Where am I? What day is it? Who're you?

My life has been roughly analogous to that tired duck cliche: churning madly beneath the surface, but kind of boring and not blogging very much up above. Let’s see if I can’t provide you with a clear view of my feathery, web-footed underside.

Daddy

Obviously, this is the most important news. Sean Douglas was born on January 25th, which mostly explains my lack of internetting during February.

Adorable. Helpless. Determined to destroy your work/life balance (in a good way).

I’ve walked the Daddy Road once before, and while much of it is familiar, every kid is different, and there are all kinds of Sean-shaped cul-de-sacs and loops and trails and dead-ends that I’ve got no previous experience with whatsoever. Still, Kate seems to think I know useful tricks and baby-optimized kung-fu, and I hate disappointing her, so I soldier on.

I’m tired, obviously. Neither Kate or I can really work on anything for extended periods of time without interruptions unless our counterpart takes one for the team for awhile.

And it’s undeniably awesome.

In a nod to parent nerd solidarity, I’ll mention that I was very disappointed that I really had no record (or clear memory) of the first few months of Kaylee’s life, other than a few crappy cellphone pictures, so I’ve endeavored to find a better way to outsource my exhaustion-depleted brain for Sean’s early days. I’d originally bought a nice calendar/notebook to use as a journal (because who doesn’t love to have an excuse to buy another nice notebook?), but in the end the solution we’re actually using is the nerdiest: a private Twitter account on which Kate and I both post notes about our day-to-day challenges (and retweet relevant stuff from our main accounts to capture that information as well), which is then compiled and archived in a blog (again, private).

The end result is a dated journal of thoughts and notes that we can access and update from pretty much any device we own, including our kindles. There may have also been some early use of Google Docs spreadsheets to track feedings while we performed them, but I’m not saying.

Dayjob

Kate was sure that as soon as Sean was born I’d get a non-contract, long-term job offer, simply because that would be the point were it would finally be convenient for me to be home.

I call this "specialworkdrink".

Kate’s very smart. I did in fact get an offer the day after Sean was born — a proper job at a place I’d done some short contract work in the past, so that’s kinda cool.

Health

I hit an age milestone in February, took stock of my condition, found it moderately functional, but in need of a tune-up, so I’m back to tracking my calories using Livestrong and hitting the elliptical whenever the very idea doesn’t make me weep. I don’t know if it’s doing anything other than make me feel better — I’m fairly certain that’s enough.

Gaming and Entertainment

Pretty much none of the gaming we did prior to 1/25 has survived impact with the diaper genie. Basically, most of those activities required (or benefited from) larger chunks of mutual uninterrupted time than we currently have available; other things have swept in to fill that void for a time — things that can be enjoyed in snatches, abandoned in mid-play without serious consequence, and still produce the dopamine kick I rely on such things to generate. Solutions for this include EVE Online, Parallel Kingdom, and (just lately) a crash course in the wonderful comedy television stylings of Community — oh my god that show is funny. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragon (it’s Advanced!) or know someone who has, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the AD&D episode (do it soon before it falls off their ‘recent’ list).

(Speaking of AD&D: I don’t know if I have an immediate solution for the current lack of face to face gaming, but I have high hopes for Yikerz. We shall see.)

Unfortunately, we have time to watch Community DVDs because our DVR harddrive died and took with it entire unwatched seasons of Fringe, Walking Dead, Leverage, Chuck, and… I dunno. More.

Online/Writing

I’m not entirely (or even mostly) silent on the internet. I’m writing regular columns for MMO Reporter and somewhat less regular things for Green Dragon Inn. Of course I tend to do most of my casual online chatter on Twitter, which is one of those go-to places to visit during a 2am feeding.

There continues to be book-related news that I can’t really talk about yet.

I’ve got a pile — an actual pile — of things I want to write about, including more Letters to My Kids, but right now… well, while I certainly could find the time to write them, I choose to spend time on other equally-important things for a little while longer.

That’s it?

That may be it — I’m more than a bit hazy in the graymeat-memory-head-area thing, so I’m sure I’ll remember something else soon. Until then, let’s revisit this nerdrage-inducing image that never fails to make me snicker.

You're welcome.

Those of you who see what I see on Twitter and in GReader might be aware that I’m writing stuff for MMO Reporter now. It’s a newish gig, but a topic I enjoy, and I’m learning a lot about the industry in the process. I’ve also been sharing a less newsy rant or two with their sister site, the Green Dragon Inn, though that’s a bit more intermittent, since I have other ports through which to vent my spleen.

In related writing-for-other-people’s-internets stuff, I’ve been asked aboard a new webzine project targeted towards gamer women ages 25+ with families and/or careers. You might ask why me, since I’m am not a woman aged 25+ and very likely never will be, but that’s OKAY, since I will in fact be providing a weekly column from the point of view of a dad+gamer, something I’ve got some experience with. The title of the column has been determined, though not by me, and it’s not something I’d have suggested, so we’ll just forget to mention it for now, shall we? Title notwithstanding, I’m excited about this project.

