Category Archives: writing/blogging/publishing related

writing, blogging, publishing

My Next “Small” Thing

December 5, 2012writing/blogging/publishing relatedfiction, new fictionMarion

One of my writer friends recently asked if anyone wanted to participate in a “next big thing” blog series where writers discuss works in progress.

I’m not ready to discuss my next big thing. The big thing I’ve been working on, I haven’t been working on enough and I can’t give a date. However, my next small thing, will be ready soon. It’s a novella that may surprise some of my readers. It’s a lot “softer” and more “family friendly” than either The Death Trip or Loisaida.

I’m still working on a description that doesn’t involve spoilers. Not quite sure how to do that. Let’s say it’s kind of Philip K. Dick meets Flannery O’Connor with a nod to Marge Piercy. Meantime, if anyone is interested, here are the first 500 words:

Schrodinger’s Telephone

1990-1991 – Lizzie

While others thought that living in the past was harming Lizzie, she knew it was the only thing keeping her sane, and would often revisit the early fall day when the course of her life changed.

Technically, it was still late summer, school having started the week before. She spent most of her vacation preparing for the term. Her lesson plans were detailed and specific down to the handouts. Any other year she might have woken up without the ring of the alarm clock at 5:45. But in those days, she found herself falling into bed early and waking with reluctance.

She had to punch in at 7:50, and while work was only a ten-minute walk away, she needed a lot of time in the mornings. Jeff was already in the kitchen. She could hear the clang of last night’s dishes, now dry, being returned to the shelves. He didn’t have to be at work till nine, could catch the train and be there in half an hour, but he was typically the first one up, out the door for a quick jog with Asta. She worried about his being out so early with only a small terrier for protection. They lived in the upper part of the upper west side, just south of 96th street, known then as “the great divide.”

Jeff, though protective of her, never thought much about the crime. He’d gone to Columbia and had lived in a dorm even further uptown. That wasn’t something Lizzie could imagine herself doing. That woman gang raped in the park last year, it was still on people’s minds, and things seemed to happen every day.

For a moment, she thought she smelled coffee. Maybe it was something wafting in through the window. Her husband had given up the evil brew in sympathy. While she told him it wasn’t necessary, she was grateful.

Jeff came in to the room carrying a small tray. He sat down on the bed.

“Morning, princess.”

She answered by rising quickly and running into the bathroom. Just a belch this time. It was the end of the first trimester, and it had been getting better. She brushed her teeth. Years later she would remember everything so clearly, even that she had been startled by what she thought was a cockroach scurrying on the floor, but it turned out to be some loose thread, maybe from a frayed sock.

She came back to the bedroom and sat down next to her husband on the side of the bed. “Uuurhh,” she grunted.

“Sick?”

“No, not really. It’s just…” She trailed off and grabbed one of the bland cookies he’d brought her on a tray. Then she took a swig of the hot concoction in the mug, “I’m so damn tired of Postum.”

He smiled and shook his head slightly. She would recall thinking just then, not of the future, which she often did during her pregnancy, but about the first time they met. Some party where the music was so loud they couldn’t hear each other, but looking into his sweet eyes, she felt he already knew her in a way that no one else ever had or would. She kissed him. He seemed surprised, but pleased, and kissed her back. There was more. This hadn’t been part of the morning routine of late. He was already being careful with her. Gentle. After, they showered together, though he never liked the water as hot as she did.

The Death Trip — The Story of an Ending and Why I’m Giving It Away

August 17, 2012writing/blogging/publishing relatedMarion

Just looking at the most recent Goodreads review of my novella, The Death Trip, the reviewer deals directly with the ending, which readers either seem to love or hate. She vigorously defended it, coming close to but carefully skirting, spoiler territory.

Some readers think the open-ended ending is clever, while others are convinced I simply ran out of steam. Few are neutral. In a sense, both are right.

The Death Trip was written as my first entry in The International 3-Day Novel Competition. The contest could more accurately be entitled The Three Day Novella Contest because I don’t know think most people get past 40,000 words. (I’ve done it three times and never got past 30k). As its name implies, you write a novel (or something close to one) in three days. You are allowed to write an “outline” beforehand although each time I entered, I wound up not really following anything I’d prepared. In the case of The Death Trip, I’d had a concept floating in my brain for some time, and wrote up a character list a few days before the contest started.

