Le sigh....

Since I've been a virtuous little points-grubber, a bottle of Paperback perfume arrived in the mail today. Sadly, while it smells fine, it doesn't really smell like a paperback. That's kind of unusual for Demeter--I've worn their Dirt and Sawdust perfume, and both smelled like a very pleasant version of either dirt (clay, I'd say) and sawdust, so I wasn't thinking that a paper smell would stump them.

Alien lives

Despite the Trang series featuring many, many space Marines, I've never felt like I ought to market it as military sci-fi.

And one reason is because I keep coming across this scenario in military sci-fi:

There are aliens. The aliens are enemies for whatever reason, or you know, no reason whatsoever. The enemy aliens decide to attack or are preparing to attack, so the humans and perhaps some good aliens get together and, relying on some far superior military technology, they surround the enemy aliens and they kill them all. Every single one!

Pardon my focus on semantics, but--isn't that properly called a massacre?

I realize that the rules of engagement tend to go out the window in the heat of combat. I don't judge that: I don't want to get killed, either, and if I were in combat the fact that I had much better weaponry than the other guy wouldn't slow me down one whit.

But in these books, these things more often than not are planned. There's a trap, the enemy falls into the trap, and then the humans kill them all!!! Forget negotiating surrender or taking prisoners--it's slaughter time!

Oh, but the enemy aliens don't surrender. That's always the moral loophole in these stories--Gee, Mom, I had to wipe out that village! Those guys don't surrender! Plus, you know, they are ugly and talk funny and eat weird food and don't live like we do--better to kill them all. It's just so much more convenient. So much more satisfying.

This may be another example of me having a hard time letting go of the metaphor.

I guess I feel like people are already so very prone to dehumanizing enemies that it's not something that needs to be encouraged. Playing up the alien's alieness to make massacre more acceptable--they're evil, they're bad, they don't surrender, we have no choice but to kill them all--makes me feel like I'm reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Because according to Hannah Arendt, that's basically what the Nazis told soldiers who didn't feel particularly good about massacring Jews: You have no choice. It's not pleasant, but it has to happen. They're evil and they won't surrender. We have no choice but to kill them all.

History: Not what you think!

I really liked this post by Fox Meadows about whether the past was really as white and sexist and hidebound and bigoted as less-well informed people tend to think. The background is that a fellow wrote a book featuring a Black female pirate, and someone decided to bitch and moan because the book did not feature a White male pirate instead. Part of the complainant's problem with the Black female pirate (other than her being Black and female, which were clearly issues for him in and of themselves), was that he felt it was unrealistic to have a pirate who was a woman. Meadow's post points out that what people think is historically realistic often has nothing to do with the way history actually was (plus, you know, it's fiction, dipshit).

(I don't know what the complainant was expecting to accomplish, but the author's response was to offer him "this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill," as well as another, equally heartfelt invitation to stop reading his books. And I have to say that, under similar circumstances, I would do the same.)

I don't blame people for assuming that, say, all pirates or all American cowboys were all white, because the sad truth is that most people get their knowledge of history from Hollywood, and Hollywood is an abominable teacher. The Western genre was really popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and by George, you can watch Western after Western after Western and not see a single African-American cowboy--not one. In addition, all the women wear Revlon Fire & Ice on their lips and nails, and there's always one with platinum blond hair who looks just like Marilyn Monroe, sometimes because she actually is Marilyn Monroe.

Movies--even "true" movies--are a tissue of lies, often the sorts of lies that leave you with your mouth gaping open at their chutzpah (coughcoughA Beautiful Mindcoughcough). The goal of movies is to attract audiences by putting beautiful characters in wish-fulfillment situations, not repel audiences by putting starving and gross people in really upsetting situations. When people think "pirates," they think of Johnny Depp (yum) in Pirates of the Caribbean (whee). They think of freedom and excitement and Halloween costumes and Talk Like a Pirate Day. The reality of pirates, past or present, doesn't even come up.

Even if you don't learn everything you know about history from movies or television, teachers and books sometimes have a definite agenda. I think the educational system has gotten better about this, but there has been a lot of propaganda fed to people over the ages. When I accompanied my elderly relative to Peru, we traveled with a group organzied by a company that specializes in trips geared to older people. The people we were with were all basically lovely, intelligent, and well-educated enough that I was very surprised at how little they knew of history. We visited a number of Moche ruins, and the Moche were very enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice. And people in our group kept saying things along the lines of, "Well, I don't know why these people had to kill each other all the time--Christians have certainly never slaughtered each other like that!"

