Ugggghhh....

I've been feeling kind of tired and headachy lately, and couldn't quite figure out why, but now the answer is clear: Sinus infection. Yuck. Obviously this is going to adversely affect production of anything other than yellow mucus.

Random bits

Life stuff is interfering with writing, but with any luck, I'll start tomorrow. A couple of interesting tidbits.

1. The Foolscap flyers: Since response to the GeekGirlCon flyers was not what I had hoped, I decided to modify the flyers by removing the "it's free!" message from the header. The thinking was that maybe that message gave the book a bargain-basement type odor--you know, "I'm making it free because I know it's no good!"

Well, maybe it does, but apparently people don't mind a bargain--I have had NO redemptions of the free coupon on the Foolscap flyers. None whatsoever. "It's free!" is back in the header for Norwescon!

2. The Meetup: That went well, I thought--I enjoyed it, and people seemed happy with it. And something interesting came up: I mentioned that it's important to have a clickable table of contents in an e-book, and one woman said that she will not buy e-books that don't have them, because they are just too difficult to navigate. Something to think about--yes, it's a pain to do them, but IMO well worth the effort.

Yet another example of the economics of self-publishing

Kris Rusch has a thought-provoking blog post in which she looks at Joe Konrath's sales numbers. What's interesting is that she makes the case that he is still, even today, basically a mid-lister--his sales are good, not great.

And yet, he's making buckets of money.

I know I've brought this up before, but I just feel like doing the happy dance whenever I see something like that--writers making a living (or waaay more than a living) off of sales that would be of zero interest to large publishing houses. There's a big difference between 70% of the pie and 10%.

Progress report

No progress today, alas. Remember how the printer died, but it was under warranty, so they sent me a replacement? Yeah, the replacement died (a Hewlett-Packard Pro8000, if you are wondering what to avoid) shortly before I left for Peru. It was probably still under warranty, but I think at a certain point (you know, like when the same model dies twice in six months) you need to acknowledge that you have purchased a lemon. It's not like the kids were attacking it with hockey sticks or anything, either--it died twice under normal use.

So I ordered a new printer (a Canon this time), and it came today. Hopefully it will last longer, and it has a built-in scanner, which presumably will take care of that issue as well. Anyway, it took a long time to set up (why these things always take so long, I'll never know), and then I had a big backlog of stuff that needed to be printed and sorted. So that plus some other errands pretty much ate my day--tomorrow hopefully I can get stuff done before I have to go lead my first Meetup as organizer. 

Why did he do that?

I recently finished Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld. It's a fascinating non-fiction book, and I feel like it contains a valuable lesson for writers of fiction as well.

The book is about the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and how it basically went off the rails and dedicated enormous resources to hassling hippies in the late 1960s. (They have long hair! LOOOONG HAIR!!!) Now, I knew that that had happened--I've read Steal This Book and Soul on Ice and a ton of other 1960s counterculture "classics" that to be honest are for the most part incredibly boring to the contemporary reader. (Yes. You smoked weed and got laid. That is so fascinating.)

But I'd never really gotten any insight into why it happened, other than Hoover was The Man, and The Man can't handle having his mind blown by young people smoking weed and getting laid, man! (I feel obligated to point out here that Hoover was probably gay, and some of the people he worked with quite closely for a long time were most certainly gay, so I don't think his problem was Puritanism.) Rosenfeld spent more than 20 years fighting the FBI in court for access to its files, so he has a lot of letters and memos and whatnot that provide insight into Hoover's thought process.

And a fascinating thought process it is! For starters, Hoover surrounded himself with people who thought exactly like he did--proof that the echo chamber existed long before the Internet. So by the time the late 1960s rolled around, assumptions like "Democrat = Communist" were widely accepted within the FBI, because it's not like anybody in the Bureau knew any Democrats or, God forbid, actually was one. In other words, there were no reality checks taking place, and no speed bumps on the road from Legitimate Security Threat Land to Crazy Town.

What was the legitimate security threat? Well, the Comintern was indeed a real thing, and in the 1930s and 1940s most Communist parties in the United States were actively managed by the Soviet Union and supported Soviet interests over American interests. In the late 1940s, people working for the Soviets were spying on the American atomic-weapons program. So that sort of thing was a totally legitimate area of interest for law enforcement, which is why the FBI got involved.

