Hey Fred, gave your review a read. For the record, it’s just spelled “Jovaik”. There’s no alternative spelling.
Something to be corrected in future printings, then.
My review of “Tales from the Guild” has just been published.
My review of “A Wilder West” by Ted R. Blasingame has just been published. I’ll recommend it.
I received an e-mail from Blasingame thanking me for my review, and commenting on the difficulty in getting a furry novel noticed by the furry community when it’s published by Lulu.com, which does not have as obvious an online presence as FurPlanet, Rabbit Valley, or Sofawolf with their well-known (in the furry community) online catalogues. He has to self-publish his furry novels through Lulu.com because he hasn’t been able to sell them to any furry publisher, although as an outsider I don’t know how hard he’s tried. One thing that I’ve noticed about his novels is excess wordiness. It’s very good excess wordiness that adds richness to his character and location descriptions, and to the believability of his character motivations. However, I can see that while a commercial printer like Lulu.com would be glad to take his money to print it, a commercial publisher that pays its authors by the word would want him to cut back on the unnecessary verbiage.
When’s your Abandoned Places review, Fred?
Probably a long time in the future. I just got word from FurPlanet that they’ve sent me a review copy; I haven’t received it yet. I’ll review it for Dogpatch Press, but I’ve recently sent them all of my reviews that Flayrah was sitting on for months, and they’ve just started publishing those. That’s why some of my reviews that are just getting posted have comments showing that they were expected to be published during 2014. They have two to three dozen of my reviews and articles to get posted. I’ve just sent them a review of “Bête” by Adam Roberts; I don’t know how long it may take to get posted.
Several years ago, Ted sold one of his novels. Hoenix, to a mainstream publisher (Baen, I think). But there were delays, and then the editor he was working with left the company and the new guy didn’t know anything that had gone before so it was back to square one. Long story short, the deal fell apart and they never published it.
I reviewed “Hoenix” for Watts Martin’s “Claw & Quill” back in October 2004. I assume that Blasingame had it published by Lulu.com after the Baen deal fell through.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071011200753/http://www.clawandquill.net/columns/11/october-reviews
The 2004 edition of “Hoenix” was 343 pages, though. It’s 366 pages now. Has Blasingame revised it again? One of the drawbacks for bibliographers with books self-published through print-on-demand services like CreateSpace and Lulu.com (and Café Press, I suppose) is that authors can make from small corrections to extensive revisions between printings, and it’s all usually still listed as “first edition”.
Y’know Fred, you might just want to post the reviews on a blog given how much trouble you’re having. Then just repost them to where-ever is publishing them.
I’ll consider it, but right now I’m happy enough with the way that Patch Packrat is posting my reviews and articles on Dogpatch Press, with weblinks and graphics added.
While I’m sure there are always exceptions, I don’t think I’ve heard of any publisher paying for novels by the word. The key word in the phrase “cut back on the unnecessary verbiage” strikes me as “unnecessary” – if the verbiage is actually unnecessary, the editor probably isn’t asking for it to be cut just to save printing costs. 
Thanks, I was just gonna add that. I can confirm we don’t pay per word on novels or novellas.
A change in page count from 343 to 366 is well within the range of what can result from difference in the formatting, typesetting, or page size, even in the absence of any added content.
I once loaded an online novel into MS word and played with the formatting until I got it to match as closely as possible the format of a mass-market paperback I was reading at the time, just to see how many pages it came out to. In this case it came out close to 800 pages (it was a pretty long novel - Greg Howell’s Light on Shattered Water, which is about 300K words). One of the things I found particularly interesting about this exercise was how much even what seems like an almost trivially small change will change the page count - I might do something like increase the paragraph indent and it would increase the length of the novel by 8 pages. The difference was more dramatic if I changed the font, or put a couple more or less lines on the page, or switched between chapter breaks being inline vs. new page vs. next odd-numbered page.
There are a lot of games you can play with this if you want to make a novel seem longer or shorter. The reference novel I used in the above exercise had 41 lines per page (assuming no breaks) while other mass market paperbacks had anywhere from 33 to 46 (39 to 41 seemed to be most common). Lisanne Norman once told the story of how when she was near completion of her second Sholan Alliance novel, Fortune’s Wheel, her publisher was already putting out promotional material saying the book would be 646 pages long. She wondered how they could know it would be 646 pages when she hadn’t submitted a final manuscript and was still working on the last chapter. In actuality, as long as you have a ballpark figure about how long it will be, there are plenty of tricks and tweaks you can apply in this manner to hit an exact page count. Besides the above mentioned tweaks, there is also some flexibility at the beginning of where you start counting as page 1.
All things considered, page count is a poor indicator of story length due to the range of variation in the number of words per page. A traditional manuscript page (typewritten, double-spaced, 1-inch margins) is about 250 words per page, and is what I assume writers are talking about when they discuss things like how many pages per day they produced. That 41-line-per-page paperback had about 375 words per page (which drops to about 330 if you factor in chapter breaks). Trade paperbacks can have over 500. If you need a more accurate measure of the length of a story, better to stick with word count.
Okay, although in this case, Ted Blasingame has written me about the difference in page counts, “A number of mistakes were corrected and some areas expanded that added about 20 pages overall to an already-huge manuscript.” So apparently the difference in page counts was due to additional material, not reformatting of the book.
Oops. Blasingame was talking about “Sunset of Furmankind”, not “Hoenix”.
Dogpatch Press is publishing my book reviews regularly now, and my months-old reviews originally sent to Flayrah are finally getting into print. Here are my reviews of “Uncovered” by Kyell Gold and “Spirit Hunters, Book 1” by Paul Kidd. Since these are almost certain to be on the next Cóyotl Awards ballot, I am glad that these reviews are published at last.
Dogpatch Press has just published my review of “Off the Beaten Path” by Rukis, which I also enjoyed very much and will recommend. It should be considered when the Cóyotl nominations open.
I think this is my last Dogpatch Press review that I will cross-post here. I am encouraging all FWG members to check out DP regularly.
Does anyone know anything about “Mort(e)” by Robert Repino, published in January? I’ve just reserved it at the Los Angeles Public Library.
Here is my list of several hundred furry books worth reading (and a few not worth reading). This is for the furry fans who say that there hasn’t been a good furry bibliography in several years.
Wow, Fred! This is awesome! What an impressive labor of love. I will definitely be perusing it in the future.