Capitalism and Contracts

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

(Or the tragic story of Ogg, Mogg and an innocent rock.)

So, once more I’m late – this time because I actually got new glasses, but the guy who was supposed to cut the lenses came in late and… — but yay, I can see.  No, seriously.  Being able to see whether I just typed in an e or an a, and whether the punctuation I put in was a period or a comma is a great relief.  Maybe I’ll get headaches less often, too.  (No, not that type of headaches.  Those remain.  Kate Paulk has suggested – because someone took the name Sarah the Slightly Mad for art, that I should fly under the flag of Sarah I Just Get These Headaches.  I will not comment on that.)  Tomorrow – for those who are nagging me via email – I shall go see the doctor, because I have at least bronchitis for sure, and I’m afraid of walking pneumonia.  I’m almost sure it’s not strep, because the throat ache followed by my voice going away just happens as a reaction to stress anyway.  So if you meet me at a con and I rasp at you, it’s probably a sign I’m holding it all in to keep the brown stuff from hitting the air-moving apparatus, and it’s a good time to either stand (way) clear or gleefully join in.

As for what specific kind of mustard got up my nose this week, that is a long, long story and instead…

Hey, let’s talk contracts.  No, not anyone’s contracts in particular.  However, I came across a bizarre notion that got up my nose in a curious way.  There was a comment left at a friend’s blog to the extent that if she expected a fair contract out of a publisher she was living in a “socialist dream paradise.”

Oh, wally, wally, wally – where to start?

Is that what they’re teaching in school these days?  That only socialism can make contracts “fair”?  Because let me tell you that’s the sort of bunk that bunk washes off its shoes after cleaning the bunk’s septic tank. It is also particularly pernicious if this is what writers believe going into a career.

First let’s talk about what a contract is, why it exists, and why it was established by humanity at all.  A contract is a written instrument to record an agreement for an exchange between two parties – because  human memory is fallible, and humans are mortal, but chiseled stone is forever.  Okay – these days we don’t chisel it in stone, but while paper isn’t forever, properly kept it is still more durable than human memory, human intentions or human life.

I always read all my contracts carefully, and determine if there’s something in them I can’t live with.  These days, I run them by my lawyer, too.  I think at this point I’ve indentured my kids to look after him in his old age, he’s helped me so much (and I can see him running away screaming if he reads this.  He’s met my kids.  Come on.  At least Robert will be nice and ALMOST certainly not experiment on you!)

Do I remember all the mental compromises I made, in every contract, at this point?  Oh, heck no.  In fact, at least one contract still extant, I SWEAR I read completely differently, d*mn it, in case you wonder why I’m not continuing the musketeer vampire series.  Ah well, I didn’t have a lawyer at the time, and this will have to be dealt with, or endured.

BUT that’s why I have stuff written down.  And they have stuff written down.  That way we know what we agreed to.

The earliest contracts were in baked clay tablets.  But you can look up at that stuff yourself.

Let’s continue exploring what a contract is – or what a deal is, since a contract is the hard-copy expression of a deal.

A deal is when you want something from someone and someone wants something from you and you decide to exchange one thing for another.  Say in prehistory Ogg had a pretty rock, and Mogg had a rock-polishing fur, and Ogg got Mogg to polish his rock in exchange for letting Mogg hold the rock now and… Hey, stop that, minds off the gutter.  This is a goram family blog!

Sometimes of course a contract is not for an exchange but for something you’re starting together.  (Leave Ogg, Mogg and their rock alone, right now.  Some privacy, please!  What happens in the stone age, stays in the stone age.)  A partnership in a business is a deal, solidified (if you’re smart) by a contract.  If you get together to sell gadgets, and one of you brings the money and the other the gadget expertise, the contract sets out what worth each of your contributions have, and how much you should get of the proceeds of the business.  A marriage is also a contract, though the proceeds you divide might not (in the sense that both of you might work and keep finances more or less independently.  I never knew a couple who kept separate finances and stayed married, but that might just be my experience) be monetary.  They might be “mutual companionship/comfort/trust.”  Or they might be raising kids together.  And though we don’t think of marriage as a contract, it certainly is, one so common that there are established forms for it. (Yes, it can be a sacrament too, but at its most basic, legalistic, secular sense, it’s a contract.)

Now I know what the feminists have to say about how marriage oppresses women and what the heck, but like most of what they say these days, they have hold of the wrong end of the stick.

Is it possible to be coerced into a contract?  Oh, brother, let’s talk about it sometime.  I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Is this a direct condition of capitalism, making fair contracts a “socialist dream”?  Pfui.  And bah.  Also snort.  It is a condition of capitalism gone bad.  The reason I ended up signing some really bad contracts was that publishing was an oligopsony, i.e. a form of market where the sellers are many and the buyers are few.  I won’t say this doesn’t occur in a free-market capitalism.  I will say though that usually when it gets to that point there are influences that require the market be not-quite-free and the society too.

And yet I signed those contracts of my own free will, judging the benefits of signing them – getting my work into print and in the hands of readers – worth the hair-of-the-dog clauses, the uncertain financial reporting, and all the rest, as well as taking 97% of the proceeds.  The fact that at the time it was take that or never be published doesn’t mean I was coerced into it.  I could have walked away whistling and put the manuscripts in the drawer to wait a better time.  (And if I’d known indie was coming down the pike, I’d have done just that – I’d have submitted ONLY to Baen.  Ah, well.  One of you invent a way to send a message back in time.)  I signed that deal because I thought the benefits of signing outweighed the benefits of letting my work rot in a drawer.

If I remember, the gentleman commenting on my friend’s blog also went on about publishing being a business.  Indeed it is.  In fact, it was the form of business known as an oligopsony, which is a symptom of a business in its terminal stages of divorce from demand, so that what it’s supplying is not wanted – which usually leads to the death of the business.  The beautiful thing about capitalism is not that it always creates fair situations, but that really bad business models tend to crash.  Now this is not fun for anyone involved in the crash, but it clears the air wonderfully.  The market usually finds a way to go around constipation, if you will.  The resultant eruption might smell bad and look worse, but it might also save the economy.

The whole point is that publishing is a business and, if it’s working properly, it is not an oligopsony, because while there might be a million writers, they’re not all widgets.  I.e. they’re not all alike.

When I ran a magazine in a very small way, I only bought stories I liked and thought would improve my business.  That is, I only paid for what I thought had value.  I didn’t buy stories blinding off the slush pile.  (And it’s amazing, btw, how few stories were both good enough and suited our concept.)  That means it was in my interest to pay the best I could and to treat my writers decently, so more good quality writers would submit to me and my business would flourish.

And it was in the interest of the writers to send me good stories and not to cheat on the contract by selling me plagiarized material or material they’d already sold elsewhere.  This way they avoided taking my business down and doing themselves out of a market.

That’s how a deal works.  Win/win.

The late extant oligopsony (I like that word.  Deal) instead thought of themselves as not a business but an instrument for changing the world.  So they ignored what the readers wanted to read and published what they thought would be good for the readers to read “take your medicine” being the operative word.  This is, to put it mildly, the road to ruin.  In the process they abused writers whom they viewed as interchangeable widgets provided the “right” opinions were expressed.

What remains of the oligopsony is still playing that sort of games.  “If you want to get published give me the rights to everything you’ll ever write, and throw in your first born.”

I suspect the gentleman who left the comment on my friend’s blog was of that mindset and came up through that system.  And no, the cure for that system wasn’t socialism, ie. A third party that will not suffer any consequences of the contract inserting itself in and telling you what you might agree upon for your mutual benefit.  Those tend to end in tears.

However, whether the gentleman knows it or not, the oligopsony is more or less dead or dying.  (Ask not to know for whom the oligo opsonies, it opsonies for thee!)  For one it is no longer an oligopsony, since you can just publish your stuff yourself or choose from an array of small or micro presses offering a dizzying array of possibilities.

So this idea that a contract would never be fair to a writer – which seems to hinge on the idea that what the writer does has no value to the company, an idea dying with the controlled market of the oligopsony – is not only insane, but pernicious if you’re the writer.

You have options.  You have alternatives.  Anyone who tells you that you don’t is not only selling something but the something is not worth having.

In the end, what you’re doing when you sell a story is licensing your copyright in exchange for certain benefits.  Look carefully at the benefits offered and make sure they’re worth the story copyright.

I’m not your mother.  I’m not going to wipe your nose for you or make sure your feet are dry.  You think through what you want and what each contract gives you.  Keep in mind that the inventor of monopoly got a pittance.  But then balance that against the fact that had he not sold the rights, it might have been kept in his drawer all his life and he might have got even less.

There are no easy choices in life – most of the time – and no one pays a fortune for you to come over and eat ice cream, unless there’s a chance the ice cream is poisoned.  Value for value remember?  You’re selling a copyright in exchange for something of value.

Just always remember that if your copyright didn’t have value, no one would be offering to buy it.  Value your work and take some pride in it – if not, what’s the point of doing it?

