Richard McGowan's Blog: Smashed-Rat-On-Press - Posts Tagged "litigation"

Well, I don't know if this will actually be the last report of the year, but it's going to be the blog posting that contains the annual stock-taking and reflections on the year past, along with juicy sales figures.

As usual in terms of book sales, 2014 began with a whimper at Smashed-Rat-on-Press, but I had already set the corporate goal early by budgeting to get one new reader per year from now on. That happened in February, so the rest of the year was just a boat load of good gravy for the furry-faced folks at SROP.

But for my main alias, the guy who wrote all those quaint Martian Women books, it was a complete wash-up year. He didn't publish anything. Boo hoo! Instead, 2014 was a bonanza year for a few pseudonyms who got all the glory. Their publications, in order, are discussed below.

One of our favorite SROP authors, Kajolium Broadwick, got the SROP year started with a little samizdat offering, Do Anarchists Dream of Exploding Ice Cream? on March 1, then followed up with his main book of the year, Three Maidens in the Dark on April 2.

This year's first authorial debut was by young Ginger Amelia Sprockette, who published two books rather back-to-back in the spring. Those were her autobiographical offerings, Soft Pink Rain on April 15 and Time Enough For Picnics on May 30.

Ms Sprockette's sales have unfortunately been zero... Er, I mean, uh not very high to date. But we've been pleased that everyone who read her books seems to have enjoyed them. LOL. I suppose if they were made available on Earth she might have sold a few more, but with the embargo situation, that's just not possible.

Then, in the middle of (northern hemispherical) summer, on the Fourth of July precisely, SROP published the second (small, and probably final) Shenanigan Cheesefield book, The Mildewed Paper Collection.

That's a free print-it-yerself poetry book, but it still doesn't sell, probably because poetry doesn't sell very well anyway, as most poets know.

And then, on Halloween Day (October 31) was the highly anticipated block-buster event of the year with the release of Sanguinity Hematode's break-out bannable novel The Girl Who Grew Crutches From Seeds in a Garden of Exotic Delights. (Which won an obscure literary award. Yawn.)

Someone (besides dear Fernij) actually read it, by the way, and then reviewed it, which was excellent news for Ms Hematode, considering the unfortunate price-hike she was forced to endure not long after the intial publication.

And that about sums it up for SROP releases in 2014.

Maybe next year will be more productive, but I may have to offer the little rodents even more carrots, seeds, and parsley to get them working harder.

And now, on to the topic everyone loves: book sales.

It turns out that 2014 was the biggest SROP sales year in history, during which we sold nearly as many books in a year as we did in the ten years before!

This year, sales nearly doubled from 2013. Yes, believe it or not! Exclamation marks, ahoy! Total sales volume across the entire SROP catalog was an unbelievable 22 books (many of which came in a November surprise deluge, coincident with the arrival of actual rain in Santa Banana). However, sales revenue was little more than half of what it was in 2013. Our little underground press made $3.54 in 2014, all of which was due to e-book sales. Last year, surprise sales of A Modest Collection of Slightly Shocking Fairy Tales (SSFT) brought in $6.00 for the year, which was weird and resulted from a regrettable "pricing problem". This year we corrected the prices on SSFT paperbacks downward so, although we sold seven copies, revenue on those sales was back down to a comfortable zero dollars.

And that brings us to the weirdest statistic of all... In the last two years, SSFT has sold 14 copies to the general public, topping all other books ever. (Not counting a handful of giveaways and artist's copies.) This is just inexplicable, as far as the SROP-ly rodents are concerned and we're huddling now trying to understand what went wrong.

We have a warehouse full of all-natural non-GMO grass-fed beef-steaks that we're willing to give away at the back door, and yet potential customers just want to nibble the colorful sugary cupcakes on our doorstep.

To be fair, however, every new book published by SROP in 2014 was read by at least one person who was not actively involved in production. That's spectacularly awesome, given our glory-free past.

Onward. Upward. And thence back to the comfort of our safe little subterranean haven.

In case anyone is watching (which is probably not the case, as far as I can tell) the official publication date for Kajolium Broadwick's book Barely Pursuing the Minions of Mab has slipped from June 2 to July 4, 2015. It may slip again, who knows, because the final cover art is dependent upon Ms Sprockette's shooting schedule. According to her most recent communiqué, she is at present in a low-velocity polar orbit ~7AUs out from Sigma Canis Majoris and is not expected back this way for a while. The good news for readers, however, is that e-ARC copies of the book have begun to circulate narrowly, and are available to those intrepid readers who can follow the bread crumbs and perform the secret hand-shake.

