Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

It was pithy and charming and had … charm, yeah, it’s charm.  Among its excellent qualities must be counted invisibility, as I don’t appear to have saved it in this drive.  RATs.   I’ll try to get it up later.  I’m at my brothers, at my nephew’s birthday party, and maybe I can go down the street and get my file….

For those who don’t know this, I am in Portugal at the moment, visiting my parents till the middle of June.

It’s not quite a return to familiar hunting grounds.  First, I’ve never lived in Portugal as an adult – I went to the States straight out of college.  The rhythms and obligations of a responsible adult in Portugal are completely unknown and often mysterious.  Second, the country has changed a lot since I was here.  When I left there was one mall.  It was a mini-mall, with maybe ten shops, and it was in downtown Porto.

So I was a little surprised when a visit to the bookstore, to spend a gift card my dad got for his birthday took me to the mall in what used to be one of the nearest villages.  The mall was both familiar and oddly different.  Yes, there were all the usual accouterments of a mall, including a food court, but the lay out was different, and there were very few people there, and none of them looked like mall rats.

The bookstore was different too.  Portugal, in some ways has always been ahead of the US when it comes to book marketing.  Okay.  In a bad way.  You know how towards the end of the old model, there, before ebooks changed the game, no one kept back lists?  Portugal was always like that.  I’m not sure why, perhaps because of the pressures of a smaller market, but the first printrun was all you got.  So bookstores are smaller.  On the other hand, they are still, strictly, bookstores.  There are no cds, no coffee shops, no movies.  Just books, in clearly marked sections.

The books are, and this is a reflection of the national character, at least in terms of the people who CHOOSE to read, mostly non-fiction of a scholarly nature.  There were a lot of books I wanted, ranging from a comprehensive history of Portugal (almost impossible to get in the US) to fictionalized biographies of various Portuguese princesses.  Unfortunately I was with my dad, who had announced his intention to buy me anything I wanted.  Even more unfortunately, these books ran in the neighborhood of 40 Euros, which is daylight robbery.

When my dad asked me to find him a book I enjoyed, I was stumped.  Apparently, only our more turgid bestsellers make it here, including Dan Brown’s Opus (opuses?) which really shouldn’t sell that well in a Catholic Country.  I mean, people know that the Catholic church doesn’t have assassins, right?  (If they did, I’d be a nun, duh.)   There were also, disguised under historical covers, book after book of undead porn.  (Some of it very good undead porn, but not my dad’s cup of tea, and certainly not the sort of thing I should recommend to my dad.)   There were other bestsellers too and I ended up settling for recommending him a scholarly book on World War II and one of Phillipa Gregory’s historical books.  I probably would have recommended Raymond Feist, too, but I doubt my dad would “get” Fantasy.

The good news is that Science Fiction and Fantasy were shelved in the middle of the other fiction.  The bad news is that there was so little of it.

How does this relate to where we are, and what the ebooks are bringing?  Ebooks are unknown here.  I had to explain my kindle over and over and over again.  The funny thing is that once explained they take to the concept like ducks to water.  They want them.  Badly.

If my dad read English I would, right now, be leaving him my kindle.  As is, though, there is no Amazon pt selling translations of works.  And here I must ask, why not?  Surely I’m not the only writer who is fluent in two languages.  If we’re going to do this thing on our own, why not sell translations?  I wonder if Naked Reader would like a Portuguese translation of ATON?  The sales will be slow, but due to the lack of back list and limited selection, the market is wide open.  It will be slow only till e-readers catch on.  And I think I know someone who can do a French Translation, and I wonder if I can get a friend to translate into Japanese if I give him a cut of the action…

This is something we haven’t even started to think about, but we should.  Ebooks are by nature worldwide.  Oh, what brave new world…

 How do you think we should go about it? 

«crossposted at Mad Genius Club.»

Today we went to the fair.  The fair – actually several fairs – take place in various villages around here on different days of the week.  It says something about the mind f the Portuguese people – to whose composition the Carthaginians made a considerable contribution, at least in the North – that the days of the week are not named after divinities of other abstractions but after fairs.  Saturday and Sunday remain from the Roman calendar, but Monday is Segunda Feira – second fair – and Tuesday is Terca Feira, and the rest of the week is properly numbered as the type of fair it is.

