Alan Baxter's Blog, page 96

Cheap books or surviving business?

I recently posted about how Aussies can get great prices on books right now because the Aussie dollar and the US dollar are at around 1:1 for the first time. Chuck McKenzie, recently wrote about how cheap online stores are a real threat to bookshops. He cited my post in his own. Chuck's a good friend of mine, a writer and makes his career as a bookseller, so there's a good case to be made from his perspective and I certainly don't take any offence that he would use my post to help back up his own position. He makes many good points that are worth considering.

Chuck's points about the comparisons between online bookstores and the paralell importation issues are valid. Follow the links in Chuck's post to learn more. Chuck says:

I'm not pissed off that people are buying online – I'm pissed off at the lack of balance, in that so many people – and, it must be said, so many of the same people who vigorously defended the rights of authors and publishers during the PI debacle – are now singing the praises of the online booksellers without apparently taking stock of what effect this shift in consumer behaviour will mean for traditional booksellers.

I'm rather torn on this subject. I want there to be traditional booksellers. I love bookshsops. I love the people that run bookshops. I've always dreamed of owning a bookshop, though I know it's a pipe dream. But I also love cheap books, because that means I can afford to buy more. I love shopping online because I live in the country and the internet is like a massive mall right on my desk. I'm also a big fan of ebooks, Print-On-Demand as an alternate publishing model and so on. The face of publishing and book selling is changing. We're moving into the future every day.

The problem is that these things are market driven. While I would love to support Australian stores by buying from them, if I can get two books for the price of one by going online, I probably will. I guess bookshops need to rise to the challenge and offer something the online stores can't. If they can't compete with pricing, they need something else to keep them viable. What that something else might be is anyone's guess. But market forces will ensure that bookshops survive or die based on the services they offer. It would be great if it were different, but we can't hold back progress, even if it kills things. Which is regularly does.

In my own case, my novels are published in the US. There's no domestic Australian distribution. So the only way to get them is online. I have some copies here and am always happy to send out a signed copy to anyone that buys one, but it'll cost them more than if they bought it from Amazon or Book Depository. Maybe having a signed copy is enough to warrant the extra expense on their part. I also sell them at cons and have books in a variety of bookstores that are generous enough to stock them for me. Chuck's store is one of those and I'm extremely grateful to Chuck for helping me to shift books by making them available on Australian shelves.

You may remember the instore signing I did recently. That was at Chuck's shop and it was excellent fun, we all sold some books and had a great time. I don't want to see things like that stop. I don't want Chuck's career to get eaten by progress.

Perhaps it's worth all of us stopping periodically to check before we buy a book. Maybe we should think about local business over price and try to help bookstores survive. But it's not really our job to do that. We're the consumers and we'll be guided by the market and the prices. As a writer, I want as many bookstores as possible, because that should mean more sales for me. I can't see bookstores ever disappearing completely. But while we wait for the shops to come up with ways to keep themselves going, maybe we should do all within our means to support them in the meantime.

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Freecon this weekend in Sydney

I've been remiss in mentioning this, so apologies for the incredibly short notice. Freecon is on in Sydney this weekend and it'd be great to see people there. It's a science fiction and fantasy convention and, as the name suggests, it's free. It's also a very small and intimate affair, so it makes for a good opportunity to get a bit closer to some writers and get to know some local fans.

When I said it was short notice, I wasn't lying. It starts tonight. The official con sessions are tonight from 5.30 to 9.00pm, Saturday from 9.00 am to 4.00 pm and Sunday from 1.00 to 4.00 pm. I won't be there tonight, but I'll be there all day tomorrow and Sunday afternoon. Writers taking part in various con panels and activities are (alphabetically) Joanne Anderton, Alan Baxter, Jenny Blackford, Russell Blackford, Matt Chrulew, Bill Congreve, David Dale, Thoraiya Dyer, Pamela Freeman, Laura Goodin, Richard Harland, Van Ikin, Crisetta MacLeod, Nicole Murphy, Gillian Polack, Emmett Spain and John Walker.

That's a damned interesting cross-section of Australian spec fic talent, so worth your effort if you can get along. The thing is being held at Bankstown Library, 62 The Mall, Bankstown.

Come along and say hello, and please tell any friends or colleagues that might be interested.

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Site upgrade

Apologies if you spot any weirdness on this site over the next few days. We're upgrading from the Basic theme to the Premium theme, which gives us a lot more options. The front end (this bit you're looking at) shouldn't change much at all, you may not even notice. But if we fuck something up and it all goes pear shaped, please bear with us.

Also, if you spot any links or pages that are broken or corrupted in any way, please let me know via email (look under the typewriter in the right hand sidebar.) Many thanks.

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Christmas shopping solved by SpecFaction NSW

Thanks to the amazing generosity of many people within our local speculative fiction community – SpecFaction NSW are hosting a fundraising Ebay auction.

You can bid on an original print from Scott Westerfield's Leviathan or a bundle of autographed fantasy, science fiction or horror novels from a huge list of Aussie authors including: Sara Douglass, Ian Irvine, Sean Williams and Shane Dix, Traci Harding, Karen Miller, Stephen Irwin, Nathan Burrage, Richard Harland, Marianne De Pierres, Angela Slatter, Kate Forsyth, Isabel Merlin, Sophie Masson, Jack Dann, Kaaron Warren, Shane Jiraiya Cummings and Kirstyn McDermott.