In other news: following on the tepid non-success of Mantissa Etherbright's recent book of poetry, the vast editorial staff at Smashed-Rat-on-Press is in receipt of a brand new short work of fiction by Ms Etherbright, and it has been accepted for eventual publication. Eager readers can expect it to come out some time before the end of the year, possibly. (We already have shocking spectacular cover art and photography for it, too.)

And speaking of year-ends and schedules and sales figures. Mid-term sales figures at SROP have confirmed that our worst publishing nightmares are not mere heart-burny dreams. Sales have been "a tad off" as they say in the biz, where "tad" means ~85% down from last year. First-half sales in any year are traditionally low at SROP because we don't usually give a fig until mid-summer at least, when we often discover the loom of impending doom and make a last-ditch effort to save bacon before December. If 2015 continues at the current run-rate, sales-wise, we may have to consider alternatives to both giving away books for free and selling them. Apparently even free postage of free books is not enough to attract patrons... (See the previous blog post, The Possibly Annual Barely Broken Books Summer Sale for information about that.) We may resort to firing them from cannons into the windows of potential readers' homes.

Then again, it's 2015. With about a million works of fiction bombarding the sales channels each year who, as they often say, gives a rat's ass about one more? LOL.

Luckily, all the SROP Pseudonymia are due to converge soon for their annual mid-term meeting at which the bad news will be officially divulged, digested, regurgitated, and recycled into all the good news that's fit to print.

While it may be constitutionally impossible for a white rodent of a certain advanced age and degree of living fossilization to write anything that isn't at least sort of sexist at some level... I hope to hell I never write a novel that utterly fails the Lutgendorff Test. Oh, wait, what's that you ask? See the article here in the New Statesmen.

Lutgendorff read the entire NPR list of 100 best Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, but didn't have to go very far in before she noticed the rampant misogyny and so forth in the sea of nostalgia. So she started keeping track of what she was reading, and came up with a test. (Note: Yes, I'm still stereotypically assuming that Liz Lutgendorff is a woman, even after doing a quick Google search, but I will happily come back and edit this if she isn't a she; or if she turns out to be a computer program.)

As you can see below, this is sort of riffin' on the Bechdel Test we all know and love.

The Lutgendorff Test asks three good questions of a book:

1: Does it have at least two female characters?

2: Is one of them a main character?

3: Do they have an interesting profession/level of skill like male characters?

Here I shall openly confess that I have not read most of the books on that NPR list; and most of them don't interest me on the face of things, so I don't even feel any loss. (Less than two handfuls of the books were penned by women, by the way.) Of those on the list I have read, I wouldn't put very many on a list of 100 greatest anything.

But I was gratified to see that The Left Hand of Darkness made the cut.

A recent article on copyright trolls in The Digital Reader drew my attention to the use of trademarks in addition to copyright as a means of retaining eternal control over works that have (or should have) ascended into the public domain.

One quintessential example of a long-term artsy empire is Edgar Rice Burroughs™, Inc. or "ERB" for short. Back in 1923, the author of Tarzan™ (not to mention and Jane™ which is also a trademark) unfortunately had the foresight to incorporate. The corporation is still in existence because, as we know, corporations that get large enough never die. ERB Inc still owns all of the non-public domain ERB work. And they aggressively protect it with all legal means at their disposal. Apparently, they have enough money to do that. This means they protect trademarks on just about every permutation of anything ERBistic. So, who runs this company? Presently, it's run by second and third generation family members. Effectively, ERB created what amounts to a literary landed gentry. An artistocracy that owns some valuable "intellectual property".

Let's look at some. First, there's the main ERB site, and then a host of others you can get to from there, such as John Coleman Burroughs, the son of ERB; and Danton Burroughs, the grandson of ERB... Do you see where this is going? Now, they're all likely to be perfectly nice and generous people who love their ancestors and care a lot about their family legacy. But they didn't write any of the ERB work (although JCB illustrated a load of it). They're all big boys and girls now, who could, just possibly one might think, do something of their own instead of sucking off the mummified teats of their creative, prolific ancestor, N generations back, protecting the turf from open utility into the indefinite future.[1]