There has been some bookish news that I can’t really talk about yet, but I will say: when I got it, it did not ruin my day. So there’s that.

What am I working on? Well, it's not steampunk.

Speaking of writing, I neglected to save my work and lost several key and painfully constructed scenes in my current novel to power failure. There may have been a lot of primal roars and some swearing. I’m quite angry with myself over the whole stupid thing, and have assigned myself nothing but apples and porridge until the scenes in question have been rewritten to everyone’s satisfaction. (Not much of a punishment, since my porridge is actually oatmeal with honey and raisins in it, but it’s the best I’ve got.)

In any case, learn from my mistakes and make sure your autosave function is actually ENGAGED, and not simply adorning your options panel like a quaint but dusty cameo necklace.

Anything else? Oh yes, I’ll be a father (again) in a few short weeks, and we (read: our contractors) are racing to finish Kaylee’s new bedroom in time to get all her stuff moved and all of the bear cub’s stuff in place. Permit delays are a killer. (As is the stress of finding out one of your foundation walls is not so much a “foundation” as a vague suggestion of stability.)

Have I found a “regular” job? No I have not. The market is so terrible it can hardly be dignified with the name; it’s really just ten million people wandering the aisles of eight million empty stalls — bit more of a maze than a market — a maze with no entrance or exit. Cheerful!

And that’s it — now you know where I’ve been, and I’ve blown the dust off this particular window enough to realize I’d like to clean it off properly and do some work here.

Happy new year and all that; talk to soon.

As electronic distribution (and web-based shopping) becomes more and more prevalent, and the percentage of electronic vs. analog versions of the same products continues to move toward electronic, brick-and-mortar stores will become progressively obsolete. Physical bookstores already account for less than a third of all book sales — in ten years Barnes and Noble will be the publishing equivalent of Sam Goody and Blockbuster.

God, I’m so crazy. Where would I come up with something like that?

Well, like every other ‘prediction’, I’m just creating publishing-industry ‘events’ by taking things — excuse me, that should read “easily observable, fairly recent, stupid fucking mistakes” — that already happened in the movie and music industries and coloring them with a publishing brush.

For instance, in the case of that ‘prediction’ up above, I simply looked at the history of Musicland swallowing Sam Goody before it, too, succumbed to obsolescence.

And I think to myself: “well, there are two major brick and mortar chain bookstores left in the US today — I expect we’ll see them go through similar death throes.

As my dad has been known to say, “Wellwhaddayafuckinknow…”

[...] a $960 million merger of Borders Group and its larger rival, Barnes & Noble [...] could help both companies pare back the number of stores they run, as well as cut costs in their back-office and distribution operations.

But any deal would face a formidable hurdle: sales at the bookstores of both chains have declined and the competition on the digital front is intense.

That’s not a ‘formidable hurdle’. That’s death.

And don’t fucking tell me that chain bookstores are some kind of inevitable creature that must exist, like a gelatinous cube in a ten foot wide hallway — music stores and brick and mortar video rental chains were inevitable creatures too.

Preliminary graphic representation of the merger details. I call the piece 'Fighting over End-Cap Placement'.

“Now that’s bullshit.”  She gave me one of her ‘you’re being stupid right now’ looks, then hit me with a “Duuuuude.” You have to know De to really understand how she says this, but I will try to convey it by explaining that the word, as spoken by her, sometimes has three syllables.

I said nothing, but probably had one of those purposely-not-getting-it expressions on. She rolled her eyes. “You know better than that.”

(And she was right, of course. I did, but it’s not something one generally talks about.)

“In fact,” she leveled a finger at me, “I dare you. I double dog dare you to write a midwestern paranormal for you next story.”

So I did. More than a few years later, that story has an agent, and that agent is shopping it around with a couple publishers, and I have De and her double-dog dare to thank. And blame.

When I think of De, I think of her unflinching, untrammeled sight into the heart of a thing. She is an excellent critic, but equally able to see a magical, whimsical, childish truth that grownups try to ignore.

I asked her to drop in today and share her memories of growing up in that magically non-magical place (because I like hearing her say the stuff that’s in my head) and then I made her talk about how that background led to her writing a zombie outbreak book set in her current home town.

(She says it doesn’t at all, to which I can only reply “Duuuuude.”)

We both grew up in the Weird West, really, although we grew up in slightly different areas.  He grew up near a small town called Miller, South Dakota, and you can pick up other entries about it on his blog.  I know that it’s affected the way he tells stories by a few of the things of his I’ve read.

I grew up slightly differently than he did, also in the middle of nowhere.  I’ve been trying for years to explain what it was like, or why anybody should care, but what it comes down to is that it was a profoundly magical place, and not in a nice way.

It didn’t seem, at the time, like living five miles away from our nearest neighbor, eight miles away from the nearest spot on the map (Lee’s Corner, population 2), or having no running water at the school was magical, but it was.  There is nothing out there.  It’s like the Australian outback; it’s like Siberia; it’s even like a remote mountain in the Himalayas sometimes.

