publishing

Oh, Amazon. Again?

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Amazon pulls fan’s review of favorite author’s book. When fan questions why, Amazon rep accuses him of being a paid shill and says “I understand that you are upset, and I regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. However, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.”

Sound familiar? Fan sends followup email explaining that he is just a reader; his review is legit.

Amazon tells fan that if he emails them about the review again, they will stop selling the author’s book on their site.

Hey, I guess it’s possible that this story has passed through a couple levels of Telephone before it comes to us, but is there anyone that doesn’t find this story believable on some level?

Yesterday’s post about Amazon’s error

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As a followup to yesterday’s post about Amazon’s bully tactics, I want to point out a link that Laurel Amberdine posted on my LiveJournal. Here’s the big surprise: the story of the woman who had her Amazon account closed for reasons they refused to divulge was a little more complicated than the original link made it seem. You’d think I’d learn to expect this by now.

However, it really doesn’t make things better, as far as the company’s behavior is concerned. That’s why I’m glad to see the updates to that link saying they reopened her account and let her have her books back.

This time, I hope she backs them up on her computer or something.

Amazon fucks up again

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It’s not great secret that Amazon.com has been acting like a pack of ruthless sociopaths for the last few years. What good does it do to pursue your own self-interest if you define it so narrowly that the people you do business with hate you so much they can’t wait for the chance to slip a poisoned knife in your back? I’m not talking about competitors; I mean your suppliers and customers.

Nevermind this article here, which details how Luxembourg-based Amazon.co.uk only pays 3% VAT tax yet demands a 20% VAT tax payment from UK publishers.

At this point, they’re now turning on their customers. One woman discovered that her account had been closed and all of her books deleted. Why? Amazon doesn’t feel that it has any reason to explain. They take your money, they erase the goods they sold you, they act like shitheels when you ask for their reasons.

You know what sucks? I sell the Twenty Palaces prequel through every service I can, from Smashwords to B&N to this very site, but the overwhelming proportion of my sales come through Amazon. We’re talking 95%. Also, a few years back I spent a full month posting affiliate links exclusively to Indiebound and then a full month doing the same with Mysterious Galaxy. No one bought anything. They only bought books when I linked to Amazon.

This puts me someplace I really don’t want to be: Most of the money I’ve earned this year has come from a company that I’ve grown to hate. I feel dirty doing business with them. I’ve been a customer of theirs, too.

So how screwed up is it that I can’t wait from someone to come along and kick their asses?

One year anniversary of the end of 20 Palaces

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I’m writing this ahead of time because I expect to be hanging with my son at the tournament when this posts, but today is exactly one year since I announced that Del Rey would not be picking up any new Twenty Palaces novels and that I was putting the series on hiatus, with all the ominous implications of the word.

And that fucking post is still the most popular thing on my blog. More people have read about my failure than ever read my books.

What has changed since then? Well, A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark is on indefinite hold. The book itself is a major misfire–not in concept but in execution. It needs a massive rewrite before it’s ready to be shown anywhere and that’s not a very high priority for me right now.

What about Epic Fantasy With No Dull Parts? aka A Blessing of Monsters? Well, shit. We’ll see, won’t we? One big change is that I seriously underestimated the amount of story there; what I’d planned to complete in one volume is not, in fact, complete after 140K words. So it will become two books. Possibly three. We’ll see what my publisher says, assuming I find one for it.

As for me, I’m working on a Twenty Palaces short story, which won’t be told from Ray’s POV. I’m hoping to have it finished soonest so I can get to work on Epic Sequel With No Dull Parts. I’m still waiting on editorial notes for King Khan, the game tie-in book I wrote for Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century role-playing game, and that will likely be the only book release for me in 2013.

I know. 2012 saw only two anthologies: Don’t Read This Book and Tales of the Emerald Serpent, and next year will almost certainly be a single game tie-in novel. I like all of that work and I’m proud of it, but I need to put out original novel-length fiction if I want to keep my career going.

Amazon Author Rank: Utterly irrelevant to me (plus free fiction)

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It’s pretty clear what the new Amazon Author Rank system is supposed to do. (For those who haven’t heard of it: they now show sales rank numbers for authors as well as their books.) It’s supposed to be a way for authors to promote themselves.

The author becomes a “top ten” author on Amazon (for an hour) and starts using that in their publicity, as though it’s some sort of bestseller list. Not only does this get Amazon’s name out in front of people but it will inevitably push some authors to work like crazy to bump their sales. Writers, while pursuing that supposedly-valuable label, put money in Amazon’s bank accounts.

Me, I don’t much care. I stopped following Amazon’s sales rankings for my books right around the time Random House started giving me accurate sales figures, updated weekly. Do I want to look at “rankings” which only compare me to other authors without giving me actual sales data, and which are calculated in secret, or do I want to look at the number of books sold? No contest for me at all.

