Hugh Howey's Blog, page 40

London Book Fair!

Today is the first day of the Fair, but we kicked it off yesterday at the Digital Minds conference. Best panel of my life was sitting at a table, gabbing with Bella Andre and Joanna Penn. Learned so much from the both of them. Wish I had the entire conversation recorded so I could go back to it over and over.

Dinner last night was also a highlight. Forced to give a toast, I said what was on my mind right then, which is that writing can be a solitary endeavor, that conferences are best for meeting colleagues, seeing old friends, and getting energized until we meet again. What followed was a three hour gab-fest that again, I wish I could revisit over and over.

Right now, I’m in the lobby of the hotel, gathering my things and our group, and about to head over to our booth. If you’re in the area, we’re at T730, right by the Kobo, Nook, and Kindle booths. Follow the sounds of laughter.

A Sandy Daily Deal!

Sunday is Sanday, it seems. SAND is Amazon’s Daily Deal today, which means they’re practically giving away my latest novel for $1.99. Two bucks! Cheaper than a bag of actual sand at Home Depot! (Or a cup of coffee.)

Keep in mind that you don’t need to own a Kindle in order to read this. Practically any tablet, phone, laptop, or PC will work. There’s a free Kindle app for all of them. Also, the audiobook edition has been reduced to 99 cents for one day only (for those who own the e-book). For three bucks, you can get a brilliant and unabridged audio recording of SAND. If you ever wanted to pressure a friend or family member to give the novel a try, today is a day to save them some money.

Happy Sanday! Get some in your drawers!

London Meet-Up!

It’s a London Meet-Up Twofer! Superstar author Liliana Hart and I are going to be at the King’s Head pub this Sunday, April 6th, at 2:00 pm. The plan is to hang out for a couple of hours and have a pint. All are welcome. If you live nearby, come join us. If you can’t make it, be jelly and wish us well.

Click here for a map to find the pub. You’re on your own for getting home!

RedBoox – Bread, Milk, Bestseller

Print books will never go away. Not completely. It isn’t just the nostalgia factor, either. Paper is cheap, and despite what shopping for replacement cartridges would suggest, ink isn’t expensive either. Modern print-on-demand (POD) books are practically indistinguishable from their large-batch brethren. A 300 page novel can be ordered from CreateSpace for less than $4, and that means it’s even cheaper to print (CreateSpace is making a profit at that price).

Print books are great for gifts, for tossing in a beach bag, for reading in the tub, and for piling up beside the bed. They are also wonderful impulse buys. And they cater to that urge for self-improvement, much like underused exercise equipment. Even if e-books move to 60% or 70% of trade fiction, that leaves a market for paperback novels. A trend that began years ago — the selling of novels in grocery stores, big-box discount stores, and airports — will continue. The problem with these outlets has always been shelf space and therefore selection. But imagine every book ever written being available right when you walk in the door at your local grocery store.

The video rental market has already moved there. Bookstores could as well. The Espresso Book Machine and its ilk already reside in some independent and university bookstores. We came very close to ordering one for our bookstore at ASU. These printers are compact, and they produce a trimmed and bound paperback in just a few minutes. Imagine walking in, wrestling those two stuck carts apart (sometimes you have to use a water hose), and then stopping at the RedBoox machine before you tackle your list.

There are two screens on either side of the machine. Someone is already browsing the cookbook selection on the other screen. You swipe your credit card, which logs you in and shows recommendations based on your prior purchases. You choose “Fiction Bestsellers,” and the screen shows you what’s selling the best nationally. You drill into the option to see what has sold the best in that particular store. A few local authors pop up. The usual names are there as well: Grisham, Collins, Patterson. You pick the book you want. The machine is already humming with existing orders. You sign the pay screen and go about your shopping.

On the way out, you stop by the machine and swipe the same credit card in the pick-up side of the printer. Some more robotic whirrings, and then the book you ordered slides down a chute. You pop it your purse (I’m using myself as an example here) and off you go.

Millions of books on-hand. No more guessing how many copies to print. No more wasteful returns system or environmentally damaging trucking of unread books several times across the country. No more printing overseas. Now, paper and ink come in the loading docks with the toilet paper and eggs. Books come out the other side. Want to own a RedBoox of your own? Good. We franchise. There’s some regular maintenance and the occasional breakdown. And since the system works by credit card, the funds go once a month to the copyright owners of the printed books, with the rest going to the owner of the RedBoox.