And always make sure you don’t give away more than you can afford to lose.

After all, if Mogg polishes Ogg’s rock to a nubbin, what does Ogg have.  (Okay, that.  Never mind.)

Go forth.  Value your work.  Always read the fine print.  Remember contracts are for when the worst happens, not the best.  And don’t take any wooden nickels.

273 thoughts on “Capitalism and Contracts”

  1. My first contract was when I was 13 and sold an article to Dragon magazine.

    I read the whole thing over and found out that I was just selling “first serial rights”, and retained all other rights.

    25 years later, when TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast was bought by Hasbro, and my article got republished without a follow up payment, I sued, represented myself, and won.

    Read your contracts!

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    2. And the story of how TSR got bought by WotC and why is an interesting one in and of itself. Also how buying Ral Partha killed FASA.

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        1. Ral Partha made miniatures, primarily the Battletech minis. From what i heard when i was in the industry, Ral Partha sold out to FASA with a significant number of improper disposal fines, and those fines suddenly became FASA’s problem.

          The TSR thing was a huge number of book returns that suddenly made oit impossible for them to ship anything. They actually had books they couldn’t afford to ship, already printed, and couldn’t afford their next printing. Also, there was a sudden spike in ink prices around that time.

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  3. Interestingly enough it is technology that created the oligopsony and technology which scared the oligopsony into such harsh terms. Jules Verne’s publisher Hetzel only had a few writers. Then along came the typewriter and now it became a tad bit easier to proof read; but publishers, in the main, farmed out the printing. Even the big houses, like Harper’s only had a few novel authors. Then the linotype machine came along. And that changed everything. Moreover, publishers were now scared authors would simply take their work to other printers, it being a _lot_ less expensive to set a book. Between 1890 and 1915 the number of publishers dropped by over half…mostly through acquisition such as Hetzel’s firm was in 1914. Now there are six big houses. And tech scares the crap out of them because tech allows a return to the successful micro-publisher.

    You can see this more in depth over at your friends blog.

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    1. The tech giveth, the tech taketh away, glad the oligopsony is getting out of the way.

      (Focuses new glasses. Why it IS a mammoth with quills. Didn’t I bully you into doing a guest post for me? If not, why not?)

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      1. I will expand a post since your posts average a far larger word count. I have much to expand on the effect of technology on the written word and on contract law. There is a reason Twain insisted all of his publishing contracts be hand written.

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  4. Contracts are a vital part of free markets and hence to increased prosperity. They do however implicitly rely on an impartial legal system because without one there’s not much point unless you happen to have an army at your beck and call.

    And talking of oligopsonies and oligopolies there’s the whole Apple thing. I spent some time reading the verdict and boy oh boy. I find it mind boggling that anyone involved from Jobs to the folks at the various publishers thought they could get away with this. Fortunately the US does still seem to have a reasonably impartial legal system

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    2. Silicon Valley is pretty much a two-degrees-of-Steve-Jobs place. If you ever have a chance to talk to anyone who had met Steve Jobs, or did business with him especially outside of Apple (I had an amazing talk once with someone who did landscape architecting for him – Just Wow.), your mind would be conveniently pre boggled as to the abundance of hubris he carried into any interaction. If he wanted to do something, then he did it until he got stopped.

      Steve Jobs did some amazing things, but humble he was not.

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      1. Even the hagiography masquerading as his biography lists some truly astonishingly arrogant acts by Jobs. Frankly, I’ve always been nauseated by the worship of him (one of the things I tease Stephen Green about is his Applefanboi routine).

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        1. Well, he did (with Wozniak – who is a much nicer guy) found Apple, and upon his return he saved Apple from going the way of so many other computer startups that are now nothing but phantom remnants and footnotes (see SGI, Atari). He managed the only surviving non-Microsoft OS through many travails to continuing relevancy, and he pretty much singlehandedly drove the iphone/ipad thing to amazing success. In his time in the wilderness he built up Pixar, and finally he established a worldwide market for those mock turtleneck shirt things he wore. Nothing to sneeze at.

          He was pretty much at the same arrogance level as Larry Ellison, with a bit more publicity. OTOH Jobs never bought one of the Hawaiian islands.

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          1. Jobs’ arrogance was a part of what enabled his success; it is the price we pay for a person confident enough to press past the barriers life erects to entrepreneurs and others with visions outside the ordinary.

            It does not excuse or justify the arrogance to recognize it as an essential component of the package. In Jobs’ case much of that arrogance was justified (in contrast to certain political leaders who need not be named.)

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          2. “only surviving non-Microsoft OS”

            Sorry, but wrong. On two counts. First, there are a fair number of non-Microsoft OSes – many, but not all, of them variants of Unix.

            And Apple abandoned its own OS when it adopted OS X – which is just another variant of Unix.

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              2. With Microsoft’s willing help.

                Why the moron responsible for Windows 8 hasn’t been drawn, quartered, and spread to the four corners of Seattle boggles my mind.

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                  2. The idea is to leave reminders around for people to learn from. Maybe make a youtube video and have it be required viewing for UI development staff.

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                    1. Yes I highly recommend a video of the Sea Lions eating the quarters, complete with a close-up of the khaki stuck in their teeth. ;)

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                  1. There’s a reason executioners traditionally wear thick leather gloves.

                    I mean, if that’s the only issue I gladly volunteer my services.

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              3. Linux isn’t the only Unix. True, Android is Linux, and it runs on a huge number of platforms, but Apple’s IOS is based on OS X, which is based on Mach, which is a Unix-variant that isn’t Linux.

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                1. I thought OS X was a BSD variant (also a Unix knock off)
                  My garage laptop is running Ubuntu. It’d be on this one too, but so far Win7 64bit has been fine.

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            2. Well, frankly, the earlier Apple OS was a varient of Unix Berkeley. Its successor was Unix-like but used the Carnegie-Mellon MACH kernel if memory serves.

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              1. The earlier Apple OS was a monolithic, single-tasking system, with a flat file system and rudimentary memory management – to which cooperative “multitasking” and hierarchical file system kludges were later applied. It had nothing in common with BSD.

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            3. Yeah, I thought about going there (MacOS and OS X and Unix and so on), but I was already parenthising quite a bit, going on pretty long already (shocking, I know), and was wandering away from my main point that Jobs was a successful guy, but arrogant as hell, especially to folks to whom he didn’t NEED to be arrogant in order to become or remain successful.

              Yes, the Apple folks originally stole all their GUI ideas from Xerox PARC’s work. Yes, Apple OS is now totally and completely underpinned by Unix. Yes, I skipped right over SunOS, and I didn’t mention ChromeOS either, nor the not-quite-operating-system that is iOS, etc. Yes, there are a wild variety of very strong Linuxish operating systems out there (this machine used to be set up dual boot into a flavor of Debian, and I have a laptop running Ubuntu), and other more obscure operating systems in exisitence… But as far as original PC operating systems (i.e. originating in the PC origin era) in wide use, I’d argue Windows and MacOS were the only two real successes, and I’d also argue Jobs is responsible for one of them even being around long enough to scoop up that Unix back end.

              Hi, I’m Mike, and I’m a tech geek. This is the twelve step meeting, right?

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              1. I think you mean the 0x0B-step meeting. That’s not here, it’s down the hall. You know how it is, the badminton club has the room on Thursdays, there was a bit of a mix-up.*

                * Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night? Whozzat, den? Dunno who ye’re talkin’ about, guv.

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                1. “Is this the zero B one one zero zero step meeting?”

                  (Hey, we do birthday cake candles in binary – is sure saves candles, but we have to explain why some of the candles are not lit every year to my non-tech-industry friends.)

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                  1. I like to give my age in hex: it means I only recently entered my twenties, and it’ll be a while before I’m in my thirties. :-)

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            1. Well, don’t forget the LISA computer, the predecessor of the Mac. Still, he was certainly a force to be reckoned with.

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              1. I never said he was inffallible – but at least he wasn’t responsible for that brick known as the Newton.

                I actually like the LISA – it was just too expensive. The original Mac OS was very heavily based on the LISA work, with all new hardware underneath it.

                I knew people who worked at NeXT – Jobs was at that point clearly driven to prove to the world he should not have been fired by Apple’s board.

                No matter what you think of the technical side of the NeXT computer, in the end Apple’s purchase of NeXT was how Jobs got back in to Apple, and less than a year later he was CEO again, so things worked out for Steve.

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            2. the NeXT OS became one of the foundations upon which OSX was built. I’d say that’s a partial success.

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      2. I know a senior researcher @ apple and a couple of other people who encoutered him while he was there. The words “control freak” tend to appear in conversations, also arogant and opinionated. But if someone he had respect for pointed out flaws in his ideas he would generally listen. The problem was when it was a humble junior

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      3. Which seems to be a defining characteristic of the successful tech company founder; there’s a reason there’s a book titled “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison”

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  5. (First-time poster, having wandered over here from Chaos Manor some time ago and visited occasionally since then.)