Wow. Um, yeah they did. Like, for centuries. Seriously, how did their history classes go? "Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses to a church door, and after some calm and rational discussion, it was decided that large chunks of Northern Europe would no longer follow the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church." "The Inquisition was exactly like Monty Python portrayed it, comfy chairs and all." "The religious dissidents left Europe and came to the North American colonies because they loved adventure!"

But the thing that really bothers me about efforts to render history more palatable and comfortable to people, is that it cuts people off from exciting stories.

Yeah, I know, that is a horribly writerly reaction, so writerly that it verges on the psychopathic, but honestly, when I was editing Black history books, that's what struck me: This is some great shit!

I mean, the violence of American race relations and the brutality of slavery meant that every little interaction could result in HORRIBLE TORTURE AND DEATH. Those are fantastic stakes. Asking for water could get you killed. Walking down the street could get you killed. Starting a business could definitely get you killed.

Deciding, "You know, I've got really light skin. I think I'll pass for white and go to the Deep South in order to investigate lynchings for the NAACP"--? Holy shit. Great story. Why no one has done a movie about Walter White I will never know.

Except that I guess I do know. It's similar to why there are no really good non-white fashion models--it's a problem of gatekeepers. Lazy gatekeepers, or gatekeepers who think it's great but there just isn't a market for that kind of thing. I've heard writers say, "Well, I'd love to write about X. It's a really fascinating topic, and I think there would be some fantastic stories there. But they'd never let me."

But guess what? NOW YOU CAN!! Now, with self-publishing, you can have your Black female pirates! You can write historical fiction that's actually accurate, and when someone says, "That's not realistic," you can tell them how wrong they are!

And who knows, maybe you'll manage to educate people about the past, so that they have the slightest clue that, yes, racial attitudes in 1453 Europe were rather different from those in 1953 Selma, Alabama, because there's 500 years and thousands of miles of difference there. Honestly.

Well, come on!

So, I've been busy writing, and Squarespace now no longer notifies me by e-mail when comments are stuck in the spam filter. (Thanks, guys--that's a big help.) So, yeah--almost a dozen comments were stuck there, and I didn't find out until I actually went poking around. Sorry about that.....

KDP Select and online advertising so far (now)

Like I said, I've had Trang enrolled in Amazon's exclusivity program since December 1st. So, do I have any updates?

At this point I've gone from zero borrows to one borrow ($2 in revenue!), so I feel comfortable in my opinion that you ain't gonna get a lot from the borrow program absent other enticements.

While I think (? data is not conclusive) that advertising is having some effect selling copies of Trang, it's not a large effect, so I'm also comfortable in my opinion that one should keep one's click bid as low as possible with a long-term pay-per-click campaign for a not-free book.

At this point, I'm skeptical that there's anything KDP Select could give me (since I am shut out of buying ads on the major sites promoting KDP Select free days) that I couldn't get by making Trang free.

Why's that? Well, I am seeing a significant uptick in sales of Trust. Not, you know, enough to pay off a mortgage or anything, but still...significant. Especially given that Trust has always been somewhat of a laggard. But you give away a bunch of copies of Trang, and...some of those people click on that back matter link and get Trust! I love it when a plan comes together.

So, really, the question for me is--do I make Trang free as soon as it comes out of KDP Select, or do I wait until Trials comes out? The original plan was to wait until the third book, but...remember how I was #3 on the science fiction: series free list? That might be exposure worth having. Maintaining such exposure would presumably involve occasional relatively expensive advertising campaigns plugging a free book, but it might be worth it (they weren't that expensive). Trang (or really, any non-Illuminati activity) is not a significant source of revenue for me anyway, and expanding the fan base may well pay off when a new release comes out.

Wow. Sounds like I've almost talked myself into it....

Some fun with math

Bridget McKenna posted to Passive Voice about how kids are enthusiastically adopting e-books. McKenna writes that the study "plays hell with the 30% e-reading cap so many people have been predicting lately."

The thing is, their own data plays hell with that particular prediction!

Let's pretend that the surveys of established publishers bear any actual relation to the e-book market. (They don't.) This data suggests that e-books constitute 25% of sales, and is increasing at a rate of 34% a year.

So, assuming that rate of growth stays constant:

In 2013, e-books will make up 34% of book sales.

In 2014, e-books will make up 45% of book sales.

In 2015, e-books will make up 60% of book sales.

In 2016, e-books will make up 81% of book sales.

In 2017, e-books will make up 107% of book sales, which is impossible.

You see why I laugh when people describe a 34% rate of growth as not truly impressive.

But the rate of growth is slowing! they scream.