Only flat.

There was grass, and there was sky, and everything else was something that someone dreamed up.  Trees aren’t natural; they’re a sign of people.  Fences are a trail back to someone’s house.  And houses are there only as long as someone tends them, day in and day out, like something fragile.  Otherwise they’re a hollow gray shell that’s been stripped bare by the wind and the dust.

The wind out there’s enough to smother babies, just suck the air out of them, so you always cover their faces.  It’s enough to pick you off your feet and throw you in the sky if you spread your coat wide.  The coyotes are closer to you than your neighbors, and a lot louder.  The blizzards kill someone every year, like a sacrifice to a very cold Hell.  The summers kill, too, and you hide out in the basement, because air conditioning is only something you see on TV.  You can see for about ten miles of grass in any direction, and it’s like being on an ocean, only you don’t get seasick.  And the flies, the horror of the flies, the constant, awful crawling when the cattle are around.

And then there are these cracks in the ground, where water has run (yes, we do get rain, big deadly storms that set things on fire almost as often as they put them out).  Most of the time, you can see them coming, but sometimes you can’t, and people have driven trucks or ridden horses right into them.

For the longest time as a kid, I had this secret fear that we’d go out into the fields during the summer and I’d lose my parents.

When my brother and I were very young, we were left in the pickup truck with books, water, and a cooler full of sandwiches while our parents drove tractors around.  We would run around; as long as we were within earshot of the truck, we were okay.  We’d make up stories, pick on each other, dig holes in the dirt–anything to pass the time.

I just knew that one of those cracks was going to open up under my parents.  They would drop in, and the wheat would cover them up again in long, golden waves, and I’d never see them again, and I’d never know what happened to them.

I’ve tried, time and time again, to find a way to explain that feeling through a story–the nothing, the crack in the ground, the disappearing — but I’ve never done it justice.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to phrase that in terms of a fairyland, in which the mortal realms and the fairy realms lie side by side, with sometimes tragic results.

The magic is close, very close.  And, from the inside, it looks perfectly ordinary.

While I’m waiting for that perfect idea of how to do this, I write other things, of course.  The idea that the magical is ordinary, even banal, crops up in pretty much everything I write.  I know that people want to think of magic as extra-special, something that can lift their lives out of the ordinary, but I can’t help but write about the magic that people take for granted or adapt to so quickly that they forget it was ever magic.  That’s what life is like now to me anyway–you’ve probably never noticed the magic of a stoplight, but I didn’t live in a town with a stoplight until I hit college.  When I discovered the Internet existed, I cackled.

I have a book coming out now called Choose Your Doom:  Zombie Apocalypse.  It’s not about magic, of course; it’s all about zombies, and I don’t consider zombies to be magic–more of an odd type of SF.  (This probably would be more obvious if Michael Crichton had written a definitive tale of zombie disease vectoring instead of The Andromeda Strain, but there you go.)  

However, I did take the idea that a change big enough to rewrite the genetic material on our planet could be inserted in our lives and used it to show that we’d do more about it than run in terror and barricade ourselves in the nearest Impregnable Fortress.  We’d use it as an excuse to steal comic books; we’d stick our fingers in it and see what it tastes like; we’d try to be heroes and end up almost ready to kick our refugees into the arms of the monsters because they’re that annoying.

And sometimes we’d even switch sides, on purpose, because that was the only way to get the job done.

I mean… come on: Middle of the month? Ironic yet clever title? Something about conserving ammo, checking your exits, and knowing when to double tap your closest friends to maximize your own life expectancy? Clever analogies… OR ARE THEY?

But no.

Today, I don’t want to talk about writing; I want to talk about reading.

Specifically, I want to talk about Choose Your Adventure books and the cultural wasteland of my youth.

Where the Outbreak Began

A few things that have always been true: from as early an age as possible, I’ve been storyteller, a reader, and a gamer. Also, I grew up deep, DEEP in the heart of the Great Plains about an hour from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s old place (seriously). My only playmate for five miles in any direction was my sister.

We got in a fair amount of trouble.

And by “we” I mean “I”, and by “I” I mean “I’m still really very sorry about accidentally spraying that superglue in your eyes, sis.”

My parents (and my relatives, and our neighbors) were very enthusiastic about anything that might keep me busy for a few hours that didn’t involve me trying to construct a functional airplane from a 2×8, our welcome mat, and a plugged-in battery charger I was about to clip to my belt buckle. (True story! Short, but true.)

As a result, people got me copies of every Choose Your Adventure book ever printed. In some cases, I had two. In the eyes of my gift-givers, they were the perfect combination of elements: a story! but a story he made up himself (kinda)! and you choose paths, like a game! Seems an obvious choice, really: I can see why folks picked them up for me by the five-pack. There was only one key bit of trivia they overlooked.

They were positively execrable. Holy pinball-tilting buddha, they were bad.