This is what I knew when I started the writing: The story would involve a Philip K Dick-like hallucinatory process, by which terminally ill people would be put into a dream-like state where they could experience an entire life — maybe one that turned out better, the road not taken, or even the future they weren’t going to get. The process would be so appealing that people who weren’t ill would want to experience it recreationally, like the old joke about people dying to get in to cemeteries.

I wanted to have a character, inspired by the then recently deceased disability activist, Harriet MacBryde Johnson, who I was sure, based on her writings, would have been appalled by such a process. While I always found Ms. MacBryde Johnson’s writing thought provoking, I didn’t always agree with her positions. As I wrote the story, I found myself creating characters with different viewpoints as well as a protagonist, Chuck, who hasn’t fully developed an opinion.

The three-day experience is a pretty intense one. With only a few hours left on the clock, I knew I had to wind the story down. I was not going to get around to actually taking one of the main characters into a “death trip” and telling that story. I’m no philosopher, but the construct of characters with different positions and then taking those positions to their logical conclusions, owed as much to Plato, or my memory of reading the dialogues as a college sophomore, as it did to any storyteller I can think of, Dick included. I never lost control of the story, but at the same time, I was allowing it to develop, enjoying the show, and a few hours before the deadline, I “got” how it would end.

Some have referred to Chuck as a “loser” or at least a not especially admirable character. I had purposely avoided making him seem heroic. I thought of him as a kind of every man, and I didn’t want to make a decision for him, nor did I want to make it obvious to a reader what he would choose. I wanted to present him with two clear choices and end it there, which at a few minutes before midnight, is what I did.

As for the contest, that first year, I didn’t even make the short list, but I did go back to the story later to make revisions and I put it on Kindle and Smashwords as my e-book beta. Because I was hoping to develop a readership prior to publishing Loisaida, a full-length novel, I decided it made sense to make the novella free on Smashwords. Amazon demanded a set price, so I charged the minimum, 99 cents.

A few months later Amazon matched the free price. Back then, they paid the writers the minimum royalty when they did that — a policy they’ve now wisely changed — so I actually got paid for the freebies. When they began charging again, I matched the price on Smashwords and its affiliated outlets. Then last year, as sales slowed to less than a trickle, I “freed” it again on Smashwords, and Amazon soon “matched” the giveaway. Even though I knew Amazon would no longer pay me for free books, my feeling was that I was making so little on the story that it would be worth giving it away to get more readers. Unfortunately, so far it hasn’t helped much in generating sales for the novel, but seeing the occasional reader-review on Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, etc. whether good or bad, always makes me feel connected to readers, and is especially rewarding when those readers comment on how the story exceeded their expectations for a “freebie.”

Smashwords, “Censorship” and Godwin’s Law

February 27, 2012Politics and Culture, writing/blogging/publishing relatedebook censorship, Mark Coker, Paypal, SmashwordsMarion

As I write these words, somewhere on the Internet someone is comparing a business decision made by Smashwords (a digital publishing enterprise) to the Holocaust.

Most likely this is being done through the use of Martin Niemöller’s oft quoted, “First they came for….”

Smashwords for the two percent of the American population who haven’t yet self-published a book, publishes and distributes e-books. It works like this: Manuscripts are submitted as Word documents by publishers or directly by authors. They are put through Smashwords’ “meat grinder” where they are converted into various e-book formats pdf, epub, mobi etc. They are then available for sale on the Smashwords’ site. If they conform to the formatting guidelines and the author/publisher chooses, they can be made available to the various e-bookstores including Barnes & Noble, Amazon Kindle and Apple’s I-Bookstore. Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow authors and publishers to upload directly, so many self-publishers bypass Smashwords and go straight to those venues.

On February 24th, Mark Coker, the President of Smashwords sent an email out to all writers and publishers of works labeled “erotica” which included the following message:

“Today we are modifying our Terms of Service to clarify our policies regarding erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest. If you write in any of these categories, please carefully read the instructions below and remove such content from Smashwords. If you don’t write in these categories, you can disregard this message.

PayPal is requiring Smashwords to immediately begin removing the above-mentioned categories of books. Please review your title(s) and proactively remove and archive such works if you are affected.”

