Keep track of yourself

Okay. This one’s been waiting awhile. Consider it a ponder-gift for the weekend.

Storytime

It’s August. It’s South Dakota. It’s hot. I’m headed back to college, driving the Brown Beater. The Brown Beater is a real piece of crap; it overheats if you idle in one place for too long, it overheats if you drive it too slow (not that that ever comes up for me), it overheats if drive it too fast, it’s ugly as hell, it’s missing the front grill (my fault), and it has no air conditioning.

So this is me: driving down the interstate on the way back to school, maintaining my speed somewhere in the high 70s, both windows rolled down, trying to figure out how and where I’m going get gas (because there’s no way the Beater is going to get me 210 miles on a single tank, but if I stop, I’ll overheat and need a half hour before I can open the radiator cap).

And the highway patrol pulls me over.

Now, let me put this in perspective: we are not talking about the enlightened interstates of the twenty-first century. Yes, even today 78 would be speeding in most states, but it’s not as much speeding as it was at that time, because back then the speed limit on the interstate was 55.

55.

78.

Pretty big ticket.

So the guy pulls me over. He’s probably having a pretty good weekend, because I am in no way the only guy driving back to school. This is all pretty routine for him:

“Do you know how faster you were going? No, more than that. No, higher. No… come on, you’re not even trying.”

He gets my registration (which has my sister’s and dad’s name on it; short-but-uninteresting story) and driver’s license, writes down the plate number, and moseys back to his car.

I don’t know what was said on the radio when he called it back in, but I assume it was pretty routine. In any case, he came back up to the Beater with the ticket half-written, and hands me my DL and registration.

“I need to verify the VIN for the ticket,” he says.

“Whats a VIN?” I reply, sincerely, because at that time in my life, I’m totally that guy.

“It’s a…” he shakes his head. “It’s a number on a plate that identifies your car.”

I don’t point out that that also describes the licence plate, because I can demonstrate learning behavior.

Most of you probably know this, but the VIN number for most cars is located in a spot that’s pretty easy to see (by design) but pretty hard to get to (also by design) — usually under your windshield, way down in the bottom corner on the driver’s side, on a small plate that’s kind of bolted to the dashboard … really, to the part of the car that your dashboard is affixed to.

The guy steps around to look at the VIN.

He can’t see it.

Now, the Brown Beater was so-called because it was brown, not because it was dirty; the reason he couldn’t see the number wasn’t a filthy windshield, it was because something was in the way.

Or, as he put it, “there is a piece of paper obscuring the VIN.” I thought it sounded a lot more ominous when he said it that way.

What had happened was that I’d put something up on the dash — probably months before — and it had slid down into that tiny little slot of space between the windshield and the dash, right over top of the VIN plate. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, except it was something like a business card. It was small.

It was im-fucking-possible to remove.

You’d have thought the guy had found Jimmy Hoffa in my trunk. Calls to dispatch were made to request advice. He inquired as to the availability of backup. He came back and tried to get that damned piece of paper out no less than three times, between these calls.

In his mind, that piece of paper was Hiding Something. See, the VIN was written down already. It was on the vehicle registration — he didn’t need to record it; he just wanted to make sure the two numbers matched.

But a VIN he couldn’t see? An obscured VIN? Suddenly all kinds of scenarios presented themselves. He reconsidered the condition of the vehicle. The fact that my name wasn’t on the registration. He even came back and asked me where my first name was “from” at one point. I heard him ask a couple times to verify that the car matched no stolen vehicle reports from ANY state, and “are you sure?”

I just kind of sat there, being bemused. I didn’t really see what the bid deal was; since I knew I hadn’t stolen the car, it never occured to me that he might think I had — I mean, who the fuck would steal this car, willingly? (Also, I knew I had another couple minutes of sitting by the side of the road before the Beater would cool down enough to start anyway. No rush, dude… no rush.)

But the fourth time he came back to the car, I got interested, because he told me that he’d “give it one more try” and, if he couldn’t get the “obscuring item” (dude, it’s paper) out of the way, he was going to call in and have the car towed.

Yes, seriously.

I had to act.

By which I mean I reached into the back seat, grabbed a piece of notebook paper, folded it in half lengthwise, and scooped the card out of the way. Took about a minute.

He just kind of stared. I handed him the registration again, and he stared at that too. Then he compared the two, saw that they matched, checked again, and handed the registration back.

He mustered what remaining authority hadn’t been bled away in the heat and interstate noise, admonished me against allowing “foreign objects” to slide where they shouldn’t (only moderately useful advice, that), told me to drive safe, and went back to his vehicle.

I waited.

He started his cruiser up and took off.

I… still… waited.

Then I started the Beater up and got moving again, with a pretty goofy grin on my face.

Because he’d forgotten to finish writing the speeding ticket.

Which had been the whole point in the first place.

It’s kind of easy to get distracted, sometimes; to lose track of The Thing This Is About because of the flashing, noisy Thing This Is Not About.

Let’s say you’re working on a story, and it’s at that point where you’re sending it out to people and getting feedback and (maybe) making appropriate changes based on that feedback. Maybe it’s your agent. Maybe it’s your publisher. Maybe it’s your reading group. Maybe it’s your mom. Doesn’t matter.

