Alan Baxter's Blog, page 71
February 15, 2012
Backing it up, old school
I mentioned in a previous post recently that I'd been using modern technology to help me keep my work safe. The beauty of Print On Demand technology is that we can produce a single volume without any great effort or expense. The downside to this is the ever-growing mountain of shit out there, but that's another story. The same thing applies to ebooks, of course. But there are many other ways we can use this technology for good.
For example, it's easy now to gift someone a hardback, coffee-table edition of photos from a wedding or holiday. Rather than sticking photos in an album – Remember that? Does anyone actually print photos any more? – we can have a lovely, glossy book.
Equally, while it's great to have all my writing saved and backed up, I still have a slight end-of-the-world niggle. My stuff is saved on the hard drive of my laptop. It's also backed up on two extrenal hard drives, a USB memory stick and I have a cloud storage thing set up, so it's on servers miles away. Every once in a while I also burn a DVD backup. But this is all digital. What happens when some fucktard supervillain drops an EMP and everything electronic becomes nothing more than a high-tech ornament?
You may think, Well, if that happens, who gives a fuck about your writing, Al? It's the end of the freaking world, you narcissistic penmonkey! And you'd be right, to some degree. But, if post-apocalyptic fiction has taught us anything, it's that the human race is one tenacious bastard and will survive. We'll fight and claw and refuse to give in. We'll end up with rag-tag bands of survivors, slowly finding each other and building civilisation anew. And who knows, we might even make a better job of it the second time around, though I have my doubts about that.
Regardless, if all our knowledge and culture is digital, we stand to lose it all. If we make sure there are hard, papery copies of as much as possible, we might not lose everything. Of course, that's also assuming we don't burn all the books to survive the hideous cold of the nuclear winter or the next ice age.
But there are other reasons to have hard copies as well. My wife likes to read my stuff, for example. Well, I often think she doesn't like it, and she once called my "a sick and twisted little monkey", but to me that's a term of endearment. Anyway, she reads my stuff. But she has no ereader and doesn't like to read on screen. Of course, she can read the contributor copies of magazines and anthologies that my work is in, and has read the print copies of my novels, but not all my stuff is produced in print.
There's also the casual visitor. If I mention a story and they say, "Sounds sick and twisted, my friend, I'd like to read that", then I can pull the book off the shelf and say, "Here, page 176."
Plus, I'm a narcissistic penmonkey and like to see books of my stuff on the shelf.
So, I went to one of those POD sites where you follow all the guides and templates, upload a text file, and a couple of weeks later you get a book. I used a pretty small font to keep page numbers, and therefore cost, to a minimum, and it arrived in the post today. All my short fiction up to the end of last year. Just for my own shelf, a hardcopy backup:
I already noticed a couple of mistakes I made in the formatting. Nothing major, and it's only for my records, so it really doesn't matter. However, I think when I do another one, I'll correct those things and maybe put a kickass dragon on the cover or something. Maybe a dragon eating a spaceship, dripping ectoplasm from its crystal fangs. Something like that.
So yeah. Backing it up, old school.
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February 14, 2012
Online Spec-Fic magazines you should be reading
So I mentioned in my post a few days ago, where I gushed about my love of online magazines, that I would post a follow-up where I list some of the best ones. Here we go then. Please note that this is just a taster based on my own reading habits and by no means definitive. Please do comment below with your favourites so we can all find new good stuff out there. I've copied the About section from each of their sites to give you an idea of what they do. Click the title to visit their site.
Online Spec-Fic magazines you should be reading:
Lightspeed is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF—and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales. No subject is off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.
Lightspeed was a finalist for the 2011 Hugo Award, and stories from Lightspeed have been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, every month Lightspeed brings you a mix of originals and reprints, and featuring a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven't heard of yet. When you read Lightspeed, it is our hope that you'll see where science fiction and fantasy comes from, where it is now, and where it's going.
Clarkesworld is a monthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in October 2006. Each issue contains at least three pieces of original fiction from new and established authors. Our fiction is also collected by issue in signed chapbooks, ebook editions/subscriptions and in our annual print anthology, Realms.
Strange Horizons is a magazine of and about speculative fiction and related nonfiction.
