Dan Thompson's Blog, page 17

Hugos, Hardcovers, and E-books

The last time I read a Hugo-nominated book in time to vote for it was 1997. I read three of five that year, including the winner Blue Mars, by Stanley Robinson. My vote had been for Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling. While I liked Blue Mars, it bored me a little while Holy Fire grabbed hold of me and would not let go. Starplex, by Robert J. Sawyer, was the third one I’d read, and while it was interesting, it didn’t really do much for me. So, if I liked two out of three, why don’t I read the Hugo nominees every year?

Because to read them in time to vote means reading them in hardcover.

That hasn’t always been true. A few times the publishing schedules would work out so that the paperbacks came out in time to be read over the summer, but often enough, they came out too late to do me any good. Certainly, I’ve gone back and read a few, years later, but not in time to be part of the Hugo decision.

So, what do I have against hardcovers?

Most people would say cost, but that wasn’t it for me. I’m hardly made out of money, but a book provides hours of entertainment, and on the dollars-per-hour scale, even hardcovers do better than a trip to the movies.

No, for me it’s the qualities of the physical format.

I don’t like the actual hardness of the cover. It makes it harder for me to grip.
I don’t like the larger size. It’s hard to take with me, so it stays by the bed.
I don’t like the weight. It makes it hard to hold in bed or closer than my lap when sitting.
I don’t like the art jacket. The book is always slipping out of it, and it’s always getting torn, unlike the sturdier art-surfaces of paperback covers.

 

All in all, my reading enjoyment is seriously impaired by the physical qualities of a hardcover book. More than once, I said I’d be willing to pay a hardcover premium for an early-release paperback, but no one ever did. So I slogged along, waiting for the paperbacks. In the rare cases when I simply could not wait, I struggled through the hardcover, but it was always with the intent that someday I would replace it with a paperback in case I wanted to reread it.

Then, last year, I bought a Kindle. As I explained before, my reading experience on my Kindle is as good as a paperback, and in some ways, it’s even better. It’s light, durable, and small. It rests comfortably in my hand, and it goes places where even paperbacks were left behind.

So now I find myself looking at first-run e-books, and instead of squawking at their high cost, I recognize that they have finally provided me with a chance to pay that hardcover premium for an early-release paperback. I no longer have to wait a year to get the book in a format I enjoy reading. I can get it now at the click of a button.

So with no small irony, I realize that next year’s Hugo awards will be given out in San Antonio, at the first WorldCon I’ll be attending in over a decade, and once again, I’ll have a chance to vote on the Hugo award for best novel. The books that will be on that ballot are coming out this year, and thanks to my little Kindle, I could be reading them right now!

So, what are they going to be? I know Scalzi has a new book out called Redshirts, somewhere between military SF and Star Trek spoof. David Brin has been pushing a first contact novel titled Existence. Iain Banks has a new Culture novel out, and Jim Butcher will be releasing the next Dresden Files novel later this fall!  (Ahem, please pardon the fan-boy squee.)

What book are you dying to read this year, even at first-run prices?

Review: Angel Seeker, by Sharon Shinn

This was the fifth and final book in Shinn’s Samaria series. It’s not that it reached any definitive conclusion to the series, just that it was the last one written and that the author has said she has no plans to write more of them.

I enjoyed it. It seemed to have a bit of a political message, but it was one I agree with.

All of these Samaria books are interesting blends of SF, fantasy, and romance. The SF bit is that we’re living in a world that is specifically not Earth but a distant colony of Earth in some equally distant future. The fantasy bit is that we’re living in a world with angels living amongst the mortals of the world, and there is no doubt about the reality of Jovah, their god. They can sing prayers and get results, anything from manna falling from the heavens to lightning bolts blasting at the desired target. And the romance… well, in some ways I would say that they are all romance books merely set in an odd SF/fantasy world.

This book has two romances. The first is between an ambitious girl and… well, I won’t say with whom. She is determined to marry an angel and give birth to an angel child. I won’t say whether or not she succeeds, but I will say that her romance is more about finding herself than whether or not she actually marries an angel. I enjoyed this one quite a bit, mostly for her character arc.

