There were books involved... @jnikkir - Tumblr Blog

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shuravf

Shallan and Adolin from The Stormlight archive series.

Requested by @tsukihime-chan, Always a pleassure to draw some Cosmere and this one was difficult but I like the result.

P.D: I forgot that I was going to be a few days without tablet but here we are again.

viria

I NEVER KNEW HOW BADLY I NEEDED HAIKYUU!! RULE 63 UNTIL I DREW ONE. and I should be working, working on important stuff

but there was no escape, my hand was drawing uncontrollably

also a little bonus with managers which I was too tired to finish:

chaosemmie

when u have to get up early but u dont want to get out of bed so u just sleep on ur boyfriend

littlestarlost

Crossroads AU Masterpost

Here’s what I’ve decided.

I like this AU, and I have a lot of ideas for it, but they’re a little different than what I’ve written so far. This isn’t going to be a fic with a single beginning, middle, and end; I’ve got some neat nightmare scenarios and weird dream logic ideas in mind, and I’m absolutely delighted at the chance to play with that kind of weird style in a different setting.

So rather than write something longer and put it on AO3, this AU will exclusively live on Tumblr (at least for now). As a further challenge to myself and a way to keep writing when my WIPs are slow, I will aim for at least one ficlet per week, and each of them will be short enough to be written on my phone. I will periodically gather the posts here, so they’re accessible for future reading. Sound good?

ETA: posts are listed below in publication order and roughly in reading order but I’ve removed the numbered list because the whole thing is going to be extremely non-linear.

A rainy Monday in January - Now with animation by @uncoolly!

A cloudy Tuesday morning

Hell, First Cycle

littlestarlost

It’s a rainy Monday night in the slog of January winter when Yuuri Katsuki sells his soul to the devil.

Standing at the bustling downtown street corner, he is a stubborn stone in the middle of the river of swiftly-moving business professionals running from the office to the train to take them home. With darkness already creeping despite the early hour, Yuuri stands, and he lets the world flow around him, and he waits.

The devil appears beside him, resplendent in a crisp bespoke suit. Peeking out of the corner of his eye and through the pouring rain, Yuuri can’t tell if the suit is pin-striped or if it’s an effect of the water skittering down the fabric. He doesn’t know what to say, so he shifts his grip on his briefcase and tries to avoid worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth.

The devil is beautiful, with pale white skin and silver-blonde hair that falls into blue eyes. His eyes remind Yuuri of the photos he’s seen of Mexican cenotes—the naturally blue-green cave pools formed over millions of years and reaching unfathomable, dangerous depths. After what seems like a whole lifetime of waiting, with rain seeping into Yuuri’s socks and weighing down his already heavy wool suit, the devil’s lips curl up into a smile that isn’t sinister or dastardly but is in fact just as unnaturally beautiful as the rest of him.

“Yuuri, is it?” he says, purring the name and sending a shiver up and down Yuuri’s spine.

“Yes. Yuuri Katsuki.” He wonders if he can even be heard over the incessant drumbeats of raindrops hitting every surface around them.

“What can I do for you, Yuuri Katsuki?”

Yuuri stares straight ahead and opens his mouth before he loses his nerve. “I want to make a—a deal.”

There’s no immediate answer, so he risks a sideways glance, and sees the devil examining him, an elegant gloved finger pressed against his lips.

“What do you want?”

Yuuri intends to look away, but he can’t; he’s caught in the gaze of those eyes, hypnotized and entranced, and suddenly his toes don’t feel nearly as wet or cold.

“I don’t know,” he hears himself say, far more smoothly than he thought possible. “I just want something more exciting than this.”

It’s the first time he’s ever voiced it out loud.

The devil smirks, and Yuuri gulps.

“That’s not terribly specific,” he replies casually. “Are you sure you don’t want to be president?”

Yuuri shakes his head, sending raindrops flying from the ends of his hair. “No,” he answers. “I just want…I want to love something.”

This time the reaction is laughter—not mocking, but definitely with a gentle tease behind it. “That’s not the sort of thing I normally cover,” the devil says. “Did you want Cupid instead?”

Yuuri looks at him, takes him in again, and once again shakes his head.

“No. I wanted you.”

The devil narrows one eye in thought, and for a moment Yuuri fears he’s said something offensive, but then the devil seems to come to a conclusion and he holds out his hand.

“Come, then,” he says. “I’ll help you love something.”

“And y-your terms?”

A flippant wave of the other hand, brushing off the very idea. “We can discuss your payment at a future date. For now, I find you interesting, and I accept your request.”

Yuuri looks up into the devil’s eyes, and then down at the hand offered to him. For the first time in his life, he doesn’t hesitate to wonder or worry; he simply accepts. Even through a leather glove, the devil’s hand is warm.

“Okay,” Yuuri says, and he swears that the devil’s face lights up with something he can only describe as joy.

“Okay,” he echoes. “Then let’s begin. And for the purposes of our arrangement, perhaps you’d better call me Victor.”

uncoolly

i animated some of littleloststar’s crazy good Crossroads au!! im going to update it bit by bit until its done so watch this space!

andstuffsketches

I’m almost done with Oathbringer, so here’s Shallan, Veil, and Lyn!!

nikiforoov

listen, i know the first one wasn’t originally meant to be vitya. i know.

but….. kubo did repost the picture and mentioned that looking at it now, it does make her think of young vitya….. and now she’s drawn this new gorgeous official art where vitya is wearing the same exact coat and the setting seems pretty damn similar?? however, the feeling of the picture is completely different. the first one has a very melancholic and lonely feel, while the other feels nice and warm even though they’re both set in the middle of winter. just look at vitya’s face! look at that smile! he’s so happy?? and he has every reason to be happy: yuuri is right there next to him holding onto his arm and yurio is with them and vitya isn’t alone anymore and he’s found his passion for skating again!

but what gets to me the most is the fact that the new official art is titled “winter fantasy”! i’d say it sounds like exactly the kind of thing young vitya might be dreaming of in the first picture and boy does that thought make me happy and hurt me all at once

maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house.

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well.

It is only about two statements that I saw go by:

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing.

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously.

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers.

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half.

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing.

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy.

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought.

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out.

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story.

miyakuli

** Permission to post it was granted by the artist Don’t remove credits & don’t repost/edit the art Please, rate and/or bookmark their works on Pixiv too **

Artist : くきわかめ

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