Mary Sisson's Blog, page 103

And there goes my day!

I managed to do some revision, adding some color to what was already written, but soon the keyboard and the height of the monitor began to bother me. Honestly, it's freaking impossible to find a hutch-type thing to raise a monitor--with my old monitor, I stuck it on a couple of phone books, but this is a new all-in-one computer, so I wanted something more stable. I think I found it (technically, it's shelves for shoes), but I had to go to six different stores to find it (that didn't actually surprise me, since phone books weren't my first choice before). I also went to the Apple store, thinking I could buy an ergonomic keyboard--joke's on me, since the store isn't the sort of place where you can actually buy things. I was told to go on-line, so I did, and apparently my old keyboard (which is actually pretty new) can work on a Mac as well, despite having the Windows logo prominently displayed on it. I'm going to assemble the shelves first and then take a shot at the keyboard. Wish me luck.

New computer!

The new computer is up and running--my goodness, everything is so advanced these days. So far, most everything is working on it (although I may replace the keyboard--this one is small, and my wrists go wonky if I'm not careful), with the notable exception of the scanner. Adobe Acrobat doesn't work on it because I bought it for a PC and this is a Mac--hello, that was kind of expensive software, you think for that kind of money that they'd accommodate both platforms--but the new computer can print to PDF all by itself, so it kind of doesn't matter. Alas, the free art software I had on my old computer (and possibly the one before that) is no longer supported--shocking, I know. I'll have to see how the new free art software works.

Progress report

Back in the saddle! Wrote 1,600 words today.

After yesterday when I decided that I couldn't possibly write because I had to buy groceries, I realized that I was resisting my dharma.

Some people have a low tolerance for yoga-speak, but as someone with perfectionist traits, I find the philosophic elements of it tremendously helpful (and doing yoga is great if you sit all day). In this case, I found it more useful to think in terms of resistance than to think in terms of laziness, because let's face it, sometimes it's as much (if not more) work to not do something than it is to do it. If I cleaned the linoleum (which was really gross), then I'm not lazy, am I? I'm working hard, doing something very unpleasant! But what I'm really doing is the work of resistance. Likewise it's a form of resistance when I choose to focus on outcomes (or, as Dean Wesley Smith would put it, to focus on dreams instead of goals).

Writers and speculative politics

As you may have already heard, Gore Vidal has passed away. He was, of course, a very political writer, and I usually found his writing reasonably entertaining. But I didn't agree with much of what he wrote, and it wasn't a simple, "Oh, he's on THIS side of the liberal-conservative political divide and I'm on THAT side" kind of thing. It was because Vidal really embodied a way of political thinking that I think a lot of fiction writers tend to embrace: His was a speculative approach to politics.

What do I mean by "speculative"? Well, think of something that's happening (say, global warming), and then imagine that it becomes this HUGE problem that more or less renders the planet uninhabitable. Congratulations! You've just written Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as well as any number of other fine dystopian novels.

Is that likely what's going to happen with global warming? Hmmm.... Well, the nation's decision-makers are based in Washington, D.C., and lately summers in D.C. have been quite unpleasant. Winters haven't been a picnic, either. Oh, and hurricane season's getting worse and worse--that affects them, too. All the carbon in the air is acidifying the oceans and causing the oyster crop to fail, so if you like fine seafood, it's going to be a rough year. Meanwhile, in the country as a whole, there's a big drought, which is going to drive up the price of all kinds of food--and voters just LOVE it when that happens.

In short: Carbon air pollution is starting to cause some really annoying problems. When a type of pollution starts to become a hazard and a nuisance, people actually do have a pretty good track record of halting its production--this is why we haven't all died from lead poisoning or acid rain, even though we're all still living in cities and driving cars and whatnot.

But that's the economist/journalist view of the future: You know, the one that's profoundly grounded in reality and that acknowledges the power of small, incremental changes. If you ask me, "What do you think is going to happen?" and you are asking that about the real world, that's the kind of answer I'm going to give you.

Writers like Vidal (and many other fiction writers) don't think this way, because it's not just exciting or dramatic enough. Vidal loved conspiracy theories--those are fun! He loved this idea that the world was teetering on the brink of collapse!!! Nothing ever made him happy: An African-American is elected president (something he thought Americans were far too racist ever to do), and he said, “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon."

