Hugh Howey's Blog, page 12

Our Silos Leak

The term “silo” is often used in the business world as a warning against limited pools of knowledge and experience. These limited networks blind us to the rest of an organization or community, and this blindness impedes growth and understanding. When you create a silo, you stake out a very small patch of land and surround it with terribly high walls.

We all live in silos of our own making, not just in business. Who we choose to associate with, who we ignore, where we get our news, the cities we live in, the ways we advertise ourselves with brands (or lack of brands). Silos cut us off and — the thinking goes — they harm us. They create the echo chambers that many today credit for our rampant and angry partisanship.

My thinking on silos has changed over the last few years. One of the things I’m now convinced of is that the tales of our social media echo chambers is wrong. Social media puts us in contact with more people we disagree with, not fewer. Social networks and online news outlets allow those who fundamentally disagree to rub up against one another more often.

This was proven with some clever research, detailed in the amazing book EVERYBODY LIES. By looking at comments on social media feeds and in the comments section on news websites, the authors of the study found clear evidence that engagement with the other side has vastly increased. Liberals spend time watching Fox News and listening to right-leaning talk radio. Conservatives spend time on MSNBC and reading left-leaning newspapers. And then there’s Twitter.

The author of EVERYBODY LIES contrasts our current situation to an age when we were not likely to encounter ideas very dissimilar to our own. An age of living in the same town for most of our lives, around the same friends and family, in a handful of jobs and with very few media feeds. And he then poses a question for further research: Is frequent contact between tribes a source of increased (and violent) tribalism?

The conventional wisdom is that we need more discourse between disagreeing parties (fewer silos), but perhaps that’s wrong. Conventional wisdom often is. The conventional wisdom for years was that the way to overcome psychological trauma was to revisit it over and over. Experts are now warning against this path (which was probably entertaining for psychologists, and lucrative for them, but proved to be ineffective for their patients).

It turns out that revisiting trauma just keeps the wounds fresh and results in a learned feeling of helplessness. Moving on simply means moving on. It doesn’t mean you aren’t dealing with the issues by going to yoga class or the beach instead of reveling in the misery for another hour at $100 a pop. It means that there are healthier things to do with your time that bring actual results for what you hope to achieve.

Rubbing up against those we disagree with, often in counterproductive ways, is like revisiting a small trauma over and over. Wounds become more raw. This seems to be the outcome more often than anyone actually tempering their view or moderating their stance. In fact, having a viewpoint challenged often leads to entrenchment and the rationalization of untenable ideas. To protect our egos, we have to assemble evidence for a hastily-chosen stance (or a stance that comes from peers or family). Gathering this evidence from biased sources simply hardens the stance.

These aren’t mere curiosities — they have real-world impact. I know from experience. About two years ago, I started doing something that has made me happier and more productive: I started blocking people instead of engaging with them. The metric was simple: Was this someone I would walk away from in meat-space, or someone I would launch into a longer conversation with?

That meant it wasn’t always about disagreeing, but more about how people behaved. I’ve blocked quite a few people who gushed in ways that were discomforting. But mostly I find myself blocking people who fetishize guns, who use words like “libtard,” who deny climate change, and the like. And you know what? It works.

It works not only for my quality of life, it highlighted something that we don’t often consider when we argue for more engagement and more tolerance: Our silos leak. You might think it’s harmless to allow toxicity into your walled garden, but those walls are porous. Your friends and family have access to what’s in your walls. When you don’t silence someone who is spreading terribleness, you are giving them a louder voice.

Many websites have wrestled with how to manage toxic commentary. Some have simply turned off the comments sections, because it’s gotten so bad. Others created a system where people can upvote and downvote comments, which leads to accrued reputations. Perhaps the best I’ve seen is one where downvotes decrease the legibility of your comments. They become grayer and grayer until they almost disappear. People seem to think twice about their tone in these environments. And these websites contribute to overall discourse by embracing silence instead of always embracing more discourse.

That’s what blocking people on my social media feeds does: it is a gain through imposed silence. I don’t attack back, or mock, or pile on with others. I just plug a hole in my silo’s wall. Not just for my own health and happiness, but for others’ as well. Now that poisonous voice has a few thousand less vectors to zip along. The toxicity is contained. One less sneeze in the crowded plane.

The experiment is ongoing. At the same time that I’m silencing those whom I wouldn’t engage with on the street, I’m deliberately challenging my views by associating with reasonable and calm people who hold stances different from my own. I’ll read an article about robots not taking our jobs, or listen to a podcast about how technological change is stalling rather than accelerating. This leads me to believe something different over time. I have the room to grow and change because I’m not being attacked, and I’m not attacking. My world becomes both more calm and more diverse.

In my novel WOOL, I wrote a story that has made readers wary of silos, even though these silos were built to contain and to protect. The challenge in the book is to understand the outside world without letting it destroy you. This means deliberate forays and reasoned skepticism. It’s a complex idea, because of all the ways it can go wrong. I’m still not sure what I think. Did the bad guys in WOOL save the world or destroy it? Did the good guys risk far too much in their quest for greater connection? Where is the balance?

I’m still looking for answers. I’m sure most people reading this disagree and think silencing people has no effect or a terrible effect. I welcome that disagreement. If these ideas interest you, I can’t possibly recommend EVERYBODY LIES enough. It’s one of the best books I’ve picked up this year. Give it a read, and when you’re ready for a little more trauma, check out WOOL if you haven’t already. Find a quiet place with a book and enjoy the silence.

The post Our Silos Leak appeared first on The Wayfinder - Hugh C. Howey.

Neo – A Word Processor for Authors

 

I should start by saying that yes, I’ve used the word processor you’re about to mention. I’ve tried them all. From yWriter and Scrivener, to Hank’s Writer and OpenOffice, to FocusWriter and Page 4. I’ve probably tried writing apps that you’ve never heard of. I’m the guy in the middle of the Venn diagram of: “Early Adopters,” “Beta Testers,” “Professional Writers,” and “Software Hoarders.” I won’t get into why each of these applications suffers from a near-fatal flaw, and I don’t mean to upset those who find that one of these programs works for them. I just want to build something better. And when I talk to writers about what I want to build, I hear from the vast majority of them that they hope I succeed. Because they haven’t found a writing program they love either.

The second thing I should get out of the way is that I don’t want to build a tool just for my own use. I know very well that there’s no one way to write a novel or a work of non-fiction. And maybe it’s hubris to think that my writing application would be better for most authors than what’s out there. So be it. It takes hubris to want to write a book and think anyone will bother reading it. It’s even worse to write a blog post and think anyone will care. And yet, here I am.

I’m going to lay out the design and features of my perfect word processor program, which I’ve dubbed Neo. I’m in the early stages of looking at consultancies and programming teams to ascertain what it would take to build this. It might be years. I might have to brush up on my programming chops and spend decades doing it myself. It might cost me a huge chunk of change. If it does get built, I hope to make it open source, so we can improve it over time and it can meet the needs of the most number of writers. But it won’t be design-by-committee. Bloat has ruined some of my favorite writing applications.

So let’s talk about Neo.

 

Installing Neo

Neo is going to understand from the beginning that you are an author. You aren’t writing a blog, or a school report, or for a newspaper. You are writing books.

When you first install Neo, it’s going to have two sets of questions for you. The first question will be for your name, address, and pen names. You can leave all of this blank if you want, and your author name will appear as “Anonymous.” The address bit is in case you’re planning to query agents (it’ll appear on your formatted manuscript). The pen name will appear on the title page if you enter one. Again, you can leave it all blank, but entering at least your name will ensure that it shows up in every document with you as the author.

Neo will next ask if you are a pantser or a plotter (and the program will give a brief description of the difference if you aren’t sure). Don’t worry, you can change your preference at any time and for each WIP. This just changes how Neo opens new documents for you. And also don’t worry about Neo being convoluted or confusing to the user. Once Neo has your name and writing style, it’s done with the questions.

 

Using Neo

Neo is going to be kept as small as possible, so that it’s fast and can run directly from a single executable. This means Neo can live on a USB stick dangling from your keychain. Plug Neo into any computer, and start writing. Write at the library, on break at work, from a friend’s computer, from a school computer, from your desktop or laptop. You can also leave the executable on a single machine if you don’t want to go the USB route. Part of the power of Neo is that you can have your WIPs (works in progress) wherever you are. There’s no excuse not to be writing.

However you run Neo (from your laptop or a USB stick), you can password protect the program so only you can open it. Your documents can be encrypted as well. Personally, I prefer things to just open quickly and won’t use the password features, but I understand they’ll be important to many users, so the option will be included.

Cloud saves and syncing will also be incorporated. Your WIPs will stay up-to-date, and you won’t lose your work.

The last thing Neo will do when you install the program is ask if you want to import any of your current WIPs. If you elect to do so, you will be given a standard file dialog. Select Word documents, .epubs, .mobis, .txts, .rtfs, and Neo will convert them and add them to your bookshelf. Speaking of which…

 

Opening Neo

When you open Neo for the first time, you will be greeted by an empty bookshelf. Eventually, this bookshelf will be full of your published masterpieces, rough drafts, book ideas, outlines, submitted manuscripts, and so on. For now, there’s just a blank white page in the upper left. A single click of this blank page will open your first WIP.

If you imported some WIPs, your bookshelf will already be populated. Take some time and rearrange your bookshelf by dragging the files around however you like. If you pulled in .mobi or .epub files, Neo will assume these are published works. The cover art will display in thumbnail, rather than a white document. Other works will just show the title and author name on the cover. Feel free to add cover art whenever you like. I find that I bend to the task of writing when I have cover art in place. It’s already a book in my mind, ready to be filled with words.

If you’ve set word count estimates for your works, a subtle progress bar at the bottom will show how far along you are. You can add as many shelves to your bookshelf as you like and scroll up and down to see them all. Each shelf can be labeled. You might have a shelf for each of your romance series. Or a shelf of outlines and book ideas, another shelf for WIPs you hope to return to, a shelf for manuscripts currently on submission to agents. However you organize your bookshelf is up to you.

