Mary Sisson's Blog, page 90

What edge are you cutting?

I recently read Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model by model/sociologist Ashley Mears. It's an interesting, if rather dryly-written, book about the economics and culture of fashion modeling. (And I was surprised reading it to realize that I know the male model "Michel"--he comes off as way more of a freak in that book than he is in real life, I think because English is not his first language. If you write nonfiction, please note how simply changing someone's name is not nearly enough to protect their identity.)

Anyway, Mears points out that there are two major schools of modeling: Commercial modeling (catalogs, advertisements) and editorial modeling (fashion shows, magazine shoots).

Commercial modeling is seen within the industry as, you know, commercial. Hot babes do well. But it's also regarded as Not Art--the idea is to appeal to Middle America, not challenge it. You or I probably have just as good an eye for a commercial model as anyone in the industry.

Editorial modeling is seen more as an art form. Those seriously bony girls with light-green, shiny skin and no eyebrows? They are editorial models. They are considered high fashion and on the cutting edge. While commercial models are pretty and sexy, editorial models are edgy, avant-garde, belle laide, and many other French terms for funny-looking. While commercial models are supposed to appeal to Middle America, editorial models are supposed to prove that whoever is trumpeting them is a true artist, with a unique and fabulous eye.

Which, as Mears points out, means that editorial models are suppose to appeal to other people in the industry.

Given how cutting-edge editorial models are supposed to be, how they are supposed to challenge conventional notions of beauty, which group do you think is more diverse?

. . . ?

Commercial models. Yuppers! People actually do market testing with commercial models, and it turns out that Middle America is actually a pretty diverse place! If you're pretty and sexy, no one cares much what your racial or ethnic background it!

Editorial models, in contrast, tend to be white, white, white. And really anorexic. (Apparently there are no really good non-white models in existence. It's kind of funny to watch the RAGE boil out of Mears' academic prose in response to that one.)

It turns out that if you have this small little gaggle of people who all socialize together and who are all constantly judging each other's taste, that taste becomes really homogenized--even if these are people who pride themselves on seeing the world differently!

I think that's a big part of why you get homogeny in movies and commercial books, too--it's not just the financial expectations that make everyone in the industry seek to produce clones of the latest hit. It's that tendency to move as a herd--everyone's in the same city, they have worked or will work together, and they do tend to socialize together.

Progress report

Edited chapter 2 of Trang--there are still a couple of lines I need to re-record, but it shouldn't be too bad.

Well, exactly!

This by Mike McIntyre (via Lindsay Buroker) is just spot on: "More than a quarter of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels have Amazon ratings of less than 4 stars." Among the under-4s are Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and Tender is the Night, which happens to be my favorite book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

McIntyre writes:

It amuses me that if Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce were still alive and wanted to run free promos, they'd need special dispensation to get shout outs from Pixel of Ink and Ereader News Today.

It amuses me much less, since I just put Trang into KDP Select and was hoping to promote its free days. What's especially annoying to me is that some of those places won't even let you buy advertising if your book is under four stars (or 4.2 stars--how they determined that was an acceptable level, I don't know).

And gee, yes, I am close to four stars, so I could just get a couple of my friends to give the book five stars and get over the hump that way, but no, no, no, I have to be ethical.

What was it Anne R. Allen said about combating paid reviews? Oh, yes:

Encourage review sites to change their policies if they require books to have a certain number of 4 and 5 star Amazon ratings to be featured. Sites like Pixel of Ink and Digital Book Today are great—but they insist on 10 four-or five-star Amazon reviews for a book to be considered for review. Not easy if you're a new writer launching a new book. Easy if you're a fat cat who uses a review mill. Because these ratings can now be purchased so easily, the arbitrary barriers do nothing but exclude new authors who don't cheat. 

Progress report

It wasn't raining (!!--how can that be?) so I recorded chapter 2 of Trang. One thing I noticed with the first chapter was that if I re-recorded a line at a later time, you can kind of tell, even with the compression and whatnot (I'm guessing it's because of a million little factors, like how close I am to the microphone and how messed up my sinuses are at the moment). So I gave chapter 2 a listen right after I recorded it and tried to do the necessary re-recording at more or less the same time. We'll see if that helps. I am clipping a lot with one character voice--he's an intoxicated loudmouth--but I'm hoping that compression will clean that up.

And as you may have guessed, I am at this point regretting having one character be an assistant undersecretary of technology trade standards and having another named Shridar Bhattacharjee. (Oddly enough, I kept getting that name right and then screwing up "Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!")

