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| Cover art for Safely You Deliver, Commonweal #3 |
Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Family, social awkwardness, and a unicorn.
Available via Google Play Books. (Google Play Books suffering mitigation for ePub downloads.)
Also available via:
Kobo
iTunes (hooray for trying again)Scribd
Inkterra
and the passel of EU booksellers that Draft2Digital lumps under "Tolino".
I would ask that everybody please avoid spoilers in the comments. If you want to talk about the Commonweal in a spoilery way, there's a Google Plus community.
Posts
21 comments:
Bought!
There seems to be a problem with the Google Play edition, it skips straight from page 155 (end of Chapter 23) straight to the end of the book. I can click manually into pages in between, but can't advance page to page.
+aaron Are you reading in the web viewer, in the Android app, in the iOS app, converted somehow to a Kindle copy...?
+Aaron -- in addition to ctate's questions, all I can say is that I can't reproduce the problem (using Google Play Reader on Android) and that the EPUB file validates. (At least before I give it to the distributors; I have no control over what they do to it.)
Sorry!
You have a couple of instances of inconsistency with Hawthorn/Hawthorne's name.
Damn fine book though, and hopefully one day I'll have a hardcopy on my shelf of books worth owning physically.
Hi Anon --
Botheration, so I do. Fixed in the source.
Thank you!
+Graydon, Don't worry about it. This only occurred in the web viewer - downloading the ePub solved the problem. Fantastic work as always, I very much enjoyed the book
+Aaron -- glad the download works!
And glad you enjoyed it; every time one of these gets published I'm expecting that this is the one where everyone goes "ewwww....." so having contrary data points is a relief.
Bought and read on Monday (mostly. Finished the last couple of chapters before breakfast yesterday). I thought it was very good, but the first few chapters were a bit confusing -- it has been a few months since my last reread of the first two books.
In particular, it felt like I had somehow missed the arrival of Constant, which was a bit disorienting. I may circle back to see if Ed's viewpoint in book 2 ellided information that would have been useful: I think the multiple viewpoints in 3 were helpful in that respect. Different characters notice different things.
The cover art is nice, AND shrinks well without turning into a dark featureless blob, which is a problem I have with the book 2 cover. (I can almost see shapes in the book 2 cover on my new 8 inch tablet that were invisible on my 7 inch tablet, but I can't really see details unless I muck with the contrast.)
+Elyse Grasso -- Ed does indeed miss things. Often social things.
Ed didn't miss Constant; Constant was a surprise.
The "Safely You Deliver" cover is too dark. I still like the anti-panda, which may have been a point of bias.
+Graydon, are you planning to have a spoiler friendly comments thread at some point? I have some questions I'd love to ask, but I'd like to avoid spoilers here.
+Aaron -- I think of the G+ community (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109105753759894785674) as the default place for spoilery discussions. This is in part because blogger's a difficult place to have a discussion without continuous moderation -- so people's initial comments can be fished out of spam/not spam? uncertainty -- and I can't provide continuous moderation.
(It also keeps the spoilers from being indexed for search, another problem with having a spoilery discussion on blogger.)
I realize everyone isn't fond of G+, but that's what appeared, and it seems to be working Ok so far.
I just finished my first read through and greatly enjoyed it. I think having multiple points of view helped expand the world and the different voices came across as being very distinct. I especially liked learning more about the social structure and history of the Commonweal. I know you have the next book underway and others planned out, but if there's ever a chance I would love a short story about the founding generation of the Commonweal. They must have been a truly remarkable people.
+Slybrarian -- Glad you enjoyed it!
The founding of the Commonweal, well, aside from my nigh-total inability to write a short story, and all the problems with the extent to which it's a "then a miracle occurred" story (about admittedly remarkable but also angry, traumatized, and frequently murderous people), anything I write about that time fixes (some of) what's possible in the Commonweal's present, and I'm finding it quite challenging enough to get just the fifty or so years I've got story notes occupying in that (rather extended...) present to stay coherent and internally consistent and all.
So I'm not very likely to do that.
Further hints about history are nigh-inevitable, though.
Bought a copy from Google and am currently reading it.
Life is not allowing me as much time to read it as I would like, but I am very much enjoying it.
Actually, how about signing up to a physical print-on-demand site, for those of us who prefer real books? You used to be able to do this via cafepress... this would also solve the gifting issue, for those of us who like to pester our friends?
+CB -- glad you're enjoying it!
Anonymous -- good design of print books doesn't come cheap, and I haven't seen a POD book I thought represented a good example of the book binder's art. (I do not assert that there aren't any, merely that I haven't seen one.) So were I going to print any of these, I'd be looking at setting up a small print run at a regular press, and then everything collapses into distribution hell.
So I don't expect I'm going to try to produce a print version any time soon; sorry!
No spoilers, but I got in an argument on the weekend. Is the library supposed to be:
1) Bakka Books, except that they actually finished construction on the Commonweal one
2) The U of T Robarts library
3) inspired by the Canadian Library of Parliament
Hi Anon --
The library hasn't got (so far as I know!) a material model in the present day; you could think "art deco cathedral to the idea of books" and not be all that far off.
(It's also, and this may not have come through all that well, an enormous building; you could put Bakka in the foyer more than once.)
Emily asks: "Does the Captain have a name"? I assured her that they must have but that apparently nobody feels the need to use it. And then I get to point to the perspective change in Safely entitled "The Captain". :-)
Hi Mark (and Emily) --
The Captain does have a name. What it is and how it got that way is a plot point in Commonweal #5, tentatively "A Mist of Grit and Splinters".
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