Unfortunately, as the level of Communist/Soviet activity in the United States waned in the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI just assumed it was better hidden. The way the Communists operated really helped stoke the paranoia--remember, this was a political movement that developed under the totalitarian regime of the czars. So Communists had a policy of 1. lying about who they were, and 2. surreptitiously taking control of organizations that were largely not Communist by having a small number of Communists enter the organization and take leadership positions.

The secrecy meant that if a group had few or no people in it who were openly Communist, you still couldn't be 100% sure that it was not a Communist front organization that would promote the interests of the Soviet Union. And indeed, Hoover and his people were, in general, 100% sure groups that were making trouble were Communist front organizations, even if the vast majority of the people in those groups were clearly not Communists.

So when the free-speech movement started at UC Berkeley in 1964, Hoover did not see a bunch of college kids agitating to pass out flyers on campus (yawn). He saw a Communist front organization (!!!). I was surprised about how sincerely Hoover believed this--I'd always assumed that the people making these sorts of allegations knew they were pretty ridiculous. But Hoover's underlings obediently produced a report saying that the FSM was a Communist front organization, and then Hoover himself was genuinely quite surprised when that report was discredited.

At this point, Hoover's thought process went like this:

Q. Why are these kids acting so weird?

A. Soviet infiltration!

Within just a couple of years, though, even the FBI knew that the Soviets had SFA to do with what was going on at Berkeley. Unfortunately, at this point they didn't care. Hoover's thought process had devolved to:

Q. Why are these kids acting so weird?

A. Who cares? They must be destroyed!

And that's when the FBI became an instrument of straight-up political oppression--hippies, peaceniks, Democrats, they were all subversives and all the enemy.

Do you see how much more interesting that kind of thing is that the simple-minded "Hoover is The Man" or "Hoover is evil" or "Hoover can't handle freaks"? It's a story, and a tragic one--a guy starts out in trying to protect people's freedom, but thanks to certain flaws in his character (an unwillingness to associate with anyone who does not agree with him; an unwillingness to adapt to change; a willingness to break the law to pursue an investigation), he winds up becoming quite possibly the most serious threat to that freedom. The slow decline in his ideals, the gradual sense that there are no rules that apply to him, the creeping belief that anyone who disagrees with him is evil--you can see how it could happen. You can relate to it even if you think you would have handled things differently.

It's so much more engaging than just having a two-dimensional villain plopped before you, along with instructions to hate him. Bad guys who are just bad--you know, one day they just decided to become evil, as you do--are such a wasted opportunity.

OK, OK....

Today I made the mistake of actually checking up on what's going on with Trang and Trust. People are 1. buying them, and 2. reviewing them favorably. I am grateful for it, of course, but what are they saying in the reviews? THEY WANT THE NEXT BOOK!!!

All right! I'll get on that..not today, please, I'm tired still, and tomorrow I have to get up at the crack of dawn and look after a four-year-old. But Wednesday--Wednesday I shall resume writing. I'm not promising a productive day, but it's on my calendar and everything.

A weak-ass report from Foolscap (but I have artists!)

Yeah, with one thing and another I basically had to shine Foolscap on. I had too much stuff to catch up on, and at least one thing I wanted to do was scheduled late at night, which just wasn't going to happen with this jet lag.

Anyway, I did drop off flyers and cruise through the art show as part of my ongoing quest to find fantasy and sci-fi artists people can potentially use for book covers. There was some overlap with the Westercon artists, so I'm only listing the people who weren't at that show and who have Web sites where you can see their work and contact them. (And seriously, artists, you really need to have Web sites. Especially if you have a common name that makes you impossible to find on Google. I'd love to help you, but there is only so much I can do.)

Lela Dowling and Frank Cirocco

Chris Sumption

Laura Cameron

Raven Mimura

Konrath gives the numbers

Konrath breaks out his sales, in detail. It's really interesting, and I'll say again that I really, really appreciate that he does this.