And that first round of feedback comes back and someone says:

“You know, I like it, but what I’d love to see fleshed out a little more is the relationship between the main character and the dog. The dog isn’t a big part of the story right now, but it used to be really important to her, so… I dunno, it just seems like adding some more stuff with them would add some nice depth to the MC, you know?”

And all that? That’s a good idea — one of those headslappingly good ideas that immediately presents you with about five ideas for what to write. Good stuff.

Then the second round of revisions happens, and you send it out again, and the feedback this time is something like:

“Loved it. I can really see the main character better. I saw you did some more stuff with the dog, and I liked it, but it seems like it isn’t quite clicking, you know? Maybe just a little more, to really get make that relationship crystal clear.”

And… okay, yeah, you can see where they’re coming from… and you can probably figure out a way to punch that up some. Okay…

Another round of revisions.

“Man, you are so close with that dog relationship, man. SO close. Two or three more scenes, and I think you’ve got it. Maybe something at the lake, in the summer…”

There are two things you can do at this point.

Write a scene with the dog at the lake.
Remember that the story isn’t about the fucking dog. Or even about the MC and the dog. The dog isn’t even a Character as much as Color.

If you chose option 1, you have lost track of what you were originally there to do.

We all see this. We all do this. We get hung up on one little stick-up nail, spending so much time time trying to bang that sucker down that the end of the day comes and we realize “shit, I never finished building the house.”

Arguments about whose turn it is to take the dogs for a walk, when the whole point of the day was to spend some time together, outside.

Long debates about the best way to administer a meeting instead of solving the problem that you called the meeting about.

Worrying more about whether The Thing You’re Writing is going to be Marketable, instead of whether or not it’s True.

Badgering your agent about which publishers they should submit your next project to, instead of FINISHING it.

Say on... DAMMIT, Porkins! — Stay on... DAMMIT, Porkins!

This weekend, take a step back and look at what you’re doing. Think about where your head needs to be, and put it there.

Be wholly within the space you need to occupy.

It’ll feel pretty great.

February 2, 2010

Getting back in the Groove: Reading your Favorite Writer

So it’s been awhile.

You had a good end of the year writing rush. You got your edits done and off to your writing group, your first readers, your second readers, your volunteer editing harem, maybe even your agent. You started a new project and lo and behold, THAT went well too.

Then the holidays snuck up behind you and kicked you in the spine.

Maybe there was travel. Gifts. Food. Possibly drink. More travel. A nasty head cold, some vomiting, and body aches topped off the festivities. Yet more travel.

Then you’re back home, and your day job would like very much if you could make up the time you just spent on the holiday break, without actually clocking any additional hours. Tax paperwork starts coming in. Your cold won’t go away. All those shows that conveniently went on break before the end of the year are back and broadcasting what feels like two new episodes a week and all your friends are talking about them and spoiling everything. The driver’s side windshield wiper starts tearing, your fifty thousand mile checkup is ten thousand miles overdue, and your kid wants to join ballet and karate.

You’re carefully sculpted writing groove caves in like a badly dug trench.

Now, please understand, when I mention a Groove, I’m not talking about a muse. I don’t believe in The Muse. A Muse. Whatever. Eff that nonsense right in the ear. Clinging to the ‘inspiration of the muse’ is some delicate, lacey bullshit (there’s a mental image) and I have no patience for it.

But there is such a thing as a groove, it is possible to get knocked out of it, and it can be a fucking drag to get back in there. Without some serious effort, it could take…

Well, honestly, it might never happen on its own.

This will not stand.

The mind-dulling blankness of January has gone by, and it’s time to dig your way back in there. Let the mud fly, people, and don’t worry about who else it hits.

What’s that? No shovel? Must you use your bare hands?

Ye–
Wait.

No. No you don’t. There are tools.

Read

It’s a simple thing to say, but one very pleasant way to make the mud fly is to read. If nothing else, it helps you remember the various cool ways those word things get strung together. Some of what you read will inspire you, some will amaze you, and some of it will, to put it bluntly, make you really really mad that you aren’t making a living as an author right now, because goddamn if you aren’t a hell of a lot better than this guy.

But I don’t need to tell you to read. You’re doing that already.

Right. It’s not the activity that I’m specifically talking about, it’s the author; what I need you to do right now is start reading your very very favorite author of all time.

You.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

Why waste precious reading time on boring old you? Pay attention: you’ve been out of your groove for awhile, and while it’s great to read other fantastic and not-so-fantastic authors, it’s more important right now to remember your own voice.

Cuz you’ve kind of forgotten.

Which makes it really hard to jump back in and pick up where you left off.

So find something of yours. Doesn’t have to be super-polished. Doesn’t even have to be good. Probably shouldn’t really be that long, either.

Read it. Listen to that writer. See how they string the word things together. Get inspired by it, get amazed by it, and get angry at how much better you can do.

Let all the good and bad of the story soak into your winter-dry brain sponge. Let it percolate.

Tomorrow, you’re going to fix it.

February 1, 2010February 1, 2010

Publishing, Charlotte, and John

Today, kids, it’s storytime.

But first (and related to the story), I’m going to revisit the Macmillan/Amazon Weekend Event and talk about publishing in general.

Now, Amazon came out yesterday with a statement about the whole weekend drama llama. Yes, they attempted to paint themselves, disingenuously, as “fighting for the little guy”, and I rolled my eyes, but I was surprised that most of the snickering and snide commentary from the internets was directed at their use of the word “monopoly” when describing Macmillan’s control over their imprints.

