Hugh Howey's Blog, page 22

Signed Books

Remember how disappointing this scene was?

Yeah, Al Capone’s vault was a bust. This weekend, Amber and I are going to try and make it up to you. We’re peeling the padlock off the old Howey storage unit and pawing through the treasures inside. Foreign editions. Original copies of the self-pubbed edition of WOOL. Pages of manuscripts with red ink all over them. High school poetry. Pictures of me with hair down to my waist. My stuffed animals (kidding. I would never put those in storage!)

Any surplus stuff will be up for grabs. I haven’t done signed editions in a while, and this might be the last hurrah for quite some time. What I’m thinking is figuring out what I have, letting you all call dibs, and then maybe order in copies of WOOL to sign for anyone who wants one of those. Or something. Details to be sorted out. Stay tuned.

 

That’s Not Us in the Future

This blog post is a response to a comment, made on a blog post, that was also made in response to a comment, made on this blog post.

This is like the Inception of blog posts.

No one’s ever been three levels deep before!

The gist of the last post was that civilizations have a narrow window in which they are capable of settling the entire galaxy and yet still backwards enough in their thinking to want to. My hypothesis is not only that this is true, but that the window for galactic domination is only open for a few centuries. By the time a civilization sets out to take over the galaxy, filling every available niche, they will have progressed ethically enough to choose not to.

Daniel Knight commented and wanted to know why I think we will ever see the filling of available niches as evil. And it’s a great question, one I couldn’t attempt to answer in the space of a comment, which is why we find ourselves three levels deep (you know, at that snow fortress level, where shit really stops making sense).

One of Daniel’s points is that we will eventually have the means to live forever, and we will keep having offspring, and all those bodies have to go somewhere, which will mean taking over the galaxy. If you continue his reasoning, we will then have to take over the universe. And if you continue this reasoning further, even that won’t be enough.

I might end my response right there and point out that any race capable of seeding the galaxy will be able to extrapolate these base impulses and realize that there’s no end to such ambitions, that space will eventually run out, and so the move is not only pointless — is not only delaying the inevitable —but only stands a chance of causing harm in the process, both by increasing the frustration of our species, now swelling at the universes’ limits, and also by reducing the universe’s potential for diversity.

That’s the simple answer: We won’t seed the galaxy, because how is that any better than the idea that we’ve run out of room on Earth? And how is the expiration of our sun any different than the heat death or collapse of the universe? Once our capabilities have expanded enough to seriously contemplate seeding the galaxy, our minds will have expanded enough to take in the bigger picture: And that is that the galaxy suddenly isn’t so big, certainly not big enough for exponential and unlimited ambitions. At that point in our ethical progress, we will realize that what we have is quite enough.

If that sounds impossible, consider the many ways that we are now defying our biological imperatives. People still live in terror of runaway population expansion, but we’ve already hit the deflection point on that growth curve. The world population is set to max out around 2050 – 2100 and then begin to decline. Despite the incredible base impulse to reproduce — an urge as strong as any (right up there with eating) — more and more people are choosing to have fewer and fewer children. Some countries are now offering couples money to have more kids (Iran and China both have or have had programs like this), and people are turning them down.

Similarly, the question: “Why don’t we expand and fill every available niche?” sounds to me like the question: “Why don’t I eat all doughnuts?” It is the extrapolation of a primitive urge that is overcome once we realize how unhealthy it is. Our drive to seek new frontiers served us evolutionarily, but it does not hold up as we progress morally. Already, there are islands and deep jungle tribes that we are aware of and choose to largely leave alone. We choose not to interfere. Sure, it took longer to reach this moral framework than it took to practically cover the planet, but the vacuum of space is proving to be the physical barrier we needed to allow our ethics to finally catch up.

And that brings us to the crux. It brings us to a very important point. There is a bit of flawed reasoning here that we all fall prey to, myself included, and it leads to really poor predictions about the future:

We keep assuming that technology will race forward and forward, but that we’ll be the same people when we get there.

That is, we place ourselves into that future. But it won’t be us there, it will be future generations, and they won’t think like we do. Millennials do not think like Baby Boomers. And Baby Boomers did not think like Victorians.

It is hubris and ego that cause us to do this. We like to think of our current generation as morally perfect. Our brains do this to protect us from our biases. Entire generations convinced themselves that slavery was perfectly reasonable. Current generations (myself included) contort our brains until we’re convinced that eating animals makes sense. What is accepted today will be abhorred in the future. We are barbarians. In a very near future, professional football will no longer be played, and boxing will be outlawed, thanks to the progress of science and (lagging behind science) ethics.

Guffaw now all you like. Previous generations likely thought the same thing about public executions, the sport of nailing cats to trees and setting them on fire, or — sticking with cruelty to cats — one Native American tribe’s habit of burying cats up to their necks, riding past on horseback, and ripping their heads off.

That revulsion you feel? That’s what future generations will think of us.

There are signs that it’s already happening. It’s hard to spot these trends, just as it would’ve been difficult to foresee the emancipation movement hundreds of years before Lincoln, but they are there.

We see a growing rejection of consumerism, even as things are more plentiful and cheaper. It might be a minority, but the small-home practitioners (of which I am one), and those who get rid of as much of their stuff as possible and find increased happiness as a result (ditto) are in clear violation of accepted cultural norms, but might perhaps be a sign of things to come. Just as lower reproduction rates fly in the face of biology and millions of years of evolution, and yet seems to be a growing and near-global trend.

In my last post, I suggested that science progresses and then moral progress comes after. The idea in this post is the consequence of that. We make a horrible mistake when we project our cultural mores into the strange and wonderful world around the corner, because that won’t be us there. It’ll be our grandchildren. There will be fewer of them than there are of us, but they’ll be much wiser and better behaved than we were.

 

 

The Ekard Equation and the Silver Years

Warning. What follows is the sort of stream-of-consciousness nonsense that I would blog more about if I knew no one visited this blog. You’ve been warned. Turn back now.

 

In the comments of my recent KDP is for Chumps post, a reader named Enabity, the author Paul Draker, and myself, got to debating the chances of artificial intelligence arising in the near future and writing award-winning novels. The three of us occupy different but slightly overlapping levels of optimism and pessimism on this front.

