Hugh Howey's Blog, page 35

Revolution? Or Civil War?

The Confederates are setting up camp here on the 4th of July.

No, really. I’m spending time with my mom in the mountains of North Carolina, and the annual Christmas in July celebration is kicking off in West Jefferson, within view of her front porch. Tents are going up everywhere to sell food and crafts. And in the field behind the library, a group of reenactors are firing off cannons and waving rebel flags. On the 4th of July.

This surreal juxtaposition is a reminder that wars within borders are considered “civil wars” if the rebels lose and “revolutionary wars” if they win.

From a distance, it’s hard to imagine (and of course impossible to remember) that not every colonial resident desired independence from British rule. It wasn’t Americans who fought for their freedom, it was British subjects. They became Americans only through victory (much to the chagrin of the peoples already settled here).

Today, a different sort of war is being waged: a war of ideas and ideals. On one side, you have people who think not everyone should be published and that readers need help knowing what to read. This group also thinks that the book is the thing, not the story. Confabulating their love of the written word with the vessel they are accustomed to receiving it in, any change in how stories are delivered is seen as a threat to their cherished way of life.

The other side believes the opposite. Every voice has a right to be heard, even if we can’t control how many people pay attention. Every reader should have the freedom to choose, including the choice to go to a curated source. This group believes that the story is the thing, whether it is spoken, on a screen, in a book, or on a website.

These sides have clashed before. The five major New York publishers have taken the war to Amazon in the past, agreeing amongst themselves to raise prices in an attempt to slow the adoption of e-books (or at least to maximize profits if the adoption was going to continue apace). They paid millions in fines for the attempt. And the publishers promised to resume their efforts as soon as they were able.

That time has come. Hachette has stated to investors that it wants control over how e-books are priced. Amazon has broken its vow of silence to say the same thing. All the smoke and thunder from this battle is over who should set the final price of the object you enjoy: the manufacturer or the retailer.

Most retail works on a wholesale model. The retailer pays a percentage of the suggested list price, and then they can choose to discount and reduce their margins if they want. This is why you can walk into a bookstore and see a hardback marked 20% off. Publishers do not want Amazon to be able to sell e-books where they might compete with paperbacks. This, despite the incredible margins they make from each sale (partly because they pay their authors a laughable share).

The tension over these negotiations is near a breaking point. After Hachette, there are four other major publishers due to negotiate retail terms with Amazon. Lurking in the woods is the combined armies of Penguin and Random House. Generals on all sides are watching the battle with Hachette, because it could signal which way goes the war.

Picking a side is not necessary, of course. Both of these companies are large corporations with the potential to do both good and ill. It is far better to say “I love books,” or “I love readers,” or “I just want to write,” and hope the noise over the hill sorts itself out. Who wants to say they fought for one of two generals whose interests were largely their own and did not perfectly align with ours? If you suit up, you are a traitor or a shill. Better to sit it out.

There was a lot of that during the Revolutionary War. Remember that it was a civil war before the outcome was determined. Subject against subject. There’s no glory in that.

But one side will have to relent in this struggle. We will wake up one day and e-books will be nearly twice what we paid for the mass market paperback equivalent, or we will wake up and find stories we love at reasonable prices. You don’t have to pick a side—no one should have to pick a side—and I’m not here to ask you to. I’m here because I have decided to suit up. And some of my brothers and sisters will disagree with me. But I fight for them as well.

The borders around us will be redrawn, no matter what. And this war will turn out to have been a revolution or a quelled uprising. Right now, it’s too early to tell. It’s a little confusing when I see Confederates camping out on the 4th of July.

The New Top-Down Approach

An extremely pro-traditional publishing friend of mine just pointed out, after conceding many of my points on the new publishing landscape, that there is no “universal answer” on how to publish.

This is the last redoubt of those who do not want to admit that self-publishing is a superior option for the vast majority of writers. It’s an appeal for equivalence, which should be victory enough. I mean, who would have thought that anyone entrenched in the publishing industry would ever fall back to: “Hey, traditional publishing is still at least as good as self-publishing.”

But I’m not happy with an appeal to equivalence. When someone says “there is no universal answer” what they really mean is “there are always exceptions to every rule.” Which I’ll grant. Out of all the authors who debut this year, one or two of them will hit it big. They’ll look like geniuses for going with a publisher. And nobody will ever care about or mention the authors who didn’t make it.

