Hugh Howey's Blog, page 19

Industry Coverage of Self-Publishing

Well, here we are. Just a few years after lamenting the lack of coverage of the growing self-publishing market, readers have pushed that growth high enough that it can no longer be ignored. The Bookseller has a write-up about the size of this market, and FutureBook is doing their Friday Twitter chat on the same question.

With KDP now the largest ebook publisher in the UK, and self-published ebooks taking a larger share of the market than any publisher in the US, the sense that something is afoot is now spreading beyond the trenches. This is exciting stuff. It will mean a further erosion of stigmas, more authors free to make choices, and more pressure on publishers to pay higher royalties and offer fairer contracts.

It’s startling to me that so much has changed in the last six or seven years. Absolutely amazing. And incredible to think that it was just 18 months ago that Data Guy wrote his little spider that creeped up the waterspout. The findings at Author Earnings keep getting validated, and it all points to greater freedoms and higher pay for artists, and more choices and fairer prices for readers. Good times, people. Good times.

Gatekeepers for Indie Publishing

There was a discussion recently in one of my Facebook groups about a possible BookBub for indies. If you don’t know of the service, BookBub has a massive mailing list of readers, and their daily blasts move a TON of titles. Subscribers sign up for their preferred genres and are then notified when books they might enjoy are on sale for cheap. Many an author has hit a bestseller list thanks almost solely to BookBub. The program is so powerful that many consider BookBub to be the best marketing tool available to authors today, if you can snag a spot.

And therein lies the rub. The reason BookBub works is because its users trust them. The works are vetted, and however imperfect this system, it results in a high level of trust and satisfaction. From what I understand, BookBub looks for a minimum number of Amazon reviews, a minimum average ranking, and solid cover art/blurb/etc. For readers, a BookBub promotion serves as a stamp of approval.

The indie equivalent might be a website like IndieReader.com that reviews self-published titles. Except IR.com doesn’t have a BookBub system where authors pay to schedule a blast, and millions of readers get a recommendation in their email inbox. BookBub users, you see, are avid readers. They WANT recommendations. They’ve already read everything on the bestseller lists of their favorite genres, and they need something new. They need two or three books a week.

Now, the best thing about indie publishing in my opinion is the complete lack of gatekeepers. This allows any voice equal access to the infinite number of available podiums. Minority voices, gay voices, male romance writers and female sci-fi writers, and all the quirky between-genre works are given a spot. These works would never see the light of day in the no-risk blockbuster model employed by the Big 5 (and that includes most of my works). Gatekeepers are bad for literature. They stifle. They censure. They play it safe.

But readers aren’t all the same. Readers, in fact, are very different from one another. Some only want to read what everyone else is reading, so they can join a movement and a discussion. Some stick to what’s been adapted to the big and small screen, or what’s hit the NYT and USA Today lists. Some enjoy scouring for hidden gems deep within their favorite genres. Some rely on their social media feeds, or their favorite Goodreads reviewers, or Amazon’s recommendation algorithms.

Saying there shouldn’t be any gatekeepers in publishing is to ignore all the readers who prefer to have some sorting done. And these readers vary considerably in how much sorting they like. The fact that self-published ebook authors now out-earn their traditional counterparts shows that even without gatekeepers and sorting, readers are going to stumble upon a LOT of indie titles. And the fact that these titles have higher average customer reviews shows that gatekeepers aren’t needed in order to ensure a quality reading experience. So this isn’t about gatekeepers being necessary. This is about gatekeepers augmenting an already successful and maturing indie literature landscape.

For indies to have a BookBub equivalent, they need to establish trust with readers. Let’s say we start a program called IndieDeals. We celebrate the independent nature of the works, touting the fact that these are reading experiences you won’t find from the mega-corps who play it safe and xerox last year’s bestsellers. You are getting indie books like you get your indie rock and indie films. You are also hearing about the BEST works at the BEST prices. These are titles that readers have already enjoyed, but now at limited-time, rock-bottom prices.

Would readers be interested in this? A great many would, I think. Including myself. But how do you make it easy for IndieDeals to vet the absolute flood of submissions they’d receive from authors hoping for a promotional slot? You can look at review count and average like BookBub does. You can also check out the cover, the blurb, and read 2-3 pages of the sample. You can look at the body of work from the author. Do they have several titles available? All look professional? All have a moderate sales history?