There are fairgrounds in Portugal still that were established as part of the gift of some monarch or other, and which have stalls made of stone and with proper roofs.  The fairs around here, in municipalities that used to have too few inhabitants to matter, are more ad hoc.  I’m sure you pay a fee to sell there (not sure how much) but after that it’s a matter of getting two sticks on the ground and a bit of cloth overhead.  Mind, these days there are a lot of beach umbrellas and other bits of civilization intruding.  Also these days half or more of the merchandise offered is unlicensed Disney knock offs and illegal copies of movies (the Portuguese are almost as bad about copyright as the Chinese.)  There are also piles of t-shirts, rolls of fabric, mountains of shoes.  The merchandise offered falls into either the “fell off the back of a truck” category or the “discount outlet” category (which otherwise don’t exist in Portugal.)  Tons of knock offs and brand name imitations.

The prices are reasonable, too, even for discount outlet merchandise, something that can’t otherwise be said for most of the stuff sold in Portugal.

And here and there, like survivals of the past you find stuff that would have been at the medieval fair, likely held in the same spot or close by: redware which I wish I knew I COULD afford to stick in my luggage (the weight is problematic) including a charming stewpot in the shape of a chicken body with the chicken wing and legs as the top; various hand painted wares; vegetables sold by the farmers; and, in vast crates, chickens, ducks and geese, including the young of the species.  (It was hard to convince my son we didn’t need a pet goose.)

Overall, the atmosphere was something like what you might imagine a medieval fair might have been.  Nothing of our sophisticated, bloodless shopping expeditions in an air conditioned mall, but probably how most of the world still shops.

No, I wouldn’t like to live here permanently, and the shopping is too haphazard (you’re never sure what you’ll find or for how much) but for the writer eye and the writer mind, it was a great experience.  I’d done it before, of course, growing up here, but this time I took notes.  I’m sure you’ll see the results in a future work.

I hope you forgive me having been absent from the blog.  I´d have managed earlier, but we were delayed in travel. It seems inevitable that when taking three flights in a row, one of them international, at least one flight will be late enough to moot all your other reservations.

In this case, I found myself stranded in Madrid for twelve hours.

Someone on Facebook informed me that Madrid is a beautiful city and I should have gone to the prado.  I appreciate the tip, except that I was restricted to the airport, tied down by luggage and other such considerations, not the least being that I was afraid the city would prove as infuriating as the airport.

The experience was sort of similar to landing in Chicago at two in the morning  –we were pointed in a general direction, given no instructions, could find neither personnel nor a screen with information and wandered long corridors in an experience reminiscent of rats seeking cheese.

Airports are always at best a miserable experience, designed for so many people coming from so many locations that itºs not comfortable for anyone.  In this case we had maximum inconvenience complicated by language barriers.  (I understand Spanish, but Spaniards seemed to understand neither Portuguese nor English.)

Yes, I know I sound like a spoiled American.  Iºll cop to the charge.  I think the patience with which people endure poor service and insane behavior on the part of those in any form of authority (and of course airport employees have authority of a sort over jet-lagged, dislocated travelers) breeds more insane behavior, erratic service and capricious rudeness.

I could be wrong, but I know that if any airport in the states were that bad, people would be avoiding it in droves.

At any rate we survived, though sleepless and comfortless.  I am just about recovered now, and hope to resume daily blogging.  Hopefully on more interesting subjects than airport complaints next time.

And fortunately on the way back my connections will be Lisbon and Philly, where I at least speak both languages and — by and large — the natives understand me.

The difficulties of serving two masters are well known, whether they be G-d and Mamon or more pedestrian entities, such as a family and a career.

It is an aphorism in espionage that no one trusts a double agent, possibly not even the agent himself.

However, until very recently, this was the absolute sine-qua-non of being a working writer. to publish, you needed to please the editors/publishers. To sell, after that, you needed to please the public.

Of course editors and publishers would tell you that they picked the stuff that would sell. (Waggles hand.) Most of the time, the truth is that they either had no idea what the popular taste was, or stood at a dignified distance, shaking their heads at it.

There are exceptions. Baen, as always, in part because of the bar, where publisher, authors and fans rubbed elbows in equality, had a good inkling what its market was and hit it square on most of the time. The other houses were hazier.