On the optimistic side, we have Paul Draker, the brilliant author of these books, who sees a computer passing the Turing Test by 2029. I’m assuming he means a real Turing Test and not the annual AI conference that holds a test by the same name. (Last year’s conference saw the nearest thing to a “win” yet, with the entry of a computer posing as a 13-year-old boy. A true Turing Test win would be a computer that hardly anyone would guess is not human, if allowed to converse with it).

Paul mentions picking 2029 because Ray Kurzweil popularized this date for the coming singularity (the day we all upload into a computer and join a collective consciousness. If Ray was in our conversation, making it a foursome, he would be the guy who thought the Jetsons lived just around the temporal corner. Brilliant man, but overly optimistic).

Enabity, on the other hand, sees very large unsolved problems for the development of AI and doesn’t give a date for computers to write full-blown novels indistinguishable from human-authored novels. I’m guessing he would put this accomplishment hundreds of years out from now.

For myself, I tend to be cautious with forecasts and would put the date that computers write entire novels indistinguishable from human-authored novels at 2040. (Incidentally, this is the subject of a current WIP of mine, The Last Storyteller. It’s also something I blogged about at length last year.) For full-blown AI, I’m guessing we’ll see it around 2100, give or take 15 years.

The conversation on AI soon slid from computers writing novels to the singularity, and Enabity made this thought-provoking point:

“If runaway proliferation of computers is in our future, why isn’t it in our past? It would take only about a million years for such a proliferation to completely occupy the Milky Way.”

This is profound stuff. Supremely profound. Enabity is saying that if our eventual unleashing of digital technology throughout the universe is guaranteed, and that we are not alone in the universe, then why hasn’t it already happened?

To put it another way: If we aren’t alone in the Milky Way, and technological advancement leads to inevitable galactic saturation, then the absence of galactic saturation might lead us to suspect:

1) Technological advancement is limited.

2) We are the current frontrunners in the Milky Way (or at least, we are within a million years of anyone else, which is a dead heat over the course of billions of years).

Paul quickly and hilariously dubs Enabity’s point the “Ferminator Paradox,” which cleaned my monitor up good. This is a mash-up of one of the great film franchises of all-time (though they are working on destroying that with every release beyond the fourth film. In fact, a great film idea: A movie studio sends a robot back in time to prevent various sequels and prequels from destroying the money-making potential of once-classic films. I know a few I’d go after).

Sorry. Right. So the Ferminator Paradox mashes up the Terminator plot of unstoppable AI with the Fermi Paradox, which is the observation that if advanced life is so common, then where the hell is it?

That brings us to the Drake equation, the worst bit of math you’ve ever encountered (at least until I reveal its rival equation in just a few moments). The Drake equation starts with the absurd number of stars in the Milky Way (100 – 400 billion), and whittles them down by various probabilities to get at the number of sufficiently technologically advanced civilizations that are currently beaming signals (like soap operas) out into space.

This is the number of stars we should be able to point a dish at and hear something. (Of course, they’ll have to have started beaming long enough ago for their signals to get here. Space is big. REALLY big.)

Every part of the Drake equation is guesswork. But the point of the equation is that the initial number (the number of stars in the Milky Way) is so high, that it hardly matters. Make any guess as to these various probabilities (how many stars have planets, how many of those planets have water, etc.), and you still get a very large number at the end. So space should be full of aliens dying on their deathbeds while their spouses make love with their brothers and sisters and everyone finds out about the illegitimate kid they had twenty years ago who has been in Mexico all this time but has now returned, is gorgeous in every possible way, but can’t act very well.

Fermi’s Paradox and Drake’s Equation have something to say to one another. It would be a bit of a heated discussion, in fact. What’s interesting is that Fermi’s Paradox came first. Fermi posed his conundrum in the 50s. Drake penned his reply in the 60s. Drake was one of the first to begin an active hunt for signs of intelligent life elsewhere, what became known as SETI. There have been a pile of optimistic searchers ever since, like Carl Sagan, and their pronouncements have all been wrong. So far, Fermi wins. Which is scary stuff, right? We keep listening to the darkness, and we haven’t heard a peep.

Now let’s get back to the three-way conversation in the comments of that KDP post: Paul Draker’s response to Enabity, on why we don’t already see a proliferation of computers throughout the universe, is that he doesn’t have an answer. I’ve already posited two of the obvious possibilities, which are that technology has asymptotic limits and/or we are the current frontrunners in the Milky Way. But neither of these are satisfactory. There are no indications that technology has limits to achieving AI or even biological immortality. Instead, we are seeing logarithmic progress where once it was linear.

(In a recent article, sent to me by Paul Draker, Ray Kurzweil makes this point: Thirty paces linearly gets you 30 meters of distance. 30 paces logarithmically gets you a BILLION meters. We are currently witnessing logarithmic expansion of technology.)

The other option, that we are the technological front-runners (ie, that we started broadcasting and listening before any other species in our radiowave cone could do the same) doesn’t feel right either. It’s too anthropocentric. Any theory that puts us at the center of the universe, or gives us special rights, privileges, or placement, is best avoided. Because science has a long and humbling history of showing us to be on the outskirts rather than the middle of things. First, with the discovery that the Earth orbits the Sun (a heresy that could get you killed back in the day), to the observation that the Sun is out in the ‘burbs, to the observation that the Milky Way isn’t a very big deal (some of them fuzzy stars up there are entire galaxies! Oh, wow, a LOT of them are), to the recent realization that an infinite number of universes are likely.

Paul Draker knows this, which is why he doesn’t have an answer for the Ferminator Paradox.

I gamely replied that there’s a simple answer: We are alone.

Now, this view is heretical to secularists, for the exact anthropocentric reasons stated above. Any time we claim uniqueness or specialness, we make a discovery that puts us in our place. And yet, the Fermi and Ferminator Paradoxes beg for an answer. And it could be that the most obvious one is correct.

Don’t tell this to those with an empirical bent. For them, the Drake equation (even though none of the numbers have been filed in) has resolved the question. There are a shit-ton of aliens zipping around in spaceships all over the universe. We just aren’t looking hard enough or in the right places.

But I believe the Drake equation may be nulled by the Ekard equation, which looks at the very long odds of certain preconditions for technological intelligence to arise. That is, rather than start with a very big number (stars in the Milky Way) and pare them down, the Ekard equation comes at the same answer from the other direction, by totaling up the long odds of advanced civilization and then applying this to the number of stars in the Milky Way.