Bestselling author Val McDermid admitted this today in this amazing story in The Telegraph. Val broke out with her fourth novel, and she knows that no publisher would have given her room to grow these days. She would have been dropped like a steaming hot potato. Literary agent Jonny Geller (joint CEO of Curtis Brown) was on the same panel with Val and agreed.

So let’s not equivocate. The chances of these two publishing paths being equal is a fantasy. That’s like flipping a coin and claiming the thing will land on its edge. One must be better for more writers than the other path. Forget the exceptions, what’s the general answer? According to Val McDermid, Jonny Geller, and myself, the answer is to start your career with self-publishing.

Here is how we know this to be true: Self-publishing is the new Top-Down Approach.

What does Top-Down Approach mean? It means you leave your options open. You start with the path that leads to any other path you care to take in the future. Five years ago, the Top-Down Approach was to query agents first and only resort to self-publishing if all else failed. Self-publishing was the very last resort. Because to self-publish under your own name was to commit career suicide. Practically no agent or publisher would touch you after.

We know for a fact that this is no longer true. People move from self-publishing to traditional publishing quite often. Which means: The former bottom of the Top-Down Approach is no longer a deal-breaker. But wait . . . it gets even more interesting.

Five years ago, publishers didn’t value backlist and e-books like they do today. Backlist books went out of print, but this is no longer true thanks to POD. Or backlist books disappeared from bookstores, but now most books are sold online. Because of these shifts, publishing contracts that once allowed rights to revert to authors are getting stricter. These days, reversion of rights are getting less likely, because books are worth more for a longer period of time. Also: non-compete clauses mean that you no longer have the freedom to publish other works how or when you choose. Because of these trends, the former top of the Top-Down Approach no longer leaves open other paths.

You can self-publish and still do whatever you like later in your career. You cannot traditionally publish and do whatever you like later in your career. The Top-Down Approach has completely inverted.

The quickest way to ruin your career these days is by publishing with a major publisher and having your book not do well. Five years ago — going back to what Val McDermid is talking about – if you published a flop, your publisher might give you a second, third, even fourth chance. That is no longer the case, and one of the most powerful agents in the business admits as much.

This is a very real shift in the way both publishing options work. It was this revelation in 2009 that made me put a contract for my second novel in a drawer and strike out on my own. I was blogging about this inversion even then. It hit me like a lightning bolt that signing lifetime rights away removed all further options, but self-publishing left open every future choice.

Which leads us to the big reveal: Signing with a traditional publisher is as risky today as self-publishing was ten years ago.

Let that sink in.

Of course, if you focus on the one or two authors who debuted in bookstores this year and hit it big, you’ll miss this. These exceptions become the equivalency. You can say “there is no universal answer.” Which will continue to lead thousands of authors astray. But who cares about them, right? Not publishers. And not pundits.

I care about advice to authors, not publishers. Pundits and publishing peeps will deny the truth of the new Top-Down Approach and continue to gamble on thousands of authors in the hopes that one of them hits it big. They’ll drop the other authors and reload next year. Val McDermid knows this. Jonny Geller knows this. Anyone with a clear mind knows this.

There used to be a path that allowed authors to nurture themselves, to hone their craft, to make mistakes, to grow as writers, to establish a following and a backlist. That path has changed dramatically in the last five years. That path used to be querying agents. Today, the path is self-publishing. It’s the absolute best way these days for the vast majority of writers. No equivalency. No appeal to exceptions. For the overwhelming majority, the surest method is similar to what other artists do: Produce your best work and make it available. Rinse, repeat, and grow. Start at the new Top. You can always fall back on a traditional publisher if all else fails.

The State of Self-Publishing

The great thing about blogs is that they serve a purpose even if no one is reading them. They are a way to journal out loud and a great method for gathering your thoughts. Blogs can also (hopefully) become extended conversations that go on for years. The problem is, the people who arrive in the middle of this conversation will have missed so much of what’s already been said. There are posts buried pages deep here that underscore so much of what I love about self-publishing. After seeing some comments elsewhere about the slim chances self-published authors have of earning a living, I thought it would be nice to dredge up a few reminders and gather my thoughts on the current state of an ever-changing industry.