Coker explained in his email that this change is due to an ultimatum given to him by PayPal, which will stop transacting his sales on Monday (2/27) if the change isn’t made. He stated that PayPal is demanding that erotica featuring sex with underage youth or children be taken off as well, but that was already off-limits under Smashwords’ terms of service, so that part doesn’t represent a change. He asked authors to pull their own offending work in order to avoid further crackdowns.

This of course has led to a shitstorm of controversy on the Internet including the Holocaust comparisons and lots of talk about “censorship,” “free speech” and “constitutional rights.”

First, let’s get something straight. Nobody’s “rights” are being violated. Smashwords is a private company that has every right to create and enforce whatever terms of service it wants. They could change their policy and decide to only publish children’s books, to demand evidence of proofreading, or even to make their authors pass a grammar and literacy test — something for which many readers would be thankful.

While there may be some writers of a specific type of erotica who have come to depend on Smashwords for distribution, and they will now be shit out of luck, that’s not the same as being forbidden to write, beaten or carted off to jail for doing so. I don’t think Amnesty International is ready to get involved just yet.

Coker’s capitulation to PayPal isn’t chilling because it will lead to jack-booted thugs coming to take us away, or even because it will deprive readers of easy, cheap access to their preferred flavors. It’s chilling because it’s a reminder that freedom of the press, even in the digital age, belongs, as it always has, to those who own one. Anyone is now free to publish on the web, but distribution is the key. Platforms like YouTube allow the possibility of going viral. Your cat could be a star. Amazon’s Kindle Digital Platform has evened the playing field and allowed for the emergence of writers rejected by major publishers. Without search engines like Google, your words and images might never be discovered. Beyond that, Twitter, Facebook and other social media offer us a new world, a world where everyone is always watching everything, where the revolution will not be televised, because television is no longer relevant, but it will be broadcast — live-streamed and viral. The web has enhanced our sense of “freedom,” our sense of living in a world of infinite possibility. But none of these platforms were invented solely for the sake of “freedom.” All of them were created as businesses to make money. All of them are free to set their own standards.

But that shouldn’t even be a concern as long as there is a market for freedom. I’m not particularly worried about Youtube changing its rules because I’m confident that a “new” similar service will emerge to fill a need, should that happen. The real danger would be if too much web-power became concentrated in just a few hands.

What’s frightening here is the enormity of Paypal’s ability to control the web. They’ve pulled their weight and their rank before, most notoriously when they kept Wikileaks from accepting donations through them. PayPal could close Smashwords down bit by bit if they chose to, first demanding that Smashwords eliminate certain categories of erotica, then all erotica, then all books with offensive language, then all books. PayPal could do this because of moral concerns, legal concerns, or because its parent company, E-Bay has decided to go into the e-publishing business, maybe even start its own erotica line. PayPal cannot prevent authors from “publishing” their work on the Internet or even disseminating it, but they can effectively eliminate even donations coming in to support distribution.

There are petitions on the web asking PayPal to change its policy on Smashwords. It’s ludicrous to think these petitions will gain much traction. PayPal was wise to go after the categories they did first. Very few people are willing to stand up for bestiality. Besides, PayPal is simply too big to boycott, too ubiquitous. Even when you aren’t paying through PayPal directly, they are often the conduit.

The question is not what kind of Smashwords do we want or what kind of PayPal do we want. The question is what kind of web do we want and what forms of action will get us there.

The answer to the first part for most of us is that we want a web where goods and ideas can be freely exchanged, an even playing field for small and start up businesses as well as a place with platforms to publicize injustice and call people to action.

As for what forms of action get us there, it starts with the idea that absolute power corrupts, and that it is best, therefore, that no one group or company control the web, especially its commerce.

We can’t change PayPal. At least, I don’t think we can. Maybe some great legal expert can set me straight on that. Maybe it effectively has a monopoly and needs to be split up. Meantime, we can try as much as possible to use and support alternatives to it. This is the new consumerism. It’s about bringing your ethics to the marketplace whether it’s buying local produce, green flooring or choosing not to buy from companies you know use child labor. It’s about voting with your wallet.

