Flying Pen Press signs Lettie Prell for first-time science fiction novel Dragon Ring
October 26, 2007, DENVER, Colorado — Flying Pen Press acquired book, electronic and audio rights to Lettie Prell's novel, Dragon Ring. The deal was made directly by the author and the publisher.
Dragon Ring is a science fiction/fantasy novel about a young woman named Nadine. Something mysterious and frightening happened to Nadine when she was very young, giving her special abilities that she denies. Instead, she throws herself into mastering virtual reality technology, yet is is within a virtual reality game where the mysterious again finds her--and does not let go.
Nadine's father dies tragically and she searches for what he knew about an alternative energy system. As she discovers the alarming truth, she finds she can no longer hide from her true self; the safety of the entire world depends on it. She also discovers why a company would lie about the true nature of their energy system, and must decide what to do with this knowledge.
Nadine's journey takes her on a chase from her native Guatemala City--now a booming technological metropolis thanks to her power father's influence--to the United States, where she and a growing number of companies rush from coast to coast in an attempt to avert a global tragedy. She needs to hurry, as she appears to be turning into a dragon--and there is nothing she can do to stop it.
In the race to the startling conclusion, Nadine learns about the strange theories and inventions of Nikola Tesla, what magic really is, and just how far-reaching Nadine's father's influence has become. Yet this is a story of Nadine's self-discovery as well: the true nature of her abilities, what the dragon insider her really is, and the lessons she can learn from her Mayan ancestry.
Lettie Prell became hooked on writing science fiction and fantasy stories in her spare time, as a creative outlet to compensate for doing too much math at work. She is a member of Broad Universe (an organization of women science fiction, fantasy and horror writers and their supporters), and is editor of The Broadsheet, the organization's web magazine.
Prell's creativity extends beyond writing, to cooking and award-winning photography. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with her writer spouse, John Domini (Earthquake I.D.) and their pets, where she enjoys a career in state government and is currently Director of Research for the Iowa Department of Corrections.
Dragon Ring is Prell's first novel. Publication date is set for May 23, 2007, and will premier at WisCon, a convention of women science fiction and fantasy writers, in Madison Wisconsin. The ISBN reserved for Dragon Ring is 978-0-9795889-6-9 (ISBN-10: 0-9795889-6-0). Cover price and page count has yet to be determined.
Flying Pen Press is a publisher of fiction and nonfiction books. It is located in Denver, Colorado and operates from virtual offices all over the world. The company's website is FlyingPenPress.com.
Flying Pen Press is a trademark of Flying Pen Press LLC. Media and interested readers can contact David A. Rozansky at publicrelations@FlyingPenPress.com, 303-375-0499. Advance reading copies will be available to members of the press and the book trade upon review of qualifications.
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 7 ( 1 removed by David Rozansky )
Dragon Ring will be publsihed May 23, 2008 (not 2007, as was written in the press release.)
You know that most traditional publishers offer authors an advance against royalties. Do you ever offer an advance?
Charles, I see that you intend to try to discredit me because my business practices are different than the "traditional" norm. It is my position that the industry is changing rapidly, by the day, and that new business models are required.
You somehow intimate that "real publishing" means putting boxes of books in warehouse to rot until the day, maybe, that someone wishes to stock it on a bookshelf. That's not publishing. The definition says so. That is warehousing, which means: "to set aside or accumulate, as for future use," the exact opposite of the word publsihing.
The concept of using digital presses is catching on. From Simon and Schuster to Random House, publishers are using print on demand, just in time distribution and standardized electronic data interchange (EDI) ordering to serve the book trade, and so does Flying Pen Press.
All printing presses these days require a pdf document to create the image that they press onto the page. It does not matter if they use a web press, offset, digital laser presses, or teh photocopy machine at Kinko's. The book sits in a computer, always, and the same pdf file drives all these types of printing. The only difference is in the size of the print order. Like all publishers, we decide which printing method will be the cheapest. In most all cases, this is proving to be the digital press combined with just in time distribution. But there will be times when doing a large print run to accommodate large orders is called for. We may pay more per book for printing, but we pay nothing at all in warehousing costs and nothing at all in inventory risk, and in the end, this means that the overall costs per book is much less than warehousing any wasted books. Just in time distribution is also environmentally friendly, and in the long run, the just in time distribution method cuts delivery time to bookstores in half. By the time a warehouse has plucked a book off a shelf and put it in the box and onto a loading dock, our book is in the store, or in the customer's hands in most cases.
The royalty question is also a loaded question intended to embarrass me, but we do sometimes offer royalties, although rarely. If we find a book that we absolutely want and are wiling to pay royalties on, then we offer the author a choice: an advance with less royalties, or more royalties and no advance. For those who take the no royalties route, we offer 40% to 46% of the gross profits from the book sales, unheard of in the industry. So far, every author has elected to take more royalties instead of an advance. In many cases, we don't even bother offering royalties, as our philosophy is to use the upfront money in marketing. By paying royalties, most publishers treat authors as vendors, as suppliers of content, and those publishers do everything they can to get the most rights for the least amount of money, constantly playing one author against another to drive prices down.
I have been a freelance writer for 21 years, and I have personal experience with this tendency to wear writers down. That is why I have elected to treat writers as partners instead, offering them a share of the profits, so that when we make more money off a novel, they author gets a share of it. This requires a writer to take part of the risk as well, but in the long run, it allows us to pay authors more money. It also compels writers to write better and more often, and happily so. These are traits that serve the readers better.
Our books are available through the standard channels. Bookstores and customers have no idea of how they are printed (which could be any of three different ways) or of how they are warehoused (they most certainly are never warehoused), or of how we pay the author (we make sure that the highest percentage possible of what the customer pays goes to the author). They don't care that we use electronic galleys to do all of our work, or that our company is a virtual office made up of editors and marketers working out of their homes, or that most of our marketing is done on the Internet. They only know that they get a great book printed on high-quality paper and bound better than most books with stronger glue, and that the books are perfectly returnable in the standard manner that they are used to, and that the book is available when they want it, and that the writing is top notch and the stories are absolutely compelling. What more is there to publishing? If you can't use technology to build a better mousetrap, then what is the point?
There is a reason they call traditional publishing "traditional." We are a progressive publisher, making the best of the latest technology. There is no room for tradition at Flying Pen Press, because traditions are inefficient, at best, and only serve to hurt the modern writer.