The second romance was between an angel and a young Jansai girl. The Jansai are one of the many cultures populating the world of Samaria, and they seem to be remarkably similar to certain Earth cultures, particularly in how they treat their women. They treat their women as cherished property, but they can also be quite vicious to their women if they step outside their defined roles. And sexual promiscuity pretty much carries the death penalty, i.e. stoning and exile to the lifeless desert.

Anyway, this second romance dealt a lot with the politics around that kind of culture. Many or most of the men seem to be quite happy to hand out these harsh punishments. Some are disgusted by it but seem powerless to stop the overall harshness. The women are mixed between those who support it simply because it’s what they know, those who hate it but find can only fight it in tiny rebellions, and those who would flagrantly flaunt the law of their male masters.

Shinn ultimately comes down hard on this culture, so there is some politics here, but like I said, I agree with her position. As for the romance, I mostly found myself shouting at the young Jansai girl to get out while the getting is good, but I confess that seeing her reluctance to leave the only world she knew gave me some insight into how many women on Earth tolerate or even reinforce these cultures here on Earth. So while parts of it made my skin crawl, it did expand my horizons.

Now, that’s all about how I liked the book for what it was. However, I do have a little complaint about what the book wasn’t, and that’s no fault of the book. What bugged me was where it fell in the Samarian timeline.

The first three books in this series proceeded along in chronological order. Then the fourth book jumped to a time long before the first, and then this one was just after the first. That would be all right except that the third book – the furthest along in the timeline – kind of ended on a cliffhanger. There had been some major change in the world, and I was left wondering what was going to happen next. After two more books, I still don’t know because nothing has been written in the time after the third book, and from the sounds of it, nothing will be.

As such, the series feels unfinished to me. I don’t know if the publisher just gave up on it, or if the author herself doesn’t know what comes next. Either way, I’m cranky that I never quite got a sense of resolution to this series.

The Fictional Age of Consent

How old should your characters be before they have sex? I ask, because my next book has a teenage boy who, by luck and stupidity, goes through a few sexual partners before the end of the book. He is seventeen years old. Is that too young? For what it’s worth, all of his partners are older and most of the sex occurs “off screen”.

I struggled with this one, and by the fact that I’m out here asking, I suppose I still am struggling with it. Conventional wisdom tells me to keep sexuality out of it until the character turns eighteen, but this is an odd case. The plot requires that he not have reached his age of majority yet, but he has been thrust into an adult world with adult choices, not to mention a body full of teen hormones. Even if I pushed his age to eighteen or nineteen, the plot would also require me to push that age of majority up to twenty, just to keep him legally as a minor.

I’m not reading much young adult fiction these days, but what little I have has been fairly non-sexual. Still, I suspect there’s quite a bit of sex in YA somewhere, simply because of the reactions I see to Twilight and the likes, and quite simply because *GASP* teenagers do have sex before they’re eighteen. Yet writing about it seems to border on child porn. Or does it?

At one point, I had thought about making him even younger, say fifteen or sixteen, but my concern over the sexual element was one of the things that eventually pushed him up to seventeen. I also considered the point that the age of consent in Texas (where I live) is seventeen.

Yet plenty of federal laws stipulate that anyone showing themselves in a sexual way must be at least eighteen years old, and for a while, the child pornography section of the Federal Child Protection Act of 2006 was being seen as possibly outlawing even the portrayal of underage characters in sexual ways. That was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008 because while no prosecutor intended to go after movies like Titanic for showing the fictional 17-year-old Jack Dawson having sex, a plain reading of the law seemed to cover such Hollywood fare.

So, I’m going forward with a fairly clear conscious that I won’t be prosecuted for it, but I still wonder if it’s going to squick some people. So, how about you? Would your reaction have been different if the seventeen-year-old had been a girl?

My N-man Starship

How many people do you need to run a starship? I see stories where it’s a crew of hundreds, while others manage with just one. It’s not that either is wrong. I think it simply depends on the rules of the story’s universe and the purpose of the ship.

At one end, I think about the one-man ships of Larry Niven or Jack McDevitt. These typically have a fair amount of computer automation. McDevitt’s ships in particular have an AI who is perfectly capable of taking the ship through all its maneuvers and activities, leaving the “pilot” as little more than a bossy passenger.

