I just heard from the copy editor--life is screwing with her, so she asked if it would be OK to push her deadline back to mid-April. I said sure. It should work: I should still be able to release the book in May if it comes back then.
And it means that instead of just having a one-week window to resume work on Trials, which hardly seemed worth doing, I now have a three-week window, which is a really significant chunk of time!
This is a nice piece on writing and how it can be therapeutic. I think that people have always told stories to process events (OMFG that was a bad war!) and to help themselves and others to understand the world.
So, Trust should come back from the copy editor in a week or so. The taxes are with the accountant with a note saying, Please look over this carefully and try to make sure that nobody goes to jail. The home-improvement project is one industrious afternoon away from being done. I read and liked Lindsay Buroker's Emperor's Edge (fantasy adventure, and it's free!) and M. Louisa Locke's Maids of Misfortune (historical mystery--it's not free, but come on, it's only $2.99).
I also read Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, which unlike the other volumes in the new translation of In Search of Lost Time, just isn't translated very well. It's a little clunky, plus the translator decided to save time and just leave a lot of the French expressions untranslated--you know, because when someone pays you to translate something into English, there's no need to be a completist about it. I once was fluent in French, but that was a couple of decades ago, and I'd rather not have to interrupt the story to look stuff up.
So, because of a licensing issue in the United States, all the volumes after Sodom and Gomorrah are available only as the old translation, which kind of worried me. But I'm reading an omnibus volume of The Captive and The Fugitive, and it's actually going fine--I think the old translation of Swann's Way (which is easily the toughest volume anyway, because it's more abstract and the time frame jumps around a lot) is what just kills people.
But, you know, even Proust doesn't really qualify as a B project. I've done all the production tasks I set for myself, and there's going to be a ton more to do--but not until the layout comes back from the copy editor. So now I'm thinking maybe I should start back on writing Trials--I'd have to start and then just completely stop again once the layout comes back, which is annoying, but it may be the best choice under the circumstances.
This cropped up on the Passive Voice--a therapist wrote and published an entire book about a patient and her drug addiction without ever mentioning it to the patient. The patient was in treatment the entire time, so there's no, "Oh, gee, I tried to get permission, but I couldn't find her" defense. The patient first found out about all this when she came across the book by accident.
Not surprisingly, she's suing.
As a former reporter, the thing that strikes me as especially dumb about this entire incident is that all of it--the lawsuit, the emotional distress--could have been obviated by the simple method of asking.
"Hey, you know, I was thinking that your story might help other people in the same situation. Would you mind sharing it? Like, maybe in a book if I can get the contract?" "Oh, I don't want people to know about everything that's happened to me and everything I've done." "Well, we could protect your identity by doing X and Y." "But what about Z?" "We could fix that by changing some of the details. I mean, the thing is, people don't think of drug addicts as being from your kind of background, so a book like this might really help other families and other kids." "Well, gee, that's true. Um, OK."
Honestly, a lot of people who have been through some pretty horrible crap are eager to share their stories. But it has to be sharing. They feel very differently about having their stories stolen from them, which is basically what the patient in this case is saying the therapist did--that he extracted her stories from her under the false pretence of helping her.
It's a more-extreme example, but it's in the same camp as going out on a date with a guy, and then trashing him publicly by name. The legal aspects are different (in that case, the date took place in a restaurant, which is a public place, and the guy didn't tell her anything that was actually that big a deal, so he can't sue), but the ethical imperative is the same: If you are told something by someone that they don't expect to see published, you need to get their permission to use it--or at least warn them beforehand.
It's just a dick move not to, frankly--if you publish your friends' confidences willy-nilly, you will soon find that you have no friends. And I found as a reporter that a "no surprises" policy (and yes, that's what it was called at one of my publications) was actually helpful--if you were more forthright about what you were doing in an interview, you were more likely to get useful information. (I couldn't always do this, because it's the nature of journalism that you don't always know what the story is going to be until after you finish the reporting, but it helped when I could.) Let's say you want to write a memoir, and it's going to include a long bit about a really nasty argument you had with your Aunt Edna. It could be really helpful to go back to Aunt Edna and have the (yes, uncomfortable) conversation with her to figure out why she felt the way she did. And even if she doesn't want to talk about it, you've given her a heads-up.
Why is it important to give people a heads-up? As the example of the patient and the therapist demonstrates, surprises get you sued. You thought that publication had a "no surprises" policy because we were so very ethical? Oh, no. Nooooo. In the United States, publications generally win the lawsuits against them because First Amendment protections are very broad. But getting sued is very, very expensive, even if you win. You want to not get sued in the first place, especially if you're self-published and don't have a legal department behind you. And when people find something out on their own that makes them feel shocked and betrayed and angry and outraged? That is when they call a lawyer.
