HFQ Delayed to Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - Ref: Amazon

Charybdis wrote::cry:

AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!!!!!!!

Please, say it ain't so Joe!

How can you delay something which already has been delayed because the previous release has been delayed?

Noooooooh!

And - can't be true, because my friends at Amazon haven't told me about it for my pre-order(yet!)

Amazon UK is also choosing the Kindle edition as 13 October (the hardback is still there for 8 Sept. I guess it hasn't caught up yet.)

It's ridiculous; obviously Tor can't run the proverbial booze up in a brewery. We've been told repeatedly that the book had to be delayed for nearly a year because Tor's system was so inflexible once it had missed the planned slot. Now it seems, they are quite happy to bump it back 5 weeks, despite it being planned into the new slot for months. I'm glad I don't currently read anyone else published by Tor, getting messed about like this certainly doesn't encourage me to change that.

I just wiki'd Tor Books and apparently it's three years older than Baen Books.
By following links, I also found that Tor is owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, one of the so-called Big Five.
This raises an interesting point. Is their apparent inability to adjust schedules in a positive aspect a result of the arthritic bureaucratic setup of such a large company? Is it the result of teutonic efficiency colliding with the fact that sometimes books take slightly longer to proof-read than planned?
I do not know the answers to these questions, but I do know that GvHPG has roused the ire of many of Weber's fans.
Things are going to get interesting!

clancy688 wrote:How can you delay something which already has been delayed because the previous release has been delayed?

I suspect it has something to do with Tor's ability to print the dead tree version and get it on the shelves. They could release the ebook version today if they wanted to, but the big money is made selling hardbacks at this point in time. That will probably change as the publishing industry becomes more digital, but physical books will hopefully be with us for centuries to come. After all, the TF had physical books printed on synthetic paper that is strong enough to endure for centuries with no noticeable aging or wear!

I'm all for RFC making as much money as possible, although in a perfect world an ebook that carries no printing costs, no shipping or storage costs, and requires no brick and mortar store from which to sell it ought to be more profitable than the dead tree version. I suspect the amount of piracy regarding anything in digital form is the reason that the ebooks are usually released the same day (or later) than the dead tree version. For a contrary view of piracy from Eric Flint, who co-authors the Torch books in the Honorverse, see the link below.

For reasons only its publishers know, the New York Time's best sellers list apparently doesn't include ebook sales, which in this day and age is absolutely ludicrous! So some ebooks (think the last book of the Wheel of Time series) have been deliberately delayed for that reason. We discussed this extensively and somewhat bitterly in an earlier thread, where RFC posted his opinion of delaying ebooks, while putting the decision that the late Robert Jordan's wife made to delay the last WOT ebook into perspective. See http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4245&hilit=Wheel+of+time&start=50

I guess we'll have to wait as fast as we can for the arrival of HFQ for a bit longer...

The chapters site http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/search/?keywords=Hell's%20Foundations%20Quiver shows the books on Sept 8 and the E-book Oct 13.

McGuiness wrote:
For reasons only its publishers know, the New York Time's best sellers list apparently doesn't include ebook sales, which in this day and age is absolutely ludicrous!

Actually NYT has combined Print & E-Book in both print and online versions of their Book Review, and has form some years.

Keith_w wrote:The chapters site http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/search/?keywords=Hell's%20Foundations%20Quiver shows the books on Sept 8 and the E-book Oct 13.

I'm glad to hear that the New York Times best seller's list has gotten its act together regarding ebook sales. Tor's decision to delay the release of the ebook of HFQ for more than a month after the hardback is even more confusing now that ebooks are counted on the best seller list.

Unfortunately that delay merely means that some enterprising owner of the hardcover will scan it page by page and produce an ebook of it long before the official ebook is released. RFC seems to feel that piracy of new books has less of an impact than I do - he doubted that the last "Wheel of Time" book lost tens of thousands of sales due to piracy when the ebook was delayed by four months! It's hard to argue that there won't be more piracy because the hardback is available over a month before the ebook rather than releasing both at the same time. See my last post for a link to a thread where this was discussed in depth, including some input by RFC.

I really don't understand the publishing industry at this point. Baen releases eARCS of all its books months in advance, and the ebook and hardback on the same day, but TOR refuses to do that. It could certainly raise the price of the ebook if necessary so that the costs of the author's royalties, the editor, promotion, and everything else that goes into the cost of a book's release were paid for equally by the hardback and ebook versions, giving it no excuse not to release both at the same time. (I suspect their current price of the ebook actually exceeds the profit margin of the hardback, but I don't know the actual numbers.) I certainly hope that every publisher reduces the price of the ebook version of a novel once it comes out in paperback.

So once again I'll be reserving the hardback of the next Safehold book at my local library so I don't have to wait more than a month to read HFQ in ebook form. Grumble, grumble, grumble... It torques me that I'll have to go to that effort, then end up buying the ebook anyway because I find them so much easier to read on my 24" computer screen, plus I reread the Safehold series before each new book. If I didn't want to own the ebook once I'd read the hardback, RFC would lose a sale based on TOR's delayed ebook release policy. In my case RFC still gets paid, but many readers aren't so dedicated to the series that they buy the ebook after borrowing the hardback from their local library or a friend. That costs him sales, and we ebook readers are discriminated against and become rather disgruntled with the publisher in the process.

For the umpteenth time I wish Baen had been able to handle another series by RFC when he pitched Safehold to them. The editing process would have been a lot easier on him, since Baen had already created his style sheet, and there would have been fewer mistakes like the dates that the editor "corrected" in OAR so we've been stuck with them ever since!

Of course since Baen makes eARCs available months before their books are published, if they published the Safehold series I'd be long gone from the Safehold forum, since I'd have already read HFQ. Alas, that would mean that the rest of you wouldn't benefit from my extensive hypotheses and brilliant analysis!

Seriously, check the Honorverse forum, whose books are published by Baen. I'm every bit as much a fan of the Honorverse books as I am of Safehold, but since I always buy their eARCs, which are available shortly after the snippets begin, if you search for posts by me in that forum you'll hear crickets chirping... I guess that's one benefit of Tor's publishing strategy, since it encourages me to participate in the Safehold forum. (But it's the only benefit!!!)

I'm sure a bunch of you will razz me about whether my presence here is a "benefit," but I do give you something to read between snippets...