Speculative fiction includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, and all other flavors of fantastika. Work published in Strange Horizons has been shortlisted for or won Hugo, Nebula, Rhysling, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree Jr., and World Fantasy Awards.
One rainy afternoon, I found my dear sister-in-law alone in the sitting room. To my shock and potential mortification, she had my collection of sensational literature out of its (obviously inadequate) hiding spot behind the leather-bound editions of Thackeray. She looked up from an eight-part adventure of Black Bess to say, "My dear Maggie! What is this rubbish?"
"Clara, my love, they're adventures."
"They're those– those red pennies!"
"You mean penny bloods, my dear? Or perhaps penny dreadfuls?"
"Oh, yes. Perhaps I do."
She looked from the lurid literature in her lap to me, and then back again several times. And then she finally said, "Have you any more?"
And so were born the Red Penny Papers.
Incidentally, Red Penny Papers are publishing my novelette, The Darkest Shade of Grey, in four episodes, starting this Friday. It's a story I'm very proud of and I hope you guys like it too.
The Wily Writers site publishes two short stories per month in both audio and text formats. They host a celebrity editor for each theme, and they choose the stories along with the producer (Angel Leigh McCoy).
They publish only short fiction that falls under the genre umbrella of speculative fiction: horror, fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal romance/mystery/adventure, and have specific themes that they ask writers to follow.
I've had great experiences with Wily Writers over the years. They've published two of my stories, Stand Off and Declan's Plan, and I'm the current guest editor, where I've picked two great post-apoc stories for this month.
COSMOS is a literary science magazine with a global following. Australia's #1 science media brand, it reaches 400,000 people every month via a print magazine, a daily online news website and a weekly e-newsletter. Our COSMOS Teacher's Notes reach 65% of Australian high schools, and we produce a wide range of quality editorial products (such as websites, booklets, posters and DVDs) for a range of clients.
COSMOS internationally respected for its literary writing, excellence in design and engaging breadth of content. It's the winner of 45 awards, including the Magazine of the Year trophy in both 2009 and 2006, and twice Editor of the Year, at the annual Publishers Australia Excellence Awards. COSMOS has also won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, the Reuters/IUCN Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism, the City of Sydney Lord Mayor's Sustainability Award and an Earth Journalism Award.
While this is primarily a print magazine, with fiction included in the print edition, they have an excellent online section of fiction for stories they can't fit in the print edition.
ticon4 launched in 2008, the fourth incarnation of TiconderogaOnline, which began way back in 1999.
Originally published by Russell B. Farr, the webzine is now edited by Liz Grzyb. We provide fiction, reviews, interviews and other tidbits to do with speculative fiction.
ticon4 is part of independent publisher Ticonderoga Publications, and is able to present you with excellent fiction for free, through donations and book sales.
Hub started as a physical magazine in December 2006. Originally intended to sell as a bi-monthly title, with the very best new fiction, features, news, reviews and interviews, the magazine was well-received by all those that read it.
Despite healthy orders and a growing subscriber base, Hub was unable to attract the advertising revenue necessary for this type of magazine to survive, and the print edition folded after just two issues.
Buoyed by the reception Hub had received, I decided to keep the momentum going. Rather than allow Hub to fold, I and co-editor Alasdair Stuart turned the magazine into an electronic journal. Foolishly optimistic, we decided that Hub was to become a weekly magazine, publishing one piece of short fiction every issue, along with regular reviews and occasional features and interviews. The first electronic edition (issue 3) was distributed to around 900 readers on April 20th, 2007.
Based in Ottawa, Canada, Kasma SF is a completely free online magazine featuring quality science fiction from some of the genre's brightest new (and sometimes more established) voices. We publish fiction on the first of every month, our blog weekly, so have a look around, have fun, and please check back often.
My story, Mistaken Identity, was published at Kasma SF in 2011.
Redstone Science Fiction publishes quality stories from across the science fiction spectrum. We are interested in everything from post-cyberpunk to new space opera. We want to live forever. Get us off this rock.
We have all been reading Science Fiction and Fantasy since we were children. It has been a key element in our lives.