This won’t replace bookstores. The reason indie bookstores are experiencing growth the past few years is because they offer a unique discovery mechanism and a place for literary community. I think they will continue to thrive, at least for cities large enough to support them. There’s room for growth in the reading community, and print on demand offers the ability to put bookstores into very small footprints. If Amazon opens physical stores to showcase its electronics and Amazon Publishing titles, I could see them using those locations for same-day delivery and also print on demand titles.

There are all sorts of solutions to explore. Hey — how about a copy of the ebook sent to your device the moment you order that print title? If you get caught in a long line at the register, you can read the first chapter of the title you just ordered on your phone. Sign me up and take my money, please!

Ones and Zeros

Spoiler alert! Neo is the One.

I still get goosebumps watching the climax to The Matrix. Love heals. Right makes might. A baddie gets his comeuppance. It’s also the moment that Neo sees the world for all its details. People like Tank and Cypher can look at a screen of ones and zeros and see the world the code is meant to approximate. Neo goes one further and can see how the code constructs the world he used to live in and thought he once knew.

Once you see the code, you see it everywhere. What seems baffling makes sense in its totality. The digital revolution is hitting in all quarters at once, and while those in the trenches of any one field have a view like Tank and Dozer, it’s possible to step back and see the effects all around you. In fact, it all boils down to those very same ones and zeros.

The twin costs of manufacturing and shipping have enjoyed primacy in the economics of retail and entertainment for centuries. You have to produce things and you have to deliver them. Both have traditionally been quite expensive. The means to do either one efficiently rested in the hands of those with immense capital. The day the internet was born, this began to change. It wasn’t immediate, of course. It required bandwidth. Widespread adoption. Delivery hardware.

We can probably point to 2010 as ground zero, with an error rate of plus or minus five years. In 2009, you have Minecraft, a video game for the PC developed by a solitary programmer, Markus Persson. Minecraft has had over 100 million registered users play the free downloaded version. It has sold over 35 million copies across all platforms. In 2011, Netflix made the controversial decision to separate its DVD rental business from its streaming operation. In 2007, Steam picked up . . . momentum with the inclusion of software from giants like ID, and what became niche has now disrupted how video games are purchased. The Second Generation Kindle came out in 2009. In 2010, the price of the Kindle dropped below $200, a target seen as necessary for the widespread adoption of new technology.

Apple released the iPad in 2010, a watershed moment. At the time, only a handful of magazines like Wired were pushing hard into digital. Soon, you had to have a digital version or you were dead. Print journalism and newspapers began to see the ones and zeros in their trenches. This was the same year Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast. Within two years, Newsweek would cease print publication before being bought out and re-launched in what is considered a risky venture at best. The tremors were everywhere.

Sometime between 2003 and 2005, digital cameras overtook film cameras. The former now trounces the latter in sales and both personal and commercial use. In 2009, 1 out of 4 homes went without a landline, converting from that analog mainstay to the new digital cell phone. In 2011, comedian Louis CK self-produced a hit comedy special, selling millions directly through his website and bypassing the standard means of production and distribution. In 2008, Apple launched the App Store, which allowed solitary programmers (or small-teams of them) to publish alongside established giants. Stories swirled of the overnight success stories (along with stories lamenting the crowded field and difficulty in getting noticed).

Just last week, my wife and I laughed about how much Twitter shows up everywhere. On ESPN, a news story is followed with a quote from JimBean2783′s Twitter feed. Everyone is now a pundit. The cost of putting makeup on a talking head, lighting it appropriately, and broadcasting its yammering are now reduced to 140 characters, made up of ones and zeros and sent across the globe. In 2010, the NYT ran an article on the “problem” with website commenting. Popular Science shut off their comments last year. If this seems disconnected—more of an issue of anonymity and controversy—I beg to differ. It has to do with access. It has to do with the cost of production and distribution. How many people could or would write in to an editor in the days of print? How much space was there for commenting? Or the back and forth replies and comments-on-comments we see today? Now, the space and access are practically limitless. And the cost is almost zero.

