Lou Anders is the editor over at Pyr Books, and I’ve begun a series for him that is proving to be great fun. It is the Twilight Reign, by Tom Lloyd, and book one is called Stormcaller. This week Irene Gallo offered Lou and I an opportunity to showcase his book and my cover art for it on the Tor.com website. Though I really ought to do these more often for my own blog, I jumped at the chance to show off a little and also help out friends. This is terrific cross-marketing, and very generous of Tor to showcase a competitor’s book!

Incidentally, Irene also has one of the very best art blogs on the internet, the Art Department.

Check out Stormcaller, from Start to Finish!

Posted by Todd in Art!, Blog Home at 3:44 PM PDT

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The orphaned works thing is back:

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

With the legislative clock counting down, we keep hearing that the Orphan Works bill is dead for this session of Congress.

Yet there’s been a last-minute flurry of activity to pass intellectual property bills and we’re mindful of comments made by the Chairman of the House IP Subcommittee, reported last March 26, that they might try to “roll the bill into either the Patent or IP bill.” http://www.capitolvalley.net/2008/03/the-main-event-congressdailys.html

As a result, we think it might be prudent to write our representatives again and do 2 things:

First, update them on recent developments relative to the OW bill:

· The August 8 Small Business Roundtable
http://www.scribd.com/share/upload/3571303/svf2tijl1ait126wp5p
· The August 30 legal paper by copyright expert Jane Ginsburg
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1263361

Second, remind them that you strongly oppose this bill, as do more than 70 trade organizations. Ask them if this bill comes before them yet this year, or is rolled into another piece of legislation, to consider these recent developments and vote no.

Considering the current meltdown on Wall Street, we might also ask them if it’s wise to concentrate our nations’ copyright wealth in the hands of a few privately owned corporate databases. Who can watch the ongoing failure of investment banks that were “too big to fail” without asking why government should want to create these giant, privately owned image banks on the backs of small business owners who neither want, need nor can afford them?

We’ve prepared a new brief letter for this purpose. It’s deep-linked here:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11957651

TAKE ACTION: DON’T LET CONGRESS ORPHAN OUR WORK
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Posted by Todd in Orphaned Works at 1:12 AM PDT

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