Vayland Rd. [4] — The Talk

~ The Talk ~

“ …it wasn’t your imagination. The plains are thick with goblins, especially along those dark gullys and river bottoms where no man has traveled in a thousand years. The natives learned to avoid the areas and the white settlers soon after. There are goblins and ogres all along there. No trolls though, no trolls…”

— transcript of a raving madman in Watertown, SD

I don’t know how long I sat on the deck. The moon wasn’t bright, and the lights were off in the house by the time I pushed myself to my feet and kneaded my back which was still pissed about the sixteen hour drive. I hadn’t slept since the night before last.

Somewhere in mid-stretch, I realized I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure what gave me the hint, but when I turned the direction my intuition pointed, there was a shadow where there shouldn’t have been in the treeline next to the house.

“Who’s there?” I said, glancing around the deck for some sort of weapon.

The voice that spoke was gutteral in a way that made me realize I’d never truly understood the word. “We’re not your enemy, Sean.” The large not-supposed-to-be shadow split into two: one shorter than me and one… still quite large. The shorter one spoke again. “We’re after the things that took your father.”

“Things?”

“Dirt-eaters.” He sounded hungry when he said it. He sounded like he was smiling.

There was a long pause while I searched for an appropriate response.

“You are directly the fuck out of your mind, aren’t you?”

The larger shadow snorted in amusement. It sounded like a prize bull huffing to scare off predators.

“You father’s missin’, yes?” The short one said.

“My dad, yeah. What do you know about it?”

“We know who did it.”

“Call the cops.” I thought about it. “Or turn yourselves in.”

The air actually got chilly. “You think we did it?”

I shrugged at the open night, wondering if they could even see it.

“You think we’re… dirt-eaters?” There was movement I caught only a bare second before the speaker was holding me by the shirt and pressing me against the side of the house. I looked down into a face a good foot and a half lower than mine, covered in random smears of grease that ran into his hair and beard. The knotted tree-branch of the arm that held me was covered in grease as well, or tatoos, or both. His eyes were bright in the moonlight and I could hear his teeth grind.

“Brock.” The larger shadow, still standing near the trees spoke softly, but his voice seemed to vibrate in the ground. “He did not mean anything by it. Let him go. You’re choking him.”

The voice was right; I couldn’t breath, but not because of the hand on my chest — the stench of sweat and oiled hair surrounded the short bastard in a miasma that made my eyes water. “Take…” I managed to choke out.

“Whazzat?” He growled in my face. His breath was a whole new color in the bouquet surrounding him.

I shoved sideways on his arm as hard as I could, using whatever leverage advantage that my height gave me, and staggered away from him. “Take a damn bath, you putrid son of a bitch.”

Another pause, this one broken by a deep chuckle from the trees that his partner on the deck joined in on. I glared while the chuckling died down. “Yeah, I’m hilarious, I’m sure. Who the hell are you?”

“Allies, if perhaps not friends.” The large shadow took a step that carried it into the moonlight, and nearly to the edge of the deck.

It held a spear in its left hand and stood close to nine feet tall, but I found it hard to focus on anything past the curving horn in the middle of its forehead.

—-

Steven stared through the bars of his cage, looking at stars exactly the same as the ones he knew.

Which made it worse.

He didn’t feel the pain. He knew it was there, but it wasn’t active unless he tried to scrape away the mud. They definitely didn’t want him to touch the mud. He watched the stars and tried not to think about the sunburn feeling that itched along his skin.

“It’s alright…”

He jumped away from the sound behind him and turned. The space behind his cage was shadowed darkness but he could make out some kind of movement. He thought for a minute that someone had found him until he realized that the movement was constrained by a cage like his own.

“Who’s there?” He tried to keep his voice pitched low.

“T- ahh…” There was a long pause. “Ted… Schafer? Do you know me?”

He did, although not well. Schafer and his wife were supposed to have auctioned their farm and declared bankruptcy a month ago. Folks said they’d moved.

“I know you. What–”

“It’s alright.” The voice in the shadows continued while a hunched form Steven couldn’t make out shifted uneasily within. “It’s alright if you want to… make noise. I watched them put the needles on you, and the mud. I know — know what it feels like for you right now.” The shape shuffled back into the shadows. The voice already sounded tired. “I just wanted to tell you that it’s alright.”

Steven watched the shadows for a moment in silence, then turned his back on the voice and sat back down.

“Hell if it is.” He murmured to the stars. “Hell if it is.”

—-

“So…” I said, sitting on the back of a tractor in the machine shed and watching my ‘guests’, “you’re a dwarf from the nordic wastelands who’s been fighting your ancestral enemy–”

“Dirt-eaters,” Brock growled helpfully.

