Elliott Hall's Blog, page 3

Falling through the genre cracks

The Guardian has an article today by David Barnett about the mixing of crime with other genres. A comment by Stuart MacBride gave me deja vu all over again:

“Halfhead is what I like to call a near-future thriller. Why? Well because there’s a weird thing that happens with crime fiction … If you write a kidnap story set in ancient Rome, it’s historical crime fiction. If you write a murder set in Elizabethan England, it’s historical crime fiction. If you write a bank robbery in the Victorian era: historical crime fiction. WWII serial killer: historical crime fiction. Write a sex offender case set now, it’s crime fiction. Set the same crime 20 years into the future and suddenly it’s SCIENCE FICTION!!! RUN AWAY!!! And a lot of readers won’t even try it. There’s something about a book set in the future that makes them think of aliens, space ships, and pasty teenagers living in their parents’ basements…

That is exactly what happened to the Strange Trilogy. The trilogy was never meant to be science fiction. It is the chronicle of a society losing its mind, told through the point of view of a detective on the sharp end of its collapse. All of the technology in the books is around today, and most of it has been around for a while. I am deliberately vague about exactly how far in the future it is, but a rough comparison would be someone from the mid-nineties looking at today. The changes in technology, like smartphones, pale in comparison to the social changes wrought by 9/11 and the War on Terror.

Yet, as MacBride says above, as soon as people hear ‘future’ they think robots and spaceships. Booksellers now sell things in hyper-specific niches, so my near-future noir, rather than drawing strength by straddling genres, ended up being unloved by all of them.

This is not a problem with readers — the examples of crossover success cited in the article like Mieville’s City and the City show that — or even narrow-minded marketers, though there is some blame there. The real problem is expectation. That is what fills people’s mind with death-rays when they see future. So, even though the trilogy was written in a noir style, and the First Stone especially is crime (The Rapture and Children’s Crusade are closer to MacBride’s “near-future thriller”) it probably would have been easier to market it as science fiction, even though there’s barely a lick of science in it.

Mieville was an established SF writer when wrote City, the same way MacBride was an established thriller writer before he tried to cross over. They both had readers that trusted them to pull them out of their genre comfort zones. For the same reason, no one calls The Handmaid’s Tale or Brave New World science fiction, though both are concerned with the impact of technology on human civilisation. Huxley and Atwood are literary writers, therefore they write literary fiction, futuristic scenarios and fantastic machines notwithstanding.

The Fall

Army vet turned private eye, Felix Strange is working the mean streets of New York, desperately trying to earn enough to fund the black-market drugs he needs to stay alive. In a newly fundamentalist America governed by Christian extremists where women’s bodies are no longer their own, taking on the case of a young girl indicted for murder after a misscarriage is reckless. But not even Strange can imagine that this is just the beginning…

I wrote The Fall so I could put Felix Strange on a smaller scale, before The First Stone. The Strange of this story is just trying to get from one day to the next, and thinks he’s only interested in making a living and staying alive. If he really was committed to those two goals, he wouldn’t help a girl accused of murder after she fell down the stairs and miscarried, especially since the father was the son of a prominent government official. Sooner or later, Strange’s big mouth, hatred of authority and general bloody-mindedness is going to get him into serious trouble with the brutal, humourless zealots running the government.

Then a prominent radio minister is murdered in New York, the religious police come calling, and his reckoning with the Elders and his own past begins.

The Care Home for Manic Pixie Dream Girls

A hat tip to the Onion AV Club(which also has an explanation of the scourge of MPDG should you need it).

How much should a book cost? Cont’d

After writing yesterday’s post, I cam across this Slate article calling out what it sees as the real villain in the DOJ v. Apple lawsuit:

Their supposed crime? To do what is most normal in any real market: insist on the right to price your own product.

Now this vital marketplace is, for all intents, under the sway of a single boss. One that has a direct interest in stripping capital from publishers. One that has a direct interest in gouging all writers who must ride its rails. One that has a direct interest in suppressing any work of reporting that questions its power, or for that matter the political economic regime that enabled such concentration of power. One that is swiftly capturing direct control over much of the rest of the U.S. economy as well.

Why is it monopolistic for six companies together with Apple to set prices, while the single company which dominates eBooks, Amazon, determine the price is fine? I have no illusions about the benevolence of Apple: were it in a dominant position, it would have as much incentive to screw over writers and publishers as Amazon does now. The structure of the agency model makes it harder for them to cudgel suppliers the way Amazon (and for that matter, the big supermarkets) currently do, but Apple has already shown a willingness to ban content it finds objectionable, and considers it a public service.

The real problem is that the eBook market is immature, and like all new markets is vulnerable to domination by the early entrants. The same thing happened in computers, phones, railways, and oil, to name but a few examples. Markets do not work without competition; they become an excuse for the dominant player to extract tribute from everyone else. That was the point of anti-trust laws in the first place, yet this suit will end up making the situation even worse.

How much should a book cost?

The lawsuit by the US Department of Justice against Apple hangs over the London Book Fair that’s been going on this week. It alleges that Apple conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices by switching from wholesale – which Amazon used, where they sell the book to a retailer at a fixed price and the retailer decides how much it costs to the reader – to the agency model, where the publishers set a price and Apple just takes a cut. When the publishers switched over, eBooks immediately jumped in price, from Kindles £9.99 to something closer to physical hardbacks. This fact is one of the reason behind the lawsuit, and I think a lot of ordinary readers would see it as evidence of collusion. Without all the cost of printing, shipping and warehousing, shouldn’t eBooks be a lot cheaper that physical ones?