One reminder that I’ve blogged about at length is that most books don’t sell very many copies. And that’s okay. It’s not a self-publishing thing; it’s a publishing thing. 98% of manuscripts submitted to agents never get published at all. They don’t sell a single copy. Nobody mentions this when they deride self-publishing as an option. The false premise seems to be that you can choose to self-publish, or you can choose to have your book on an endcap in every bookstore while you are sent on a 12-city tour by your publisher. That’s not the choice. The choice is to self-publish or submit to an agent. This is the choice.

If you self-publish, you can immediately move on to writing the next work. You don’t have to look back at all if you don’t want. You have the rest of your life to promote that work, if you decide to promote it at all. If you are one of the 1% to secure an agent, the earliest you might see that work in a bookstore is a year. More likely, it’ll be three to five years. And you’ll be asked to rewrite that work, not based on any artistic vision, but based on what’s currently selling, what publishers are currently looking for.

Most analysts don’t cover these options honestly from the writer’s point of view. I’ve blogged about this before. What you get is coverage of what books do once they have already been published. Which means hearing experts hold up NYT bestselling Big 5 authors as the perfect example of what publishers do well while claiming that any self-publishing success story is an outlier and a fluke. I’ve got some news for everyone: Any book that gets published by a Big 5 publisher is a fluke. The books on the endcaps? Those are the flukes among the flukes.

The truth is that when it comes to trade fiction, more self-published authors are making a living today than traditionally published authors. And despite what some people claim, this isn’t because of output. Those self-published authors are doing better with fewer published titles, on average. The biggest names and highest earners in traditional publishing are overwhelmingly authors who debuted prior to 2009 and have a lot of works available. And the biggest earners on both sides publish in the genres that readers overwhelmingly prefer.

Also, despite what some experts would have you believe, self-published authors are still breaking out with their first works. AJ Riddle and Brenna Aubrey are two examples, and the current bestseller lists on Amazon are loaded with new self-published authors you’ve never heard of. Andy Weir’s THE MARTIAN sold a ton of copies and was picked up by Random House and 20th Century Fox. This was a debut novel, and Andy hasn’t published anything since. He succeeded through self-publishing faster than he would have landed an agent if he went the traditional route.

The claim that these are exceptions ignores that every book in the bookstore is an exception. It also ignores the fact that there are more exceptions among the self-published crowd than there are among the traditionally published crowd. We know. We counted.

Another thing that has been mentioned over and over again here but rarely gets any press is that not all of us got into this because we wanted to make money. Many of us would pay to write if there was a fee involved. We love this like a hobby, one that we attempt to do on a professional level. I pay more for a single lens as a passionate photographer than it costs to have a manuscript professionally edited and wrapped in gorgeous cover art.

I’ve had a grand total of three paying gigs as a photographer. I will never earn back the money I have spent on camera equipment, and this is camera equipment I saved up for back when I was working for $10/hour shelving books. Where is the outcry? Why don’t we approach literature like we approach music and the fine arts? Yes, there is a commitment when it comes to time and money. Yes, the chances of “making it” are slim. But with music, photography, and the fine arts, we “self produce” while we grow our audience and hone our craft. We work our way up, rather than break out. We love what we do, and we dream of making a living doing it, but it isn’t necessary. What’s amazeballs about self-publishing is that you have the freedom to do all of this, and your chances of making money are still greater than submitting to agents! Note that I’m not saying your chances are great, only that they are greater. 98% of those who go the traditional route will earn precisely zero dollars.

Meanwhile, what I’m seeing in the trenches is a rapid rise in the quality of self-published works. Here’s another reminder: How you decide to publish does not appreciably alter the quality of the end product, and this is more and more true every day as publishers do less editing and self-published authors do more editing. The output of the two paths are converging. Part of this is due to people making different choices in how to publish in the first place. As more hardworking and serious writers skip to self-publishing, the quality of books available to readers will continue to increase, while the number of gems in the traditional publishing slush pile will go down. This is a self-reinforcing system.

There are other pressures as well. Traditionally published authors are expected to do more and more of their own marketing these days, and fewer of them are being sent on book tours. Authors are even expected to shell out their own money to attend book conventions. Meanwhile, publishers are still wasting money on traditional media advertising that no longer works. These days, it’s not uncommon for self-published authors to know more about metadata and how to market a work than publishers do. I have met people in charge of publishing and marketing procedures at major houses who don’t even know the basics. I could tell you horror stories—and I’m not alone.