For a long time, I think the tastes were congruent or close enough. But in the late twentieth century, with all the publishing houses in NYC, and all the editors coming from the same general background – usually liberal arts, prestigious college – and the business managers being corporate entities, divorced from the day to day running of the business and its consequences, the tastes became at times two very different things. This is where the editors came from who thought their job was to educate the public. (Hint – you’re supposed to SELL to the public. All else is secondary.)

Because I’m one of those writers who can do both “literature” (It’s not, but it can pass) and normal, fun books I quickly became aware that the public as manifest at signings, fan letters and the occasional offer to have my baby, liked the second kind. The editors (and a lot of agents) OTOH preferred the first. They wanted to feel like they were facilitating/publishing something “important.”

After a while I learned to walk the line. Put in just enough literary/historical references (a certain number seem to happen spontaneously) to sell the book to NYC and keep it fun enough to sell to the fans. All while – yes – trying to serve my inner drive and need to express a specific story.

Did I succeed? I often listed madly one way or the other.

In the brave new world where authors sell directly to the public, how will that change the character of the books? I don’t believe it means all writing will be drivel. Neither do I believe that all of it will be worthy. But I confess I’m very curious to see how things work out.

(I’m going to be en-route to Portugal for the next twelve hours or so, and after that my access to the net will also be erratic for about two weeks. I intend to keep up my daily posting, but the hours – particularly given my tendency to calculate time zones backwards – might become very interesting.)

Three days ago, I took it upon myself to dispute the conclusions of Michael Levin writing in the Forbes blog and prophesying the end of the book. Not just the end of the paper book, or the end of the book as we know it, but the end of the book, period.

He seemed to believe it was at least in part suicide, with the publishers choosing to publish a lot of things that no one really wanted to buy, and – as it were – metaphorically standing at the end of the abyss saying “stop me before I jump.” In this scenario, Amazon came along and gave the final shove.

Perhaps because economics is my hobby, I tend to look at the same scenario – and I’ll admit Michael is right – grosso modo – about the scenario – and see the free market at work. Or perhaps more accurately, the iron law of economics at work: if there is a market that’s being badly served and someone else comes up with a way to serve it better, the model will chance and the old way of doing things die out. Or in other words (sorry, writing this late at night after a day spent packing for two weeks abroad) if you build a better mousetrap the manufacturers of inferior mousetraps will go out of business.

So far so good. What I disagreed – and disagree – with is the disappearance of the book as such. Michael, who, it turns out, is a good sport and didn’t even get upset at my calling him Mark – Okay, didn’t get VERY upset – (It’s something I do to Michaels. My friend Michael Kabongo has been for some time “Tony” to our circle of friends. No, he doesn’t like it, so I wouldn’t advise trying it.) but his comment in the “about” section of my blog clarified his argument.

Dear Sarah,

Many thanks for reading and responding so passionately to my piece about publishing in Forbes. The reality is that there are more of them than there are of you and me, in that you and I pay for content and others don’t, or won’t in the future. Maybe I’m as wrong as you say. But my first name is Michael, not Mark, so perhaps we both have a right to be wrong! I enjoyed your piece and am glad that you saw fit to write about it. Warmly, Mark no wait Michael

(I think by “passionately” he means that I’m excitable. That’s fine. I am. My husband says so, and he knows me quite well.)

His next statement however raises eyebrows. For more on this, look at the Baen Free Library. Also, note that Baen has long run its ebook section on low prices and no DRM and far from having a loss continues to thrive.

For yet more corroboration that piracy alone won’t kill an industry, look at music. Yes, it’s completely different from before going electronic, but again, provided the price is reasonable and there’s no DRM you’ve eliminated two reasons to pirate: costs, and because it’s a challenge. Music for money still exists and it still supports artists.

The caveat here is that Michael works, mostly, in non fiction. I’m not sure of the mechanics for non-fiction. I know in fiction, most people have an instinctive understanding that only this writer could produce this work, and if the writer starves in his lonely little attic, you won’t have any more… Honor, or Athena, or Captain Vimes, or…

I’m not sure the same understanding applies to non fiction. It’s entirely possible that people just assume there’s no intrinsic virtue to how-to or non-fic, that the info was there, if anyone else had collected. Non-fic might fall under the misguided aprehension that “data wants to be free.”

