Mary Sisson's Blog, page 98

Ugggghhh....

I've been feeling kind of tired and headachy lately, and couldn't quite figure out why, but now the answer is clear: Sinus infection. Yuck. Obviously this is going to adversely affect production of anything other than yellow mucus.

Random bits

Life stuff is interfering with writing, but with any luck, I'll start tomorrow. A couple of interesting tidbits.

1. The Foolscap flyers: Since response to the GeekGirlCon flyers was not what I had hoped, I decided to modify the flyers by removing the "it's free!" message from the header. The thinking was that maybe that message gave the book a bargain-basement type odor--you know, "I'm making it free because I know it's no good!"

Well, maybe it does, but apparently people don't mind a bargain--I have had NO redemptions of the free coupon on the Foolscap flyers. None whatsoever. "It's free!" is back in the header for Norwescon!

2. The Meetup: That went well, I thought--I enjoyed it, and people seemed happy with it. And something interesting came up: I mentioned that it's important to have a clickable table of contents in an e-book, and one woman said that she will not buy e-books that don't have them, because they are just too difficult to navigate. Something to think about--yes, it's a pain to do them, but IMO well worth the effort.

Yet another example of the economics of self-publishing

Kris Rusch has a thought-provoking blog post in which she looks at Joe Konrath's sales numbers. What's interesting is that she makes the case that he is still, even today, basically a mid-lister--his sales are good, not great.

And yet, he's making buckets of money.

I know I've brought this up before, but I just feel like doing the happy dance whenever I see something like that--writers making a living (or waaay more than a living) off of sales that would be of zero interest to large publishing houses. There's a big difference between 70% of the pie and 10%.

Progress report

No progress today, alas. Remember how the printer died, but it was under warranty, so they sent me a replacement? Yeah, the replacement died (a Hewlett-Packard Pro8000, if you are wondering what to avoid) shortly before I left for Peru. It was probably still under warranty, but I think at a certain point (you know, like when the same model dies twice in six months) you need to acknowledge that you have purchased a lemon. It's not like the kids were attacking it with hockey sticks or anything, either--it died twice under normal use.

So I ordered a new printer (a Canon this time), and it came today. Hopefully it will last longer, and it has a built-in scanner, which presumably will take care of that issue as well. Anyway, it took a long time to set up (why these things always take so long, I'll never know), and then I had a big backlog of stuff that needed to be printed and sorted. So that plus some other errands pretty much ate my day--tomorrow hopefully I can get stuff done before I have to go lead my first Meetup as organizer. 

Why did he do that?

I recently finished Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld. It's a fascinating non-fiction book, and I feel like it contains a valuable lesson for writers of fiction as well.

The book is about the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and how it basically went off the rails and dedicated enormous resources to hassling hippies in the late 1960s. (They have long hair! LOOOONG HAIR!!!) Now, I knew that that had happened--I've read Steal This Book and Soul on Ice and a ton of other 1960s counterculture "classics" that to be honest are for the most part incredibly boring to the contemporary reader. (Yes. You smoked weed and got laid. That is so fascinating.)

But I'd never really gotten any insight into why it happened, other than Hoover was The Man, and The Man can't handle having his mind blown by young people smoking weed and getting laid, man! (I feel obligated to point out here that Hoover was probably gay, and some of the people he worked with quite closely for a long time were most certainly gay, so I don't think his problem was Puritanism.) Rosenfeld spent more than 20 years fighting the FBI in court for access to its files, so he has a lot of letters and memos and whatnot that provide insight into Hoover's thought process.

And a fascinating thought process it is! For starters, Hoover surrounded himself with people who thought exactly like he did--proof that the echo chamber existed long before the Internet. So by the time the late 1960s rolled around, assumptions like "Democrat = Communist" were widely accepted within the FBI, because it's not like anybody in the Bureau knew any Democrats or, God forbid, actually was one. In other words, there were no reality checks taking place, and no speed bumps on the road from Legitimate Security Threat Land to Crazy Town.