From writing and submitting our own stories, we've learned that there are only a handful of online & print magazines that pay a professional rate for original science fiction stories.
We decided that there needed to be one more.
We know the magazine will probably not be profitable, but we have planned for that.
We will focus on producing a quality science fiction magazine and on exploring every opportunity to make Redstone Science Fiction a long-term success.
There's no About page for me to copy and paste for this one, but Abyss & Apex is a great magazine with consistently good fiction.
Original Science Fiction and Fantasy every weekday. Welcome to Daily Science Fiction, an online magazine of science fiction short stories. We publish "science fiction" in the broad sense of the word: This includes sci-fi, fantasy, slipstream—whatever you'd likely find in the science fiction section of your local bookstore. Our stories are mostly short short fiction each Monday through Thursday, hopefully the right length to read on a coffee break, over lunch, or as a bedtime tale. Friday's weekend stories are longer.
*****
This was only a quick selection, and only a selection of online magazines. Much as I love them, there are loads of great print and other format magazines out there and it's worth checking them all out. And, if you're a writer, you should be submitting to all these places too!
So, I know I've missed plenty – fill in the gaps. What are your favourite online SF/F magazines? Give us a link in the comments.
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February 13, 2012
Tuesday Toot – Lisa L Hannett
Tuesday Toot is a semi-regular feature here at The Word. An invite-only series of short posts where writers, editors, booksellers and other creatives have been asked to share their stuff and toot their own horn. It's hard to be seen in the digital morass and hopefully this occasional segment will help some of the quality stuff out there get noticed. It should all be things that readers of The Word will find edifying.
Today, it's Lisa L Hannett.
Who is Lisa?
Lisa L Hannett hails from Ottawa, Canada but now lives in Adelaide, South Australia — city of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Her short stories have been published in venues including Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14, and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer's Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. Her work has appeared on Locus's Recommended Reading List 2009, Tangent Online's Recommended Reading List 2010, and has been published in the Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010. The February Dragon, co-authored with Angela Slatter, won the 'Best Fantasy' Aurealis Award in 2010. Lisa is a graduate of Clarion South.
Her first collection, Bluegrass Symphony, was published by Ticonderoga Publications in 2011. Midnight and Moonshine, a second collection co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in 2012.
What are you tooting about?
I recently wrote a short piece on the Weird West in fiction for www.suvudu.com, in which I was also given the chance to talk about my first book, Bluegrass Symphony – and it goes a little something like this:
Bluegrass Symphony is a collection of twelve dark fantasy stories, set in a territory riddled with dangers. People in the wilds of Alabaska, Two Squaw, Plantain, and Tapekwa Counties may not follow the law as we know it, but their towns are far from lawless. Justice and honour come from smoking guns — and nothing is missed by the mysterious Reverends' eyes. This is a land of great magic, great risks. Shapeshifting is both a bootlegger's skill and a twig-wife's cruel punishment. Desperate deals are brokered between rough woodsmen and Minotaurs, Fae creatures and midwives, soul-smoking Mayors and Pegasus-riding delivery girls, Sheriffs and highwaymen — for safety, as well as selfishness. But as Ann VanderMeer points out in the book's introduction, "These stories are about more than people just trying to get something from one another. These stories are about power and redemption, transformation, and sacrifice." Everyone in the Weird West is the agent of their own fate — but in Bluegrass Symphony the line between defeat and salvation is often as thin as the soil under a wolfboy's spurs.
What other people have been saying about it:
Publishers Weekly wrote: "Hannett's first collection shows off her fondness for lush imagery, unsettling concepts, indirect prose, and multilayered plots…a collection for fans of weirdness, wonder, and oft-disturbing twists."
Robert Shearman says: "Lisa L Hannett's collection plays like a country music album composed in the darker places of imagination, the little corners that you don't want to look in as you tap-tap your foot to the catchy beat. Coolly beautiful, then coldly brutal, this is one of the most unnerving debuts in years."
Kirstyn McDermott says: "Take a scruff of minotaur hair and a handful of mermaid scales, mix them with mothdust and the bloody feathers of a murdered oracle, and you might get a taste of the strange and dream-soaked magic that Lisa Hannett conjures with this remarkable debut collection. Bluegrass Symphony introduces a rare and original voice whose stories linger, dark and luscious and bold as tarnished brass, long after you have finished reading them."