    Aside from SFWA membership (which, I gather from your “Alas, SFWA” over at PJMedia—and now Google turn up other similar sentiments you’ve written—you don’t value much) are there other holds the big publishers have over writers to discourage independent publishing?

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    1. Only if you’ve signed stupid contracts (I did some) that don’t let your rights revert. Worse, if you signed contracts (which I haven’t — well, not forever, and it lapsed) giving them rights over everything you’ll ever write. Other than that you’re free.
      Mind you, there might STILL be reasons to write for a publisher. Baen, for instance, has a dedicated fandom and can give you a “lift.”

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    2. Yes, multiple volume options. You sign a contract which has a stipulation that they have first dibs at future work. Looks good…if they don;t like my next novel I’ll shop it elsewhere. Not so. That is the crippling part of teh 70’s RCA contract. It persists to this day where artists are not allowed to publish or put on the internet work they do even if it’s not on a disc produced by the music house. Distressingly the Big Six seem to have found this a Good Thing(tm). And so have some micro-publishing houses that should know better.

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      1. This is probably part of the reason Heinlein ‘s contract with Scribner for his Juveniles had a termination clause effective upon their turning a book down.

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  6. I do find it interesting that human nature is such that the first instinct of most entrepreneurs who clime the mountain of the open market and achieve some measure of success is to “cook the books” in such a way as to prevent anyone else achieving the same level of success. I submit as example the trend towards legislation that requires any large business to maintain a staff of legal experts simply to remain in compliance with the law. Such generally guarantees the failure of any startup company through lack of resources or damage from legal fines and penalties. It’s even reached down to the level of the family farm, see recent post on bugs, weather, and the guy with the clipboard.

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    1. Oh yeah, The Ripoff Press has some of the most ferocious copyright lawyers. That’s why it’s so hard to find the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers on the Web.

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    2. The government abets this, in effect helping to reduce competition.

      Sometimes I think that this is an unintended consequence of politicians and bureaucrats pursuing their narrow self-interest.

      Sometimes I think the government is fully aware that taxes are progressive and acts to maximize its revenues, while serving a different flavor of cynical lie to the voters depending on which party is in power.

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  8. Among my greatest frustrations when reviewing publishing contracts are not – to be honest – the oppressive contracts. They are straight forward business decisions for the client. Is it worth accepting the oppressive clause or not?

    What frustrates me the most are the badly drafted contracts that are unclear, ambiguous and badly worded. Because its harder to counsel my client what to do with a clause that is so badly written that its a guess what it actually means. And because it creates a possible future dispute between the parties as each’s expectations are set by divergent interpretations of those badly written clauses.

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    1. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.
      The publisher has enough resources to litigate, and the author does not. Automatically puts them in a stronger position

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  9. What of the charge that with indie publishing, it’ll be hard to sort the good writing from the bad? The bad will drive out the good, since the reader has no way of telling if he’s reading “good writing” or not and thus the good writers will stay away unless backed by a traditional publisher.

    I guess the “preview” feature helps out with this. Don’t buy an indie book that has no preview. :)

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      1. The argument goes that traditionally published books at least meet a minimum standard of quality, free of typos, cliches, amateurish description, etc., since authors had to put hours into their craft to even reach that point.

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                  2. The worst features to the consumer of oligopsonies, cartels, monopolies, and companies that are effectively the only major player in a niche are higher prices and lower quality.

                    When there’s no competition, human beings are naturally lazy creatures, and will devolve to doing the minimum possible to get by. Whether it’s Publishing “services” by the big six (now five), customer service at the DMV, the price and quality of diamonds available in De Beers-controlled countries (you’re trying to sell me the waste cutting chips, embedded in a ring, for HOW MUCH??), or the amount of innovation and service we got under old Ma Bell, consumers suffer. (And then there’s scheduling warranty repair work on appliances. ‘Because we’re the only shop in town authorized to fix your sears washing machine under warranty, the technician will be there on Thursday, between 8am and 5pm. If he doesn’t show up after you waited at home all day, please call and reschedule for three weeks out.”)

                    Anybody Press is the best thing to happen to the reader. As the many indie books competed against legacy and against each other these last five years, the covers, blurbs, story and copy editing, and marketing have gotten far more sophisticated. Sure, the prices have gone up (though not to the heights demanded by the failing models at the top) as $0.99 becomes the dross pile, but the level of quality has, too.

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                2. The problem is that it isn’t just one publishing house, all books I have read published in the last few years have had numerous typos, regardless of publishing house. Most indy books do to, but practically all of those written and published by established authors are equal to or superior to traditionally published books in the proofreading and typo regard. New authors run the gamut, from those who probably spent way too much time editing and proofreading and have no typos, to those that are writing in EFL (English Fourth Language) with an incomplete grasp of not only grammar, but the language itself, and never bother to read over their first draft before publishing. Unless someone else has read them and can give you a negative or positive recommendation, the only real way to find out is to read at least part of their book. This is why the preview function is good, or the free promotional story, it lets you check out a new author without investing your hard earned cash.

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                  2. When the publisher offered Newton an error sheet for Principia, Newton said in effect why bother? Anybody competent to read it will make his own corrections.

                    I’m inclined to forgive such errors in books I otherwise like mostly by authors I otherwise like, otherwise not.

                    I’ve been burned by reading ARCs of books on my must read regardless list that were bad enough to ruin the experience.

                    I’ve also noticed that some authors can rattle off every single error or mistake in a given edition of their own books but not others. Like the movies where the part of the Winchester 73 is played by the Winchester 94 and the part of the cap and ball revolver is played by the Colt single action Army (Bonanza say was cap and ball era but all the holsters were filled by single action army Colts and Great Western cartridge guns with a nod to the period by omitting bullet loops from the gun belts) I’ll try to put up with things.

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                    1. Hondo, where in the same conversation they mention the date as 1872, and that the soldiers are using model 73’s (hint: the model was named after they year it was first produced.)

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        2. I suppose a standard will evolve in which the editor’s logo will appear on the spine where the publisher’s imprint is today.

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          1. The point is that some form of gatekeeper will evolve, since readers need a mark of quality to know that the title is worth the money.

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            1. I’m REALLY not sure they do. It’s more like people choose their level. Look, I spent years reading fan fic. You adjust your expectations, specially say in Austen fandom where many writers are ESL. You just go “oh, that’s because she’s from India” and after a while don’t even notice it. Readers are USED to gatekeepers, but that seems to matter less and less. Yes, some readers will want impeccably proofed or whatever books, but, judging by popularity and number of comments you’d be amazed by how many people prefer never-resolving, meandering soap-opera plots, bad grammar and bathos. Who are we to decide how our neighbors should enjoy themselves? Making reading enjoyable is the goal, not what people SHOULD enjoy.

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              2. Anyone pushing the value of gatekeepers needs to explain how those gatekeepers came so close to keeping Harry Potter from being published. There are numerous other such stories of authors meeting closed doors before ultimately breaking in and becoming phenomenally popular — and no way to guess how very many authors who might easily prove more popular but couldn’t break through.

                Gatekeeper contributions to success suffer from post hoc, ergo proctor hoc issues ad infinitum.

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                1. In a far more minor scale, my first short was an honorable mention in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (take it for what it’s worth.) It also gathered EIGHTY rejections before selling including some from “pays in copies” magazines.
                  Oh, and Darkship Thieves, at the moment my most profitable book was in a drawer for fourteen years, because my agents refused to submit it, let alone editors rejecting it.

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              3. Yes, some readers will want impeccably proofed or whatever books, but, judging by popularity and number of comments you’d be amazed by how many people prefer never-resolving, meandering soap-opera plots, bad grammar and bathos.

                The main stream news?!?!?!

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            2. There’s a difference here: “Gatekeeper” implies one agency letting some books to market, with others being kept out. A “mark of quality” (or even better a raft of different “marks of quality”) that differentiate books on the open market, with no requirement that any book sold have such a mark, is a rather different thing.

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              1. But the mark implies a certain quality, so you know you’re getting your money’s worth. People will more likely spend scarce entertainment dollars on something likely to be good.

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                2. Which is why I mostly avoid mainstream SFF. It’s generally not stuff I enjoy reading, so yes publisher marks do indeed signal something, just not quite what they hope for. The only publisher I buy reliably is Baen, and there’s a reason for that

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                  1. Let me guess: they don’t insult you and lord it over you with sanctimonious moralizing.

                    I’ve been reading Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International and while he lets slip some politics, most of the story is focused on the conflict at hand rather then beating the reader over the head with a moral. It’s a good style to have.

                    If I want to listen to a sermon, I’d go to a church.

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                    1. Not really, Ringo and Kratman, and even Williamson and Flint can’t be accused of writing apolitically, it is just than Baen chooses stories for the story, rather than for the politics. They are often accused of being right-wingers, when actually they publish authors of all political types, it is just that the other publishers stick strictly to left-wing authors.