The two equations do the exact same thing. But one is a bunch of guesses by an optimist, and the other by a pessimist realist.

The Ekard equation might include the following long chances, and it stipulates that many more are unknown:

• We must first ignore all stars too close to the galactic core (the galaxy itself has a “Goldilocks Zone”).

• We must then ignore all stars that are either too young or too old.

• We must then ignore almost all binary and trinary star systems (which may be more than half of all star systems. They present tricky orbits and wild seasons).

• Then ignore systems without a planet in the habitable zone.

• Then ignore almost all systems without a proto-sun, like Jupiter, to clear out impactors.

• Then ignore most systems without a massive moon paired to the target planet (which may be necessary for both impactors and tides. Tides may be necessary for life to transition to land).

• Then ignore all systems without terrestrial life. (Not going to tame fire underwater).

• Then ignore all systems without dextrous life. (Opposable thumbs and/or tentacles required.)

That’s just a few of the long odds. Look at the moon, for instance. The Ekard equation operates somewhat from the Anthropic Principle, which points out that the universe is of course set up for intelligent life, because here we are to observe and comment on it. But it goes one further by assuming that since intelligent life isn’t everywhere we look (The Ferminator Paradox), then perhaps anything really bizarre about our solar system is a precursor to the incredible luck of intelligent life.

The moon, for instance, is pretty bizarre. It took a glancing blow between two proto-planets. A direct hit, and you’d have an asteroid belt (or the re-accretion of a single planet). Too glancing of a blow, and you wouldn’t have gravitational capture. If a large moon plays a significant role in the evolution of intelligent life (and it might), then you could be looking at one-in-a-trillion odds right there. Which means this one supposition alone would account for the dearth of intelligent life in the Milky Way. In fact, one-in-a-trillion odds would mean that only one out of every three or ten galaxies has a single soap-opera-broadcasting race!

And that’s just one of the odds. When you cut out the galactic core, you lose a lot of the stars the Drake Equation depends on. When you get rid of the binary and trinary systems, you lose half of what’s left. That 400 billion begins to disappear about as fast as if you left Donald Trump in charge of it.

Add in all the things we don’t know about. Plus the observable odds that out of hundreds of millions of species on the one planet that we know harbors life, we can observe that only one of them learned to smelt ore. And everyone knows that smelting ore is a precondition to soap operas. Now consider the odds that organisms can become sufficiently advanced to master technology without first destroying their habitat. Plus the odds that an organism can be aggressive enough to dominate their biome without being so aggressive that they spend all their time warring with members of their own species. Plus the chances that attaining the highest levels of advancement probably include attaining the highest evolvement of cultural philosophy, which would include not making contact with organisms on their own journeys, nor seeding the galaxy with death stars, nor even broadcasting pathetic cries of loneliness out into the ether (besides soap operas).

Calculate these long odds, multiply them out, apply the odds to the number of stars in the Milky Way, and you probably get the number 1. These odds, of course, can be revised the moment we observe the number to be 2.

In the end, the Drake Equation reminds me of all the Popular Science magazines with talk of time travel on their covers. What you have here are fans of science fiction, who of course pursued a career in the sciences, and took their wildest fantasies with them. I have the same biases and fantasies. Which is why I try to guard against them. What we lack right now is enough people of secular bent considering the possibility that normally arises from theologians: We really could be alone in the Milky Way. When it comes to broadcasting soap operas into outer space, that is.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m open to the idea of there being other intelligent life out there. I think it’s a high probability. But I think it’s a stance rarely challenged by those of us who want it to be true. Of non-intelligent life, I’m of the opinion that it exists practically anywhere there’s water. I see life as being a direct consequence of chemistry. I bet there were self-replicating chemical strands within thousands of years of the Earth forming (in fact, I think there was life here while the Earth was still forming, being bombarded with impactors and getting walloped by the moon. Just not very stable life, as it was constantly disrupted and starting over).

Also: I don’t think we are special, or that the universe was created for us. There are a lot of galaxies, and possibly an infinite number of universes, so there is very likely an infinite number of technological civilizations out there. But possibly not in the Milky Way. And anything not in the Milky Way is effectively cut off from us forever. Space is growing faster between the galaxies (and accelerating) quicker than we’ll be able to cross those gaps. We’re relegated to our local cluster. And yeah, I’m ignoring the screams from readers saying “warp drives, dude!” Warp drives and time travel alike are crushed by the Ferminator Paradox. Einstein set the speed limit for the universe, and science fiction fantasies of traversable wormholes are the same sort of longing and loneliness that cause us to invent religions. Those theories and our gods come from the same desire and all have the same amount of evidence. We should guard against such impulses.

So where does that leave us? With one more option, and I believe it’s the most likely option, and I think it saves us from any technological limits, any fears of being alone in the Milky Way (much less the universe), and is based on sound theory and not wishful thinking. The longer I think about this theory, the more “right” it feels to me. I doubt it has ever come up before, because it requires a strange mix of both technological and moral optimism, and these two things rarely go hand-in-hand (moral optimism is rarely found on its own).

I call this hypothesis “The Silver Years.” It posits that civilizations have an extremely narrow window in which they are sufficiently advanced to dominate the universe and still assholes enough to believe this is a good idea.

The name comes from the observed phenomenon wherein Olympic silver medalists are less satisfied than bronze medalists. Silver medalists, you see, are just a step from gold. While bronze medalists were that close to not being Olympic medalists at all!

I know of an author who debuted at #2 on the NYT list. He and I share a publicist. He got the news while on book tour, and was despondent for the rest of the tour. Depressed. Had he debuted at #15, just making the list, experiments suggest that he would’ve been buoyed. Ecstatic, even.

This observation also applies to people moving up in their careers. Once you are aware of the phenomenon, you see it everywhere. People are often assholes while gaining a bit of success but before they get to a place where they are fully satisfied. Middle-management, if you will. The Silver phase is this middleground of jerktitude, and if it is left behind, it is usually either by attaining more, or realizing that what you have is enough.

It seems likely to me that intelligent races would go through something similar to this Silver Phase. That is, any race sufficiently advanced enough to dominate a galaxy, will, within a few hundred years, give up that fantasy of galactic domination.