These twin forces, the cost of production going to zero and the power of distribution expanding exponentially, are changing anything that can be converted to digital. Those twin costs were once the purview of middlemen who had enormous coffers, complex technical know-how, and a monopoly on access. None of these are any longer a concern. Last year’s best rap album, The Heist by Macklemore and Lewis, was self-produced and self-published. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. Compare that to the $10 billion the film industry took in for 2013, which translates to roughly 2 billion viewing hours for the entire year.

Walk around your mall. There are no music stores. There are no 1-hour photo developers. No places to buy those once-ubiquitous yellow boxes of 100/200/400 speed film. Waldenbooks is gone. Radioshack is shuttering over 1,000 stores, as almost no one buys and builds analog radio gear anymore. We all have smartphones and iPods in our pockets. We rush from one WiFi hotspot to another like thirsting desert nomads dying for a digital sip. Bending and aiming rabbit ear antennas has been replaced with moving toward a window and holding a phone aloft to catch a whiff of 4G.

Where once I had a blinking 12:00 on a VCR I couldn’t figure out how to program, I now use my phone to set my DVR to record a basketball game while I’m out of town. I skip the commercials. I’m more likely to buy something based on a recommendation from a Facebook friend or based on a collection of reviews on Amazon, all written by regular folks like myself. How does Consumer Reports hope to compete with thousands of hours of real-world use from thousands of real-world people? All of these disruptions are related.

Whatever field you are in, the chances are that you are being impacted by these forces. They are real and incredibly powerful. The people who think small tweaks here and there will allow them to adapt are out of their minds. Kodak likely thought this was true. Many people think their field will be immune because it’s special. The only thing that’s special is the content. In many cases, that content can be reduced to ones and zeros. The purists will claim that digital is inferior to analog. This was the argument in the camera industry. It was the argument in the music industry. But access, availability, flexibility, cost, immediacy, all trump nostalgia for the vast majority of users. And an influx of new experiences continues to delight consumers—new experiences that are only had when rules are broken and small independent developers have equal access to markets.

In today’s NYT (March 31st, 2014), you have a story about the WWE’s new digital streaming network, which grants subscribers full access to programming without the need for a cable or dish feed. This is stoking anger among traditional distribution partners, but the WWE’s stock has has tripled since the product was launched. On the same page, you have a story about the film industry’s ongoing battle with piracy. Turn to page 7 and read about the producers of the venerable American Life program considering a move to self-distribution.

The best book I’ve read lately about all of this is Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think. This is an absolutely amazing page-turner, a book that should be required reading for all bipedal mammals with opposable thumbs. I read it in two sittings while on vacation a few weeks ago. If any of these trends interest you, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. You’ll read quotes about the downfall of publication going back two thousand years that sounds identical to what we’re hearing today. You’ll hear how warnings about technology destroying culture date back just as far, and again, the ancient jeremiads are identical to what you hear today (and are just as likely to be wrong).

The picture that emerges from this book and daily observations is that our digital revolution is unique, but our responses to it are predictable. They are the common responses to anything new and anything that disrupts. By the end of Clive’s book, you’ll begin to see the code all around you. It’s there, in ones and zeros, zipping through the air. It is the digital ether, a great equalizer. We are awash in it. Some feel that they are drowning. Some are hoping the weather will change. The rest of us are going for a swim.

In my industry, the product is story. Stories are made of words. If we get attached to how those words are transmitted, we run the risk of drowning. Words can be audiobooks. They can be e-books. They can be parents reading aloud or spouses reading to one another. They can come from our phones, our tablets, our laptops, our e-readers, our printed books. But they’re just words, no matter our individual preferences for a particular medium. And words can be broken down into ones and zeros and be transmitted for practically nothing to anywhere in the world.

When you step back and see this, it should make you a little dizzy. And a lot of things should make complete sense. Like how the climax of The Matrix is this unkempt cubicle worker named Neo, who pounds on his keyboard all night and has no social life, suddenly changes the world by saying a single word, “No”, to a handful of gatekeepers.

The Art of Nidhi Chanani

Six years ago, my two awesome nieces invited me to play a game with them. We were at my dad’s farm in North Carolina, and my father and stepmom were huddled with Jordan and Catherine on the sofa. They were taking turns telling stories, and I was asked to come up with something.

Not knowing the rules, I made up a story about a cloud named Misty. What I was supposed to do is tell a story about something that had really happened to me recently. As I watched how it was done, this forgotten little tell about a little cloud began to coalesce in my mind. I thought that if I had any sort of artistic talent, it might make for a cool children’s book.

