Category: Writing

Posted on

Wizards of the Coast takes a… novel approach to dealing with PDF piracy

Angry Bear is angry.And by “novel”, I mean to say “utterly stupid and short-sighted.”

Earlier this evening RPGNow, Paizo, and DriveThruRPG pulled all of their Wizards of the Coast PDF products (where both new and much much much older products were available) at WotC’s request.  The ability to purchase them ended at noon – the ability to download products that you’ve already bought ended at midnight.

According to Wizards of the Coast, this was done to prevent piracy.  (In a followup statement, they clarified that they believe this… because they are luddite morons.)

“We have [taken these actions] to stop the illegal activities […], and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”

I love the vast understatement from one gaming site today:

“I predict an increase in piracy of Wizards products.”

REALLY?

Let me take this one step further.  I guarantee – not ‘predict’, but guaran-goddamn-tee that every single PDF of WotC products made available after midnight tonight will be a pirated copy.

Just… think about it for a second; you’ll see exactly what I mean.

See… before today? Sure, some people were sharing PDFs like that on file-sharing sites, and there was pirating going on. Sure, yes.

Was it because the PDFs were made available by WotC and sold online?

No.  You’ve been able to get PDFs of ANY game book — hell, any book at all — even ones that have never had electronic versions available, ever since scanner technology became remotely mainstream (early 90s), because people have time, and geeks have desire for the electronic versions.

Until today, at least most of the people who wanted electronic versions of their game book were getting the PDFs the easy way: google search, got to RPGNow, click, click, download.  No torrent software. No worrying if you picked up a virus with your latest PDF. Easy.

Now, the only way to get the electronic version of a WotC product is to get it from a pirate site.

I can either not get it at all (sucks for me, and WotC gets no money), or I get it from a torrent site (hassle for me, and WotC gets no money).

The pirating people? This has no fucking affect on them what. so. ever.

Well, no; that’s not entirely true.

This move by WotC, ostensibly meant to fight piracy, will actually ensure that more people will come to their site to download ALL the PDFs they want (for games, for novels… whatever — I mean, as long as they’re THERE for the DnD stuff, they might as well look around and see what else is out there, right?…).

It’s not just stupid and short-sighted.  It doesn’t just ensure the piracy of their work by 100% of those that want PDFs of DnD material; it actually hurts all the other companies in the industry as well.

Posted on

Why all the indie-publishing posts, Doyce?

I’m being interviewed by another writing site in a few days (this one live, via Skype, with someone in Austrailia – it’s is SO COOL to live in the future), and they were kind enough to send me some of the questions they planned to ask, so I could get my thoughts in order. (Good plan, on their part.)

The last question on the list is a doozy: “Why are you still pursuing traditional publishing for Hidden Things when there are so many other options out there today?”

I’ll be biting my tongue not to say “masochism”.

But there’s a flipside to that question, and it goes something like this:  “You have a book that was good enough to get representation from an agent, and which you’re (slowly) bringing in line with a publisher’s desires and looking at some success with actually getting the thing published in the traditional market – getting over the threshold, really. Why are you putting so much time into learning about indie publishing?”

Like the header warns at the top of the page, I’m all about my perpetual projects and daily obsessions.  The possibilities that exist out there for authors regardless of how they want to get their work out to a reader are definitely one of my obsessions, and as such, it’s one of those things that will continue to get a lot of posting love from me on this blog.  Hopefully it’s not boring folks too much; me, I find it fascinating.

I’ve made a living of walking into completely unfamiliar new businesses every couple years, learning said business, then teaching those in the business about how to do it better — that’s how I pay the bills.  One of the things I do in those situations is question the standard operating procedures.  “It’s done this way because that’s how we do it” is an immediate red flag to me, and the more I learn about how publishing functions today, the more red-flags I see.

In the movie and music industry, the big companies started to focus only on big-money-making projects, and as a result artists that wanted to… you know… do art (or at least their own thing) went independent.  The same focus on big-money-makers has been happening within the publishing industry (thanks in part to consolidation of publishing into a half-dozen meta-imprints), but there hasn’t been the same leap to indie publishing.  Affordable tools are out there, the quality-in-production is there; authors have the ability to publish, distribute and market books without any involvement from mainstream publishers, thanks to print on demand (POD), e-book technologies, Web 2.0 and the fact that Amazon is now the #2 bookseller in North America and #1 worldwide — but the authors don’t move, because of the stigma of self-publishing.

Yes, before house-consolidations began, publishers were everywhere and there was truth to the idea that an other only self-published if they weren’t good enough to make it ‘legitimately’. This is no longer true, but the characterization of self-published authors as talentless hacks persists.

“It’s that way because it’s always been that way.”

That’s not survival behavior.  It’s not even intelligent behavior, which is puzzling, because it’s coming from intelligent people.

I post a lot on this topic right now because I’m trying to figure it out.

Caveat lector.

Posted on

How to give readers their tree-book fix as an indie author?