You might not care very much about one such company. But it's not just one. There are also megaliths like Disney®, which has grown far beyond mere control by a few descendants. See what happened to Charles Schulz's Peanuts for example, now 80% owned by not-the-family. And Jimi Hendrix Inc., still family controlled, for now. There are shadowy parasites, like those who wanted to extort $220,000 from Nina Paley to use some long-forgotten music of Annette Hanshaw in Sita Sings the Blues .[2]

Where does it end? It doesn't. Organizations like that are gobbling up all creative work as far back as they possibly can, and when they can't go far enough, they buy off the US Supreme Court, or Congress, or what have you to extend copyright terms. And the public is left with the so-called orphan works problem.[3]

It's a good thing Homer™ didn't have tradmarks at his disposal or we would still be paying off his brood for all that Odyssey™ stuff. And even I have made use of some plot elements from Shakespeare® (a.k.a. The Bard™), so I'm certainly glad he didn't incorporate or trademark his stuff, as are hundreds upon hundreds of other individuals who have used his work as a spring-board for their creative endeavors in the last few hundred years.

Democratic society—you know, that kind where all citizens have a good chance of being somewhere in the middle of the pecking order—is kind of supposed to protect the interests of the general populace from the ravages and depredations of a self-interested aristocracy that accumulates everything unto itself. But that doesn't work for creative products in a world where copyrights and trademarks keep being extended and expanded, in which the corporations that control them also influence the legal system that's meant to keep things more or less equal-opportunified.

Welcome to a glimpse of the far future, folks: a dark, polluted world, devoid of animals but populated with umpteen billions of teeming, snarling, humanity consisting mainly of ordinary disgruntled drudges, all plugged into a non-stop entertainment juggernaut to keep them docile. Just like in that Matrix movie. Remember that one? It will inevitably be a world in which the only artistically creative work ever produced will be owned and operated by a handful of giant corporations that solely benefit a few executives and shareholders, eternally sucking at the mummified teats of Creators who died aeons ago, or using a few bright souls of their modern time as wage-slaves to keep the machine chugging along with bits of fresh artistic meat. Corporations like ERB and Disney, only bigger and hungrier. They will make the laws and extend their control to the point where nothing independently artistic can actually exist unless they allow it, and get their little cut, of course.

In a world like that, an artist has two choices: prostitution or obscurity. Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with prostitution (even though it gets a bad rap sometimes) as long as it is fairly compensated. And obscurity has its attractions as well, to certain types of stealthy maverick. But the most likely outcome for artistic wannabes of the future is a life filled with terror in a world where independent art is stifled forcibly; under constant threat of expensive lawsuits and prison sentences for infringement... as the popular creative space is increasingly controlled by the parasitic, gluttonous corporate amoebas, ever eager to squash, absorb, or render impotent, anything they can't both control and make money from. (It's probably obvious by now that I wouldn't have survived very well in the McCarthy era, huh?)

Now, of course, there are some people who think the modern situation is perfectly fine. Shouldn't descendants be entitled to profit from the work of their parents? Or grand-parents? But... How many generations down the line? I'll bet most of the people who find this appealing wouldn't look very kindly upon living in a dictatorship of an aristocracy oblivious to their needs and freedoms in anything aside from the creative realm...[4]

---- Footnotes ----

[1] If the stuff remained legitimately all-in-the-family, I might be less annoyed about the situation just like I'm not very annoyed that Britain still has a royal family, but that's not how these things work. They creep inexorably, gobbling up everything. Eventually, ERB Inc will pass out of family control because (for example) someone decides they'd would rather sell it off for some cash, and then the ERB legacy will pass into the control of a soulless corporation that will lock down control forever to enrich its major shareholders. And if/when something like that stops making money, it will just get thrown down into the oubliette with all the other dregs of history, where nobody who might care will ever be able to enjoy it.

[2] Please do read that all Sita/Hanshaw stuff carefully for an amusing tidbit on attempts to ban the film in India, and the delicious quote from an interview with Hanshaw herself, who said in part: "I disliked all of [my records] intensely. I was most unhappy when they were released."... Oh, how amusing that whoever "owns" the recordings is still trying to cash in on them in the 21st century!)

[3] A side effect of the orphan works problem, for example, is that you probably will never be able to obtain or read a copy of Carol Deschere's book Small World: only 2,000 copies ever existed. It's still under copyright. And probably nobody could make any money at all by reprinting it. I'd guess even her children don't care if it's eternally out of print and inaccessible, even though, in the modern digital age, it would require relatively little effort to scan a copy, produce an e-book from the scans; and the result could be distributed world-wide instantly, effectively for free, forever.