Remember, the goal here isn’t to serve the authors’. That can’t be the focus. The goal of a promo list like BookBub is to serve the readers. As soon as you fail to do that, you lose their trust, and now the program is worthless. Some authors seem to be looking for a BookBub that does less vetting, that will take anyone and anything, and somehow still provide a massive sales boost. This is impossible. There are readers who want gatekeepers, and figuring out how to reach those readers requires new ways of thinking.

It starts with learning not to hate the idea of gatekeepers. This is difficult. The existing and historical gatekeepers have been so completely awful at their jobs, that it has hurt the entire concept of gatekeeping. The existing gatekeepers are bad at their jobs for a few reasons, worth listing here so that we can begin thinking of gatekeepers who won’t suck at what they do:

1) The existing gatekeepers confuse their taste for readers’ tastes. What we get are too many works beloved by MFA grads and unpaid interns, and not enough awesome urban fantasy, romance, sci-fi, and fantasy. You know — the books avid readers are consuming at a prodigious pace, and the books that they need at great prices and from deep down the bestseller rankings. The very books we need more of, along with a discovery engine that churns rapidly and accurately to increase the number of titles gaining exposure.

2) The next big problem is that the first two tiers of gatekeepers have no control over what actually gets published. This is a big problem with the current system. The bean-counters are the only real gatekeepers who matter. You’ve got two outer walls in this keep (the shark-infested moat of agents and the great wall of editorial), but the door to the palace is the only one that matters. For a work to get financed, it better look like the last works that made a lot of money. That means the same names every year, and the same plots/characters, until those plots/characters stop making money.

No risks are taken at this final gate, and the outer gatekeepers know this. So a lovely manuscript shows up beyond the moat, a blue shawl wrapped around her head, lovely prose bundled and mewing against her chest, and a mix of genres across her fine face that is both exotic and beguiling. The outer gatekeepers swoon, knowing this is the one they’ve been looking for. Alas, they turn her away, having had this discussion with the king and his viziers too many times. Their sci-fi needs to be pure sci-fi, and from a white male, please. Get this hag some gender-obscuring initials or send her on her way. (Or the same for a male romance writer, or an author who writes with gay characters who engage in plots not about their gayness, and so on.)

3) The existing gatekeeping system has no patience for artistic development. Editorial is a thing of the past, and so is the system of giving budding talent the time to mature and develop a following. Related to this is the need for gatekeepers today to find works that will sell in the hundreds of thousands. Being good is not enough. They need to find what is profitable with the least amount of sunk cost and time. That means looking for celebrity (Snooki), name recognition (the already top-selling or popular in another medium), and clones (this manuscript is a lot like Twilight!).

Look, it’s easy to rag on gatekeepers with all the limitations they have to work with and what they are after (quick scores with minimal risk). The shame is that they’ve muddied the concept of gatekeeping in general. The problem with gatekeeping, in essence, is that it has to be exclusionary. This goes against the idea of self-publishing, where everyone is allowed access. But initial access to the market is not the same as equal access to all parts of the market, and this is where we need to start thinking about the positive aspects of gatekeeping.

Let’s look at romance novels as an example. When I wrote The Shell Collector, I wanted to write a true romance novel, which meant giving the work a Happily Ever After (HEA). If you don’t have this, you haven’t written a romance novel. Hey, that’s pretty exclusionary, right? Right. Because it’s all about the readers. And they have certain expectations. Here, the gatekeeping is by convention, and it is policed by both authors and readers. If you sell a work as a romance, and one of the protagonists dies of cancer at the end, enjoy your 1-star reviews explaining that this isn’t a romance novel, and that any reader going in expecting to get the product they were promised is going to be disappointed.

Reader expectations makes for a lot of necessary gatekeeping. Will the digital file be formatted properly to work on all devices? Technical requirements like this are a form of gatekeeping. As are cover art dimensions and resolution requirements from self-pub retailers like Amazon and the iBookstore. Or having the work in the language specified. And free enough of typos to be enjoyed. Here, the readers serve as gatekeepers. Riddle your work with errors, and you’ll get enough bad reviews to stop future readers from taking a chance. That’s gatekeeping, and the kind we should applaud. The kind that should cause us to take our craft seriously and improve our work.

It’s obvious to me, then, that gatekeepers come in all shapes and sizes, and many are quite good at what they do. It’s also obvious to me that different readers want a different level of sorting and sifting. Some want none at all. But indies are missing out on the subset of readers who want their works vetted. The kind of readers who trust the BookBubs of the world.

