Worlds & Time

Thursday, July 08, 2010

One Line to Live By

I'm not endorsing parenthood, but one line on page six of this article struck me as good advice to live by:
About twenty years ago, Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell, made a striking contribution to the field of psychology, showing that people are far more apt to regret things they haven’t done than things they have.
If I do ever have kids, I'll try to remember to make sure that this is one of the pieces of advice that I drop on them. I know that it's true from personal experience. I've never been windsurfing, and I regret it.

/via Andrew Sullivan

Monday, July 05, 2010

NetGalley and Carina Press

So, through something I have to deal with at work, I found the website "NetGalley" which allows you to request eARCs (electronic advance reader copy(s)). Basically, you can get a digital copy of a book to read or review before the actual book comes out in stores.

The Neil Gaiman edited Best American Comics 2010 is on there, which is pretty cool. There's also a version of the Little Prince as a graphic novel. But I don't expect those things really need my attention to sell them. Neil Gaiman and The Little Prince are both brands that aren't going to be helped by a relatively minor blog review. And I'm not really interested in either of them enough to want to request them.

But I do get some blog traffic around both my comments on gay porn and science fiction fantasy. So I was especially interested to find that there was a novel listed that actually fit into that niche: Savage Sanctuary by Jacqueline Barbary. I requested that one and another one that Carina Press publishes, Life After Joe by Harper Fox.

Both were denied, which was too bad. I wouldn't have bought either of them, especially from an unknown press. It's not the loss of a sale for them. Really, the best that could have happened was that I liked them an gave them a favorable review. Well, won't bother now.

So, I guess the whole point of this post is: what's the point of NetGalley if you can't get galleys from it? If you're wondering whether to bother signing up (and they ask you for a lot of personal information, including your real address and phone number), I would say no.

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