This is a good post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch about the ability of self-published writers to produce books of good quality. I think part of the problem for writers who haven't worked in publishing is that they view the publishing process as kind of a black box--you write the manuscript, it goes into a magical black box, and viola! out comes a book!
The human mind being what it is, the black box has a certain appeal--you don't have to learn (it's too hard for you, anyway), you don't have to trouble yourself, someone else will take care of everything for you.... Yeah, you've heard this before.
Of course the magical black box is a lie. Publishers hire people--and the people, not the publisher, are the ones who turn your manuscript into a book. It's not like publishers actually pay the vast majority of these people very much money, so even the people who work full time in book publishing routinely moonlight--which means you can hire them, too. To save even more money, many publishers rely on freelancers, who can work for you just as easily (maybe more easily if you're polite and you pay them on time).
Yes, when you do that, you have to be the boss and do some thinking. But at least if you feel that, say, your cover art isn't working, you're in a position to find something that works better--you don't just have to sit there and seethe.
One thing Barry Eisler caught about Scott Turow's ignorant and nonsensical little rant is that Turow uses a phrase that was used in that equally ignorant and nonsensical New York Times op-ed piece. The phrase cropped up again (talking point!) in this more-recent anti-Amazon rant.
The phrase? Literary culture.
I am, to put it mildly, a culture vulture--my idea of a good time is to visit a museum or see a show or read a book. One of the things that I miss the most about NYC is all the culture: Despite the fact that it's a very expensive place to live, the advertising and fashion industries are headquartered there, meaning that visual artists who aren't big names can still find paying jobs. Theater, while hardly a normal industry, attracts and employs a lot of talent. The arts are hugely important to the local economy--the museums and shows attract a ton of tourists.
Culture is everywhere: There is street theater and pay-what-you-can museums and public art installations. Even purely commercial operations, like stores, rely on artists: They have beautiful window displays in winter and huge floral exhibits in spring (and people fly across the globe to shop in them).
Where I live now, there's certainly culture, but I feel like it's less accessible. It's shut away. With a few exceptions, you have to go to it, it doesn't come to you--you usually can't stumble upon it serendipitously, which is one of the great joys of public art.
Not coincidentally, some of the cultural institutions here are incredibly snooty--I never saw anyone grab their pearls and gasp because someone dared bring a child into an art museum!!! in NYC, but I've certainly seen it here. (And yes, I know the Frick doesn't allow children. That is because it is a historical home filled with breakable antiques, OK?)
Just as the snootiness stems from the unavailability of culture, snootiness causes culture to become unavailable: I don't know where the pearl-grabbers think the next generation of art lovers and supporters is going to come from if children aren't allowed to see museum-quality art. This applies to a lot of things--our tax money subsidizes the production of junk food. Make junk food cheap and good food expensive, and whaddya know? You get a lot of unhealthy people who don't know what cheese actually tastes like, because food that tastes good and is good for you is only for rich snobs.
Snootiness is equally pernicious when it comes to literature. To generalize broadly, I feel like Americans have this idea that well-written or classic literature is just snooty--you read Shakespeare because you have to or to prove to other people that you're the type of person who reads Shakespeare, not because he's a really good writer. A friend of mine grew up in Barbados, and she was really surprised to hear that people here often think Shakespeare is something you have to force yourself to read--apparently the way they teach it in Barbados is, "Here's a really awesome story! Yeah, you have to work a little because of the language, but it's totally worth it! Shakespeare rocks!" Which he does: Hamlet, first and foremost, is as entertaining as hell--there's bodies dropping everywhere.
(This perception that fine literature is necessarily snooty can result in hilarity. I know a woman who got into big trouble in high school for writing a paper on homoerotic themes in a story by William Faulkner. Her English teacher was shocked--absolutely shocked!--that someone would suggest that William Faulkner, a man who wrote repeatedly about interracial sex back when that was something really taboo and who once wrote an entire novel about a woman being raped with a corn cob, might touch on deviant sexuality!)
So in my opinion, if you're really interested in creating a literary culture, you have to make it easy for people to read. This is why I like libraries. It is also why I like e-books. You also have to make it easy for people to write, which is another reason why I like e-books.