I was also kind of disappointed. The people doing the snickering are readers (and writers), and they should understand the meaning of the word well enough to know that it was perfectly apt.

Monopoly: exclusive control or possession of something.

Of course Macmillan has a monopoly on the books produced by their various imprints. It could not be otherwise. It’s not a monopoly in the “Ma Bell” sense, but that wasn’t the sense in which it was being used.

Does Amazon likewise have a monopoly on ebook sales?

Nnnnnnno. Maybe no. Probably not. They do not control ebook sales to the degree that Macmillan controls who gets access to Macmillan books.

But hey: it’s close enough that if someone said “Amazon essentially has a monopoly on ebook sales”, I would not bother to argue, because it’s not worth the effort and gets us nowhere. For the sake of argument, let’s say both Amazon and Macmillan both have “exclusive control or possession of something” that the other one wants some access to.

Ultimately, all that happened this weekend was Macmillan and Amazon fighting over which monopoly interest gets to exert their pricing desires, not whether. And the thing to remember about that is that pricing determined by a monopoly is, generally, never good for the consumer.

So who was I rooting for in that weekend fracas? Please: that’s like betting on a fight between two rabid weasels — I’d prefer they both lose. Amazon’s just trying to maintain their hold on epublishing and push Kindle sales, and Macmillan won’t earn authors one cent more by forcing Amazon to sell books for $15 bucks (they should, but only if the author has the sense to renegotiate contracts based on the change to the market Macmillan’s trying to push through), and their justification for the ebook pricing is an insult to my intelligence.

Who do I think will ultimately win? In the end, any of the Big Six publishers will probably come out ahead in a game of chicken with Amazon unless technology provides a new model for publishing, because publishers have more leverage as the content provider.

(Really, authors should have the most leverage of all as the true source of content, but that logic only works if authors acted in unison, which… well, come on. The most influential move most of us make in a given day is deciding whether or not wear pants.)

For me, all that this weekend did was remind me how much is broken with regard to the way publishing works.

Writers, whether published or not-quite-yet, please hear this: I need you to think like a reader for a little bit. I know you are readers. I know. Shh. Shut up and bear with me. This isn’t a trick: I’m not going to steal all your royalty checks while your eyes are closed. Just… think like the person who, at the end of the day, finally buys and reads a book.

Because here’s the thing: in the world of paper publishing, publishers don’t give a tin can fuck about you, the reader.

In the world of paper publishing, you are not their customer.
In the world of paper publishing, the book seller is their customer. This means that it doesn’t matter if you think a book costs too much; it only matters if their customer thinks so.
In the world of electronic publishing, you are not the publisher’s customer either. Amazon is their customer. Mac iBook store is their customer.
In the world of electronic publishing, you *could* be their direct customer, but in almost all cases, you aren’t.
Here’s a dirty little secret: the Big Six don’t really want you to be their customer. If a bunch of people are their customers, there are suddenly all these individuals who ‘want things’ and ‘have opinions’. Right now? There’s a handful of customers to deal with/please/coerce. The current set up is better and easier for publishers.

Please don’t think that I hate publishers for this. They are businesses. This is how the business works right now and, unless the technology available forces a sea change, it is how it will continue to work.

And please don’t think I’m lumping writers in with publishers. Writers (all those I know, and I know quite a few) love readers, even if they aren’t their readers. As I said, they are readers.

So, be that reader for a second. Let me help.

Let me tell you about Charlotte*.

Storytime

Charlotte is one my coworkers. Charlotte loves to read. She doesn’t really read the same kind of stuff that I do, but we still manage to find lots of reader-stuff to talk about, because there’s a kind of commonality two avid readers can usually find.

Right now, Char’s having a pretty rough time. Like a lot of folks, she’s feeling the pinch of the recession: she traded in her much beloved, bright red vehicle for one with lower monthly payments; she and her husband are looking for a more affordable place to live because their current house is proving to be too much of a burden right now. She’s got a injury that she has to go to physical therapy for several times a week.

… and she has to deal with John*. John is old school. John doesn’t use Outlook’s calendar function – he writes down everything on one of those desktop blotter calendars and insists that be the ‘master calendar’ for his department, and that is just the tip of the iceberg of retrograde thinking that floats around inside his head.

(Note: that isn’t actually the master calendar for his department: every few weeks, someone takes his calendar and “manually syncs” it with the Outlook calendar EVERYONE ELSE uses, thus creating a viable electronic version… which he’ll never ever see. Which, come to that, he doesn’t even understand the need for.)

At Christmas time, Charlotte asked for one thing: a Kindle. As far as I could tell, everyone in her life pretty much chipped in and got it for her. Maybe she got some other things as well, but if so, I didn’t hear about them. She loves that thing, and she uses it constantly. Her lunch breaks are Kindle breaks. Her weekends (thanks to her injury) are pretty much “Kindle and heating pad” days. We’ve talked about Amazon’s DRM on the Kindle a few times, but the bottom line is that it doesn’t really affect her and so long as that continues to be the case, she doesn’t really care.

She just wants to read.

And, I think it’s safe to say, because of the Kindle, she’s buying more books than ever. Any writer would be lucky to have Charlotte as a fan.

Well, maybe.

Not if your ebooks cost fifteen bucks.

