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Ursula K. Le Guin Resigns

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Rounding the bend toward the finish line in college I found myself with a few electives to burn. Although sci-fi was not and is not a passion of mine, I decided to take a science-fiction survey course because I knew there were good writers working in the genre. Over the course of the semester we read through a stack of classics — some hard science, some soft sci-fi — and I genuinely enjoyed them all.

While I don’t remember the titles of many of the books (I’m terrible with titles), we covered the names anyone would know: Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin. I remember Ms. Le Guin particularly because her unusual, rhythmic name somehow matched her powerful prose style.  [ Read more ]

Opting Out of Sales on Amazon.com

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When I originally decided to use CreateSpace as the print-on-demand (POD) publisher for my short story collection, The Year of the Elm, one of the main attractions was its tight distribution integration with Amazon.com. (CreateSpace is a subsidiary of Amazon, and an amalgam of two companies that were acquired by Amazon in 2005.) I have always been opposed to proprietary e-book formats, so making my work available for Amazon’s e-readers was less of a draw. However, because I already offered the collection in multiple e-book formats on Smashwords, adding a Kindle version was essentially adding a market, not a product. Offering a print-on-demand paperback and selling it through Amazon, however, was a whole new proposition.

The conventional wisdom about distributing a book through Amazon is that every independent author should make their work available on that site. In fact I’d wager that every person reading this post believes that to be one hundred percent true. And as someone who felt a definite thrill when I first saw my work for sale on Amazon I understand the appeal. Instead of waiting for a publishing-industry gatekeeper to green-light participation in the market on an equal footing, Amazon makes it possible for you to green-light yourself. Who’s gong to turn that down? (I mean, other than Groucho Marx, and, apparently, me.)

Over the past two years or so, much to my surprise, I have slowly come to the realization that my work doesn’t and probably never will belong on Amazon.com. Incongruously, this evolution was accelerated and crystallized over the past couple of months while trying and ultimately failing to compel the Bing search engine to find my work on CreateSpace’s out-of-the-way e-store pages. Yes, the fact that royalties are higher on CreateSpace than on Amazon is a plus, but that’s about the only obvious business-related advantage in choosing CreateSpace over Amazon. Yet I’m still convinced I’ve made the right decision.

Before exploring my rationale in detail, however, a couple of stipulations. First, there is no question that Amazon.com long ago became the default bookstore for the country if not the world. Tell most consumers to order a book and they will, without thinking, click over to Amazon because the association is that complete. Second, it is also clear that Amazon does an excellent job of facilitating purchases and fulfilling orders. Since many people already have an Amazon.com account, and because Amazon does everything possible to make purchases effortless, there is literally no easier way for most people to buy a book.

Given those two truths, it should be obvious that any self-published author who chooses not to make their work available on Amazon.com is an idiot. And for a long time that’s how I felt as well. Until, that is, I started thinking about what I’m trying to do by self-publishing my own work, and about the relationship I want to have with my readers. That’s when it dawned on me that what Amazon.com wants and what I want are not the same thing, which in turn led to the realization that how Amazon gets what it wants is not something I want to be part of.  [ Read more ]

Data Rape

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Date rapists drug their victims for two reasons. First, to make the act of rape as easy as possible. Second, to make it all but impossible for victims to remember or dispute what happened. Unless a victim is willing to act on what may only be dim suspicions, subjecting themselves to the rigors and indecencies of a dubiously predisposed legal process, including invasive testing, there’s no possibility that the perpetrator will be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Date rapists can always claim sex was consensual and point to the victim’s willingness (if not eagerness) to be in the perpetrator’s company. Because the victim’s memory will be impaired due to the date-rape drug, they will be incapable of contradicting the assertions of the rapist absent any forensic proof to the contrary. Worse, if the victim doesn’t know what happened, how can they themselves be sure they said no?

Not surprisingly, the people most at risk for date rape are innocents who have no idea of the existence of date-rape drugs. If you’ve been around the block a few times, or gone to college, you know to keep an eye on your drink at the parties you attend. But if you’ve led a fairly sheltered life and genuinely believe that mommy, daddy, god and law enforcement are watching out for you when you venture into the world, you may not know that some of the people who seem most excited to meet you are flashing practiced smiles and reciting well-honed sales pitches designed to victimize you in ways you might object to if their intent was fully disclosed.

