1) A dating service for people who like white hats with anchors.
2) A hotel that’s free to stay at… but it’s decorated with beach trash.
3) You should date an illiterate girl.
4) From boiling water to instant fog. Video. Now that’s cold.
5) Casting the 1940’s version of Harry Potter films. Too many of the biggest stars of the day, but fun to think about.
6) Phelps family protests the movie RED STATE. A counter-protest breaks out. Some NSFW text.
1) A Wrinkle in Time in 90 seconds. Video. So. Effing. Cute.
2) MEOW. Video. Zombies uber alles, yeah?
3) A jury of your peers, not a jury of your purrs. I deeply regret writing that previous sentence.
4) Before and after photos of the flooding in Australia. Mouse over the pics to change them.
5) Why I don’t pay much attention to reader reviews.
6) “Impossible” physics w/out special effects. Video. Trompe l’oeil made awesome.
7) Edgar Allen Pooh.
Except this one. In short, it’s a novel contest where the winning entry will get a full edit by Del Rey editor in chief Betsy Mitchell. She’s my editor, and I’m going to tell you right now that she’s smart and knows a helluva lot about making stories work. She won’t be going through the text marking the verbs that should be pluperfect or whatever, but she will get in depth with the characters, setting, plot and tone of your work. Invaluable.
Also, there’s no entry fee, no crazy rights grab, and even if you don’t win the grand prize, you might still win a whole bunch of books. Free books! You can’t beat that with a cricket bat.
I think most writing contests are a waste of time. Better to work on the manuscript, create a good query, and compete in the marketplace. The prizes are better. However I’m making an exception and recommending this one. If you have a novel that you think is damn good but can’t place anywhere, consider entering it. You might learn a lot.
Death to novel-writing workshops! Check the comments, too.
I took a novel-writing class way way back in the day. You wanted to learn how to do something, you took a class, right?
Well, it wasn’t what you’d call useful. The teacher taught an odd, artificial system and workshopping a six- or sixteen-page chapter outside the context of the book was useless. Before printing up pages to hand out, I’d search the document for the word “eye” because it was a huge deal there if you made a mistake like “His eyes went around the room, searching for a face he recognized.” Sure, it’s bad writing. It’s also an extremely easy critique to make, and they would make it, every time, even if the word didn’t appear in the document.
What did help my writing was: smart critiques from smart people, and studying good novels.
Some sad news: Jim Butcher’s latest novel Ghost Story has been pushed back from it’s original publication date in April to July 26th.
Unfortunately, that was the publication date for Circle of Enemies, but because Harry Dresden casts such a long shadow, Ray Lilly has been bumped back by one month; the new publication date is August 30, 2011.
I know that will annoy readers who have been waiting for the new book. Sorry. It can’t be helped.
First, the preamble. Posts like this need a little stage dressing, because there are so many folks out there with a My Favorite Argument[1] at the ready and I don’t want to be distracted by the Usual Conversation.
There have been lots of posts about ebook piracy recently. Some folks are furious about it. Some consider it a mild annoyance. Some don’t much care. Some frequent torrent sites to steal books.
Oh, but they don’t like that word “steal.” More than once I’ve heard people say that downloading an ebook without paying for it isn’t stealing because the author/publisher/bookstore still has their copy. How can it be stealing if they don’t deprive the owner of the item?
Well, intellectual property isn’t the same as a Hibachi, and words, miraculous things that they are, often have more than one meaning.
Standup comics have long policed their own when it came to stealing jokes. Bradley Manning is commonly said to have stolen government secrets to give to Wikileaks. Mattel accused MGA of stealing the Barbie concept for their Bratz line. This isn’t a crazy new use of the word.
Now, let me pause a moment to say this: I personally think ebook piracy is a mild annoyance when I think about it at all, and the times I think about it are a) when Google Alerts emails me that my book has appeared on a torrent site and b) when a bunch of people blog about it. I usually shrug and delete the Google Alert messages without clicking through to the sites, and I skim the blog posts.
What does bug me, and maybe this is evidence that I’m seriously screwed up or something, is when people pretend that stealing isn’t stealing, or that they aren’t doing anything wrong, or that what they’re doing somehow helps the person they’re taking from. I don’t really care that that they did it and I’m not interested in why, but don’t try to convince me that it’s perfectly fine.