What was the legitimate security threat? Well, the Comintern was indeed a real thing, and in the 1930s and 1940s most Communist parties in the United States were actively managed by the Soviet Union and supported Soviet interests over American interests. In the late 1940s, people working for the Soviets were spying on the American atomic-weapons program. So that sort of thing was a totally legitimate area of interest for law enforcement, which is why the FBI got involved.

Unfortunately, as the level of Communist/Soviet activity in the United States waned in the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI just assumed it was better hidden. The way the Communists operated really helped stoke the paranoia--remember, this was a political movement that developed under the totalitarian regime of the czars. So Communists had a policy of 1. lying about who they were, and 2. surreptitiously taking control of organizations that were largely not Communist by having a small number of Communists enter the organization and take leadership positions.

The secrecy meant that if a group had few or no people in it who were openly Communist, you still couldn't be 100% sure that it was not a Communist front organization that would promote the interests of the Soviet Union. And indeed, Hoover and his people were, in general, 100% sure groups that were making trouble were Communist front organizations, even if the vast majority of the people in those groups were clearly not Communists.

So when the free-speech movement started at UC Berkeley in 1964, Hoover did not see a bunch of college kids agitating to pass out flyers on campus (yawn). He saw a Communist front organization (!!!). I was actually pretty surprised about how sincerely Hoover believed this--I'd always assumed that the people making these sorts of allegations knew they were pretty ridiculous. But Hoover's underlings obediently produced a report saying that the FSM was a Communist front organization, and then Hoover himself was genuinely quite surprised when that report was discredited.

At this point, Hoover's thought process went like this:

Q. Why are these kids acting so weird?

A. Soviet infiltration!

Within just a couple of years, though, even the FBI knew that the Soviets had SFA to do with what was going on at Berkeley. Unfortunately, at this point they didn't care. Hoover's thought process had devolved to:

Q. Why are these kids acting so weird?

A. Who cares? They must be destroyed!

And that's when the FBI became an instrument of straight-up political oppression--hippies, peaceniks, Democrats, they were all subversives and all the enemy.

Do you see how much more interesting that kind of thing is that the simple-minded "Hoover is The Man" or "Hoover is evil" or "Hoover can't handle freaks"? It's a story, and a tragic one--a guy starts out in trying to protect people's freedom, but thanks to certain flaws in his character (an unwillingness to associate with anyone who does not agree with him; an unwillingness to adapt to change; a willingness to break the law to pursue an investigation), he winds up becoming quite possibly the most serious threat to that freedom. The slow decline in his ideals, the gradual sense that there are no rules that apply to him, the creeping belief that anyone who disagrees with him is evil--you can see how it could happen, you can relate to it even if you think you would have handled things differently.

It's so much more engaging than just having a two-dimensional villain plopped before you, along with instructions to hate him. Bad guys who are just bad--you know, one day they just decided to become evil, as you do--are such a wasted opportunity.

OK, OK....

Today I made the mistake of actually checking up on what's going on with Trang and Trust. People are 1. buying them, and 2. reviewing them favorably. I am grateful for it, of course, but what are they saying in the reviews? THEY WANT THE NEXT BOOK!!!

All right! I'll get on that..not today, please, I'm tired still, and tomorrow I have to get up at the crack of dawn and look after a four-year-old. But Wednesday--Wednesday I shall resume writing. I'm not promising a productive day, but it's on my calendar and everything.

A weak-ass report from Foolscap (but I have artists!)

Yeah, with one thing and another I basically had to shine Foolscap on. I had too much stuff to catch up on, and at least one thing I wanted to do was scheduled late at night, which just wasn't going to happen with this jet lag.

Anyway, I did drop off flyers and cruise through the art show as part of my ongoing quest to find fantasy and sci-fi artists people can potentially use for book covers. There was some overlap with the Westercon artists, so I'm only listing the people who weren't at that show and who have Web sites where you can see their work and contact them. (And seriously, artists, you really need to have Web sites. Especially if you have a common name that makes you impossible to find on Google. I'd love to help you, but there is only so much I can do.)

Lela Dowling and Frank Cirocco

Chris Sumption

Laura Cameron

Raven Mimura

Konrath gives the numbers

Konrath breaks out his sales, in detail. It's really interesting, and I'll say again that I really, really appreciate that he does this.