Critics of self-publishing will say that not every writer wants to be a businessperson. Meanwhile, publishers expect just this of their successful writers. And they should. Few musicians make a career of their art without understanding the business side of performing and releasing their work. The same is true of commercial artists, photographers, and filmmakers. Yet somehow, the myth of the writer who just pounds out words and hands in rough drafts persists. One of the top-selling authors at this very moment is John Green, and where are the critics who make fun of all the hours he and his brother Hank pour into their YouTube videos? If theirs was a self-published success story, it would be denounced as a gimmick of social media. But all I see is genius and hard work.

The simple facts are these: Writing can be a blast. It should be a blast. People do it on places like WattPad and FanFiction.net for free. Yes, it’s almost impossible to make a living at this, and that’s true no matter which direction you go. The chances are just orders of magnitude greater if you self-publish. It’s not just the greater royalties or the ability to control your prices. It’s the ability to write stories that readers want but publishers fear to invest in. And there’s the greatest advantage of all, which is that self-publishing allows you to complete your work, make it available, and then move on to the next project. There is less chance of burning out or getting discouraged.

Those who submit to agents often drop out of the race before they even cross the starting line. They don’t get to their fifth or sixth work to see what they are capable of. Publishers no longer give authors that much time to grow. A good friend of mine published his first work with a Big 5 publisher and got a fat 6-figure advance. His editor botched the second book (demonstrably), and no offer came for the third book. This is by far the most talented writer I personally know, and he has given up on the one creative outlet that he is best at.

On the other hand, I have several friends who self-published and got discouraged by their lack of sales. They quit, but their books were still available. When sales picked up and reviews and emails began filtering in months later, they rediscovered and returned to their passion for storytelling. The eternal nature of the modern book is vastly underappreciated, because the development is so new. Of the dozens of advantages self-publishing has over signing away lifetime rights to our art, this may be one of the most powerful.

Here’s a fun trick: When you see someone deriding self-publishing, ask yourself if their critiques don’t in fact apply to all publishing. Generally, they do. And then remember all the advantages listed here and elsewhere that those critics try to wave away but can’t. Among my peers, I’m seeing more and more authors move from traditional publishing to self-publishing. Even Pulitzer Prize winners, Edgar Award winners, Hugo Award winners, and mega celebrities.

I’m also seeing writers like HM Ward, Brenna Aubrey, and myself forego 6 and 7-figure contracts in order to self-publish. The biggest untold story of them all, however, is the number of authors I know who have tried traditional publishing after having success on their own who swear to me that they’ll never do that again. And yet you have pundits claiming that every self-published success runs immediately to a New York publisher. That simply isn’t true.

To recap:

Very few writers of any stripe earn serious money from their work. Most earn nothing at all.
Self-published authors, on average, earn more than their traditional counterparts.
It is disingenuous to compare all self-published works to the mere two percent of works that manage to get traditionally published.
What is expected of authors is not as different as people think. Self-publishing isn’t that hard, and traditional publishing doesn’t mean writing and doing nothing else.
The output of what manages to get traditionally published is not any better than the corresponding top 2% of what is self-published.
Genre matters however you publish. You can shelve it under “fiction” if it makes you happy, but it’s probably still a mystery, fantasy, romance, or speculative fiction story if it’s selling well.
More than half of all print book sales are now online , and audiobooks are as popular as ever. The “digital revolution” isn’t just about e-books, which is why the playing field is even more level than most care to admit.
The claims that e-book sales have flattened comes from sources that ignore self-publishing completely. The sales needed to hit the same ranking on Amazon’s bestseller lists keep going up, which means the market is still seeing growth. Ignore pundits who are only covering roughly 50% of the market.
Most of us write because we love it, not because we expect anything from it. Success cannot be measured by someone else, only yourself.
Anyone covering this industry from the perspective of publishers or bookstores should be ignored. Seriously. This industry is about the reader and the writer. All discussions about those in the middle should be secondary, at best.
Finally and most importantly, there shouldn’t be any animus between writers, however they publish. This is hard enough without trying to tear each other down. We are in this together. It’s our world that’s changing. In many ways, we should be standing together and demand that it change faster.

This Blog Post is Awesome

It’s double-plus-good awesome, in fact. Because it just points you to two David Gaughran blog posts, both of which must be read. Including the comments.