Also, because some non fic, at least (school books) is unlikely to crawl out from under the thumb of the big houses any time soon, it will probably be overpriced and DRMed to the gills.

So Michael might be right. It might be the end of a TYPE of book. I don’t think so, but I’ll concede the point that on THAT I have no other proof than a gut feeling that once people realize the stuff you can get for free is worth what you pay for it, they will realize non-fic writers need to live also.

However, as I told Michael Levin, in my answer to his comment, the future is notoriously hard to make predictions about, particularly when it hasn’t happened, yet. I will admit for non-fic he might very well be right, which means the market will transmute to another media. I’m going to guess specialized how-to and non-fic blogs, probably supported by contributions.

(I’m going to be en-route for the next thirty six hours or so, and after that my access to the net will also be erratic for about two weeks. I intend to keep up my daily posting, but the hours – particularly given my tendency to calculate time zones backwards – might become very interesting.)

It never rains but it pours.  I woke up at five am with a screaming cat in the hallway — Euclid, being neurotic, which falls under his job description.

Immediatley afterwards, I realized I was in pain.  One of my teeth has been feeling weird for a while, but nothing approaching pain — I’d actually describe it as “encased in cork” if that makes sense.  Well…  it started hurting in the middle of the night, and it is a tooth anchoring a bridge, so it’s not something I can get easilly done in Portugal.  (Yes, I know those are supposed to be dead through root canal first, only this one has already had two go rounds.)

Appointment with doctor — for which I do not have the time — in about an hour.

Afterwards, I’ll try to do what I can in terms of packing/laundry/etc.  It’s going to be a long day, particularly if I end up spending the afternoon in emergency dental surgery.

THIS is the kind of luck I battle against…

Yesterday I answered a series of interview questions for Literary Lunes Magazine. This happened with a lot of other “business catching up” which had to be done before I go to Portugal, since there I’ll only have intermittent internet access, when I visit my brother’s house. My mom appears to think the internet is the work of the devil or something.

Anyway, among those interviews there was one I’ve never been asked, and which UTTERLY baffled me. “What is you muse?”

I had no idea how to answer that, so I went flip – which, you know, is what I do when I have no clue what people are talking about. I said if I had a muse, she’d wear a toga and lift aloft a clothes iron, because I do most of my ideation while ironing or doing other boring, routine tasks.

I’m still bothered by what they mean. Perhaps they asked “who” (I don’t remember) but that only makes it more baffling. When I wrote poetry, this was easy, since I usually wrote series of poems to someone, normally my crush of the time. (Sigh. Time is the enemy of us all. The young man I wrote 200 sonnets for between the ages of 14 and 18 is now completely bald and looks… well, nothing like he used to. This hurts more than aging personally. Who was it who said something about time making a mockery of our loves?)

But I don’t write poetry and I don’t write straight romance (I don’t write gay romance, either – I mean, as you know very well that I don’t write romance on its own, not as part of a bigger plot.) So the question of a muse doesn’t arise. Or does it?

Of course I fall a little in love with my characters, but not that sort of love. It’s more the love of parent for child, or the love of creator for creation.

Sometimes a book does center around one character, though. It’s not – I think – so much a matter of “love” or even “muse” but more a matter of following the pain. I write to the pain. I go where the pain is.

I think this is because I write to resolve pain – to resolve conflicts within myself that can’t be resolved any other way, starting, inevitably, with the fight between mind and body, but twisting to a lot of other things. And if you’re scratching your head and wondering what I mean by pain – to take an example, I know that I’m not the only one who left her native land behind. Half the members of the Mad Genius Club have. And I’ll admit I wanted to be here, and I’m happy where I live and with my family and friends here. But at the same time, every time I go back, I remember I severed a piece of myself and left it behind – a whole parallel history that was more likely to happen, the person I’d be if I’d married someone there and lived there. It hurts a little not to be able to be in two places at once, no matter how much you love where you are.

But I’m not alone. Even if you never left your birth place and your birth family, I bet the world has changed so much around you that your childhood is as irretrievably lost as my own. It’s part of being a physical, mortal creature caught in the coils of advancing time. No human being deserves that, and all of us live through it. And there’s no way to resolve it, to come to terms with it. Except through art. At least for me. And my art is mostly my writing (the rest being on the lines of a hobby.)