That charming person picking you up at the door and complimenting you on your appearance and buying you flowers or a nice dinner or taking you to their home in the country may be thinking the entire time about how they are going to put drugs in your drink and have sex with you without your consent, but they’re not going to disclose that fact. Because if they did you might reasonably object to that kind of treatment and opt out of the date, thereby denying the rapist what they want most.

Innocence Lost — Again
Hailing originally from the Midwest as I do, I have more than once been accused of being a country bumpkin. Having gone on to live in Los Angeles for a few years, and in the bustling Northeast for a few years after that, I flatter myself that those stops instilled in me the kind of street savvy and deep cynicism that allows people in those media centers to simultaneously dismiss and lampoon everyone else in the country. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago I was reminded once again that you can never really leave the turnip truck when I read a Wall Street Journal article detailing the degree to which e-readers mine personal data from those devices. Even as I know one of the main goals of any internet-connected business is the procurement and exploitation of user data, including the selling of customer information to third parties, it still never occurred to me that e-readers were mining information about the private reading habits of users.  [ Read more ]

Independent Authors and the Bookware Biz

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In a recent post I rejected the idea that self-published authors always need to own their own ISBN’s. My rationale was primarily financial, but it was also influenced by my belief that independent authors should not try to mimic the publishing industry’s traditional business model:

Still, as a self-publishing author I think it’s important to remember that what I’m doing is not what most people in the greater publishing industry are doing.

I may be looking to use the same sales channels that everybody else is using, and I may be packaging my content in the same delivery vehicle (a book), but in terms of scale there are significant difference that shouldn’t be ignored.

It’s understandable that independent authors would look to the book industry for a template upon which to base their own self-publishing efforts. It’s understandable, but it’s also a mistake. To see why, imagine for a moment that you’re a potter. Your goal is to make your own pottery in your own studio, and to sell that pottery in a small shop. Would it make sense to base your manufacturing and sales decisions on the business models used by Corningware or Dansk? Or might you find more practical utility in mimicking the business models of other local artisans, even if they produced paintings and jewelry?

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The Infallible Editor

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Not everyone tells stories, but we all create and embrace narratives as we move through our lives. As human beings we do this for a number of reasons, including making life seem more orderly and secure than it actually is.

For example, it’s commonly said that during a time of war anyone who serves in the military is a hero — in part for risking their life, and in part for doing a job the rest of us don’t want to do. The reality, of course, is much different. People in uniform are no different than people out of uniform. Even during a time of national emergency there are military murderers, pedophiles, psychotics, traitors, and on and on.

But that’s not a narrative that makes us sleep well at night. We need to believe that the people in the military are highly-trained professionals keeping us safe from harm, and we don’t want to feel guilty about not taking that risk ourselves. So we buy into a narrative of dedicated heroes who put our physical safety ahead of their own lives. The military encourages this narrative because it helps maintain their funding, and because it shields them from analysis that might force a change in doctrine or structure.

We embrace such narratives because they allow us to get out of bed and slog through our day without freaking out about existential pointlessness or worries that the people we are forced to rely on are letting us down. It’s ultimately an extension of childhood, where you can’t see your parents as individuals partly because you don’t have the cognitive capacity, but also because you know on a primitive level that you are wholly and completely reliant on them for your survival. No matter how many times a parent hits you or passes out in front of you from drugs or alcohol, you know they’re good people down deep because they have to be.

As someone who tells stories for a living, I see these kinds of narratives in every aspect of life, every endeavor, every organization, every business, every profession. Despite the example above, I also see the utility of these narratives, and the benefit to individuals both within and outside organizations that use narratives to further their cause or justify their existence.

