Remember when I said I’d be in an anthology with a bunch of great authors like Seanan McGuire, Tobias Buckell, Mary Robinette Kowal, and many more? Well, now you can see the whole Table of Contents here:
http://www.johnjosephadams.com/robot-army/table-of-contents/
Check it out, you guys. It’s pretty cool. Expected sale date: July 1, 2014
Let’s start with the good news. I’m going to be in two anthologies coming out this summer, both of them funded via Kickstarter: Help Fund My Robot Army & Other Improbably Kickstarters, and the shared world Walk The Fire, Vol 2. Don’t worry, no one is asking you to back a campaign, I promise. These projects were closed months ago.
Again, the books will be available some time this summer, and believe me I’ll post links to buy them when they’re out.
The complicated part is this: I’m glad both books are coming out and I’m pleased with the stories I sold them, even though both rejected my initial submissions.
The WALK THE FIRE antho is a shared-world deal, centering on a future where people can travel via special fires. That’s right, fire. You step into the flames in one place and emerge in another. It’s teleportation with a few complications added in.
Anyway, the first story I wrote, “A No Without A Thank You”, was basically a slam on Doctor Who, because I thought the fires allowed people to travel through time and space. The anthology bible even said “time and space” in one spot. Feedback from the editor insisted that I hadn’t followed the guidelines correctly, and I had to read the bible several times before I worked out that it was supposed to be “time and space” only. The guidelines as a whole only made sense if they were space-only. Oops.
At that point, with a rejected story, I could have withdrawn; I do have a shitload of work to do to fulfill my own Kickstarter. But! I’d also promoted the campaign to my readers and thought it would be unfair to them if I back out of the project now. So I set everything aside and wrote a second story, called “Sterile Oceans”, which was accepted. And I’m proud of that story. Plus, “A No Without…” is ready to go into the short fiction collection I listed as a stretch goal for my Kickstarter backers. So that’s all good.
HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY… brought up a similar situation, although the reasons behind it were different. That anthology is a collection of stories told in the format of a Kickstarter campaign–with a sales pitch, stretch goals, comments, the whole deal–and my original submission was a parody of the “Above the Game” campaign, (which I won’t link) that PUA manual that supposedly advocated sexual assault. My story was about a PUA who planned to sell (short-acting) love potions, and who insisted they were completely different from roofies.
It was dark, yeah, but the editor decided it was too dark and bounced it. Once again, I had a choice of disappointing backers or writing a second attempt. The followup story was accepted, and it’s fun (but deliberately slight) and technically, this also frees up the PUA/love potion story for my own story collection.
Except, now that this loser in UCSB (I’m not posting his name online) has had his rampage, I’m tempted to yank it all together. The original story was supposed to be darkly funny, but I’m not feeling it anymore.
Anyway, two new anthologies mean four new stories from me this summer (or maybe just three, who knows.) I’m also thinking I need to take a break from Kickstarter anthologies.
I haven’t been online all that much (and shouldn’t be right now, either–I have books to finish) but apparently Amazon has stepped up its pressure on Hachette by yanking buy links for all their books. Beyond that, they’re also screwing with search results, messing with book categorizations, and pushing readers who want to buy Hachette books toward Hachette’s competitors. And the reason they can do this is you.
Now, if your response to all this is to say “Amazon is an independent company and they can legally do whatever best serves their interests,” let me assure you that I agree. They can legally do all these things, just as Wal-Mart can legally include information on sighing up for food stamps during their new employee orientations. There are a lot of things powerful people and corporations can do that are both legal and deeply, deeply shitty.
And why is Amazon doing this? Because Hachette won’t accept a new, lower rate on their ebooks.
But the thing is, this wouldn’t matter so much without you.
It’s the readers who give Amazon all this power. It’s people who click through Amazon links but never do for any other bookstore, and who impulse buy like crazy online but no where else.
Some years ago, I tried an experiment: For a full month, I wrote about books constantly and all the buy links I put in my posts went to indiebound. Not one person bought a book.
The next month, the only buy links I posted went to Mysterious Galaxy, a terrific store in San Diego that ships books just like any other seller. Not one person bought a book.