See, when I got a chance to talk to Charlotte after all this stuff that happened this weekend, the first thing I asked her about was her purchasing habits with her Kindle, because she’s the only person I know who uses their Kindle in the way in which it was intended. Kate uses one, but she uses it exclusively for work, which means reading partial and full manuscript submissions sent to her by authors. My agent also uses one, but pretty much in the exact same way. As far as I know only Charlotte uses it the way a regular reader does.

And Charlotte doesn’t buy fifteen dollar ebooks. Most of the time (are you listening, Amazon?) Charlotte doesn’t buy ten dollar ebooks. Given a choice between a book listed for five bucks and ten bucks (or the promo stuff available for free), and all other things (quality, subject, reader interest) being equal, she’s just not going to buy the ten dollar book. They’re both books, after all, reasonably well-vetted, and as I’ve said, she just wants to read.

“But,” cries the writer, “if I let Amazon list the book for five dollars (or four, or three, or two), I will make half as much per sale.”

Sure. Yes.

You know how much money you’re going to make from selling that ten (or fifteen) dollar book to Charlotte?

Nothing.

Because she didn’t buy it.

Cheap sells more copies — puts more copies of your story in front of more readers.

And maybe, juuuust maybe, authors should be more concerned with getting their stories to the greatest number of readers, instead of worrying about per-sale payoff.

Maybe publishers should be too, instead of clinging to the old publishing model in which their real business is selling paper.

Stuff I Learned this Weekend

In the postscript to this piece, ~~Eirik Newth~~ India, Ink. explains why Big Publishing consistently cites costs to create ebooks that fall miles outside my experience and expectation.

Short version: they’re doing it wrong.

Long version:

Publishers are still producing paper books the “X-Acto–and–wax” way and then outsourcing their e-book production to other companies, which probably automate the conversion process, and then they’re not practicing any kind of QA on what comes back, because nobody gives a shit, because the people who make the decisions don’t read e-books.

No wonder they think making an ebook is an expensive, time-consuming process.

Yes, you read that right. Publishers aren’t producing workable electronic files when they produce a paper book — their product essentially has to be OCR’d by a third party company to get an ebook out of it. They start with a ~~hardcopy~~ difficult-to-translate template file and make someone else turn it into an electronic version for distribution; a version they’ll never read.

They are, in short, my coworker John.

John’s on a ‘planned retirement’ schedule that concludes in a little over a year.

People are counting. the. days.

Draw whatever parallels from that that you like.

January 31, 2010January 31, 2010

Elephant Fight: the Macmillan-Amazon scorched earth offensive

(Author’s Note: Chuck has a calmer assessment of this situation. I get worked up about this stuff. If that offends, I highly recommend his post.)

All right. Wow. There’s a lot to talk about here.

First, Backstory

Once upon a time, the five major publishers in the country decided they wanted to sell their ebooks for about 15 bucks, give or take. Their reasoning and justifications given for this price point were (and continue to be) insultingly disingenuous; the real reason (in my opinion) I will sum up in this trite opening paragraph as “this new technology scares the holy fuck out of us, and we’d like to erect a price barrier around it to ensure that only wealthy early-adopters make use of it until about 2022, when we hope we will finally understand it.” (I will address their reasons in a more detailed manner below. Promise.)

Amazon took a look at this and decided to sell those books for ten bucks, instead. Given that they still have to pay publishers the same amount as they always did, and still owe the publisher the same percentage of fifteen dollars that they always have, it’s fair (if mildly mathematically inaccurate) to say that, by doing so, they were voluntarily losing 5 bucks on each ebook sale.

(“Losing” is a poor way to say it; they were setting themselves up to make considerably less per sale, but they hardly started hemorrhaging money.)

Why would they do this? Well, they haven’t said why, officially, but there are three main schools of thought on the subject:

If they price the ebooks for less, it will drive consumers to Amazon’s Kindle device. Once a consumer has bought said device, they are pretty much locked into buy ebooks from Amazon into perpetuity, so this reduced price results in a huge net win for Amazon.
Amazon is pricing ebooks at 9.99 to set expectation for ebooks priced a well below the publishers’ 15 dollar target, to eventually use that consumer-groundswell to force publishers to lower their prices permanently.
Amazon is FIGHTING THE MAN, using their corporate power to defend consumers from the greed and tyranny of Big Publishing.

I have listed these theories in descending order of likelihood/connection to reality. (Also, #2 is basically a fake-out: it doesn’t exist without either #1 or #3 as a motivator.)

Full disclosure: I have believed each of these three theories at some point in the past, though I’m currently standing by Theory #1, because (generally speaking) any theory about a corporation that ascribes the least amount of moral compunction and the highest amount of profit-mindedness is probably going to be the most accurate.

What’s the new News everyone’s on about?

Within the last 48 hours or so, all the books (paper or electronic) published by Macmillan or any imprint of Macmillan (Tor, St. Martins, etc) became unavailable for direct purchase via Amazon.com. (I say ‘for direct purchase’, because you can still buy em, but only from third-party businesses that sell through Amazon.) The NY Times talks about it here.

Basically what happened is that Macmillan struck a deal with Apple, in which Macmillan gets to set ebook prices at whatever price they want in the iBooks store, and in exchange, Apple gets a bigger chunk of the profit. Once that deal was set, they went to Amazon and proposed the same deal. This was Strong Arm Negotiation Move #1 (or #2, if you count the 9.99 pricing that Amazon adopted as String Arm Move #1, but that only works if Theory #2 is correct, and I don’t think it is — for Amazon, it’s not (primarily) about ebook pricing — it’s about selling Kindles.)