Even taking a more active hand, the single crewman usually only has to be alert and on duty for key transitions such as sub-light maneuvering thrusts or transitions into and out of the FTL-drive of choice. As long as nothing else goes wrong, this one crewman has a lot of time to kill. Then again, if something does go wrong, he has to be the one-man repair crew, and in many cases, his options are limited to sending out a distress call for a rescue ship.

At the other end we have giant warships like the Enterprise or the Galactica. They seem to have less computer automation, so they require more people spread around the ship pushing the right buttons at the right time. They also have extra functions that those one-man ships do not, ranging from combat to exploration, so they need extra crew to deal with those things. And as the button pushers and red-shirts add up, you need more officers for command and control.

Furthermore, a lot more can break on a warship than on a small passenger ship. In fact, warships frequently seek out situations where things break spectacularly. No longer is one lonely crewman replacing a leaky fuel line. Instead, it’s a team of thirty repairing a hull breach and welding the engine mounts back into place.

But what about the in-between cases?

One of the reasons I really enjoyed Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper series (start with Quarter Share) was that he paid attention to all the boring little details of keeping a ship up and running. From his books (and some of the ones I’m working on), I’ve realized that in addition to the obvious jobs of sitting in the captain’s chair and locking phasers on target, there are three main things that occupy the bulk of the crew: standing watch, doing maintenance, and sleeping.

Standing watch is probably the most boring thing you can imagine, because you’re essentially waiting around all day for something to go wrong. This looks like a prime candidate for computer automation. After all, the computer can wait 24/7 for something to happen, and it doesn’t need a chair. Still, it’s important to have an actual person there, because when something does go wrong – and sooner or later, it will – then you want to have a live body there, paying attention, and ready to take action. There are quite a few things that could wait five or ten minutes for you to wake up and get dressed, but the matter/anti-matter injection valves probably can’t wait.

Maintenance is almost the opposite. You’re not waiting for anything to go wrong. You’re fixing it or replacing it before it can. The environmental team is changing out the CO2 scrubbers, and the engineers are realigning the polarity on… well, you know how those engineers can be about polarity. Some maintenance is hard to do when you’re underway, but if the ship has any kind of redundant systems, you can be sure that they’ll be falling back to them on occasion both as a test and for a chance to do maintenance on the primary system.

And sleep? Sleep is kind of a placeholder for all the drawbacks to those lazy organic crews. They keep wanting to sleep, and that’s on top of wanting to eat food several times a day. I figure about the hardest you can push someone is twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. We’re not talking about heavy physical labor in the cotton field, but keeping alert for twelve hours is a challenge. You’d be a lot better off with eight-hour shifts and enough crew to allow other downtime. Toss in a galley, maybe a small gym or some recreation, and the crew to manage all that. Pretty soon your little eight-man ship is ballooning up to twenty or more.

I screwed up on this in my first book Beneath the Sky, in that the merchant ship Jinley is crewed by only four or five, but I never delved into the day-to-day shipboard life in that story. In the upcoming Ships of my Fathers and Debts of my Fathers, I thought about it a lot more and concluded that a merchant ship that size really should have six or seven crew: two navigators, two engineers, an environmental specialist, a cook, and a captain who can hopefully jump in to fill any of those slots in a pinch. That’s largely because the rules of this particular universe makes FTL a hands-on task, dealing with the shifting tachyon winds and managing the ephemeral sails that grab that wind. Twelve-hour shifts are a bitch, but bigger ships with more crew provide an easier life, with more downtime, better rested crews, and more redundancy.

So, before you head out on that long solo flight, give some thought to who is going to fix the toilet when you’re laid up with flu. Do you have a robot helper? A first officer in cryo-sleep? The 800-number for deep space Roto-Router?

Review: The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Moon

I picked this one up because my wife recommended it. She said, “It saved fantasy for me.” That was high praise, but I can see now that it was worth it. I am also tempted to say that it saved fantasy for me, but I’m not sure I’ll find much else like it.