You know what I used to do with the CYA books? (Never did a three-letter acronym serve multiple masters so admirably.) I used to read them in page order. Not because I didn’t understand how they were meant to be consumed, but because digesting the elements of the product as a mishmash of unrelated plot points, sappy successes, predictable reveals, and weak failures was not, on the whole, any worse. Also, when I did it in that order, I could make up the interstitial stuff that lay between each page so that the whole thing still (or, finally) made some kind of sick sense.

That was my experience with Choose Your Adventure books when I was a kid. (A few years ago, someone gave Kate a copy of a CYA reprint at a book fair. It did not encourage me to revise my childhood impression.)

The Infection Spreads

You can, given this background, imagine my terrified caution when I learned of a new book coming out. It’s called Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse, and it looks like this:

Take a look at that cover. I’m not really qualified to discuss nuances in a piece of art, but I feel compelled to point out it’s got zombies in it. I believe my love of zombies is well-documented.

But then there’s this cover copy.

You control the fate of Tobe, a teen-aged slacker living in the shadow of the Cheyenne Mountain military complex. When a secret experiment goes awry, the citizens of Colorado Springs are exposed to an alien mold that turns those infected into zombies. With your help, Tobe must battle the newly undead, wild animals and the most dangerous creature of all: Man. Will your decisions help him save the city, or lead him to certain doom?

Obviously, I was torn. On the one hand, you have this:

But on the other, this:

I think you can understand my concern.

Clearly, there was only one thing to do: for my sanity, for your safety, I had to read the thing.

“But Doyce,” (you ask), “how can you have made this sacrifice for us? The book doesn’t come out until November 26, 2010.”

Obviously, I am a time tra–

Err. No, wait. You don’t know about that yet. Paradox. Right.

Obviously, I used my many nefarious contacts within the underworld and put out the word that I needed a copy of the book a few weeks earlier than the unwashed masses. I was eventually put in contact with De Knippling, one of the authors, and we met for some unpronounceable yet delicious coffee in her home town.

“Your city,” I said. “Nice place.”

“Err,” she replied, “thanks.”

“Be a shame if anything… happened to it,” I cliched.

“”Umm…” She raised an eyebrow in my direction, obviously to conceal her trembling fear. “Dude, do you want the arc or not?”

“SUBMIT TO MY COERCION.”

“Whatever.”

Conversion is Complete

Following that exchange (or one almost exactly like it in all ways except the actual words spoken, and the location, and the coffee), I set in to ‘read’ this ‘book’.

I died. Then some other stuff happened. Huh. Cool.

I read it again.

Dead. Some entirely different stuff happened. Heh. Funny.

Again.

Dead. (A hippo?!? What the hell?)

And again.

Dead… and this time I felt the slightest tug of… sadness? Was that a real moment of touching humanity there? Why yes, yes it was.

People, I’m horrified.

You know what the authors have done with this thing?

They’ve destroyed a (literally) life-long prejudice; my well-considered and heartfelt disdain lies dead and mouldering while a category of books that died in the mid 1980s shambles upright and stumbles back into the light. Worse, they’ve taught this unholy creature about humor and pacing and suspense and the tragedy and joy of the human condition. They made it good.

That’s what Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse is: it’s good.

I wanted it to be bad. I needed it to be bad so that I could continue to cling to my childhood, but this book denied me — it pulled my tattered copy of Inside UFO 54-40 out of my hands and turned my eyes toward the light.

Then it ate my brains.

I suggest you check this thing out. Sincerely. It’s fun romp, a number of entertaining yarns, some surprising depth and (if you know the authors) unsurprising humor, and I think most of the people I know will like it.

And don’t worry about the way it makes your eyeballs itch; the infection only burns for the first few minutes, and zombies are always more effective as a horde.

At least one — probably several — big publishers will try to introduce their own ebook reader or ebook format, despite the fact that popular formats exist and are already being whittled down to a few survivors. These things will suck huge amounts of money that could have been spent partnering with existing solution providers and solving the problem with already-adopted tech.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE.

Check this bit of brilliance out:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced a tabletish color ereader targeted at children in mid-2011. Called the Fable, the seven-inch touchscreen device will sell for between $149 and $179 (plus cellular connection fees). “Several” HMH books will be pre-loaded on the device, and Isabella ceo Matthew Growley says they “have right now four other publishers signed up,” though he would not name them. (That implies, but does not state, that the company is thinking of a proprietary store and/or format.) The device will be sold from their own website and “select retailers.”

Nook Color notwithstanding, HMH svp of digital strategy and planning Cheryl Cramer Toto says “there is a real market need out there for a kids’ color tablet.”

In other device news, E Ink [Doyce: the technology that Kindle uses] is unveiling their first color electronic paper display at a trade show in Tokyo today.

Tomorrow, Ford will announce a product called an “fTire” that will, in the words of one insider, “reinvent the wheel”.

Jesus wept.

People: Kids books make up twenty-five percent of Kindle sales. It’s the fastest growing category for Kindle. I needn’t mention what percentage of all ebook sales Kindle and Nook represent.