Then, Macmillan told Amazon that if they didn’t accept that proposal, Macmillan wouldn’t give them access to their ebooks until about six months after other distributors (read: B&N, iBooks) had it.

Amazon said no to this deal, and after what I can only imagine was an acrimonious end to the meeting, pulled all Macmillan stuff from their site. This was Strong Arm Negotiation Move #2.

So…

I managed to stay out of the “debate” surrounding this for the better part of Saturday, until my wife (who is a bright and shining star in the industry, and thus gets industry communications brought right to our doorstep by scantily-clad delivery ‘boys’) brought it up after she got a panicked “special weekend edition” message from Publishers Marketplace, penned by John Sargent of Macmillan. At the time, it was an industry-only thing, but PW sensed the potential newsiness of the topic and made the letter freely available to the unwashed masses here. An excerpt:

I regret that we have reached this impasse. Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future. They have been a great innovator in our industry, and I suspect they will continue to be for decades to come.

I want to parenthetically point something out here. Mr. Sargent is making a huge mistake in these two sentences:

Amazon is not part of the publishing industry.
They used to be, yes. Those were the days, eh?
We have it stuck in our head that they’re an online bookstore. They haven’t been just an online bookstore for years. Amazon can not only deal with the loss of sales from Macmillan imprints for a good long time, they could get boycotted by every major publisher in the industry and for most consumers they’d still be the primary source for almost every other retail thing you can reasonably expect to buy online. Such a massive change in the publishing industry would alter Amazon, but not end it. Not remotely.
In other words, for Amazon, Macmillan is a ‘nice to have’. (Yes, in terms of Kindle sales, it’s more than that, but only in terms of Kindle sales. Kindle is a route of expansion, not a means of survival.)

I’m not trying to make some point with that — I just want to call out that the scale of this move on either side is not the same.

The debate on this event, such as it is, boils down to these two points:

Amazon can do what it wants — it’s just trying to get a fair price for ebooks to the consumers, cuz holy crap: fifteen bucks for an e-book? And I don’t even own it? Eff that.
zOMG publishing books costs money — Amazon and you greedy consumers are going to bankrupt publishing and then there won’t be any more books at all. Ever.

Dear Proponents of Either Side: You’re both wrong.

The crippling costs of creating ebooks (writers: Macmillan isn’t on your side)

I’m going to go after “The cost to publish e-books Oh My God, Woe” side first, because it’s the next thing in the list of quotes I grabbed from various sites.

Over on The Harper Studio, we have this gem from 2009 explaining to all the unwashed why e-books cost just as much to make as hardbacks. Excerpt:

We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copyediting, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible in these stages.

What an incredibly disingenuous pile of crap. I’m actually insulted that people think I’m so dim as to swallow this.

Yes, Harper, you have all those costs, but you only pay those costs once. You don’t get to claim those costs as justification for the price of ebooks when you’ve already paid those costs during normal dead-tree print-and-production — those costs are already your justification for high-priced hardbacks; by the author’s own statement, actually paper-printing a book costs about 2 bucks per unit, and it’s these production costs that drive hardback price points up. Don’t tell me you need to roll these expenses into ebook costs as well to make ends meet, because before ebooks existed, you were making money hand-over-fist without that revenue stream.

I’ve said it before, and I will keep saying it: once the process has been completed for printing a hardback, 90% of the production work necessary to create an ebook version of the same book is ALREADY DONE. The cost has already been paid. If you try to sell me the same thing a second time, I’ll tell you to fuck off.

(Note: if someone wants to publish a new book as nothing but an ebook, then yes, they totally get to claim all the costs of copyediting and so forth, and I have no beef whatsoever with paying 15 or 20 or 25 bucks for said book — I do it ALL THE TIME with independently published, ebook-only, roleplaying games and think nothing of it. But when ebooks are merely one part of a book’s list of available formats? No.)

And here’s some costs that paper books incur that ebooks don’t:

Cost of printing. Only 2 bucks a book, but that’s still almost 10% of the retail cost of a hardback, and 25% of the cost of a paperback.
Cost of distribution. Books in trucks (and planes) being shipped around the country.
Cost of warehousing. Incurred by both the publisher and the brick and mortar retailers.
Cost of returns. (Significant, and anticipated in book pricing and contracts.)
Cost of additional print runs. There are no additional print runs of ebooks. You never run out. Ever.

So let’s look at a normal, big-publisher ebook; one which is being produced along with hardback and paperback editions:

Author advance: already paid as part of buying the right to publish the book in the first place. Would have been paid regardless of the existence of an ebook version. Not an ‘ebook cost’.
Editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Again, this is not an ‘ebook cost’ – it’s just a part of publishing at all. Ebooks don’t ‘own’ this cost.
Cover design. Ditto.
Interior design. A ha! Yes: here is a thing where some separate consideration must be made for the ebook. This is work that would not otherwise take place, but it is a tiny subset of the work already done to lay out the paper edition, and in many cases amounts to nothing.
The sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity. Not an ebook-specific cost. Hell, in most cases, publishers don’t know what to do about marketing ebooks — they’d rather people didn’t know about ebooks, and just stuck to the good old days, so marketing the bloody things is a little counterintuitive for them.
The staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible. Yeah, you need someone who knows how to post the ebook to Amazon and Smashwords correctly. If any of the big publishers out there need someone to teach them this, I do freelance education and my rates are quite reasonable, especially when the subject is so simple.
And as I’ve already said, there is no cost of printing, truck-and-plane distribution, warehousing, returns, or additional print runs.