Literary culture is not you and your buddies being taken care of while the price of books goes ever-higher and the number of people who read them goes ever-lower. It is people reading. They may not read what you like, in which case you could try to influence their opinions by reviewing books, and then other people would disagree with you, and you could have debates over it that degenerate into bitter feuds just like in the good old days of the Algonquin Round Table. But if people aren't reading to begin with, literary culture hasn't a prayer.
Yeah, that sounds odd. Anyway:
OK, so here's the newest version of the full cover of Trang, now complete with spinal flair:
Titan's not quite perfectly round, but it's going to wrap around the spine anyway, so I don't think anyone will notice that's it's deflating. (I blame the Magic Man.)
Anyway, since I had to go noodle with the paper book on CreateSpace anyway, I pulled it from Expanded Distribution again. That's because of this discussion: A number of people have chosen to offer the book only on Amazon because you can make it quite a bit cheaper, and the lower price compensates for the lack of other outlets. I can see the arguments both ways, but basically the only time I've sold paper copies has been through Amazon, so maybe making it cheaper would be helpful. In addition, there's no actual exclusivity--I can still offer it for sale to bookstores if I want.
I am of the generation that discovered the television show Beverly Hills 90210: No, Not the New One--Shut Up and Get Off My Lawn. This was back when TV shows were all basically produced by the big networks, and as a result they tended to be very bland and predictable, because they were geared toward not offending anybody.
In contrast, the first season of 90210 was delightfully shocking. For example, you had a character named Kelly, who was super-duper popular. Why was she popular? Because she lost her virginity at the age of 14, when she was a freshman, and the guy she lost it to was a senior. She wielded this fact like a cudgel--you're telling her what to do? Well, honey, are you so hot that you lost your virginity at age 14 to a senior? Guess not!
Trust me, at that time, nooooooobody was suggesting in a teen-oriented show that having sex could make you popular in high school, especially if the guys you were having sex with were a lot older. Of course, out in real life, it certainly could, and everyone knew it, but they weren't supposed to admit that on television.
90210 became very popular, at which point they toned it way down and I stopped watching it.
The episode that made me realize that this show was no longer worth my time was one with Emily Valentine. She was Brendan's psycho stalker ex-girlfriend, who started out as bad news and spiraled down into more and more insane behavior. Finally she doused a homecoming float with gasoline and sat on it with a lighter. Dun-dun-duuuhhh!
And then not only did she decide not to make Emily Flambé, but she proceeded to launch into this lengthy analysis of why she was so unstable. (Her family moved a lot.)
OK. Say, you're emotionally unstable. You've been unstable for quite a while. Your instability is making you screw things up, and which is making you even crazier. Finally you get ready to commit suicide by setting yourself on fire.
You are not in a position to analyze why you are acting this way, OK? You are too unwell. You might understand intellectually that what you are doing is harmful, but you don't understand the forces that drive you to harm yourself, at least not in a helpful way. Maybe after therapy and perhaps medication, and once you get some distance on events, maybe then you can sort out all the whys and wherefores--but not in the red-hot moment.
It's contrivance. In 90210 it was that safe, pedagogical approach to teen fare--you can't have someone do harmful things without turning it into a "The More You Know" moment, otherwise all the parents' groups will accuse you of glorifying bad behavior. I recently read a novel where, despite the fact that it was set in the 19th century, all the characters exposit (constantly) about their family and their interactions exactly the way people who have been through a lot of therapy in the 21st century do. That's also contrivance--historically-inaccurate contrivance.
These kinds of contrivances suck away all the drama. It's not just that having all your characters prattle on about how their father and their brother and their mother and their sister and their cousin and their brother-in-law and their dog all interact now and have interacted at every point in the past is dull--although it's certainly that. It's that Emily Valentine was all better. She was 100% fine--no need to worry about her any more! She's never going to do anything bad again! Please don't care! It's very, very difficult to relate to someone who has a mental-health hotline in their head that will magically call them at any stressful moment in their life and make sure they never, ever do the wrong thing.
Which is not the same as saying a character can't grow and become more stable--but it's a process, and circumstances have to be right. In Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Mark Vorkosigan does this pretty convincingly: He is given a very robust support network, it takes a lot of time, and he's never without his hang-ups. The very fragility and imperfection of his recovery is emotionally engaging. He isn't just bonked on the head by the Contrivance Fairy's wand and magically made all better the way Emily Valentine was.
This is something random that cracks me up. In case you are wondering, I am definitely a member of the Illuminati.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has another insightful blog post on the immensity of the changes in publishing. She notes that publishing used to be taking place in an environment of scarcity--only X amount of self space existed, meaning that you had to guess which books among the gazillions of unpublished books out there would sell the most if it were allowed to take up one of those precious spaces.