So I go where the pain is. I find the pain in the character, the situation, the world, and the tension that comes from that pain, and I go in and wind the plot around the pain till catharsis happens.

This is the closest thing to a “muse” I can admit to, and it makes me sound like I keep a closet full of whips and chains. (I don’t, though the cats sometimes make me wish for a whip and a chair. Yeah, I know they’d just play with the leather strips.)

So what do you think they meant by “muse”? It made me feel completely out of step, like there was an entire world of writing out there that I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t fathom. After twenty six years of writing, that is a pretty scary idea.

Does everyone but me have a muse? What is a muse in this context? Do you have one?

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club *

Michael Levin at Forbes announced the coming end of books

http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/05/20/are-books-an-endangered-species/

The publishing world gathers next week in Manhattan at BookExpo America, its annual trade show, but the one subject attendees won’t be discussing is the coming collapse of publishing and the inevitable disappearance of books.

Like other prophets announcing the end is coming, Mark Levin is wrong. Books are not disappearing. In fact, we might be entering the most vibrant time ever in publishing.

Oh, almost everything he says will sound intuitively right to people of a certain age, even those who work in the field. By people of a certain age, I mean people over say fifty five. Not all of them, but most of them. Ten years ago, on email lists with these authors, who are my elder colleagues in the field, I struggled to convince them that a) Amazon wasn’t a passing fad. b) Amazon was far more significant than anything – ANYTHING – they’d seen so far. They kept talking about browsing and serving coffee and bookstore cats and the virtues of brick and mortar. Oh, and the ineffable romanticism of the smell of paper or the feel of pages or something….

I get a feeling those people STILL have no idea why or how Amazon succeeded. They certainly don’t seem to have a grasp of how the rest of us use it. And then there’s the other side of it, the “the books are disappearing” side of it, which will seem intuitive to most people in the industry who never had ANY connection to their readers. We’re writers. We tend to run in flocks. Writers and wanna be writers naturally become the most vocal ones even in online reader forums – ALMOST all online reader forums.

Before I started being published by Baen I THOUGHT that the only people reading me were people looking to get published. Now that is not true, at least not for Baen readers, a good number of whom are “just readers” but the normal writer might not bump into many of those.

So, he’s wrong on two counts – how Amazon and ebooks are changing the game and what the game IS. He’s right – very right – on other things, like the model of publishing a bunch of books, promoting very few of them and blaming all failures on the writer himself. He just fails to take the logical conclusions from this.

The reason that publishing functioned the way he says it did – with publishers publishing an enormous amount of things that no one wanted to read – is that by the mid nineties, at least, publishers had managed to completely insulate themselves from market feedback. What do I mean by that? Surely they knew what sold and didn’t sell?

Well, yes to an extent. It will shock anyone outside the field to know that in fact there are several systems for ESTIMATING how many copies sell, but no system – not even point of sale – that covers every book sold. The best systems cover between 1/3 and 2/3 of the market – the composition varying depending on the type of book and where it’s stocked.

But – you’re saying by now – they know how many books they printed and how many returned, right? Well… maybe. Sometimes. For a given value of “know.” First of all there’s the lovely returns system. Books are not sold to the bookstores who stock them, they’re put on consignment. It used to be that books were “stripped” and the front covers mailed back. (The rest was in theory, but rarely in practice, discarded. More often sold for $1 on some discount rack.) That at least in theory allowed for some counting. But sometime along the line books were just virtually stripped, and a certain number virtually “returned”… by entering the numbers into a computer. Add to this that since at least the late nineties most publishers have been working on a de-facto Print On Demand basis. This is because of some government regulation counting inventory as tools and supplies and taxing publishers on inventory sitting in warehouses.

I have no idea what contract the publishers have with printers, but in my contracts – pretty much all of them  except Baen– it says print runs under some amount – say 100, though I think it’s more normally 500 – they don’t count as a new print run and don’t have to be reported.

So, imagine my laydown is 2000 (unfortunately not a rare, non-pushed print run.) Of those 500 are virtually returned (true or not, who knows? Do you assume every bookstore employee is not only scrupulously honest but very good at entering numbers? I don’t.) However, meanwhile another 3000 are printed and sent out in thirty 100 shipments. Of those, 1000 are “returned”.