OF COURSE that rate of growth is going to slow, at least as a percentage of the overall market. It has to! You can't actually control 107% of a market--it's like eating 107% of a pie! (Although, if e-books actually cause the overall market to grow the way paperbacks did, we may see the value of e-book sales in 2017 top the overall value of all book sales in 2012. Which would be very cool.)

Anyway, let's halve the rate of growth, making it 17%.

In 2013, e-books will make up 29% of book sales.

In 2014, e-books will make up 34% of book sales.

In 2015, e-books will make up 40% of book sales.

In 2016, e-books will make up 47% of book sales.

In 2017, e-books will make up 55% of book sales.

So, at half the current rate of growth, within five years more than half of all book sales will be e-books.

What the people predicting a 30% cap on e-books are predicting is basically a zeroing out of e-book growth--not a reduction in that rate of growth, but a complete halt. And they are expecting that zeroing-out to happen, you know, today. Because if the rate of growth stays anywhere near where it is now for just a couple of years, e-books will be outselling every other format--paperbacks, hardcovers, you name it. And that's in dollar value.

I actually do think we might see a zeroing out of e-book growth in the next few years among traditional publishers, but that's because I think it's quite possible that that particular group is going to be largely forced out of e-books. In that case, e-books will be left to the indie writers, who are much harder to survey.

What's that 30% cap? It's wishful thinking. It's people pretending they know the future when they don't. It's inconsistent with existing data from publishers of fiction. And it's extremely unlikely.

Progress report

I re-recorded Pinky's lines and the other lines that needed fixing on Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook. That went much better--in a way, it was better to record all his lines together because it helped me to keep his accent consistent. I finished the fixing and did the sound compression, so all that's left is going to be noise removal.

Progress report

I edited chapter 5 of the Trang audio book. UGH. It is the first chapter with Pinky. Wow. I used to live in a neighborhood with a large population of Balkan immigrants (yes, that did get a little nerve-wracking at times--one of the joys of NYC is that people don't always leave their wars behind), but I have really lost the flow of that way of speaking--I'm going to have to practice for a bit and re-record every single one of his lines. At times he sounds way too much like Yoli, who already sounds way too much like a female Cheech Marin. (Yes, I realize that it is unlikely that a Chilean astrophysicist would sound like a chola, but I grew up in Chola Central so people are just going to have to deal with that.)

The too-neat ending

I enjoyed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when it came out, but I never actually watched it that regularly until the last season. So recently I decided to watch the whole thing.

The show's series finale is this behemoth of nine or ten linked episodes, and what I remember feeling about all that when it finally came to its conclusion was a vague sense of disappointment, a sense that it was really all too pat. Watching it again, this time with the full weight of seven seasons of the show behind it, I felt exactly the same way.

If you've never watched the show, it takes place on a space station, and the main characters are a mix of humans and aliens. In that great Star Trek/social science-fiction tradition of using aliens as metaphors for human problems, there's a lot in there about issues of identity in a multi-cultural society. (Gee, no, it didn't influence the Trang series at all--why do you ask?)

Well, at the end those issues are largely dropped in favor of basically assigning each alien back to their home planet, whether or not they have actually lived there as adults or can relate to the people there in any kind of meaningful way. There's a big dollop of wish-fulfillment thrown in there, so that no fewer than four of the major characters end up ruling and/or saving "their" people, and another gets hoovered up to live with some mystical aliens (leaving behind both a son and a pregnant wife) because he's kind of related to them in some vague, mystical fashion. The concept that someone might leave a place, move someplace new, and be happier in the new place is totally discounted--the major alien character who stays on the station does so only because his planet is no longer traditional enough for him.

While metaphor can deepen a story, I feel like the finale of Deep Space Nine shows how the sloppy use of metaphor can really weird people out. Part of the problem with the finale for me is that if you have that metaphor (alien identity = ethnic identity) in the back of your mind, you can't help but notice how neatly the conclusion of the series parallels the "solution" certain white supremacists have for the United States--just ship everybody back to where they came from, and we'll all be happier!

The other issue is that, while it's really an ensemble piece, there is a main character, the captain of the station, named Benjamin Sisko. He is pitted against a character named Dukat, who is always kind of an antagonist, but who, as the show progresses, becomes an outright villain.

The problem with Dukat is that, as he becomes a villain, he explicitly and repeatedly identifies himself as the enemy of Sisko. He makes it very clear that there is going to be--in fact, there must be--some big confrontation between him and Sisko, and that only one of the two will survive.

And then, in the series finale, there's a big confrontation between Dukat and Sisko, and only one of the two survives. Take a wild guess which one.

Ugh. You know, that kind of set-up is extremely common: The big hero meets the big villain and defeats him. It's why Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is kind of a waste of paper--870 pages to learn that Harry Potter must defeat Voldemort? I'd figured that out already, thanks.