Which isn’t to say that no one clicked those links. They did. But those clicks didn’t translate into sales.
More recently, I posted links for the new paperback POD edition of Twenty Palaces. The link pointing to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The link to Amazon got more sales than the link to B&N got clicks. When I’m talking about sales ebook sales for the same book, B&N provide about a fifth what Amazon does, with all the rest in negligible numbers.
Now, this is what the general public has chosen. When people go looking to buy something online, they turn to Amazon. Hell, when I want to send a purchase request to my local library, I use the Amazon page to dig up the publication date and the ISBN.
But at this point it’s hurting authors. (Here’s the website listing Hachette’s authors, highlighting bestsellers, of course, but like most publishers they have a mob of midlisters.) Anyone could be next. Small presses are already being squeezed. Self-published authors have been so happy with their “70% royalties” (which is really a 30% sales commission for hosting/delivering a file and processing payments) but as soon as Wall St decides the company needs to start turning profits, I’ll bet that’s the first place they start to squeeze.
But this raises questions for me: Do I remove the links to Amazon for all my books, as other authors have done? Like Fred Hicks, I’ve already emptied my Amazon cart of the obscure crap I was planning to buy when The Great Way was finished.
What’s the point of doing all that, of linking to other book sellers large and small, if readers won’t buy from them, even for paper editions?
One of the perqs of the Walk The Fire 2 Kickstarter is a signed “title page” from each of the authors. It’s just a sheet of paper with the name of the story, my name, and my signature (in a font other than Comic Sans).
Anyway, my design sense is sort of crap, so I turned it over to the closest designer I know: my 12-year-old son. This is what he came up with:
The gray circle prints up lighter than it shows here, but that’s to its advantage.
The kid did a fine job, I think.
Last Friday, a funny conversation popped up on Twitter. It started with Kameron Hurley, when she tweeted this:
Just saw someone refer to me as a "Big Name Author." Oh no, no people. WHERE ARE MY 100 DOLLAR BILLS???
— Kameron Hurley (@KameronHurley) May 2, 2014
Click through to read the whole thing, but there was also this:
@timpratt @KameronHurley someone: “I am building my career to be like yours.” Me “oh fuck, don’t do that.”
— Tobias Buckell (@tobiasbuckell) May 3, 2014
I think it’s worth saying that science fiction and fantasy is a small, disparate field, even on the internet. Those writers whose names you see on popular blog posts or online articles, or who have award nominations, or several thousand Twitter followers? You might be surprised by how much they struggle getting their books out there. Getting noticed, convincing readers to try their work instead of that other author’s, racking up enough sales to keep going and maybe, just maybe someday earning enough that all those hours of writing pay off at something like minimum wage.
Sometimes I think of the internet as a huge cave complex with innumerable caverns. Where I am standing, it may seem crowded with people, and many of the voices I can hear seem so big they echo off the walls, but people just one cavern over have never heard of any of us and don’t care a whit for the drama that sucks up all of our time. And beyond that cavern is another and another, all filled with people that we can’t reach.
The U.S. has a celebrity culture, which seems to be spreading beyond our borders, that encourages folks to assume that “well-known” somehow means “powerful” or “successful.” I’m just saying it’s not so, not with writers. A footprint that might seem large to an individual is probably smaller than you think in real terms.
Anyway, Kameron Hurley has a cool series you should check out, and so does Tobias Buckell. If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, you should. That’s how Big Name Authors are made.
You guys know about Kindleworlds, right? It’s a system that Amazon set up some months ago to let people write, publish, and sell fanfiction based on established properties like The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, GI Joe (not the movies) or “The World of Kurt Vonnegut” (and so on). All you have to do is follow the content guidelines and not suck. Complicated, right?
Well, today I discovered that there’s a Kindleworld license for Veronica Mars, but only for the years covered by the TV series. The content guidelines make it clear that anything taking place after the end of season three is verboten.
Yet again, I wish I could be prolific. It would be tremendous fun to tear off a quick VM whodunnit, preferably hammering at the class warfare aspects and digging into the private lives of some of the supporting characters. (Like Cliff! “These are my people, V.” I love that dude.)