What I’d love to see is a network of indie editors take over this role. But it might require an entity such as IndieReader.com, or Goodreads, or a few highly motivated individuals to tackle properly, but here is how I think it would look:

A network of IndieCertified editors, formatters, and cover artists would be listed on a single site for authors to employ. The cover artists and formatters would gain admission through their portfolios. The editors through their previous works or on a trial period (perhaps with recs from other editors or writers). Any and all are welcome to apply for certification. The idea here is that you can’t have enough qualified professionals available. It’s not about excluding, so much as giving a place for committed professionals to gather. If a hopeful applicant is committed, they should have the chops or be willing to develop the chops to get in.

Keep in mind, this is all about the readers. This isn’t about giving every hopeful cover artist or editor free entry. Some people will be denied, and yeah, that sucks. It should pain any of us artists to think about rejection in the indie world. And it should give us pause to consider the creation of tiers, or haves and have-nots. The last thing we should want is to become like the big publishing houses, where our works are stale, formulaic, and all the same. But there’s a broad space between censorship and complete lack of quality control. A very broad space. We should be able to stake out some territory here without crossing offending lines.

Not only would this sort of collective assist writers in finding top-notch talent whose production schedules aren’t completely packed (looking at you, David Gatewood), it would also earn titles a stamp of quality assurance, so readers interested in such vetting would know that the work has been edited by a professional with a proven track record (or proven ability). This would allow an email blast system like IndieDeals to know the work has already been checked for the basics of quality assurance. All they would then have to look at is number of reviews and average, to allow readers to vet the plot and actual reading enjoyment.

It’s important to remember that the pie of readership is not limited or fixed. If readers begin to enjoy their pastime more, while finding consistently great deals, they’ll have both the motivation to read more and the means to purchase more titles. When you look at how much time and money goes to the video game industries, TV, film, social media, and the like … you can clearly see that literature has room to grow tenfold or a hundredfold by taking time and money away from other pursuits. The limit here is completely up to the value experienced by the users. The higher that value (which is a mix of enjoyment and price), the more they’ll engage.

Going after readers who prefer vetted materials is a way of expanding that total pie, especially for indie authors. And doing what it takes to win those readers over will likely increase engagement from other types of readers. The next goal should be to figure out how to win non-readers over and get them hooked. Indies should be thinking about these issues a lot, because they aren’t the concern of the blockbuster BPH model of publishing, which seems to look at the world as a limited pie, unable to grow, everyone fighting over the same crumbs.

I have some ideas as well on how to win over new readers to the fold and grow that total pie. More on that in a future blog post…

 

 

Two Must-Read Books on Nature

Two books every nature-love MUST read:

Nature Wars by Jim Sterba. An incredible look at how nature and man have encroached on one another.

The New Wild by Fred Pearce. I rarely recommend a book whose ebook cost more than $9.99. Get this one from the library if you can. Or wait for the price to drop. But DON’T miss it. This is hands-down the most eye-opening book on nature that I’ve ever read. You might cringe at the subtitle: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation — but I challenge you to read the book and not come away convinced.

My favorite sort of read is the kind that opens my mind to new ideas. Both of these books did this. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Athletes and Ice

Does it seem like more and more athletes are missing more and more of their careers? Pitchers are pitching less games and fewer innings per outing, and yet everyone needs Tommy John surgery to repair their elbows. The NBA has been hammered the last few years with injuries to superstars. The threat of injury has every athlete getting more “treatment,” but despite all the extra treatment, it seems like bodies aren’t holding up as well.

Makes me wonder if we’re going to discover one day that icing joints down after rigorous exercise is like bloodletting a sick patient. We treat swelling like swelling is a problem, but it’s a solution. Swelling immobilizes joints and oxygenates damaged tissue. Rather than let the body do what it is built to do, we treat a remedy like it’s some symptom.

The same thing with fevers. High body temps kill viruses meant for a narrow range of temperatures. We see the fever as a problem and fight that, when the fever is what our body uses to get better. My dad is a stubborn cuss; when he gets sick, he just piles on the blankets and “sweats it out.” You know, like what we have done for millions of years (for longer than we’ve been humans).

I guess I inherited this stubbornness. When I sprain an ankle, I walk it off. Yeah, it hurts like sin, but the last thing I want to do is numb that hurt. The hurt tells me where not to put pressure. Pain isn’t something given to us to punish us; it’s a tool for avoiding further tissue damage. Without pain, we would leave our hands on the hot stove.

