A publishing dilemma (for the reader)

Cat Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is now out (Here’s her talking about it, with links to a few places it’s for sale. It’s a wonderful book; I’ve read it and I will certainly want to read it again.

I read it when it first came out – anyone reading this probably knows the story, but if not, it’s a unique one. TGWHCFiaSohOM was opriginally mentioned as the main character’s favorite story from childhood in Valente’s adult novel Palimpsest. As I understand it, people said “Cat, you should write that one,” and she said “I can’t, I have to spend my time on books that I can sell because writers need to eat.” And then at a time when she needed money, it turned out that people *would* buy this one and she was able to raise the money she needed by putting this book online as a crowd-funded piece. Then others notied it was really kind of wonderful and decided to publish it as a conventional book, and here we are. So far so good.

THing is, I was part of that – if I recall, I contributed to its funding, and felt pretty good about being part of that. Now it’s for sale, and I want it so I can reread it. (The book is still online here here, but they’ve quite reasonably taken down the final act.) There is a Kindle version, but it’s $9.99, as much as the hardcover at the moment. My personal policy these days is something like, I’ll freely buy books for $6.99 and $7.99, but when it gets to $10 or so I have to really want it or that has to be a good savings on other editions. In this case, I do really want it, but I also sort of feel like I’ve already paid for it.

On the other hand, the Kindle edition is really not the best way to go with this book anyway, because the illustrations are beautiful. I think what I will probably do is to buy it in hardcover next time I go to the US, or if I see it in Amsterdam. (I wonder if my brother and SIL would object if I started a policy of buying one for me and one for the niebling when I buy children’s books? That could result in major shipping issues,though!)

Also, I should make it very clear or people will misinterpret what I’ve written: None of this is a complaint. I have written it and put it up here in public because I think it’s a dilemma that’s going to happen a lot more as new publishing methods shake out. I am not complaining about Valente or her publishers taking down the inline novel or selling something that was originally crowd-funded; you do what you need to do to make ends meet so you can go on creating. Further, in some ways the issue is mine: if I didn’t reread incessantly I wouldn’t even care, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had created a downloadable version when the book was originally up, that I didn’t download. Finally, there are a lot worse places my discretionary income can go than to supporting makers and to voting with my dollar to convince a particular one that I really like a particular kind of thing she’s made.

But it is an odd situation, and I think it will happen again.