Can someone else compete with Kindle? Yes. Can someone build a better, cheaper ereader than Kindle? Yes.

But you know who won’t?

Publishers. Building the next great electronic gadget is not what they do. It is, in fact, one of the best examples of Not What They Do.

Okay, I’m done ranting. I’ll wrap up with another prediction. Here we go:

This isn’t over. At least one other publisher will announce some similar project in the near future.

(Because why just compete with Kindle when you can compete with each other as well? *headdesk*)

Website: *explodes*
Me: …the hell?
Website: What?
Me: You just exploded.
Website: Nuh uh.
Me: Yes. You did. You are still exploded, in fact.
Website: Well…
Me: What?
Website: At least you noticed me.
Me: …
Website: Sorry.
Me: I’ve had a lot on my –
Website: I know. I know. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Here… I’ll unexplode for you. Gratis.
Me: You don’t have to –
Website: It’s fine. It’s fine. Really. Just… it’s fine. You should finish up your job aps and the new coursework. I know it’s how you spend your mornings right now.
Me: Actually…
Website: *sigh* What?
Me: Well, the apps are in, the course is done — I’m writing this morning.
Website: Oh, on Adrift? I thought I saw something about that on your other site.
Me: My other…
Website: You know. The Twitter.
Me: The Twitter?
Website: Shut up.
Me: The Twitter? Who are you, Betty White?
Website: Maybe I am.
Me: What? What does that even mean?
Website: Nevermind. Shut up.
Me: Listen. *sigh* The reason I noticed you exploded is because I was going to write something with you.
Website: Pff. Sure.
Me: Really. Look, I got some pictures to go along with it.
Website: *glances sidelong* That’s a pretty random collection.
Me: It’s kind of a potpourri post.
Website: … thus marking the one and only time that “potpourri” will show up on your website.
Me: Well, two, now.
Website: Whatever. *rubs scalp with fingers* Grab-bag post, huh?
Me: If you like. I don’t have to if you –
Website: Just get over here and type.

Why Hello There

Hello?

Yes, it’s been pretty quiet around here, but that’s only because it’s been really noisy everywhere else, and while I love me some oversharing, there’s a point at which the day to day slog of doing contract instructional design and job hunting gets a little banal, and that point is somewhere just before I ever start talking about it on the blog. I’ve been working out my schedule (which keeps changing), and the points during the day when I would normally write here have been swallowed by writing for other stuff.

That picture, by the way? That’s totally me — lots of tappity tappity tap, lots of phone calls, and a growing feeling that I’m having two conversations at once, all the time. I’m hoping that’ll pass.

Let’s see what else is going on…

The death of the paper book! Again!

There’s been a lot of very intelligent talking about books and writing and piracy lately, and while I’ve been keeping my eye on all of it, I haven’t jumped in because my feelings haven’t really changed, which means the music I’d be adding to those jam sessions isn’t substantively different than the stuff I’ve played before, and everyone’s already heard that.

Print is dead, long live print.

I’ll tell you this for free: I agree with Konrath — the changes that are coming to publishing will, in the end, come from the rainmakers (the writers), not the people manufacturing buckets (huge props to Rob Donoghue for that analogy). I look around at our greatest living shamans today — the mightiest rainmakers — and I examine what they’re doing, and it looks a lot like someone marking a trail for others to follow. That Steven King dude? He’s training a LOT of readers to like ebooks. I’m just sayin’.

There’s a lot more to this conversation than just paper vs. plastic, but it is one of the sides to the dodecahedron, and I truly feel that electronic (self-?) publishing will be the thing that melts traditional publishing down to its composite goo, remoulds it, and forges it into something new in the next two decades.

It’s important.

I’m Done with Facebook

Yeah, I'm done.

It’s not that I’m a particularly private person. It’s not that I think anything I post on facebook is that inherently valuable.

But it bothers the fuck out of me when someone takes any portion of me — any fraction of my anima — and sells it off like erection-inducing rhino horn powder to the nearest advertising megacorp. No. Not me. Not anymore.

Facebook. Initially welcoming. Ultimately crap.

Arizona

Nuff said.

The Beard

It comes and goes, oscillating between “sea captain” and “gruff grandfather”. At some point in there, Kaylee decides that Daddy Don’t Get No More Lovin’ til the thing comes off, so off it comes. Wail, my brothers, but know that I will soon be with you again.

Someday, I will be a super-wizard.

Gaming stuff

Hoping for a little tabletop Dragon Age this weekend, maybe even next weekend — two weeks in a row. That’ll be fun.

Still playing the FATE-based Diaspora, and it’s good. It’s probably the best FATE iteration I’ve played, but I suspect that’s only because I haven’t played Dresden Files yet. It’s good – don’t get me wrong, it’s damn good – but it’s good in the way that reading Ekaterina Sedia is good: you simply cannot shake the sense that the authors are not communicating with you in their mother tongue. The Diaspora guys speak FATE fluently, but one gets the sense that they’ll never be wholly comfortable within it.