You can also have multiple instances of works, and they’ll stay synced together. Maybe my novel SAND is on my “Published Works” shelf and also on my “SAND Series” shelf. This allows you to place several works on the top shelf so you can keep working on them, without having to remove them from where they need to be to stay organized. If you’re like me, you have dozens of Word docs scattered on your hard drive – works in progress, story ideas, published works – and finding them is a chore. Neo understands that you are dedicated to your writing and that you will generate dozens of WIPs, outlines, and book ideas over many years of writing. As you expand your library, you’ll find Neo is ready.

 

Your WIPs

Most of your time will be spent in your WIP, getting awesome writing done. Here’s where most writing programs fail, because they make distraction-free writing seem like plan B. Like an option you need to dig around in menus to turn on and off. Neo is built from the ground up for distraction-free writing, where options only intrude when you need them.

The best writing application I ever used was an old version of Pages, back before Apple ruined the program. In full-screen mode, you had a white document with black borders on either side. At the bottom, the only things visible were the current page number and the total document word count. That was it. You didn’t even have your toolbar and start menu down there (or Apple Dock). Instead, your writing environment lived on its own screen. A three-finger swipe was required to move you back to the rest of your computer. When you were in writing mode, the other things your computer could do simply disappeared.

This is what Neo will look like while writing:

If you mouse over to the left, you’ll get a navigation pane. This will show thumbnails of each page of your book. The first page of new chapters will have a large chapter numbers on them. If you prefer to navigate by chapter, there’s a simple slider button to switch back and forth. This is to give you a general idea:

(Please note that I’m relegated to Microsoft Paint for this. The red stripe on one of the pages shows a note that needs to be addressed. More about these later.)

If you mouse over to the right, you’ll see comments and notes. You can drop these in yourself, or they might be part of the markup and track changes if you’ve gotten a work back from your editor. There’s a button here to “stick” this side open while working on revisions.

If you mouse down to the bottom, you’ll find tabs. Yes, TABS! Gone are the days of having a separate document full of notes, or a separate outline. My favorite tab here is the “Darlings” tab, which is always to the far right. This is a trashcan of sorts, but one that saves your trash. Any paragraph that’s gumming up the works, but you can’t delete because we’re writers and we fear that the last sentence we wrote will be the last sentence we EVER write, you can drag into the Darlings tab, and it’ll be saved while getting out of the way of your WIP. More on the Darlings tab later.

You can rename the tabs if you like, but one is by default called Notes and the other is Outline. If you change the names of these tabs in several documents, Neo will note this and change the default in future documents, so you don’t have to keep doing it (a simple thing to program that will make it feel like Neo is listening and learning from you).

On the bottom, you can also click the page number to cycle it through chapter number if you like. And you can click the total word count to see instead the chapter word count. Very similar to the reading interface on the Kindle. Options without the clutter.

The bottom of the document is also where you’ll find productivity prompts, which we’ll get to later.

And at the top, you’ll have your File menu and some basic formatting options. Formatting will be kept to a minimum in Neo. There won’t be lots of “styles” to choose from, and only a few fonts installed by default. Most of the formatting will be doable with a simple right-click from within the writing pane, without having to mouse up at all. Highlight a paragraph and right click to see centering options, bold, italics, and a few others. Neo knows you’re writing a book, not a presentation for work. The cool formatting stuff is there, but most of it is automatic. Let’s discuss some of that…

 

Formats and Formatting

Neo is biased towards .mobi and .epub files, because it knows that most books are now being sold in digital form than anyhow else. It will also output to PDF, .doc, .txt. .rtf. One neat feature is that you can output to “manuscript,” and Neo will change your font to Times New Roman, doublespace the entire document, unjustify the margins, include your name and address in the top corner, and attach any cover letters or query letters you might have included in the WIP as tabs.

The main focus, however, is perfect ebook files. Complying with Amazon’s standards will be a huge goal, as well as keeping up with them as they change. That means TOCs are in the right place. It means cover art is the right resolution and size. It also means a place to enter metadata once your work is ready to be published (and Neo will walk you through creating this metadata, and remember your choices so it gets easier and quicker over time).

Some of the best formatting magic happens in Neo while you’re writing. When you open a new document, Neo will already have a title page in place, with your author name and “Untitled” highlighted. Type a new title or leave it untitled for now. If you have a subtitle in mind, there’s a place for that (maybe this is part of a series, which Neo is also looking for).

When you hit Enter, Neo will create a new chapter, number it for you, and give you a cursor. Start typing, and you’ll notice that Neo automatically makes the first paragraph non-indented with a large drop-cap for the first letter. This is to remind you that you’re writing an awesome book that people are going to love. And as a visual cue for the starts of chapters. This formatting will be carried into the ebook files and PDFs if you so choose.

Neo also keeps up with your chapter numbers. Want to insert a new chapter in the middle of your WIP? Neo will auto-update all the other chapter numbers. A quick hotkey creates a new chapter, so no need to go to the file menu and choose Insert > Page Break, then type a chapter number and center this and make the font bigger, and then go down and left-justify the first sentence, etc. Just Alt-C and start typing the next scene.

One thing you will notice when it comes to formatting is what Neo doesn’t do. It doesn’t nag you for perfection in your rough draft. Misspelled words will not be underlined. You’re writing a historical novel or an urban fantasy story – you know this made-up word is made up, thank you very much. The last thing your creative brain needs is a klaxon shouting WRONG while you’re in the middle of a creative thought. Eventually, as you use Neo, you’ll stop thinking about spelling and typos. This will push your creativity to the next level. You can always step through a spell check any time you like. But not while you’re writing. (Word just gave me a green squiggly for that last sentence fragment. Neo would know not to bother.)

 

End Matter

This feature is worth pointing out in its own section. In Neo, you can create a Global End Matter file. This is the material that will go in the end of your digital ebook editions. It should have links to social media feeds, links to other works you’ve written, a brief bio, an author website link, and so on. By creating a single end matter file, Neo will make sure all your WIPs are up to date. When you publish a new ebook, Neo will ask if you want to add this to your end matter. It will then update the end matter of all your other ebooks, create new .mobi and .epub files, and remind you to republish them. Professional authors know what a huge deal this is and how many more readers it will lead to. Neo will also be smart enough to keep multiple editions of .epub files for different retailers, so Apple links are in the Apple ebook.

You can also create per-document and per-series end matter. And create a new end matter file for each pen name if you like (so racy stuff isn’t linked to from the tame, or to tailor your message to a series’ audience, say). Of course, you can ignore the end matter feature entirely and publish your works without any end matter at all. This stuff may sound confusing to the new writer, but it is very important and will save metric shit-tons of time compared to doing it all manually with every file (not to mention updating older files).

 

Outlines

If you told Neo that you’re a plotter, not a pantser, you’ll have seen something different when you open a new document for the first time. Neo will have started you in the outline tab. You’ll still name your document, but you won’t have a separate title page. Instead, the title will be at the top of a waiting outline. Here, you type a short description for each chapter (or leave it as a number if you like). And then you type a scene list, or a description of what happens in each chapter. The TAB key will move you in and out of outline levels, and the ENTER key will move you to the next line.

When you move to the writing tab at the bottom of the document, you’ll find your description of that chapter and your scene list in the notes and comments pane on the right. The default for you plotters will be for this pane to be stickied open, but you can hide it if you like. On the left, the navigation page will show your outline and where you are in the outline. You can revert back to the page/chapter navigation panel as well. Each of your WIPs can be written in either style. Pantsers can try plotting and vice versa. If you start your document in the pants mode, you’ll find the outline tab is waiting for you at the bottom, a great place to add notes and to-do items. When you open it, you’ll find yourself in the same place of the outline that you just left from the writing pane. Again, all of this is optional.

 

Productivity Features

Neo will come with some cool productivity features. They will be simple to set up, not things that cause you to spend more time fiddling with the program rather than writing (as if writers were fond of procrastinating!)

The bottom of the screen will house these productivity features, right below the tabs. Here, you can enter your guess for the total word count of the project (If you are new to writing, you’ll be surprised at how good you get at estimating the final word count of your projects). You can also enter your daily word count goal. Click on these, and Neo will bring up graphs of your progress, very similar to NaNoWriMo’s excellent graphs.

You can also turn email reminders on or off. Neo will email you if you start missing your goals, and these goals and thresholds can be changed with sliders from the top menu bar. I’d love to see Neo include the last few sentences you wrote in your WIP in its email, as a nudge forward.

You can set session goals as well, with internet blocking. Tell Neo you want to write 500 words or for 1 hour, and it will disable your internet adapter and start counting. Neo will also keep track of how many total hours you’ve spent in your documents. And it’ll show you a “Total Plus” word count. This is the number of words including the words you’ve deleted along the way, plus the words written in notes and outlines. It gives you a fairer sense of how much work you’ve put into what ended up being a short story.

You can use Neo without delving into the productivity features. You don’t even need to use the tabs, which are at the bottom as well. But they’re there if you need them, and out of the way if you don’t. I see the Darlings tab as an extension of these productivity items. Often, a well-written but unneeded paragraph or scene keeps us from moving forward in our WIP. We can’t delete it, but it’s holding us back. Productivity plummets.

All you have to do in Neo is highlight the chapter or scene and drag it toward the bottom of the screen. The tabs will appear. Drop the selection on the “Darlings” tab, and those words will be saved in case you need them again. The psychological impact of this cannot be overstated. Writing continues with no remorse for what’s lost. And Neo remembers where the darlings came from if you want to restore them at any time. You can even publish a “Director’s Cut” version of the original for your diehard fans to check out. (This can include the outline and notes tabs, a behind-the-scenes version for those who will enjoy this).

The Notes tab is another productivity tool that will come in handy. How many times have you written notes right in the WIP? Now you can highlight those and drag them to the Notes tab. It remembers where you wrote the note, in case it’s scene-specific. More ways to simply highlight, drag, move on, and keep writing.

