Library School Graduate and Book Lover

By:  Will Allen-DuPraw

These Albatross look eerily similar to certain 80’s icons…

Every teenager goes through phases, and Albatross are no exception. The transition from juvenile to adult can be a trying and confusing time for these birds, and the result is a sense of style that is, well, rather dated. 

Every year when juvenile albatrosses begin to molt, their colony begins to look like an 80’s convention rolled into town. In fact, it would seem that many 80’s hair styles were inspired by these glamorous birds. Take a look at these match-ups that appear to be too close to be coincidence:

Not only did Billy Idol (right) lift the hairstyle from this molting albatross, but it seems the smoky eye was an Albatross original as well.

While this man’s carefully groomed mullet is impressive, it’s no match for the nature-made version sported by the Albatross (left). The mustache is a nice touch though.

This photo is already screaming anything I could possibly say about the matchup…

This punk rock Albatross (left) was clearly the inspiration for Robert De Niro’s edgy Mohawk in Taxi Driver.

Fascinated yet? Learn more about these iconic seabirds.

First Attempt at Creating New Albatross Colony Using Eggs is Milestone in Seabird Conservation

Photo: V106 - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Pacific Rim Conservation partner to translocate albatrosses in order to protect the future of Hawaii’s albatross colonies. Photo credit: Pacific Rim Conservation

She may not have a name, but her number is significant - V106. She is the first of 46 chicks that were translocated from Kauai to Oahu to return as an adult. Her return is an important milestone in the founding of a new Laysan albatross colony at James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge in Kahuku.

V106 hatched three years ago and was raised inside a new predator proof fence on the refuge. After flying out to sea on June 30, 2015, she has returned to the refuge after having spent the last three years wandering the North Pacific Ocean.

First Attempt at Creating New Albatross Colony Using Eggs is Milestone in Seabird Conservation

Photo: V106 - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Pacific Rim Conservation partner to translocate albatrosses in order to protect the future of Hawaii’s albatross colonies. Photo credit: Pacific Rim Conservation

She may not have a name, but her number is significant - V106. She is the first of 46 chicks that were translocated from Kauai to Oahu to return as an adult. Her return is an important milestone in the founding of a new Laysan albatross colony at James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge in Kahuku.

V106 hatched three years ago and was raised inside a new predator proof fence on the refuge. After flying out to sea on June 30, 2015, she has returned to the refuge after having spent the last three years wandering the North Pacific Ocean.

Photo: Wisdom has a remarkable history of successfully raising chicks.  Wisdom newest chick finds comfort in her mother’s embrace. Photo credit: Bob Peyton/USFWS.   

At 67, Wisdom, the world’s oldest known breeding bird in the wild, is a mother once more! On February 6th, approximately two months after Wisdom began incubating her egg, Wisdom and her mate Akeakamai welcomed their newest chick to Midway Atoll.

Wisdom, a Laysan albatross and the world’s oldest known breeding bird in the wild, has returned to Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge and Battle of Midway National Memorial. The approximately 67 year old Wisdom flies thousands of miles each year to return to Midway Atoll. Her arrival is overshadowed only by the news that she has also laid an egg.

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

We’re beyond excited to hand over our tumblr to Codi Gary for the day!

We’re celebrating the release of DON’T CALL ME SWEETHEART with an all day takeover, which features a look at the inspiration behind this first installment in the SOMETHING BORROWED series.

Author Codi Gary shares the inspiration behind the location of her new book, DON’T CALL ME SWEETHEART:

Don’t Call Me Sweetheart takes place in the fictional small town of Sweetheart, California. Set in the foothills above Sacramento, this beautiful rural area in El Dorado County is home to gorgeous wineries and little, western towns. Since this was where I grew up, it was easy for me to visualize all the roads and landmarks (although, some were made up like the ghost town, Buzzard Gulch) and put Sweetheart between Mt. Aukum and Somerset, California. (If you have never heard of these towns, don’t feel bad, few people have!) But, places like Placerville and Coloma are popular tourist destinations and thirty to forty-five minutes from the place I grew up. During California’s Gold Rush, Placerville was called Hangtown because of the numerous hangings that took place in the town. Hangman’s Tree Bar sits on the site of Placerville’s original tree where vigilantes would execute men without judge or jury. Coloma was a HUGE gold rush location and people still find gold today in the American River (and in the other rivers and streams in the California Foothills.)

Why did I pick this area to set my Something Borrowed series? Because it is a beautiful, secluded place with mild weather most of the year. It’s the perfect town for celebrities to come get married away from the paparazzi. There are two roads that lead in on either side, and less than a thousand people in each town. If you were the paparazzi, would you think to look here?

If you ever get the chance to visit this area, I totally recommend it…plus, it’s less than an hour and a half from Tahoe.

From DON’T CALL ME SWEETHEART author Codi Gary:

Curl up with your favorite drink and take a trip to Sweetheart, California…where the coffee is black, the landscape is breathtaking, and weddings are big business. Fall in love with Marley and Luke as they navigate their way to happily ever after…

Author Codi Gary shares a special excerpt from her new book, DON’T CALL ME SWEETHEART:

“Since you’re feeling so much better, I guess I should get going.”

Did she look disappointed? “Okay. Well, thanks. I appreciate you coming by and staying.”

“Hey, if you want me to stick around, I’m happy to. We could find a movie to watch, and I can fetch you stuff while you call me a man servant.”

The smile on her face was almost shy. It was charming. “You say that like I won’t take you up on it.”

He put his hands on either side of her legs and leaned closer. “So, does that mean you want me to stay?”

Just a flutter of hesitation in her eyes, and then she smiled. “Yes. Stay.”

From author Codi Gary:

Meet Butters August 15th when Don’t Call Me Sweetheart releases! Likes: showers, Trix cereal, and staring at people while they sleep.

For never was a story of more woe than crushing on a boy who doesn’t know.