So how much damage are we doing by giving athletes ice baths and wrapping ice packs on the shoulders and elbows of pitchers? I suspect quite a bit. Not only are we getting rid of the immobilizing swelling, which allows us to move joints and micro-tear ligaments that need healing. It also deadens the pain which would tell us not to move the joints quite that far or in that direction until they’ve had a chance to heal. Plus, heat and extra blood may have some recovery effect.

It’ll be nice when we get those nanos up and running and we can monitor recovery on a cellular basis, see what’s going on in the tissue over time, and hopefully be brave enough to try different recovery methods along with some control groups. The first hypothesis I’d test is whether the control groups who don’t ice have stronger recoveries. My guess would be that we need to get extra building blocks into bodies, in the form of nutrients, vitamins, proteins, and minerals. Maybe have athletes breathe a higher oxygen mix for a full day after a taxing outing. And whatever we do — don’t fight the swelling.

 

False Summits

It’s the bane of hikers, the false summit. You’re staggering up the trail, or a rocky ridgeline, and you’ve been eyeing the peak for hours, only to reach that spot and see that the trail keeps rising, that the rest of the mountain was simply occluded from view.

So you march toward the next peak, believing this one, only to discover yet another false summit.

This can go on so long that when you arrive at the true top, the feeling is one of both immense relief and disbelief. You march the last agonizing steps expecting to be fooled again. And then you want to collapse and kiss the rock that leads upward no more.

For the longest time, turning 40 was my personal summit, the end of my road. My plan was to be dead by June 23rd, 2015. And not in some vague, “If I keep this up, I’ll probably never to live to see 40″ kinda way, but more in the tradition of some Inuit tribes, where the elders paddled off in their canoes to make room for a new generation.

I only ever discussed this plan with my best friend Scott and Amber. I trusted the two of them not to have me locked up. And I know the reaction from those who have soldiered right past 40 is that this is a young age, and to stop being histrionic. But that was exactly the point. 40 is young. And if we’re not careful, we’ll twiddle our thumbs until we get there.

Scott knew me as well as anyone has ever known me, and he knew I was dead serious about this plan. He saw me say over and over that I was going to do something absurd, and then watch me go do it (or more likely, be my accomplice). We used to have tearful conversations about the plan. He would try to talk sense into me. But as I explained it to him, planning on being dead by 40 was not an attempt to curtail my life, but a way of expanding it. By planning on being dead by 40, I made my life so much longer.

I’ve always been fascinated with the perception of the passing of time. My earliest powerful memories are of being in the back of our red and white Ford van on the way to the beach. We made the trek every summer, and my brother and sister and I would create a playroom on the folded-flat rear seat, which turned into a bed. The three and a half hour drive was interminable. Time slowed to a crawl. Anticipation, striving, forgoing immediate self-gratification, and the racing mind of youth conspired to turn what I could otherwise idle away with a book on any given afternoon into a savage form of torture for which there was no end.

In high school, years later, I would do the exact same drive, and time would fly right by. Same length of time, two very different experiences.

Being curious about the cause of this, I began paying attention to how different time seemed to flow depending on circumstances. What I noticed was that the first time I drove anywhere with my new four-wheeled freedom, the drive felt much longer than the subsequent trips. Each drive along a route seemed to take less and less time. I realized that the first time I drove to a new place, I was hyper alert for the directions, and I was seeing new things. There was so much to take in, and so my brain would rev up, effectively slowing time down by processing a lot more. As I became familiar with the journey, my brain would shut off and coast. I could zone out, later “come to,” and marvel at the curves I navigated without being aware of them.

Three and a half hour drives today feel like absolutely nothing to me, but only if I’ve done them before.

A similar revving of the brain occurs during life-threatening events. I’ve been in a few car crashes, and time really does slow down. The brain is like a CPU, and it can be overclocked. It’s not efficient to run at max speed all the time, so the brain shuts some cores down and coasts when it can. 30% of our calories are burned by this 5 pounds of our bodies. But when our survival is at stake, it makes sense to dump all resources into calculating some way out of the mess. Newness and fear, then, seemed to be the way to keep life from zipping right by.

Comparing life to a road we travel is so obvious that it’s become cliche. So my revelation from a car crash as a youth and all those road trips was this: The way to make a life feel long was a combination of newness and danger. Seeking danger seemed like a bad idea — more a recipe for a shortened life than a perceived longer one. But what about newness? I decided to explore this further.