[4] For further reading:

Who really benefits from long copyright? Note the story of the Kookaburra song, now owned by a publishing company that has diddly-squat to do with the heirs of the song-writer.

Evils of the TPP...

Stuff that should be in the public domain by now... I'm especially annoyed about the Gershwin legacy. And I found the position of Victor Hugo's heirs in 1997 to be interesting... What a ruckus that would have made, had Hunchback of N.D. still been under copyright when Disney butchered it. LOL.

Happy Birthday, yet again

Good evening and welcome, new friends and old, to the show that never ends, even when you want it to: Smashed-Rat-on-Press!

As we scurry past the longest, darkest night of the year and approach Christmas—probably the brightest hoopla night of the post-autumn season since Diwali—we would like to wish you all good-cheer, plentiful grog, warm hugs, and cozy caverns with bright fires to keep them warm. And books. Books really put the "O" in cozy. At least for some of us, and maybe for you, too.

It's becoming sort of a SROP Rodential Christmas tradition to trot out the free and ancient Yuletide story collection, Violists. Get it while you can! (It's always free.) And don't miss the free Cheesefield poetry books, too.

Everything else from SROP is also available free for the asking, too, of course... At least, the e-books can be had for free in the speakeasy by people who can follow the bread-crumbs and contact The Rodent at Smashed-Rat-on-Press to make their requests. Don't miss our festive pair of Green and Red catalogs!

And remember there's not just one rodent in residence here in mostly-sunny Santa Banana. The SROP stable of authors includes such unknown "brown dwarf" luminaries as: Kajolium Broadwick, Shenanigan Cheesefield, H. Cogito Epsilon, Richard McGowan, Ginger Amelia Sprockette, Mantissa Etherbright, and Sanguinity Hematode... So there may almost be something in the ratty stocking for almost everyone.

This is not really a sale; it's more of a last-ditch effort to give away some stuff that's sitting here on the Big Shelf of Unwanted Tomes.

Once in a while the Head Rodent at Smashed-Rat-on-Press has to re-print a book because a typo is found in the current edition. Or the format needs to be changed a little. Or we decide to typset it in some other font entirely. Since we only keep one sample copy of each book on our archival shelves, this means we sometimes have extra copies sitting around which are known to be somewhat imperfect. They might have a few little typos, or have some formatting glitch. But the text in them is generally the same as the latest available edition, except for the little defects. The books are entirely readable and not known to contain utterly embarrassing problems. (Those that turn out to be too embarrassing even for free giveaway get ripped to shreds mercilessly and used as nesting material for the little furry-faced folks at SROP. That happened to two books this afternoon, in fact.)

Single copies of the following paperback books are available, free for the asking to readers over 30 years of age. Free shipping within North America is included. (Sadly, there's no chance of these arriving before Christmas, and not likely before the new year.) All you need to do is figure out how to e-mail the rodent at SROP and request one of these books. We promise we won't haunt you later or send unwanted catalogs to your mailbox or anything of that sort.

After each book title is a brief description of what's wrong with it, editorially or print-wise:

The Girl Who Grew Crutches From Seeds (1 typo)
The River Rises on Fanny's Future (2 minor typos)
The Princess on the Rock (format diff only)
A Harlot of Venus (format diff only)
On the Klickitat (different cover)
Diane at Fifteen (mostly punctuation issues)
The Typographer's Left Shoe (clean extra)
Slightly Shocking Fairy Tales (limited-print-run copy)

As each book is claimed, I'll cross out or remove the titles. (Like this.) So if you see it here and it's not crossed out, it's still available. However... Any books left over on January 1, 2017 will be heaved into the annual conflagration. For reference, here are all the lovely covers in a row:






And if there's something else in one of the SROP GREEN or RED catalogs that you just can't live without, feel free to ask because we might be desperate magnanimous enough to load you down with a free copy anyway, compliments of the chef.

Happy Holidays!

P.S.: Don't forget there are also four unloved copies of Anna Conda of the KGB still available as well.

For about 36 hours, give or take a bit, the little romance, "An Uncommon Surfeit of Lipstick" will be freely available for download. You can get a MOBI format copy for KindleHERE, or an EPUB for your other device HERE.

These links will disappear after Valentine's Day is over in most of the world, and this posting will self-destruct.

*poof*