Fake Bestsellers, Concern Trolls, and Hidden Agendas

Media Bias and Amazon

Seriously awesome analysis from David, as we have come to expect.

No More Shitty Baskets

Diversification is good. Amazon’s market share must be kept in check. This is something self-published authors and the Big 5 publishers seem to agree on. Self-published authors stress the importance of placing titles with every available distributor, while publishers and their pundits worry about how much of the book market Amazon currently controls. If these two parties agree, they can’t possibly be wrong, can they?

Not so fast.

There are costs to diversification. The greatest cost is the loss of impetus for change. If we celebrate diversity simply for diversity’s sake, that means we will publish with anyone, no matter what. So our eggs go into and reward shitty baskets.

Discrimination is an ugly word when it comes to people, but it is an absolute necessity when it comes to markets. As self-published authors, we are the customers of retail and distribution platforms. We are the customers. We agree to pay ~30% of our earnings in exchange for the delivery of our goods. We are also paying for a reader review architecture, technical infrastructures, recommendation algorithms, customer service for our readers, and various other services.

We are not paid a royalty. Royalties are doled out by publishers or producers who provide creative inputs. What we offer is a fully-constructed product ready for sale. We are publishers. Every distributor we do business with lures us in with their payment splits, user base, and merchandising opportunities. We pay them for these services. They aren’t paying us for manuscripts.

Grasping this is essential to understanding the problem with indiscrimination. Distributing e-books to every market or retailer, no matter what, is the exact same thing as purchasing all products in a certain retail category. It’s the same thing as giving a dozen candidates one vote each. There is no market improvement without discrimination. There is no signal that some policies are appreciated while others are abhorred.

What the diversity crowd is suggesting is that, presented with a wide field of products with varying prices and build qualities, we should elect to buy all of them. Spread our dollars evenly. That is not competition. Competition is the existence of various markets, not our participation in them. It is our choice to participate in only some of those markets that gives force to competition.

Calls for diversity are really calls for indiscrimination. Again, this is awesome when we’re talking about social diversity, but not when we’re talking about economic diversity. If there’s a basket that pays twice as much in exchange for voluntary exclusivity, I’m going to go with that basket and watch the other weavers shore up their offerings. When conditions improve elsewhere, I’ll move my eggs back. This is the beauty of digital eggs: They are unbreakable, and I can lay an infinite number of them.

Most importantly, with the click of a button, I can move my eggs to any basket anywhere in the world. This is a critical point to grasp—and it is the reason that no retailer can amass such a lead that they can then abuse their customers. Remember: We are the customers.

Right now, most self-published authors put all their marketing weight behind Amazon and their KDP service. Links to books are usually Amazon links. Shared reviews are Amazon reviews. This one company’s lead perpetuates itself. But imagine what happens if Amazon increases the distribution fee we pay down to 80% from the now very reasonable 30% (remember that these aren’t royalties).  The fear seems to be that Amazon might in the future leave us with as little profit as publishers do today. Ignoring the strangeness of this fear, let’s look at how tenuous a market these basket weavers hold:

 

Amazon’s e-book market share has plummeted from 90% to something around 50% – 60% in just a handful of years. For a parallel, look at how Google’s Android OS overtook Apple’s unbelievable dominance in smartphone operating systems in just a few years. Or what became of MySpace, Internet Explorer, Yahoo, and AOL. No lead is safe. You could start with an absolute monopoly today, crack the door just a little, and someone is going to kick that door in and raid your fridge.

 

Why? Because if a market leader abuses their position, authors will immediately switch to sharing iBookstore links or Kobo links to their published works. All promotional energies will move to another digital basket. We will upload somewhere else first and point every customer in that direction.

I get emails from readers asking where they should purchase my books so that I earn the most. You don’t think every author and their mother will be blogging about which company to move to if Amazon changes their rate? You don’t think readers will care? Millions of customers will change their buying habits overnight. Again, ask MySpace how quickly eggs can jump from basket to basket. All of these digital basket weavers—the retailers and social media platforms—live in constant terror of the fickleness of consumer choice. And that’s a good thing.