And what I noticed right off the bat is that for most people, life is not so much a journey as it is a commute. We like to pretend that life is some open road we explore, but it’s really a path we carve into the pavement, worn there by habit, or the back and forth of routine. I wrote about this in I, Zombie, a horror book primarily concerned with the horrors of a habituated life.

A life of commute scared me. It meant traveling the same road back and forth every day. Wouldn’t my brain then shut off and allow me to coast, managing curves without even thinking about them? Wouldn’t my life speed right by like the drive between my house and my best friend Nathan’s?

I wanted a life that would feel longer, a path that stimulated my mind by constantly feeding it new scenery, new experiences, and new information. This realization hit me like a lightning bolt one day. I was 19 years old, sitting at a lunch table with my Tandy computer repair coworkers, all of us in our white shirts and garish ties, a few pocket protectors scattered here and there. My colleagues were a lot older than me. And I saw, in an instant, that I would be them with the snap of a finger. I would repeat the same actions over and over, and my life would disappear just as surely as those curves that I’m able to unconsciously navigate along familiar roads. I would startle in my seat, glance in the rearview, and wonder where the path went.

Soon after that lunch, I moved to Charleston, SC, to shake my life up a bit. I went back to college, got a job doing something I knew nothing about, and bought a boat to live aboard. I was always an avid reader, but now I read voraciously and far more variously. Before, I’d consumed mostly Sci-Fi and Fantasy. I would read all the Forgotten Realm and D&D books. Like familiar roads, they would allow my brain to shut off and the hours to float by, completely unnoticed. Each book was largely the same. Now, I turned to challenging books by Russian authors and lots of non-fiction about really esoteric stuff. Books that required every sentence to be looked at twice, just like new scenery when we’re afraid of missing some turn.

Any adventure or opportunity that came my way, I said “yes.” A girl asked if I would pose nude for a sculptor friend. Sure. Someone asked if I would help drive their daughter from Charleston to LA. Absolutely. We did the drive in 36 hours. I jumped on a boat once heading for Hong Kong for no pay, and this required finishing my classes in the middle of the semester and leaving a very cushy job driving a water taxi. The more uncomfortable and new, the more likely I was to go for it. Despite my fears. Despite the craving for comfort and ease.

Friends and family used to tell me that strange opportunities like this just seemed to come my way. Curious about this, I took a deeper look at what was happening, and I saw the same opportunities were there for them as well. The difference was that I was actively seeking them and always taking them. I went on church trips to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. I took vans full of kids on Alternate Spring Breaks to volunteer in Bronx shelters. Life was about maximizing my experiences to avoid that very life from slipping away. And it was all fostered by my self-imposed time limit of 40 years to live.

When people tell me, “Oh, but 40 is young,” what I hear is: “Why try to live a full life today? You’ve got time!”

Without a deadline, it would be so much easier to put off bold plans until I was no longer bold enough to tackle them. Or to put off my dreams until the forever-sleep robbed me of the chance at them.

I hated the thought of “having plenty of time.” My plan was to cram in all the things I wanted to accomplish in half the time, and nothing in my life has been a better motivator for getting things done.

When loved ones heard I planned on being dead by age 40, they were sad for me. It was hard to reconcile my active and happy life with such a philosophy. What they missed was that the happiness owed everything to the plan of a curtailed life. I was living a full and happy life because I didn’t assume I had forever.

Something I noticed while in college: Most kids spent the majority of their time doing the same few things. Again, it’s like driving a commute rather than heading to a new destination. After a few nights bar-hopping in Charleston, I realized that my memory of college would be a single memory, an average of all these nights, just a vague recollection of laughter with friends over drinks. Each moment would be enjoyable, but few would stand out over time. My life would be compressed due to lack of newness. This is the same observation over and over: Take detours in order to fill a life with new memories, lengthening the perception of time.

This doesn’t have to mean a lack of family or true and deep friendships, either. My two best friends today are people I’ve known and kept up with for over twenty years. Amber and I moved every few years, taking on new jobs, selling homes and buying new ones that needed more work. We were contributing to society more than we would have if we’d stayed with the same jobs and grown apathetic and bored. Or in the same houses, rather than buying new ones and fixing them up as well. We left behind a trail of improvements, and found ourselves improved as a result.

Rather than have vague memories today of thirteen years in South Florida, where we met, we have all these different stages of our lives that stand out in stark relief. A year in an apartment, two years in our first home in Florida, two years in Virginia together, five years in North Carolina, three years in Jupiter. Five distinct lives instead of one.