                      I don’t consider Ringo and Kratman ‘lording it over me’ but if I was a leftist liberal I might. On the other hand you can’t get much more left-wing than a card carrying communist, and Eric Flint writes for them also. The common thread is they all write stories that people want to read, rather than stories that conform to the publishers political worldview.

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                    5. Well Luce seems not to like sermons either so such sermons as may be in it tend to be rather short

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            3. As a consumer I know that I’d *like* to have someone else sort through and find what’s not completely horrible. I would think that it would be a useful service if someone could figure out how to make money doing it.

              Getting free samples or free stories as a promotion might do it well enough, though, without having a middle person add that value.

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              1. In a way, I think this is what the also-bought on the Amazon site is doing. It’s a very kludgy form of word of mouth – “I can’t tell you why, or what they thought of it, but people who paid good money for this book also paid good money for these other ones, and often enough there might be something to ’em.”

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          2. Or you don’t buy anything else from that writer. Don’t forget that you can get samples of most kindle books. Don’t forget also trad books are far from clean — I know. I’m going over some of my old ones…

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        3. Not actually true. And the houses added historical mistakes to my books. No, really. I don’t mind the fresh from college (?) copyeditors, but I do mind alterations after page proofs.

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          1. Sounds pretty bad. But what about the idea that indie has simply exposed the slush pile for the world to see?

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            1. It’s false. First, most of the really bad writers I know refuse to go indie. I’m not sure why, but my guess would be “they wrote one book. It was hell to do. They want a million dollars advance. They want it yesterday.” I’m not sure why but most people who REALLY can’t write are in it for the ‘validation’ (Some people who can are too, but never mind that.) Perhaps they feel something is lacking? Or perhaps they spend more time trying to do the “cool thing” — promote, go to cons, hobnob — than write and the art suffers?
              Second most people who are truly appallingly bad put one book up then give up when it does go mega bestseller. I’m not sure if talent correlates to persistence and ability to plan. Heck, I’m not sure talent exists, or only craft.
              BUT the truly appalling books — below trad — are easy to spot. The description is usually eye-crossingly bad, and if not the first page is. And few of them go anywhere. So, you get very few “slush like” experiences. Or at least I do. Also, you learn to avoid certain names.

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              1. I’m not sure why but most people who REALLY can’t write are in it for the ‘validation’ (Some people who can are too, but never mind that.) Perhaps they feel something is lacking?

                I’m guessing that they see the J. K. Rowlings and Suzanne Collinses and want a piece of that, with the red carpets, talk show interviews, and movie deals. They don’t see the backstory that went into those people’s success, the sheer perseverance and laboring in obscurity, the unsexy work of drafting and revising — all while juggling job and family responsibilities — that made those authors the successes they were.

                Though this guy is a comic book author, he explains, in an understated way, what it took. He has a relaxed schedule now, but he didn’t have it starting out. Keep in mind that a chapter per week is pretty darn grueling.

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                1. Awesome interview – thanks for posting it!

                  Yeah, some of these are the same sorts of people who come up and say “I’ve got this great idea. You should write a book on it, and we’ll make millions.” … …
                  I’ve also run into them saying “I’ve got an idea for an awesome webcomic, but I need someone else to do the illustrations, and to set up and run the website.”

                  I’m not sure, honestly, if they’re afraid of the work involved, or afraid of the failure they’ll risk by putting themselves out there with all the work. Or both.

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                  1. No such thing as an “ideas guy” because ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementations are what you want.

                    Probably the work involved scares people off.

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        4. I’ve got several Mercedies Lackey books for folks who claim such to see, among other books… in one especially bad case, her characters ransack a camp twice, in different manners.

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              2. ” … his Riverworld series” in the first novel of which he killed Mark Twain on an almost daily basis.

                Don’t you hate it when you realize you left off the punchline?

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              1. SFWA started trashing writers with different views early in its existence. Van Vogt (see the recent Transgalactic paperback reissue and listen to the podcast) was roundly if not soundly criticized by Damon Knight for The World of Null A though in that book what it meant for Gilbert Gosseyn to die is debatable. He was around for sequels though. Rogue Moon and such also raise the issue of identity and the meaning of death with a character dying many times and alive at the end.

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                  1. Farmer suffered from a tendency to get so immersed in the tale he was telling that he would forget where it was going and wander off into side trips, bunny trails and digressions before eventually reaching the end of the book and hastily wrapping up everything he could think of to conclude. The fact that a character death could be of such little consequence as to go unnoticed suggests interesting things about the field at that time.

                    The Tiers books were not the worst instance of this; the Riverworld books were so extremely unfocused that we can only pray he was a pantser because nobody who actually plotted like that should be allowed out unsupervised.

                    I sometimes suspect his spirit of possessing George R. R. Martin.

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                    2. *RimSHOT* Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week. Try the veal: it’s simply exquisite. And remember to tip Our Hostess. She works really hard. Or hardly works. I can never remember how that one ends. . .

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        5. Sarah actually covered this in a post several months ago (no, I’m not suggesting you try to dig through a couple hundred posts to try to find it). Basically, it seems that the traditional publishing houses, presumably because of their stranglehold on the market, have dropped the ball in this regard, and that while what you say was quite a bit more true in the past, it has pretty much fallen off the cliff in the past 20-30 years.

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          1. I REALLY need to get used to reading further down a thread before commenting. I hate finding out that the comment I thought was going to be just a couple down from the one I was replying to is nearly halfway down the page.

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      2. Not only have a I read really bad books from traditional publishers, I’ve barely started getting myself to not finish obvious junk. And to try the library, since they don’t label potato-chip mysteries “this is stuffed with political junk.”

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        1. GROAN. I call them bubble-gum mysteries, and the political junk is what broke my habit. I used to read six a day. I’ve been re-reading for a while, and I’m only NOW starting to try indie ones. Yeah, some are stupid, but few are AS politically stupid as the trad ones.

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            1. I read fiction so much for the story that I barely notice political stupidity, even now, unless it’s at least the third time through.

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              1. I’ve gotten to where I’ll notice but go on if the story is good enough..but things like the “sneaky pie brown” books, I’m shocked to find aren’t even an interesting trip to the solution.

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          2. I found a few geological murder mysteries in the local library. The gal who writes them is a geologist out in your neck of the woods, Sarah. They have a lot of science in them. In one, she points out that if you suck all of the water out of a mile-deep aquifer it ain’t never coming back, because the mile of rock on top of it will defeat any attempts to replenish it.

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            1. “geological murder mysteries”???

              Death By Glacier?
              Pinned a mere ten feet ahead of the onrushing glacier, watching its massive bulk crush everything in its path, Pierre knew he had mere decades to escape!

              I guess The Caldera of Doom would be a better approach.

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      3. Vastly more traditionally published works have made the thrown-against-the-wall-flight due to pure crappiness in my reading lifetime than have indie ebooks made the virtual-thrown-against-the-wall flight equivalent of deleted-without-finishing.

        Sure, the standard deviation in quality is greater in indie, but shopping indie ebook offerings is much more like the hours I spent in my youth browsing through the truly massive SF stacks of any of the several local paperback emporia, vs. the modern experience of visiting the tiny combined SF/F area in my one remaining local brick and mortar bookstore.

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        1. Sure, the standard deviation in quality is greater in indie, but shopping indie ebook offerings is much more like the hours I spent in my youth browsing through the truly massive SF stacks of any of the several local paperback emporia, vs. the modern experience of visiting the tiny combined SF/F area in my one remaining local brick and mortar bookstore.

          Indie is, essentially, the new pulp. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

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          1. Indie is, essentially, the new pulp. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

            The pulp era was one characterized by a wide open marketplace. It is only when publishers start trying to ensure “respectability” that the pruning becomes problematic.

            Publishers would perhaps do well to focus more recruiting on book store clerks and less on colleges.

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            1. In the pulp era, plenty of writers and artists were making a darned good living, and new writers and artists had a wide-open market for submissions as well as plenty of peers. Probably the most prosperous American literary era ever.

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              1. The vast majority of the big name authors throughout the Golden Age got their start in the pulps. Louis L’amour claimed it was the best way to learn to write, because the competition was fierce, you learned to write a good story that most of all, Moved!

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                1. He meant the competition between publishers was fierce, so they actually bought stories that grabbed readers attention and held it.

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              2. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that a higher proportion of Americans were ACTUALLY literate… as opposed to having gone through an elementary school graduation. Grrrrr!

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        2. The funny thing is that I’m more likely to read “out of genre” in indie, and have found some very nice books I’d never even see in a physical bookstore. They usually share a theme — look for WWI mysteries, and you get other mysteries set in wars, and also Christian fic of WWI and II and… — but I’d never have stumbled on them otherwise.

