NPR does a story about the “formula” for bestsellers (pfft! Don’t even), and the comment section turns out the wackiness.
I’m writing an international suspense novel about a vampire wizard from India who is a descendant of both Jesus and Mohammed, and who leads a secret elite team of spies fighting the worldwide crime syndicate. This individual can have out-of-body experiences, visit heaven, or change sexes at will, has a cool costume, and can fly.
I asked him to read this blog post by Mur Lafferty, then I pointed out the quote at the top, which comes from the opening to every episode of BURN NOTICE. We’ve been watching season one of BN, and that quote had gotten by me without notice every time. It was an opportunity to talk to my son about something I try to point out often–the way women and girls are treated in this society.
But there it had been on my TV set and I hadn’t even noticed. I hate that.
Anyway, he read the letter above, and I told him his homework for this week would be to look around him for more examples of this sort of thing: bad-mouthing the female, using women or girls as an example of something shameful.
We’ll see how long it takes him to find them.
1) Notch, creator of Minecraft, is planning a new “hard science fiction” space exploration game. Sadly for James Nicoll, the early promotional materials mention a cloaking device.
4) Top 10 Dying Industries in the United States.
5) If Darth Vader had been a good father.
6) Nazis hire official lobbyist to lobby Congress.
7) Murals in Minneapolis that will soon face the wrecking ball.
Have been in Surrey, B.C. for 97 minutes. Still have not tasted poutine. Am too self-conscious to ask the front desk staff about it. Drove to mall where Pokemon tournament will take place tomorrow to make sure we could find it. Discovered they have enough seating for a Neil Gaiman reading, which should be more than enough. Have already scouted outlets for tomorrow’s long event.
Realized I packed my laptop but not my powercord, leaving me with nothing but the charge on a four and a half year old laptop battery. Bought replacement powercord at Mall. Wept tears of blood over price tag. Consoled myself that I completely funded an injured child’s MRI, probably.
Ate at food court at insistence of boy. Not only was food terrible, there wasn’t enough of it. Returned to hotel room to discover this is the only Best Western on the continent to not have a list of local pizza places that deliver in the room.
Boy has declared Surrey much more “futuristic” than Seattle based on an elevated train and hi-rise apartment buildings. How did a kid born in 2001 come to embrace the futurism of the 1930’s? Have tried to convince him that a “mooney” is a coin worth a million dollars, but he is not convinced.
Now he wants to see the hotel pool. May be getting wet soon, but in metric units of water.
In a few hours my son and I will be taking off for Surrey and the Pokemon Regionals there. I won’t be dropping by bookstores or meeting folks: this trip is about my son and his fun. I do plan to work on my book while my son plays.
Anyway, progress on A BLESSING OF MONSTERS has been tough lately… right up until yesterday, when I had a great day. Protip: It’s hard to be motivated to write when you know every word is just going to be cut in the second draft. Yesterday I reached a part I knew I would keep, and things magically became easier.
With luck I’ll have time to write a bit later so I won’t lose the whole day. But tomorrow should be better.
First the store: It’s not working and I don’t know why it’s not working. Shopp’s help system isn’t very helpful but I plan to create a help ticket (or whatever they call it) sometime tomorrow morning.
Until this gets fixed, everyone who buys a story directly from me will have to wait for me to email the file to them. I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t see another way to handle this for right now. To complicate things, I’m going away this weekend and don’t know how much internet access I’ll have. No matter what, I hope to get some Starbucks time to check emails and so forth.
Anyway, yeah I suck. No big.
About the agency pricing thing: John Scalzi already wrote some sensible advice for people who root for one side or the other in the ebook price battles. But one thing I want to point out (and I’ve talked about this before, bear with me) is that these changes are not the result of some inexorable process.
For too many people, the changes we see around us are treated as though they’re the result of “natural” progressions. They think that New York City has a bunch of highways cutting through it because people like cars, and that’s also Los Angeles dumped the trolley system in favor of all those freeways. But that’s bullshit; people made those decisions, and they didn’t make them because Americans were clamoring for it. They had the power to do what they thought was best and highways were it.
You can argue whether it was a good choice or not (I think not) but despite the fact that people love cars and were buying cars as fast as we could make them, other choices could have been made, other directions taken.
The same is true for ebooks. E-readers and ebooks are beloved by some people, and they want more and more of them. I don’t find ebooks very convenient but I’m not against them–the first half of this post was all about the difficulties I’ve had selling them.