You can buy a copy of Bluegrass Symphony at www.indiebooksonline.com (or Book Depository, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online retailers).
What's in store for Lisa:
Midnight and Moonshine, co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in November 2012 (Ticonderoga Publications).
Midnight and Moonshine traces the origins of the icy and dangerous Fae and explores their interactions over the centuries with the Laveaux and Beaufort families. Driven from their realm, the Fae come to America with Viking raiders in the 10th century; when the Vikings discover the nature of their stowaways, they desert them in the new land. Left to their own devices the Fae worm their way through history, largely keeping apart from humanity, but occasionally making connections that come to have long-term effects in America's alternative Deep South.
I have also recently received a grant from Arts SA to write the first book in a dark fantasy trilogy, The Familiar. So for the next 8 months, I'll be writing a novel I've been planning for ages, which is all about witches and shapeshifting and lunatics… You know, all the usual things!
Finally, Simon Marshall-Jones gave me the greatest Christmas present ever this year: on Christmas day, he bought Smoke Billows, Soot Falls for Spectral Press's gorgeous chapbook series. Simon describes the story as "beautifully bleak and spookily haunting" and promises that "it's a belter of a tale!" Keep an eye out for it in 2014!
You can find Lisa online at http://lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.
[You'll remember I was recently crowing about just how brilliant Bluegrass Symphony is. And it really is, so get yourselves a copy. I'm also a big fan of Angela Slatter's work, so the thought of a co-authored collection coming out soon is very exciting. - Alan]
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My Wily stint – both stories now online
You may remember I mentioned a while back that I'd been asked to be a guest editor at Wily Writers. I was honoured to take on the challenge. Wily Writers is a fantastic online fiction podcast – they publish two stories a month, in text on the site and as very well read podcasts. Two of my own stories, Stand Off and Declan's Plan, have been featured there in the past.
When I was asked to guest edit one month for them, I scored the Post-Apocalypse themed month. The entries were all very strong and I had a hell of time picking just two. I'll post something in a few days about the actual process of editing and selection related to that. In the meantime, both the stories I chose are now online.
Bloodstone by R B Payne is a light-hearted look at post-apocalyptia, with a very Hunter S Thomson-esque protagonist.
Coyote Blessing by Owen Kerr is a much darker and more personal look at life after the end.
Both stories create a great sense of place and character, but both are very different and deal with their subject in very powerful ways.
Get yourself over there and check them out now.
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February 11, 2012
Why I Write – my guest post at "A Horror Writer's Blog"
The erstwhile Lee Pletzers recently invited me to pen a guest post at his site, A Horror Writer's Blog. So I did:
When Lee asked me to write about how and why I write, the question struck me as a strange one. How can I not write? But I suppose that's the kind of thing a lot of non-writers don't get. I have these stories and characters squirming around in my brain like maggots in rotting flesh, and I have to let them out or I'll explode. And yeah, I just compared my brain to rotting flesh – have you read the stuff I write?
I'm lucky, but as the old saying goes, the harder I work, the luckier I get. My "day job" is as a Personal Trainer and Martial Arts Instructor. I'm lucky because those things mean I see clients and teach evening and morning classes and subsequently have large chunks of the day in which to write. But I worked bloody hard to get myself into a position where I could do that. No one becomes a Kung Fu instructor overnight. I'm lucky because I do the things I love for a living – I teach the traditional Kung Fu that was taught to me, I help people get in shape and I write…
Read the rest at A Horror Writer's Blog.
Thanks Lee!
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February 10, 2012
For the love of online fiction magazines
I've had my work published in just about every medium in which fiction can be published. I'm very proud of that. My novels are in print, ebook and, very soon to be released, audiobook. I'd love to see them make it into graphic novel and film. Maybe one day. My short fiction has been published in print and electronic magazines, print and ebook anthologies, podcasts and online magazines. And one of my stories is currently being adapted into a short film. There was a time when print was considered the only "real" publishing and everything else was a poor cousin at best, an exercise in vanity at worst. That's changing dramatically.