If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas

I mentioned yesterday that I think all the deals with Author Solutions are going to backfire badly, and while I'm in Cassandra mode, I wanted to toss out another possibility: I think it's likely that a company that consistently screws its clients is not going to be shy about screwing the companies that buy or do business with it.

Look at what's happening over at Hewlett-Packard: They are taking an $8.8 billion writedown (wow) over their acquisition of Autonomy, which is basically an admission that they paid $10.3 billion for a company that was really worth only $1.5 billion.

That kind of thing isn't really that uncommon, although the size of that particular writedown is certainly impressive. The accounting practices at public companies are much more tightly regulated than the accounting practices at private companies, and as the Autonomy case demonstrates, an awful lot of money can be created or hidden via seemingly arcane practices like when and how to recognize revenue.

And while there were longstanding questions about Autonomy's accounting practices, there don't appear to have been allegations that the company was ripping off clients, which is more than can be said about Author Solutions. Author Solutions claims a mere 4% profit margin, and I do wonder how much of that margin comes from "accidentally" withholding half of the royalties its writers are due.

But publishers always treat writers like crap! Surely Author Solutions will treat large publishing houses with honestly and respect!

You know, like they did Simon & Schuster! The New York Times writes:

One odd twist of the deal is that Author Solutions was purchased by the British publishing giant Pearson in July. Pearson has made Author Solutions part of Penguin, a Simon & Schuster competitor. But since Simon & Schuster was already far along in the planning with Author Solutions for the new brand, it decided to go forward anyway....

Wow. When the Times is skeptical of a New York publishing deal, you know it must smell to high heaven.

I see covers

This is from a Pintrest site called The World of Steam. Some of it's historical, some of it's modern, and a lot of it would make really good and probably relatively inexpensive covers for steampunk novels....

Progress report

I didn't actually make any progress today (there's random crap going on, and to be honest I'm still recovering from the extended sleep-deprivation experiment that was Thanksgiving), but I decided to go through and tally up my total word count on Trials, and it is:

25,600 words.

Not too shabby, right? That's roughly a quarter of the book, or the length of a novella. Just proving to myself that even if it doesn't feel like I'm getting a lot done, if I just keep plugging away, I will eventually get a lot done.

Criminals!

Recently an elderly relative received an alarming phone call from someone purporting to be from Microsoft. She had a terrible virus on her computer, this fellow told her, and for the low, low price of $250, he would take control of her computer remotely, fix the problem, and download a bunch of software onto her computer to make sure it never happened again!

She was incredibly grateful that this man alerted her to this horrible problem--she knew that her computer was old and buggy, but she had no idea things were that bad--so she promptly gave him her credit card number and let him download whatever he wanted!

Then she told the younger generation about it, and we made her unplug her Internet connection, get a new computer, and inform her credit-card company that she had been defrauded and needed a new card.

We're hoping that the credit-card company can sic the police on this guy so that he doesn't steal from any more seniors, but other than that, we're pretty much just focusing on the this-elderly-relative-needs-more-supervision end of things.

Imagine, though, that the guy running this scam actually worked for Microsoft. The Surface bombed, Windows 8 was a nonstarter, and Microsoft thought, "Screw it--the tech industry is just too hard! All that innovation is really expensive and doesn't always pay off. I know! Let's buy a company that specializes in ripping off addlepated and tech-adverse senior citizens!"

So, they did, and this guy who charges elderly people to install malware on their computers wasn't lying when he claimed he worked for Microsoft and went through the whole charade (which he did) of consulting with his boss in Seattle.

Well, in that case, we probably wouldn't just leave it in the hands of the credit-card company. In that case, we'd be looking at Microsoft's $227 billion market capitalization and its $72 billion in annual revenues and its $66 billion in cash, and we'd be discussing a lawyer seeing if we couldn't get a piece of that--not because we are especially greedy (although I certainly wouldn't turn down a piece of $66 billion), but because we'd be royally pissed that some allegedly reputable company had stooped to this kind of patently illegal fraud.

Which is why I think the whole strategy of traditional publishers allying themselves with Author Solutions is going to blow up in their faces. As Victoria Strauss (via PV) mentions, it's no secret that Author Solutions is a scam press. In the past, writers ripped off by the company might have just decided to lick their wounds and go home--after all, self-publishing has always been kind of a scammy business, right? And these scammers are often hard to locate and rarely have the assets to make a long legal fight worthwhile.