Games overwhelm me at times.

On the computer front, Kate and I are still really enjoying, of all things, Wizard 101. Enough so that we’re playing when we don’t “have to” with Kaylee, and have a pair that we’ve taken well ahead of the trio we play with our youngest gaming partner. It’s good times, and frankly it’s a good game. I even like the dueling arena, which gets back to the game’s MtG/Pokemon deck-dueling roots in a way that I find very satisfying, even when I’m getting my ass kicked.

Also? Teaming up to play a game with my daughter? Awesome.

Back in Middle Earth

We’re not spending a ton of time in Lord of the Rings Online at the moment, due to our Wizard 101 binge…

You're Tolkein my language.

… but I’m getting my fix all the same.

Kaylee and I are reading The Hobbit. By my best reckoning, this marks the realization of a personal dream probably 20 years in the making, and I am very very happy about it.

The dwarves are stuck in the barrels now, floating down to Laketown. Bilbo has a cold.

Kaylee keeps telling me that none of this would have happened if they’d stayed on the path, like Gandalf said.

Sooth, child. You speak sooth.

In the Meantime

I write. I’m coming to the tail-end of my contract work, and I’m taking the opportunity to let go of my job-search stress and use the time to find out what I can do when I’m not cramming my writing time in wherever it will fit, like mortar between boredom bricks. It’s a bit scary, and more than a little stressful, but the words keep moving from my fingers to the screen, and some of them really make me happy, and there are so many many worse things than that.

I have all the direction I need.

I’ll talk to you soon.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

Preface
I waited a day to talk about this, because I was pretty mad and ranty about it yesterday. Having given it a full twenty-four hours and evaluating my internal gauges, it turns out that I’m still angry, and that is not likely to fade, so there’s no point in postponing the discussion further.

Because I’m mad, this post may meander a bit. I will edit it as much as I can to make it coherent, but no promises. Don’t hate me for THAT, at least.

Points of Reference and Context you will Need

Yesterday, Simon and Schuster (a fairly major book publishing company) announced that they will be delaying, by four months, the electronic-book editions of about 35 leading titles coming out early next year.

(Hachette, another publisher, also announced plans along these lines, but I’m focusing on Simon and Schuster’s statement because Hachette only announced their intent to do so, not the concrete plan — in other words, they might still back out, and ‘we might do this too’ isn’t news to me.)

(Update: HarperCollins is on the same bandwagon.)

Giving credit: this story was linked off twitter by James McQuivey, who wrote about it at length on the Forrester Blog. It’s a good read, and (necessarily) polite enough that no one’s likely to lose a client over it. If you want a polite assessment, I recommend his.

(Egregious oversight: my amazing wife wrote about this yesterday on her agentry blog, and got a good conversation going there as well.)

Anyway. @glecharles (Guy L. Gonzalez) linked it on twitter, which brought my attention to it, and Rob Donoghue (whom I’m not going to link to on Twitter because his page is privacy-locked, but whom I respect immensely) summed up my immediate reaction with this comment:

Simon & Schuster and Hachette – doing their part to guarantee ebook piracy becomes the norm.

If you don’t see the point Rob’s making, give me a minute – I promise I’ll get to it.

This whole thing is essentially a straight-up counterattack aimed at online retailers like Amazon who are selling the ebook copies of best sellers for “only” $9.99.¹

See, those $9.99 sales are actually costing Amazon about five bucks per sale. Get that? Amazon is losing money on every bestseller Kindle ebook they “sell”² right now. Why are they doing this? Simply, to set consumer expectation for a lower price point on ebooks and to use that as leverage to force publishers to sell ebooks for a price somewhere in the same hemisphere as ‘sane’.³

Now, I’ll give S&S props for honesty; they are very up front about the reason for this decision: money. From the WSJ article:

…taking a dramatic stand against the cut-rate $9.99 pricing of e-book best sellers.

“I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices.”

Simon & Schuster has high expectations for the 35 titles involved, all of which either have large printings or are expensive.

[P]ublishers have come to fear that the bargain prices will lead consumers to conclude that books are worth only $10, or less, upsetting the pricing model that has survived for decades.

Ms. Reidy said she is concerned that e-book sales are cannibalizing new best-selling hardcovers.

“What horrors,” cry publishers. “Ebooks only cost us a tiny, tiny fraction of the money required to print, ship, store, and physically stock hardback copies of our books, so those evil, evil people-who-are-not-us actually want us to charge proportionately less money for them! Woe. Woe!”

What greed. What myopic planning. What longing for an unrecoverable, pre-digital past. What mewling.

And worst: what foolishness, to force your customers to steal from you.

Let me explain how easy it is to create a digital copy of a book. Almost anyone I know can do it in less than an hour with tools readily available.