Still talking about “publishers fighting to protect their old business model” or “Time to get ready for this new economy” is childish crap. It’s Naivete dressed up in Cynicism’s old clothes. There is no unavoidable future here, there are only choices. Either we make the choices, or people with money and power will make them for us.
Personally, I’d like to see us work on a system that fosters competitiveness and openness, and you don’t get that with either collusion or monopolies.
While it may seem as though I repaired my online store today because of turmoil in the online bookselling world (for the click-phobic, that’s a WSJ report that the Dept. of Justice is filing a lawsuit against Apple and five of the so-called Big Six publishers because of agency pricing), that’s just a coincidence. For one thing, Random House came to agency pricing later than the others, so the accusation of collusion doesn’t work. For another, it’s not like I’m selling a ton of books at the moment anyway.
No, the truth is that Shopp 1.2 wasn’t working. Now that they’ve released Shopp 1.2.1, I’m hopeful that it will. If you’re interested in picking up a copy of some of my short fiction or the Twenty Palaces prequel, [link deleted]. Just be aware, initial first buyers, that you will be my guinea pigs; I haven’t confirmed that the store works yet. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to pull it offline again.
As for the collusion charges, I’m doubtful about them. I can understand why Amazon wants them to be sustained; their business model relied on taking losses to drive competitors out of the market. Amazon would like to be in the place that Wal-Mart is: they want to be the only retailer connecting large groups of consumers and the people who create products they want to consume.
Of course that won’t happen, and I know it. Didn’t I just put up my own online store again, where I sell electronic versions of my fiction directly to you?
But the portion of the market that Amazon already controls is alarming, and I say that as a person who makes the bulk of his self-publishing money through them. Over Christmas, I earned ten times as much money through Amazon as I did through my own site, and that takes into account the higher royalties I get through Shopp/PayPal.
So I’m not anti-Amazon by any means. I’m also not against the large New York publishers, several of which are already settling the case, according the early news reports. For me, as a writer, I want both to be healthy and vibrant ongoing concerns.
But I also want there to be smaller publishers and smaller booksellers, too, and independent brick and mortar shops where I can browse the shelves, plus online sellers like Indiebound, B&N, all of them. The real threat to this strong market isn’t from the traditional publishers, it’s coming from Amazon and their increasingly draconian contract demands.
A world where Amazon has cornered the market in books and ebooks would be harmful to me, personally. I want them to be out there in the mix, connecting readers to books, but I do NOT want them to strangle everyone else until they dominate the market.
So I’m pleased to see that John Sargent at Macmillan is planning to fight the case. Go, him. And I hope the DOJ moves beyond the accusations of collusion and start looking at the market share that Amazon currently holds, and their own vertical integration issues with the launch of their own publishing arm.
It’s not about being pro-Apple/anti-Apple, or being pro-Amazon/anti-Amazon. It’s not about “liking” NY publishers or an online store. I’m not pro or con any of those things, and I certainly don’t “like” one massive corporation over another. Anyone who says they do is a bit of a fool.
But I do want a healthy market, and I’m not sure the Department of Justice is acting in the best interest of that market.
So, Forbes is reporting that JOHN CARTER has earned back its budget overseas, partly by topping the box office for two weeks in a row in China.
Of course, there’s still the marketing budget, but never mind about that. DVD preorders are strong and I like to imagine that quality will out.
But this does give me an excuse to revisit the film, just a little, in a way I couldn’t before.
After seeing it a few times, I think I might have worked out one of the reasons people didn’t go for it in large numbers. The ending. [Spoilers, obvs] In most movies, the big fight scene/marriage would be the end of the film. It feels like an ending.
Then you cut to Dejah waking alone in bed, and Carter walking around the tower deciding to throw away his amulet (wouldn’t it have been nice to take Dejah to Jasoom at some point to see the sailing ships, assuming she could survive in Earth’s gravity?).
Then he’s back on Earth, and we return to the journal and ERB, and…
Okay, here’s where I make a confession: One of the tropes I completely fucking hate to see in a book or movie is “Death will reunite you with the ones you love the most.” I seriously hate it, because to me it seems to be objectively pro-suicide.
There was a novel–I thought it was written by Dan Simmons but a scan of his bibliography doesn’t show anything familiar–that ended that way. His family died at the start, he traveled around like Kwai Chang Caine until he finally jumps off a bridge and is reunited with his loved ones. God, how I hated that ending! I hated it so much that I felt queasy at the finale of GLADIATOR.