When I lived on boats the first time, I met the most interesting families I would ever come across. Parents with teenage kids. Parents with newborns. Many of them stayed on the move, homeschooling as they went. I just spent a week on my friend Terry’s boat, and it’s littered with all the books and supplies for schooling his teenage kids. These kids growing up on boats are the brightest, most mature young adults I’ve ever met, hands-down. They aren’t on a commute; they are on a journey.

Our brains evolved to live a life of constant trouble and danger. Amber and I discussed this a while back, when she had a very restful night of sleep, but said she kept waking up all throughout the night. I’ve always noticed this with nights spent camping or on a boat at sea. You don’t get the eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, instead getting little naps punctuated by semi-alertness.

Well, what did our ancestors do? They didn’t lock the door of the cave, knowing no one would come in and eat them, spear them, or take their things. The only way to get a truly restful night of sleep was to assuage any worry by remaining vigilant. That is: True rest came from the complete lack of stress that anything bad might happen in the night. Shutting our brains off for eight hours at a time is not the goal of sleep but a curse. Shutting off our brains for decades at a time is not the goal of life but a similar curse.

Moving is a pain. Selling and buying homes are a pain. Quitting jobs and seeking new ones are a pain. Getting rid of possessions and living light is a pain. Saying goodbye to existing friends and meeting new ones is a pain. Every one of these splinters of sensation, though, stands out in the end. And the decades of numbness go by like those daydreamed and unseen curves.

And so back to the summit: The march to 40 was a march to a false one, sure. Along the path, people would call down and tell me to go slow, to take it easy, that there’s a lot of mountain left. Along the path, hikers with the full mountain in mind or a trail map would see my traipsing off into the bushes along either side of the trail, trying my best to scout out the entire mountain, to look under every rock and around every corner, and they would say to me, “There’s plenty of time to do that once you get over the next rise.”

Screw that. There’s always plenty of time until there’s none left.

I turn 40 this month. It is an amazingly young age. I’ve never been in better shape, and there’s so much potential mountain stretched out ahead of me. But there’s even more that I want to do. So why look at 70 or 60 or even 50? Why put anything off? I’d rather pick out the first false peak that I can see and assume that’s as high as I’ll ever get. And what can I accomplish before I get there?

My best friend Scott had his first of two kids when he was my age. So even that’s not out of the question. I’d love to have a family, raise them at sea, homeschool them, watch them grow. The idea that a vagabond lifestyle leaves you cut off from people and unable to also have a family is an excuse to commute to work every day, to not take chances, to not live a full life. I’m saying this as someone who feels the urge all the time to settle, to be comfortable, to stop taking chances. I’m not saying the lifestyle I chose is right for anyone other than me, only that I wouldn’t be as fully happy any other way.

We often hear that “age is just a number.” Yes, but it’s a useful number. Age is a mile-marker, those little green signs that dot the interstate. I feel like I have a choice: I can tune out and zoom down the highway, noting those little markers now and then, and peering in the rearview and wondering where those decades of flattop went. Or I can scramble over that berm, peek behind that bush, climb that outcrop, and forget about highways and paths straight to the top and the idea of getting anywhere as quickly and painlessly as possible.

 

 

 

The Pot Luck Signing Begins

Today is my first day back in the States for six weeks. It’s a testament to how wonderfully jetlagged I am that I’ve been up since 3am, working. The Pot Luck is all about not knowing what you might get, just that it’ll be signed and stamped. But those of you who made requests, we’re doing everything we can to get in the ballpark of what you want.

We have some extra items here, so if you get more than you asked for, that’s why. There’s going to be a lot of craziness going on. With this many packages, one or two are going to be lost or returned back here or damaged. It’s just statistics. We’re talking nearly a thousand boxes and envelopes going out! I apologize in advance if your package is affected. We’ll get something out to you to make up for it.

Domestic shipping will be a mix of Priority flate-rate boxes and Media Mail. It could take a week or so to get your item, and items might not all be shipped out until next Monday or Tuesday. So be patient! And share those unboxing videos with all your epic disappointment! And for everyone who requested the “Ugly Wool,” your chances are roughly 1 in a 1,000. Not very good. But someone’s gotta win, right?

I love my readers too much

I hate airports.

I love flying, though. I mean, I stare out the window and marvel and think of all the dreamers in history who wanted to soar like a bird and see the earth from above, and here I am doing it with a pack of peanuts and a plastic cup of room temperature water. It’s a miracle. And we groan about it.

