Because I didn’t have free fiction set to give away. What can I say? My son’s “novel” isn’t finished yet and most of my short fiction is already for sale as ebooks, either on my online store (which is still not working ten days after I asked for help from Shopp tech support) or B&N/Amazon.
Then I realized I’m still giving away free chapter of my novels. Chapter one of Child of Fire is here.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t really count. Go easy on me here, I’m behind on my current book.
Yesterday on Twitter I was talking about the importance of taking the blame for every failure and rejection. Today I feel like talking about the shame of revisiting work.
There’s not a lot to say, though. After I send something off, I hate to revisit it because I know I’ll see things I want to change. Not little tweaks, either, but places where I use a pronoun with an unclear (to me) antecedent, or text that seems too rushed, or a scene without enough description of the setting.
I just did it last night. Nothing big, you understand. Just a quick little nothing. But looking at it now just makes me feel sad and useless[1]. (Not that I have time to redo it.)
Which is the perfect way to start a writing day! Actually, yesterday was pretty good if a bit tough. Today will be even harder, but I’m hoping to surpass myself. I really really need to finish this book.
[1] Usually when I post something like this, I get people dropping me notes of encouragement or whatever. Thanks, but it’s not necessary.
The Tales of the Emerald Serpent anthology is over and it’s fully funded:
(Let’s see if iframe will work in WordPress.)
Thanks to everyone who pledged. I know a lot of readers were unhappy that the benefit level for a physical book was so spendy, but when the book itself comes out I’m sure you can pick up a copy at regular book price.
The Dinopacalypse Kickstarter is nearly over…
and is running out of stretch goals. The benefit levels are pretty reasonable, too. At this point you can get ebooks of several of those novels for a paltry pledge. Take a look.
Finally, here’s a project I’m not involved in at all, except as a backer:
Sentinels of the Multiverse is my new favorite game to play with my son, and they made their goal for the new expansion set AND the second edition of the basic game in one day. That’s how popular this game is becoming. Personally, I’m hoping that they make their stretch goals so we can get the “promo cards” that let us change the way games are played.
Anyway, I’ve been recommending this game (as often as I do such things) but at this point I think it would be best to pick up the second edition. It will have better game balance for the villains and will make record-keeping less of a chore. And the Rook City expansion means tougher fights.
Added later: iframe doesn’t work in the cross-poster, so I’ve added links in the text.
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.
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.
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.
As I write this on 5pm PST on Tuesday, the Kickstarter for the Professor Khan novel (KING KHAN!) I’m planning to write, which needed to reach $25K to be funded, now has fewer than twelve hundred dollars to go.
And it turns out I had the details of the stretch goals wrong in yesterday’s post: Evil Hat has already committed to publishing a stand alone Spirit of the Century novel starring mystic detective Benjamin Hu, written by Brian Clevinger, creator of Atomic Robo comics. I can’t believe I left that out. A $10 pledge would get you an ebook of that novel, too, along with all the others.
Also, BoingBoing did a brief news article on the Mayan-themed anthology I’m in, and now that project has less than fourteen hundred dollars to make its funding goal.
Kickstarter is doing pretty well by me right now.
It’s true. I don’t know if you’ve been following Evil Hat’s Dinopacalypse Kickstarter, but they started with a goal of $5K and blew through that in no time. This is one company that’s really making Kickstarter work for them.
Anyway, the “stretch goals” (projects they’ll fund if they reach funding levels past their original ones) have been pretty cool. At $15K, they committed to a whole trilogy of Dinopacalypse books…
Wait, I haven’t described these books yet, have I? They’re set in the Spirit of the Century game universe, an early 20th century pulp adventure role playing game in which player-characters who protect the world from conqueror apes using technology from lost Atlantis, thwart the schemes of Doctor Scrooge to steal from the poor, destroy death rays, and otherwise take out mad scientists, world conquerors, and evil sorcerers.
The Dinopacalypse books are about Gorilla Khan, conqueror ape, taking over the world with the help of psychic dinosaurs. Beyond that, the stretch goal for $20K is an Amelia Stone novel–she’s a hero who battles monster gangsters in 1930’s Paris–written by C.E. Murphy herself.
And then there’s the $25K goal, which will get you a book written by me. Yep, if the Kickstarter hits that mark, I will write a pulp adventure novel about Professor Khan, a hyper-intelligent gorilla turned Oxford professor and disillusioned “son” of Gorilla Khan. It’ll be set primarily in Hollywood(land) of the time period, along with some fun pulpy stuff thrown in.
And if Evil Hat reaches its stretch goal of $30K, Stephen Blackmoore, the author of the zombie noir City of the Lost, is going to write KHAN OF MARS. I know.
You can read more about the supporter levels and what pledges get you what swag right here in Update #6. A $10 dollar pledge gets you ebooks for all the novels, but for physical books you should read through the various tiers. You can also see artwork, get cool wallpapers of dudes with jet packs shooting pteranodons, etc, etc. Did I mention that the Kickstarter is already above $22K as I write this? Fewer than three thousand dollars in pledges will get this sucker going.
Anyway, I still haven’t settled on a title for intelligent ape in Hollywood novel. KING KHAN? PROFESSOR KHAN TAKES HOLLYWOOD? I dunno. Maybe, after I finish A BLESSING OF MONSTERS and start working on this, I’ll hold a contest.
I know I’m not one to be all rah rah about the projects I’m working on, but this one is definitely exciting.