Six years later, I decided to turn that story into an actual book. I started looking for an artist, and when I saw Nidhi Chanani’s website, she became my top pick. I just wasn’t sure if I could get her onboard. Today, I can announce that Nidhi is starting sketches, and Misty — The Proud Cloud is going to be a reality.

To see more of Nidhi’s work, check out her gallery. Swoon-worthy art. More soon!

 

Confessions of an Outlier

Six hours a day, 365 days a year, for 5 years. That’s all it takes. Or some combination of those numbers.

There are a handful of books every aspiring writer should read. One is Drive by Daniel Pink. Another is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The first will impress upon you the difficulty but necessity of self-motivation. The latter will demonstrate its cumulative power.

In Outliers, we learn that the rags-to-riches story of a lone genius overcoming odds is a false one. People often succeed because of cultural heritage, because of where and/or when they were born, because of chance occurrences, and because of opportunities seized. Small advantages become massive advantages. Young Canadian hockey players born in January, February, and March benefit from a year-end cutoff. These boys are larger and swifter than the rest of their cohort. 40% of the top players are born between January and March. Why? Because they are chosen for small differences, are placed into programs where they practice more, and so they get better than their peers. Much better.

One of the last chapters of the book will torment you. It details the progress kids make as they move through elementary school. The kids are grouped according to socioeconomic class. What researchers have found is that the achievement gap grows from 1st grade to 5h grade. Why this is has confounded education experts. Until someone began testing children at the beginning and end of every school year and compared gains over summer break with gains made during the school year. What they found — and you have to see the tables of numbers to appreciate this — is that all of the gains evident at 5th grade are made over the summer break, where low SES kids fall back and higher SES kids surge ahead. Schools aren’t failing kids as much as what they do (0r don’t do) when they aren’t in school is.

Gladwell also looks at several of the lone genius stories and shows how many of these people are products of their times. A list of the 75 wealthiest people in history, which goes all the way back to Cleopatra, shows that 20% were Americans born within 9 years of each other. Between 1931 to 1940, a group that includes Rockefeller, Carnegie, Armour, J.P. Morgan, George Pullman, Marshall Field, and Jay Gould were born. They all became fabulously wealthy in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, just as the railroad and Wall Street and other industries were exploding. Gladwell points out:

“If you were born in the late 1840s you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820s you were too old: your mind-set was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there was a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held.”

I started writing in 2009. That was the year the Kindle 2 was released and the price of e-readers dropped below $300 and then below $250. In 2011, when KDP Select was announced, I was in the first cohort to join and begin using those 5 freebie days. Purely by accident, I was one of the early adopters of serialization, with shorter works priced at 99 cents and longer works priced above $2.99.

I know I’m not that good. I know others are just as good and a whole lot better. But two things Gladwell’s book harps on time and again are opportunity and hard work. For as long as I’ve been giving interviews, I’ve credited luck as a driving force. If I had started writing in 1999, I wouldn’t be sitting in my underwear pecking on a computer right now. (Well, I might, but I’d also be living in my mother’s basement.) If I had continued to procrastinate and had waited until 2019 to self-publish, my works might not have stood out or gained traction.

What can you do with the knowledge found in Outliers? You can learn the potential reward of putting in 10,000 hours of hard work. Even the story of Mozart is debunked, who didn’t hit his stride until he had his 10,000 hours invested. He just got them in earlier than most. I have easily averaged 6 hours a day, every day of the year, for 5 years. I did this with a job and a house to maintain. I did most of the cooking and cleaning during these years. It’s possible. It isn’t easy, but anyone can do it.

That’s the best lesson of this book. Kids from the Bronx graduate from elementary school, and 80% go off to college. When you read the hours they put in, you might be sad for them. I’m not. I’m proud of them. These are kids who get up at 5:30 in the morning and stay in school until 5:00 in the afternoon. They have a shorter summer break. They go to school on Saturday. It seems inhuman by American standards. Meanwhile, students in many Asian countries don’t have a summer break at all. They put in more hours. It’s the reason they score higher on some tests and do well at universities. What’s innate about them? They are from a culture that farms year-round rather than in a fallow-field cycle. Cultural effects that pervade a collective psyche and have enormous and intriguing outcomes.