The autographed books are being auctioned off in five book-bundles. For a complete description of the contents of each bundle or to bid on one of these great items refer to the list of Ebay item numbers below and make sure you place our bid between 16 and 25 November, 2010.

You can view all the items on auction at the SpecFaction eBay auction page or click on the item number links below to go to specific items.

Signed short story collections including an unpublished story by Sean Williams (Item Number: 200542551759)

New and signed fantasy novels (Item Number: 200542236233)

New and signed fantasy novels for all ages (Item Number: 200542554272)

New and signed science fiction novels (Item Number: 200542552834)

New and signed dark fantasy, horror, and historical novels (Item Number: 200542556121)

Print from Scott Westerfeld's novel Leviathan, signed by the artist (Item Number: 200542561373)

The auction is being held by SpecFaction NSW Inc., hosts of the 2010 Aurealis Awards. Funds raised will go towards holding the awards night and helping create a range of NSW based events and activities for readers and writers of speculative fiction. SpecFaction NSW is a not for profit group.

For more information on the 2010 Aurealis Awards go to www.aurealisawards.com.

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Phantoms of Suburbia – an exhibition

Today I'm using my blog for some nepotism. And there's nothing wrong with that. My wife, Halinka Orszulok, is an artist and has a show coming up, so I wanted to talk a bit about it. Her artwork is not unlike my writing – dark and suggestive, subverting commonly held perceptions. She's been kind enough to supply the artwork for two of the books published my small press venture, Blade Red Press. Here are the books in question:

These are both excellent collections of dark speculative fiction, by the way, so be sure to go here and buy copies. You won't regret it.

Halinka now has a solo exhibition coming up at Flinders Street Gallery in Sydney, so I'd like to officially invite you all along. The show runs from the 18th November to the 11th December and the official opening night is Tuesday 23rd November from 6 to 8pm. That's when the big crowds, free booze and Halinka herself will be there. Yes, you read that right. Free booze.

Halinka has written all about her work on her website, and it's well worth a read. You can find that here. You can also see a gallery of her work, including all the new pieces for this forthcoming show, at her gallery page here.

Below is the official invite for the show, click it for a larger version.

Hope to see a lot of you there. Please do spread the word to anyone that you think might be interested.

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Skyline – movie review

Skyline is an alien invasion movie that my friend described as War Of The Worlds meets Cloverfield. That's a pretty solid description of the film. It opens with these strange lights descending from the clouds in the middle of the night. The lights settle on the ground and people are drawn to the beauty and mystery of them. And I mean drawn to them in a serious way – this is what happens:

It soon becomes apparent that the lights are not beautiful but quite malevolent. Once everyone is pretty much mesmerised, massive spaceships descend and suck everyone up inside. At first we have no idea why, but it can't be good, right?

The story for us is from the point of view of a collection of rich young things living in a tower block penthouse. Here's one of the problems with the film for me – the characters are not really very likeable. It's hard to know exactly what they do, but one of them is filthy rich (he owns a sweet Ferrari as well as the cool penthouse) but he's cheating on his girlfriend and is a bit of a two dimensional "rock star" character. There's more to like about his mate, who has come to visit along with his girlfriend, only Mr Rock Star is secretly planning to co-opt his friend's help. It's not very complicated and, more importantly, is completely fucking irrelevant. I can't be bothered trying to explain any more. This is not a character driven film. It's a spectacular "what if" movie. It would have been nice if the characters were more likeable, but I suppose it doesn't really matter.

Once the alien invasion is in full swing our team of unsavoury heroes decide to escape the tower block and head for Mr Rock Star's boat, just two minutes away at the marina. It's not really clear what they planned to do then, but I think the general idea was to simply get away as all the alien carnage appeared to be happening on land. They soon learn that getting to the boat is pretty impossible. Which is just as well, as later in the film we see some major carnage out on the water too.

There's not an enormous amount of story in this film, but the thing that makes it good is that it doesn't shy away from the horror of what an alien invasion would actually be like. People are pretty much ants under a giant galactic heel. The ships and the technology are very cool, the alien brawn are brilliant creatures which may or may not appeal to H P Lovecraft fans. Personally I really enjoyed the Cthulhu-esque nature of them.

Another strong point of this film is its consistent point of view. We know everything from the perspective of the small band of survivors and that means there are loads of questions unanswered, as there should be. Where did the aliens come from? What are they after exactly (more on that later)? What are the military powers of the world doing about it? We do get to see one awesome sequence where the military come striding in, but it doesn't go exactly as planned.

The team of plucky humans battle on against the invading aliens, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. So, can they survive? SPOILERS after the next pic, so don't read on if you haven't seen the film yet and don't want it spoiled. Suffice to say that this film is short on story and character, but big on effects and ideas. It's well worth a watch as long as you don't expect to be cerebrally challenged to any great degree.