1. Acquire a hard copy of the book in question. Paperback or hardback. Doesn’t matter.
2. Cut the spine off. Fan the pages.
3. Drop those pages into the autofeeder on any decent digital copier. It’s nice if it’s one of those higher capacity ones like those that sit at your day job, but even the $200 printer/fax/copier/scanner jobbies that you can get at Office Max will do just fine.
4. Click “Double sided original” and “Scan to file”.
5. Wait. (Or, if you have the cheaper unit, repeat the process for a chunk of pages a time.)

I now have a digital copy of the book, saved to my computer. With a few more button presses, I can format it for pretty much any ereader on the planet, but it’s probably already a PDF, and thus accessible by nearly anyone.  If I want to get fancy (and that’s a big if) I can run Optical Character Recognition on each page of the scanned document to make it a truly scannable, searchable document, but I don’t need to – I already have a readable copy of the book.

…which I can flag with a few tags and share via any one of a thousand various methods largely impossible to trace back to me.

That whole process took me less than an hour. I am, at best, merely competent with a number of introductory-level tools available to me for such a task. I don’t do this. Moreover, I don’t do it to make money, so I haven’t streamlined the process. For someone with experience, this process takes less time to do than it took me to describe it and format the bullet list.

(This, incidently, is one of the weakest reasons why DRM (Digital Rights Management) on ebooks is futile, rank stupidity, and an utter waste of time and money.)

So let’s say I’ve done all this.⁴ Let’s forget about best-sellers for a second and say I’ve done this with one of the several hard copies I own of one of my favorite books that’s currently unavailable electronically: The Well-Favored Man, by Elizabeth Willey.⁵

Let’s say that you read about this book and you’d like to get a copy. Hard copies are in vanishingly short supply and ebook versions aren’t available via normal channels. Just for the hell of it, you do a Google search for “Willey torrent well-favored”⁶ and lo and behold, you see that such a thing exists.

Do you download it?

The file might carry viruses. It might be incomplete. It might be a copy of the Spanish edition. It might be barely legible. It might, in fact, be all of those things, but there is one thing it most definitely is.

It is the only option available. Of course you download it.

Now, you’re probably like me: you’d like to give some money to the author. Maybe you’d even like to give some money to the publisher — I can’t think of good reason not to, really — but the option isn’t there, so you don’t. I mean, it’s not your goddamn fault, is it? If they wanted money, they’d have made the thing available via legitimate channels, and you’d have bought it there.

Because, seriously, it’s not about the money, is it? You’re not breaking the law to get this book because of the price tag. Given the choice between a potentially virii-laden, potentially ugly, potentially incomplete, potentially foreign-language edition copy from a torrent site and one from Amazon, I know that I would pony up and buy from Amazon. Or the publisher’s website. Or the author’s website. Or whatever. It’s safer, it’s better, and it’s just generally nicer.

But I don’t have that choice in this situation.⁷

Now, let’s take a look at a Shiny New Best Seller.

As we did previously, let’s create an example that flies very far from reality, so that I can’t be accused of actually doing this stuff. Unfortunately, Simon and Schuster actually publish writers I enjoy, like Stephen King. I need an example that I would never in a million fucking years ever want to read. Maybe Hachette…

Oh look: Hachette publishes Stephanie Meyer. Bingo.

So let’s say that Stephanie Meyer is publishing a new book. Perhaps something aimed at the adult readers market — some kind of modern-day horror story about how almost everyone in the world has been taken over and brain-washed by aliens and only the main character and the rest of the holy chosen who coincidentally reside in Utah and a few others have been able to resist this soul-destroying effect.⁸

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I really want to read this book. A lot. I’m salivating at the very thought of it.

Let’s also say that, for whatever reason, the hardback copy is a non-starter for me. Doesn’t matter why, but the point is: I want an electronic copy.

The book comes out in hardback. There is no electronic copy available.

What am I going to do?

Of course I am. You know I am.

Why? Because there is no legitimate copy available.

Why? Because the publisher made sure that was the case. They purposely created a situation that, in the case of The Well-Favored Man, exists only because of true scarcity and a book that never existed electronically in the first place. This other scarcity, the one I’m experiencing now, from this (no doubt) best seller, is artificial; created by the simple fact that someone at Hachette chose not to click on the ten or so buttons that need to be clicked to publish a book electronically.

Now, some folks are comparing this to the staged release of hard copies of books. “First there are hard copies,” they say. “Then there are trade paperbacks, then Mass Market paperbacks. That’s the Natural Order of Things — we’re just inserting Ebooks into the Natural Order.” Those people are not thinking; they are not taking into account that what we are talking about here is digital.

Because, you see, digital is not the same thing. It is a new animal, one of which the publishing industry is, by and large, abjectly terrified. If I want a paperback copy of a hardback that just came out, I am just plain out of luck; such a thing does not exist, and it shall not exist until the publisher makes it so.

The ebook already exists.

An hour after this hypothetical Meyers book hits the stands, someone has scanned it and put it online. It will exist on 24 thousand peer-to-peer machines in half as many hours. Or maybe someone at the publisher ‘leaked’ the electronic proofs for a little private Holiday Bonus. Or any one of a dozen other things happened.