When you're presenting something that's been done so many times before, to pull it off you either have to do it in a really interesting way (which I think the Potter books do, eventually), or mix things up a bit. One of the joys of the Buffyverse was that, more often than not, the big hero (Buffy or Angel) did not defeat the big villain. Sometimes they did, but more often than not things didn't work that way: A friend might do the dirty work, or maybe the big villain actually wasn't such a big villain and got offed by a bigger villain. If the villain was a serious threat, getting rid of him had to be a group effort, and sometimes the hero wouldn't quite manage it properly and the villain would come back later. In the case of Angel (who becomes a villain at one point), he was only a villain temporarily, so taking him down was an agonizing experience.

The point was: It was unpredictable. Things in the Buffyverse always had the potential to go sideways. As a result, even when there was a straight-up hero-defeats-villain scenario, it was fresh, because there was a very real chance it might not come off. You didn't come out of it feeling like you could have saved a lot of time by checking out on the storyline the moment Big Villain said, "Ha-ha! It's going to be a battle to the death between Big Hero and me!"

How does quality shine through?

I was recently reading something about a reclusive-but-successful author, and people were commenting on how wonderful it was that some authors refuse to market and just let The Quality of Their Work Shine Through, and that contemporary authors should do the same.

I've heard this quality-of-the-work-shines-through argument before--for example, when someone decides not to proofread their book, because The Quality of the Work Will Shine Through!!! and I guess blind the reader to all the stupid grammatical errors.

The problem with deciding that you will just let The Quality of You Work Shine Through is this: THAT IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN IF NO ONE EVER READS YOUR BOOK.

Literary quality is not actually a form of light. There is no bright halo surrounding the really good books. Literary quality cannot shine through unless someone 1. knows your book exists, 2. picks it up, 3. reads it, and then 4. talks it up.

In the past, authors didn't have to market because publishers did it for them--or, at least, that was how things were supposed to work: Publishers sent books to reviewers. Publishers paid co-op to books stores for better placement. Publishers got extracts published in literary magazines. And in return, publishers got most of the money.

It wasn't that there was no marketing going on. It was just that the authors weren't the ones doing it, or at least not all of it.

It's really easy for people to think that their contribution to a success was the only one that matters. That's true of editors, marketing people...and writers! We do the writing, so we tend to think that good writing = successful book.

But if you write the best book in the entire world and then hide it, who is going to read it? If you put your book out without a cover and no support, who is going to find it? Readers aren't psychic--they don't know that a great book exists unless they're told.

Marketing isn't easy, and it doesn't come naturally for most people. But marketing isn't only for inferior writers. The notion that good-quality writing doesn't have to be marketed is simply bullshit--there's a strategy for marketing literary fiction (New York Times book review; NPR feature) that is as by-the-numbers as the marketing done for the most crassly commercial book imaginable. And the idea that so-and-so is such a superior writer that he just sits on a mountaintop next to Bob Dylan, contemplating his own awesomeness, probably came straight from so-and-so's marketing department.

That's the thing....

Lily While LeFevre has a good post on how silly the "Sign over your rights, and you'll do nothing but write!" argument is. (You know, aside from the fact that people working for traditional publishers spend a hell of a lot of time doing things other than writing. Read this and every other pre-self-publishing blog post by Joe Konrath if you don't believe me.) If you can write nonstop for 12 hours straight and not have it be complete gibberish that you have to throw out the following day, I salute you, but I can't. When I wrote nonfiction for a living, the vast majority of my time was spent conducting research--whenever I worked someplace that paid me by the hour rather than by the job, I was always surprised at how little time I spent actually putting words to paper.

Progress report

Today was kind of a bass-ackwards day for progress, in part because I really wanted to start writing again today but that just was not going to happen. So instead I listened to the MP3 files of chapters 1 & 2 of Trang, which sounded fine, and decided to go over chapter 3 one last time before converting it into an MP3. The good news is that chapter 3 was much cleaner than 1 & 2 were--let's hear it for getting up the learning curve. The bad news is that I realized I had done the metadata wrong with the MP3 files, so I had to convert 1 & 2 again, which defeated the purpose of listening to the "final" product and making sure nothing was wrong with it.

I think I'll just wait on giving everything a listen in MP3 form--at this point I'm getting too familiar with the material, and I had to start chapter 2 over again because I was tuning it out. (Because of the way today was, I had to multitask, so the moral of the story is not to multitask checking audio files with anything that requires concentration.) So far I haven't found any new and exciting glitches caused by the conversion process, but you know that the one file I don't listen to will be the one that's gibberish....