(Also: writers? If this “agency model” becomes the norm? Renegotiate your contracts, because you’re getting screwed.)

Anyway: I think it’s fair to say that fifteen bucks for an ebook, when the paperback edition incurs more production/distribution cost and is priced for half as much, appears to be, as they say, “fucking robbery”. Readers aren’t stupid. It doesn’t take much to look at the justification for current ebook prices and think “that’s just not fair.”

Especially when you don’t even end up owning the ebook the way you own a paper book.

Which brings me to Amazon.

Amazon isn’t on Your Side Either

The very idea of Amazon being portrayed as some kind of consumer-rights advocate when it comes to ebooks is insulting. Amazon’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) for the Kindle is a slap in the face to the traditions that surround the act of buying, reading, and most-of-all owning books. Amazon’s ebooks are locked to the Kindle (or to Kindle-simulating software, also available from Amazon), and even if the book has no ‘official’ DRM, it’s still in a Kindle-only file format that no one is legally allowed to create a translator microbe for.

Thus, the grave-pissing level of insult that the Amazon ebook setup inflicts on readers. Now, you need a license agreement to read your new book. Now, you can’t share a good book with a friend. Or your wife. Or your kid. Copyright recognizes the reader’s rights to own, loan, gift, resell and read your books any way you want. But now, they aren’t ‘your’ books; you don’t own a book — you lease it.

Amazon wants that. They can fuck off, too.

In Summary: Caution

Listen: you want to charge 15 bucks for an ebook? Fine.

If the market sustains it, fine. I don’t think the market will. I think you can sell an ebook for half the price of the paperback and still be essentially printing your own money. (And I am not alone in this opinion.)

I think it’s telling that readers are coming down on Amazon’s ‘side’ on this whole thing, even though Amazon clearly gives fuck-all for the reader’s rights. In as much as I can be said to have a side in this, I’m also on that side.

But I’m not standing too close to Amazon when I take that side. I would suggest the same level of care for anyone standing with either of these combatants.

Because those big bastards will trample you if you’re not careful, and they don’t care if they do.

“When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.” — Kikuyu Proverb

January 5, 2010January 5, 2010

Hugging my Security Blanket Ball

Short post today; I love you (I do, really. Put this mask on.), but I have other writing to do.

So last night, I spoke to Twitter and said:

I love my new bowling ball. My new bowling ball hates me and is filing for a restraining order. I think I’ll name her ‘Carla’.

Yeah. I’m going to talk about bowling again.

As I’ve mentioned previously, my bowling game has improved quite a bit in the year since I got started in a league with some other gamer nerds in the area. Good times and steady improvement led to a pretty surprising second-place finish for the fall season. Our team was edged out of 1st place in a nail-biter of a final game, our salty tears diluted somewhat by the fact that Kate and I were first in the Most Improved categories for our respective genders and we both got second place in our “High Handicap Series” categories.

Oh, and the prize money. That helped too.

I decided to farm the filthy lucre back into the habit that spawned it and get myself a new bowling ball.

See, for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been using a ball generously given to me by Chris (the guy who got us into the league in the first place). It’s an old ball of his, drilled for both his hand measurements and for a ‘beginner’s’ grip. It’s a little beat up, and I have to kind of crook my thumb a bit to wedge it into its hole well enough, but… well, it works. It doesn’t do anything too fancy, but clearly I can make it hit the pins.

So why get a new ball? Well, I can turn in a very nice score with the Old Ball, but it doesn’t really let me do those fancy curving shots that you see the pro guys put out, and those fancy curving shots actually help the ball hit the pins in a way that makes it more likely they’ll fall down and go cracka-boom.

So I dug around a bit, and took some suggestions from Chris, and ordered up a nice new ball. It’s pretty. It does lovely curvy things. I named it Carla. You know, just in my head. As a joke. Totally a joke.

Before the new season started last night, I went in and got the ball drilled. Oh, shush: quit snickering.

Okay, fine: “I got new finger grips added to the ball.” Happy now?

The guy at the shop told me that he would allow no stinking beginner’s grip on a ball like that, so I drilled me up a ‘fingertip’ grip.

Which is fine; that’s kind of what I was expecting. When he was done, the ball was finally ‘finished’. Ready.

And damn she was pretty.

But there’s a saying in bowling: “Pretty balls don’t throw strikes.”

The ball curves, yeah. WAY more than I’m used to, but that hardly matters, cuz I can’t get the damn thing to come off my hand; that fancy fingertip grip basically means that everything I’ve trained myself to do with Old Ball is wrong wrong wrong. So wrong that I damn near hurt myself last night. I’m going to have to completely relearn how to play, pretty much from the ground up.

So after an abysmal first game (95 pins! Woo!) during which I threw more gutter balls than I think I ever have in a game, and air-balled a fifteen-pound hunk of stone more than I’d like to admit (encouraging many nearby bowlers to look around for the moron noob who didn’t know how to play), I put Carla back in my bag, mumbling something like “It puts the lotion on its skin…” and pulled out Old Ball. My security blanket. Security ball. Whatever. Shut up.