I do enjoy Urban Fantasy, but I confess I’ve never really enjoyed much traditional fantasy, i.e. epic sword and sorcercy, though I could never quite put my finger on it. The best I could say was that, “I just couldn’t get into it.” I figured that the genre simply was not for me, and I stuck to my science fiction.

After reading this book, I think I figured out my problem with most fantasy. It’s the long expository openings setting the scene and showing off all the world-building the author has done. I can’t really blame most of these authors, because this seems to be The Way It Is Done, in a mold set first perhaps by Tolkien himself.

Well, with all deference the old master, this usually bores me to death. It’s the kingdom of Blahdyblay, ruled by the Lords of Nuchinsuch since the ancient days of Dear-God-my-eyes-are-bleeding! We’re usually seven or eight pages in before anything actually happens, except in rare cases, where we start with some brief excitement, only to be followed by page after page of exposition. Look, I’ll give you the One True Ring if you’ll just shut up about the damned jibbenweed smoke for five minutes!

Sheepfarmer’s Daughter does not suffer from this problem. Admittedly, it starts with a now unfashionable prologue, but even then, it introduces a mystery. Then, chapter one starts with our protagonist, Paks, doing stuff. She’s in a struggle and is making a change in her life. She’s already five steps into the mythical Hero’s Journey, and she’s just getting started.

Yes, the book shows signs of quite a bit of world-building. There are old alliances, gods and saints, raging ogres, fallen kingdoms, and so forth, but it doesn’t come in a front-loaded infodump. Instead, it is revealed to us through the eyes of an wide-eyed foot soldier, one muddy step at a time. The narrator doesn’t tell us about the southern farm lands, the impenetrable fortress, or the honorable allies. Instead, Paks marches through them, butts up against them, and fights alongside them. We don’t so much see the world as we feel it.

Beyond that, the story is good, and it is both gritty and noble. People die, Paks gets hurt. Wounds heal slowly, and scars accumulate. But honor is upheld, and despite all the setbacks and painful losses along the way, the good guys win in the end. Since it’s also the first book in a trilogy, I should also say that powerful forces are at work in the world, and we see them moving slowly and at oblique angles. I don’t yet know where they’re going, but I can see that they’re going to pull Paks deeper into the crucible and explain the mystery that was laid out in that prologue.

So, it was very good – beyond five stars. It’s the first of a trilogy, so I’m looking forward to diving into them, even though they’re each about 500 pages long. And what’s more, Elizabeth Moon has returned to this world after several years, so even after I finish this trilogy, there will be more waiting for me. I’m tempted to dive in headfirst, but I think I’ll stretch it out a bit and savor this one for the next year or two.

Avoiding the Genre Trap

I want to write more than one genre of fiction. For that matter, I want to write some non-fiction as well. But a lot of writers end up writing in only one genre, the literary equivalent of type-casting. How does that happen, and how can I avoid it?

For starters, it happens to fewer authors than it appears. Quite a few of them write in multiple genres already, but they do so under different names. When their name is invested with a genre identity, like Anne Rice and the supernatural, it makes some sense to go with a different name for a different subject, such as the kinky erotica of Anne Rampling. This isn’t always the author’s choice, as it has often been forced by publishers, but a number of them have crossed genres under the guise of a new name.

But regardless of the name, there is still a real temptation to keep writing the same kind of thing. After all, if you crank out a great SF trilogy, you get pretty good at writing SF. While the nuts and bolts of writing SF would serve you well in fantasy or mystery, it would not be quite as simple. I suppose it’s the difference between building a second lawnmower vs. cobbling together a leaf blower. It’s simply easier to crank out the same old thing over and over.

Easier yes, but not as much fun, I would think. Having already done some genre jumping, I find I enjoy the mental muscles it exercises.

Then there’s the bird-in-the-hand issue of selling books before they’re written.  I’ve heard more than one author talk about how different things are once they’re selling books via a proposal. Once they’re a proven commodity, they can sell a book based on an outline a few chapters and then live on the advance while they actually write it. But publishers seem to want exactly what sold well last year, just newer. So, if your last SF novel was a success, they’ll want another successful SF novel.