Alas, I do not have the time for it. Even as a novella or something, it would take too much time.
Like most people, I follow a link or check out an article and think “I should share that with folks!” Twitter’s good if you have nothing in particular to say about it (or just want to add something snarky), but some stuff deserves to be talked about. Well, I’ve gotten in the habit of leaving browser tabs open that I want to get to later, then leaving them sit for way too long. Blogging! Who has the time!
So, instead of just giving up and closing those tabs, I’m going to list them here with a little note about why I thought they were worth reading about:
To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair. Note: this article did not get me to write an extensive response to it.
Amazon-owned Audible lowers royalty rates on self-published audiobooks Is this the first sign of the long-expected rise in Amazon’s sales commissions?
Ian Rankin: ‘It took 14 years for my writing to pay’ Bestselling UK writer talks about how long it took him to find success. Ten books! Funny, after this Kickstarter is done, I’ll have ten books out, too…
From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author’s life? A lament on the fact that nothing is guaranteed for writers, especially sales. No mention is made of the economic collapse, of course.
Making Compelling Arguments through the Power of Story Author (and professional marketer) Kameron Hurley offers great advice on writing blog posts people will want to share.
I thought this was interesting: So What Do You Do Brendan Deneen, Executive Editor of Macmillan Entertainment? Short version: he hires writers to write work-for-hire novels in company properties, which he then sells to Hollywood.
The Internet is Fucked (but we can fix it) An argument to declare the internet a public utility, create real competition, and fix the terrible internet-access situation in this country. I’m sold.
Is Genre Fiction Creating a Market for Lemons? Cheap ebooks as used cars.
Is the “Seattle Freeze” a Real Thing? Science says yes! For those who don’t know, the Seattle Freeze is a sort of chilly demeanor that makes it difficult for new arrivals to make friends.
There was a great piece on Morning Edition yesterday about art that becomes popular versus art that doesn’t. Is there some quality that makes some art successful and preserved forever or is it all just random chance?
Obviously, the big problem with a question like that is that you can look at only one timeline; there’s no way to look at an alternate world where the Potter books never took off (or they did, inevitably).
For those who haven’t clicked the link (you can listen to the short news piece or you can read a transcript of it) a Princeton professor decided to create a number of alternate virtual worlds to test the hypothesis that popular art becomes popular because of its inherent qualities rather than random chance. He created a database of music by unknown, unsigned bands and invited thousands of teenagers to listen and download their songs for free.
Those teenagers were randomly sorted into nine different “worlds.” In one control group, the teens did not get the chance to see which songs other teens selected. In the other eight, they did.
Try not to be wildly surprised, but different songs became popular in different virtual worlds. A song that was number 1 in one setting was 40th (out of 48) in another. Further experimentation established that there was a minimum level of quality below which popularity was not possible, but after that there was no predicting what would be successful and what would not. Read it yourself if you’re curious.
My problem with this is not the assertion that popularity does not come solely from quality, and that a piece of art that is well-known is not inherently better than something obscure. It’s always been perfectly obvious to me that wonderful and excellent books could/should have been popular but weren’t (I’m not talking about me, now).
My objection here is that the good professor chalks popularity up to “chance.” In fact, he (or at least the reporter covering his work) hits the idea of chance very hard. But that’s a black box.
I’ve talked about this sort of thing before, but there are a lot of effects that people attribute to chance simply because they are not well understood. What I would like to see is an experiment that examines the way those songs became popular in each virtual world. Was it an early surge? Was there an early surge that faced a backlash, with the more popular work getting a secondary surge? I’d like to know, and by that I mean that I’d really really like to know.
#SFWApro
As a followup to the post I put together linking critical analyses of Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings report, I have something brief to say: It’s clear that Howey’s data isn’t all that great, which he knows. It’s also clear that the conclusions he’s jumping to–even before he gets to analyzing B&N or whatever he’s doing next–are not supported by the data.
That’s too bad because this could have been the data I’m looking for. The book I published before last was self-published, and this year I expect to self-publish five more times. As I consider small press offers to put out the books, it would be really helpful to have numbers to look out.