But while I really, really do not agree with Vidal's thinking as it applies to real life (if the choice is between changing out lightbulbs and committing suicide in a survivalist bunker, I'm gonna go buy me some CFLs), I can't argue that the speculative approach doesn't have value to the writer of fiction. I mean, Philip K. Dick made Gore Vidal seem like a calm and reasonable fellow. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell both wrote novels that they genuinely thought reflected what the future was going to be like. The imaginative habit of taking Trend X and extrapolating it to an extreme is key to speculative fiction--even fantasy creatures tend to be extensions of traits you see in yourself and other people. And what is an insane conspiracy theory other than a rip-roaring story?

It's a marathon, not a sprint

Summer's not an easy time to write, is it? It's the lack of regular schedules for people. Anyway, come August 11th I get SLAMMED--young people, old people, all requiring full-time care--until the end of September. The perils of having a family, I guess.

I was really stressing myself out about wanting to get, oh, I dunno, 100,000 words done on the novel before August 11th. And then I was like, Jesus Christ, relax. The stress isn't helpful (I was even freaking over the positive reviews of Trust, because what if Trials isn't as good? ACK!), that's a totally unrealistic goal, and this isn't like a push to finish a layout that's over in a matter of days. I'm going to be working on this thing for months, I'd better figure out a sustainable work schedule for myself. It's like exercise--the best exercise routine is the one you actually do, so if you unleash the insane inner perfectionist, set a bunch of crazy goals for yourself, and make yourself miserable, you'll burn out.

Anyway, the new computer is here, but I'm still waiting on one component. Soon I'll have to figure out the transition from one to the other, since not everything is going to be compatible.

The difference between a bubble and a new industry

I'm about to engage with Ewan Morrison again--rest assured, I realize that he's either 1. a complete idiot, or 2. pretending to be a complete idiot because it gets him press coverage. But I think it's worth doing, because once again he's expressing a more-extreme version of what a lot of less-obviously-insane people seem to think.

Case in point: He wrote, "I’m convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble, and that it will burst within the next 18 months."

This whole concept that self-publishing or e-publishing is some kind of bubble that will burst (you know, when readers get tired of the poor quality...yadda...yadda...yadda...any minute now, it's a-gonna go) is something you see a lot. It's usually coming from people in traditional publishing who have a vested interest in the status quo, and they tend to sound like someone who is convinced that, any day now, their ex--who left the state, married someone else, and now has five kids--will come back to them.

But putting aside the agendas, how do you tell the difference between a tech bubble and something like the Internet or cell phones--a new technology that alters the way people do things in the long term?

Well, for starters, let's discuss what a bubble actually is. Remember the Internet bubble of the late 1990s? (No? Shut up.) Remember how people thought the Internet would completely change the way we communicated and did business?

Remember how they were right?

It wasn't really an Internet bubble or even "another tech bubble." It was an investment bubble. People were throwing money at Internet companies like there was no tomorrow.

Let's look at another investment bubble that is usually easier for people to grasp--the recent real-estate bubble. You buy an OK home in an OK neighborhood for $200,000. Three years later, it's worth $500,000.

Is your home suddenly bigger and nicer? No. Has your neighborhood drastically changed? No. Has the value of a dollar drastically declined overall? No. Has the price of your home changed a lot? Yes.

A bubble is when people start throwing money at something with no regard to the underlying value of the asset. Your house's inherent value as a place to live didn't change during the real-estate bubble. Its price really, really did.

A similar thing happened during the Internet bubble. There was this new industry happening. It was clearly worth...something. People threw money at every company in the neighborhood of that new industry with no regard to their actual value.

People threw money at companies that were losing money and had no real prospects of ever making any. People threw money at companies that were making very little money and had no real prospects of ever making more. I remember reading an article about an Internet company whose stock had a price/earning ratio of 2,000 (P/E ratios are more normally in the teens)--and the article suggested that the reader run out and buy as many shares as they could. I'm sure many did.

Did that investment bubble mean that the Internet wasn't a real thing? No.

