On October 1-2, 2011, Hydra House and en theos press will have a booth at the newly reinvigorated Bookfest in Kirkland, Washington. You can find the information here: http://www.northwestbookfest2011.com/

Danika Dinsmore (“Brigitta of the White Forest”) will be there, teaching two workshops: one on creating Dystopian fiction, the other on creating Imaginary Worlds. J.D. Munro (“The Erotica Writer’s Husband”) will be on a panel called “Taboo: Crossing the Line – Sex and Sexuality in Literature” at 5pm on Saturday. Not sure where our booth will be, but you can bet we’ll be selling books and giving away chocolate!

Nice to see Bookfest making a comeback. Back about ten years ago, I was on the board of the Eleventh Hour Productions, which oversaw the Seattle Poetry Festival. We shared an office with Bookfest in that incarnation down in Columbia City (Seattle), and we all saw how much work those ladies put into Bookfest. So I sympathize with Sheryn Hara and the others in putting this event together. It’s not easy!

With a great deal of pleasure, we are pleased to announce the publication of speculative fiction short stories by West Seattle writer K.C. Ball entitled “Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities,” slated for release in November, 2011.

The book will feature twenty four stories, eighteen previously published and six of them brand new.

“Snapshots” is edited by Redmond author Cat Rambo, and features a kick-ass cover by Seattle artist Christopher Sumption. The plan is to launch the book at Orycon in November.

K.C.’s writing is snappy and cool, and marches the reader through some bizarre twists and turns before arriving at emotionally satisfying conclusions. She is a Writers of the Future winner and a graduate of Clarion West. She has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Analog, Every Day Fiction, and Kasma, among many others.

We are very excited to be releasing K.C.’s book as the first official release of Hydra House. Watch for more great work to come from this author and many others.

Come out and see us this weekend at Foolscap in Redmond! We just found out a few days ago that both Danika and Tod will be sitting on panels there as well as reading on Saturday.

The gracious Patrick at Fairwood Press will be handling book sales for us, and there will be a few copies at Park Place Books, so if you haven’t got a copy of “Brigitta of the White Forest,” now’s your chance, and Danika will bring her special stamp along!

The schedules are:

Danika Dinsmore
Friday 4:00 PM Elk Why So Much Fantasy and So Little SF?
Saturday 5:30 PM ? Reading
Saturday 9:30 PM Canyon For Love and/or Money
Sunday 2:00 PM Canyon Writer Inspiration: What Inspires You to Write?

Tod McCoy
Saturday 8:00 PM ? Reading
Sunday 11:00 AM Alder New Paradigms for Creativity and Compensation?

Tod will have chocolate and wine at his, so come out and see him!

It appears I finally broke into the Apple store.

About two weeks after I got my EIN (by calling the IRS directly), during which Apple repeatedly told me the EIN was wrong and denied me, forcing me to click the resubmit button each time, I was approved. All I can figure is that my EIN finally went on file and Apple figured it out.

On to the next step.Uploading a book.

The software isn’t nearly as user friendly as you would think. There is step after unexplained step, forcing you to think real hard about what is expected. There’s one intermediate step that asks for metadata or a related ISBN or some such thing, and I finally just left that one blank and moved on. A couple of errors popped up with the EPUB, but those were easily fixed in Sigil. (Tweak Epub is what I use for the OPF errors.) Finally, after hoop after hoop on my new old Mac, it took.

What an ordeal.

HOWEVER. It’s been … I don’t know. Ten days? Still not approved. Just sitting in limbo. Granted, Apple SAID it would take ten days (seriously? ten days? for what? someone to read the book?), but I honestly didn’t think it would take that long.

So I wait patiently.

And wait.

iTunes is not even supposed to be that large of a market. If they really want to make it worthwhile for people to sell in, they better get off the stick, as it were. All this hoop jumping is ridiculous.

I got my email last week that my iTunes account had been approved! Yay! About time. I think the holdup was the fact that my EIN was brand new and not on file with the government yet. Took about two weeks. But at last, the first hurdle was gone.

On to the next hurdle. You get into your account, you accept the Terms and Definitions or whatnot, then you get to look at your dashboard. Flip through some instructions, download a PDF on how to proceed, and then download the iTunes Producer.

But wait … it’s not running. In fact, my computer doesn’t know what to do with it. Huh? What kind of file is that?

Search around, no instructions. None. Nothing to indicate why it’s not working. Search and search and search some more, all the while getting that sinking feeling that what you have is an Apple file that only runs on Apple computers. But do they SAY that anywhere?? No??