The two most reputable tracking services variously report 1000 sales and 500 sales. This could mean anywhere between 1500, 3000 and possibly 4000 sales. Or it could mean the reported ones were the only ones you actually sold and the rest was lost in the cracks. What the heck does the accounting department at the house do? How do they pick the number you “sold”? Is it surprising that people report exactly the same number of sales across various houses? I’m sure they use a formula. And I’m sure the formula favors the house, of course.

Add to this that sometime in the nineties Borders introduced computers to control inventory and invented the concept of “stocking to the net.” This means they order as many books for their shelves as the number you sold before. This leads almost inevitably to the death spiral. I.e. bookstores ordered (and stocked) ten of your books last time. Seven of those sold (this btw, is an unusually high order if not pushed. And the time books stay on the shelves before being culled has shrunk to something like four weeks. If you’ve sold seven in that time, you’re doing well.) So for the next book they order seven and sell four. For the next book they order four… You can see where this is going. When it reaches zero, you, the writer, who are to blame for this, of course, have to change your name or quit writing.

Now, I can see where this system gave Borders a huge advantage when they were a small chain in Michigan.  They would still — of course — order authors who made it big AFTER they banned them.  But for the average author, it prevented their stocking “things no one reads.”  I mean, there were still other places for authors to make it big, and to return to those few bookstores with big numbers that resisted the “ordering to the net” bane. I can’t for the life of me understand what possessed the rest of the field to follow suit, or even Borders to extend it nationally. Surely it is obvious to anyone not lobotomized that this would lead to every author not receiving publisher-ex-machina extraordinary help being kept out of the market. But apparently bookstores didn’t see this.

For editors OTOH this was a happy time. Look, as far as I know, publishing has always moved by fads. For instance, there was the whole gothic romance thing in the eighties. Something sold and then they bought all of it. And for a time all of it sold. But the fads weren’t completely divorced from public taste. The bookstores/market acted as a check on that. The publishers could “push” a book to an extent, but there were always bestsellers that flopped completely and books that weren’t pushed at all that made a runaway success in independent bookstores. Did I mention that by the late nineties most independents were dead or dying? And that distribution took place through three distributors?

Why was this a happy time? Well, because most editors don’t care how well a book sells. They care how closely they predicted how a book would sell. When they first decide to buy a book, they have to decide how much advance to pay and have to take these figures to “meeting”. The figures are based on what the author has sold in the past, what the books are, how those books have sold in the past, and, oh, yeah… the editor’s intuition. Or something. It should be clear to everyone by now that these projections are more art than science. After all, books are not cans of beans. You can’t say “A hundred people will eat beans in this town this week.” For instance, I read an awful lot of mystery, fantasy and science fiction, but just because a book says something like that on the spine it doesn’t mean I’ll like it. Heck, even my favorite authors wrote two or three books I hated.

So it’s risky for the editor to make these projections. And it looks good if the projections work out.

By the mid nineties most books sold exactly till what was owed the author was what he/she had been paid in advance. And then the book was taken out of print.

Precision of this sort in forecasting the uncertain is only possible if the producer takes the bit between his/her teeth and controls how much the book sells. This was possible by controlling distribution. Here the whole concept of “push” came in and bookstores started charging publishers for special displays for the books – end caps, dumps – as well as engaging in convoluted quid pro quo. The publisher who wanted to make sure an author who got a big advance did well could, for instance, offer a discount on a bestseller (or threaten to cut the bestseller’s laydown with that store) if they took also 100 books from promising author X.

So, by … oh, even five years ago, books were like late-stage USSR. They were completely a command economy, where what the consumers wanted didn’t matter nearly as much as the internal numbers and the validation of the bureaucracy and career bureaucrats.

However, by five years ago this was already being undermined by Amazon. Amazon affected me most, first, as a reader. To understand how much or how, you have to understand how I read. I’m a high volume near-indiscriminate reader. If this were done with anything else, I’d be considered addicted. I have to read before sleeping, for instance. I have to read at breakfast. I’ll read the back of a cereal box, medicine instructions or wanted adds if that’s all I can find. HOWEVER in every genre and subgenre “I know what I like when I see it.” Let’s take mystery: I read cozies, police procedurals and woman in peril. I read thrillers, historicals and humor. HOWEVER I don’t read “Chic Lit” in any of those varieties. It’s nothing against the people who do, but I’m in my late forties, it’s been a long time since I dated and I don’t live for shoes.