When I tell people that I used to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning to write before work, I’m giving them the secret to my success. That’s the confession of an outlier: I was writing at the right time(s). 2009. 5 am.

You might be reading this in 2014 at 5 pm. Guess what? It’s not too late. There’s tomorrow. And the day after. And it isn’t about getting rich; it’s about a different kind of wealth. If you’ve ever wanted to see what you are capable of, what kind of mark you can leave behind, you have to put in the hours. Outliers is full of remarkable stories of men and women who made the best of their opportunities. You should do yourself a favor and read it. Check it out on Amazon.

Sign of the Times – 03-17-14

Some observations from today’s New York Times: A story on the technology, film, and music festival SXSW laments the infusion of brands and big bands in what used to be an indie scene. A few choice quotes:

“No one will miss the stranglehold the large music labels had on the industry, but having shoe and snack food companies decide what is worthy could strangle the new, unruly impulses that allow the music business to prosper.”

New, unruly impulses. I like that. And then:

“You hear a lot of the Ramones on commercials these days, but if the suits were in charge when the band was first playing, you never would have heard of them at all. (Anybody who wonders about the impact of big companies as cultural gatekeepers need only go see a studio blockbuster.)

Makes you wonder if literature could move toward a similar respect for the indie scene.

Another story on Disney’s The Lion King becoming the top-earning show on Broadway caught my eye. This is the musical equivalent of a backlist title, a show that is over a decade old. Using complex and secretive pricing algorithms timed to the season and the day of the week, Disney has been able to maximize profits. Two things to note (and possibly learn from): The first is their refusal to charge as much as their competitors do at the top end. One of the reasons for this? To reduce the chances of buyer’s remorse, according to the show’s producers, which leads to more positive word-0f-mouth.

Finally, a large company is considering the psychology of pricing and purchasing, and the result is that they are killing their competitors, who charge more for the same seats. A quote from the piece:

“If you purely listen to what yield management folks would advise, we could charge a little more . . . But our theory is, because we’re in this for the long haul, we’ve decided we’re not going to set a new high ticket price for the street.”

Compare that to the digital price-fixing publishers employed in jacking up e-book prices. The long view is to take backlist, look at demand, consider the psychology of price in purchasing decisions (and regret), and beat the crap out of your competitors. Makes my ideas with New HarperCollins sound like profit-making suggestions, huh? In some quarters, they’ve been considered all risk with no reward.

One more interesting story from today’s Times:

On the cover of the business section, the story of how start-up space companies are competing with the top dogs. One satellite company in particular is poised to disrupt the global imaging sector with a network of cheap and lightweight satellites that leverage over-the-counter components for massive cost savings. According to the Times, “These start-ups have one thing in common: They think they can undercut the old guard with lower prices and smarter thinking.”

These satellites are the size of shoe boxes and are designed to last a handful of years on standard laptop batteries and solar panels. Even better, they are constantly being upgraded, even as the complete network of 100+ satellites is being deployed. The 7th editions are in space and the 10th editions are being assembled on the bench. The assembly takes place in what has been dubbed

“a ‘clean-ish room,’ separated from the kitchen by some loose plastic sheets”

A team of 40 is creating a network of imaging satellites with $65 million in contracts already in place, and the promise to resolve down to the level of an automobile and show before, during, and after images of any natural disaster. The uses for their data are numerous. The way they’re going about collecting it is ingenious.

There was one other story in today’s paper that caught my eye, but I’m too busy to hunt it down again. And while I’d love to do this every day (the signs of digital disruption are everywhere that you look), I think it’s better, simpler, and gloriously ironic to suggest you take out a subscription. Yes, for the paper edition. I can’t recommend home delivery of the Times enough. Seriously. It will change your life. Get rid of the cable bill and read the paper every day. If you dream of being a writer, it will fill your head with ideas for new plots and improve your vocabulary and your writing.

The $16.99 Media Hub that Saved My Knees

I love this little device. I ordered it with very little expectations. The price and fuzzy picture on Amazon did not instill much hope. What I got in the mail ended up being a little marvel that keeps me at my desk rather than under it.