Finally you come across some references on other bulletin boards (MobiReads is a good one) where other people are complaining that iTunes Producer won’t run on anything but a Mac. Okay, then. I finally wasted two hours of time when a simple sentence would have fixed this: THIS FILE WILL ONLY RUN ON APPLE COMPUTERS.

So now I either have to buy a Mac or find a trusting friend who will let me borrow theirs.

Again, I am delayed in uploading my book.

I guess I can’t complain too much. Having worked for that OTHER big software company, I have to say we didn’t give much thought to making things work with Apple computers …

So, two weeks later and still no luck. No love from Apple with regards to getting into their bookstore, and no way of knowing just what the heck is going on. No number to call, to information posted by Apple, just an email address to an account that probably never gets checked. Argh.

Although I think I know what’s at the root of this. When I first applied, I used my SSN instead of an EIN — in most cases, especially for a sole proprietorship, that should be FINE. But for whatever reason, Apple didn’t like it and rejected my application.

So what I did was to pick up the phone and CALL THE IRS. Under most circumstances, people think that’s CRAZY. But it turned out to be a quick and efficient way to pick up an EIN right there on the spot! Now I have one.

I plugged it in to the Apple website and guess what? No love. Same thing. But the nice tax man said that it might take three weeks to get into the system before someone like Apple can verify it.

So now all I do is check that email account for the Apple rejection email, which contains a link to “try again.” I think every other day I do this. I re-enter my new EIN and wait for something different to happen.

Maybe someday soon my persistence will pay off.

So today I looked into adding “Brigitta of the White Forest” to the Apple iTunes bookstore. Now, I’m a pretty tech-savvy guy, but WOW. Apple is doing themselves no favor by having the application process so convoluted and difficult to get through. In fact, two years after they set this up, you still can’t find any information on what you’re supposed to do!

I tried to sign in to my “iTunes Connect” account and got nothing but an error saying that someone had already submitted an application through this ID. Well, I guess that was me, right? But there was NO WAY to find out. None. No information in my iTunes account, or in my profile, or anywhere.

I tried Googling this problem and came up with very little. Some people had this problem, but nobody had a common method for correcting it. In most cases, they had to write the Apple support team and wait for a response. NO PHONE NUMBER. I even tried calling a random Apple number I came up with and was referred to an email address. Wonderful.

Turns out I had applied a couple of weeks ago and my application was delayed because my EIN wasn’t correct. I only found this out by doing a search through my email for “do_not_reply@apple.com”. I came up with a cryptic email telling me this much. I tried inputting my SSN again, but haven’t received a reply.

In the meantime, I decided to just pick up the phone and call the IRS about my EIN, since they’re the ones who issued it. A very polite man at the other end was all too happy to look me up (nope! you don’t have one!) and issue me a brand spankin’ new EIN. And there you go. I guess I’m an official business now.

I emailed this into the Apple black hole and am now waiting for a response. Apparently, this isn’t automated. There are monkeys at the other end who take care of this. And so I wait, and wait, and wait …

What an ordeal. Just for one book. But this will, of course, allow me to post others.

Life in the internet age. Pah.

It is with great pomp and circumstance (please envision grandiose festivities in your head), on this Solstice Day, 2011, that I am proud to announce the birth of Hydra House, a new imprint focused on publishing science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction works by Pacific Northwest authors, with an emphasis on the digital mediums. I chose “Hydra” not because of the nefarious nature of the beast, but rather because of its multi-headed form and its ability to regenerate and grow in new ways when completely chopped off. (Okay, maybe the metaphor IS a bit of a stretch, but I like it.)

The goal is to work not just with the print form of the book, but to work at distributing the text in a variety of forms, including print books, ebooks, audio, and possibly movies, television, and games, depending on the nature of the content. It’s an evolving concept for a press, and I intend to try and stay abreast of emerging technologies.

In the coming days I’ll have more information posted about the press and the services I’ll be offering, including an ebook conversion service. Hydra House will be able to convert books into epub, mobi, and pdf formats, which cover pretty much the gamut of electronic readers.

And finally, the first book to be released by Hydra House, I am very proud to announce, is an as-yet unnamed collection of short stories by West Seattle-based author and 2010 Clarion West school chum K.C. Ball. The book will be edited by Cat Rambo, a notoriously excellent author in her own right.

While en theos press will continue to operate as a small poetry press (granted, probably publishing less frequently), the one work that will be carried over to the new press is “Brigitta of the White Forest,” by Danika Dinsmore. We have received an enormous amount of positive feedback and are looking forward to the release of the second book in the series, “The Ruins of Noe.”

Please stay with me as I expand and grow the House of Hydra!

Cheers,

Tod McCoy
Hydra House
June, 2011