This must sound downright insane to really smart and sane people. Because everything we know about life is that it spreads and spreads and fills every niche. Morpheus gets this lecture in The Matrix, when Agent Smith compares humanity to a virus. Those who are most optimistic about our technological progress are equally pessimistic about our natural history. They understand where we came from, nature red in tooth and claw. Hence the portrayal of the mad scientist as a trope. Hence the presentation of all alien visitors as marauding conquerors. Would history give us any reason to suspect otherwise?

I believe it does. Take Stephen Pinker’s recent work and TED talk on the decline of violence. Our moral sphere keeps expanding, enveloping previously trodden-upon sectors of life. Here’s a truth not espoused often enough: Moral progress FOLLOWS scientific progress, rather than the other way around.

As we discover more about ourselves, each other, animals, the planet, it affects our empathy drive and our circles of inclusiveness. Science is the font of ethics. It has always been this way. Science pushes forward, and conservatism and religion attempt to keep us in the old ways of doing things (this is not a condemnation of religion. It is a condemnation of our innate tendencies toward conservatism, which is one of the things that drives religious institutions and ways of thought).

So: Scientific discovery propels us toward the ABILITY to seed the universe, but then advanced morality rushes in its wake like a trailing shockwave, and global consciousness realizes that the drive for expansion and the insatiable curiosity that drove us to this point will also be our downfall, and the destruction of our biome (as it largely has been).

We see this in environmentalism. Technology creates destruction, and then our ethics mature in the wake, and we use different technology to mitigate or undo that destruction. Many of our bodies of water are cleaner now than they were a hundred years ago. Forests are returning. We will one day begin to undo the effects of global warming (CO2 ppm remained stable during an economic recovery for the first time since such measurements have been made). The fact is that we do care, but that caring tends to lag behind our rush to be creative, to push boundaries, to consume, and so on.

This gap between scientific progress and ethical awareness are our Silver Years. How long this period lasts is up for debate (many would debate whether it even exists, but these people would have to explain how they believe in limitless scientific progress and stunted moral progress, which is a mix of optimism and pessimism that flies in the face of human history).

I put the Silver Years as being in duration 200 to 500 years. That’s the gap in time during which a civilization would have to set out to conquer the universe before realizing that such a goal is not only evil and folly, but that making contact at all and interfering with the progress of other lifeforms as they take their own journeys, is a tremendously horrible idea. Again, science (and science fiction) lead the way, as this was a principle proposed in the original Star Trek. The goal is to observe, to know—to expand our knowledge, but not our influence or our destruction.

As a race, I see us growing ethically in countless ways. I see tolerance growing. And when doubters balk and point to modern injustices, what I see is a reaction to those injustices that would be unimaginable ten years ago, much less 100 or 1,000. Yes, we still see radicals beheading people for not agreeing with their ideologies. Not long ago, it was the King of England doing this, and people turned out to watch. The treatment of animals has vastly improved, and much of that comes with scientific progress. When we learn that chimps share more than 98% of our genes, we see them differently, and then we treat them differently. The knowledge comes first. Our right action lags.

None of this explains the lack of soap operas beaming at us from every star. The Ekard Equation likely has more to say on this front. But the Ferminator Paradox could also be explained with more uplifting news: We tend to behave better, as a race, with each passing generation. We grow more tolerant, more open-minded, more inclusive, more shocked at age-old horrors and determined to put an end to them. It just never happens quite as fast as we like, and our pace of innovation will always be faster.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t get there. And all of this means we might not go anywhere. Not beyond our solar system, anyway. By the time we can, we’ll realize it isn’t such a good idea. The ego and hubris that provided the tools will be tempered by the wisdom that follows in its wake.

 

 

 

What Can’t You Do?

Why not?

This video moved me. What do you want to do with your life?

So many of our impossible challenges require long term commitments. They require failing, day after day after day after day. Gradually, you fail less spectacularly. And when success comes, it’s like a birthday. All that aging in steady increments, but then you are suddenly something different, in that clearly defined moment when you do what was previously impossible.

For the last three months, I’ve been doing exercises every morning called the Five Tibetans. At first, I couldn’t do them all. Even now, I can’t do them all that well. But they feel different every day. I feel different every day.

Exercising, dieting, writing, practicing, these things require habitual application when we want to do anything else. But what do we want to become? Do we want it bad enough? Are we willing to put in the effort?

The most inspiring thing about this video? The fact that he set up a camera and filmed week one. You know who does that? Someone who expects to succeed, no matter what. Name your challenge. Know you’ll conquer it. Know it in week one, when you can’t even touch the rim.

 

KDP is for Chumps

I have a confession to make: I’ve been a chump. When it comes to writing, I’ve been a major chump.

Webster says that a chump is someone who is foolish or easily deceived. That’s been me as a writer. For 90% of my life as a writer, I’ve been a chump. Time to come clean.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I work on a few writing projects that will make me little to no money. One is a story that may never get published. The other project will hardly be read. I’ve been devoting a lot of time to both projects.

I’ve been thinking about this as I see more reports on how rare it is for self-published authors to make considerable income. I’ve been mulling it over while watching this thread go wild at KBoards, asking if KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is chump change for chumps.

I’m here to tell you that KDP is a place for chumps.

I know because I’ve been one. Let me tell you my story:

The year was 1986. Having recently read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Ender’s Game, I decided to write a novel. I was eleven years old. I sat down in front of my father’s Apple IIe computer, and began pecking away. I wrote a story about an oaf who stumbles through a hole in his yard, discovers that the Earth is a spaceship, and begins playing chess with his robotic bedpan. Adams and Card would’ve been very much not-proud of my attempts.

Within weeks, I abandoned that novel.

Then I started another. This time, a rip-off of Tolkien. Elves, dwarves, mages, and warriors.

A abandoned that puppy as well.

For the next 23 years, I read voraciously. I dreamed of writing a novel. This was at the very top of any bucket list I would’ve made during that period, a bucket list that swung wildly from marrying Wonder Woman to spending a year living on the Great Wall of China. Writing a novel was always at the top. Because it was the thing I tried most often to do and failed at most consistently.

I could never write anything worth reading. I would never be good enough. I was wasting my time. It took too much effort, and for what? No one would want to read what I wrote, not even me. I could never make a living as a novelists. Those people had college degrees. They studied literature. They had MFAs. And so writing-a-novel sat on my bucket list right above sailing-around-the-world.