How is e-publishing a bubble? Well, I'm sure someone like Morrison would point to the rapid increase in people e-publishing and making money e-publishing as a sign that it's a bubble. But people flocking to adopt a new technology, like cell phones, or a company selling lots of a hot new technology, like cell phones, isn't the same as investors throwing wads of money at cell-phone companies. When someone buys a cell phone, they're switching over to a new technology--they're going to use that cell phone, at least until something better comes along. They've changed their habits and behavior, and it's going to take some pushing to get them to change again, much less change back. Investment money is a completely different animal--the habit is throwing money at a hot trend, so the money will jump from investment to investment much more easily.

There is money being invested here, to be sure. But it's not being invested by some fund manager who doesn't care what they put the money into, as long as the company's stock price is going up. It's being invested by consumers who buy e-readers, tablet computers, and smart phones. It's being invested by writers who are effectively starting their own businesses. It's sticky money--the vast majority of the people investing in self-publishing aren't going to suddenly decide to throw all their assets into shares of Australian gold mines instead.

And of course, if self-publishing is a bubble, the question is raised, how is this bubble going to pop? What happens with true investment bubbles is that prices suddenly (and savagely) fall to something more in line with the actual value of the underlying asset.

So, what is the actual value of a book? By Morrison's logic, the actual value of a book is where traditional publishers price it--somewhere in the neighborhood of $15-$20. So when this bubble pops, the prices of books will increase by $10-$15.

That will be amazing to watch. Millions of consumers will say, "I'm tired of paying $3 for a book! I want to pay $20! That is the true value of a book!" It will completely upend a central tenant of classic economic theory. It will make history.

OK, fine--it's not going to happen. (It would be pretty awesome, though.) Morrison is either 1. a complete idiot, or 2. pretending to be a complete idiot because it gets him press coverage. Possibly, he's 3. so painfully ignorant he doesn't realize that authors make as much money off a self-published $3 book as they make off a traditionally-published $20 book, so supply isn't going to be affected by these low prices, or of course, 4. pretending to be so painfully ignorant because it gets him press coverage.

Actually, I do think there's something of a bubble here, just not where Morrison thinks it is. I think there's a bubble in the price for publishing services, which will deflate as writers learn more about self-publishing.

Bezos gives an interview

So Kindle Nation Daily has an interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (via PV). Of course he's very vague and gives no numbers. ("eBooks have become a huge fraction of the books sold," but how huge, Jeff, how huge?) I would love for some indication of how self-published books are doing, but given Amazon's secretive culture, I guess we have to take what we can get.

The other thing to remember is that CEOs are masters of spin--that's pretty much a job requirement--so you kind of have to take what they say (we are wonderful people! our growth has no limits!) with a grain of salt. But there was still some stuff I found interesting, namely:

[Jeff Bezos:] We do still offer our 3G version of the Kindle. And that is a very popular choice, in fact people who buy that Kindle are the people who read the most.

[Len Edgerly, the interviewer:] Why do you think that is?

JB: I suspect it’s probably some that they are the more serious readers, so they want the very best Kindle. But we also see that their reading increases even more than people who buy the other Kindles. And the reason, I think, for that is that it makes getting books even more frictionless, makes it even easier. You don’t have to look for a WiFi hotspot. You can just get them wherever you happen to be. And it roams globally at no charge, so people can figure that out, too, and get it wherever they are, even if they’re traveling around the world.

LE: It’s amazing how that small of an additional convenience would translate into more sales and reading.

JB: Exactly right, and we see this in everything. Many years ago we did this thing called One-Click Shopping, and tiny, little improvements can drive people to do more of something, just because you’re making it easier.

This is what the people who wail about the decline in literary culture are missing. If you actually want people to read, it's not helpful to have books be expensive, and it's not helpful to have a system where you have to go a specific kind of store in order to purchase a book. If you make reading harder to do, fewer people will do it--they'll turn on the TV instead.

This is extreme, but....

I debated about posting this, because it's SO insane, but there's this article in The Globe and Mail (via PV) that's sort of an exciting new low for reporting on the changes in the publishing industry.

It was so bad that, in all honesty, I couldn't read the whole thing. Here's as far as I got:

Ewan Morrison is an established British writer with a credit-choked resume and a new book out, Tales from the Mall, that the literary editor of the venerable Guardian newspaper hailed as “a really important step towards a literature of the 21st century.”