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          1. This is certainly true, though it’s also a source of frustration with Amazon’s really very odd categorizations (“They called this book a WHAT?” “What do you mean that don’t have a category for ‘military SF’?”) when I try to e-browse, especially using the interface on the Kindle itself. And Amazon’s recommendations algorithm can be uniquely absurd at times. But at least there’s a relatively large pool of titles to actually browse through.

            The thing is, those old paperback emporiums had probably 30 or 40 feet of 8 ft tall bookshelves absolutely stuffed with paperbacks. Remaining modern physical bookstores are lucky to have 12 ft of 4 ft tall shelving for SF/F, mostly with hardcovers, and lucky therefore to be offering maybe 100 titles max, and that’s way more gatekeeper-ing than quality control-ing, and for me just not worth the effort.

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            2. “. And Amazon’s recommendations algorithm can be uniquely absurd at times.”

              No, really?

              I admit I might have confused it by ordering a book on scientific dog breeding and one of Amanda’s Nocturnal books at the same time. But when it combined those two and decided, “You might like… The Werewolf Breeding Cycle: erotic romance” (No that isn’t probably the actual title, but it was something about werewolves and breeding, and labeled erotic romance or erotica in the title) I had to scratch my head.

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              1. Scientific dog breeding? There is a book on the family tree of Mr. Peabody? Is it true that Rin Tin Tin was a great-uncle of his?

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              2. Try adding kids’ books, cattle breeding stuff for my mom and various cryptozoology stuff…. oh, and my husband surfing for Catholic stuff for a surprise Christmas present three years back…

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                1. Yep, or ninja rubber ducks, a book on pirates, Robert Hoyt’s Catskiller (good book), an exercycle, and a machete.

                  It’s not what you think… some of those were gifts…

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                  1. Oh, gad, I’d forgotten about family gifting!

                    *shudder*

                    They need a “no, really, I’m not interested in that– it was a blind link from the web that wasn’t what I thought” button.

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                    1. They do have a manage your recommendations section, down at the bottom of the page, but who ever takes the time?

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                    2. I worry that you’re coming frighteningly close to invoking your son’s comic characters here. And that is a scary thought.

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                    5. Ach, you are so right, it is indeed ratskiller. And there is much beer, and killing of rats in there. As for whether or not any cats die… well, the rest o’ you will have to read the book to find out!

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                    7. Given cats’ well known propensity for how they respond to being called by name, I am considering, in the event of another cat, the name Ignore Me.

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                    8. Every cat we’d had will come when called.

                      This may be related to having gotten them at a very young age, fed them generously while small, and being prone to using them as garbage disposals randomly… but they come for their standard dry food, too.

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                    9. My main cat not only comes most of the time when called, she will actually answer “mow?”

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                    11. I so fell in love with the story from that guy who saw the then-new Pope sneaking out, pulled of a picture-perfect tail of him to a house in the city…and found out he was feeding cats. No kitties in the Papal Quarters.

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                  1. Hehehe…. my husband’s “recommendations” on Netflix are a hoot after six months of the girls being the only ones watching stuff on it!

                    “Netflix suggests LaLaOopsie because you liked Justice League, Ruby Gloom, Pengu and My Little Pony.”

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          2. Indie allows for some mixing and matching of genres, since there isn’t any gigantic print run or scarce shelf space to restrain risk-taking.

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    2. It was always hard to sort good stuff from bad. At least now we can look at reviews and read a sample in the comfort of our homes, instead of standing in a bookstore. (I’ve been thrown out of bookstores for standing and reading too many beginnings, in three continents!)

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      1. Ah, that. The Japanese have a word for it: “tachiyomi” (literally “standing [tachi] and reading [yomi]). It seems bookstore owners the world over get highly annoyed with that.

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        1. I’ve never been to Japan, otherwise I’d have been thrown out of bookstores there too. I was BANNED in a bookstore in the city where I went to college, though in that case I WAS reading entire books. English-language books were scary expensive — the equivalent of $30 for a paperback in the eighties — because of “culture protecting” tariffs. Eh.

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          1. If they had to levy tariffs on English-language books to “protect the culture,” I’m guessing that studying English was (and is) really popular over there.

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            1. Actually no. Well, not my generation. It was not offered in public schools for a few years, except if your parents jumped through a few hoops. Mine did. Most didn’t. Then it reasserted itself. But this is not like Sweden or such where you learn English in Kindergarten, and even in college, in an English Major, I found very few of my classmates were fluent. HOWEVER all foreign books are taxed. Because otherwise it MIGHT become popular. Or something. (Actually I don’t know how EEC changed that. I know that cable and TV from spain is making Portuguese a dialect of Spanish. Or so it seems to this outsider.)

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              1. HOWEVER all foreign books are taxed. Because otherwise it MIGHT become popular. Or something.

                How does that even work if the people can’t read the thing?

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                1. Sigh. Most people can’t read the thing. the few that can are usually relatively well off. But the purpose is not to collect the tax, but to discourage reading in a foreign language and becoming fluent.

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                  1. Too bad the Internet has pretty much torpedoed that strategy. They’ll need a Great Firewall to keep people from reading English now.

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          2. Anybody remember the story which I recall as true but maybe it wasn’t – one of the eventually great and famous in the literary world was reading a book he couldn’t afford in stages at the bookstore. One day he found the money to actually buy it and rushed to the store where he found the book off the shelf and behind the counter. Pleading his right to be the buyer the bookstore owner said they existed to serve readers and he had pulled the book for fear it would be sold before the customer could get it all read piecemeal.

            Jacques Barzun said a good editor was thing of beauty and joy forever but it was hard to find somebody to do a better job than he did on his own. On one of his books the copy editor made a change saying the house used the American Heritage Dictionary as the final authority so the change was necessary. Mr. Barzun said that the American Heritage Dictionary used him as its own final authority and he’d get the dictionary changed so please leave the copy as written.

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      2. We are faced with an embarrassment of riches in that anyone with net access has an enormous amount of information at their fingertips. The downside is of course the daunting task of sorting through the dross for the gems you know are out there.
        With the advances in AI and data mining we are starting to see custom search engines that learn their user’s interests and serve up content that the program decides might be of interest. For example, Amazon regularly sends me an e-mail with recommendations for works by writers their algorithm thinks I might like. The name Hoyt features prominently as do Ringo, Weber, Williamson, etc.
        Don’t know that I’m all that comfortable about the whole thing, but it is what it is and I expect such “services” to only expand and get more invasive for good or ill.
        I expect that as indie drives a stake into the heart of traditional publishing the consumer’s desire for quality content will give rise to advisory services whether AI or human to sort through the muck and deliver suggestions compatible with the individual user’s profile.

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        1. I mess with Amazon’s “mind.” Buying (in no set order) sci fi, geology, 17th century warfare, German-language medieval biographies and archaeology guides, Arab linguistics, black metal albums, and recordings of the pilgrimage music for the Camino del Santiago send it into tizzies.

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      3. I guess I’m pickier than most reviewers. I look for sample chapters these days. I’ve been burnt too many times by 5 star glowing reviews. I picked up “A Few Good Men” based on the strength of the first chapters Sarah published on this blog several months ago. Probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Great book BTW.

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        1. Thank you. But yes, I read first chapters, too. Which is why Amazon and free chapters are great! Even if my house had more room and I didn’t NEED to buy most new books electronic, I’d still download beginnings before buying. There were a couple of mysteries that REALLY burned me in the 90s. I don’t remember one title, but the other was something about a Wandering Arm. I thought I would like them, the reviews were great. I bought. Ew.

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          1. This is the generic problem with selling information — ANY kind of information. How do you know the information is good/useful/whatever until you’ve seen it? And once you’ve seen it, how does the seller persuade you to pay for it? With books, free sample chapters work well — but with other kinds of information… the problem is harder.

            I’ve seen way too many cyberpunk and/or SF settings full of “information brokers” where it was clear that the author had never thought through the problems inherent in selling information. The info broker isn’t going to give you the wrong info — he does have a reputation to uphold, so if he says this is video of the Blue Canary corporate headquarters at midnight last Friday, then you’re going to get video of the Blue Canary corporate headquarters at midnight last Friday. But whether that video will actually contain the evidence you need… you can’t know until you watch it. And by the time you watch it, in a sci-fi/cyberpunk setting, you probably have the ability to copy it. (Recorders in your cybernetic eyes that can record what you’re looking at, for example). So how does the info broker prove that this is the video you need, while still maintaining enough value in the video that you’ll want to buy it?

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            1. Stanislav Lem wrote a short story in the collection _The Cyberiad_ where the protagonist developed a sort of zero-point-energy tickertape machine that pulled information out of the Brownian motion of atoms for a million-eyed tyrant who was bent on learning everything, and was proposing to use torture to get it from the main character. In the end, the tyrant was smothered in an endless flow of tickertape that had only useless, trivial information that had no context and no use. (a true analogy for the internet in a way)
              Pulling out useful information from multiple databases can be exacting work, and you have to have a feel for the information that is collected for each one so you don’t wind up running all over the map and wasting time. I would suspect that complex and barely legal datamining would be specialist work.
              I always envisioned the data-brokers to be more like Paul Drake to Perry Mason. More of a source of information to fit into context, than any sort of Deus Ex Database that hands you the solution.