To be clear, I love my brag shelf. That's the part of my bookcase which houses all the magazines and books that feature my work. It's a thing of beauty. I'm a bibliophile and I love to hold books and feel the pages. I love the scent of ink on a glossy magazine page. But, as a writer, I want to be read by as many people as possible. I want people to enjoy my work, talk about it, get something from it and share it with their friends. And I can't help thinking that we've moved to a place where that isn't best achieved with print any more.
There are numerous ways to get "published" these days, and that in itself can be a problem. I use quote marks there for a reason. Just because a website will post your story on their garish page, pay you nothing and, probably, don't really care about quality, doesn't mean you should be dancing in the aisles. It's quite likely that nobody is reading that page beyond you and the other contributors. And ask yourself, did you read any of their stories?
Of course, anywhere that an editor of any kind chooses your work over someone else's is cause for celebration – congratulations, you are a published writer. But we should all aspire to higher things. Personally, I aspire to being paid for my work, ideally being paid well, and being read by as many people as possible.
This is where online magazines are really starting to earn a place of reputation. There are many online zines now which are run just like a "proper" magazine, with editors only choosing the best work and actually editing it. With pay scales that venture well into pro-rates, recompensing authors for their painfully extruded word babies, and with a readership numbering into the many thousands. All these things are great for a writer's career – recognition, payment and readership.
Many of these magazines are using technology to its best advantage, and making themselves into a kind of hybrid model. For example, they may start with an online edition but also make each issue available as an ebook for people to read at their leisure on their Nook, iPad, Kindle or whatever marvel of reading technology they favour. Some sites also produce limited print runs of each issue, or chapbooks, with added value – signed and numbered, maybe – that readers can collect. Some also produce an annual anthology of their stories, or a Best Of the year anthology. Others use a combination of online text and downloadable podcast. All these things can also help to generate income for said online zine and keep it alive and keep it paying its authors.
All these things are getting the blood, sweat and tears of us crazy writers out to the hungry minds of readers in a variety of ways, of which print is arguably the least important. And they're doing it with those two most important criteria well in evidence – payment and editing. As a result, hopefully, they garner a wide readership.
The other advantage of the primarily online model is the ubiquitous and permanent nature of the thing. If you read a great story in an online magazine, you can tell a friend pretty much anywhere in the world and that friend can instantly access the story themselves. They don't have to track down a book or magazine, or pay expensive overseas shipping rates. Bang! One new reader, maybe one new fan. With social media, it's as simple as tweeting a link to spread the magazine joy out among people well beyond your circle of actual friends and family.
Of course, should the website ever go down or get deleted, the work goes with it. Should that friend I mentioned not have an internet connection, they are excluded. That's one reason I'm a fan of the secondary print/hybrid option (chapbooks, POD anthology, etc.) as that means the work is preserved, in however a limited way, beyond the inevitable EMP that destroys civilisation. Plus, authors get something for their brag shelf. (We're petty, vain creatures. Love us and love our work, please!)
On that front, and as a slight – well complete and total – tangent, I've recently paid fifty bucks to put all my short fiction to date (around 200,000 words of it) into two Print-On-Demand hardcovers. They're just for my own shelf, a preserved hard copy of my work. It's easy today with sites like Lulu automating the process. After all, I back up everything I write on hard drive, memory stick and cloud storage. Now it's easy to back up in print too.
Online magazines are starting to be recognised industry-wide, pulling in all kinds of awards for themselves and the fiction they publish. More power to them, I say. It's never been easier for writers to reach more people, though of course, it's still bloody hard to get work accepted by the really high-echelon, pro-paying online zines. But there's that aspiration again. I plan to continue submitting to those places and thereby continue to support them by offering my work as well as reading the work of others they already publish. And I'll tell as many people about them as I can. It's good for me, my career, the magazine in question, and all its readers and fans. In a future post I intend to list a run-down of my favourite online fiction magazines, which is why I've avoided mentioning any specific ones here.
Well, I'll just mention one. My new novelette, The Darkest Shade Of Grey, will be serialised over four weeks at The Red Penny Papers, starting in a week or two. I'll be sure to let you know when that's up. As the publication is so imminent, I couldn't resist a quick plug.