But when you're getting ripped by a company like Penguin (owned by Pearson PLC, with a market cap of $15 billion, annual revenues of $10 billion, and $1.6 billion in cash) or Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS Corp, with a market cap of $25 billion, annual revenues of $15 billion, and $1.5 billion in cash), that math starts to change. Suddenly, the guy who ripped you off is really easy to find, and he's got a freaking ton of money! Plus, business newspapers love a good scandal, and a public company has a lot to lose when its reputation gets tarnished--investors start to avoid it, which makes it much harder to raise money--so they are quite motivated to pay someone to shut up about their questionable business practices.

So, why would a "reputable" publisher set itself up for the kind of bad publicity and legal hassles you get when you start ripping off little old ladies? Ah, well, that I think is another case of large publishers having gotten so into the habit of crossing an ethical and legal line that they've forgotten it ever existed. I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that Harlequin, the publishing house of "Authors shouldn't be able to make a living" fame, is the target of a really impressive class-action lawsuit. And if you read today's blog post by Kris Rusch, just as an aside she mentions:

I certainly wouldn’t be earning a living [writing for traditional publishers]—a reasonable, above-poverty rate living—any more. In the last few years, I earned about one-quarter of what I used to earn in my bad years. The advances have gone from survivable to insulting. And now publishers are fudging on royalties owed....

Recently a friend started contract negotiations with a medium-sized publisher that I’ve worked for. The contract the friend forwarded me was shockingly bad, worse than any I’d seen in the last year, grabbing every right, including rights to all of my friend’s future projects. The contract only paid for the first project. The rights to the other projects could have been tied up for decades without payment because this once-honorable publisher got greedy.

Greedy and lazy. Greedy and lazy.

Business-y links

I had the kid today, but Passive Voice is totally on fire, so I thought I'd link:

Simon & Schuster is entering the vanity press business, partnering with none other than Author Solutions, now owned by Penguin and soon to be owned by Random House. So, that's like three major publishing houses deciding that straight-out ripping off the ignorant and naive is the proper way for a respectable publishing house to earn revenue nowadays, and if Simon & Schuster merges with HarperCollins, it will be four.

Harlequin's authors are still suing it, and if you're wondering just how scummy Harlequin is, the original article lays it all out in loving detail.

(I'm going to link to my old "Trust the Process, Not the Publisher" post now. No reason.)

Anyway, last Christmas, everybody and their dog got a Kindle; this Christmas, the dog is getting two. And someone is getting tired of hearing Jonathan Franzen whine about it.

Getting away from PV for a moment (shocking, I know), I'd mentioned earlier that Lindsay Buroker was posting about diversifying away from Amazon. How has that gone for her? Pretty well! She says:

In these last few months, I’ve reached a point where I could make a modest living as an author even without Amazon.

She credits having free books available with goosing sales at other retail outlets, as well as international sites.

So it is possible to diversify, and I find it notable that the people who think it's really important to do so (Buroker, Kris Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, me) are all people who have a significant history of self-employment and dealing with clients. And in an amazing coincidence, we all seem to think about this issue the same way--i.e. we all get REALLY REALLY REALLY nervous about being dependent on a single source of revenue. As Buroker writes:

I wasn’t too concerned about this until I started thinking about becoming a full-time independent author, AKA ditching the day job. I didn’t want to depend on one revenue stream, not if that money had to pay all the bills. As lucrative as Amazon can be, one never knows when they might switch the tables (dropping to a lower royalty rate or putting your account on hold for some reason or another), and then where would you be?

Progress report

I finished the noise removal on chapter 1 of Trang--huzzah, I think it's now officially finished, although I still have to convert it into an MP3.

I was out of town for Thanksgiving and got back yesterday--I suppose I should be happy that I have this lovely beta task to do when I'm groggy as hell (I didn't get much sleep, and not because I was busy doing fun things), but I'm kind of frustrated to be looking at these progress reports and realize that I haven't written anything for two weeks. (Good thing I don't do NaNoWriMo, huh?) It also became painfully obvious during Thanksgiving that this coming spring is just going to be very hard on my productivity--I have to help an elderly relative who is a chronically disorganized hoarder get a house in shape to sell. No, this person does not live in the same state I do--that would be just too easy.

The frustrating thing is that my nice new computer (that I got specifically so that I could produce books more easily) with the enormous screen (that I got specifically so that I could do layouts more easily) is not even remotely designed to travel. Since the person will be moved out by the time I get there (a good thing, trust me--otherwise nothing would get thrown away, ever), there will be no computer and perhaps no Internet access--God, this is sounding very much like I have to get a laptop, isn't it? Uuuuugh.