Throughout most of the nineties, when the kids were little, our normal vacations were in Denver, then about an hour and a half from where we lived. The vacations usually lasted three days and started with a swoop by the new/used bookstore where I NEVER spent less than $250 and walked out usually with three bags full of books. These books then got devoured while taking the kids to the amusement park, or sitting under shade trees watching them play, or reading in the hotel bed while they watched cartoons.

Sometime after 2001 I noticed that I was finding fewer books I wanted to read. I’ll tell you the blunt truth, the last time I made one of those visits, four years ago, I bought $35 worth of books, most of them replacements for books lost or destroyed.

Meanwhile in the oughts my buying from Amazon skyrocketed. Because the problem, you see, was not that there weren’t books being published that I might like to read, it is that those were not the “cool” ones that got “pushed” (which to my biased mind seemed to be mostly about sleeping with tons of guys and bitching shoes.) They just never got on the shelves. A friend of mine referred to her visits to the bookstore as “I’m going to go and be disappointed by chain name.” So I started buying on Amazon. I started as a way of finding the people the publishers weren’t pushing but who had books coming out (I read Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones before they were cool in the States, for instance.) And then I stuck around to read the “also recommends” and the books mentioned in the comments. If anything I was buying more books, a lot of them on hard cover, due to pre order. But I was buying less at brick and mortar stores, because they simply didn’t stock what I wanted.

When a supply system is completely divorced from feedback – see the late stage USSR or the late stage publishing before correction by Amazon/ebooks – you inevitably get what the people at the top think people SHOULD WANT to consume. In fact, if I had a dime for every time an editor said something like “my job is to educate the public” or “my job is to refine the public taste” I’d be buried in dimes, and I’m not a small woman. Of course their job SHOULDN’T be any of that. And in fact it wasn’t. Their job, as defined by the way they got paid more, promoted and admired was to buy books that their particular clique admired. And their clique being mostly of a uniform age, with the same type of liberal arts degrees from the same type of college and living in the same environment (NYC) their choices were amazingly uniform. One thing Mark Levin doesn’t mention are the vast quantity of pseudo literary books that are what Holly Black called “the grey goo” or something like that. No protagonist. No antagonist. No discernable plot. Basically slice of life story in the lives of Woody Allen clones minus the tantalizing quasi-incest angle. These books got the most awards, got called important, and got their editors lots of prestige. And no one bought them unless they got assigned to literature classes. Or rather, no one bought them knowing what they contained. But it was always possible to fudge numbers enough that the author sold another “important” book.

This infected even science fiction and fantasy, in their quest to be taken “seriously” and in fact, it infected almost every field, except Romance (which notably is still the best selling field.) This is because the incentive was to make the editor respected, not to make the house money.

So, is Mark Levin right? Is epublishing the end of books.

No. Not only no but HELL NO. It might be the end of the precious, coddled, literary work of art. (Though I doubt it. There will always be a café society that enforces the reading of these pastermieces as a way to achieve entrance.) It is almost certainly the end of the “pushed” book.

But Levin seems confused on two things. One is the expectation of payment.

He refers to electronic media as something people expect to be free. This is patently false. Oh, it was true perhaps in the beginning, and what we got was worth every penny. These days, though, I pay for both blogs I like and fansites I like. The subscription is not enforced, but I pay because I want the service to go on.

Even music is not free online, at least not music people want to listen to. Myself and friends pay for subscription services as well as various downloads. Yes, there’s any amount of pirating, but a lot of this is by very young people who couldn’t afford to buy, anyway and who will pay once they’re fans. [(For a clue on this consult Baen about Webscriptions.)