In the meantime, what are your favourite online fiction magazines? Let me know and I'll try to include them in the future post I mentioned. Do you read much online fiction? Prefer it over magazines? Buy the ecopy later? Share your habits.
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February 6, 2012
Tuesday Toot – Joanna Penn
Tuesday Toot is a semi-regular feature here at The Word. An invite-only series of short posts where writers, editors, booksellers and other creatives have been asked to share their stuff and toot their own horn. It's hard to be seen in the digital morass and hopefully this occasional segment will help some of the quality stuff out there get noticed. It should all be things readers of The Word will find edifying.
Today, it's Joanna Penn.
Who is Joanna?
Joanna Penn, writing as J F Penn, is the author of thriller novels Pentecost and Prophecy in the ARKANE series. Her site TheCreativePenn.com helps people write, publish and market their books and has been voted one of the Top 10 Blogs for writers two years running. Follow Joanna on Twitter @thecreativepenn
What are you tooting about?
Joanna's 2nd novel, Prophecy has just come out on Amazon. Joanna's style has been described as Dan Brown meets Lara Croft, fast paced thrillers based on religious stories with a kick-ass female heroine. The books aren't Christian but delve into the myths and legends behind the Biblical stories as well as visiting places of spiritual significance.
"I looked, and there before me was a pale horse. Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth." Revelation 6:8
The prophecy in Revelation declares that a quarter of the world must die and now a shadowy organization has the ability to fulfill these words. Can one woman stop the abomination before it's too late?
From the catacombs of Paris to the skeletal ossuaries of Sicily and the Czech Republic, Morgan and Jake must find the Devil's Bible and stop the curse being released into the world before one in four are destroyed in the coming holocaust. Because in just seven days, the final curse will be spoken and the prophecy will be fulfilled.
If you like fast-paced thrillers that involve spiritual mysteries, a dash of the supernatural and amazing locations, you'll enjoy Prophecy. It can be read stand-alone but the first in the series, Pentecost is only 99c or free for Amazon Prime members if you want to start from the beginning.
Prophecy on Amazon.com
Prophecy on Amazon.co.uk
Currently the books are only available on Amazon Kindle but you can also sign up to be informed of print and other ebook versions here.
[You'll remember I mentioned this book as part of my holiday reading a little while ago. It's a rollicking good read and very well researched. Joanna's background, with her degree in theology, really shines through on this one. - Alan]
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Making the Impossible Real: Writing Speculative Fiction with Robert Hood
Here's one for the Aussies near (or not so near) Sydney. Master's Master, Robert Hood, is running a workshop on writing speculative fiction. It'll be held at the New South Wales Writers' Centre in Rozelle, in Sydney's inner-west. It'll be well worth travelling to, because I know Rob and he's not only a fantastic writer, but a great bloke. This one day workshop will be well worth your time and money.
Whether dealing with angels or demons, past or future, aliens, post-humans or artificial intelligences, stories of alternate realities, imagined futures and fantastical impossibilities have been a never-ending source of fascination for writers and readers for as long as humanity has told stories. But once you leave the everyday world behind, once you embrace worlds where the impossible happens, how do you make your writing believable? How do you make the impossible possible?
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February 3, 2012
Amazon, KDP Select, Monopolies and Asshattery
Seems like everyone is weighing in on this debate and I can't help having my say too. First and foremost, I'm all about seeing things from every side and not throwing out babies with bathwater. Seriously, who the fuck throws out babies!? So it's fair to say that I still really like Amazon and all they've done. There's no question that they've changed the face of publishing and bookselling and, for the most part, in very positive ways. Of course, brick and mortar booksellers will have a different view, but that's life and progress.
Amazon single-handedly made ebooks the ubiquitous force they are today. Others helped it along, of course, but Amazon made it happen in the timeframe we've seen. They've opened up the playing field to let indie authors and small presses compete realistically with the Big Six. They've made books and other items readily available and affordable to millions of people who may have had trouble accessing those things before. I don't like everything about the Kindle model – exclusive file format, etc., but it's very good overall. Amazon are very good overall.