My computer speakers don’t have a headset jack. So when I get on Skype, I have to crawl around behind my computer to unplug the speakers and plug in my headphones. This little puppy does all that for me and more. I never have to take anything in or out of the jack. Just press a button, and I’m on my earbuds. Press it again, and I’m on my speakers. Even if I used the front jacks on my computer case, this would still be more convenient and worth the investment. Even better is the volume control right on the side. No more clicking down in my task bar to adjust the volume for my earbuds. Now it’s just a turn of the dial right by my keyboard. Same for the speakers.

I don’t pimp wares often. Just when they change my life. If you find yourself switching back and forth between speakers and headsets, you should check this guy out.

God Plays Dice

Einstein didn’t believe that the physical world, at the smallest of levels, could be dictated by randomness. He and his friend Neils Bohr had animated arguments over the mysteries of quantum mechanics. As it stands today, it appears that Einstein was wrong and that God does indeed play dice. And this may be just as true for art as it is for subatomic particles.

The great writer Paul Auster once said, “The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.” As a wildly successful writer, perhaps Paul could intuit what researches have recently confirmed: There is an element of chance in what works of art succeed and what works go unnoticed.

I highly, strongly, stomping-my-feet recommend that you listen to this short piece from NPR before reading along any further. You should also read the show notes here. Don’t worry, it won’t take long and it’ll totally be worth it.

http://www.hughhowey.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/20140227_me_good_art_is_popular_because_its_good_right.mp3

For those who didn’t read or listen, a quick rundown of the research: A Princeton professor, baffled by why the Mona Lisa is the most popular (or famous) work of art in the world, set out to create several identical worlds populated with the same set of little-known songs to see if the same music would be favorably rated. For a control, he had one group of students rate the music without those ratings being visible to others. The rest of the groups could see how other people rated songs. What he found was that minor differences in popularity were accentuated in the groups where cross-talk was possible. Seeing what others liked increased the chance that you would like it (except for the occasional hipster, of course). The songs that rose to the top did not correlate across his identical worlds. And it’s worth mentioning that his sample size of listeners was huge: 30,000 listeners across the 9 worlds, so variance in taste can’t explain the results.

This research might disturb some while bringing comfort to others. For me, it helps explain the wild popularity of one of my books, which seems disproportionate to its worth. It also explains why many fantastic works can suffer in obscurity. It also reinforces the enormous power of word-of-mouth. In my line of work, reader recommendations are everything. This would also indicate that online reader reviews are more important than reviews from lone critics in more traditional outlets.

I’ve noticed this with my iTunes shopping habits. While scrolling through albums, my eyes (and mouse) are drawn to the songs with the longest popularity bars. I’m more likely to listen to these, and therefore to buy them, and therefore to recommend the songs to others. Small variations beget large differences in outcome. The butterfly doesn’t just flap her wings, she judges art. Or to twist another phrase: I might not know art, but I know what you like.

What do we do with this knowledge? There are some things we already do to counter this effect. We temper expectations when we see things very highly rated. I watched Disney’s Frozen expecting massive disappointment, because all I’d heard was how awesome the film is (and it was). But is it good to go into a work as a critic, armored against amusement? Possibly not. I’m reading a novel right now with a massive reputation and a huge endorsement from my mother, and all I can do is see the flaws. I’d rather not have heard a thing about the work. Previews ruin films for me. And when my friend Chris recommends anything (a comic, video game, film), he wants to go into all the things I’ll like about it. I have to beg him to stop. His recommendation is enough. Don’t prime me; just let me experience it.

This may be impossible to do when it comes to discovering new works of art. We rely on one another to help sort through the massive options in all forms of media. But maybe we should limit how much information we take in before we give a work a try. And perhaps we should pepper our samplings with some number of unknown works to give other artists a random chance. Free book samples allow us to do both of these things without a penny spent. And it can take less time (and be more enjoyable) to read a sample chapter than to sort through a dozen reviews before making up our mind. If the work captures your attention, read to the end of the sample and then give it a purchase.

For artists, the Princeton research can be a balm or a torment. That undiscovered work may never be discovered. God’s dice simply came up snake-eyes. If that makes us uncomfortable, Einstein would say that we’re in good company, that this is not how the world should work. Bohr would say that God cares not if we approve of how He made the world. I would say that undiscovered works should be given plenty of time to have their chance. New cohorts of readers are coming into being all the time, just as with the 9 worlds Princeton researchers concocted. Or go the nuclear option: Unpublish those unloved books and put them back up with a new cover and title, and give your piece a chance.