Publishing today is a confusing mess of issues. Am I doomed to slave wages as a mid-list author?  Worse, will I end up losing money? Does the ‘vanity press’ stigma still exist? If so, does it exist for the reader, or just the publishers? If you’re publishing indie, are you stuck with e-books? If not, what kind of solutions out there? Which ones are ripoffs? How can you get listed with libraries?  How can I get my stories out to people who have a book fetish?

It’s an issue that requires a lot of research, and the answers usually lead to more questions (What are my price points? Whose service is really the best deal? What you do you mean ‘it depends’?)

April Hamilton has a great piece up on her blog Indie Author that answers at least some of these questions while comparing venerable Lulu.com to Amazon’s CreateSpace Lulu vs. CreateSpace: Which Is More Economical For The DIY Author?

A quick excerpt:

One advantage of listing your books through Bowkers and Nielsen, whether you do it yourself or let Lulu do it for you, is that doing so makes your books available for order through any retailer, bookstore or library. Personally, I don’t feel indie books receive enough bookstore or library orders to make this worthwhile, but if your motivation is to make your book available to be listed on Amazon.ca, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble online and even Borders online, it’s probably worth the expense.

As you can see, it’s not all about the price comparisons of the two services, but also a good explanation of what needs to be done to make your POD product function as a proper book in the main venues.   April has some great free ebooks on her site that explain the whole process involved in creating your own book, starting with writing the damn thing and taking through through the whole indie publication process, so this doesn’t surprise me.

Posted on

The death of the Emoticon

2206_mourning_over_dead_friend1A few weeks ago, I noticed an interesting comment from someone I follow on YouTube, which went something like this.

“This is really great news, which I feel calls for a pretty major deviation from my normal internet posting rules. I know you guys hate them, and you know that I hate them, but just this once, in honor of the occasion, I’m going to type a smiley. :-D”

In the replies to the original poster, I saw a number of people surprised (or mock surprised) at the inclusion of the smiley, and it got me thinking about emoticons in general; has there actually been a drop off in their use?

After almost a week of paying desultory attention to painstaking research on the subject, I’ve decided the answer is a qualified yes. Yes, within the group of people whose electronic communication I regularly read, there has been a marked drop off in the use of emotion-indicating text markers. They aren’t completely gone, but there are definitely fewer showing up than there used to be.

Any thoughts on why that might be?

My personal theory is that emoticons emerged (re-emerged, actually, since they were in use in other non-electronic eras) when communication over the (nascent) internet was starting it’s first major uptick, and more and more people were trying to make use of the written word, sans any other medium, to make a point or (harder still) have a conversation and/or debate. The reason given at the time was that communication solely via text was ripe for miscommunication – that text robbed the speaker of tone and inflection critical to conveying the nuances of an ironic or satirical statement. In short, they were saying they needed a smiley face so that people knew they were joking. (Conversely, readers said they needed the smiley to identify such things.)

Are people less sarcastic/ironic/satirical today? Seems unlikely. Sure, most of us use a smiley here and there, but – at least for me – it’s often to take the sting out of a particular harsh statement; less “this is a joke” than “remember we’re all friends here.” My opinion is that we (the global internet-using culture) have so immersed ourselves in text-based communication since those early digital days that we’ve collectively relearned how to clearly communicate nuance in the medium, as well as how to detect it.

We’ve become better readers. And writers.

Now if we could just get people to stop typing “LOL” as though it’s an actual word.

Posted on

Tor.com gets a jump start on April 1

Tor.com / SaiPhai. Phantasee. The unavyrse. And related-er subjectz. / An Open Letter to Our Readers:.

A common reaction to the new TÖRdötCÖM revolution has been to point out that our new name is actually pronounced exactly the same as our old name, a criticism which must be addressed in two parts:

First, the pronunciation is indeed the same, but the ATTITUDE is totally different. It’s all about the Extreme Vibe embodied by the concept of TÖRdötCÖM-ness. It’s a feeling. It’s almost a flavor, if you will. If Tor was a bowl of Doritos snack chips, TÖRdötCÖM is a family size sack of super-delicious Doritos Extreme Kickin’ Chili, served to you in a space jacuzzi by sexy fire-aliens. We trust that this distinction is clear.

Read the whole thing, it’s quite funny.  You can (apparently) send any feedback to sharkjump@tor.umlaut.com.

Posted on

Bracelet

A snippet of fiction, inspired by today’s one word.

“It’s a bracelet.”

“Well, it’s a bit more than that. It’s a DNA imprint that can be used to identify you to any of a hundred different systems on this ship.”

“It’s pretty.”

“… and it’s pretty, yes.”

Posted on

Optimism, Action, and How To Be The Neighborhood Pulp Hero

What’s this? A pulp action author picks up Spirit of the Century and gets inspired.

To go back to the original pulps, the writers of Spirit of the Century got it right. In the 1930s, if you joined the Doc Savage fan club, you’d be sent a membership card, on the back of which was the “Doc Savage Code:”

1. Let me strive, every moment of my life, to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it.

2. Let me think of the right, and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice.

3. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage.

4. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do.

5. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.

The author springboards from this example and a great Harry Chapin quote from the book itself, to talk about how you can make changes in your neighborhood and your life – how to ‘be a pulp hero.’

It’s a fine piece. I recommend checking it out.