 

Other Features

A couple of features for the in-the-writing mode. I hate having to stop writing to go into a file menu on a program, because it breaks the flow and makes me think about checking my email or any other number of things that don’t include writing. The simple em dash is an example. Unless you set up a macro, Word and some other programs don’t have easy access to this necessary literary tool. Neo has preset macros for the em dash, ellipses (which are a single unit of three periods, rather than three actual periods, which keeps them from being split up in pagination), and other useful symbols. These are easily accessed in the “Symbols” menu option, with the shortcuts for each shown right beside them.

Another thing that breaks my flow is when I need a placeholder for something to research or revisit later. I often find I need to mark a place to come back to, rather than jump onto Chrome to look something up, or pause to think of a new character’s name. I usually type “XXX” and remember to search for this latter. But in Neo, I’ll simply Alt-X and move on. Neo will insert a question mark and create a sticky note. The default will be to keep typing and not even fill out the note, but you can click over and do this in the right hand pane if you like. The point is to keep writing but have reminders to come back to these places that need more time, thought, or an internet break.

Dream additions to Neo that I am still wrapping my brain around include ways of keeping up with which works have been submitted for publication where. Maybe you have manuscripts out to agents, and you want to keep up with who has a copy and nudge them at a certain auto-preset date. (There are great standalone apps for this, but I would want to integrate it. Even if you are primarily self-published, you can keep up with which anthologies a short work is in, which books are in which boxsets, which short works are submitted to Lightspeed or literary journals and prizes, what books are in KU and which ones are published more widely).

Another dream addition would be to convince Amazon to allow KDP integration, so Neo can publish directly to your dashboard; keep up with sales, page reads, earnings, free copies given away; update end matter with a single click; and make typo fixes a cinch. Even better would be for all online retailers to provide an API for this or standardize the process, but now I’m beyond dream territory. Sadly, this will never happen.

 

Summary

That’s Neo in a nutshell. I know there are writing tools made just for authors. There are even writing tools made by authors (some really good ones). What sets Neo apart is the sum of its features. Less bloat than general purpose writing applications, less confusing than Scrivener, more useful than typewriter apps, and much more geared for ebook creation and publication. But also ready for querying agents and PDF / print-on-demand as well. Neo will even keep up with the draft you sent to ACX for the audio edition, so you can know how it differs from later, updated ebook editions.

Neo will be designed from the ground up to be portable, so you can take it everywhere. It’s secure and synced, so you don’t lose files or give away access to them. It organizes works on more than name and date last opened, so now you can organize by genre, series, length, publican plans, etc. Your files can sit on several such bookshelves without making undue copies. And when you’re in Neo, the focus is on writing. Not on formatting.

Ideally, Neo will be open sourced and free to use. I’m exploring any and all options. Maybe something branded for NaNoWriMo, or Goodreads, an ebook retailer, or a writing website. If you have thoughts, leave a comment below. I’m currently talking with programmers and consultants on how to get this done. Might be a decade before anything comes to light, so don’t hold your breath. But I’m willing to invest the time and money to make this a reality.

 

 

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Dispatches from Silo 18

When I wrote about the silos in WOOL, one of the ideas I wanted to capture is the insanity of walling ourselves off from each other, and all the trillions we spend defending from and attacking one another, when we’re all in the same green-and-blue space-boat. Viewed from afar, it’s absolutely bonkers. Yet we persist.

Travel can be antidote to bigotry. I recently spent over a month in Cuba, which is the most silo-like country I’ve ever visited. Not much has changed in the 16 years between my visits. The land and its people are still blindingly beautiful, and still suffering from political insanity. Most of that insanity comes from its own government, and a system that simply does not work. An American embargo that serves no obvious purpose other than cruelty certainly doesn’t help. It’s one of the most confusing and conflicting places I’ve ever been. The more time I spent there, the more thousands of kilometers I drove, the more cities I visited and people I met, the more my opinions shifted and convictions eroded. One observation is this: A handful of individuals, rallying around a single charismatic leader, can derail the course of a country’s history and lead millions to shocking deprivations.

A study of history should make this clear without having to buy a plane ticket or set sail. And yet walking around inside of it, talking to people who had meals of sugar water as kids, who now call a decade of starvation “The Special Time,” bangs this truth home with a sledgehammer. More startling is the impassioned defense of Fidel in a country he helped make so poor. I watched so many people bawl in the streets during his wake and the procession of his remains. To many, their captive symbolized freedom. And the Orwellian way in which many in Cuba are convinced that they can’t go abroad due to the restrictions of other countries is mind-bending. I even traveled with Americans who took these excuses at face value and thought Cubans were free to leave at any time, if only these foreign governments would allow them.

The ingenuity and artistry being lost to the world is a travesty, but that’s not just Cuba. In Panama I encountered a young boy who moved and leapt like a natural dancer, who had a physical creativity and self-awareness that made me wonder if Gene Kelly had been reincarnated. I look at the snapshots I took of this kid in flight, and I can’t help but wonder if all that soulful beauty will end up trapped in an old man who never knew an outlet for some pent-up talent. The free flow of talent and ideas is what makes humanity so amazing. This is why walls and silos are so infuriating.

There’s another lesson here in Panama, one seemingly not passed on and hardly learned from. This canal right outside my window that cuts through two continents is an engineering marvel, but also a political experiment. Panama City rises up along the shores of the Pacific with gleaming towers and a mighty bustle. The people here have profited from what someone built and gave away. And a powerful pride of ownership oozes out of taxi drivers, workers, people on the streets. My novel-writing brain got to thinking about alternate realities. I tried to imagine a world where the United States took all of the unbelievable wealth it generates and used that to go around the world building incredible works of engineering, and then giving them away.

Most of the exodus from Africa right now is being created by drought and global warming, not war. And what war there is, notably in Syria, was created largely by drought. The lack of water and the slow march of the Sahara is forcing an entire people to abandon their homeland. Like most refugees everywhere in the world, the decision to leave is not made with pure joy. Most would stay, if only opportunities existed where they happened to be born. It’s often a choice between home and health, which is not a choice taken lightly. This is something I can’t help but think is tragically true: The world could have spent far less money building desalination plants and pipelines than they’ve spent on bombs, and Africa would be growing green rather than seeping red.

Really imagine for a moment the absurdity of this: We could spend a few hundred billion dollars on a dozen desalination plants, pipe that water to the parched countries of Africa, which are largely drying out because of carbon-fueled progress made elsewhere, and the people of Africa would have more crops, increased wealth, greater options, all of which lead to less violence, less emigration, lower population growth, and the greater importation of foreign goods and services. The United States could spend less money building things than it does blowing up things, and at the end of the ordeal, you have something functional standing there, rather than craters and suffering.

It’s so much more difficult to be generous rather than angry and hateful. One of the humans I admire most in the annals of history died trying to send this message (it’s sad that most who try to send this message suffer from its offering). Hanging from the cross, Jesus is said to have uttered forgiveness for those who crucified him. He washed the feet of prostitutes and embraced lepers. Imagine the courage not of men with rifles, but women with rivet guns. I know it sounds absurd. But if we lived in that world, imagine if someone suggested that instead of enriching our neighbors and building things, we spend ten times as much money making bombs and dropping them on people’s heads. Those people would also sound insane, and I think more rightfully than what I’m suggesting.

Conspiracy theorists say the war machine is all about profit motive, which is nonsense. There’s profit to be made building solar power plants and smart energy grids and desalination plants. There are all kinds of profits being made here in Panama from a path cut between two seas. The hangup is not capitalism, which can work wonders to improve our quality of life. The hangup is our emotions, which cultivate fear and aggression and short-term thinking, making it impossible to see how investing in generosity pays ultimate dividends.

Imagine a world where the United States goes around building works of infrastructure overseas, then leaving those works in the care of their new owners. An army of orange-vested builders moves on to the next project. Now imagine in that world that there are people who hate us for these works, who bomb us, who protest us. What are they bombing and protesting? How do they recruit others for their brutality? What speeches do they give? How many would listen?

China is investing heavily in African infrastructure. They are building trains and power plants and other utilities. These are being built at a great cost to the African countries, which are incurring massive debts, so it’s not quite the build-and-leave strategy that I would love to see, but it’s better than what the United States and Russia are doing in Africa right now. Think of the ties being built between China and Africa through these projects. How many Africans are going to grow up riding Chinese-built trains with an appreciation and admiration for Chinese ingenuity and technology? How many are going to want to go to university in China? Open business partnerships in China? How many will look East with a smile, and rightfully so?

We should be competing with China not for the islands of the Pacific but for the hearts of the Africans. For the hearts of all people. Instead we instill them with fear. In many ways, what Obama did during his eight years was more pernicious than the trillion-dollar wars Bush saddled us with. Drones seem humane, because they are meant to be targeted, but they exist everywhere and at all times as specters of death. I’ve read moving accounts from those who live beneath them, who describe the all-pervasive fear of an errant attack. It’s like living with a drunk. You never know when someone who professes to love you will strike you, maybe even fatally this time.

Science fiction is full of laments over the wastefulness of war. Many such books look to the cosmos as a place we should be building bridges. I think we’ve got a perfectly good home right here to concentrate on first. It’s a strange dichotomy of optimism and pessimism to think that we can settle on and terraform Mars, but that we can’t possibly figure out a few degree rise in temperature here. It’s the optimism of science coupled with the pessimism of our relationship with nature. But really, if the science were so easy, we could settle by the millions in Antarctica. And if nature were such a pushover, we’d have toppled her by now.

I think the greater irony is that we’ve allowed our fear of “other” to blind ourselves to how enriching the other truly is. Global wealth shoots up as we include more people in on the process. We treat immigrants as job-stealers, then celebrate in our community at news of another birth. Each person added creates more jobs than they take. An immigrant steals a job no more than a newborn. An even greater infusion of wealth occurs when we move a person from a place of poverty to one of opportunity. A girl who stays at home on the parched farm struggles to bring in apricots. In Silicon Valley or Houston or Boston, she creates an app that increases global productivity, alleviates frustrations and wastefulness, creates jobs and improves life for her family and many others.