That’s because airports suck. Security sucks. The queues suck. Customs and Immigrations . . . I LOVE you guys! Love you so much. You’re the best. Just passing through!

Ahem. So here I am in London, with a 6 hour layover in Heathrow after a 12-hour flight from South Africa, and what do I do? I go through Customs and Immigration, and put myself back outside of that sacred shoe-wearing, bottled-water-having halo of airport security, knowing I’ll have to pass through again. All to sign a single reader’s book.

When I get to Florida in 17 hours, I’m facing an even more monumental task: Sorting, signing, packing, and shipping over 1,200 items to over 800 individual addresses.

And you know what? I don’t hesitate to say “yes.” Because in aggregate, all your little decisions to buy my stories has had a bigger impact on me than I’ll ever have on another human being. And it isn’t even close.

You all sent me around the world for three years, signing books on six continents, two dozen countries, and hundreds of cities. You let me stay at home and write with my dog, so she could get three or four or twelve walks around the neighborhood. You made my mother almost forget about the fact that I still haven’t finished college. And you made sure that the boat I sail around the world on (’cause it was happening no matter what) is less liable to get me killed.

I love you all.

Especially you, Customs! And you, Immigrations!

The Box

A new short story just went live.

Funny how I feel bad charging 99 cents for something that took a little over a week to put together. Is it worth a dollar from the reader for the 10 minutes it takes to get through the story? I don’t know. I can only leave the guitar case open and keep strumming.

There have been a lot of stories about AI coming to life. But once we get past the initial event, and all the political and economic ramifications, what about all the little AIs that come after? How many strange and wonderful scenarios are there?

Asimov did this with robots. He went past the gee-wow creation and looked at the breakdown of the utilitarian machines. Anyway, here it is. Steal it somewhere if you can’t afford the cover price.

Renting vs. Owning

I couldn’t wait to own my first house. I mean, I literally couldn’t wait.

The closing date was still a week away, but I was already over at my future home on Taft St. in Hollywood, leveling a plot of soil in the back yard, spreading sand, and installing pavers. There was a covered arbor back there, and I wanted to create a patio where before there was just a patchwork of grass, soil, and loose rock. In the middle of the yard there was also a huge tangle of vines covering an old fish pond. Soon, I would have this up and running as well.

The owner of the house didn’t mind my enthusiasm. In fact, he very much didn’t mind. A lovely gay man, he spent the week sipping lemonade on the new patio and offering suggestions and advice as I worked on what would soon be my yard. I was learning not only how much I would love my first home, but how much I would love improving it and working on it.

I’d had the same experience with my first sailboat, Xerxes. I would stay up past midnight at times with a miner’s light on my forehead doing odd projects around the deck. Owning something is to want to care for it. Especially if you worked hard for the money used to acquire that thing. When something is given to you, or when you’re just renting, it’s hard to put the same effort in for its upkeep and improvement. Not to say it doesn’t happen, just that there’s something primal about sweeping out our caves and putting up some bison art.

There’s a myth out there about self-publishing related to this. Because of the big publishing houses’ eroding market share and growing irrelevance, there’s a concerted effort going on to promote traditional publishing as at least a viable alternative to going it on one’s own. The industry has moved quickly from besmirching self-publishing to attempting to sell the middleman-enriching route. Which is understandable; they want to lure in clients and continue making most of the profits off our art. But there is something abysmally wrong with many of their arguments, and we owe it to aspiring authors to point those fallacies out.

The particular myth I’m talking about here is that self-publishing requires a lot of hard work, while traditional publishing means all you have to do is write the manuscript. This is plain nonsense, of course. Publishers expect authors to promote their works, to engage on social media, to answer emails, to do signings and interviews, and much more. And this ignores the massive amount of work it takes to even get published (researching agents, writing queries, tracking responses, doing rewrites).

But let’s set aside the fact that authors of all stripes have to work their butts off to make a living at this. What pundits and publishers miss, because they have no experience with it themselves, is that self-published authors don’t work harder because they have to. They work harder because they want to.

Authors who have only traditionally published also fall prey to this myth. They’ve only ever rented. They sign ownership of their art away, and now they are punching a clock, toiling for peanuts, and that’s not a motivator to toil more. It’s a disincentive. Which is why most authors work a day job teaching creative writing, procrastinate, phone in manuscripts at the last minute, and waste their prodigious talents. They are like the first European settlers who starved to death in a land of plenty because they knew all their hard work was going to be seized by the sponsor company.