There's no question that I would rather have Amazon around than not. Although, on a slight digression, when the hell are we getting an amazon.com.au? Seriously, Amazon, why do you hate Australia?
But there are changes happening at Amazon that I don't like. I've never been able to ignore a bully and I don't like monopolies. They're bad for everyone except the person in control of said monopoly. And while Amazon are still doing many good things, they're starting to do many questionable things as well.
The major problems are these:
- Setting up as a publisher, not just a retailer;
- Starting the KDP Select program;
- Cutting publishers out of control;
- Propogating the cheap and free model.
Why are these things bad? Let's look at them one by one.
Setting up as a publisher:
This is not a bad thing per se – another opportunity for writers to get published is a good thing, right? Well, not if it restricts the writer's ability to sell their work. Whenever Amazon set up a service, they make it exclusive to themselves. For example, their CreateSpace POD printing venture means stock is only available through Amazon.com – not even the other Amazon branches internationally. As a result of in-fighting, Barnes & Noble have said they won't stock any Amazon published books. This is a direct result of B&N's problems with previous Amazon exclusivity policies, and I can't really blame them. But it means that writers being published by Amazon have a greatly restricted range of outlets for their work. And Amazon encourages that in order to gain monopoly share.
Starting the KDP Select program:
This is a program where authors can make their Kindle ebooks available free for 5 days out of every 90. The idea is that it will greatly enhance their profile, drag more readers to their work and they'll see greater sales in the long tail. Amazon have a pool of cash and for every author with a free book, Amazon distributes a share of that pool based on how many free downloads that book saw. Sounds great, but it's not. That distribution pool is already getting smaller, the vast majority of people involved will only ever see a tiny fraction of it and, worst of all, those books can only be included if they're exclusive to Amazon. No iBooks, no Smashwords, no Nook, etc. That means that once again, Amazon are forcing exclusivity and using sweet, sweet cookies to lure authors into snubbing every other retailer. Then you find out that the cookie is made of mud and dog crap.
Cutting publishers out of control:
It's getting harder and harder for publishers to manage their stock at Amazon. My novels are published by Gryphonwood Press. They recently commissioned new cover art for both books and tried to get Amazon to update the art. Nothing happened. No responses, no changes, nothing but huge frustrations. Eventually, after talking to my publisher, I went to my Amazon Author Central page and requested the changes myself. The update was made inside 24 hours. This is Amazon responding to authors, not publishers. That means they're actively cutting publishers out, which actively encourages authors to do their own thing. That's not an author's job. It's their publisher's job. But this strikes me as an underhand way of getting authors to distrust their publishers or decide they can do without them and go the indie route, which is better for Amazon.
Propogating the cheap and free model:
So many novels are on Amazon for 99c. I've already talked about the free option on the KDP Select program. This is a big problem. For one, many readers are starting to undervalue work. They decide to wait until something is free or reduced to 99c before buying it and that's bad for authors. This is our job – we're trying to make a livng here and there's a lot of work in writing a novel. It's worth more than a single dollar. But Amazon don't care. They've got something set up where anyone can upload an ebook, charge a buck for it and think they're on the author gravy train. 99.9% of those people are unlikely to sell more than a handful of books. But that's all right with Amazon. After all, if they make 75c for every book sold, they don't need to sell millions of every book. They just need to sell a few copies of millions of books. Each author is making fuck all, but Amazon are raking it in. And those authors who stick exclusively with Amazon are told they'll do even better, with no guarantee that that is actually the case.
You can see how all these things are set up to benefit Amazon, at the expense of everyone else – authors, publishers and readers. It's better for all of those people if price points reflect the effort involved in making the work being sold; if product is available through a range of outlets for a range of devices to give readers a choice and therefore give authors a greater chance at more exposure and sales, leading to a stronger career. The only beneficiary of the models described above is Amazon.
Now I don't mind Amazon doing well for itself, but not by monopolising an industry and not at the expense of authors and readers. That's where I have to step in between the bully and bullied and say, "Wait a fucking minute, here, what do you think you're doing?"
What can you do about it? Lots of things.
If you're a writer or publisher:
Don't make your work exclusively available in one place. It benefits everyone to have it available in as many places, for as many devices as you can.