And he says some things that I think are really important when it comes to signing deals with publishers, especially e-book only deals, so I'll quote them here. Emphasis is added:

On a $6.99 legacy ebook, the author makes $1.04 after agent commission. The publisher makes $3.67. So let's play the advance game.

A publisher pays an author $20,000 advance. Author keeps $17,000 after the agent is paid. There is no paper version. The ebook, priced at $6.99, sells 12,000 ebooks in five years, which is what my legacy ebook Dirty Martini has sold.

The author would still owe $7520 on the advance before earning another nickel. In the meantime, the publisher has made $44,000. Minus the $20k advance, the publisher has pocketed $24,000, and still will make money for a few more years without paying the author any more.

If the author self-pubbed his own book at $6.99, and sold 12,000 copies, he would have made $58,880.

If publishers keep signing authors for ebook-only deals, at the current royalty rates, they'll get richer than they ever have, at the expense of authors. Authors will still be living advance to advance, never earning out, and publishers will be printing money by doing nothing more than providing cover art, proofreading, and editing services--all jobs that can be freelanced for fixed costs.

If you are thinking about signing an ebook-only deal with a publisher, crunch the numbers first....

Tread lightly. There's a big difference between taking $1,000,000 because a publisher thinks you're the next James or Hocking, and taking $20,000 that you'll never earn out.

You see?

In today's Wall Street Journal: Three out of four start-up companies backed by venture capital fail.

Venture capitalists "bury their dead very quietly," Mr. [Shikhar] Ghosh[, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who researched the subject,] says. "They emphasize the successes but they don't talk about the failures at all."

There are also different definitions of failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghosh's research.

Failure often is harder on entrepreneurs who lose money that they've borrowed on credit cards or from friends and relatives than it is on those who raised venture capital.

Just making the point that venture capital isn't the golden ticket some people who liken it to traditional publishing would like you to think it is. Big expectations + tight deadlines = high likelihood of failure. Doesn't matter what industry.

I'm here!

Yes, I am back from my long trip to Foreignia--Peru, specifically.

It was a great trip; we never had to go to the hospital or even see a doctor, which was a serious relief. And the place is fantastic. The high point was, of course, Machu Picchu, which really lives up to its billing--fascinating ruins in a truly awesome natural setting.

Anyway, tomorrow Foolscap starts, so I should have some posts on that soon, assuming all the stuff I have to catch up on doesn't kill me first.

Lindsay Buroker (whose books kept me mightily entertained on that 8-hour plane trip) did a post on offering subscriptions to short stories, but the main thing that intrigues me is that she's thinking about strategies to diversify writers' income streams away from Amazon. (I'm assuming that it's not a coincidence that she has another recent post about selling ARCs directly to readers.)

Obviously, if you're just getting started, Amazon appears to offer the most powerful tools for getting noticed. (And both Buroker and M. Louisa Locke have good posts on maximizing the impact of Amazon exclusivity.) But I do feel that it's important to diversify revenue sources (and marketing venues) when you can, even though it may take more effort and be less rewarding than occasionally scheduling free days on KDP Select. If diversifying was easy, fewer people would get caught in the trap of their own expectations.

And Joe Konrath says that since phony reviews don't kill anyone, there's nothing wrong with them. Right. This is pretty much what you can expect from an on-line fight. "I am becoming increasingly shrill defending something that I would never, ever do! Just because I would never do it in a million years, ever, doesn't mean that it's wrong!! You're an asshole!!! Fuck you!!!!"

The only reason I bring this up is because Konrath's moral relativism takes a different spin in the world of law enforcement. The Federal Trade Commission determined in 2009 that, yes, "paying for positive reviews without disclosing that the reviewer had been compensated equates to deceptive advertising and would be prosecuted as such."

Now, do paid reviews kill people? No. That's why you can rest assured that you won't go to death row for doing it. Will you get fined? Will you have to wear an orange jumpsuit and pick up trash along the highway? Will an ankle bracelet become your latest fashion accessory? That depends entirely on how annoyed the FTC gets about this issue. Remember how I said that ethical behavior helps you to not get sued? It also helps you avoid nasty letters sent by the district attorney's office. Something to think about.