Old Ball didn’t fail me. The approach I used was simpler. Crude. Basic.

But the pins fell down and went cracka-boom.

Frustrating, to have the New Pretty Thing and to have to actually WORK before it produces… well, forget about ‘something better than the old ball’; I’ll be happy with ‘something comparable to the old ball’.

Is this about writing? It might be. I’m a pretty basic guy when it comes to putting words down. As Papa said “I know the 10 dollar words, but there are older words; better, simpler, and those are the ones I use.” Could be that the thing I’m working on right now also includes some fancy-schmancy tricks that I’ve seen used by writers I admire, and I thought “I can do that. How hard can it be? It’s just writing.”

Yeah. Gutterball.

So what happens to Carla now? Do I stick with Old Ball and my respectable-but-maybe-not-as-good-as-it-could-be game?

No. This weekend, I go to the lanes and I practice. A lot. First I figure out how to simply deliver the damn thing, then I’ll figure out how much that changes the roll, until finally, maybe, I’ll get the results I want. Practice practice practice. Lots of people throw tricky balls like mine; they do just fine, and dammit, they aren’t any better than me.

But last night I bought a bowling bag that holds two balls. Old Ball will never be very far away.

Sometimes you need old and simple and crude and ugly. I see no reason to give up the simple things that work, just because I’m working on a fancy new thing.

None at all.

January 4, 2010January 4, 2010

Everything One thing I Know about Writing I Learned from MMOs

Once upon a time, I was a pretty hard core MMO raider.

Now, I’ve been playing MMOs since long before they were called that (or had graphics) and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent on such pastimes, but I’m not talking about the play of MMOs in general — just about a very specific activity: raiding.

For the uninitiated, ‘raiding’ is a term for an activity in a multiuser game like World of Warcraft. In this activity, you and a largish group of other like-minded people assemble at a set time online and in somewhat organized fashion attempt to defeat some boss in the game who is designed to be too tough for a single person or even several people to beat. These fights are usually quite challenging, with multiple phases and ‘tricks’ that you need to figure out and learn how to deal with before you can finally put all the pieces together, do all the dance steps in the right order, avoid the specter of Plain Ol’ Bad Luck, and beat the guy.

All MMOs with which I am familiar have this mechanic, though some (CoH) have it to a much smaller degree, which others (LotRO, WoW, many others) use the idea of ‘added complexity’ to bring interest to boss fights that would otherwise be “the big guy gets the guy’s attention, and we all beat on him with relative impunity.”

Because of those little tricks and features, it’s a situation where you go into each new fight pretty much assuming that you won’t win the first time. You’re not really even trying to win — you’re gathering information. What kinds of attacks is he using? Fire? Okay. Do his special attacks have any visual or audio clues that provide warning? Do we have to stay moving or fight in a particular location, or both, depending on what’s going on? How hard is he hitting? How hard are WE hitting? Is he resisting our attacks too much? Can we fix that?

And, ultimately: “How can we avoid the thing that just killed us, the next time?”

Victory does not come easily, and it rarely comes quickly — when I played World of Warcraft, I participated in a raid a couple nights a week, for two to three hours each night, and it would often take us several weeks of attempts to learn how to reliably down a new boss. During those weeks, there were no rewards — nothing but the ongoing drain of repair bills, consumables consumed, and the ever present specter of Time Spent Without Victory.

In terms of gaming, I don’t think there is anything else like this try-fail-try-fail-try-again experience in other games. Certainly not tabletop rpgs.

Sounds pretty depressing, but I’ll tell you a secret: The Win Made it Worth It. There was nothing at all like finally putting it all together and making it work.

And I still enjoy it. I certainly don’t raid like I used to (or play WoW, come to that), but probably my second favorite thing to do in Lord of the Rings Online is to get in a group with Kate and a few other good players, chat about our day, and figure out how to beat a new fight.

Sometimes, we don’t figure it out.

There’s this new fight we tried this weekend that looked like it would be pretty easy to beat. I mean, tricky, yes, but even during the first attempt we pretty much had it figured out: when he says THIS, you run away; when he says THAT, we all bunch up; don’t stand on the open grates with the fire underneath; stay behind him.

And then, suddenly, we were dead.

“What happened? Oh. Fire. Fire bad. Stay out of the fire. Okay. Good tip. Let’s try again.”

Almost beat him… and boom. Fire. Weird.

And again, and again, and again, and again.

Finally, we called it for the night, said we’d ponder it, and come back to it later — maybe ask around on the forums to see What The Hell?

So we ask around, and everyone says we’re idiots. No one knows what we’re talking about. No one’s having that problem.

Well, dammit, what do we do now?

Easy.

We go back and try it again.

Like I said, there is no real corollary (that occurs to me) between this experience and any other kind of gaming.

That’s not to say it doesn’t remind me of something; it reminds of several things, one of which is writing.[1]

In November, I blasted through writing Adrift. I didn’t finish it, because it’s considerably longer than 50k — probably twice that — but I knew that would happen, and I was prepared to continue on in December.

Which, to be clear, I have done. But man has it been painful.

How painful?

I’ve been working on the same scene — not editing it, mind you, just writing it — pretty much for the whole of December. Nothing is working right. Everything is coming along hard; every sentence is like pulling out my own front teeth with a pair of pliers.