In other news, tomorrow I take a long, long weekend away from home. My son and I are catching a train for northern California so he can compete in the Pokemon regionals. I have no idea what sort of internet connectivity I’ll have (certainly none on the train) so don’t expect to see me around much. I’ll do my best to visit at least one Starbucks a day to check email, but I’m not sure I can promise even that much.

Finally, Black Gate has begun to feature fiction on their website, and their latest offering in the first short story I ever sold. To be honest, it’s been available for free since it was published, but they’re featuring it again. Check it out. Special thanks to author Martha Wells for pointing it out. Good thing I read her LiveJournal, eh?

All right. There are errands and packing to do. Signing off for a while.

Hiding from your troubles (publishing post)

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I’m sure you all know people who hide from their problems. Maybe you’re one of those people yourself–I’ve certainly been there and understand the urge. The short-term pain of telling someone something they don’t want to hear–along with the chance that they will truly freak out and lose their cool–can be so upsetting that people put it off as long as they can. Yeah, it will all be worse someday, but at least they’re avoiding the pain of right now.

It’s always better to be as up front as possible: This book will be late, there’s a problem with these checks, chain store X won’t be carrying your books. Present the problem as soon as you know for sure you can’t avoid it. Present a plan to fix it. Apologize for the difficulties it will cause. Yeah, there may still be anger and embarrassment, but it will be less.

Now, I don’t *know* this was the problem with Ridan Publishing (Context), but the particular author mentioned in that post did a good bit of research into them before she signed with them to make sure they were legit, and still things turned weird. No payments. No communication. No acknowledgements that contracts have been terminated.

But that’s what it sounds like.

The good news is that the publisher has contacted the unpaid author in question with the promise that communication will resume and issues will be addressed. It’s a good first step, but I’d like to hear that all royalties have been paid.

Whatever the cause, I realize it’s not as simple as saying “Always be upfront about problems.” Of course that’s easy to say, right? I know that it life can sometimes seem overwhelming and stress can make us do the wrong thing even when we know it’s wrong. Still, however hard, doing the right thing is usually less painful than doing the wrong one.

In other news, I completely forgot that Brickcon is this weekend. Maybe my son will want to go tomorrow, since today is already dedicated to errang running.

See, yesterday afternoon my internet suddenly shut off. I tried all the usual tricks but couldn’t reconnect, and my son hovering at my shoulder (he had a multi-player Minecraft session planned) didn’t help. Eventually, the help tech at my ISP declared that my problem was my modem and, although it bounced back for a while last night, I have to spend most of this afternoon on a three-bus trip to buy a replacement.

I hate going to Best Buy.

Anyway, it’s another writing day shot all to hell. Ah well. At least I’m not pretending the modem is just fine and I don’t have to do anything about it.

Additional thing about that attack on the agent

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As a followup to yesterday’s call for public shaming, I want to make a point that I’ve made on Twitter, G+, and of course in the comments on LiveJournal: When bloggers or Goodreads reviewers receive crazy hate mail from authors unhappy with their unhappy writeups, there’s a huge groundswell of support. Comment sections fill up with commiserations and well-wishers, and folks turn to their own blogs and Twitter accounts to talk about how awful it is.

That’s how it should be.

But when agents receive hate mail for a form rejection, they get crickets. As I mentioned yesterday, the flow of vicious emails agents get camouflages the threats from truly dangerous people, and it should not be accepted with a sigh and a what are you going to do?. There’s no reason to accept it; those writers should be exposed and shamed just like the self-publishers who get nasty with reviewers.

Rejected author attacks agent: a call for public shaming

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Last night on Twitter it came out that an agent was attacked outside her house just after she’d gotten into her car.

After being convinced to call the police, they wanted to look at the emails she’d gotten recently. She was sure there was nothing to it. All she had were the usual responses to rejection every agent gets from writers: “The normal I hate you and I want you to die and I’ll kill you”.

The cops were not so casual about it. They identified one guy, went to the address he put on his query, then busted him.

But here’s the thing: how did we get to the point where an influx of hatred, threats, and vicious remarks are an acceptable thing? I realize people have been turning a blind eye to the horrifying shit women bloggers get, but agents have been receiving the same treatment for years to the point where it’s seen as the normal course of business.

Here’s a tip: If you’re so outraged at receiving a rejection that you have to send a hateful response, self-publish. Seriously, if you’re moved to respond in a nasty way, you aren’t ready for that end of the business. Just go ahead and publish your work yourself.

Because every nasty response, every threat that you didn’t really mean, every expression of contempt, is just cover for threats that come from the crazies who really will do violence. It normalizes the awful behavior to the point that recipients can’t tell when the threats are genuine.

I suggest there be some sort of public display of these hate messages, along with identifying information: name, city, email address. Your query would be confidential. Your response to a rejection would not.

I don’t know if that would work, but I wish there was something we could to.