“Whatever.” I turned to his monstrous companion. “And you…” I’d somehow managed to miss that it was wearing full fifteen-century samurai armor, but in my defense it was nine feet tall and did have a damned horn sticking out of it’s forehead. “You’re some kind of ogre wizard –”

“Magi” it corrected.

“– Magi who’s been working with him for how long?”

The creature made a dismissive gesture and stepped toward me. “The duration of my partnership with Brock is not relevant, Sean. What is relevant is our partnership with you, one which can save your father. Also, please call me Bhuto.”

I stared at the proffered hand — one that could easily palm my skull — and shook my head blankly. It was withdrawn.

“What kind of partnership?”

Bhuto straightened and adjusted his armor. “The only one which can save you father from these –” he used a word that slid away from my mind like oil. “We should travel as I explain.” He appraised me. “Do you have a weapon?”

For the first time in two days, I felt like smiling.

February 6, 2010February 8, 2010

Vayland Rd. [3] – The Cage

~ The Cage ~

Steven didn’t want to wake up; sometimes you know things aren’t going to be good when you open your eyes.

On the other hand, better to see the trouble coming than get hit by it. He shook his eyes into focus and looked around, then shook his head again and squinted.

The sky was the color of an old bruise — solid cloud-cover in dusty grays and purples from one end of the sky to the other — but that wasn’t really the problem; in fifty years you can see some pretty odd weather kick up.

The problem was, he was looking at the battered sky through the bars of a wooden cage. Worse, the cage was in the middle of some kind of camp. There was a fire burning a few feet away, cooking something that smelled like rotten corn silage in a pot almost as big as the cage he was in, and there were about a dozen little huts around him that looked like they were made out of sod.

The people walking around, including the two looking at him in the cage, were short little wiry bastards with dried mud caked all over their skin.

And they didn’t look like right at all.

—-

He tried to get loose when they opened the cage doors, but they were strong and there were a lot of them. They pulled him to a stunted, leafless tree that stood in the middle of the camp, and tied him too it. The rope they used was never intended for this purpose; over an inch thick with harsh bristles jutting from the weave like thorns, it chafed his skin even when he didn’t move. They wrapped him in a coil from shoulders to knees, leaving him with his back pressed to the surface of the dead tree. The knots required by the thickness of the rope were twice the size of his fist.

Two of the… things, walked up to him after he was secured. Their noses were about three inches too long, same as the chins, and what skin he could see where mud had flaked away was the same color as the sky. Their eyes were the black of used forty-weight oil.

Not human. Sean would know what to call them, probably; he sure as hell didn’t. He’d hoped he was dreaming, but he knew himself well enough to know he’d never come up with something like this.

The taller one (a little more than four feet tall, and not quite as bowlegged) spoke, phlegm rattling in the back of his throat like the sound of a kid’s straw that’s hit the bottom of a chocolate malt. “You the man Steven. You ours now.” The second one sniggered, and Steve was sure he saw the first one twitch in annoyance.

“I’m not a damn thing to you. Let me go and I’ll be on my way.”

The rest of the crowd around him murmured when the first one nodded, acting as though he’d expected that answer.

“Good. Fight is good.” He gestured to the second one, who stepped forward and unfolded a cloth on which he laid out the first bright or clean things Steven had seen in this place.

Needles.

—-

They rearranged the ropes so they could get easy access.

That was necessary; the needles weren’t very long, just thick.

He’d tried keeping track of how many they’d driven into him, but he lost count when they moved past his arms and shoulders and into the area between his collarbone and neck. It had all been very quiet, though; the things seemed very intent on what they were doing and aside from sucking his breath in past his teeth, he wasn’t making any noise.

Damned if he’d make any noise.

Eventually the sky was dark and they were done with the needles, finishing with his face — pushing the last few into the muscles of his jaw had almost got him to make a sound, but he hadn’t.

He hadn’t. He was sure he hadn’t.

He looked up to see the taller thing standing in front of him. Its lips were pulled back to damn near its rear molars in a dead man’s grin.

“Good. Ver’ good.” It nodded approvingly. “Strong.” It turned away. “MUD!”

The hell?

He had time to puzzle it over. Several of the scrawnier creatures began wrestling the foul-smelling pot off the fire, dragging it through the dirt toward him.

When they began to pack the hot, stinking mess onto his body, using the pins as anchors to prevent it all from sliding off, Steven still didn’t make a sound.

But it was much harder this time.

—-

It was starting to get dark.

It was starting to get dark and there was still nothing that made sense in any of this.

My family weren’t the sort of people who ended up interviewed about alien abductions in the Daily Sun; yet here I was, sitting on the back deck mulling over… what?

Muddy, barefoot footprints all around the back door — broad, flat things that made me think of Gollum. Smears on the windows that looked like finger marks with no prints. Drag marks heading toward the shelterbelt behind the house, before they vanished.