But the ending of JOHN CARTER is pretty similar: the protagonist happily walks into his own tomb and shuts the door, then lies back with the lilies around him. He smiles speaks the words that take him out of the this world and into the one he calls home.
And as much as I love this ending, I think it’s the reason people were soft on the movie. Lawrence Block tells the story of a time he sat on a plane while the man beside him watched the movie BURGLAR, which is based on one of Block’s novels. As he tells it, the man was engaged throughout, laughing often. When the film ended, Block asked him: “What did you think of the movie?”
The reply: “It was okay.”
Block believes it was because the ending was soft. The guy enjoyed the whole thing, but it didn’t have a strong ending so his last experience of it was a let down. And what about the people who see JOHN CARTER, expecting a typical action movie denouement? So many folks complained about the nested flashbacks (always with the tone of “Some other people might find this troubling, but not me) that I think the real source of the objection is that ending, where things feel like they’ve been wrapped up, but there’s a whole frame scene story that everyone’s forgotten about.
Did I mention that I love the way it ends? I love fantasy novels and movies. I love adventure stories. And the end of the movie seems so like the way I enter into a fictional world that it felt like falling into a story all over again. Very powerful. Yeah, the movie is flawed, but for me that ending was quite strong.
And now I’ll stop writing about this movie for a while.
I just returned from the SFWA business meeting, where I learned All The Secrets. Sure, it was 40 minutes long and I left home at seven am to get there and only arrived at the library to start working at noon (thanks to a missed bus connection) but those secrets were totally worth it. [1]
I probably should have loitered afterwards to socialize, but Saturdays are a big writing day for me and I really really didn’t want to lose any more work time today. Besides, I suck at socializing. I’m the boringest guy ever, so it’s best for everyone if I just walk into a room, sit quietly, then walk out again later.
Actually, here’s a tip: If you hear there’s going to be a SFWA business meeting going on at a convention or whatever, just go ahead and crash it. No one checks IDs or anything; just walk in, help yourself to a coffee and a danish, then sit somberly while the nice folks run through the agenda. If they pass a paper around to record who attended, just write “Harry Connolly” on there or some other unrecognizable nobody, then you’ll be able to kick back for some private time with a bunch of pro writers.[2]
The meeting was at Norwescon, which I attended last year. Considering the public transit times involved, I’ve decided it’s just too far to go. Sure, the crowds will also keep me away, and my weak chat fu, and my general disinterest, but the travel times are another arrow in my quiver.
At least I got to use the nice hotel bathroom rather than the downtown library.[3]
Other news! I created a Facebook Page, and will slowly be changing my FB time to that, and trimming back my “friends” on my regular FB account. Nothing personal, but I need to recapture some of my time. If you find yourself unfriended over there, it’s only because I don’t know you really or I see the content you post elsewhere.[4]
Finally, I have something else I need to mention that keeps coming up. I shouldn’t bury it in a weekend post, but what the hell:
I’m not going to do a Twenty Palaces Kickstarter.
Yes, I’ve been involved in two Kickstarter campaigns. The Spirit of the Century one panned out pretty quickly, and the Tales of the Emerald Serpent shared world anthology is still working its way toward the goal.[5]
But neither campaign has been “mine.” I placed fiction there, but I haven’t set the goals, the pledge benefits, the timelines, none of it. I haven’t made the videos and I don’t post the updates. Those projects are someone else’s babies.
A number of people have asked: why not Kickstart a new Twenty Palaces novel? Here’s the answer: While I’m sure I could set a pledge level that people would be willing to meet, it’s not money that’s stopping me. It’s readership.
Each of the Twenty Palaces books sold fewer and fewer copies than the one before. They diminished.[6] As much as I loved the series (and believe me, I love them like crazy–those books are ten years of my life) continuing to push them would be career suicide.
I have new books I’m working on. Some of you will hate them, some will like them–I’m comfortable with that idea. But I have to be writing books that increase my readership, not shrink it.
The Twenty Palaces setting is a dead horse, and my whipping arm is tired.
Okay. Time to make pages.
[1] I’ll even share one with you: It’s hard to get rich in sf/f publishing. You heard it hear first.
[2] As far as you know.
[3] Confidential to the dude in the next stall: Holy Christ, you have my utmost sympathy.
[4] Stupid timeline.
[5] Check out the $5 and $10 pledge levels. They seem like a great bargain.
[6] Circle of Enemies has sold one-third as many books as Child of Fire, and the numbers have pretty much played out. These books are not going to make a surprise resurgence.