This happens. It’s the way it happens. It only speeds up as we lower barriers and tunnel from silo to silo. But trusting in the process, even with centuries of examples, is so much harder than giving into fear, xenophobia, short-term thinking, anger, blame, distrust and all the dark rest. We can see it in our fear over job loss. Entire occupations are being transitioned to automation and software faster than we can relearn and adapt. It’s terrifying. I’ve been inside industries while they were disrupted and my livelihood shaken. Blaming immigrants satisfies that angry id and soothes our hurt egos, but it’s not what’s happening. We know this as surely as we know that bathtubs, ladders, and swimming pools are more dangerous than radicalized Muslims. At the height of the second gulf war, more soldiers were being lost to motorcycles and suicide than to engagement with the enemy. Coal jobs are being lost to the plummeting costs of solar and soaring profits of wind. But where’s our person to blame? To hate?

What exactly is it that we want? If we want to save the lives of soldiers, we will care about motorcycles and depression and PTSD. If we care about job creation, we would care about reeducating disrupted workers and easing transitions. If we care about private wealth, we would concentrate on global wealth. If we care about being safe, we would open borders. If we care about reducing the number of refugees, we would build great works abroad and give them away. If we cared about the survival of our species, we would spend our trillions making the most Earth-like planet we’ve ever known an even better place.

I think we don’t know what we want. And that we spend too little time even contemplating such questions. We just feel, and we lash out, and we spasm. It’s so much easier blowing up at others than it is to build relationships. So much easier to blow up things than to build them. Walls and silos are built one hateful, lazy brick at a time. Toppling them is difficult and comes at too great a cost. So much better if they’re never built at all.

 

 

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Post Election Thoughts

I have the luxury of being a jumble of thoughts today. My gay friends, female friends, Muslim friends, and immigrant friends are a jangle of nerves. I can’t imagine waking up in this country full of fear, but that’s the place in which many find themselves. This feels like a massive step backward for our country, but as a science fiction author full of optimism about the future, I’m going to stick to my naive and positive ways.

First, however, my dire thoughts, so I can end on all my positive notes:

The Supreme Court. The ultimate check and balance in our triumvirate is going to go conservative. I worry about reproductive rights, gay marriage, gun control, and so many more issues where progress has been made (or where we hoped it might be made). My naive optimism tells me that despite this, what we call conservative today would be considered liberal in the past, and that trend will only continue. And the Supreme Court tends to rule according to public will (see gay marriage). So as long as the populace improves, the courts will as well. Only 18% of Americans voted for Trump, and many of those because of distaste for Clinton (who also got 18% of the vote). MOST of Americans support gay marriage. MOST of Americans care about the environment. MOST of Americans want reproductive choice. The court will continue to reflect this.
Free trade. Trade protectionism has been likened to shooting a hole in your own boat hoping to get your rival’s boat to sink faster. I worry about rolling back NAFTA and the death of TPP. One of the reasons net immigration from Mexico has been flat or negative has been the rallying of their economy (a wall will only make it harder for some illegal immigrants to get home!). Cheaper than building a wall is to help job growth south of the border. Guess what? They buy more of our stuff as they develop a middle class. Having a 3rd world country next door is worse than losing some manufacturing jobs.
Foreign perception. Hey UK, you owe us one for making you look good.
Uncivil discourse. Our top spot belongs to someone who has made fun of the disabled, the overweight, the fairer sex, African Americans, and immigrants. This can only embolden others to spread a message of hate. And the other side of the political spectrum will likely return in kind. We need an end to this cycle, and it has to start somewhere. My naive optimistic take is that a Clinton win would have put the onus on conservatives to accept the outcome and dial back the negative rhetoric. It’s not an easy thing to do. I welcome the challenge.

Now for some unwarranted and unbridled positivity:

Progress is going to happen no matter what. It always has, even with some baby steps backward. Take the environment: Solar panel costs are plummeting. Solar is now cheaper to install than any other power source (even without subsidies). The economic advantage means that even Republican governors are green-lighting solar plants purely for financial considerations. Going solar, and adopting electric vehicles, are the surest long term way out of our global warming ways. This will happen even if pipelines are opened and we start to subsidize coal just to win a handful of jobs back. Those job hires will no longer be profitable. Legislation won’t save them or their polluting industry. (I dream of solar panels and robots being manufactured in the rustbelt)
Social progress is going to continue as well, over the long term. The only evidence I have of this is that the trend has been moving in one overall direction for a few thousand years. Future generations tend to be more compassionate and liberal than previous generations. So even the young Trump supporters who rail against Islam don’t justify slavery or say that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. I know that previous sentence sounds ridiculous, but that’s the point. Yesterday’s social movements are today’s satire.
A brief spate of trade tariffs might have benefits in the long term. No trade deals are permanent, nor are free trade deals off the table forever. Everything is negotiable and renegotiable. An end to free trade will help a small segment of the population (mostly wealthy owners of manufacturing concerns here in the States and a handful of low-wage jobs), but the cost is going to be higher prices of imported goods for all citizens. Maybe we need a reminder that this is how trade protectionism works: Every consumer is harmed to protect the interests of a small group of people, who are also consumers, and so are also getting hurt. It could lead to saner policies in the future. Here’s hoping.
There’s no chance in hell of this happening, because the people it targets are the people who would be displaced, but I really like Trump’s call for term limits. Trump won the highest office while spending half as much as his opponent, defying all odds and professional punditry, with an anti-establishment cause that has some planks that might as well be Bernie’s. Maybe this will spur others to run against incumbents in the House and Senate with a primary goal of establishing term limits. I don’t like the analogy of Congress needing a grenade lobbed into their midst, but a flash-bang might not be a bad idea.
Yeah, the rest of the world is laughing at us for putting a Cheeto in the oval office. But Putin might not want to laugh too long. When Trump is sworn in, future Russian hacks are going to be against HIS (Donald Trump’s) country. Right now, those hacks are against the establishment. There are going to be some 3am Tweets that arrive closer to lunchtime in Moscow. The overseas operators who enjoy screwing with us, and are cheering a Trump presidency, are going to have some regrets.
Civil discourse. I was heartened by speeches from Obama, Clinton, and Trump after the election. This is how democracy works: You fight for your candidate, and when you lose, you hope your opponent does well while the other side calls for unity. Country comes before party. This is rarely how it works, of course. Politicians sabotage their country all the time to lay blame and maintain power. But the way to fight this is to lead by example, not counter every ill with more sickness.On Twitter, I joked that my leaving the country for 4 years couldn’t have come at a better time, but that’s actually an unfortunate coincidence. In truth, this is the worst time to be going. Leaving means ceding the country to those who think the past was better than the future. This election would have gone differently were it not for the drain of liberalism out of our small towns and rural America to the universities and vibrant cities where progress is made, but where blue votes cluster uselessly. Just as the rest of the world agonizes over the “brain drain” as their finest students come to our great universities to study (and often stay), we should worry about a drain of liberalism as our most worldly citizens cross borders both state and federal. Maybe it’s time to move back to Arkansas to launch that startup. Or re-friend those we’ve blocked to renew some discourse. Or to just approach those who think hate will make this country great again and offer them a hug in response.

My heart breaks for those who are now fearful of their rights and their safety. My heart also breaks for those who have lost their jobs to technological progress and globalization and who think that immigrants are to blame. We are going through a period of global upheaval, which will all be for the better, but will be painful for many in the short term. Social progress and economic progress are going to come in fits and starts. Things are changing so rapidly that we find ourselves bewildered, lost, and unable to adapt in time. Some can’t adapt to the idea that men and women have fluid genders and differing sexual preferences, and the backlash is awful. Some can’t transition careers as quickly as markets are overthrowing entire industries, and those people deserve our sympathy as well. White men can’t deal with an end to a millennia of power, and this is the last-gasp death-spasm as demographics change forever.

You can’t convince me that 2100 won’t be a better year to be on Earth than 2016. Even as we build levies to keep back the rising sea, we’ll build them together. Even as computers, AIs, and machines take more of our jobs, we’ll transition together. More of our world will thaw, and maybe that won’t be such a bad thing. Perhaps in the future, we’ll be looking at moving to Canada not out of protest, but because of the weather.

Whatever happens, we’re in this together, the entire world, every human being. As I come out of the state of shock from the election results, I find myself wishing Donald Trump well. Despite all the vitriol and all the ways that I disagree with him. Despite the fear his policies place in the hearts of those I love. I hope the weight of the office, and our collective well-wishes, and the awesome strength of our people, make the next four years ones of progress. I care more about this country than I do the letter beside someone’s name, or who wins power in the next election, or who gets credit for our steady march onwards. What I care about is that onwards means upwards.

Now to write some more science fiction. These dystopias don’t create themselves, you know.

 

 

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Imagine Dragons and Beacon 23

The first time I heard the Imagine Dragons song Radioactive, I dreamed of a collaboration. Their hit single came out in 2012, at the same time WOOL was taking off. Every time I heard the song play I imagined the credits to the film rolling while Radioactive blared from theater speakers. It’s a song you sing at the top of your lungs; a song you scream.

The tone is as perfect as the lyrics: a mix of sonorous and sad with hard-hitting and angry. It feels like a revolution song, a desperation song, a song of being hemmed in and breaking out. It’s dystopia and apocalypse, but also a song that makes you feel powerful and full of hope. I’m waking up, I feel it in my bones / Enough to make my system blow…

While I could easily see this on a WOOL motion picture soundtrack one day, what I never imagined in a million years was that our mediums would fuse more directly. When Booktrack reached out and said the band wanted to do an original mix to one of my novels, I fell out of my writing chair. What they’ve come up with is simply astounding.

If you’re not familiar with Booktrack (where have you been?), they’ve taken augmented ebooks in a very cool direction. The idea is to allow authors, musicians, and fans to create audio soundtracks that play while books are being read. Subtle sound effects and mood-inducing tunes dial up the tension, and it all paces itself to how quickly you are reading. I like to adjust the volume right to the point that the music almost disappears into my subconscious. It’s an amazing experience when done right, and Imagine Dragons has knocked it out of the park.

Beacon 23 was the perfect novel for this mash-up. It’s the story of a man alone on the edge of space wrestling with his demons. The tone swings from humorous to sad to tense to romantic to horrific. Imagine Dragons laid down their tracks with new work and sound effects to create an original Booktrack for the text. It has me excited for the new ways we can tell stories and collaborate with other artists. Music used to play an important role in the oral tradition of storytelling. What’s old is new again.