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              1. So – does this mean I should be on the lookout for this guy? Because I had an idea several of years ago to make something covered in a forest of nano-scale piezoelectric crystals to extract energy from Brownian motion.

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                1. Can you quantum tune it to extract meaning and not just energy? At that, can it be tuned to extract meaning in a language that can be interpreted? I think of Dirk Gently making a scrawl in purple ink and declaring that it was the answer to the mystery, he just needed someone to find out what language it was; the question had turned from an insoluble logic question to one of mere linguistics

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                  1. Oh, you said “information”? Besides using it as a microphone, I’m not sure how you could extract meaning from it, unless you want to postulate that the fluctuations are actually a result of information being carried from the hypothetical “cosmic consciousness”, which would imply that’s how a lot of people get their ideas…

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                2. I’m sorry, Wayne. Did you mean the tyrant, the inventor, or Stanislav Lem?
                  I recommend Lem, he was an iteresting writer, the others were robots (it is the _Cyberiad_ after all)

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      4. I’ve read books all the way through while standing up in bookstores, then came back and bought them when I had some money. What got me exercised about all this stuff lately, was the realization that for the last 10 years or so, I would go into a bookstore looking for good SF with money in my pocket, and then leave after a while with the money still in my pocket.

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        1. And you think I have it bad — consider I read SF, mystery and historical and, in extreme pinch, romance. For five years before the last five (when we went mostly online) we called our trips to bookstores “let’s get disappointed.”

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      5. Sarah, that’s the difference between being a charming young lady and a 5’9″ guy who, as one of my friends put it, is a walking projector of “f*ck with me and die” when I’m in crowds of strangers. I haven’t been thrown out of a bookstore since I was 16. ;-)

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  10. I wish to clarify two things:

    “I think at this point I’ve indentured my kids to look after him in his old age, he’s helped me so much …”

    She hasn’t indentured the boys – the Secretary of State rejected my UCC 1 filing registering my liens upon them.

    “ … (and I can see him running away screaming if he reads this. He’s met my kids. Come on. At least Robert will be nice and ALMOST certainly not experiment on you!)”

    That’s not a fear, Robert knows I bite.

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    1. Just like to say I think it’s awesome that someone’s lawyer is commenting on their blog, and making the funny.

      It’s a rare lawyer that’s cool enough for that, and going all Spock-style just adds to it.

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        1. *fox grin* There are different types; Spock is one I’d aim for– the one that doesn’t think of itself as cool. Folks here can probably come up with a bunch of different flavors, most of which would be ruined by someone accepting in their heart of hearts that they are “cool.”

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                1. That is my favorite Temple Grandin quote. When she got to meet B.F. Skinner, he put his hand on her thigh. She told him, “You may look, but you may not touch.”

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        2. Minor quibble: she did not say you were cool, she said you were a lawyer cool enough — which is akin to asserting i am humorous for an accountant.

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                2. Anna Hayward, who used to maintain the FAQ for alt.support.autism, is married to a mathematics professor at the University of Cambridge. He keeps insisting that he is perfectly normal because he is just like all of his colleagues.

                  Y’all should read her account of autistic Mommy raising neurotypical kids. It’s a hoot. She had to devise an algorhythm.

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                  1. AFAIK none of us is autistic, though younger son shares some sensory issues with aspergers kids — and I suspect those run in my family because I remember having them. (Stuff like being unable to write on a line till I was 14)

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                    3. Tell him he’s just saying that because he wants the bennies, and a handicap sticker for the car.

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          2. Are we measuring levels of funny by using Larry Correia as the baseline for accountants? That’s some high bar, right there.

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        1. I’m pretty sure a title search would turn up any active liens.
          And realistically, it only matters if you try to sell them.

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            1. I kept trying to use mine to trade for groceries at the supermarket. That didn’t work, either.

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              1. My mom said that other kids were left in a little bassinet in the flower garden, but she found me in the coal scuttle. I’d like to point out by then I was old enough to know she was teasing me, so it was okay.

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          2. I thought that Xenophon was the most over plagiarized classic, but evidently Ransom of Red Chief is fast overtaking …

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  11. I never knew a couple who kept separate finances and stayed married, but that might just be my experience

    …and here we see Our Lady Hostess has never met John and (the unfortunately ill) Theresa Kerry, or similar folk in the Thurston Howell III economic strata – the accounting and estate planning needed to keep everything separate really require the wherewithal that the blueblood level of wealth provides.

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    1. I know more than a handful of millionaires. I’ve chatted with them about their wives and kids, their airplanes, their investment deals… and you know what? Almost all of them that earned their money are happily married, with a wife who runs the finances. Often, she stayed home and raised the kids, too, til they were grown and gone.

      Just because the Kerrys and the Kennedys and the other trust fund babies get the press doesn’t mean they’re representative of the level of wealth.

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      1. The Millionaire Next Door by Stanley and Danko is a very rewarding book to read. It points out what Dorothy Grant says, and also points out that Millionaires don’t live Million dollar lives. The people who live those lives are called debtors.

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        1. Very true, I know a couple of millionaires (one of them splurged and bought a new Kia a couple of years ago, he was in his mid seventies and that was the first new car he had ever bought) and have done jobs for a few more. The couple I know personally were blue collar workers who saved and invested their money, or in one case had some money going into the Great Depression and spent practically all of it on real estate at fire sale prices, then spent their working life doing blue collar labor and sold enough real estate at retirement age to be money millionaires (as opposed to asset millionaires). The vast majority who live as you would picture a millionaire living never actually become millionaires, though they may make more per year than many millionaires they spend it to fast to accumulate wealth.

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            1. Not really – If you’re running a well-maintained car until the cost of the regular repair bills exceed the cost of getting a new car, the difference in lifespan between buying brand-new and buying 2-3 years old is negligible. The cost in money up front, be it all paid in cash or paid over five years plus all the interest from the auto loan, is significant.

              Buying brand-new furniture versus buying used (yard sale, craigslist, or antique store) has the same timeline, as do circular saws, jigsaws, lawnmowers, and to some extent, clothing (especially kid’s clothing and jeans.) I do admit, you have to invest more time up front to acquire them, though, than if you buy new.

              I do, however, agree with you when it comes to good tailored suits, athletic shoes, high quality workboots, and mattresses. And, very sadly, refrigerators and dishwashers. (Washing machines and dryers, and deep freezers, you can get good deals from folks moving, but when the fridge went, I gave up and bought new.)

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              1. – If you’re running a well-maintained car until the cost of the regular repair bills exceed the cost of getting a new car, the difference in lifespan between buying brand-new and buying 2-3 years old is negligible.

                Certainly true for pecuniary costs. True for folks with more time than money. For folks with more money than time the costs of taking the car in, doing without and getting the car back can make a new full warranty car a little sooner (before the cost of the regular repair bills equal new car payments) the better choice even at a higher out of pocket cost.

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                1. Ah, if only I had more money than time. You’re right, for people who have that challenge, selling when the car runs out of warranty may make sense. (These are also probably the folks who keep restaurants in business, so I can enjoy them as a rare treat.)

                  Until the day I experience that challenge, I am glad there are people with that problem, who buy the brand new cars and then sell them when they’re 2-5 years old.

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                2. ” For folks with more money than time the costs of taking the car in, doing without and getting the car back can make a new full warranty car a little sooner (before the cost of the regular repair bills equal new car payments) the better choice even at a higher out of pocket cost.”

                  Or of course they can quit buying ‘American made’* automobiles.

                  *For some values of American made, last I checked a couple years ago the two most ‘American made’ autos were made by foreign companies, the Toyota Corolla and the Honda Accord. For the purposes of this snark the definition of American made is GM, Ford, and Diamler-Chrysler.

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                  1. THIS. My 2001 Nissan Frontier has an odometer that won’t roll over until 10,000,000 miles. I’m not so sure it won’t make it.

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            2. I think these folks are going by the “let someone else shakedown the new cars” theory. It’s certainly not fun to find out that your new car is a lemon or needs some kind of car maintenance fainting couch.

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              1. No, honestly, one quick google and craigslist search later, my theory is:

                2007 Subaru Impreza: $4000 on craigslist (+ assumed $2000 repair bill, because there’s always something) = $6000

                2013 Subaru Impreza: list $17,895 – $22,295 +tax +interest on car loan + higher insurance cost on new car

                If I’m running this car for 13-18 years until it finally gives up the ghost (Subarus are good at running for a long time at relatively low maintenance, until they flat give out all at once), the 5-year difference in lifespan for a third of the price (or less) is a lot more money in my pocket I can save, invest, or spend elsewhere.