One author described how his advances became something of a trap, because he felt he could no longer afford to branch out and try a different genre or experiment with some of his stranger ideas. While it might make a fabulous novel, even a commercially successful one, he knew he could never sell something that different on a proposal. So he stuck with what he knew, living from one advance to the next.

Most of all that, of course, is second or third hand information, but I confess that this is one of the things that pushed me towards self-publishing. I did not want to find myself in the position of writing a particular book simply because it was a lot like the last one. That’s hardly the only reason I went that way, but it did enter into my thinking.

The other thing I’m doing to avoid the genre trap is to write as much as I can and to do it in multiple genres. Certainly, I’m going to write some series books, but they won’t all be in the same genre, and some of them will definitely end so that others can begin. Right now I have three book projects strongly underway, with several others taking shape in the shadows.

Two of those are the first two books in a new SF/space opera series, set in the same universe as Beneath the Sky. These will follow the tale of a boy learning the truth about his parents and will eventually lead him into conflict with Father Chessman, a minor character from Beneath the Sky. The first of these, Ships of My Fathers, should be out this fall.

The other book that’s well in hand is the start of an urban fantasy series set in a Pittsburgh but stretches into other realms, ranging from Hell to the city of Fae. It’s less about the mighty magical powers coursing through the world and more about living in the nitty-gritty reality of that society. The first of these, Hell Bent, should be out early next year.

As for the other stuff that’s forming in the wings, I have a military SF series taking shape (also in the Beneath the Sky universe), two solo SF novels addressing more existential questions, a vampire series set in Japan, an epic fantasy of aging heroes, a mystery or two, and even some sketchy plots around romance and erotica. And then there’s the epic seventeen-novel future history that I’ll likely never write, as well as the many free-floating ideas that haven’t settled into a home yet.

If I go as far afield as romance, I’ll probably use a pen name, but I’d like to keep all of my SF and fantasy under my original name. There are enough successes like Elizabeth Moon and C.J. Cherryh who have spanned that pair of genres to prove it can be done. Whether mystery would go out under this name is an open question.

All I know is that I don’t want to end up writing book 17 of a series I’ve grown to hate, but perhaps I’m overly claustrophobic on that front. Maybe someone else would snuggle right on into that situation and be happy as a clam.

What about you? If you write, is your chosen genre a cozy sweater or a bear trap?

Birthday Wishes

Today is my birthday, in memory of my mom’s hours in labor, I decided to give most the USA the day off: Labor Day.  (Forgive me, but I only get to make that joke about once in seven years…)

Friends and family often ask me what I want for my birthday, and I usually have no idea. Or rather, I have plenty of ideas, just very few that people can buy in a store.

My wife got me some desperately needed new pocket t-shirts… which I inadvertently swiped from the laundry this morning before she had gotten the chance to wrap them. And then I think my 8-year-old daughter is getting me a new pair of reading glass, since I think I need to step up a bit from these +1.25 glasses.

These are all good, but what I find myself really pining for are things like:

More time to write.
Fewer bills.
More book sales, or failing that, more book reviews from the sales I already made.
New knees, or failing that, fifty pounds less for them to be carrying around all day.
Better communication with my autistic son.
The audacity to tell a particular idol that he’s full of shit.
A chance to go back and do a few things differently.
Star Wars prequels that don’t suck.
One more day with my father.

Those things don’t come in a store.

But this didn’t either. I got to spend an hour today throwing paper airplanes with my 8-year-old twins. I chose a design with a heavy blunt nose, vertical stabilizers, and wing flaps that all combine to provide a lot of lift. I couldn’t quite get it to do a loop like I’d remembered it could, but they’ve been sending it around it long spiraling circles, sending it down the stairs, and having a blast. All from a few pieces of paper and one innocent little question, “Daddy, how do you make a paper airplane?”

But I’ll like the shirts and glasses, too.

[A late addendum: My daughter had been hinting all day at a "big surprise, so bright you'll need your sunglasses!"  After the presents, I got my sunglasses as instructed, and she took me outside for the surprise.  She told me she had discovered how pretty the sunsets are by looking out her window, and she wanted to surprise me by sharing this wonderful fact with me, that sunsets are beautiful.  Wait for it.... awwwwwwww!]