Now publishing is in an environment of abundance: Shelf space is infinite, so you can publish everything and see what flies!
In abundance, you can toss anything into the mix, quantify its sales, and pick winners based on sheer numbers. In scarcity, you have to go with the best of what’s available, and hoping (praying) that you don’t lose too much money on everything else.
She thinks that the change is just amazing. I think the change explains why traditional publishing is so much more like playing the lottery than self-publishing.
The other night, I was explaining my history of trying to get my books traditionally published to some people, and I realized that I was still upset about it. Being the analytical sort, I was trying to sort out why, after all this time (and after it not really mattering anyway), it still bothered me so.
And I think part of it is that the whole "You're great! Nuts to you!" thing just didn't jibe with my experience working in publishing. Publishing in New York City (not anywhere else, I know) is, or at least was, a normal sort of industry.
People from out of town would ask me, "How did you ever get a job in publishing!?! Did you know someone? Who were your connections? The Rockefellers? The Forbes?" I realize that I went to Harvard, and I had a fairly comfortable childhood--out in the fricking sticks, at terrible schools. Harvard was a serious adjustment for me.
Trust me, when I graduated, I didn't know a freaking soul in publishing. I had noooooo connections. I had no clue about careers--no clue. I went into publishing because one day when I was almost finished with my senior year (and hadn't gotten into the Ph.D. programs I'd applied to in a desperate attempt to stay in college forever) I realized that I enjoyed reading magazines and that somebody must make them.
And yet, I had a perfectly respectable career. I got jobs in publishing (and journalism) by answering "help wanted" ads, just like everyone else does in every other normal industry. Like job applicants in every other normal industry, if I was qualified and enthusiastic, I usually got hired.
People say things like, "You're not entitled to have a book published." And on one level, that's true. You're not entitled to perform brain surgery--unless you go through the training and pass the boards and get the license, at which point you are, in fact, entitled to perform brain surgery.
The problem--and I guess the source of the frustration for me--with traditional publishing is that, because of this environment of scarcity, you never reach the point where you are entitled to be published, even if you've won stuff and been published before and worked really hard on something that everyone (including the people who reject it) thinks should be published. Nowadays everyone who wants to be published is entitled to be published. Fine, you're not entitled to have a monster best-seller, but I think that if you work at it, you can indeed find an audience to appreciate and support your work. And that is a real revolution.
Today I found myself near a shop that is part of a local chain. I saw big signs on the walls saying "LOCAL! LOCAL! LOCAL! OMG LOCAL!" so I went in. I don't live near any bookstore other than The World's Worst Barnes & Noble (seriously, the ones in NYC were fine, but this one is awful--they sell books that look like they have been mauled by bears), but there are a lot of local bookstores and chains in my area.
In general, and today was no exception, I walk in thinking, "Local bookstore! I bet they're interested in local writers! I should scope this out for when I have more books out!" And I look around and...gosh. Around here the grocery stores and the gift shops are hugely into letting you know that a product is local--they put up signs indicating that something is from the area and all that. The local bookstores, are, to put it mildly, not. There may be a section of local travel guides and maps, but local writers...? No. "Buy local" to them just means "buy here."
But as I was wandering through the sci-fic/fantasy section (yeah, unless George R. R. Martin is local...), I did notice something interesting and potentially useful. One big complaint about book retailers is the tendency to sell books "spine out"--i.e. sitting on the bookshelf so that you can see only the spine. That's probably how you keep your books on the shelf, but writers would prefer it if a book is "face out"--i.e. sitting so that you can see the front cover. Face out makes the book more noticeable; spine out takes up less space on the shelf.
So, publishers of science fiction have done something very interesting--they've made the front and the spine look the same. The cover art repeats on the spine. (If the book is a small, fat mass-market book--which Trang, alas, cannot be, because CreateSpace won't allow it--then the spine is also about the same width as the front cover. Which means the spine art and the cover art are identical, but honestly, those proportions can't make the book easy to read.)
I have not given Trang a fancy spine. The full cover looks like this:
The only actual art is on the front.
I didn't think that mattered, but now I'm changing that opinion. If I want bookstores to stock the book, it needs to have more...shall we say, spinal flair, if only because other sci-fi books do. I don't think it should be hard--I can basically extend Titan over the spine (it can't go onto the back cover down there because that's where the bar code goes) and then put another, smaller portal higher up so that it overlaps the spine and the back cover.