I’m not ready to close my PayPal account. For some things, it may still be the only game in town, but I can choose alternatives for my own “merchant services.” And maybe some competitor will seize this opportunity to present itself as an alternative, a company only interested in taking our money and not in judging our tastes. (Maybe even a company committed to not being evil.)

I’m not pulling my books from Smashwords, though God knows if PayPal checked out the content, they might pull them for me, but I am hoping that Mark Coker is working on setting up alternatives and not waiting around for the next shoe to drop.

Meantime it does no one any good to start shouting that they have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. They never did. They never had the right to yell anything in a theater, unless they owned it, though for one brief shining moment maybe they thought they owned the Internet.

Who Still Buys Hardcovers?

January 7, 2012Politics and Culture, writing/blogging/publishing relatedchanges in publishing, ebooks, publishing, publishing industryMarion

My loyal readers (both of you) know that I keep an eye on the publishing industry, and try to make sense of pronouncements and prognostications, especially as they regard e-books and the future for those of us outliers. But here’s something that still mystifies me: Who buys hardcover books?

The better-half and I are book junkies. We have far more DTBs than anyone living in a cramped apartment ought to. But very few of these are hardcovers. A quick perusal of the stacks shows that the b-h has more hardcovers than I do. Mine tend to be graphic works — Mondo Boxo, by Roz Chast for example, or movie books like Lulu in Hollywood, badly damaged by certain bored kittehs who used it as scratching post.

The b-h has more hardcovers than I do reflecting his varied interests — eco-systems, travel, botany, geology, etc.

Both of us have a smattering of fiction and biography in hardcover. Generally, these are books that were purchased used, gifts or found in the laundry room. It is exceedingly rare that either of us buys new hardcovers. Generally, when we do it’s a question of impatience. The last new hardcover I bought, I purchased shortly before I got my kindle. It was The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, the last of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. I came late to the series. I’d devoured the first two books, and the third one had just come out in hardcover. I broke down and bought it after finding out that I would be 504th on the New York Public Library waiting list.

Here’s the thing: hardcover books aren’t just expensive, they are big and bulky. I’ve never seen them as “better” from a reader’s point of view. I bring this up because there is a constant debate on the Kindle forums regarding the price of e-books. Much has been said about the “agency pricing” model and how Amazon wanted to cap prices for ebooks at $9.99 but got outflanked by big publishing. Many readers complain that e-book prices for new books often exceed the paperback prices, but that doesn’t matter much to me. As a consumer, and avid reader, I’m likely to buy the cheapest version of a book I can get. I prefer to get books from the library (since I’m likely to only read a book once) or to get them used or free from my laundry room and then “recycle” them by leaving in the laundry room when I’m done. Usually, I can wait for a book from the library or to be discounted, but on the rare occasion when I don’t want to, getting the book on Kindle at a lower price than I’d pay for a new hardcover feels like a bargain to me.

I finally paid more than $9.99 for an e-book when I decided I “had to” read Stephen King’s 11/22/63. The initial Kindle price was $26; apparently this was an “enhanced” version, which included some old CBS footage of the Kennedy assassination. That was more than I was willing to pay, but once the price came down to $14.99, considerably lower than the hardcover, I grabbed it. It’s now back up to $16.99. My reasoning was simple: I wanted to read it. I wanted to read it THAT SECOND. I wanted to read it at the lowest available price and without having to leave my house or wait for a delivery.

What I don’t get, however, is who, under normal circumstances buys hardcover fiction when less expensive e-books are available?

I took a quick look at the Publisher’s Weekly hardcover bestseller list. The first 17 books listed were mostly mysteries, thrillers, or fantasies, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, even the very late Michael Crichton was represented. General fiction as represented by Nicholas Sparks came in at number seven and Janet Evonovich at number 9. It’s safe to say that none of the books represented would be considered literary fiction or serious fiction. So is it all people who simply can’t wait to read the next one by _______? Or do people prefer to read hardcovers because they think they are more “classy”? What happens to these books once they are read? Are they resold? Given away? Placed proudly on bookshelves for years to come?