The kind of crap I used to think up.

Mom slid open the patio door and stepped into the gloom, her arms crossed as though she was cold. “You want anything to eat, bud?”

I shook my head. “Why’d you call me out here, Mom? I mean, I’m glad to be here and help you out, but what…” I let it go and shook my head again. It was quiet for several minutes, except for the sound of absent-minded bug swatting.

“I thought–” she started, then stopped. “I thought you might be… I thought you might know something.”

“About this?”

She sighed, and shrugged her shoulders in a way that seemed like an apology. “About… things that might help.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Eventually, she went back inside.

February 5, 2010February 5, 2010

Vayland Rd. [2] – The Road

~ The Road ~

Churkk scowled.

“I like night, Churkk. Dun like day. Dun like heat or light or pantin’ or th’ way groud puffs up dust atcha when ya run.”

Churkk’s scowl deepened. He liked the night as well, but it irritated him to agree with the creature skulking alongside him.

“Night is cool. Night is good. Wraps us up and lets us come out of the cracks and up to see things. What I think is the best is –”

“Jek.”

“Yeh?”

“Shut it.”

Jek did, looking suitably cowed. He still walked alongside, however, and Churkk swore even the runt’s feet slapped on the ground different than anyone else. Everything about Jek was annoying.

The light from a house poked through the trees at them, but rather than turning to go around it, Churkk took them in closer without explaining. Slowly, they crept up to the corner of the building, then along a wall to the lit window.

Jek started to whisper a question, but stopped short when Churkk smacked him in the middle of his forehead without even glancing back to aim.

Inside, Churkk could see a people-room with things to sit on. The woman sat on one, but didn’t see his long, mud-caked face at the window or the light glinting off his beady eyes, because she was crying — great, shaking sobs that shook her bent shoulders and moved her whole chair.

Churkk watched this for some time. It made him smile.

—–

I lie to myself when I say nothing ever changes back at home — nothing ever seems to change in a place you lived for twenty years — but there were always fewer houses. Farming was a dying profession; every time I drove into familiar territory, the wide open plains seemed wider, flatter — less and less to do with people.

The road was mostly straight, rolling over gradual hills in what could often be an infuriating exchange of Passing and No Passing zones. It would start to wind soon. I knew this area; could still recite the mileage between every major and minor landmark for a hundred miles in any given direction, even landmarks that didn’t exist anymore, such as the old country school house that had apparently been torn down since my last visit and whose absence nearly made me miss my turn onto Vayland Road.

After a few miles, the curves began.

The farmland my family owned was on the high side of the county, raised above the lower, eastern half by a ridge of hills that Vayland Road crept along, curling around cuts in the earth that were somewhere between narrow valleys and broad ravines, filled with thickets and brush that by local wisdom wouldn’t even let a breeze through without a couple of good scratches. Gullys. That was the word.

I’d grown up riding in cars along this stretch of highway, then driving it myself, then driving away. The blacktop lead right past the farm’s driveway.

Mom was out on the front step before I got out of the car.

No one else was there.

February 4, 2010February 8, 2010

Vayland Rd. [1] – The Call

[What follows is the first part of a short story I’m working on revising. The rest will follow over the next however-many-days-it-takes. I might put some editing notes in the posts’ comments. If you’re looking for such things, look for them there.]

Vayland Rd.

I remember, when I was a kid, riding in a car with green, leathery seats that got very hot in the sun. The car was green as well, although a different shade, and it seems to the me of my memories that most of the cars back then were that color. It was a popular trend, or maybe my child perception was skewed.

At any rate, the car was green, the seats were green, it was summer, the sun was hot, and the seats were hotter. We had the windows open to let the air in and my mom was driving to town on an errand.

The road was a winding black hardtop that looked down into sharp ravines between the hills; drops that seemed (to me) to go down and down farther than anything in the whole world. Every drive, I would look down and out from the tiny back windows of the two-door and think about what it would be like to go sailing off the road and into the ravines, tumbling over and over and finally exploding at the bottom, like on TV. A little morbid, but we lived a long way from any other kids my age — I had to make my own fun.

So, with the sun beating down and my boredom rising, when I saw a goblin shambling along the bottom of a ravine with an old, rusted sword balanced across his shoulders like the yoke of a wagon, I didn’t bother mentioning it to my mom. Even at that age, I assumed I’d imagined it.

I believed that for the next 23 years.

—-

~ The Call ~

My cell phone rang while I stood in line for lunch, the screen showing OUT OF AREA instead of a number. I thumbed it open to stop it from ringing and muttered a terse “This is Sean” into the mouthpiece, which usually clears up wrong numbers in a —

“Hey bud, how’re you doing?” My mom was only person in the world that called me ‘bud’, a lukewarm leftover from my preteen years that she tended to drag back out when she was feeling down.

