Mary Sisson's Blog, page 83

Le sigh....

Since I've been a virtuous little points-grubber, a bottle of Paperback perfume arrived in the mail today. Sadly, while it smells fine, it doesn't really smell like a paperback. That's kind of unusual for Demeter--I've worn their Dirt and Sawdust perfume, and both smelled like a very pleasant version of either dirt (clay, I'd say) and sawdust, so I wasn't thinking that a paper smell would stump them.

Alien lives

Despite the Trang series featuring many, many space Marines, I've never felt like I ought to market it as military sci-fi.

And one reason is because I keep coming across this scenario in military sci-fi:

There are aliens. The aliens are enemies for whatever reason, or you know, no reason whatsoever. The enemy aliens decide to attack or are preparing to attack, so the humans and perhaps some good aliens get together and, relying on some far superior military technology, they surround the enemy aliens and they kill them all. Every single one!

Pardon my focus on semantics, but--isn't that properly called a massacre?

I realize that the rules of engagement tend to go out the window in the heat of combat. I don't judge that: I don't want to get killed, either, and if I were in combat the fact that I had much better weaponry than the other guy wouldn't slow me down one whit.

But in these books, these things more often than not are planned. There's a trap, the enemy falls into the trap, and then the humans kill them all!!! Forget negotiating surrender or taking prisoners--it's slaughter time!

Oh, but the enemy aliens don't surrender. That's always the moral loophole in these stories--Gee, Mom, I had to wipe out that village! Those guys don't surrender! Plus, you know, they are ugly and talk funny and eat weird food and don't live like we do--better to kill them all. It's just so much more convenient. So much more satisfying.

This may be another example of me having a hard time letting go of the metaphor.

I guess I feel like people are already so very prone to dehumanizing enemies that it's not something that needs to be encouraged. Playing up the alien's alieness to make massacre more acceptable--they're evil, they're bad, they don't surrender, we have no choice but to kill them all--makes me feel like I'm reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Because according to Hannah Arendt, that's basically what the Nazis told soldiers who didn't feel particularly good about massacring Jews: You have no choice. It's not pleasant, but it has to happen. They're evil and they won't surrender. We have no choice but to kill them all.

History: Not what you think!

I really liked this post by Fox Meadows about whether the past was really as white and sexist and hidebound and bigoted as less-well informed people tend to think. The background is that a fellow wrote a book featuring a Black female pirate, and someone decided to bitch and moan because the book did not feature a White male pirate instead. Part of the complainant's problem with the Black female pirate (other than her being Black and female, which were clearly issues for him in and of themselves), was that he felt it was unrealistic to have a pirate who was a woman. Meadow's post points out that what people think is historically realistic often has nothing to do with the way history actually was (plus, you know, it's fiction, dipshit).

(I don't know what the complainant was expecting to accomplish, but the author's response was to offer him "this engraved invitation to go piss up a hill," as well as another, equally heartfelt invitation to stop reading his books. And I have to say that, under similar circumstances, I would do the same.)

I don't blame people for assuming that, say, all pirates or all American cowboys were all white, because the sad truth is that most people get their knowledge of history from Hollywood, and Hollywood is an abominable teacher. The Western genre was really popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and by George, you can watch Western after Western after Western and not see a single African-American cowboy--not one. In addition, all the women wear Revlon Fire & Ice on their lips and nails, and there's always one with platinum blond hair who looks just like Marilyn Monroe, sometimes because she actually is Marilyn Monroe.

Movies--even "true" movies--are a tissue of lies, often the sorts of lies that leave you with your mouth gaping open at their chutzpah (coughcoughA Beautiful Mindcoughcough). The goal of movies is to attract audiences by putting beautiful characters in wish-fulfillment situations, not repel audiences by putting starving and gross people in really upsetting situations. When people think "pirates," they think of Johnny Depp (yum) in Pirates of the Caribbean (whee). They think of freedom and excitement and Halloween costumes and Talk Like a Pirate Day. The reality of pirates, past or present, doesn't even come up.

Even if you don't learn everything you know about history from movies or television, teachers and books sometimes have a definite agenda. I think the educational system has gotten better about this, but there has been a lot of propaganda fed to people over the ages. When I accompanied my elderly relative to Peru, we traveled with a group that specializes in trips geared to older people. The people we were with were all basically lovely, intelligent, and well-educated enough that I was very surprised at how little they knew of history. We visited a number of Moche ruins, and the Moche were very enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice. And people in our group kept saying things along the lines of, "Well, I don't know why these people had to kill each other all the time--Christians have certainly never slaughtered each other like that!"

Wow. Um, yeah they did. Like, for centuries. Seriously, how did their history classes go? "Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses to a church door, and after some calm and rational discussion, it was decided that large chunks of Northern Europe would no longer follow the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church." "The Inquisition was exactly like Monty Python portrayed it, comfy chairs and all." "The religious dissidents left Europe and came to the North American colonies because they loved adventure!"

But the thing that really bothers me about efforts to render history more palatable and comfortable to people, is that it cuts people off from exciting stories.

Yeah, I know, that is a horribly writerly reaction, so writerly that it verges on the psychopathic, but honestly, when I was editing Black history books, that's what struck me: This is some great shit!

I mean, the violence of American race relations and the brutality of slavery meant that every little interaction could result in HORRIBLE TORTURE AND DEATH. Those are fantastic stakes. Asking for water could get you killed. Walking down the street could get you killed. Starting a business could definitely get you killed.