When I was 23, I tried to sail around the world. I didn’t get very far. I spent a year in the Bahamas, went through a couple bad storms, ran out of money, and started working on boats to earn enough to get by. I wrote a lot. Poetry. Short stories. First chapters of novels. I read several books a week. I knew by then that I’d never sail around the world, just as I knew I’d never write a novel.

In 2009, I was 34 years old. I know how young 34 is, believe me. But I felt like my chance at so many dreams had passed me by. I was living on land, domesticated by the love of my life, with a perfect dog, a tiny home, no debt, and time on my hand. Yes, I was young, but I’d given up on some of my dreams. And so when I sat down to write one day, it was simply to write a first chapter. It wasn’t to write a novel. Just a beginning. The story was called Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue.

Instead of a chapter, I wrote 50 pages.

Amber came home from work, and I showed her the printed pages, my hands still shaking from mania and from having stared at a computer screen for ten straight hours. I’d written over 10,000 words since she left the house. I demanded that she read. She humored me. An hour later, she asked for more. She asked what happened next.

I said, “I have no freaking clue.”

For the next six days, I wrote. I may have eaten a little. I may have slept a touch. But mostly, I wrote.

In seven days, I had a 70,000 word rough draft. An entire story. Beginning, middle, and end. With foreshadowing. Characters I cared about. A plot that made me weep and laugh. Something I was proud of.

Amber read it and loved it. I spent the next seven days revising. I added 30,000 words, wrote a different ending, brought one character back to life, killed another, and had a decent draft. We were in Charleston, visiting my mom and sister the day I wrote the last word on the new ending. On a Sunday afternoon, we went to dinner, and I stared at the USB memory stick sitting on the table with us. A novel I wrote was on that USB stick. We drank wine. My mom, sister, and Amber chatted and laughed. I stared numbly at this thing, sitting on the table, a scratch off my bucket list.

The five hour drive back to Boone was one I’ll never forget. I was a different person. Before that moment, I was a bibliophile vagabond. I was a sailor. A dog lover. A life partner. A decent son. A middling brother. A failed writer.

Now I was one less of these things. I felt alive. I knew that this was what I was meant to do: Write.

And so I started work on the sequel, Molly Fyde and the Land of Light. Meanwhile, I sent the entire Word document of my first novel to any takers. My cousin Lisa. Online friends. Strangers. Whoever would read the thing. I started a blog and considered uploading the novel in free installments. But the feedback kept coming in. My cousin Lisa said it was the best novel she’d read in ages. Could she send it to friends? Sure. An online friend (and professional editor) said it didn’t suck. That it didn’t suck a lot. That I should get it published.

So I googled how to get published. I spent a week learning about query letters. I went to the library and found a thick book of agents and publishers. I queried. I kept writing. I kept sending out copies of that draft to anyone who would read it.

Two small presses expressed interest in my pitch. I sent partial submissions, which led to full submissions, which led to offers. Tiny advances, but I didn’t care. Someone was going to edit my work and pay to have it printed. This was beyond bucket list. This was something else entirely. Another celebratory dinner. A contract signed. A book edited and released.

Any dreams of making a living as a writer were short lived. I’m not sure I even entertained such a fantasy. I knew it would be up to me to sell every copy of every book. I knew how little I would make, how few friends and family I had, and how few of these would dare to buy their nephew’s science fiction novel. I knew this as I signed the contract, as I went through the edits. I knew it as I wrote the sequel and started on book three.

I didn’t care.

The contract came for Molly Fyde and the Land of Light. I had a long conversation with Amber. I liked the writing more than the publishing. I enjoyed creating new worlds and new characters. I enjoyed sharing these stories with friends and family. I really enjoyed creating my own cover art, doing my own pagination and layouts, and contributing to my blog. When I wanted to move some text to the left five pixels, I wanted to do it on my computer, fiddle as much as I wanted in order to change how the story was delivered, not send emails back and forth with someone else, explaining my idea and getting a PDF in return. I just wanted to create stories, in their completed form, the entire book.

So I didn’t sign that contract. I bought the rights to my first novel back. In less time than it took to learn how to query, I learned how to publish my works on my own. Paperbacks and ebooks. It took me a weekend to learn how.

And so I wrote for the love of writing. I got a job in a bookstore. I wrote every morning before work; I wrote over my lunch hour; I wrote at night and on weekends.

I made my stories available. I was one of the early chumps who used KDP to upload my ebooks. I used a print on demand service for my paperbacks. For my birthday, Amber bought me a Kindle. I downloaded the first Molly Fyde book to the device and stared at it. And then, overcome with guilt over the price of the thing, I talked her into returning it.

I wrote and wrote. It was a hobby, in the dearest sense of the word. A passion. Something I would do if monthly fees were required. Something I would gladly pay to do.

Rather than play video games or watch TV with my spare time, I wrote. My father said I should spend more time promoting my existing novels rather than write more of them. My mother asked if Oprah knew I’d written a novel. I told my super-excited and proud parents that I’d be lucky to sell 5,000 copies of my works, total, if I wrote twenty novels over the next ten years.

That was my goal in 2009. Write two novels a year for the next ten years. Twenty novels, and then I’d see where I was.

It is almost six years since I started writing that first novel. I think I’ve written fourteen novels since then. In addition to the novels, I’ve written novellas, short stories, edited three anthologies, helped direct a graphic novel, and wrote a children’s book. All for the love of it. And the biggest cost to me was my time.

Six years spent writing, mostly while working a full-time job. For several novels, I spent nothing on the production. I did my own cover art, my own pagination, my own layouts, my own formatting. Friends and family helped with the editing. This was no different than my years as a painter, when I stretched my own canvases. Or my years as a photographer, where I had my own matting and framing workshop. I cut glass and mounted my work. I blended pulp and pressed my own paper. It was fun. I loved it.

But keep in mind that for over 20 years, I routinely gave up on writing. I started novels and abandoned them. Keep that in mind.

It wasn’t until 2009 that I started writing and loving it. A mere six years later, I have put a down payment on a sailboat. This will be my second boat. My first was the one I sailed to the Bahamas sixteen years ago. The one I lived on while in college. I spent five years living aboard that boat. I hope to spend the next five, at the very least, on my next boat.