“Hey, I’m good. What’s up? Something wrong?”

“Oh, you know…” Her voice wavered a little bit. A bad sound. I stepped out of line and headed for the door. “Been a little crazy here the last couple days.”

“What’s going on?” I didn’t try to keep the frown out of my voice; it wouldn’t make her feel any better if I did.

“Well, we can’t seem to track down your dad.”

I stepped into the watery sunlight and pressed the phone against my ear to block the white noise from passing traffic. “I lost you for a second. You can’t track down Dad’s what?”

“No, we can’t find him.” I heard her set something metal down on something solid. She was wandering around her kitchen, fiddling with things. It was a Tuesday. She wasn’t at work. “It’s been two days.” She paused. “Or four, I guess. Three and a half.”

I scowled at the pavement. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me. Is he traveling?”

“No, he’s been home for a couple weeks.”

“Did… what happened? Did you get in a fight or something?” It sounded surreal even as I said it.

“No, of course not.” She, the properly-raised Midwestern wife, sounded vaguely insulted by the idea. “I went to bed a few nights ago and your dad stayed up watching TV. When I got up he wasn’t there. I thought he’d gone out to get some work done before it got hot.” I heard her move something else across the counter. “But he wasn’t.” Her voice crumbled, and she took a breath that sounded like a series of tiny gasps – the kind you hear little kids make between knee-scrape sobs.

She sniffed into the phone. “You still there?”

“What? Yeah.” I shook my head. “Quit… quit moving things while you’re on the phone — you can never find them later.”

“Okay.” Her voice was small and sounded further away than it should.

I let my eyes move from the sidewalk to the sky. “I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon.”

“Are you sure?” She sniffed again. “I know it’s a long ways.”

“Yes.” I made sure not to hesitate, but let my answer stand for both of her statements.

“Okay. Where should we pick you up?”

I started down the street, heading for the back parking lot. “You won’t, I’m driving out.”

“Oh honey, you can’t.”

“It’s the only way I can,” I replied, unable to keep the tightness out of my voice.

“It’s such a long ways.”

I checked my watch. “I need to get moving if I’m going to make this happen today. Okay?”

“Okay.” She’d given up arguing, which told me more about how bad it was.

“Call me if you find anything out. Be careful,” I finished, and ended the conversation wondering why I’d said it.

Several hours later, filling overnight bag and leaving messages with various people about an unspecified family emergency, I still didn’t know.

February 3, 2010February 3, 2010

The Wonderful Stink of Revision

Did you read it?

No, not yesterday’s post; did you read something of yours? How was it?

Don’t tell me you’re not done reading it yet; you were supposed to pick something short.

And don’t tell me you didn’t have time; that’s your lack-of-grooveness talking. Make time. Read it while your significant other is doing a frame-by-frame live Tweeting of Lost or something. Time enough to accomplish The Reading exists, it’s just in the wrong box right now. Go get it.

So whadja think?

Needs some work, dunnit?

Good.

You’re gonna revise that sucker.

I know, I know: you’re out of the Groove. I’m saying “You need to revise,” and you’re all like:

Keep it simple. Have some clear technical goals in mind.

Find the spots where the story doesn’t seem to go into a scene long enough or far enough. Take it the rest of the way.
Fine the spots where your voice is muddied and indistinct. Clarify it. Clean things up. This is probably something you wrote awhile back, and you’ve learned stuff since then, so make use of it.
Kill adverbs. Rewrite the sentence so that you’re saying the same thing with better words.
The one scene that doesn’t seem to do anything? Take it out. This is your acid test revision: no less than 10% of the original text should hit the cutting room floor.

That’s the official list of goals.

But what you’re really doing is getting down in the muck, up to the neck, in your own writing. In you. Wallowing in the glory of your own wonderful stink.

That is your method, and it’s also your true purpose in this little endeavor. Yes, doing the revision will be nice, but your real goal here is to remind yourself why you like playing with words, and what all your favorite toys feel like.

Wallow. Get the mud in deep. Oink oink.

As a show of solidarity, I’m going to do a little public wallowing for the next week or so. My particular mud bath will be a short story I wrote a few years back called Vayland Rd. It’s a peculiar little thing I wrote as part of a 24-hour blogathon, so it’s about 7 tenths inspiration and 5 eighths exhaustion, but it came from a good place, I like the characters, and the story’s important to me.

As I revise, I’ll post a chunk of the yarn up here every day, so you all get something to read in between your own wallow sessions. Sound good?

Hope so, cuz it’s the best deal you’re gonna get.

Now get back to your wallowing.

Oink.

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