That whole idea is based on the mistaken assumption that the physical book is the expensive part. I thought that myself before I was published and began to look into it. Actually the cost of print and warehousing is only about a tenth to a third of a book’s price, depending on who you talk to. By far the biggest expense is paying people to sift through the slush pile, help an author you find there edit their work, and then pay some other people to market it. All of these costs are hidden or unknown to the reader. My books went through my agent, my editor at John Murray, then a copy editor, then a proofer, each draft coming back to me for more revision. I am grateful to all of them, because I know their work made my novels better. The fact that a book is electronically published or printed doesn’t change the need for quality control.

Let’s go back to the price difference that resulted between Amazon and Apple: Was $9.99 the ‘true’ price of an eBook, and the increase pure collusion gravy? Actually publishers were selling the eBooks to Amazon for more than that, and it was selling them to us at a loss to gain market share for the Kindle. Once it had achieved its goal, Amazon would have a captive market and no longer feel the need to take a hit on eBooks. In the meantime it was pushing all publishers for deeper and deeper discounts, to in essence make publishers (and me) pay for the cost of increasing Kindle market share. This fact was as hidden to the consumer as the cost of editing. All they knew was that eBooks cost £9.99, and then they didn’t.

This problem is all over the wider economy. Over the past 15-20 years, we have become habituated to think things are cheaper than they are, with loss-leader specials and fast fashion cheapened by currency manipulation, food and especially meat massively subsidised by government assistance to farmers, to name a few examples. Our idea of the value of things has been completely warped by forces we can’t see or control. Our monkey brains still store value in physical objects, not ideas. So if we are paying that high a price for an eBook, we feel robbed, because we are getting nothing to hold and touch for our money.

So how much should books cost? I think we haven’t decided yet. The era of self-publishing will bring those hidden editorial costs out into the open, by showing what a book can look like without them. If people are happy with the 99p self published eBooks, then that is how much they will cost. I personally am happy to pay more for a book that has been edited, — I still think a £7.99 paperback is great value considering how many hours of enjoyment I will get out of it. We’re going to see how many other people hold the same opinion.

Good Citizens Have Nothing to Hide, Great Canadian Hypocrites Edition

Not content to watch the UK and US try to pass ridiculous controls on the internet, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews tabled a Canuck version called Bill C-30, The Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. It is as clumsy and ham-handed as the title suggests, where once again a government is trying to force the complete reworking of the internet to fit their political interests (or those of their donors.) Vic Toews has helpfully suggested that those who oppose the bill are basically standing with child pornographers, and attracted much-deserved ire from the internet and Anonymous, a group you really do not want to piss off. In retaliation for the bill, and his threats and hypocritical personal life, while he was campaigning on a family values platform.

Another family values liar is no big news, but I think Toews has managed to turn himself into a perfect illustration of the inherent bullshit of 'good citizens have nothing to hide' that always crops up whenever people talk about regulating the internet. (Toews' braindead comment about child pornographers immediately reminded of odious tabloid journalist Paul McMullan who testified that 'privacy is for paedos' at the Leveson Inquiry.) What Anonymous is doing to Toews is what Toews wants to do to the entire Canadian public. As they say in the video, we cannot allow privacy to become a two-tier system.

Charlie Brooker, the Sun and witchunts

The fact that some Sun reporters might user the human rights act makes the above all the sweeter.

The First Stone, and when political parties break bad

Paul Krugman describes the scenario for The First Stone without knowing it:

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

Marcus Thorpe would be giving ass loads of money to one of Mitt Romney's superPACs, and Santorum is about as close to an Elder-approved presidential candidate. His supporters wouldn't forget all that money Thorpe put behind the godless (at least to them, he is Mormon) candidate.

The question is just how much power the crazies have. They've been making a lot of noise, and doing awful things at the state level, but without the cash they can't do anything federal.

It isn't quite the inter-party war that plays out in The First Stone, but it's a lost closer than I ever expected to see.

The ‘delight and prey of Wall Street’

In that New York Magazine article I talked about yesterday, I forgot to add this great quotation from a hedge fund manager:

“We used to rely on the public making dumb investing decisions,” one well-known Manhattan hedge-fund manager told me. “but with the advent of the public leaving the market, it’s just hedge funds trading against hedge funds. At the end of the day, it’s a zero-sum game.” Based on these numbers—too many funds with fewer dollars chasing too few trades—many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the past year and a half.

That is why John Francis Adams, almost 150 years ago, called the general public “the delight and prey of Wall Street.” Not much has changed.

The 'delight and prey of Wall Street'

In that New York Magazine article I talked about yesterday, I forgot to add this great quotation from a hedge fund manager:

"We used to rely on the public making dumb investing decisions," one well-known Manhattan hedge-fund manager told me. "but with the advent of the public leaving the market, it's just hedge funds trading against hedge funds. At the end of the day, it's a zero-sum game." Based on these numbers—too many funds with fewer dollars chasing too few trades—many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the past year and a half.

That is why John Francis Adams, almost 150 years ago, called the general public "the delight and prey of Wall Street." Not much has changed.