                I do agree, though, it’s never fun to find out your car is a lemon, no matter what price you paid for it. We buy cars to run reliably, and it’s disappointing and frustrating, not to mention expensive in time and money, when it turns out otherwise.

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                1. The other thing to take into consideration is that borrowing money, paying interest on it, is another expense. When you are buying a $18K car on payments, you are paying more than the sticker price. If you are paying minimum payments on a card for the $500 business suit you bought for the job, you are paying far more than just $500. You also pay for the convenience of borrowing money.
                  I always figure that I can either pay someone to loan me money, which I have to pay off in monthly installments, or I could save money monthly for myself and I get to pocket the difference when I buy something for cash.
                  It is another situation where you need to ask if the contract you want to get into is worth what you get out of it.
                  (There are online calculators that can help you figure out if it pencils out for your finances)

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                  1. There was an engineer I heard of back when I worked at MSFC around 1971 who claimed to have the cheapest way of having a car. He would buy old cars which barely ran for $50 or so, do no repairs, just add oil and gasoline, and when they died, sell them for scrap value and buy others just like them. I believe he ran the numbers and could prove his case.

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                    1. Saves on Insurance, too, since you’re hardly going to bother covering your own car in that circumstance.

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                    2. That worked much better before the used car / snake oil salesman slithered into the white house and completely scr—d the used car economy six ways from Sunday with “cash for clunkers”. It’s going to be a long time before we fully shake that “market distortion” out of the economy.

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                    3. Also a problem if there are emission laws, a lot of registration taxes and a thriving illegal community that buys functional-but-totaled cars and drives like they’ll never be identified…..

                      Cash for Clunkers was icing the cake, in addition to removing so many replacement parts from circulation by destroying them.

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                    4. Yep, works even better if all you need is transportation, if you need a specific type of vehicle, say a 4×4 compact extended cab pickup, or if in one of those communist states back East you need an 8 passenger vehicle that will pass emissions, it gets a lot harder. But if all you need is something to transport you across town to work then yes you can buy a running car for $300-500 (and often times a good running, clean car that will run for years if you go to a few estate auctions or the like) and with scrap autos at $180/ton last I checked, well most cars will go at least 1 1/2 ton, compact pickups 2 ton+ and full-size pickups close to 3 ton.

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                2. The KBB.com and a little poking around in my area has starting prices in the $8K+ range, with the new ones having a “fair price” listed as $17.7

                  We’ve been trying to find a not-beat-to-crud car for my husband. Trying to find one under $3– even though we’re looking as old as a decade– ain’t working.

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                1. Yep, I got two out here with over 330K on them, and one is in great shape, never did any repairs, just the normal maintenance; brakes, oil, tires, fanbelts, etc. The other…well it has had 330K of hard miles, and it is beat, I have done extensive motor work, etc. to it, and am looking for a replacement. My Ford diesel on the other hand only has half that many miles, and it is a money pit, but I need a 3/4 diesel, and they are all money pits, so I’ll stick to the one I got into for a realitively cheap price.

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      2. I know more than a few millionaires – those net worth levels are actually pretty common all things considered here in SV – but I don’t know any billionaires, nor any old-money trust fund kids whose trust’s net worth is a closely guarded secret of the Cook Islands banking system. That’s what I meant by the Thurston Howell III set.

        Around here it’s likely I’ve dodged around multiple hundred-millionaires in Trader Joe’s and Whole Paycheck Foods, especially if I were to shop more towards Palo Alto.

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        2. Well I’ve met one SV billionaire and a number of people in the “getting close to that” range. It boggles me how (comparatively) crappy their homes are if they live in Silicon Valley. In some cases it’s because they bought the house 20+ years ago and never moved, in other cases its because houses in SV are so outrageusly expensive that even a tin shack in Palo Alto sells for $1million.

          I know a couple of people who’ve said they’ve done the sums and it is cheaper (and frequently quicker door-door) to live near Reno, get a private pilots license and cessna and fly to Siliconv Valley rather than live in that area. They are “semi-retured’ so it isn’t like they have to have regular meeitns etc. M-F but they do tend to be there 1-2 days a week

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          1. I met one of the heirs to the Michelin fortune when I was in Panama. His grandfather, who earned the money–still earning the money, had a stipulation that any of his children or grandchildren who wanted to spend his money had to either get a completed BA or spend four years in the military. The boy (seemed very childish to me) had never met people who had only a few nickels to rub together. He thought that all women would fall down at his feet for sex. He was shocked that he couldn’t buy me… BTW several of the petty officers were getting bought at a regular basis.

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            1. The fraction of people who can behave decently while habituated to power might be smaller than the corresponding fraction habituated to drugs or alcohol. The power could be political, financial, social, intellectual, etc. By habituation I mean the enjoyment of/indulgence in power for its own sake, not as a means to an end.

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              1. Yes– very sad imho. The grandfather (source of the wealth) had lost his children and was in the process of losing his grandchildren (car crashes and other vices of the extremely wealthy).

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    2. One notes if that it’s inherited wealth, one has the excuse of conditions and things. Like a couple I know of who married with a pre-nup — another bad sign — because they were both elderly and wanted their own property to go to their own descendents.

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  12. “…oligopsony, i.e. a form of market where the sellers are many and the buyers are few.  I won’t say this doesn’t occur in a free-market capitalism.  I will say though that usually when it gets to that point there are influences that require the market be not-quite-free and the society too.”

    – Sarah

     The only way a oligopsony can survive is when the market is not free? Then by definition it’s not Free-market Capitalism. 

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    2. THIS is my opinion, I’m not absolutely sure, though, because I don’t fully understand the pressures that led to the take overs and mergers that made most publishers disappear or become part of huge monopolies, out of Germany or something. Same way I don’t — fully — understand how the chains took over, except that the stocking to the net and push model confer limited advantage up front (but then kill the market.) It’s sort of like in evolution you can become TOO well adapted to a niche, and then keep specializing to the point you’re not viable and you can’t leave — I imagine. I just don’t know enough economics to have more than a feeling.

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      1. Let me clear up what I tried to shorthand.

        In a Free-market there are only two forces at work, they are demand (The Market) & supply (Goods & Services provied by Suppliers).

        Any other forces economist like to tout as market force are controling or regulating forces coming from and enforced by a third outside agency. This can be done at the behest of the principles involved; seller, buyer, or because of a precieved mandate the third party outside agancy has. All of this is usualy done under the guise fairness (As RES pointed out)/protectionism. This outside agency must protect us from each other & from business. The problem is that only the principles involved can determine what is fair for them at the moment of the transaction. 

        We in the US like to delude ourselves into thinking we operate under or have a Free-market based economy. When in reality we have controlled/regulated economy.

        The only curtailing of freedom in a true Free-market is the voluntary relinquishing of said freedom to act with out consequence, and that is where contracts come in. Both parties agree to do or provide certain things, if not a consequence ensues; loss of reputation, future business and even possible a loss of assets.

        We in the US seemed to be under the empression that we operate under a Free-market, because we are free to choose from the limmited choice that our Gov’t and other controlling agencies allows us in the private sector, and soon that isn’t even going to be the case. We have long been forced to buy services we might or might not use from the Gov’t.

        That is why I put the ? at the end of my restatement of what you said. I wasn’t quite sure what you ment by less-free if you were refuring to all other markets/economies other than a Free-market or like a lot of people thinking that there was different gradations of a Free-market.

        In a Free-market business either adapt or not. You can build a business on a niche, but then your business is at the mercy of the market. Your nitche goes away your business goes away. You can try to employ protectionist tactics, but unless you are in a controled economy that can force the public to buy something…. But even then people will find other means of getting what they want.  Either new supplier will provided it with a new inovated business model (Baen, Indie) or on a Black-market will. How often do you hear about this in contries that ban books. A Black-market is just a Free-market given a bad name ;-)  .

        Economics isn’t all that complicated; unless you are talking to an economist.

        Supply and Demand.

        We complicate a very simple equation.

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        2. I’d disagree. I don’t like the word forces and I’ll get back to that but I’d say there’s a supply function, a demand function and an information stock and flow. Feel free to include perfect information in the definition of free market and take the conversation so abstract we might as well go purely symbolic.

          On forces. That said I’d say there’s a demand function and a supply function each subject to all sorts of outside forces as weather affects the supply function for wheat and demand for bread. Useful to distinguish movement along a supply or demand curve (acknowledging that curve is an abstraction) from a shift in supply/demand curve.

          Economics is a smoke and mirror enterprise in which folks are first taught with the instructor palming lots of cards and talking as though the supply/demand functions were smooth, uniform, well behaved and everywhere differentiable (to include have a marginal value everywhere) then advanced students learn enough math for more realistic models then even more advanced students show that it doesn’t matter – like the 3 places on a slide rule the simple models are good enough for our data and our knowledge.

          All these vary over time – stocks and flows are primitive concepts easy enough to talk but difficult to deal with. To the extent they are widely known revealed prices either offered or asked are valuable information. Buyers and sellers tend not to know prices for transactions that never took place. Revealed preferences analysis and all that.