The advantage of bright lines

So, Joe Konrath has a post on the paid-reviews scandal that displays, in my opinion, a pretty unhelpful approach, which is to say that it's a slippery slope and that everyone is imperfect. Both things are completely true, and they are also precisely why people do things like draw up ethical codes--if we were all saints, codes, taboos, and laws would be unnecessary.

The notion that those who are (very publicly) trying to state what is and is not OK must be a pack of hypocritical, glory-seeking, witch-hunting assholes is something that in my opinion can very quickly turn into "taking someone else's inventory." That's a term popular in Alcoholics Anonymous-type organizations, because people who are massively fucking up their lives do it a lot. You know, "Well, OK, maybe I did get drunk again, and maybe I stole your car and drove it through your living room window and killed your dog, again, but you're fat!"--that sort of thing.

For example, Konrath points out that The New York Times, which reported the story, has a pretty questionable ethical relationship to publishing. I agree--this is a paper that has repeatedly printed fantastical misinformation about the industry--but that's completely irrelevant to whether or not the paid-reviews story was accurate or important. Certainly The New York Times is on the lookout for negative news about self-publishing; this time, they actually found something significant, instead of having to make something up again. This is why this particular story is having an impact that their fright pieces did not.

I'm sure there are people who will use this sudden interest in ethical reviewing cynically and others who will be unfairly dinged. But things are so scammy when it comes to reviews right now that I think there is real value to making overt public statements regarding what kind of behavior is unacceptable. If you are new to publishing and have never really grappled with these issues before, you look around, and you see that Kirkus Reviews wants to you pay them $450 for a review and Publishers' Weekly wants $150. After that, if someone asks you for "A 'fair' donation" in exchange for effectively letting you into a cooperative, it sounds really reasonable and not at all shady. If there's no blowback on all this (and there should be, especially on places like Kirkus and PW), if no one takes the time to point out how this sort of thing damages all writers and no one notes that it's really pretty easy to name-and-shame people who do this (and there are people who feel so strongly about this that they will indeed name-and-shame), paid reviews will become the norm. Coughing up $20,000 for fake reviews will become no different than coughing up a similar amount on advertising--hell, yeah, it's pricey, but if you're lucky enough to be able to afford it, why wouldn't you?

When a publisher goes under

Remember that Rusch post where an editor mentioned that your traditional publisher could get bought up by one of the tech players? Amazon just bought some 1,000 titles from the publisher Dorchester (via PV), which closed earlier this year.

Note that when Dorchester went under, rights to their books did not automatically revert to the author. Instead, they went up for auction. An auction that had all of ONE bidder. It appears that this bidder will allow the writers who don't want Amazon as their publisher to get their rights back, but guess what? They didn't have to do that.

Did Amazon buy all of Dorchester's titles? I don't know. What would have happened if the auction hadn't attracted any bidders? I'm guessing limbo....

Control: It matters

Kris Rusch has a really scary post on the contract (actually a Terms of Use agreement, wow) that you have to agree to with a certain e-publisher.

We can quibble about whether or not a particular royalty is a good deal, but honestly, I feel like the primary advantage of self-publishing is simple: You don't give up ownership of your work. That is something that sounds very simple but that puts you in a far greater position of power.

And another thing....

This is an addendum to my previous post: Just like the stuff you write is text, not you or your soul or your baby or whatever other metaphor people use to indicate that they have overidentified with their writing, your business is not you, your soul, or your baby. It is a financial investment.

More specifically, it is a long-term, high-risk investment with poor liquidity. There is certainly a place for something like that in your portfolio, but you should NEVER have 100% of your money in a long-term, high-risk investment with poor liquidity.

People say "I plowed every last dime back into my business!" as though this were a marker of great virtue, when the fact of the matter is, from a personal-finance perspective, that is no different from saying, "I plowed every last dime into my collection of antique cars!"

It can be difficult-to-impossible to find a buyer for any business. And writers in particular have traditionally gotten screwed when they sell their rights. If your business is making money, you need to 1. pay yourself, and 2. use that money to diversify your finances the hell out of that business. If that leaves you with less to spend on your business, that's fine--a little spending discipline never hurt anyone.

"My poor planning stole my retirement"

This is an article in the Wall Street Journal about small-business owners who are having to defer retirement "because" of the recession.