That pundits, publishers, agents, and editors don’t get this is frankly startling to me. They see the incredible hours that self-published authors put in, and they assume that it’s forced drudgery. That the work is necessary. Maybe because they are all punching clocks, they don’t know what owning your own business feels like.

Small business owners reading this are nodding their entrepreneurial heads. They went from punching a clock to taking a chance, to believing in themselves, and when they saw that their efforts brought immediate and direct rewards, it made them want to work harder. It is this reward mechanism that people are seeing across the self-publishing landscape, rather than any necessity born by the publishing path. There is striving, yes. But much of it is happy striving.

The really pathetic response to this, even when some in the biz understand the psychology behind why self-published authors work so hard, is to say, “Not everyone wants to be a small business owner.” Or basically: “Not everyone wants to own their own home.” And: “Not everyone wants to be their own boss, work their own hours, and be in charge of their lives.”

How dehumanizing. Not everyone wants agency? Self-actualization is the highest on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You basically have an entire industry out there trying to brainwash artists into not valuing the creative freedom opened up to them by simple digital tools and print technologies that have made the middlemen irrelevant. You’ve got an entire industry subsisting on the cruel art of learned helplessness.

You don’t have to go it alone if you self publish. Join a critique group. Form a writing club. Hire an agent, editor, assistant, or publicist. “But not everyone wants to take all that risk,” the agents of helplessness will say. As if a $15,000 advance paid out over two years is either a heavy burden to them or a saving amount of money for an artist. Besides, it’s the artist taking the risk either way.

The author who plans to submit works a day job and writes on the side for years until they hammer out that first rough draft. Those hours represent otherwise lost wages. And what would they really have to risk in order to own their art instead of being renters? The cost to self-publish a professionally edited manuscript, with brilliant cover art, is less than the cost of a computer, or a work truck, or the first month’s lease on a retail space. Each book is a small business with almost no startup costs. And the manufacturing costs are both minimal and one-time (editing, cover art). After these, you just upload, press a button, and a retail partner does the rest.

The real risk is selling art for cheap, accepting horrid contracts and low royalties, and placing pricing decisions in the hands of misguided corporate suits who want to protect some pathways to readers at the expense of others. Or trusting these suits to negotiate fairly and competently with your prime retail partners. That’s risk. And it’s a risk fewer and fewer authors are going to want to take, and the response is going to be myths and zombie memes and fear-mongering from the middlemen who are missing out.

Whenever you see them warning you about all the hard work it takes to self-publish, understand that they are dead wrong. Self-publishing doesn’t take extra hard work, it just makes the work so much more enticing and rewarding that you’re likely to do more of it. Anyone who has ever owned, rather than rented, will understand the difference. And anyone claiming that we would all just be happier to rent, or to give up control of our creative endeavors, or wave away our human agency, is selling something you should be wary of anyway.

 

 

Identity Theft

This is a weird one, and it seems that it’s been going on a long time. I’ve gotten messages via Facebook and email to let me know that people are stealing my identity and then asking people for money, saying their daughter is sick. One scam artist is using pictures of my niece on their Facebook profile. I’ve also had people come on Facebook accusing me of being the one doing this, as if that makes more sense than some con artist downloading my pics and starting up their own account.

If you are reading this, you know who I am, and you know if I ask you for money to tell me to “Fuck off.” But that doesn’t help the people who are being scammed who don’t read my blog. Look, no one is stealing my identity because I’m an author. They are stealing my identity because my pictures are freely available, and because I wear soothing blue colored t-shirts, and everyone knows to trust a guy with a winning smile and a blue t-shirt.

I’m not the only person they take pictures of. The only reason these people get busted, and I even hear about the scams, is because they nabbed pics from someone who has tens of thousands of Facebook followers. That increases the chance of some overlap. Again, they aren’t taking my pics because I’m quasi-well-known. They are morons for taking pics from someone with so many followers. The rest of the con artists are invisible, because they are wiser.

If you see this shit happening, report it. Telling me about it won’t solve anything. I can’t stop these people. And no, I’m not going to wall myself off from the rest of the world because there are bad people who take advantage. There will always be bad people who take advantage. My general advice is this: If someone you don’t know is asking for money, assume the worst. Most people in dire need have at least a friend or a family member to turn to. And if they don’t, there are political and religious institutions who will help an honest person in need.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Even if the dude is wearing a blue shirt and looks a lot like me. In fact, if you see anything like that, run like hell.