You know, much like I don't think Amazon is either the devil or your best friend, I am truly agnostic regarding Barnes & Noble. What, deep down inside, I hope happens to them is that they fix their Web site so that it's easier to find indie books, because then more indie writers would make more money!
But stuff like this post (via PV) just baffles me. It's entitled "Why You Should Consider Buying Your E-Books from Barnes and Noble," and it says thing like, "If we want to avoid having our digital reading lives shaped by Amazon and Amazon alone, we have to support someone who can serve as a check on it. And at this moment, that’s Barnes and Noble."
You know something? When Scott Turow makes a lot of nonsensical statements about the competition Amazon faces, and when major publishers enter into nonsensical price-fixing arrangements because they are all desperately trying to preserve Barnes & Noble, I understand it. They fear the future, and Barnes & Noble represents the past, back when publishing was an industry they understood.
But when some regular Joe comes along and says, "Barnes & Noble is the only way!" I say, look around you. There are alternatives to either company. This is digital media--the field is wide open. (And I'm not the only one who has noticed--I mean, yeah, PayPal backed down, but that just means that you will have yet another way to accept payment for "Raped by Uncle Ostrich.")
And honest to God: If you are worried about what Amazon will do if it gains market share, well, why don't you try worrying about the things Barnes & Noble already did back when it had serious market share? This is a company that forced publishers to offer it special discounts on the wholesale price of books so that it could profitably underprice indie bookstores and drive them out of business. It was sued for this, and then it turned right around and tried to buy Ingram, which is a major distributor and pretty horrific at using its market power to quash other companies' competitors even when it's not owned by one of its clients. If you want to support a company that has consistently pushed the antitrust envelope and that firmly embraces the notion that publishing is an old boy's network, closed to the hoi polloi, then you really should be sure to buy your e-books at Barnes & Noble.
I mentioned having to deal with a lot of tax idiocy this year, and by that I don't mean the normal filling out of the 1040-EZ. The thing that makes this (and many!) tax season so stressful is dealing with a certain individual who has absolutely no concept that processes matter. This person is an older woman, and she waits around for some big swinging dick to come along and tell her what to do, and then she obediently does it, whatever the hell it is. Seriously--the tax advice could be "dose your home in lighter fluid and set it on fire," and as long as a man told her to do it, she'd be sloshing the Kingsford about and trying to find a match without even thinking about it.
I am by no means the only person to find parallels between this kind of behavior that is both encouraged in most women and very much indulged by some, and the way authors often are encouraged to behave and sometimes actually do behave.
Here are some myths common to both:
Don't worry baby, I'll take care of you. Never true. No matter how fancy and powerful someone seems, it's not necessarily in their interest to take care of you--and so they won't. If you are being told not to worry your pretty little head about something because Big Daddy has taken care of everything, beware! You may be getting advice from a cat!
We inhabit separate spheres. Don't you love this one? Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. Women love babies. Men love trucks. Women drink wine. Men drink beer. There is nothing that cannot be parceled off into separate gender spheres.
I notice this a lot because I am both handy and, you know, a dame, which is kind of mind-blowing for some people. I once was stopped at a KMart by a woman who saw that I was buying a replacement toilet seat, and she wanted to know...well, basically she wanted to know if it was possible for a woman to replace a toilet seat. I am not talking about an actual toilet (although I replace those, too), I am talking about a toilet seat--two screws and you're done. I'm pretty sure a monkey could replace a toilet seat. Blindfolded. A friend of mine was buying furniture at Ikea, and another woman told her that she couldn't buy furniture there because she didn't have a boyfriend. Dead serious--there was no connection between those two thoughts, just the automatic assumption that you can't use an Allen wrench if you don't have testicles. (Helpful hint: When assembling furniture, even men use their hands.)
So, yeah, without question I'm better at writing than at doing cover art, but you know something? I'm not afraid to try. I'm not afraid (or too good, or whatever) to poke around in that sphere. At some point I may hire people to do certain production tasks for me, but when I do that I'll have a decent idea of the amount of work required and whether it's worth the price.
You can't make it without me. Wow, seeing a lot of this lately. Change is always stressful, but when your only game plan has been to latch onto someone like a remora, it becomes devastating when that someone moves on. If you identify as a BigPub House author rather than as an author who happens to be published by BigPub House, then it becomes very easy to put BigPub House's interests before your own.
What does this all boil down to? Dependency. People get used to being dependent, and some people just love it to death! But when you turn yourself into a dependent, you aren't simply making yourself vulnerable--you are choosing not to grow. That relative I was talking about in the beginning of this post? She has been 15 years old her entire life--I use tactics gleaned from advice for negotiating with teenagers to deal with her, and she's a senior citizen. Be afraid, be very afraid.