The Ethics of Paid Reviews

The writing blogosphere is ablaze this week with the scandal of paid reviews. In an article for the New York Times, David Streitfield revealed that various businesses have been posting fake 5-star reviews for hire.  In his short tenure, he produced about 4500 reviews, most of them farmed out to people who spent only a few minutes glancing over the book in order to include the relevant details in their glorious review. The people buying the reviews were typically indie/self-published authors.

The response I have seen from the writing blogs has been damn near universal condemnation. This is wrong, unethical, and downright shameful. Authors should never buy good reviews.

I agree, and to make it clear, I have never paid for a review, good or bad. The fact that my book presently has only one review on Goodreads and one review on Amazon should be testament to that. Also, while I do post reviews here on my blog and over at Goodreads, I have never been paid to do so.  (Heh, though if you have read my book, feel free to take this as mournful plea to go post a review.)

But over in the comment thread at The Happy Logophile, blogger Jo Eberhart asked why we are all so mad about it:

…I wonder whether we’re actually so incensed about this issue because the reviewer is being paid, or because the reviews are guaranteed to be positive. Is it the unethical behaviour of the authors in “bribing” someone to read their book? Or is it the unethical behaviour of lying about the quality of the book?

It was an excellent question, and it got me thinking. Where is the ethical line? Is it that the reviewers were paid, that the author was the one paying, or that the review was guaranteed to be good?

I don’t believe it’s a problem for reviewers to be rewarded in some way, even in cold hard cash. The New York Times pays staff writers to review books. Newspapers, magazines, and even booksellers do this all the time. For that matter, Consumer Reports pays its staff to review toaster ovens, and I think we’d all agree there’s no ethics violation there.

But these purchased reviews were not commissioned by a neutral party. They were commissioned by the author himself. That’s getting into murky territory. Can an author pay someone and expect a genuinely honest review of the book? “Here’s your $50, no strings attached. Read the book and post your honest opinion, good or bad.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to really cut those strings. Even if the author uses this reviewer only once, a reviewer who gets a reputation for posting bad reviews won’t get much future business from the other authors either.

But promising to post a good review no matter what? Ah, that seems to be the real ethical line, because the reviewer is willing to tell a lie for that money. Even if the reviewer truly liked this particular book, his willingness to fall back to a lie somehow invalidates the true reviews.

This problem shows up even outside of this current scandal of paid reviews. There is often a quid pro quo arrangement between authors of “I’ll review/blurb your book if you’ll review/blurb mine.” From what I hear, even in traditional circles, this carries the expectation of a good review. The release valve for honesty seems to be that if you can’t give a glowing review, you don’t post a review and simply tell the other author, “Sorry, I wasn’t able to get to it in time.” Even that goes over poorly.

Ultimately, I think the problem is that reviewers receiving compensation is not the problem. The problem is when that compensation leads the reviewer to lie about the book.

Still, it would be nice to find a way around this ethical dilemma, particularly for indie/self-published books. Why? Because there are real economic benefits to solving this, both for authors and for readers.

Namely, indie authors who have quality books need the endorsement that comes with multiple good reviews. They have eschewed their chance at getting the “gatekeeper” endorsement of traditional publishing, so reviews and word of mouth are the only endorsements they can get.

Meanwhile, shoppers would like to be tipped off to all the indie crap that’s out there. Glowing reviews by the kind of service mentioned above cloud this issue, and it would be nice to see them buried by real readers’ reviews.

And finally, readers who are capable of putting out a decent review might like a little reward for putting in the effort. There’s not enough money available to pay the equivalent of a million New York Times columnists, but as e-book pricing moves up out of the 99-cent basement, there is at least a little bit of money available to throw at them.

But can we find a way for authors to pay that money without giving the reader a reason to lie in the review? It seems that the best way to do it is to insert an intermediary between the author and the reviewer to see to it that the reviewer is rewarded for writing a review but not punished for writing a poor review.

I think Amazon could be such an intermediary.

Here’s how I think that could work. I’m looking at this specifically from their KDP Kindle publishing program, but I think elements could be carried to other platforms.

I, as an author, could say that I want some more reviews for my books.