Check out the landing page for the Booktrack edition of Beacon 23, where you can sample a preview for yourself. And I’d love to hear what bands you’d enjoy working with, or what songs have inspired your reading and writing. Do some books and musicians just go together in your head?

Here’s the official press release.

 

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The Greatest Threat

The greatest threat the world faces today is not terrorism, or global warming, or nuclear weapons*. The greatest threat facing us today is income inequality. And it’s easy to fix. We just need the willpower to do so. And we need to convince the very people being screwed to ask it to stop.

This is difficult to do, and it presents a bit of a paradox. Every Sunday, millions of people who don’t have much money send what they can to televangelists who have millions. It’s no coincidence that this is the same demographic that thinks rich people should get more tax breaks. The trickling down is supposed to happen from both the heavens and Wall Street. That it doesn’t does not shake anyone’s faith — the money keeps moving from the impoverished to the scandalously rich.

Whenever I see a paradox in human behavior, I don’t assume it’s faulty wiring; I assume the wires were soldered down in a different time for a different purpose. We overeat because we were made for a time of scarcity and infrequent feasts. When a stash of sugar was found thousands of years ago, it paid to gorge and sock energy away in fat. That same wiring gets us diabetes today. It used to serve us well; it no longer does. This is the very sort of thing I write about at length in my WAYFINDING series. Much of human suffering follows the same pattern.

In my upcoming WAYFINDING entry, I go into detail exactly why I think people vote against their obvious best interests. But here on my blog, I want to concentrate on the financial outcome of our modern economy, why I think it’s going to get worse, and why we need to act on this right now and not a moment later. We are in the same place we were with global warming three decades ago. Most of the damage had been done, but it would’ve been a good time to change course. Now is a good time when it comes to income inequality.

The arguments against redistributing wealth should be familiar to the reader. One is that the poor today have never had it so well, and this is true. Global poverty is plummeting even faster than our most optimistic estimates from just two decades ago. Fewer people live below the subsistence level; women are gaining freedoms around the world by taking more control over their financial well-being; fewer children are being forced to work. The pockets where progress is slowest are coming into stark relief precisely because it’s becoming more rare. All of this should be acknowledged and applauded.

But absolute wealth is not the key to human happiness. Relative wealth is.

There are dozens of game theory experiments which bear this out across cultures and age groups. The concept of fairness is wired into our DNA. Children shown shapes of different colors being unfair to other shapes take sides without prompting. They do the same for puppets acting out various scenarios of ill dealing. And in a classic experiment where two people are presented with a sum of money, and one gets to choose the split while the other gets to take or leave the deal, almost no one gets away with screwing the other party. If the split is too great, the person who can accept refuses, and nobody gets anything. People are willing to harm themselves a little in order to spite someone who is being unfair.

In nature, prey often signal a warning when spotting a predator. This puts the caller in greater jeopardy but saves the flock or herd. Such altruism is often explained by group selection (the individual shares DNA with the rest). But this theory isn’t accepted by all. And there are rewards for those who shirk, just as the group will often punish shirkers when found out. Even in nature, no one likes a freeloader. But you often find animals doing the equivalent of paying too little for a shared pizza, so that even among friends, the till comes up short. Good people often try to do as little good as possible. What’s important for the group is that fairness is maintained by punishing those who attempt to get away with too much. Even if everyone in the tribe is stuffed, if you have one person larding away ten times as much for the lean days, resentment will build. This resentment should not be underestimated. Society is more likely to crumble from this threat within than any threat without.

Think about what money represents for a moment. Money is just a symbol of work someone has performed. It might not be the person holding the money (maybe it was given as a gift or inherited), but when it was originally handed over in a transaction, it was because the person giving it accepted goods or services from the person receiving it. I need my roof fixed. My roofer needs groceries. The grocer’s roof is just fine, but he is having trouble sleeping at night. So I pay the roofer, and he can pay the grocer, who buys one of my books. Now we all sleep well at night.

The most important thing for any economy is circulation. There’s a classic example that bears this out: A college professor has her students dump out their bookbags, purses, and pockets onto their desks, everything except for money. Now the students walk around and see what everyone else has. If they wish, they can trade any of their items for anyone else’s items. Trades invariably happen, and since both parties agree to each trade, both feel that they are getting the better end of the deal (one boy’s trash is another girl’s treasure). At the end of the experiment, the same amount of items are still in the room, and yet everyone feels richer. That’s the beauty of trade. It’s not zero-sum.

This is compounded, of course, when actual things are made from raw materials. That might be programming code from the raw material of intellect and time. Or a network of train tracks built from steel and sweat. The more productive the things we build, the more reward we expect to see for society as a whole (though rarely for those doing the building). There’s a balance to be had, of course. The railroad tycoon is risking his entire fortune to build the rail, all for the hope of great reward. The immigrants dying for peanut pay are escaping terrible conditions at home for the hope of freedom in a democracy. The pay is not equal, but neither is the risk nor capital. Some balance needs to be figured out.

There are those who think the answer is a flat tax, that the wealthy and poor should pay the same rate. As an argument for simplicity, this works. In practice, it would lead to far greater income inequality and more social strife. It seems like a good deal for the wealthy until their country is burning down around them; there are unintended externalities not only to polluting factories but polluting policies. The flat tax is a terrible idea, whatever the revenue generation models tell you, because of the psychological effects of inequality. The game theory results that reveal people are willing to harm themselves in order to bring ruin on the unfair should serve as a warning. A grave warning. Ignore the psychology of human behavior, and you’ve ignored everything that matters when it comes to the economy.

I have changed my mind 180 degrees on this issue. I used to think the wealthy should keep what they make. They earned it. Why should they be punished? And they are job creators. I had all the lines down. But it’s all bullshit.

My instruction began as a yacht captain. I worked for billionaires who had yachts that cost upward of $20,000,000. That’s twenty million. I think typing out all the zeros is useful. I’ve seen owners who use their yachts a few weeks out of the year. Sure, they created jobs for the boat builder, and for the crew on the yacht, but you still had $20,000,000 of people’s time and energy tied up in a big piece of plastic that was barely used. The yachting industry didn’t shake my previous conviction, though. I still saw the 1% as job creators. Just wasteful and largely unhappy ones.

In my next career, I installed high end audio video equipment in the second homes of the very wealthy, and my education continued. Mind you, there was zero envy on my part, just curiosity and bewilderment. I never wanted the things that these people had. My convictions weren’t shaken by comparing my lot to theirs, but by seeing how much capital was being tied up rather than circulated. There was no trickle down. There were giant buckets, puddles, pools, and reservoirs. Lakes, even. And with celebrity rags, the paparazzi, and social media, more and more people could see the inequality building. Societal unrest (even the poison of societal discontent and unhappiness) were the natural result.

What really sealed the deal in my conversion was a story in the newspaper about the modern fine arts trade. Granted, this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back; I was already coming around. Then I read about warehouses full of paintings that no one could see. It turns out that paintings are now an investment commodity. They go for tens of millions, and then are put away in dark rooms to appreciate (all based on speculative bubble-blowing). It’s not the artists’ hard work that I saw wasted here, but rather all the work from all the people who paid a dollar or pennies at a time into the pockets of billionaires. All that pooled money, trickling up from so many consumers, investors, and builders, was ending up in warehouses of art that didn’t even go looked at.

There is a problem when the hours being put in by so many people are ending up in yachts no one is driving, houses no one is living in, and art no one is seeing. The solution to this is very simple, and it would not only fix most of the social unrest (including a lot of race relations), but will also finance the fixing of many of our other major issues. Instead of that money sitting in warehouses full of art, imagine it sitting in a new smart power grid, high speed trains for shorter commutes, higher wages for teachers, or a guaranteed income for every American. There is easily enough wealth for all of this. And no, you are not going to remove incentive if you levy higher taxes on the wealthy.

The impetus for working hard and having more than your neighbors will always be there, as long as some inequality is possible. Inequality in itself is not bad. Trying to remove all of it is a terrible fucking idea, as evidenced by every attempt to do so in human history. You can’t motivate people to work if the level of their hard work is not commensurate with how much they earn. Those who work the hardest and take the most risks should enrich themselves. Those who agree with this need to come around to the idea that there’s a limit to how much this is a good idea. It doesn’t do the wealthy any good for the rest of society to not be able to afford their wares and services. And as the classroom example and the art warehouses show, the key to a healthy economy is for wealth to shuffle around.

The highest federal US tax bracket is currently around $415,000. That’s not nearly high enough. The difference between making $400,000 a year and making $400,000,000 a year is ENORMOUS. An individual making $400,000 a year in New York City is upper middle class. But take 41% of that money in federal taxes, and 6.85% in state, plus all the sales taxes, tolls, gas taxes, etc, and you’re living off less than $200,000 in a city where modest rent can take up a third of that. Compare that to someone making $400,000,000 who is paying the SAME federal rate. That makes absolutely no sense in the world. We need more brackets, and we need a higher rate for the top brackets.

This isn’t about punishment for success, either. The wealthiest are being rewarded the most for the changing economy. The tools being built are benefitting them disproportionately. There are dozens of examples, and they all follow the same trend we see in entertainment (a trend I’ve been on the winning side of myself). It’s a blockbuster model. Working backwards from the present, you go from having a Facebook founder in Mark Zuckerberg who has hundreds of billions, to dozens of media CEOs who have mere billions, to hundreds of local media tycoons who have millions, to tens of thousands of similar niche and local forums and social networks where people were making a solid wage, to salons and bowling alleys where people were congregating and socializing in person.

Hundreds of billions, to billions, to millions, to hundreds of thousands, to a regular wage. That’s what you see when you scrub back through time in just about any industry today.

Work backwards from Amazon, where you have a hundreds-of-billions founder making what used to be mere billions by CEOs from a dozen mega retailers, to millions from those who owned regional chains, to hundreds of thousands from those who had a few locations, to a liveable wage for mom and pop stores. The same is true for Apple, Microsoft, and so on. Increases in efficiency, global networks, computer systems, the appeal of brand recognition, scales of economy, all work to push more and more of those dollars, which represent hours worked, into fewer and fewer pockets.