You know, I'm just grateful that the antitrust thing didn't happen before I sent the Trust layout to the copy editor.
Anyway, the whole brouhaha has been kind of interesting, because it's brought out a lot of people who don't know much about self-publishing. So there's concerns that the end of agency pricing will force down book prices (not necessarily), that lower book prices mean less money for authors (only if you don't self-publish), and that it will result in a precipitous decline in quality (not necessarily, because writers can hire help). (And gosh, isn't this the sort of helpful reassurance and advice for writers that you might expect to hear from the president of the Author's Guild? Maybe he's too busying looking for Abba LPs and Toto 8-tracks.)
One thing I thought needed more clarification than can be provided by a simple link is the difference between market dominance and anticompetitive behavior. Obviously, it's easier to engage in anticompetitive behavior if you dominate a market, but the two things aren't the same.
Let's take an example from Scott Turow's amusing little diatribe: Amazon controlled 90% of the e-book market by the end of 2009. Now its share is 60% of the e-book market.
Unlike Turow, I try to not automatically regurgitate information that has been spoon-fed to me by large publishers. Therefore, I will note that nobody knows how big the e-book market is, which means that it is impossible to determine with any accuracy who controls how much of it. (I'm crossing my fingers that the discovery process will result in some good data.)
But for the sake of argument, let's say that those numbers have some basis in reality (perhaps by "the e-book market" he means "the market of e-books produced by large publishers who provide me with talking points"). Well, Amazon dominated that market for about five minutes. And then it lost a huge chunk of market share!
Turow looks at this and says, Yay! Price-fixing did the trick! David Gaughran looks at this and says, Um, hello? At the end of 2009 the Kindle was basically the only e-reader on the market. Now there's the Nook and the iPad.
Honestly, I think Gaughran's much closer to the truth, but even if you buy Turow's argument, the fact is that competitors came into a market that was almost completely dominated by Amazon, and they quickly reduced Amazon's market share by one-third. If you are wondering why, oh why, the Department of Justice doesn't investigate big bad Amazon for anticompetitive practices? It's because Amazon didn't try to exclude competitors. Instead, Amazon allowed competitors to enter the e-book market and take away market share. That is not anticompetitive behavior.
Now, you might argue (and I'm sure the large publishers will) that thanks to all those self-publishers out there, large publishers no longer dominate the supply of e-books. Maybe so, maybe not--the absence of data on e-book sales makes it impossible to know.
But one of the reasons the publishers decided to get together with Apple and fix prices is that they were afraid that Amazon would "pit authors against publishers" and make self-publishing attractive. So the fact that Amazon went ahead and did that and now there are all these self-published e-books out there happened in spite of traditional publishing's efforts to prevent it.
In other words, the fact that traditional publishers may no longer have a dominant e-book market share doesn't mean that they didn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. If an illegal scheme backfires--I try to rip off your granny, but she's too smart for me--that doesn't somehow make it legal. Likewise the fact that the price-fixing scheme they hit upon guaranteed lower margins for publishers and a 30% profit margin for Amazon doesn't mean that they didn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. It just means that, in addition to being unethical, they weren't very smart.
My sister bought me a membership to a local theater group that give me free admission to four shows a season. It's been a nice gift, although the problem with any local theater group when you do not live in a locality that draws talent from across the globe is that sometimes the local talent is talented, and sometimes it's...that other thing.
So I tend to avoid the shows that require large casts. Today I saw a two-man show that was excellent; a month ago I saw a one-man show that was so boring I managed to hit upon a solution for a home-improvement problem that had been bothering me.
The problem in the latter's case was not the actor; it was the script. Both shows were about real, historical people. But the excellent show was a story, and the boring show was just, you know, a story.
"Like, I met this guy once? And he was like, really interesting. He, like, grew up in Austria. And when the Nazis came, like, in 1939 or whenever they came to Austria, he was, like, 18, and he was like, NFW. I'm not sticking around here. He wasn't Jewish or anything, he just thought these people were appalling. So, he was a big hiker, right? So he walked from Austria to someplace in France where he got a boat ride to the UK! Then he moved here, to the US, and he's stayed here ever since."
Stretch that out for two hours, and you've got the boring play.
Now, I read the playbill, and the author of this play met the person the play is about in real life and blah-de-blah-blah and this really happened--it really happened--and the person was really real. And the author felt like he couldn't embellish or alter this person's story in the least, because they were a real real really real real person who most people didn't know about.