You, the reader, could buy a book and post a review.

If you are reviewing a book that an author has requested reviews for, you would get some percentage of your purchase price back. Maybe you would get back 20% if you simply gave it a ranking, i.e. how many stars? Perhaps you could get back as much as 50-60% if you actually wrote a text review.

The review/rating you gave the book would not impact your payment or keep you from reviewing other books.

If an author decided he had enough reviews or that he did not like the reviews he was getting, he could turn off the pay-for-review option.

Here are some of the things I like about this:

Amazon could ensure that the payment was truly a refund by only offering to those who bought the book from Amazon. This would also limit the paid reviews to one per customer per book.
The author would have no control over the kinds of reviews he gets. Once the review goes up, the author automatically pays for it. He gets no choice on which reviews he pays for or who gives those reviews.
The only real choice the author gets is whether or not he wants to pay for any additional reviews. He might decide after fifty good reviews that it’s enough. On the other hand, he might decide that after eight one-star reviews that he’s better off not paying for any more of them.
The author pulling the plug does not prevent more reviews. It only stops the payment for future reviews for that book.
Offering a refund percentage of less than 70% would keep the payments less than the author was making from the book, so Amazon would not so much be charging the author as discounting the royalty in exchange for the review.
Likewise, keeping the payment to less than the cost of the book would keep readers from abusing this as a get-money-from-starving-authors scheme, since they could only get back part of what they had already spent.
Since authors would likely turn the option off after receiving some number of reviews/ratings, there would be an incentive to review new books that did not yet have many reviews.
Amazon could hold the reviewer’s payment as a discount on future purchases, thus encouraging future sales for themselves and eliminating service charges on small financial transactions.
While it doesn’t stop an author from paying people to go post false reviews, it would make those less valuable by providing good books a more legitimate path for reviews and drowning bad books in truthful reviews.
Hopefully, the possibility of paid reviews would increase reviews overall, even on the crappy books that do not want honest reviews.

 

So, some questions:

Do you think this dodges the ethical issues around an author paying for a review?
If you are an author, would you use such a system?
As a reader, would this encourage you to write more reviews or post more ratings?
As a shopper, would this make you trust Amazon’s reviews less, more, or about the same?

Or am I crazy for even suggesting it?

Neil Armstrong

Most of you probably know by now that Neil Armstrong died a few days ago. He was the first person to set foot on the moon, and he was in some ways made immortal by his words, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

I was not quite two when he landed, and I’m told I was awake and watching when it happened, but I have no memory of it. Certainly, though, I grew up in a world where man had walked on the moon, and the next steps beyond seemed imminent. But they never came.

I was going to write a rather sad piece about that lost opportunity, about how in some ways we’ve squandered the last forty years, but I did not want to disrespect those who have given their last measure of devotion to space exploration in that time. John Scalzi managed to walk that fine line better than I could have, so I’ll point you to his remarks.

However, I would like to add one more thing. Neil Armstrong was an engineer. Yes, he was a damned fine pilot, but he also had a degree in aeronautical engineering. He always said he was a nerd, and that all of his NASA accomplishments came from the efforts of other nerds like himself.

My father was one of those nerds, and electrical engineer. He was working at Collins Radio, and they got part of the contract for the Apollo communication system. The piece he designed did not actually go into space. In fact, it wasn’t even part of the groundside receiving system. Instead, it was one of the components that carried the signals between the groundside antennas and mission control.

It was a small part in a piece you might not consider terribly significant, but still, Neil Armstrong’s one small step arrived to the rest of us because my dad did his small part, just like so many others. While Neil provided the step, I think he understood that it was all those nerds who had provided the giant leap.

Grr, virus

My normal Monday essay was delayed until next week due a virus on my desktop.  That seems to be resolved now, but I’ve still got my fingers crossed.

Ironically, I’m also dealing with a bacterial infection in my sinuses.  I’ve upgraded to the antibiotic that my doc prefers, but it gives me insomnia.  We’re trying to offset that with a couple of weeks on Lunesta.  I have no idea how those chemicals are going to fight it out long-term, but so far it’s late-night insomnia and very sluggish mornings. We’ll see.