Since self-published writers are, in essence, small-business owners, I would like you to read that. And then read it again.

And then read my blog post about why you shouldn't lock yourself into best-case expectations.

Of course I feel bad for these people--I also feel bad for the people who died on the Terra Nova expedition--but when people do things like start a business with the expectation that they will be able to sell it at a certain price at the exact time they wish to retire (which they also magically know in advance), I also feel like they should have had the phrase, "Man plans; God laughs" explained to them at some formative point in their lives.

I loved being my own boss--it was worth the price to me. But there was, indeed, a price. I did not have a predictable income. How unpredictable was my income? Well, there was a certain fat month and a certain lean year where I made pretty much the same amount of money.

I was able to swing that sort of thing because when that fat month came along, I did not assume it would be repeated. I always set my financial life up on the assumption that disaster was about to strike.

I did not buy a dream house. I did not saddle myself with an attractive deadbeat. I did not assume that I "needed" a costly [whatever]. I did not buy expensive doodads or take expensive trips "because I'm worth it." It was more important to me to be able to sleep nights.

Since I am naturally risk adverse, it was a real adjustment for me (hence the sleepless nights) to shift from having a salary to freelancing. It also took a much higher level of financial organization. If you're on salary, every week or every two weeks a specific, predictable amount of money just shows up.

That's very nice. It's really easy to get used to that.

When you have your own business, THAT IS GONE. You have no safety net. No one owes you anything. Your work can dry up for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And your life may change--that lean year was not the fault of my clients, it was the fault of my own life circumstances that prevented me from doing paid work.

Your book sales are going to fluctuate. Your genre may have its day, and then, suddenly, its day is over. You may not be able to crank out books at the rate you used to. You may be the flavor of the week, but that just means that next week, the flavor will change.

Don't assume the fat months will last. Protect your core. 

The amazing evaporating backlist

This (via PV) outlines how print backlist sales are plummeting thanks to e-books. This does not bode well for traditional publishers, since the backlist is the industry's old reliable cash cow. You don't have to spend money marketing the backlist, and if the book is old enough, you don't even have to buy the rights, because it's in the public domain. If it's used by schools, then you have a captive audience that literally has to buy it.

But what if they don't? What if they can go to Project Guttenberg and get it for free? This, I think, is going to be the main challenge posed to publishers by e-books--not the pathetic and obvious lie that e-books cost a lot to make, but the fact that e-books are making it so that publishers can no longer monetize the public domain.

Of course, they can always rip off authors, so there's hope for Penguin yet.

DAISY, DAISY, give me an answer, do

So I did a little poking around into DAISY, and I don't think I'm going to do it. It seems easy enough to convert something into DAISY--there are add-ons for Word and OpenOffice that will save something as a DAISY file--but once you have the file, what then? You can't put it up someplace yourself for people to buy--or if you can, they're keeping that information mighty quiet.

The other thing is that a lot of the things DAISY was designed to do, e-readers can do now. Kindles read books aloud, and apparently Apple devices can make Braille. If you're on Smashwords, someone can buy the .DOC version of your book and convert that into DAISY themselves, and hopefully soon they'll be able to do that with an ePub file. To be honest, I hope that DAISY becomes outdated and unnecessary as e-books become more adaptable.

Dribs 'n' drabs

The Passive Voice has a profile of the head of HarperCollins. There's a lot of self-serving nonsense but also some interesting nuggets: According to the article, more than half of HarperCollins' revenues on fiction books sold in the United States come from e-books, almost half of revenues from its Avon romance imprint are from e-books, and the company expects that more than half of all its fiction revenues will come from e-books within 18 months.

Note that these are revenues--i.e. the actual dollar/pound value of books sold--not the number of books sold. Since e-books usually sell for less than paper, that means people are buying more books--a lot more. Quoth the article: "While sales of HarperCollins's paper books are flat year on year at about £120m, according to Nielsen Bookscan, digital titles are up 250% and now account for 20% of UK income."

And this is a useful post from Crabby McSlacker on managing your time when you're working for yourself--the flip side of flexibility is lack of structure, which can be a challenge. Plus, she has pretty pictures from her vacation in Scotland!