Well, you know something? The guy I was talking about three paragraphs up is a real person, too. What difference does that make? You don't want two freaking hours of me saying, Oh, yeah, this guy was cool.
Now, the excellent play was also about a real (really really real) person. It's also about a totally made-up person: Of the two characters in the play, one is a historical person and the other is an invention, who is something of a composite of some real people, plus a generous dash of I need to make this play work.
So guess what? The invented character has an arc: He learns from the real-life character and goes from being a Padawan to a Jedi. He's also a great foil to the real-life character: He's got a fantastic backstory, which is used to pull out revelations from the real-life character, as well as to illustrate the way the real-life character used and was affected by his own life experiences.
An arc and a foil--that is just too much to expect from someone in real life. And that's the point!
If you want to write about real life, do the research and write non-fiction. You will have to deal with stuff that doesn't work so well in a story (John Nash was a real dick, for example), but that's non-fiction--you have to be disciplined and tell the truth, even when it's unsavory or inconvenient.
When you cross the line into fiction (even "based on a true story" fiction), cross the line. Just go for it. I don't respect the truthfulness of the guy who wrote the boring play--I think he's a punk for not having the courage to write an interesting play. The discipline with fiction isn't the truth: It's the story. In fiction, the story comes before all.
A teeny-tiny bit of progress to report: I revised the promo/jacket copy for Trust. Unfortunately my time and attention right now is mainly being taken up by some tax-related idiocy, which was really, really NOT what I was hoping for....
Oh my God! A non-rant! This is a very cool article about creativity (you have it, you can cultivate it) in the Wall Street Journal. Helpfully, it distinguishes between the situations that require insight--where you should relax and distract yourself and let your subconscious do its thing--and those that quite you to just keep plugging away.
This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.
Because publishers used a system called agency pricing to raise e-book prices, there are now several people speculating that if agency pricing comes to an end, traditionally published e-books will drop precipitously in price, destroying the price advantage that indie e-books have.
To which I say: Not so fast.
Agency pricing just means that the publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the retailer takes a cut. That's all. Large publishers can and do offer e-books for 99 cents. They just don't do it very often, because they can't afford to.
Why not? High costs. How high? Well, let's take as gospel this back-of-the-envelope calculation by the Wall Street Journal and say that, in order to cover their costs and make an acceptable profit margin, a large publisher must make at least $9 ($9.09, but we'll round) on an e-book.
In the traditional book retailing model, the retailer pays a wholesale price to the publisher, and then the retailer can set the sale price however they like.
The publisher still sets a price--but it's the wholesale price, not the retail price. If the publisher needs to make at least $9 on each e-book sold, then the wholesale price is going to be at least $9.
That puts a floor under the price--the retailer can price the book below $9, but they're going to lose money.
They might do it anyway: Agency pricing was forced down Amazon's throat because they were buying e-books from publishers for $13 and selling them to the public for $9.99. They took a $3 loss on e-books because they wanted to spur the sales of a weird new gadget called the Kindle.
That was a couple of years ago, which is an eternity in e-book land. The Kindle is no longer weird and new--it is one of Amazon's best-selling items.
So, I'm going to guess that nowadays, Amazon is a lot less likely to be willing to take a bath on e-books. Indeed, Amazon now sells Kindles at a loss to drive the sales of e-books, so if they start selling e-books at a loss, too, they're going to get into big trouble--they need to make a profit somewhere.
Amazon may well retail a hot new best-seller for a few bucks cheaper than the competition (as they do with paper books), but I don't see them taking a book they paid $9 or $13 or whatever wholesale price publishers want to charge ($20? $25? $40?) and marking it down to $3 or 99 cents. Taking a $6-$12 loss on each copy of a book that sells millions of copies is going to be tough even for Amazon to keep up.
The cost structures of indie and traditional publishing are just so different that it creates a huge gulf in the prices they can charge--and those cost structures won't change in a hurry. Look at that number that caused so much drama: $9.99. Amazon was selling e-books for $9.99, and publishers panicked. Meanwhile, over in indie publishing land, $5.99 is seen as quite expensive, and people are afraid to sell stories for 99 cents.
Which makes it less likely that Amazon will drastically cut prices on traditionally-published e-books: They have this huge library of indie books now that, for the most part, sell for less than $4.99. And they make money on those cheap books! They don't need to take a $10 loss on some traditionally-published book in order to convince people that it's worth it to invest in a Kindle. They can offer a ton of $3 books instead--and make a profit!