Deciding, "You know, I've got really light skin. I think I'll pass for white and go to the Deep South in order to investigate lynchings for the NAACP"--? Holy shit. Great story. Why no one has done a movie about Walter White I will never know.

Except that I guess I do know. It's similar to why there are no really good non-white fashion models--it's a problem of gatekeepers. Lazy gatekeepers, or gatekeepers who think it's great but there just isn't a market for that kind of thing. I've heard writers say, "Well, I'd love to write about X. It's a really fascinating topic, and I think there would be some fantastic stories there. But they'd never let me."

But guess what? NOW YOU CAN!! Now, with self-publishing, you can have your Black female pirates! You can write historical fiction that's actually accurate, and when someone says, "That's not realistic," you can tell them how wrong they are!

And who knows, maybe you'll manage to educate people about the past, so that they have the slightest clue that, yes, racial attitudes in 1453 Europe were rather different from those in 1953 Selma, Alabama, because there's 500 years and thousands of miles of difference there. Honestly.

Progress report

I did noise removal on Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook. It's almost done, there are just a couple of lines that I want to redo because I got mushmouthed in places.

Well, come on!

So, I've been busy writing, and Squarespace now no longer notifies me by e-mail when comments are stuck in the spam filter. (Thanks, guys--that's a big help.) So, yeah--almost a dozen comments were stuck there, and I didn't find out until I actually went poking around. Sorry about that.....

KDP Select and online advertising so far (now)

Like I said, I've had Trang enrolled in Amazon's exclusivity program since December 1st. So, do I have any updates?

At this point I've gone from zero borrows to one borrow ($2 in revenue!), so I feel comfortable in my opinion that you ain't gonna get a lot from the borrow program absent other enticements.

While I think (? data is not conclusive) that advertising is having some effect selling copies of Trang, it's not a large effect, so I'm also comfortable in my opinion that one should keep one's click bid as low as possible with a long-term pay-per-click campaign for a not-free book.

At this point, I'm skeptical that there's anything KDP Select could give me (since I am shut out of buying ads on the major sites promoting KDP Select free days) that I couldn't get by making Trang free.

Why's that? Well, I am seeing a significant uptick in sales of Trust. Not, you know, enough to pay off a mortgage or anything, but still...significant. Especially given that Trust has always been somewhat of a laggard. But you give away a bunch of copies of Trang, and...some of those people click on that back matter link and get Trust! I love it when a plan comes together.

So, really, the question for me is--do I make Trang free as soon as it comes out of KDP Select, or do I wait until Trials comes out? The original plan was to wait until the third book, but...remember how I was #3 on the science fiction: series free list? That might be exposure worth having. Maintaining such exposure would presumably involve occasional relatively expensive advertising campaigns plugging a free book, but it might be worth it (they weren't that expensive). Trang (or really, any non-Illuminati activity) is not a significant source of revenue for me anyway, and expanding the fan base may well pay off when a new release comes out.

Wow. Sounds like I've almost talked myself into it....

Progress report

1390 words. Yay!

Some fun with math

Bridget McKenna posted to Passive Voice about how kids are enthusiastically adopting e-books. McKenna writes that the study "plays hell with the 30% e-reading cap so many people have been predicting lately."

The thing is, their own data plays hell with that particular prediction!

Let's pretend that the surveys of established publishers bear any actual relation to the e-book market. (They don't.) This data suggests that e-books constitute 25% of sales, and is increasing at a rate of 34% a year.

So, assuming that rate of growth stays constant:

In 2013, e-books will make up 34% of book sales.

In 2014, e-books will make up 45% of book sales.

In 2015, e-books will make up 60% of book sales.

In 2016, e-books will make up 81% of book sales.

In 2017, e-books will make up 107% of book sales, which is impossible.

You see why I laugh when people describe a 34% rate of growth as not truly impressive.

But the rate of growth is slowing! they scream.

OF COURSE that rate of growth is going to slow, at least as a percentage of the overall market. It has to! You can't actually control 107% of a market--it's like eating 107% of a pie! (Although, if e-books actually cause the overall market to grow the way paperbacks did, we may see the value of e-book sales in 2017 top the overall value of all book sales in 2012. Which would be very cool.)

Anyway, let's halve the rate of growth, making it 17%.

In 2013, e-books will make up 29% of book sales.

In 2014, e-books will make up 34% of book sales.

In 2015, e-books will make up 40% of book sales.

In 2016, e-books will make up 47% of book sales.

In 2017, e-books will make up 55% of book sales.

So, at half the current rate of growth, within five years more than half of all book sales will be e-books.

What the people predicting a 30% cap on e-books are predicting is basically a zeroing out of e-book growth--not a reduction in that rate of growth, but a complete halt. And they are expecting that zeroing-out to happen, you know, today. Because if the rate of growth stays anywhere near where it is now for just a couple of years, e-books will be outselling every other format--paperbacks, hardcovers, you name it. And that's in dollar value.

I actually do think we might see a zeroing out of e-book growth in the next few years among traditional publishers, but that's because I think it's quite possible that that particular group is going to be largely forced out of e-books. In that case, e-books will be left to the indie writers, who are much harder to survey.

What's that 30% cap? It's wishful thinking. It's people pretending they know the future when they don't. It's inconsistent with existing data from publishers of fiction. And it's extremely unlikely.

Progress report

I re-recorded Pinky's lines and the other lines that needed fixing on Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook. That went much better--in a way, it was better to record all his lines together because it helped me to keep his accent consistent. I finished the fixing and did the sound compression, so all that's left is going to be noise removal.

Progress report

1350 words! Whoo!