Seriously. I know the RIAA acted horribly a few years ago. I know they victimized people. But you know what? Victimized is not the same as virtuous. What the RIAA did was pernicious and out-of-proportion, but it didn’t make illicit file sharing all right.[2]
So, if you download books without paying for them, don’t pretend what you’re doing isn’t wrong. Embrace it! You saw something, you wanted it, you took it! Maybe it was inconveniently unavailable in the format you wanted. Maybe you didn’t want to wait for http://www.bookdepository.com/ and their free worldwide shipping. Maybe you already own the book in another format and want a backup copy. Maybe you refuse to pay above a certain price. Maybe you think writing as a profession is going to go out with manual typewriters (I’ve seriously seen this argument made, that writers didn’t deserve to be paid for their work). It doesn’t matter! You wanted, you took. Own your truth.
That’s the preamble. To repeat, I’m not much interested in ebook piracy as an act, I don’t think about it often and I’m generally bored by discussions of it. Mostly, I’m not interested in back and forthing over the rightness or wrongness of it. I’m more annoyed with the justifications than the actual stealing.
This is the main point I wanted to make in this post: Pirated ebooks distort the market.
I know some people believe that ebook piracy doesn’t cost them a dime. I see their point. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that significant numbers of illicit downloaders would be customers under other circumstances. Some would, but significant numbers? Who knows?
However, I want to quote another line from Ryk’s post which I’ve seen stated elsewhere so often that I think it’s becoming accepted wisdom:
There is only ONE way to mitigate this activity; make the book available easily, very cheaply, online. This is why iTunes makes billions; they recognized that people WILL pay for stuff, but they won’t pay what they think are excessive prices, and they won’t pay ANYTHING if it takes them ANY effort to go looking for it, sign into some arcane website…
And… well… if most of them wouldn’t be customers anyway, what’s the point of looking at the iTunes model, which is meant to bring casual bandits down from the mountain passes? There’s a disconnect there, but it’s an understandable one. We want everyone to be our readers, don’t we? Theoretically. But what about this?
Hardbacks are more expensive to produce than paperbacks, but they’re not that much more expensive. The difference in price reflects, in part, that a certain number of an author’s fans want the new book so badly that they’ll pay hardcover prices. Less fervent fans wait for the paperback. That’s pricing based on demand.
But a lot of intellectual property is no longer being sold based on demand, or what the market will bear. It’s being sold based on what will be so trivially easy and cheap for consumers that they won’t steal the product instead. And the more demand there is, the more likely it will be stolen, so there is no chance to price accordingly.
And what do you call that? Klepto-capitalism? Appeasement Capitalism? Ransom Pricing? Along with the so-called Kindlegarteners, who have been screaming about ebook pricing (with Amazon.com’s explicit permission), this just drives home the idea that the work novelists do is so trivial that taking it without paying is no big deal.
Maybe, as ebook devices increase their market share, more readers will need to be steered toward an iTunes-like (ie, cheap and convenient) store to prevent them from just stealing the books. And while I don’t much care whether this person or that torrents my book, I do dislike the idea that theft has a downward pressure on the amount of money I can make from my work.
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[1] For those who have forgotten or where reading here the last time I touched on this, MFA explained: People typically have arguments that they like to have. When there’s a subject they feel passionate about, and they believe they have a strong, righteous take on it, they’ll often turn a discussion on a tangential issue into a chance to trot out My Favorite Argument, because it’s comfortable and easy.
[2] And, since some people will wonder: no, I don’t have any pirated music. Nor do I have pirated books, films, or software. It’s all freeware or paid for.
1) Why you shouldn’t text and walk. Video.
2) Five self-defense books for women who want to lose a fight. Comic Life put to good use, I say. via Martha Wells.
3) Casey Kasem might curse at me for following a funny bit with a sad one, but Reading as Comfort.
4) Perspective on the “Tiger Mother” book, via Douglas Triggs. It’s interesting to hear the way the WSJ edited Chua’s book to make it seem like she’d written a manual for creating “model minority” children. And by “interesting” I mean “fucked up.”