          As Dr. Pournelle points out wearing his Dr. hat in a truly free market we’d be offered human flesh in the market place some still breathing. Not sure it’s my duty but it would be my pleasure to strap on any gear I can still get into and go shopping in that market Baslim style.

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          1. Clark,

            Now we are getting into is economics a science or an art?

            At it’s core to me an economy, business or even the individual single transaction is a system. You can try to model it with math mathematics or map it with a systems map but the larger and more complex the system variables you introduce. The only thing we can know for certain is what happened and what is happening, but we can only surmise why it happened or what will happen.

            Function is a better term for the two side of Supply & Demand.

            Now to the Dr. Pournelle example.

            1) The use of the Dr. Hat reference is an appeal to authority.

            2) As I and most other Free-market Anarchist/Anarcho-Capitalist defined a Free-market all parties must consent freely with out the use of force or deception for the transaction to be valid under a free-mark it.

            3) It’s made with out or out of context.

            4) It, as you have stated it, only addresses supply of Supply & Demand. Just because someone offers a good or service doesn’t mean there is a demand for it, and without a demand why would someone provide a good or service?

            5) As stated implies, to me at lest, that the two actions expressed could only happen in a or user a Free-market.

            6) I’m pretty sure if I go into a hospital and need a heart transplant that hospital is going to try to fill the need/demand.

            7) We still practice a form of contractual/indentured servitude right now it’s even voluntary they ever reinstitute the draft then not so much. It then moves right into slavery.

            8) I’m getting tired people calling something Free-market or permisable under one and bashing it for the supposed failure, just as I ‘m tired of people bashing Free-market Capitalism for the falures of our controlled, regulated fascist system that we operated under now.

            9) Can we stop building straw-men?

            :-)

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            1. 7) We still practice a form of contractual/indentured servitude right now it’s even voluntary they ever reinstitute the draft then not so much. It then moves right into slavery.

              Not just the military; I’d argue that the student-loan system falls into the “indentured servitude” category as well. And while it’s “voluntarily” entered into, most people don’t feel they have much of a choice in the matter considering how necessary a college degree appears to be to get jobs. (There are always exceptions, and if you know how you can often make an exception, but for the most part the degree is necessary.)

              Plus, the way Oregon is thinking of revising student loans, it’ll become explicit indentured servitude, rather than implicit. On the whole I think the change may be a good thing, if only because it’ll be more obvious to people what they’re getting into.

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              1. Pay  It Forward: The Debt-Free Degree Plan

                More obvious? They are marketing it as no debt. If you are getting something today with the promise to give up a portion of future income tomorrow that is a DEBT.

                And, Yes Debt is indentured servitude: implicit or explicit?

                I guess it is true pigs can fly all we have to do is call birds pigs…

                At lest with tuition you can or have the option if paying up front.

                All this system is doing is playing with the margins. And like every other pergressive nonsense it will not control the cost of education. This model is just a flipped backwards Pension plan. With this plan what is to keep me from getting a degree then moving to Hawaii & become a beach bum working as little as possible, paying back the minimum.

                Hmmm…

                eoionline.org/education/more/pif-presentation-or-leg-feb13.pdf

                stateofworkingwa.org/2012/pay-it-forward/index.htm

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            2. In fact I intended the tip of the hat to Dr. Pournelle as an acknowledgment that I was using his formulation with respect to the defects of the free market. This given that I expect most people reading this to also read Dr. Pournelle both in print and on line. Thus most readers would recognize Dr. Pournelle’s language and so I hastened to give credit lest I be accused of stealing without attribution. You can’t win, you can’t even break even.

              Just as Mr. Heinlein liked to be called Mr. while Ginny was Ginny I’ll go along with calling folks what they want to be called. For Jerry that varies by context from Jerome of McKenna to Dr. Pournelle.

              Citing Dr. Pournelle or Richard Feynman or whoever, economics does indeed have aspects of a voodoo science.

              On the other hand economics has aspects of compiled observations hypothesis and verification. For example Gresham’s law has a general application. A paperback exchange that simply trades books 2 in for 1 out will soon have shelves filled with Harlequin Romances and empty of science fiction and fantasy. There really is a certain logic to empire. Some people confuse high school civics with economic analysis. Much like Lysenkoism there is some bad science called good economics to grind axes better.

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              1. Clark,

                I have no problem using orhers points of view to add depth of meaning and broader base of understanding. Emphasizing that Dr. Pournelle wears a Dr. hat was a little bit, hay can’t argue with Pournelle point of view he be a Doctor( at lest that is how I took it. I’ll take you at you word that was not how you intended it.). You had already cited him as the source with the use of his name. Anyone that already knows of his body of work will give it the weight of consideration they thinks it deserves, and anyone that doesn’t know of his work shouldn’t base their opinion of him, and on if what he said was valid, on a title.

                “What Dr. Pournelle  said about Free-markets is relevant, and I’m paraphrasing here , “……””

                The argument put forth isn ‘t even one you unique to Dr. Pournelle. It’s the standard, “If we don’t have an outside source to control us, we will turn to cannibalism, raping, pillaging & selling each other into slavery.”

                I could have responded with a quote of my own. Like:
                 

                “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?”

                THOMAS JEFFERSON
                First Inaugural Address
                March 4, 1801
                 
                Hmmm…

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  13. You said
    “Let’s continue exploring what a contract is – or what a deal is, since a deal is the hard-copy expression of a deal.”
    I am not commenting

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  15. … if she expected a fair contract out of a publisher she was living in a “socialist dream paradise.”

    The crux of this is the use of the word “fair.” That is a word with very subjective meaning, so much so that it is entirely possible for both parties to a contract to have cause to think it “unfair.” Adding a third party merely adds another version of “fair.”

    A big part of this arises because you cannot properly evaluate another person’s cost. An author entrusts her child to a publisher and wants it to be treated “fairly” — while a publisher selecting a middling quality work from a crowded submission queue merely hopes to recoup the publication costs plus a little profit, justifying the opportunity cost of not selecting a different submission.

    And that is in an ideal situation, one where the publisher is not under tremendous pressure to service highly leveraged debt while indulging the demands of a dozen different clamoring interests, not least of which are other authors hoping for their books to get the promotion they need.

    The reason your only hope of a “fair” contract exists in a “socialist dream paradise” is that both of those are never going to occur in the real world; they are only to be found in that land where unicorns, elves and energy from rainbows exist.

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  17. lol. I’ll come back because I can’t stop. It was down hill for me the moment of Ogg and Mogg before you even warned me. I knew there was no hope when “[feminists] have hold of the wrong end of the stick”.

    I realize at this point that it is a lost cause and will just continue to go down hill at this point and I’ll try again later. If I skip Ogg and Mogg next time it should be safe.

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  18. The gentleman commenter was probably confused by having been exposed to the liberal newspeak definition of “fair”, were a contract or any other exchange is only “fair” if all parties are getting an exactly equal benefit from the exchange. It is logically impossible that this sort of “fair” would be achieved on any sort of regular basis. After all, the reason exchanges take place is that there is a difference between the parties on the subjective value of what is being exchanged.

    A true example, (slightly simplified and modified but human memory): My mother, a typical baby boomer liberal, had joined a carpool I was part of. The arrangement was that each person world drive one day a week and be driven the other days. But my mother was only working at her office three days a week so she declared that this arrangement was not “fair” because while everyone else was driving one day and being driven four days, she was driving one day and being driven two days. She wanted the arrangement altered to compensate her for this inequality.

    The rest of the carpool and I didn’t see it this way. We were not having to drive any less on those days she was not riding with us. If she didn’t think that two days of riding was an adequate compensation for all the day of driving she was certainly free to drive herself all the time, take the train, or find another carpool. We though an exchange was fair to a party if that party got more value then she gave up. But my mother was focused on it not being “fair” that someone else seemed to be getting more benefit than her.

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    1. We just sold our old van.

      It’s a great vehicle, but doing double-duty as a kid hauler AND a stuff-hauler meant we (more importantly, 5’3 me) had to pull the back seat out a lot– four seats and a bench, the bench only fit in the far back, and Washington doesn’t want anyone under 13 in the front seat– and there was the chance that it would die while we were in the middle of booger-all nowhere without cell service.
      We sold it to a (6’+, very fit young-grandfather age) guy who hauls stuff from Lacy to Marysville, WA– ie, “around the Seattle blob”– but wanted four bucket seats for when he’s moving folks around he wants to be impressed, and wants someplace for his girlfriend’s grandkids when they go somewhere.

      He paid more than he hoped, but got more than he hoped (about two grand less than a dealership); we got less than we asked, but more than we feared (and didn’t have to deal with selling the tires and chains separately, plus got more than double what we’d have had as a trade-in.)

      That’s a good deal, to me.

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    2. The solution to your mother’s problem seems simple: she should have ridden along on the two days she did not have to be at her office.

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