This next boat is much nicer than my last one, and I owe that to my readers. I owe it to my writing. I owe it to the years I spent pursuing something that I love. I owe it mostly to KDP, CreateSpace, and ACX. These tools allowed me to share my stories with the world. There are many such tools available, but these three have introduced me to the vast majority of my readership and the vast majority of my earnings.

Now let’s get back to me being a chump.

But first, a disclaimer. Because the reports on earnings for self-publishers are right: Most people don’t have this level of success. Publishing stories like mine are the exception. Just like lottery winners are the exception.

But that’s a horrible analogy, a lottery. It’s one you see thrown around a lot, but it misses the point. Here’s a better analogy than a lottery: Imagine someone showing up to your house and giving you a fat check because of how many people read and enjoyed your Facebook posts. Or because a lot of people thought your front yard was beautiful. Or because your knitting or piano-playing were widely enjoyed.

Imagine this only happened to a few hundred people over the past five years. But now imagine that thousands of people are getting decent sized checks for their Facebook posts or Twitter feeds or forum contributions or hilarious emails to friends. Imagine that some entity was distributing more money to people like this than the 5 major publishers were distributing to all of their authors, combined.

This is how I look at my situation, and the situation of thousands of other writers. I’d be writing and making my stories available no matter what. Everyone reading this writes and entertains somewhere for free. But in my case and thousands of other cases like mine, KDP, Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, CreateSpace, and ACX insist on paying. And paying more, and more often, than a publisher would. All while working at our pace, in full control, doing what we love.

Let’s forget for a moment most of the flaws in these self-selected surveys that are meant to dissuade us. Forget for a moment that this survey in particular was focused on our “most recent release,” and that many self-published authors taking the survey complained that their most recent release just came out a week or a month ago. They weren’t asked about their other twelve works, which continue to sell. No, for all the survey’s flaws, there is only one that matters, and it’s a flaw that shows up in practically every survey that looks at publishing income. It’s the flaw that made a chump out of me.

You see, the first poor assumption here is that all those self-published authors are in it for the money. And the second poor assumption is that the authors who get publishing contracts are the only ones who tried to get publishing contracts. Plenty of people have a dream to write and be published by a major publishing house, earnings be damned. 99% of these people fail. You never see them or their works. Their dreams are never counted.

This was me. For over twenty years, this was me. Dreaming of writing, but thinking my fate rested in the hands of others, terrified I wouldn’t be good enough, that I wouldn’t pass muster, that I’d never be allowed to chase that dream, and so I gave up with the first glimmer of doubt, the first stab of self-criticism.

Stories of rejection letters and piles of submissions threw gasoline on these doubts. Stories of those who tried and gave up. Even stories of tragic vindication like the publication history of A Confederacy of Dunces filled me with fear. Fear of failure. Fear of pointless struggles. Fear of being denied a chance.

KDP is for chumps. Because it’s one of the best places for chumps to gather and to stop being chumps. KDP is for chumps like restaurants are for the hungry. It’s a magnet for chumps, and as soon as you enter, you stop being one.

I was foolish for giving up on my writing. I didn’t have realistic hopes of making my stories available. It wasn’t until I started writing on forums and blogging and finding an audience through the free and open publishing miracle that is the internet, that I started to believe. And I stopped being a chump.

Going back to that thread on KBoards, I’m sorry that not everyone’s dream of vast riches comes true. There are a lot of people out there dreaming of getting rich quick, just as there always has been. But this wasn’t my dream. It’s never been my dream.

My dream was to write a novel. It’s been my dream since I was eleven years old. I’ve spent most of my writing life being a chump, because I couldn’t see what must be blindingly obvious to so many digital natives today: The only person who could deny me this dream was myself. I was the only thing standing in my way.

Maybe your dream is different. Maybe you want to be published by a major house. Maybe you want to get rich quick. I’d love to see the survey that gave us those odds. Because those dreams aren’t up to you. Only the writing is. And here’s where the gathering of chumps have an advantage that confuses the pundits.

You see, the same surveys have shown that the chances of earning a living are about equal between self-published authors and traditionally published authors. The chances are equally bad, that is. Very few earn a full-time living making art. But consider this: On one side of this comparison, you have a group of lottery winners who got lucky and scored that publishing contract. You have the 1% of winners. On the other side of the comparison, you have all the chumps who decided to stop being chumps and make their stories available to the world.

That’s right. For once, the 99% are doing just as well as the 1%. There are a lot of happy chumps out there, making art, connecting with colleagues and fans, getting a story out and working on the next, engaging with the entire process of storytelling, finding a passion and reveling in it, with everything that comes after a big fat bonus, however slim others want to make it out to be.

 

 

A Life at Sea

St. Francis 50 – Guinevere

I just spent a week aboard the sister ship to my future catamaran. This was hull #18 of the St. Francis 50 line. I helped sail the boat to the Miami Boat Show a few weeks ago, where I put a deposit down on hull #19. The next day, a lovely couple purchased Guinevere, the boat I helped deliver. The owner then invited me back to the Bahamas to spend a week on the boat, discussing its systems and plans.

I will take delivery of hull #19, Wayfinder, in July. We will sail it from South Africa to the U.S., and I’ll live permanently aboard. I’ll have a separate blog to detail the build process and travels. There will be some changes to this website to aid in navigation and to reflect a near future of far more writing, less blogging about books, and more blogging about life. It’s amazing that I have found something even less exciting to write about than the book trade, but I have.

www.the-wayfinder.com

 

Wayfinder

We spent one week every summer at a family beach house in North Carolina. All I could think about on the interminable drive to the sea was the small SunFish sailboat sitting in the garage of that house. Kicking off my shirt and shoes as soon as we arrived, I would drag the small boat to the sound at the back of the house and spend the next week tacking and gybing. If there was no wind, I worked the tiller back and forth to barely make way. As a very young boy, sailing made me feel free in a way nothing else could.

I read about Joshua Slocum’s adventures sailing around the world alone. I read about Sir Francis Chichester, Robin Knox Johnston, and Bernard Moitessier. I read about an amazing teenager named Tania Aebi who sailed around the world by herself on a dare from her father. When I moved to Charleston, I readily took any offer to get out on the water. Several of my friends had boats. When I met people who lived on small sailboats, I started looking into costs. It turned out that I could buy a boat for $10,000 — not much more than a decent car — and make it my home. So I did.

