publish one of the worst manga ever, “Legend of Lemnear.”

Thanks for bearing with me on this trip down Manga Memory Lane. Today’s winner is Francisco C. of California! I’ll be sending you some manga (probably not CPM manga) ASAP! :)

Chat live with Eisner Award-winner Nina Matsumoto on Tuesday, November 24 at 3 PM EST!

Nina first made a splash into the manga scene with a single image she called “Simpsonzu”—an illustration of the entire Simpsons cast, drawn in a manga style. The image caught the attention and imagination of the comics blogosphere—as well as the attention of Bongo Comics. Impressed with Nina’s work, they offered her a position as a penciler for comic book series such as The Simpsons and Futurama.

On October 20th, I posted news titled Auction: Terry Brooks Character Name.

In short, Terry allowed fans to bid on an auction where the winning bidder could have their name in a future book. The auction helped raise $1700 for children, schools, and other non-profit entities around the world. Terry gives as much as possible for numerous charities throughout the year, and that one created a fun new opportunity for him.

The character from the winning bidder became the G’Home Gnome Shoopdiesel in the recently published A Princess of Landover.

That one turned out so well that Terry decided to do it again—this time for a Shannara character name!

The auction went live in October and ended at noon on November 11th. To help get news of the auction to Terry’s fans, I posted the information on Suvudu and the News section of his official website, mentioned it on his official forum, and sent out an email blast to his Brooksbooks newsletter which goes out to tens of thousand of people.

By the end of the auction there were 72 bids, fans hoping to get the chance to be immortal as a character in a Terry Brooks novel.

What dollar amount did the auction finally go for?