There’s no stopping this trend. There’s only redirecting the percentage of flow. Because that’s what economies are all about, flow. Keeping the items moving around the classroom, the dollars circulating through the purses and pockets. There’s no trickle down, there’s trickling everywhere. How we divert that flow will fund all our great infrastructure needs while also making sure those with the least don’t feel like burning that infrastructure down. Again, game theory tells us that people are willing to harm themselves if it means punishing the unfair. Ignoring this is the height of folly. I implore flat taxers and those of a Republican sway to consider these effects.

A number of the billionaires who have benefitted most handsomely have signed on to divest themselves of most of their wealth. One of the responses you’ll see by those who are angered by my argument here is that, “If you believe that, then give all your money to the IRS. They’ll take it.” This is just an attempt to silence the debate, for no amount of overpayments by a handful will correct the overall system. In the presidential debate last night, Donald Trump bragged both about making over $600,000,000 (MILLION) last year and NOT paying a dime in taxes. He’s not alone. All that wealth is going into things like warehouses full of art. It’s a lot of human capital that should be kept in flow and put to better use.

All it would take is more tax brackets with higher rates. And lower the rates at lower brackets. We should be debating these numbers, and not the principles behind them. A top bracket of $200,000,000 with an 85% rate would be my starting point. Work down to a tax bracket of $2,000,000 with a 40% rate. Lower the rate for those making between $400,000 and $600,000. Those making less than $60,000 pay no federal taxes at all.

Tax capital gains at the same rate. Close corporate loopholes. Get rid of all subsidies (including for farmers). When you get to keep the first $60,000 you make, that’s a subsidy for everyone, across the board, with almost no red tape, no forms to fill out. Streamline the IRS as a result. Punish companies who attempt to park profits overseas. And offset the offshoring of cash and the emigration of the wealthy by offering instant citizenship to anyone who moves to the US and puts down a certain figure on a home here (say $400,000), or sets up a business here in the US with initial capital in a certain range (say $5,000,000), so that the people who leave to hide their wealth are more than made up for by those who want to live in the US and enjoy our infrastructure.

If you think that’s naive, look at California. It has some of the highest tax rates, and yet it’s one of three states seeing massive explosions in businesses founded (Massachusetts and Texas being the other two). A great climate, amazing universities for recruits, and other allures more than offset the higher state income tax. You aren’t going to chase off wealth with higher taxes and more brackets, just as you aren’t going to remove the incentive to work hard. People will still want to be millionaires so they can buy Ferraris. They just won’t be able to afford a dozen of them. And that will be a sign that we’re achieving the right balance.

There is absolutely no greater ill facing the world today than income inequality. And it can be fixed by adjusting a few sliders. All it will take is the half of the populace that wants to reward wealth with more wealth to realize that their wiring is not based on reason, or even their own emotions, but evolutionary urges that no longer make any sense. Again, I’ll be exploring those urges in my next WAYFINDING piece. In the meantime, I humbly ask that you start looking around at the places that dollars are pooling, no longer circulating, in things that aren’t being used, or art not being seen, or luxuries not being enjoyed, or taxes outright not being paid, and see if your way of thinking might not swing around to what many of us now believe.

And what we believe is that income inequality has gone too far, is being hastened by modern technological advances, and it must be corrected before it gets much worse. We need to start thinking about a post-work economy, where everyone is guaranteed a living wage as more jobs are automated, disrupted, or devalued by the tools and innovations that are concentrating wealth. This will not be a bad thing. Everyone can prosper. As long as our wealth isn’t stagnating, but is free to trickle in every which direction, with some pools and puddles bigger than others, but to a degree that does not stifle innovation and does not inspire an uprising. That balance exists. Let’s at least look for it.

 

 

 

*Your chances of dying at the hands of a terrorist are slim. Poor eating habits and humans texting while driving have a much greater chance. Hell, ladders do. Even crazier: You have a greater chance of dying in a car while abroad than being killed by a terrorist abroad. Global warming is a major problem, but one that’s on its way to being solved by the plummeting costs of solar and looming population declines. A handful of nuclear strikes by a North Korea would be locally devastating, but income inequality threatens to burn us everywhere all at once.

 

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The Woman in the Red Dress

The 67th International Astronautical Congress convenes today in Guadalajara Mexico. All the world’s major space players will be there, discussing policy and product development. If there’s one conference I could walk around with a badge on, it would probably be this one. There are few things more exciting going on right now than the leaps in commercial space exploration. Tomorrow, Elon Musk will outline SpaceX’s path to Mars. And in recent weeks, Blue Origin unveiled their new rocket design which will be the most powerful in existence, the sort of thing you need in order to get to Mars (and beyond).

My last planetary astronomy course is twenty years behind me. For my final, I wrote a thesis on Io, and I haven’t been graded on anything having to do with the planets since. But there’s a reason I’m a science fiction author and not a literary guy: I’m a geek for this stuff. I try to stay on top of it. Which is why I don’t understand for the life of me why we’re aiming for Mars right now. In fact, I see the red planet as being precisely like that lady in the red dress from The Matrix: A distraction for boys and their toys. We need to look beyond her.

Musk seriously wants to send dozens of colonists to Mars within the next twenty years. (He actually says within 10 years, but I’m accounting for the fact that Musk misses his production estimates for both Tesla and SpaceX launches, plus the recent loss of a second Falcon 9 rocket). Let’s ignore for a moment all the technical hurdles (sticking the landing, refueling for a return trip, power / food / water) and ask something that’s really been bugging the hell out of me: Why Mars?

Mars is a terrible place to try to live. Yes, there is ice on Mars, but we’re talking a thin coating, not large chunks of the stuff to be melted and consumed. Yes, there was probably life on Mars at some point, but we can discover that with machines, not people. Yes, we need to get people off Earth so all our eggs aren’t in the same basket, but there are better baskets. And this is what I would say to SpaceX or Blue Origin if I was at the IAC: Look closer, folks.

There are three (perhaps four) things we should be doing before we go to Mars to set up a colony. Before I list these things, I want to point out my guesses for why we’re wasting precious resources doing the wrong thing. There are three that I can come up with:

The first is the primal desire to Go Where No (Wo)Man Has Gone Before. We’ve already set foot on the Moon, and we already have a space station in orbit, which makes those targets booorrring! These missions to Mars are flag-planting missions, and that’s a terrible reason to do science. It’s too emotion-based.

The second reason is the pop culture allure. We’ve been reading and watching Mars adventures since we were kids. There’s a nostalgic desire to make that happen which outstrips the logic.

The third reason is that Mars is a planet and the alternatives are not. We seem to be hung up on this. We want our next outpost to be very much like our current one. I think this is very much the wrong course of action. In fact, there are advantages to having some diversity among our baskets.

Here are the four things our private and commercial space organizations should really be focusing on, and thereby helping to drive government agencies in the same direction:

The primary focus should be on the Moon. You might think Mars’ size, or the presence of ice, makes it more hospitable to a colony, but that’s not the case at all. Mars has almost no atmosphere (which is why landing there is difficult). It also has no inner dynamo (liquid metal core) to generate a strong magnetosphere to ward off solar radiation. So Mars would be just as inhospitable as the moon, except for two things, which make it less hospitable: It’s a long way to ship supplies and send rescue missions, and the mass makes landing and relaunch a lot more dangerous and expensive.

The Moon is closer and smaller, and this makes it the best place for our first off-world terrestrial colony. All the things we will need to learn to do (such as shield ourselves from radiation, which is the largest hurdle yet to conquer) are better off learned here. Water, fuel, and air can all be generated from the Moon’s regolith. Tourism and industrial science can help finance the colony. Communication delays are negligible, and the colony stays the same distance (roughly) year-round. There is absolutely no good reason in the galaxy that we should be aiming for Mars over the moon. Just the three emotion-based ones listed above.

Being on the Moon protects us from apocalyptic disasters here on Earth. It also puts our lifeboat much closer. We could build up the colony much quicker, and more countries could be involved, making this a truly human endeavor. The Moon would also make for the best place to build our launch pad for the rest of the solar system (and stars beyond) with its low gravity. It’s also much, much, much more affordable to go there. We shouldn’t let the fact that we’ve set boots on its surface before, or that it’s not a planet, have us overlook the enormous benefit to a Moon colony over a Mars colony.

There are three other things we should be looking to do to aid this endeavor: We should expand our presence in orbit, attempt to mine the heavens, and get people paying to visit space. Some companies are already working on the first one; we are doing a basic version of the second; and number three is probably going to be in operation in just a few years.

The International Space Station is an impressive machine, one of the most impressive things we’ve ever built. We need a bigger version, open to tourism, and a place to train and acclimate the growing number of astronauts that a colony will require. Space stations also create lifeboats for our lifeboats. There will be times when even Earth is too far for the help that the Moon will require (because of launch conditions needed here and our gravity well, more than distance). This would also be a great place to work on artificial gravity (the centripetal kind). What I would propose is that our space station be designed, from the beginning, to be modified into the living quarters of our eventual interstellar craft. That is, the thing we build in orbit for a hotel, will one day be our winnebago to Alpha Centauri.

Mining the heavens is going to be critical to finance all of this. One large asteroid could have enough precious elements to finance years of space exploration. And it’s much cheaper to develop industrial capacity in orbit (or on the Moon) than it is to heave all the things we build up from Earth. Automated drones will bring asteroids back and place them in the Moon’s orbit, where they will be mined. We are probably a century or two away from achieving this, but it will happen. We could do it in 50 years if we weren’t so distracted by that woman in the red dress.

The third thing I mentioned is going to happen soon, and that’s to get people paying for a trip into space. Blue Origin is probably just a few years away, and Virgin Galactic would already have been there were it not for a catastrophic failure of their previous design (they flew their new carrier for the first time this month with the spacecraft attached). I’d put my money on Virgin having the first paying passenger into space, but I think the ride with Blue Origin will be more exciting (more time spent at higher altitudes). If it was possible, I’d volunteer (and pay) to be on the first commercial flight for either company. That’s how keen myself and many others are to pay six figures to fulfill a lifelong dream. Squeezing people like me for large sums is going to not only help fund the other stages, it’s going to be great data for future cosmonauts.