I’m imagining that’s it’s an older demographic, but then I wonder who precisely. Kindle early adapters skewed old, and the main selling point for the “traditional” non-backlit e-readers was that they read like print, not a computer screen, which appeals to people who grew up reading print. Given that the price of e-reading devices has come down and that e-book prices remain below hardcover prices, it would seem likely that more traditional hardcover buyers will switch to ebooks. I’d like to know why they haven’t made the switch already. I don’t know what the market researchers have uncovered but my guesses would be (1) they don’t like “e” anything and would prefer to just read their books (2) they like the feeling of “ownership” they get from print books, and on some basic level you don’t “own” your e-books no matter what Toni Morrison says, (3) while they might consider price, they also take into account “sharability”. They always pass the book along and then discuss it with at least one other person, and so far e-books with DRM don’t provide a good system for doing that.

So here are my prognostications on book formats and pricing:

DRM will continue to have a negative impact on e-book sales since it’s still much easier to share your DTBs, and even circulate them within your family or non-virtual social network. While having all your books in a “cloud” somewhere may be great insurance in case your devices are stolen or destroyed, there’s something off-putting about a company like Amazon controlling your cloud. It’s not irrational for consumers to be concerned, not just about sharing, but that someday Amazon (or a competitor) will simply scoop up your “books” or impose a new rule: “Henceforth, you will pay to us the sum of $100 a month for “storage” or we will hold captive and eventually destroy your entire library.”

Possibly Amazon’s hedge against this is that we are moving toward what AOL founder Steve Case, referred to as a “sharing economy.” While entrepreneurs like Case, believe that younger consumers are more interested in “use and experience” then ownership, the model that has made Zip Car profitable, might not work for books. Books have almost always been shared, passed along between friends, stored on shelves where guests were welcome to them. They are available for free at libraries. Like movies, most be people don’t mind sharing, and we may only experience the same book once. Yet unlike movies, people want to “own” their books, and “ownership” seems to add value even though the same book will probably only be “experienced” once by the same consumer, and most books won’t be resold. It’s not that people don’t want to “share” the experience of reading a book; it’s simply that they want to do so without the interference of a big company, or with a big company getting a cut every time they share.

It wouldn’t be against Amazon’s self-interest as a publicly “consumer-oriented” company to create a different system. They could probably even figure out a way to make money from it. How’s this: Instead of a virtual lending system that is amazingly complex and restricted, why not a DRM that sells you a license that still can’t be copied, but can be removed from the “cloud” and lent a limited number of times before it self-destructs?

Right now Amazon “storage” is free because this sells more books. People can buy ebooks and read them with the kindle app whether they own a Kindle or not. That would still be the case. The difference would be that people could remove books from this “virtual” library without having to have Mother’s permission to do so.

If you could, in fact, actually “buy” your download, then Amazon could, without raising too big a ruckus, actually charge a storage fee. They might offer different pricing schemes for this — book recovery (in case of device loss or damage) for any ebook purchased through Amazon and not purposely removed from the cloud by the consumer, could remain free, but the ability to read books on multiple devices could have a fee that could rise with the number of devices.

Like the current used book market it wouldn’t be so great for publishers or authors, but consumers would love it. Let’s say you limited a book to five moves before it self-destructed. That would be pretty similar to what happens when you loan someone a book and they loan it to someone who loans it to someone. While that might lead to some online swapping systems that would cut into profits, it could also work out for sellers and publishers. The “books” themselves would be more valuable (and Amazon could charge more) because they could be loaned or resold, and there’d be no danger of Amazon coming to reclaim them. Amazon could as it does now, get a cut on resales or become a direct seller.

Just as there are now different formats for print books with different pricing — hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, there could be different e-formats as well — a “first run” that comes at a higher price with bonus features (as was tried it with 11/22/63), a lower-priced version that comes out later without the bonus, and a third run, equivalent to “mass market” that’s considerably cheaper but maybe with a more limited number of loans or no free storage.

Granted, the Internet makes a lot of things easy, and it might be very easy to set up a “used e-book” website and offer people money to sell e-books that still had loans (just as it’s almost as easy now to became an online used book seller). But how much would that actually cut into sales given that “used” e-books would have fewer if any “loans” available and couldn’t be stored free or used on multiple devices? Amazon currently makes a large profit selling used print books, and could continue the trade with e-books. Publishers and authors could demand something they don’t currently have with print — resale rights and restrictions.

In short, it could be done in a way where almost everyone wins, except of course brick and mortar bookstores. I have also ideas about that, but I’ll save them for another post.