My best friend and I nearly killed ourselves bringing the boat down from Baltimore in January of 1996. I lived on the boat for the next five years. Three of these were while attending classes at the College of Charleston. One year was spent in the Bahamas, where I cruised off to after dropping out of school (why get a degree and slave away for 40 years to one day retire on a boat when I was already on one?) When my funds ran out, I realized the error of my calculations, so I started working odd jobs on other people’s boats to get by. This led to a career as a yacht captain, which kept me on the sea for the better part of the next decade.

I left the water years ago to follow my better half inland. Since then, I haven’t stopped planning and dreaming of getting back on a boat and sailing around the world. Or just sailing up and down the coast. The destination was never the thing, only the lifestyle. Meeting new people. Shifting horizons. Adjusting latitudes and attitudes, as Jimmy Buffett would say.

I am currently in Miami for the Sail Only Boat Show. It’s my third boat show in the last two years, as I’ve narrowed down on the make and model of my future home. But this is the week. In the next couple of days, I’ll put down a deposit, and by this summer, I’ll be living aboard again. If you see a catamaran named “Wayfinder” bobbing at anchor, that will probably be me. It’s a name with deep significance for me, something I’ll be writing about at length.

And that’s the miracle of working as a writer: I can do it from anywhere and everywhere. The past few years, I’ve done a lot of writing from airplanes and airports while on business trips abroad. SAND was entirely written overseas while traveling through seven different countries; I think it’s a better story because of those inspirations. In upcoming years, I may be writing near your home port.

In addition to my usual mix of fiction genres, I’m also working on a series of pieces about my past sailing adventures, my random thoughts about life and what-not, and a bit of a travelogue of my new journey and the people I meet along the way. Right about the time I make this transition, I’ll be turning 40. Age has always been a number to me, but this will be a birthday to truly celebrate. It marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. And you know me, I’m a fan of cliffhangers. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

 

 

The January Author Earnings Report

Our fifth Author Earnings report marks the first anniversary of this website. We now have a year of quarterly snapshots to analyze, and the results have been consistent while also revealing gradual trends.

This time around, we look at ebooks and ISBNs. There is an entire “shadow industry” of ebook sales uncounted by industry pundits. A year ago, we gave you the first look at a shadow industry of indie ebooks. This year, we get a first glance at the works that no one is tracking or counting.

Which raises the question: Do we need ISBNs? Probably something like them, but not at their current cost to benefit ratio. ISBN-less ebooks outsell those with ISBNs, which proves nothing except that ISBNs aren’t needed for sales success. If the industry or retailers want to track ebooks, let them offer a standardized and low-cost means to do so.

Another point is that ebooks change over time as authors update them and their backmatter. There may even be different editions for each retailer, so links point to sequels at that website. Expecting a different ISBN for each of these editions is not realistic. These numbers are simply a relic of the print days, which are on their way out. But that’s looking ahead to our next report.

The Shell Collector on Audible

The Shell Collector is now up for pre-order on Audible!

Really excited about the voice acting for this novel. Samara Naeymi absolutely nails Maya Walsh. Give the sample a listen if you like.

And here’s the SoundCloud link as well.

In related news, my short story Glitch was given the audiobook treatment. It’s dynamite, if you ask me. Check it out on SoundCloud. And check out this blog review of the audio edition of Glitch here.

Best-Selling AND Unknown by M.L. Banner

I am currently somewhere off the coast of Cuba with intermittent internet access, so I’d like to thank Michael for taking over my blog today. Michael’s story is the real story of self-publishing. Yes, the vast majority of self-published works never sell in great numbers — just as the vast majority of queried works never sell a single copy (they never get the chance).

But there is a middle range of self-publishing success that gets almost no press. Michael’s story is one I could have written several years ago to describe what happened to me. I find these stories inspiring. And I understand that success is not a given, that it isn’t easy, that it requires a healthy dose of luck or the benevolent forces of the Great Algorithmic Unknown, but for me it helps to know that you don’t have to be the one in a million to make the hard work worthwhile. And it helps to know that writers with no prior following are still seeing results if they tell great stories.

Now I turn it over to Mr. Banner.

Best-Selling AND Unknown

by M.L. Banner

Nine months ago, I self-published my first book on Amazon. I won’t lie to you; this exercise was purely a flight of fancy for me. I really wasn’t planning a career in writing; only later did I find out I love to write. Then, something remarkable happened, an epochal event that changed everything for me: my book sold really well. Okay, maybe not Hugh-Howey-well, but still pretty darn good: over 2000 the first 30 days and over 6000 in 60 days. Just so there is no confusion, I had no following (maybe 15 people I know personally bought my book), and I had never written anything longer than an article (I’ve written many of these) before this. I certainly never expected to have a #1 bestseller in my two genres. However, I can’t take the credit for this any more than I can attribute it to luck. I know I had to write a good enough book, with a professional cover, a captivating blurb and all that. Yet, there was something else at work here.

I was a newbie author when I hit the “Save and Publish” button, but I’ve also been an entrepreneur for many years, having run businesses in lots of different markets. I have to tell you, I was absolutely blown away at the effortless and cost-free nature of self-publishing a novel and releasing it within hours to the book-buying-public. There is simply no other business with almost no barrier to entry and the ability to sell your product immediately. No doubt, it is this simplification and lack of barriers that has drawn thousands of new authors like me into self-publishing. Also true with more authors comes more bad books, but it means many more great books too.  And because the book market is not static, as indie cheerleaders like Hugh have pointed out, I believe the number of readers is expanding; add to the equation, low pricing and ease of purchase, brought on by clever self-publishing platforms, and that means the market is buying more and more books. My over-loaded Kindle and iPad can attest to this.

Okay, I know the big question is, “How did you do it?” A better question would be, “What was it that made your book sell so well?” In full disclosure, when I started, I didn’t know any of the other publishing platforms, and I didn’t spend much time researching them either. I chose KDP Select not because of any specific love for the company, it just sounded the easiest, and I knew Amazon held the largest share of the eBook market: It was a business decision.