But perhaps most importantly, space tourism is going to fuel imaginations, which are the true rockets of innovation and exploration. Emotional allure can be just as useful as it is distracting. While the big lady in the red dress up there is leading us in the wrong direction when it comes to commercial space exploration, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t get people fired up and wistful. Send a manned mission to Mars, to touch down and do some science and return home. That’s a noble endeavor. But seeing that planet as a basket for humanity’s eggs is misguided to the point of being downright stupid. Our own orbit and the surface of the moon are far better targets. Here’s hoping that someone comes along and disrupts the very companies disrupting space exploration, or that one of those companies lowers its sights while expanding its ambitions. There are so many far grander things we can do closer to home.

 

 

 

 

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Two Missing Pieces

My love of reading most certainly comes from my mom. My mom is a book addict and raised me to be a book addict. I remember Dr. Seuss books arriving by mail in cardboard wrappers, and random days suddenly becoming Christmas morning. And there were the thousands of times I made her read Go, Dogs Go and Harold and the Purple Crayon with me. On any road trip, if we spotted a bookstore off the highway, I would squeal and point and she would hit the blinker.

Later in life, we formed a habit of working the crossword puzzle together, taking turns, two clues apiece, until we were both stuck and had to put our heads together. She taught at my high school and later at my college, where we would meet for lunch and scribble in those little squares. We also did jigsaws puzzles together, and recently added backgammon to the ways in which we spend quiet, quality time together. But it was mostly the two of us with books, and later our Kindles, and the puzzle. I couldn’t add up the hours I’ve spent with my mom like this.

When I started writing, she became my first and biggest fan, my beta reader, and my red-pen editor. She urges my writing along by always reminding me to send her something, to ask what I’m working on now, when I’ll write another Molly Fyde book, and so on.

Which makes our recent collaboration really special. It shouldn’t be a big deal, just an exhibition at her local library that mixes the written word with a piece of art, but it means the world to me. My mom has always painted and been crafty. I remember as a kid her cross stitching or painting on blocks of wood or rocks. She has covered hundreds of canvases. It’s something she loves, just as I discovered that I love to write. But I never thought we’d team up and put these separate loves together. When the library called for submissions from anyone in the community who wanted to mix words and paint, she asked if I would join her.

Below is a picture of our work on the library wall. I love that she dabbled in my wheelhouse by painting a robot’s arm. The other piece is the small white table where we’ve put together many a jigsaw puzzle. Thanks for letting me be a part of this, Mom.

 

Two Missing Pieces

Under the table, behind a flap

of cloth, a jumble of cardboard boxes

each missing a piece

A schnauzer ate one, another is

under the sofa cushion, and a piece

lives in the vacuum cleaner

There’s a barnyard scene, with golden

hay bulging from the bright red, and

a hole in the cloudless blue sky

There’s a sailboat race, and somehow

the boat in the lead is missing

part of its sail

But the hardest puzzle is the great

bowl of candy, all that repetition,

with a jelly bean gone missing

Hours and hours and hours go into

what can never be completed

So the table sits empty, mother and son

far away, not even the border sorted

and started

Always better to spend those hours,

even though they can’t last forever

Nothing is ever complete.

 

The Things We Built

An engineer sits at a workbench. There are bolts and screws and bits of wire scattered about; a soldering iron leaks a curl of gray smoke.

Old hands rub one another — tired and sore. There’s a keyboard nearby, many of the letters worn off from years of use. By the time a keyboard is worn this well, the letters don’t matter anyway. Ancient muscles have the most memory.

A computer screen asks [Y/N]?

The engineer knows where the Y is. A finger poises, a conversation remembered, a man asking “are you sure?”

There is a baby growing in a womb, and no question whether they’ll keep it, but they have the conversation anyway. Are they sure? The engineer wonders if the child will become a president. Very few wonder if they’ll become…

The memory of gunshots. The old engineer pushes that day away. Poised finger trembles. A conversation and a question.

There’s a robot nearby, lifeless. All it takes is a keystroke. A press. Permission.

Everyone thinks of all the terrible things these machines might do. Movies and books full to the brim of metal men pulling triggers.

But what if one might become president?

This one?

So many fears over the things we might create,

so few conversations about the men we built.

 

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Rock, Paper, Scissors

More bad news in the book world, for those of you following along. On the heels of bad news from the Big 5 publishers, we have yet another dismal earnings report from Barnes & Noble. Sales are down 6% over the same period last year, which probably explains why they just changed CEOs … again.

The previous CEO was around for just over a year, and this kind of turnover does not bode well. The chain is most certainly in trouble. But it’s a comment from Riggio, the new acting CEO, which makes me think they don’t understand why. Riggio blames the drop in sales to reduced inventory. He says the only way to stand apart from other bookstores is selection. This tells me that one of the handful of names synonymous with selling books doesn’t understand what’s happening in book retail.

I probably know the least amount there is to know about selling books, but from as many angles as humanly possible. I basically grew up in the Waldenbooks in Monroe Mall. It was the only reason I wanted to go to the mall. I lived on that nasty carpeting between those crowded shelves; it was where my mom knew to find me. My mom went on to become a B&N general manager, first in Spartanburg, SC. She would put me to work moving sections, and I’d help customers who figured I worked there. When I went off to college, I got a job with B&N and helped open their North Charleston store, stocking bare shelves according to planograms and selling books to customers.

Later, I helped run an indie bookshop. I did this for years while trying to make it as a writer. I also went to book conferences and worked as a professional book reviewer for a while. Then I became my own publisher, started working with several of the largest publishing houses in the world, dozens overseas, and went on a hectic travel circuit to six continents where I spent more time talking about the book trade and business of being an author than I did hawking my own books.

So while I haven’t done any one thing in the book trade for decades, for decades I’ve been doing all of them. As a result, I eventually observed and then came up with what I call the rock, paper, scissors model for book retail. I think I first gave this talk at a private conference put on by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly publishing. The room was full of cutting-edge tech and publishing geeks. On a whiteboard, I drew something like what you see below (Later, I would use nifty slides, some of which you can see here):

The Rock, Paper, Scissors of Book Retail

On the bottom left of my terrible trackpad sketch, you have the mom and pop indie bookstore, which for a very long time was the only way to find and buy books. The factory there on the right is the big box discounter, which wasn’t a book phenomenon so much as a laser and database phenomenon. The advent of the UPC code and computers allowed for massively more inventory, and we got the Home Depots, Best Buys, and the B&Ns of the world. (Seriously; the laser did that shit)

In the above book version of rock, paper, scissors, B&N crushes Indie due to selection and price. This is what all the big box discounters do, and it’s what happened in the 80s and early 90s. Indies couldn’t compete on the vast selection and massive discounts, and they started going under. We even got a Hanks/Ryan film about this.

Then Amazon comes online, and Amazon destroys B&N in the two things they were really good at, which again was selection and price. We might say that Amazon smothered the big box discounters with their online web presence and global shipping. Borders shuttered, B&N languished, and indie bookshops began to increase in number. (I’ve given this talk a dozen times, and at this point I normally liken Amazon having saved indie bookshops to the way introducing Canadian wolves saved Yellowstone National Park by winnowing the deer population, but I’ll spare you.)

So B&N crushes Indies, and Amazon smothers B&N, which leaves the fact that Indies snip away at Amazon. And Independent bookshops do this by bettering Amazon in both presence and community*.

Presence means being able to pop into a local shop to browse for a gift for a friend, or see what the staff recommends, or because many of us can’t walk by a bookshop without buying something the way other people can’t pass a Starbucks or a Ben & Jerry’s without satisfying their addictions.

The other aspect, community, means a place for book lovers to gather*. It means author signings and book clubs and storytime for children on Saturdays. It means staff picks and local interest sections and a small shelf for area authors. It is the literary book hub of the community in the same way that libraries are. The good ones have a dog or a cat roaming around.

Which gets us to why B&N is failing and why Riggio doesn’t seem to understand the book trade anymore. B&N will never be able to compete with Amazon on price or selection. Never. No one goes to a B&N hoping they’ll have the backlist title they’re looking for. B&N has books 2 through 12 of the fantasy series that everyone is telling you that you have to read, and they’re sorry but they can special order book 1 for you, as they’re currently out, but it’ll take 3 to 5 weeks to get in, and they’ll CALL YOU ON YOUR PHONE when it arrives, and you can drive back to the store to … fucking kill me already.

Riggio, and whomever he hires, is going to run B&N like it’s the 80s when Amazon didn’t exist, and B&N is going to go under. What’s absolutely stark-raving mad about all of this is that Amazon understands the rock, paper, scissors model, and they’re diversifying by opening indie-style shops. Their new small footprint bookstores are giving them the presence they’ve never had. A third store has been announced for Chicago. They are moving into an area that B&N should have pivoted into, though it’s not clear B&N could have. Long leases were signed to lock in great rates, the way a noose helps lock life out of the brain.

I’ve blogged in the past about what I’d do as a Big 5 CEO (I still love all of these ideas). And I’ve written about the indie bookstore that I plan to open someday (it was going to be before my circumnavigation, but now it’ll likely be immediately following). So what would I do if someone forced me to be CEO of Barnes & Noble? How would I save the chain? Could I? Can anyone?

I normally can write my protagonists out of the most dire of situations. That’s what my brain spends a lot of its processing cycles doing: coming up with realistic escapes from certain doom. But in this case, I don’t think B&N has an answer. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried writing this blog post (the first time was a few weeks ago, when the new CEO was let go). I tried writing a long piece about creating a small footprint bookstore franchise, like the Waldenbooks that I grew up frequenting. I saw them being as ubiquitous in strip malls as Gamestop and GNC. A reliable place to see what’s new or bestselling, pick up a gift, grab a magazine or newspaper, or a picture book our kid hasn’t read yet.