I don’t feel bad for companies that go kaput on the basis of customers exercising their free choice. I’m not a fan of diversification for diversity’s sake. That would mean supporting badly behaving companies because it’s nice to have some variety. This is one of the primary arguments against allowing Amazon to have too much market share: “Sure, they are awesome today, but what if they become less awesome tomorrow? We should support as many less awesome companies as we can right now, just in case.”

I have no problem going all-in if a company is making decisions that I believe in and support. I can move my eggs with the press of a button. These calculations are vastly different when you own the rights to your eggs, and those eggs are digital.

Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson said it best: “Put all your eggs in one basket — AND WATCH THAT BASKET!”

I love this sentiment. Especially in a day where my eggs can’t break, where I can print or have a computer spit out an infinite number of them, and where thousands of weavers are sitting around, fingers on keyboards, able to concoct new baskets the moment an industry leader screws up. As for diversity? When we have a number of companies all fighting to pay artists a fair wage and charge customers a fair price, spread the love. Those are the only baskets I’m interested in. Offer me that, and you can have my eggs.

David Gaughran on Amazon/Hachette

One of the sanest comments I’ve seen on this dispute was recently left by David Gaughran on another story warning indies that Amazon is coming after them next. David’s points are too good to remain buried, so I’m linking to the comment here and publishing it in full below:

David Gaughran:

Hi Nate, I won’t go over the ground other commenters have, but I will say this: treat all the news reports with skepticism. The Guardian piece from Weds, is based on a piece from the Bookseller on Tues, which is entirely based on leaks from Hachette UK execs.



Even if the leaks are true (which is an unknown) they could be very selective. Here’s a couple of sample scenarios (and I could do about 10 of these, all plausible):

SCENARIO A:

 

Hachette wants Agency. Amazon wants Wholesale. Hachette says OK to Wholesale, but wants some of those Agency percentages and terms (i.e. a 70/30 split, but Amazon to swallow all discounting). As this deal is even better for Hachette than Agency was (or Wholesale was before that), then Amazon says, OK, but then we have to charge you for all the stuff we give you for free: pre-order facilities, co-op, etc.


 

Hachette then leaks “Amazon is making us pay for all this stuff that was free like pre-orders. Whaaaaa!”

 

SCENARIO B:

 

Hachette and Amazon both agree that Agency is dead, but differ on the Wholesale split and how much Amazon can discount. Amazon thinks it should be more like print because it has to swallow all discounting under Wholesale, so it offers a (picking a random number) 60/40 split instead of 70/30. This will actually work out better for Hachette because it’s getting a guaranteed 60% of list, and Amazon will discount heavily (and shift more units). But Hachette doesn’t want Amazon to have power over pricing and discounting, so negotiations aren’t going anywhere.

 

Hachette then leaks “Amazon wants to massively cut royalty rates. Whaaaa!”

 

***

 

The fact is we don’t know. And I don’t trust the Hachette leaks to be the whole story. At all. Let’s not forget the Macmillan scenario for 2010, when EVERYONE was sure Amazon was the bad guy, and then it turned out that Macmillan was part of an illegal conspiracy to fix the price of e-books.

 

The Big 6 mounted the same global media push then – Amazon is destroying the book business! – and everyone fell for it.

 

Let’s be a bit wiser this time, and resist what is quite obviously a very sophisticated PR campaign from the large publishers.

 

It’s amazing to me that Amazon is still hammered for removing the buy buttons on Macmillan books even after getting all the facts. It’s also amazing to me that Hachette authors are complaining about delivery speed and pre-orders when Amazon published authors aren’t allowed in bookstores AT ALL. The consensus seems to be that Amazon published authors are to blame for signing with those imprints. The hypocrisy here — and the cruelty of that hypocrisy — are astounding.

Your Kick-Ass Science Story of the Week

New Addition to the Indie Toolbox

I’ve recently learned that Karyn Marcus, my former editor at Simon & Schuster, is taking on freelance work and has some openings coming up. She might be booked through August, so you’ll have to email her to inquire. I added a link to her email address in my Indie Toolbox down on the left hand side of the website. You’ll find my favorite cover artists, my e-book formatter, and my favorite editors down there.

The Future of Art

The future of art will be a lot like the past:

Having the freedom to do what you love, doing it with abandon, until you get so good at it that someone else loves what you do.

The Writing’s on the Wall

How brilliant is this? OK Go’s latest video is my favorite thus far. So much kick-ass going on that you have to watch it more than once.