Scott Turow, who is president of the Authors' Guild, posted this astonishing bit bewailing the Department of Justice's likely upcoming lawsuit against some large publishers and Apple as a result of their collusion to fix prices in order to slow down the adoption of e-books.
Where to begin? Well, of course, I began over here with:
Aaaand I'm going to continue here with:
We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded in adopting the agency model for e-book pricing.
Given that Steve Jobs bragged about it, I think it's pretty much public knowledge.
We do know that collusion wasn’t necessary: given the chance, any rational publisher would have leapt at Apple’s offer and clung to it like a life raft.
Gosh, did you know that collusion is a perfectly rational response to competition? Just like fraud is a perfectly rational response to the need to raise money! Of course, it doesn't make either activity any less illegal, because what is in the short-term interests of an individual company isn't always in the long-term interests of society at large.
In addition, Turow seems to think that colluding with Apple to fix prices somehow isn't collusion. I'm sorry, but when Apple invites you to do something illegal, it doesn't magically become legal because the offer came from the Wizard of Cupertino.
In addition to venting about Turow's chop-logic, I really wanted to talk about an analogy that Turow draws that I feel is very apt: He compares authors to musicians.
If you didn't know, once upon a time, a musician needed the support of a record label to become well-known. Record labels unquestionably abused their power, but they were the only real option, so musicians sucked it up and signed crappy contracts and took whatever they were given.
Then digital came along. Record labels did horribly, record stores shut down, and that was that.
What happened to the musicians? Well, artists like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber looked at something called YouTube and said, "I can make that work." And it wasn't just them: Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Adele and many others have found large audiences and certainly aren't hurting for money. They didn't just rely on a label, of course, they had to hustle and get creative: OK Go and Cee Lo Green have been very open about how they make money in this new world.
But according to Scott Turow, these commercially-successful artists just don't exist--Napster wiped out the music industry back in 1999, and no musician has made money ever since.
In Turow's mind, the fact that technological change was hard on record labels means that it necessarily hard on musicians. But they're not the same thing, and what hurts one doesn't have to hurt the other
Likewise, authors are not the same thing as publishers, or for that matter, bookstores. Since he seems to be unclear on this fact, I'll point out again that Turow is president of the Authors' Guild. Authors write books, and then they need to sell them.
Now, if he were a little more reality-oriented, Turow might throw himself into helping authors navigate the changes that are happening to publishers and bookstores, so that authors can still sell the books they write. Nowadays authors have to hustle and get creative and not expect everything to stay still, but they can indeed sell books and make a good living.
Think of Madonna: She's not still waiting around for Sire Records to recover; she's moved on.
Turow, on the other hand, is still with Farrar Strauss & Giroux, which published his first novel in 1987. I'm sure at this point that if anything bad happened to FSG, Turow would feel like a member of his family had just died. And unfortunately, he can't understand that not everyone is served by their publisher the way he has been served by his. He can't understand that what is in a publisher's interest isn't necessarily what is in an author's interest--in fact, screwing authors is a good short-term strategy for publishers to make money.
Worse yet, Turow doesn't even realize that publishers are capable of doing wrong. Yes, publishers might be worried about Amazon and unhappy with their bottom lines, and the executives involved may be desperate to save their jobs. They might have received a very tempting offer from that beguiling devil, Steve Jobs. That doesn't make what they did ethical or legal. They could have tried competing or adapting; instead they tried price fixing. When faced with adversity, they chose to break the law. That was their choice, freely made, and I will shed no tears when they pay for it.
If my rant isn't rant-y enough for you, David Gaughran has a post titled Scott Turow: Wrong About Everything, and Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler had a good time, too. Oh, and go here and scroll down to Lee Allred's comment--hilarious.
Amazon’s predatory pricing would shield it from e-book competitors that lacked Amazon’s deep pockets.
Like Apple. THERE’S a cash-poor company. [I'll add that he also mentions Google, which is of course desperately poor.]
Bookstores were well along the path to becoming as rare as record stores.
Which is why the number of indie bookstores are up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/independent-bookstores-add-a-new-chapter/2011/08/12/gIQAfMh9LJ_story.html
Like rock bands from the pre-Napster era, established authors can still draw a crowd, if not to a stadium, at least to a virtual shopping cart.
Whereas poor Lady Gaga is forced to sit at home, all alone, with no fans and no money.
And publishers won’t risk capital where there’s no reasonable prospect for reward. They will necessarily focus their capital on what works in an online environment: familiar works by familiar authors.
Which is why Amanda Hocking labors in obscurity as well.
Jesus, does he even read what he writes?