Maybe it could work. I tried to make it work on paper. But it would require a rebranding that I don’t think B&N can pull off. They aren’t going to win the anti-corporate PR angle that indies manage with their patrons (shop here and pay full price to keep our squeaking, non-automatic doors open). They also can’t be flexible in scope, opening the occasional big-box (non-discounter) where needed, like we see in Powell’s in Portland, the Tattered Cover in Denver, and other massive indies around the country.

Independence means flexibility, creating the bookshop the community needs. B&N has been completely shitty recently about their commitment to community. When I worked in a B&N, I ran a book club and arranged chairs for a weekly meeting with loyal shoppers to discuss whatever we’d decided to read that month. There were comfy chairs everywhere! We actually did author signings.

Someone at B&N counted some beans a while back and didn’t see the point in author signings (they only sold 4 books?! We had to return 12?!) or the comfy chairs (they’re reading without paying!) and so they stopped competing with indies. Again, there is no competing with Amazon, not with the wreck of a website they’ve got (Amazon and Google hire computer engineers from MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. B&N gets a CTO from another physical retailer with a shitty website and tries to patch existing code. They’d be better off — I shit you not — if they paid one brilliant teenager a million bucks to see what she could come up with in a single cheeto-and-redbull manic month).

The problem with the franchise model that I kept going back to is that there aren’t enough readers to support it. We don’t have as many book addicts as coffee addicts, so forget the Starbucks model. And everyone needs a haircut, so SmartCuts will be everywhere, but reading physical books is dying. The avid readers have moved to digital, which doesn’t clutter the house or break the bank. Physical books won’t go away, but neither will vinyl records. The problem is one of growth. There won’t be any, not of the non-coloring variety. And most physical books are bought online now anyway.

So where the rock, paper, scissors comparison breaks down is that it was a model in motion. It wasn’t a permanent balance. The big box discounters only had their advantage in the pre-Amazon days. They got complacent, lazy, moved too slowly, and they won’t survive. The future will be a mix of indie bookshops and the big A. And if Amazon keeps figuring out the physical retail side of things, and gets author events, book clubs, and writing workshops going, they may be able to beat the indies at their own game. Perhaps they can become the franchise model that I tried to envision, the resurrection of the Waldenbooks of my childhood.

I certainly hope so, because the one unspoken thing here that Amazon does better than the other two is diversity. Amazon doesn’t blacklist books from self-published sources like CreateSpace. They also carry (naturally) the Amazon imprint titles that indie bookshops won’t touch. Limited space means they can’t carry everything, but their inclusive philosophy means that there’s nothing they won’t carry. Breaking out online won’t get easier for indie authors, but any who do will have a bookstore willing to shelve their titles. The impossible just moved to very, very difficult. That’s an infinite improvement.

I miss my days of working in B&N, and I miss the days when my mom ran a store and would put me to work moving the entire computer section one shelf at a freaking-hell-these-things-are-heavy time. But I’m not sure I’ll miss what B&N has become. I celebrate the increasing number of indie shops. I welcome the Amazon bookstores. And these days, I spend most of my processing cycles trying to figure out how to make reading as addictive as coffee and ice cream. That’s the protagonist hanging over a cliff. And nobody is talking much about her.

*I put an asterix on community twice when discussing Amazon, but I think this might be incorrect. The advent of reader reviews, and the way that book links are shared via social media, not to mention their acquisition of Goodreads, puts Amazon in a clear leadership role in the online community of readers. But this is physical community I’m talking about, and we have yet to see what Amazon has in store here (if anything).

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A Peek Behind the Curtain

Major publishers are in trouble. Publishers Weekly reports declines across the board at all five major publishers. What is happening here is not new, as much as publishers would like you (and themselves) to believe. For the past four to five years, publishers have found growth almost exclusively through acquisitions, mergers, layoffs, and the largesse of their primary retail account, Amazon. All of those forces have run out of room.

As self-published books took off and began commanding a growing share of the book trade every quarter, publishers were able to weather the storm mostly because of increased profitability as more of their business moved to Amazon. Even as they damned the online bookseller, they profited from lower returns rates on physical books thanks to Amazon’s predictive on-time ordering. (The returns rates at bookstores could be around 40%. Amazon shaved those to under 5%) Publishers also made bank on ebooks as Amazon paid publishers their full amount while discounting to the bone and taking the hit on the retail side. When publishers fought for a return to agency pricing, they fought for an end to this discounting, which has pushed more and more sales to self-published authors. Those sales (those readers) are probably never going back.

Let’s dispel a couple myths: The first is the idea that book sales are languishing because there hasn’t been a breakout hit like (whatever book sold well the previous year). I’ve been seeing this line trotted out for two decades, whenever a publisher has a lull. Usually it’s a single publisher explaining their performance in a quarter due to “Not having a hit like we had in Insert-Book-Title-Here last quarter.” These days, it’s the running excuse for the entire book trade. And it’s absurd. Think about the number of damning things publishers are saying about themselves when they make this quarterly excuse:

• They are admitting that they can’t create a bestseller

• That none of their marketing and promotional tools work!

• That book sales are either all luck, or…

• Completely dependent on the talents of the authors that they have historically abused.

Beyond the weirdly circular reasoning of, “The reason we didn’t make as much money this quarter is because we didn’t have a book sell a ton of copies this quarter,” there’s a lot to be wary of in the above bullets. As a writer (the peeps I care most about), it should be eye-opening. None of the promises a publisher makes to you can be kept. It’s out of their hands.

Whatever they tell you they’ll do to make your manuscript a bestseller, they said to thousands of authors in the past year, and they failed at all attempts. Meanwhile, I know of a dozen self-published authors who have broken out over this time. I had a married couple on the boat for lunch this week who are both deciding when they should quit their day jobs, as they are steadily making 5 figures each month. If you go to writing conferences, you’ll run into dozens of silent success stories like this.

Probably the most damning evidence that publishers can no longer drive sales is the sad excuse for books that have kept them afloat. Last year, it was a rejected rough draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, published against the wishes of the dying author. This year, it’s a play not even wholly written by JK Rowling. And over the last two years, it has been coloring books hiding the slide in physical book sales. None of these things are books. Publishers are no longer in the book trade; they are in the what-the-hell-can-we-do-to-make-a-buck trade.

The irony here is that for years we’ve heard that major publishers are all about Literature, with a capital L. And Amazon is about diapers, and Google is about data (scanning all books), and Apple is about devices (selling iPads). The reality is that all of these companies are about profits, so their actions should be compared, not their motivations, which are largely the same. Their actions tell us about their philosophies as they pursue those profits.

Major publishers have colluded in order to screw the reader, have offered ever worsening book contracts to screw the writer, and have resisted innovation in an attempt to harm their top retail account. Higher prices, fewer rights to authors, and fewer sales channels have been where they’ve exerted their muscle. Let that sink in.

The actions from the west coast have been quite different. The new publishing leaders (Amazon, Google, Apple), have opened their markets to more voices, have paid higher wages to writers, have passed along greater savings to readers, and have increased choice and availability in formats.

There has been some good news from the smaller publishers, as indie publishing houses figure out how to compete. Some medium sized publishers now offer the print-only deals that the Big 5 are loathe to offer (I’ve signed four more of these deals in the past year, and I know of other authors who have seen them as well). My agent and I have also seen hard terms of copyright with some of these deals, limiting the terms of copyright to five or seven years. And some of these publishers have dabbled with promotional opportunities at Amazon that major publishers have avoided for fear of making more profits alongside their biggest retail account (bizarre).

What can we expect to see next? Well, what if we started from scratch, today? What kind of book trade would we build? It wouldn’t be the large big-box discounters like B&N (which just changed CEOs again, and is probably 2 to 3 years from going under). If I was building the book trade of today, I’d mostly do what I described in this blog post if I was a publisher, and this blog post if I was a bookstore owner. What we really need back today is Waldenbooks, with a small footprint store in every mall and in a lot of strip malls. Like a Gamestop or GNC type of franchise, one that people can buy into and have the freedom to run like a community indie store. Those are the kinds of stores Amazon is building (they just announced another in Chicago). It’s the opposite of what B&N is thinking of doing (selling wine and opening cafes).

The Big 5 are going to become the Big 3 or the Big 0 eventually. Medium sized presses that are doing the right things will eventually overtake them. The first major publisher to go all-in with Kindle Unlimited will make bank and survive (and seriously impact indie sales overnight). Amazon is going to continue to dominate in print, ebook, and audio, because they think about the reader first. Indie stores are going to do well because the world is urbanizing, and people will support local shops and continue to buy books that they never actually read. And writers are going to have new opportunities in gaming and VR spaces, as well as the genres that publishers neglect, until the day that AIs are writing all our books for us.

Until then, you can expect publishers to make pretty much every mistake they’re capable of making. Ingrained biases and wishful thinking will continue to lead the way. A recent survey that showed more people prefer print books over ebooks will be taken as gospel, when Amazon knows from their data that ebook readers read an order of magnitude MORE books than print book shoppers. So while publishers mold their business decisions around the people who read two books a year, Amazon will continue to cater to the readers who would consider this a slow weekend. It doesn’t take a genius to sort out who is going to win market share when that sort of lunacy is taking place.

Five years ago, I called for publishers to do whatever it takes to gather data on their readers’ habits, even if that meant giving away ebooks or partnering with Amazon on every promotional opportunity they could (in exchange for some also-boughts data). Instead, they have pushed up the price on the one format they could easily track and use to entice readers to get onto mailing lists. They have fought with Amazon over the discounting that was only hurting Amazon’s profits. And they have resisted subscription services that have seen actual growth (Kindle Unlimited) while dabbling in services that were operating like Ponzi schemes.

These are the same publishers who damned B&N as the devil until it was too late, and then saw B&N as their savior. In a few years, while profits are still plummeting, and publishers are blaming it on the lack of a bestseller like Book X from the year before (probably a rejected rough draft of a play about a paint-by-number artist), they’ll turn to Amazon to save them and have to wrestle with a beast that they created. And all of it was unnecessary.

All they needed to do was treat their authors better, do more for their readers, and pare down their costs. The Amazon formula for success. Instead, they’ve done the opposite on all three accounts. And they wonder why times are tough.

 

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