DRM is a joke that people in the industry just don’t seem to get. There is only one way to deal with ebook piracy, and that’s by providing a safe, clean, legitimate, keeping-my-karma-shiny electronic version of the book — a clearly superior competition. That strategy actually makes piracy non-viable as a practice, let alone a consumer choice.

The publishers (and the authors) are worried about the downward trend in ebook pricing. “We won’t get paid as much,” they say. “Shouldn’t we be worried about that?”

Consider this: you can get paid marginally less, or you can get paid nothing at all.

Simon & Schuster publish Stephen King, who recently released Under the Dome. S&S released the ebook and hardback on the same day. King will no doubt release another book in 2010, and for that future release S&S will delay the ebook availability by four months.

You want to see a fun chart?

In eighteen months, look back and chart the ebook sales from the first four months of Under the Dome (following the first date-of-release for the hardback), and compare those numbers to the ebook sales from King’s next book for the first four months following the first date-of-release for that hardback. I’ll help you out: the four monthly totals for the new book will be zero.

Then: listen to the wailing from S&S (and maybe King, though I hope to god he’s smarter than that) about how ebook piracy is cutting into their sales.

This decision, which I fully believe is grounded in nothing less than a toddler-like desire to cling to the once-profitable but entirely outdated publishing structures of the past, actually creates an environment where, from a ebook-pirate’s perspective, it is a good idea to steal from them, because there is no legitimate competition in that space.

Since this mistake so closely echoes mistakes made in the music industry about 15 years ago, I have no doubt that their next epic cock-up will be to roll their ‘losses’ down to the artists on whose work they float in a sea of black ink.

The publishers are afraid of the way the world is changing. The authors are ignorant of the larger sea-changes coming in (most of them, and god love ‘em for being so fixated on the writing that they are). The publishers act out of that fear, creating a situation where getting a pirated copy of the book is the only option.

And the authors end up paying for that mistake.

That’s why I’m angry.

I hope to christ that anything I create is pirated across every fucking p2p network in the world. As a relatively unknown author, obscurity is far more deadly than piracy. In the end, I will profit from more people reading one of my stories, even if I didn’t get paid for it that first time. I’m not some hippie content-wants-to-be-free guy, but I do very firmly believe in removing any and all obstacles between someone who wants to read my stuff and… my stuff.

Some folks asked me yesterday what I thought of James McQuivey’s idea to delay the ebook four months, but also give it away as a free thing with every purchase of a hardback edition. I think it’s a great idea. I thought it was a great idea when I suggested it to my agent about six months ago on Twitter. However, I won’t take credit for it – the indie gaming industry has been doing that for years; as a smaller, more nimble publishing organism, it has already felt and adapted to the changes of the digital age, and could teach the ‘real’ publishing world a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t.⁹

Authors: your story – the story itself – is not worth 25 bucks per copy, simply because the hardback gets priced at that amount. It’s not even worth the $7.99 for which the mass market paperback sells. Both of those amounts encompass a lot of publishing costs that having nothing to do with you or the story. The value of the story (to the publisher) is exactly however many pennies on the dollar you get paid, per copy. If you want to fight for something, fight to make sure that value does not decrease (or better yet, increases), regardless of whatever happens to the price of the books or ebooks. You have that kind of leverage, because your story is the heart of the thing in the end.

The true value of the story is in how well it connects you with your readers, both now and for years to come.

What follows are the posts I saw that intrigued me in one way or another.

ON PUBLISHING

• Think digital first, print maybe.
• Focus on your verticals – the reason why genre fiction works in digital.
• Digital change is completely changing the publishing industry. Nobody has THE RIGHT to survive.
• Publishers need to think like Games Developers http://bit.ly/bxSCv

ON WEB PRESENCE

• Publishers/Writers should create a life-long URL for each work “don’t be fooled into allowing others control of your metadata”

ON DRM

• DRM: “Retailers want to own the customer.”
• The use of “unprotected” to describe DRM-free is very objectionable. Why not “unrestricted?” @doctorow
• Any time someone mentions “interoperability” and “DRM” in the same breath, they’re engaged in wishful thinking. @doctorow
• If DRM is always broken, in what sense does it “protect”? Restricts use, restricts interop, doesn’t protect.

ON AVAILABILITY

• Let readers buy the book [as a bundle in all possible formats] & allow the reader to choose the format they want. (I just suggested that like… two weeks ago.)
• …making “All books available to All”… one of the most ambitious ventures in the book industry. http://bit.ly/bIW1H

ON THE FUTURE

• The best way to predict the future is to invent it. @v_clayssen
• Substantial increase in Android Market. Looking at graph suggests in 2 years will have caught up with Apple app store
• “Books: the fastest growing category in iTunes AppStore.” @innOva

My impression:

Publishing, at the moment, is stuck. There’s lots of talk about how publishers need to get with it, and where publishing is now, and what they don’t want to do to solve their problems, but there’s no grand solution proposed.

At least they acknowledge the problem.