Real Review or Sockpuppet? A Handy Guide

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There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about sockpuppet reviews: essentially, dishonest reviews posted under pseudonyms that either praise books or slam them. Sometimes the author themself is writing the review. Sometimes it’s a firm they hired, or friends. Sometimes the review was written out of spite by someone who hasn’t read the book.

Still, book buyers say they still use reader reviews to help decide whether they will buy a book or not. So! How can a reader tell the difference between a genuine response to a book and a review written for those Nefarious Other Purposes?

Allow me to illustrate some basic principles from the fictionalized examples below. And feel free to play along? Sockpuppet? Or Real?

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At first glance, this might seem like a sockpuppet. Look at how effusive that praise is! And completely unqualified! But note that the reviewer makes sure to mention that they totally found the book at random, not because they were intrigued by the premise or the author’s other work. It was just crazy luck! Convincing? I say yes.

Also, there’s no way this could have been written by, say, the author’s friends. My God, it’s like, two sentences. Two and two words. What kind of shitty friend would take the trouble to post a fake review but only write a line or two?

Verdict: Real

*****

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If you thought this sockpuppet review was the real thing, then I feel genuine pity for you, my friend. Look at it again and you’ll see within those few words a brutal personal attack on the author. To whit:

What kind of inhuman monster says they would recommend a book to their friends and then give it only three stars? Have YOU ever looked at a three-star review and thought “Gosh, I should pluck that out of the ceaseless tsunami of printed matter washing past me every day!”

Of course not. That’s a clear and obvious taunt directed at the author.

Verdict: Sockpuppet

*****

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A less-savvy observer might view this as a kind of author advertising, most likely placed by the author themself!

However, note the run-on sentence and sloppy spelling (er… in the review, not the body of this post). Would a sensible author write so poorly? I think not. What’s more, the book named in the review is on the Kindle, which means there is almost certainly a free excerpt available. These books are pretty much uniformly terrible. Would an author want readers to sample a terrible book? The idea itself is ludicrous.

Verdict: Review.

*****

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The raw, vicious hatred behind this review is clear on its face.

Verdict: Sockpuppet.

Remember, authors: Any review that makes you feel bad is probably a personal attack.

Remember, readers: Any review that makes you reluctant to buy one of my books is absolutely a fake.

I hope you found this lesson helpful.

6 Things Make a Post

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1) There are a lot of folks who like to kick school teachers (esp the unionized ones) and you might think that I, being a homeschooling parent, am one of them. I’m not. Check out this post by a friend on why she quit working at a public school in an L.A. ghetto. Yeah, she’s a talented writer, but I know she wanted to stick it out. Unfortunately, we live in a top-down society that likes to micromanage our workers.

2) As reported on Genreville, there’s an opening at Harper Voyager for books in their upcoming ebook-focused Impulse imprint. Submissions will be open for two weeks only, starting October 1st. More details at that link, for the curious.

3) No, authors do not routinely create sock puppets to praise their own books and disparage others’ so don’t let these assholes fool you. There’s something sad and grasping in all the recent revelations about fake reviews, purchased reviews, and bullying of readers who post one-star reviews. Kate Elliott was on Twitter talking about visibility, and how desperate writers can feel about their work. “If only people would give it a chance!” Right?

But that assumes that success is an incredibly frail thing, something so delicate that a couple negative reviews can destroy it. I don’t believe that. Enthusiasm is a powerful thing, and if you can make people excited about your work, that enthusiasm will be enough.

4) You know what makes me laugh (quietly, on the inside) when I see big corporations complaining about copyright violations? The knowledge that it’s their fault. They’ve spent decades building this consumer culture where people are constantly pushed to get more more more, are judged for what they have, are assured that they can get it cheaper and faster, and have generally been driven into a state where acquiring shit they don’t need feels awesome.

Then technology changes things so they can get what they want without paying, so they do. They don’t care how much money, time, energy, or expertise went into something. They see it. They want it. They take it. And honestly, that’s the kind of culture we’ve built.

5) What I can’t stand, though, is the way companies have responded. Take a look at this io9 article about Ustream cutting off the online feed of the Hugo Awards midway through because they showed (with permission) clips from TV shows. An automated system shut down the video immediately and there was no way to restore it until after the awards had ended.

Now, you’d be hard-pressed to find another spec fic writer who cares less about the Hugo Awards than I do. My indifference is colossal. However, the program that shut down the feed shut off service without any attempt to discern that the users were at fault. Just, boom, you’re out. Notice also that in his apology, Ustream’s CEO made sure to mention their paid service, suggesting that things would have been fine (of fixed quickly) if the users had paid up first.

There has got to be a better way to work things out.

6) I’m writing this last night and I won’t be around when it posts. The plan is to duck out of my home early and get to work on KING KHAN. I’m so close to finishing this first draft I can taste it (but I won’t finish tomorrow. Probably.)