5) Nothing is Forgotten. A webcomic.
6) Pixar’s sculpture zoetrope. Wow. Video. via Tor.com
7) “But if you’re going to go there, you have to go there. If this feels safe, comfortable, or affirming, you’ve done something wrong.” Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Confederacy, but there’s a lot to think about for anyone who needs to do a little world-building.
1) Charles Stross gives both Child of Fire and Game of Cages a thumbs up. “More, dammit!”
2) LiveJournaler Zornhau liked Child of Fire very much. “Imagine James Elroy characters on a fast-paced, shit-kicking mission in a Stephen King small town horror scenario, underpinned by a cosmology so coldly alien that by comparison the Lovecraft Mythos seems anthropomorphic and anthropocentric…”
3) LiveJournaler Spartezda enjoyed Game of Cages a great deal. “Urban fantasy with smart interesting opposition for the MC, fast-paced action, a clear-eyed take on the issues it raises, and an intriguing magic system that we’re slowly learning more about.”
4) Game of Cages received a terrific review from Colleen R. Cahill for the Fast Forward Contemporary Science Fiction video podcast. “Fans of Jim Butcher and Dean Knootz will find Game of Cages a great book, with plenty of excitement and thrills; this is one worth ignoring the cover and diving in.” That’s a link to the direct transcript of the review, but there’s no video to watch. Apparently, this is from October, but I didn’t know about it until Google Alerts found the blog post announcing it last week. They do have an interview with Jane Linskold still, which is pretty cool.
5) Priscilla at Cult of Lincoln really enjoyed Child of Fire. “Superb. I love the costliness of the magic system–it brings a freshness into the urban fantasy genre.” But I had to turn to Google to find out who Kristin Chenowith is.
6) Former SFBC editor and current book-a-day blogger (among other things) Andrew Wheeler gave Game of Cages an excellent review a short while ago, and now, in his end-of-year roundup, he’s named that book best of September over some pretty stiff competition: “… an urban fantasy that short-circuts miles of the standard justifications and romanticizations of the genre.”
7) Rich Brassell calls Game of Cages “pretty decent stuff.” It’s another instance of a reader looking forward to the next book in a series when they only gave it three out of five stars. I wouldn’t follow any series that got fewer than four stars, but there you go.
If you see a bank robber take your three-days-from-retirement partner hostage, he may order you to stand back.
If you see a squad of soldiers aiming their weapons at a newly-discovered ally, you can tell them to stand down.
If you win the high noon quick-draw shootout with the evil sheriff, you can stand over his corpse.
If you have to give a valedictorian speech, you can stand on a podium.
If your friend has been falsely accused of leaking state secrets to the super-terrorists, you can stand behind her.
However, if you’ve decided you no longer want to sit in that chair, you do not have to stand up. You can just stand. No direction needed.
That is all.
My wife and son have just left me here alone while he gets an eye check up. Wish we had vision insurance, but what can you do? The boy can’t see.
I just finished listening to Nancy Pearl on our local NPR affiliate, KUOW. She recommended Jo Walton’s new novel along with Gail Carriger’s SOULLESS. I sent them an email mentioning Cherie Priest’s BONESHAKER, but Nancy Pearl brought up her name before they had a chance to read it on air.
They didn’t mention my books.
Which disappointed my wife, but I didn’t expect it. I don’t think the Twenty Palaces books are quite up her alley, to steal a cliche. Too dark, I think. Even if she had read them (and as a fan of hers, I wrote a personal note for the folks at Del Rey to send with her review copy–I even have a Nancy Pearl Action Figure but it’s an older, less flashy version) I’m not sure I would have passed her Rule of 50. Which is fine; no writer should expect that their book be loved by every reader everywhere. In fact, god forbid.
Anyway, the fam is out and Warren Olney has been turned off (I like his show, but his voice has a quality that’s hard to ignore) so I can dig in to the copy edit of Circle of Enemies. I lost the whole day yesterday dealing with my blown knee, but I’m less than 60 pages from the end, and I’d like to finish tonight.
Then, finally, I’ll be able to write a post or two about some of the things that have come up lately, like putting a direction behind the word “stand” and on the need to figure theft of your product when setting price points.
Back to it.