Just when I think I’ve got it, boom. Fire. Dead. The looming specter of Time Spent Without Victory. Right now, I’m not even trying to win; I’m just trying to gather as much information as I can, so I can improve my performance in the next attempt.

Then, I stare at my screen, and I think “well what do I do now?”

And sometimes, there’s no poetic answer. There’s no author’s quote that shines a light ahead. There’s no technique or skill or talent to get you out of it.

There’s just the answer I learned from Boss Fights in MMOs.

“Go back in. Try again.”

1 – The other thing it reminds me of is submitting your work and trying to get published, but that’s a whole different post.

December 18, 2009December 18, 2009

Extracting the Signal from the Noise

Over on Twitter today, I linked to three of the seven parts of an analysis of the Phantom Menace that was posted over on YouTube, and which I initially found on /Film: 70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

The reason I didn’t link to all seven videos? I didn’t want that to be the main thing I linked to today.

Some folks retweeted it and seemed to enjoy it… others were put off by the video’s… odd tone.

Which I totally understand.

How should I explain this tone?

Ahh…

Okay, you know the serial killer guy in Silence of the Lambs?

Not Hannibal Lector, but the other guy? The “It puts the lotion on its skin / or else it gets the hose again.” guy?

Yeah. Him. Imagine if that guy, in between skinning girls to make a woman-suit, sharply and insightfully analyzed all the (multiple) failings in Phantom Menace… and periodically went off his meds.

That’s the video. It even sounds just like him.

It’s not to everyone’s taste.

The problem is, the insight is really good. It’s really useful, from the point of view of story construction and character building and even the use and purpose of cool-ass fight scenes.

But can I legitimately recommend a video like this to someone when I know the humor might be distasteful?

Yeah, I probably can. I’m sorry if the humor is not funny to you, or it goes over the line, but dammit, the analysis is too sharp to ignore. I always knew I didn’t like Phantom Menace, but I’d never put a lot of brainsweat into why. Thanks to this guy – his fucked-up sense of humor notwithstanding – I understand why, and I take away tools I can use to make my own stories better.

I guess I just have to remind myself it’s a joke. It’s part of the ‘brand’, maybe, and that’s his choice, but it’s also his problem – I’m just focusing on the useful signal. Sometimes I have to ignore the joke.

I mean, we all know Chuck’s not actually gaining carnal knowledge of vegetable or animal produce, right? We know Warren Ellis isn’t boiling hookers and shooting their cerebral juices into his femoral artery, yes?

Maybe this guy jumps over the line here and there. Fine. Yes. Not every joke is funny. Fuck knows I scratch my head at some people’s idea of humor sometimes, and at the twitter retweets that link back to my site with a parenthetical “Warning: NSFW”.

Really? Where the fuck do you work? I’ve known pastors that swear more than me.

Anyway.

If you really can’t stomach the meat because of the seasoning, I’ll try to summarize the guy’s points, below.

But I still think you should check out the video.

Keep people around who will push back on your work and force you to make it better… or just make sense.
People need to care about your protagnist – someone you can identify with – especially if you’re writing genre stuff. Get really basic. People should be able to:
“Describe the character without saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore, or what their profession/job is.”
ACTION: in part two of the video, the guy’s analysis of what the first scene of the original movie conveys is brilliant.
You might be able to skip part three, because it’s JUST about the movie’s plot holes. So’s part four and five.
“Welcome to Coruscant, Home of the Mid-air Collision.” Heh.
Part Six: five minutes in. What Fight Scenes Do.
“When you’re worked up with emotion […] you expose your humanity a little.”

Temptation, revelation, anger, redemption.

“Lightsaber duels have less to do with the fight, and more to do with the characters.”

“We need a deeper meaning to things.”
Part Seven: the Ending Multiplication Effect — the simpler endings have more force and interest because we can focus on the important elements and the story.

So… yeah. The summary doesn’t really do the points justice. Not really.

I completely agree if you found the noise ratio too high to get anything out of the signal. Okay. I respect that. This is, I suppose, simply my explanation of why I chose to to the recommend the thing anyway.

(Also: I’m a huge Star Wars fanboy. There’s that too.)

December 16, 2009December 16, 2009

Keyboard evolution

So I’m teaching a basic business writing class last night, and someone asked about whether or not they should double-space after periods and colons. I said that that had been the rule at one time, but as a practice it was pretty much dying out. Like most things having to do with the dos and don’ts of writing, this is something I know to be true, but I’m more than a little fuzzy on the why.

They (of course) asked why.

And I heard my mouth say:

Much of it comes from graphic designers who think that the big white space after a sentence is ugly, especially now that few people use mono-spaced fonts like courier. Those double spaces really stand out in true-type/proportional fonts.
But even if that weren’t the case, there is no point in wasting time with double-spacing after periods today, because most anything you write will end up on a website somewhere, and web browsers never show more than one space after the period, anyway. (Even if you do it, no one will see it, so it’s wasted effort.)

After my mouth was done talking, my brain was left wondering “Is that right? That actually sounds right.” (My brain is justifiably suspicious of my mouth.)

Turns out, it pretty much was. It’s fascinating to me, the way in which our environment (-cum-technology) visibly and continually redefines “normal” in writing/communication.

(And I’d like to thank Twitter for helping my unlearn a two-decades-old double-spacing habit.)

Category: Musing