When I published Stone Age (http://bit.ly/stone-age) in April, I had few expectations that I would peddle more than a dozen copies. A couple of days later, a few of my friends nibbled, then a few stalwart strangers bought, and then Amazon’s algorithms kicked in. My little tome made it onto Hot New Releases for both my chosen genres, giving it astounding instant visibility: As if a clerk plucked my novel from some vague pile and placed it in the front window of his book store—only this was the largest book store on the planet. And that was it. Three weeks later, Stone Age became a #1 best seller in both its categories, and has remained in the top hundred ever since.

Understand this, I am a bit of a tech guy and very process oriented—I still run several internet-based companies—so I wanted to find out why this happened and not leave anything to chance with the next one. On Halloween, I released my second book, a sequel to the first. Taking the knowledge gained from self-publishing Stone Age, I was much more purposeful in this launch, and the results were equally fruitful: it became an Amazon top ten Best Seller on the first day, #2 on the second day, and it remained in the top twenty through the New Year. Did lightning strike twice? No! Everything I did from writing to my audience, the professional cover, the editing and proof reading, the blurbs from fellow authors, advanced copy readers giving early reviews, cross-promoting my first book, and emailing my growing reader list, all contributed to my second book’s achievements and my first book’s resurgence. However, it was the Amazon structure that ensured my good fortune. Speaking of which, my November earnings from both books hit five figures.

This made something else plain to me: It turns out that self-publishing is far more lucrative than convincing a publisher to take your work for a minuscule royalty, just so you can say, “I’m published!” Don’t get me wrong, there are times when selling to a publisher may become a strategically wise move, but that doesn’t have to be the end game. I’ve met several authors who are “published” with large presses but haven’t sold very many books. I’m not bragging, just pointing out that making money as a self-published author, even quit-your-job-kind-of-money, is still very much possible by folks like me with practically no following.

To this end, Amazon’s brilliance shines. They’ve created the distribution network and the algorithms that give unknown authors’ books visibility in front of scores of readers who are looking for books in similar sub-genres. Understanding this and a few other things I’ll share, I know that if you write a good enough book, one that hits some of the hot buttons your readers expect, it will sell well.  In my case, Amazon’s network made my two books visible enough that almost thirty thousand people have found them. Without this structure, one word comes to mind: obscurity!

I’ve had an mind-numbing crash course in writing and publishing this past year. Yet, there are several things I’ve learned (both good and bad) that I wish my present-self could go back in time and warn my past-self about. Hopefully, you will benefit from my top mistakes and recommendations, and avoid the need for time travel.

My Top Five Mistakes that you’ll want to avoid:

1.  Don’t be cheap on editing – I went with the cheapest editor I could find. I just didn’t think anyone would buy my first book and so I didn’t want to invest that much in it. Big mistake! I am quite sure I would have sold thousands more copies of my first book had I not initially published with so many errors. Now I employ an editor and proofreader, and I get help from many wonderful volunteer beta readers.

2.  Don’t rush your book to the marketplace – Hold off clicking that “publish” button, no matter how tired you are of rereading it. Again, editors and betas can help you with this.

3.  Don’t think of other authors in your genre as competitors – Quite the opposite. Reach out to other authors, especially those who have had success in your genre. Read their books and post reviews on your platforms and then tell them about it. That’s how relationships start.

4.  Don’t be cheap on your own platform – Buy a domain and set up a website (you can do so with GoDaddy for less than $100 per year). Then, make sure your site’s focus is on building your subscriber list: These will be your future advanced copy reviewers and fan base that will push your next book onto the Hot New Releases list.

5.  Keep writing – Your most important activity is to write. Don’t stop. Make it a habit and write every day. Then when it’s ready (see #2), release your next book. Each book you publish (if it gains visibility) lifts the sales of your other books, especially those in the same series.

My top five recommendations to improve your chances of success:

1.  Take as much time to write your best book possible – I cannot stress enough how important this is. Again, get it right the first time. I lost many potential readers, perhaps permanently because I wasn’t careful with my first book.

2.  Publish to Kindle Select – I know this is a powder-keg issue right now because you’re reluctant to give into Amazon’s exclusively requirement (even though it’s only for 90 days), but this will absolutely help you in their algorithms and therefore their Best Seller Rankings. Remember, a higher ranking leads to more visibility, which leads to more sales. Married to exclusivity is anxiety over KU, but my KU borrows continue to boost my books’ rankings over those that are not in Select. Certainly if you have a big readership base you’ll need to examine this point more closely. But if you do not have many followers, this action is practically a necessity these days.

3.  Choose the right sub-genre – For your next book, choose the two sub-genres (fitting to your readership and the book’s storyline), with the lowest number of books in it. Check the bottom 100 of the Hot New Releases (in that sub-genre) and see what it would take to make it there. Use http://kdpcalculator.com/index.php to help you translate Best Seller Rank (BSR#) into the approximate number of daily sales you’ll need.

4.  First goal: Make the Hot New Releases in at least one sub-genre – To do this, you’ll need to sell a progressive amount for the first five to eight days after launch. In most sub-genres, this is not a big number, but something like one sale the first day and maybe eight sales by the eighth day ought to be more than enough: That’s 42 books total. Do that and you should make it on the Hot New Releases list for your sub-genre(s). Boom, instant visibility! I’ve known other authors who set their book price at $0.99 for the first ten days or so, just to give it the added boost to make the HNR. Once you’re there, you’ll have up to 30 days of best-selling fun ahead of you.

5.  Use Countdown + promotions to build audience & visibility – With Kindle Select, you can run a Countdown (after your first 30 days) to get your book in front of another group of readers who haven’t tried you out yet. Then run a few promotions during those days. A $100 to $200 budget should be sufficient.

I truly feel blessed to write this.  After some initial luck, lots of hard work, marvelous people who have helped (including betas, editors, artists, other authors, etc.), and a little skill–hopefully improving daily–I have found an endeavor that has brought joy to me and to tens of thousands of people I can now call my readers.

This is an amazing age we live in where anyone can invest some time and a little money and be entrusted with almost complete power by platforms like Amazon to release a book to their immense customer base. More amazing still is that today, a complete unknown can complete head-to-head with big publishers and well-known authors and sell a lot of books.

 

For more from or about Michael, visit him at,

Website: http://mlbanner.com

FB: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorMLBanner

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ML_Banner

G+: https://google.com/+Mlbanner/