Unfortunately, it’s often the case that such narratives are not a function of genuine personal, societal or cultural need, but rather an attempt to exploit the very idea of a narrative for self-serving reasons. You can see this most clearly in all aspects of politics, where messaging and rhetoric aspire to nothing more than sloganeering and nationalism of one flavor or another. Maddeningly, this kind of narrative marketing usually works, and all the more so when threats of imminent death are churned into the mix.  [ Read more ]

Price, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series of posts on that subject, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Months ago, when I began idly wondering what my short story collection should sell for, I repeatedly found myself thinking in relative terms. In hindsight that approach seems to make sense given the rampant uncertainty in the e-book market , but it was more coincidence than prescience. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t know how much the industry didn’t know.

The comparison that popped up the most was what I took to calling hamburger pricing. Invariably this analogy would present itself while I was driving, because it’s impossible to travel anywhere in the United States for more than fourteen minutes without passing a hamburger stand. (I made that statistic up, but please feel free to quote me. The world can always use more urban myths.)

What I kept thinking at the time was that whatever my short story collection was worth, it had to at least be worth the average cost of an average hamburger at an average drive-up window. Without doing any research I pegged that number around $4, and in a lot of ways I felt like the idea made sense.

Which of course it doesn’t.  [ Read more ]

Ghostwriting the Ghosts

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Early Friday morning, a reader dropped this comment in a thread about ghostwriting:

Second, I don’t know how concerned the publishing industry really is about the sanctity of authorship. There are new Jason Bourne and Hitchhiker’s Guide books coming out and the original authors are dead.

I honestly wasn’t surprised to hear that these authors and their works were being recycled by their respective estates. Whatever loyalty an author’s relatives or heirs might have to the author’s original material, and whatever reverence they might have for an author’s original voice, it’s awfully hard to leave a vein of gold in the ground. And particularly so if the person you might be insulting is already dead.  [ Read more ]

Cover Design and Authorial Control

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see the other posts click the CDW tag below.

As mentioned in several previous posts, I took a hard, considered look at the publishing industry several times over the past two decades. I considered and tested both the intake process and the opportunities open to me, but found the gatekeeping pervasive and the timelines absurd. The idea of sending a manuscript to an agent or publisher who demanded an exclusive look, yet promised a vague response time measured in months, was untenable to me. In each case, after earning a few rejections and calculating the mathematical odds of success, I moved on to mediums that offered me more access, if not also more money for my storytelling efforts.

I want to stress that I have nothing but respect for writers who have endured and persevered against years of rejection, whether or not they achieved the level of success they desired. I don’t consider that a mistake. I consider it something I couldn’t do, in part because I’ve always been as interested in the process of storytelling as I have been in producing works authored solely by me. It hasn’t mattered whether I was writing screenplays, interactive scripts or novels, but I understand that many writers feel differently. What mattered to me was doing it and getting paid to do it so I could do it again. If what had mattered most was producing a book with my name on it, I readily concede that until recently I would have had no recourse but to appease the denizens of traditional publishing.

As also noted in previous posts, there is a direct correlation between my renewed interest in writing fiction and the fact that I no longer have to jump through publishing hoops in order to reach readers. Whether I can make any money writing fiction is the obvious question, but for now that concern stands apart from the authorial reality and opportunity defined by the internet as a distribution pipeline. Whatever new risks the internet presents (piracy, obscurity), the ability to reach readers without first appeasing intermediaries and gatekeepers feels like freedom.  [ Read more ]

Suspension of Disbelief Revisited

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Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.  [ Read more ]

Self-Publishing and Me

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The following post is my entry into the Backword Books Contest, which ends today. And yes, I almost forgot.

As I noted in a previous post, until very recently self-publishing was tainted with the implication of failure. It was tacit admission of inability in a world where ability is deemed equal parts talent, determination, networking, pedigree, bombast, salesmanship, sensationalism and hype.

For writers unable to find traditional publishing outlets — for whatever reason — there have always been self-publishing options, including subsidy and vanity publishers. Whatever you think about those options, the important point here is that technology has always been available to pursue one’s own publishing objectives, provided one had the money to do so.

So if the technology has always been there, what’s changed? Why is self-publishing no longer inherently considered a sign of failure? The internet is the answer, but not for the reason you think.  [ Read more ]