By his own account, Morrison is also being driven out of business by the ominously feudal economics of 21st-century literature, “pushed into the position where I have to join the digital masses,” he says, the cash advances he once received from publishers slashed so deep he is virtually working for free.

“I’ve been making culture professionally for 20 years, and going back to working on spec again seems to be a very retrograde step,” Morrison says. “But it’s something a lot of established writers are having to do.”...

Many will cheer, Morrison admits, including the more than one million new authors who have outflanked traditional gatekeepers by “publishing” their work in Amazon’s online Kindle store. “All these people I’m sure are very happy to hear they’re demolishing the publishing business by creating a multiplicity of cheap choices for the reader,” Morrison says. “I beg to differ.”

Of course Scott Turow weighs in at this point (I mean, of course), and the article is kind of a hilarious admixture of warnings that publishing is going to become "feudal" and "winner-take-all" and warnings that the "masses" (who are "publishing," not publishing) are going to take over--it's like they couldn't decide whether the left-wing bugaboo or right-wing bugaboo would scare people more, so they went with both.

But the thing that amazed me the most was Morrison. He's quite a wonder. I mean, a million writers are delighting many millions of readers with their books, but everyone should just knock it off because it's an inconvenience to him. Oh, sorry--I'll go unpublish my novels right now, sir!

The whole "I've been making culture professionally for 20 years" quote is remarkable as well. Morrison has been "making culture" (in his socks, presumably) professionally for 20 years and he's never had to adapt? He's never had a publication go under, or had an editor jump ship and be replaced by someone who insists on using their "own" writers? The man who created "a really important step towards a literature of the 21st century" never had to adjust his writing to stay relevant? Wow...Canada really is a wonderland! *

Oddly enough, when I think of someone who is a professional, I think of someone who gets paid to work in an industry, most typically because this is how they themselves pay for food, shelter, etc. And when your survival depends on you getting paid to work in an industry, you have to keep up with the industry. Health-care professionals read medical journals. Manufacturing professionals explore outsourcing and automation. Retail professionals scan bar codes.

You do that because if you get lazy, you wind up not being able to bring anything to the party that anyone thinks is worth paying for.

But I guess professional makers of culture are the exception. Or, given what's happening to Morrison's finances, maybe they aren't.

The thing is that Morrison's attitude is only an extreme version of one shared by a hell of a lot of people. Writers who believe that their "life simply does not allow them to learn yet another new thing." Writers who want to have mass sales without having to cater to mass tastes. Writers who are still producing documents the way they were taught to in seventh-grade home ec class in 1965. Writers who think that progress is a bother that is best ignored.

* Someone pointed out that Morrison is, in fact, British. So that should read "Great Britain really is a wonderland!" except for the whole part where I'm really talking about a magical land in Morrison's head that is completely disconnected from reality.

Progress report

I replaced the chapter ornaments, input the fixes, and uploaded the new versions of the various Trust e-books. It makes the file a little bit larger, but not much.

Progress report--chapter ornaments edition

Team Grown-Ups is back up to full strength, thank God, so today I switched out the chapter ornaments for Trang. I was thinking of just doing that whenever, but then I realized that after all that work to do flyers for GeekGirlCon, I should make sure the book looks it best before I give away those coupons. And this way Jaye Manus won't think poorly of me. (Oh, like I'm one to talk--polish matters, at least to me.)

It was pretty easy to do. I made a little black and white JPEG of the portal:

And inserted it, centered, wherever I had a break within the chapter. I also bolded the chapter heads, which I hadn't done before. I looked at it in the various formats from the various retailers both on my desktop and on my phone. It's surprising to me what a difference there can be between, say, a Mobi file from Smashwords and one from Amazon, or how they look in Mobipocket vs. Kindle for the PC vs. Kindle for the iPhone--one reason I wanted to do this now is because the Mobi from Amazon looked a little funny on the iPhone. (Some writers buy Kindles just to see what stuff looks like on there. I haven't done that--do you then have to buy a Nook and an iPad and an Android tablet?--but I can see the logic. Maybe when they're all in the thrift shops I'll do that--it won't be long now.)

Anyway, the little portal is sometimes bigger compared to the text and sometimes smaller, but it's all within an acceptable range. So yay! I'll do the Trust e-books tomorrow.