No. They can't survive. And that's just how it should be. Apart from the awesome effects, the best thing about this movie is how useless the humans are in the face of such an attack. No matter how much we pride ourselves on our ability to survive, if an entire race of aliens with the technology to reach our planet actually did so, we'd be fucked. And that was held true by this movie.

The very end sees a strange hint of things to come, with the aliens for some reason sparing a pregnant woman when all they were doing was harvesting brains and brainstems. Plus, it would seem that if you see the light but manage to not get taken by it, you become really strong, your brain goes red and you can be transformed into an alien with a human mind and start the revolution. There's absolutely no explanation for why any of that happens, but it does. Thus the little twist at the end that gives us some hope for the salvation of humanity. Perhaps.

Of course, there's the same old compatibility problem. Remember Independence Day, when Jeff Goldblum takes out an entire alien invasion with a computer virus? We can't even make an Apple Mac talk to a PC, yet Goldblum was able to plug directly into the alien mainframe. Even their ports are the same size! What are the odds? In Skyline it goes even further – apparently our actual brains are compatible with alien bodies. So I presume we're led to believe that the aliens grow these worker bodies, then trawl the universe harvesting brains for them. Seems to me that if they have the ability to build the ships and bodies they have then they should really build the brains too and save themselves a lot of trouble.

Still, a hugely entertaining movie that's well worth a watch if you like a bit of the spectacular. It would have been great if a bit more had been put into the story and the character development, but that's not really what this film was about. From that perspective, it's worth the price of admission.

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You have to dream big

I'm a big believer in reaching for the stars. If you only ever have mediocre dreams, you'll probably only ever have medicore results. I firmly believe in working your arse off and holding onto those dreams of great success in whatever it is you want to do. If you don't have faith in your ability to achieve great things, why should anyone else?

Work hard, dream big, don't be a tit. That's my philosophy lesson for today.

With that in mind, Joanna Penn pointed this out to me and I thought it was hugely entertaining. So I'm using it to dream big. Click on the pics for a bigger version. Go and try it yourself.

(I'm not sure if I'm expecting my books to one day be Broadway musicals, but that would be kinda mad.)

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My mind to your mind…

I'm honoured to say that I was invited to be part of an S F Signal Mind Meld. You'll know if you read here regularly that I'm a fan of the S F Signal blog. They regularly do these Mind Meld things where they ask a question of a broad range of people in the SF community. This time they asked me too and the question was:

Which Horror Novel Would Make a Great Film? Why?

You can find my answer, along with all the other fine panellists, here at S F Signal.

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Help get The Price by Neil Gaiman made into a film

The internet is a truly wonderful thing sometimes. There's this website called Kickstarter where people can post up project ideas to see if they can get backing. Neil Gaiman tweeted about this the other day, so I checked it out. A guy called Christopher Salmon is looking for backers to make an animated film of Gaiman's short story, The Price.

The Price is one of my favourite Gaiman shorts and I'm a huge fan of movies, so when anything like this crops up I pay attention. Especially when these things are fan driven rather than corporation driven. When a fan is trying to make something happen it's usually far closer to the original vision and, as a writer myself, that's important to me.

You can learn all about the project here. There's a video that's worth the watch to see the details and get an idea of Salmon's vision. He needs $150,000 to make the film and currently has close to $50,000 from nearly 700 backers. You can pledge anything from $10 up. If you pledge $1,000 or more you can be credited as an Associate Producer on the film. You can also get DVDs when the film is made for lesser donations and so on. All the details are on the site.

I think this is an awesome idea and I've made a small pledge myself. Every bit helps, so have a look and see if you can spare a few quid to help this happen.

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Dollar parity book bonanza

This post is more for the Australian readers than the international ones. Sorry international people, no offence. But read on, it might interest you anyway. You see, for the first time the Aussie dollar has hit parity with the US dollar. In fact, at the time of writing, the exchange rate is AU$1.00 = US$1.00582. So for every Aussie dollar we get a US dollar plus a half cent bonus.

So what?

Well, here's the good part. The internet makes for the biggest shopping mall humanity has ever known and with dollar parity we get amazing deals over here. Books in Australia are stupidly expensive. My novels, for example, are AU$19.95 RRP in Australia. If you go to Amazon you'll see my books are US$9.99. Well, right now that means they're pretty much AU$9.99 as well. That's half price. Or go to Book Depository and they're US$9.17 with free worldwide shipping. So you really can get books for less than half price at the moment, without even losing out on postage. And that's all books, of course, not just mine. (I couldn't resist some shameless self-promotion).

The same applies to pretty much anything else you can think of. With dollar parity, even factoring in shipping, you can get goods for way less than Australian domestic prices. Be careful though – anything over $1,000 will attract taxes which might smash your savings, so order in lots of less than a grand if you plan to spend big.

I'm not one to trash local business or distributors, who will miss out big time with this parity situation, but let's be honest – none of us are made of money. And who knows how long this parity situation will last. So get on board and take advantage while you can. Right now you can order RealmShift and MageSign from Book depository (click on the book names for handy direct links) and literally get two for the price of one. Can't argue with that. While you're there, get all those other books you've been promising yourself. Go on, you deserve it.

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