Sadly, despite Mr. Howey’s bold conclusions, I don’t. Yeah okay the guy keeps talking about the limits of the data he’s collected, but he also talks as though the data has proved him right. Actually, he’s claiming to be proved righter than ever.
As the links in that previous post demonstrate, that’s not the case. It’s pretty clear that, once Howey got the data, he didn’t really know how best to use it, nor did he know what was absolutely not allowed. The enthusiasm and certitude behind his conclusions are textbook Dunning-Kruger Effect.
We’re all prone to confirmation bias. How many people dismissed what he said without really looking at it? How many people really looked at the report, recognized the flaws, then decided to believe it all anyway? It’s easy to believe flattery. It’s easy to stand in the mirror in just the right way to catch yourself at a good angle. We exert that sort of unconscious control all the time; that’s why we need smart knowledgeable people who know the rules. Howey may know how to write a bestseller but when it comes to data analysis he’s just another thriller writer. Also, it seems that his “Data Guy” is really just “Coder Guy.”
It’s too bad. I could have used expert advice. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any to offer and he doesn’t even know it.
ObDisclaimer: I self-publish fiction and plan to self-publish more fiction this year. I am not philosophically opposed to the Author Earnings Report that Hugh Howey has begun. I am seriously dubious about several of its conclusions and some of the ways they are presented. For example, I don’t like that his comparison of reader ratings runs only from 3.0 to 4.5 instead of from 0 to 5, which is the actual possible range. Anyone who has looked at graphs knows that “zooming in” is a way to make minor differences appear more important than they are.
Also, Howey is planning to do additional surveys to include vendors like B&N but he’s already rushing to judgement on the “best” path for authors after only looking at Amazon data.
To be clear, I would like it to be true that self-publishing will bring in a lot of money; I’m just skeptical of Howey’s report and waiting for some expert analysis. As I find that analysis, I plan to link to it.
That’s what this post will be. I don’t plan to link to praise or skepticism here unless it actually examines the methodology of the report. So:
2/13/14:
Digital Book World points out that the AE report is heavily focused on successes. See also this unrelated post on Survivorship Bias which predates the AE report.
UK Crime Writer Steve Mosby points out an excluded middle in Howey’s conclusions, along with raising other questions.
On Absolute Write, author S.L. Huang points out problems with the statistics and what’s excluded, along with other issues.
Agent Joshua Bilmes points out this isn’t the first time someone has tried to calculate earnings based on a list of bestsellers and that Amazon’s rating system is hopelessly compromised.
In the comments of the AE report, author Ramez Naam points out some basic errors in assuming royalties (even if they could be accurately calculated by Amazon sales ranks) equal payments to writers going the traditional route. There are a great many comments on the report itself, but few are substantive.
A more in-depth comparison of pricing and rating.
Later:
Comparing self-publishing to being published is tricky and most of the data you need to do it right is not available by Mike Shatzkin
2/14/14:
Porter Anderson talks about the cultural push behind the report and against it. However flawed it is, it’s seen as a powerful argument.
At Futurebook, Philip Jones lays out the contradictions between Howey’s admissions of his flawed data and his sweeping conclusions.
Digital Book World, which had criticized Howey’s report yesterday (see above) now claims it supports their own (much disputed by indie authors) findings.
I’d meant to include only analytical posts, but this is something I see quite a lot:
So the data is “shonky” but the narrative is too exciting not to buy in. So far, this is a very common reaction.
Jim Hanas calculates his “Hugh Howey Income.” Mine is zero dollars, which is, I promise you, wildly incorrect.
2/16/14:
This post by a person who creates studies and databases will likely be the last one, because it’s just what I was looking for. The author of the critique has no bias one way or another in terms of how to publish fiction, and she has informed and detailed critiques of not only the way the data was put together but by the sweeping conclusions that Howey presents. h/t @mlvwrites on Twitter
I’ll add more of these as they cross my path. I think that last one does it. If there’s another critique as informed that touches other issues, I’ll add it but I won’t be actively looking any more. Also, I plan to write up a little something later on, summarizing what seems to be going on with this report and the furor around it.
Spoke too soon: This examination of Howey’s methods by Courtney Milan is really excellent.