Don't price your work ridiculously low and devalue it. Equally, don't price it stupidly high and drive all the readers to pirate sites instead.
Don't saturate the work with DRM, inconveniencing readers who can't read a book they paid for on seperate devices.
Stand up against monopolising policies wherever you can.
If you're a reader:
Check various venues for the availability of the work you want and don't always buy in one place.
Try to buy non-DRM versions in order to encourage greater openess in the future. DRM is not the way to fight piracy.
Don't go for pirated work. If you respect the authors you're reading, pay them for their work.
Don't only read free books and those you can get for 99c. At the very least, you're cutting yourself off from some really good stuff out there and only encouraging the lowest common denominator.
Chime in with a comment below if you have an opinion or an idea about this. Or if you completely disagree with me – I'd love to hear why.
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January 31, 2012
Tuesday Toot – Andrew McKiernan
Tuesday Toot is a semi-regular feature here at The Word. An invite-only series of short posts where writers, editors, booksellers and other creatives have been asked to share their stuff and toot their own horn. It's hard to be seen in the digital morass and hopefully this occasional segment will help some of the quality stuff out there get noticed. It should all be things readers of The Word will find edifying.
Today, it's Andrew McKiernan.
Who is Andrew?
Andrew J McKiernan is an author and illustrator living and working on the Central Coast of New South Wales. His first short story, Calliope: A Steam Romance, was published in the 2007 anthology Shadow Plays and was named in a number of year's best recommended reading lists for fantasy. Since then his stories have been published in magazines such as Aurealis, Midnight Echo and the Eclecticism e-zine, as well as the anthologies In Bad Dreams 2, Masques, Scenes from the Second Storey, Macabre: A Journey Through Australia's Darkest Fears, and Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2010. His stories have twice (2009 & 2010) been shortlisted for both Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, as well as a Ditmar Award shortlisting in 2010. His story The Desert Song from the Scenes from the Second Storey anthology received an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year Vol.3. Andrew's illustrations have appeared on many book and magazine covers, as well as featuring in the collections Shards: Short Sharp Tales by Shane Jiraiya Cummings from Brimstone Press and Savage Menace & Other Poems of Horror by Richard Tierney from P'rea Press.
What are you tooting about?
Three short blasts from my own trumpet today…
Toot the First
In a land where the veil between life and death has been torn aside, how far would you go for the one you love? This is the question asked in Love Death, my new story appearing in Aurealis #46 on Kindle and at Smashwords. It is about the death of love and the love of death and how those two things entwine like lovers within the human psyche. It has romance. It has love lost and love regained, and love lost again. It has life and death and states in between. It is exotic and erotic and disturbing by turns. And in the end, there is hope. But most importantly, it is available to read for FREE from Smashwords!
Toot the Second
After a 650,000 year round-trip through the Oort Cloud, long-period Comet C2094VI is returning to our solar system. The Peregrine Expedition is sent to the very edge of the Kuiper Belt to land on Comet C2094VI. Their mission? To unlock the scientific secrets trapped within its icy time-capsule. But what nameless horrors lurk at the comet's heart? And what does its return mean for the future of humanity? Find out in my Lovecraftian SF story The Wanderer in the Darkness available now in Midnight Echo 6, the official magazine of the Australian Horror Writers Association.
[NB - My own story, Trawling The Void, also happens to be in that particular issue of Midnight Echo - Alan]
The Final Blast
Having just passed that most wonderful Festive Season of stress, depression, credit card debt and familial disfunction, what could be more appropriate to our mood than an anthology of Christmas themed horror? Ho Ho Horror from The Australian Literature Review is now available in both print and e-book formats. Edited by Steve Rossiter and featuring stories from both new and up-and-coming authors such as Gordon Reece, Belinda Dorio, Sam Stephens and Cameron Trost this anthology is certain to have you quaking in your santa boots. And believe me, I know! I had to illustrate each of their sordid and depraved tales for the anthology, as well as supplying the full-colour cover illustration! Even weeks after reading the stories, I still can't look at a plum-pudding or sprig of mistletoe without a shiver of terror. Go get it now… it will make a great stocking filler for your kids next year.
Andrew's website: http://www.andrewmckiernan.com
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