And he says some things that I think are really important when it comes to signing deals with publishers, especially e-book only deals, so I'll quote them here. Emphasis is added:

On a $6.99 legacy ebook, the author makes $1.04 after agent commission. The publisher makes $3.67. So let's play the advance game.

A publisher pays an author $20,000 advance. Author keeps $17,000 after the agent is paid. There is no paper version. The ebook, priced at $6.99, sells 12,000 ebooks in five years, which is what my legacy ebook Dirty Martini has sold.

The author would still owe $7520 on the advance before earning another nickel. In the meantime, the publisher has made $44,000. Minus the $20k advance, the publisher has pocketed $24,000, and still will make money for a few more years without paying the author any more.

If the author self-pubbed his own book at $6.99, and sold 12,000 copies, he would have made $58,880.

If publishers keep signing authors for ebook-only deals, at the current royalty rates, they'll get richer than they ever have, at the expense of authors. Authors will still be living advance to advance, never earning out, and publishers will be printing money by doing nothing more than providing cover art, proofreading, and editing services--all jobs that can be freelanced for fixed costs.

If you are thinking about signing an ebook-only deal with a publisher, crunch the numbers first....

Tread lightly. There's a big difference between taking $1,000,000 because a publisher thinks you're the next James or Hocking, and taking $20,000 that you'll never earn out.

You see?

In today's Wall Street Journal: Three out of four start-up companies backed by venture capital fail.

Venture capitalists "bury their dead very quietly," Mr. [Shikhar] Ghosh[, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who researched the subject,] says. "They emphasize the successes but they don't talk about the failures at all."

There are also different definitions of failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghosh's research.

Failure often is harder on entrepreneurs who lose money that they've borrowed on credit cards or from friends and relatives than it is on those who raised venture capital.

Just making the point that venture capital isn't the golden ticket some people who liken it to traditional publishing would like you to think it is. Big expectations + tight deadlines = high likelihood of failure. Doesn't matter what industry.

I'm here!

Yes, I am back from my long trip to Foreignia--Peru, specifically.

It was a great trip; we never had to go to the hospital or even see a doctor, which was a serious relief. And the place is fantastic. The high point was, of course, Machu Picchu, which really lives up to its billing--fascinating ruins in a truly awesome natural setting.

Anyway, tomorrow Foolscap starts, so I should have some posts on that soon, assuming all the stuff I have to catch up on doesn't kill me first.

Lindsay Buroker (whose books kept me mightily entertained on that 8-hour plane trip) did a post on offering subscriptions to short stories, but the main thing that intrigues me is that she's thinking about strategies to diversify writers' income streams away from Amazon. (I'm assuming that it's not a coincidence that she has another recent post about selling ARCs directly to readers.)

Obviously, if you're just getting started, Amazon appears to offer the most powerful tools for getting noticed. (And both Buroker and M. Louisa Locke have good posts on maximizing the impact of Amazon exclusivity.) But I do feel that it's important to diversify revenue sources (and marketing venues) when you can, even though it may take more effort and be less rewarding than occasionally scheduling free days on KDP Select. If diversifying was easy, fewer people would get caught in the trap of their own expectations.

And Joe Konrath says that since phony reviews don't kill anyone, there's nothing wrong with them. Right. This is pretty much what you can expect from an on-line fight. "I am becoming increasingly shrill defending something that I would never, ever do! Just because I would never do it in a million years, ever, doesn't mean that it's wrong!! You're an asshole!!! Fuck you!!!!"

The only reason I bring this up is because Konrath's moral relativism takes a different spin in the world of law enforcement. The Federal Trade Commission determined in 2009 that, yes, "paying for positive reviews without disclosing that the reviewer had been compensated equates to deceptive advertising and would be prosecuted as such."

Now, do paid reviews kill people? No. That's why you can rest assured that you won't go to death row for doing it. Will you get fined? Will you have to wear an orange jumpsuit and pick up trash along the highway? Will an ankle bracelet become your latest fashion accessory? That depends entirely on how annoyed the FTC gets about this issue. Remember how I said that ethical behavior helps you to not get sued? It also helps you avoid nasty letters sent by the district attorney's office. Something to think about.