BTW, Baen Books, in SF and fantasy is an exception to almost all of the processes above (though the distribution got interesting for them too, since bookstores refused to stock them for the longest time – you see, they publish both center-right, right and communist authors, so in the twisted parlance of our days they’re a “right wing” publishing house, that bookstores often refused to stock – the reason being too complex to go into here.) This is because Baen Books was a family publishing house (still is) controlled by one person who did not care what the establishment thought of him (now her). Baen maintained (and maintains) an online presence which allowed/allows them to listen to their public directly, so they had a better idea of what sold or didn’t. (There were other innovations which I won’t go into, due to space constraints.) And Baen books, btw, is doing very well.  Better than ever in both print and ebook.]

Most of the writing available for free on line, is worth its price. The exception being the free books on Amazon and the free samples of books on Amazon which are of course really just used as promotional devices.  Oh, and the Baen Free Library which is evil book-pushing.  They hook you with the free ones, and know you’ll pay to keep yourself in books from then on.  (I have a book there.)

And that’s the second thing in which Mark Levin is totally wrong. I now routinely browse Amazon from my Kindle. It’s very easy to download samples (for free) of books that sound even vaguely interesting. I tend to buy about one in three books whose samples I download, and often these aren’t books I’d have THOUGHT of buying, even in a store. Even better, I’m totally uninfluenced by the quality of paper/colors on cover or where the book is shelved. I can assure you I’m buying more books than ever.

Will we see the mega blockbusters, like Rowling or King or… Well… I don’t know. There will continue to be such things as sudden inexplicable fads. Let’s face it, nothing rational can explain those explosions. There will also still be bestsellers, for a definition of bestsellers (though I think they might change in way of manifesting – i.e. right now bestsellers are books that sell a lot of copies in a brief period of time. I think in the future there might be a lot more “sleepers” which sell almost nothing for a year or two and then suddenly achieve critical mass and take off and sell… And continue selling, since there’s no inventory to carry and no printed books to warehouse.) There will still be books that sell a few dozen copies and disappear forever. But I suspect the average model will become the book that sells, oh, somewhere between 5 and 10k copies. In the current model that is a “killing” number. No publisher can publish books that sell only that forever and make a profit. However, for a book selling at say 3.99 ( for ease of my horrible mathematical sense) published by the author (or a small press) this means either 2.75 or 1.32 in profit for the author, which over 5 to 10k books means an author writing two to three books a year (not unusual) is making a passable living. A living that will GROW every year, as more books are added to the list, and the old ones continue selling.

The end of the book? No Mr. Levin. The end of books that are the equivalent of rotting turnips or size 21 boots for the left foot only. The beginning of the golden age of stories people actually want to read.

*Crossposted at Classical Values.*

Over and over again, when talking to writers, they say things like “I write because I have to”. Is that true?

Well, to a great extent it is. Not that I have to write, as such, but that life is so much easier and saner when I’m writing than when I’m not. I sleep at night, for one, and I don’t dream of stories. (It’s actually normal for me to dream of stories, with people I never heard of, yes, particularly if I’ve been in a long, dry writing spell.)

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean writing is easy. Heck, even when I’m DRIVEN on a book, as I seem to be on Darkship Renegades which is entirely in my head save for minor word changes and tweaking, it’s still not easy to write.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is this almost euphoric feeling of writing when I’m completely immersed in the book and the words are flowing and the story is playing itself out – seemingly – all around me. We haven’t yet invented the tech to replicate that feeling with someone else’s stories, and it’s glorious. BUT that feeling requires silence and time and a certain state of mind.

It’s all too easy to snuff out the writing light. Not just with me, but with all my friends, I’ve noted that illness, stress, worry about a family member, worry about an upcoming trip (I’ve mentioned I hate flying, right?), disruptions in the household (say, painting a room or moving stuff around) all of this costs writing time all out of proportion with what time the thing takes, objectively.

A lot of writers start their career when the kids leave the house or when they retire. I think I’d have done that, given the option. As is, looking back over the last ten years, it’s astonishing how much I manage to get written around the edges, even if at times it requires me to go to a hotel for a couple of weeks to finish books.

Yeah, our lawn is dead, our fence needs painting, our house inside needs painting too, and I have to only clean once a week – I feel guilty about all of these. OTOH I know what I’d think if I could meet with one of my favorite dead authors and he told me that he’d written ten fewer books so he could keep a lovely lawn.

This of course is a roundabout way of saying the novel(s) aren’t done. Which means I bought three batteries for my laptop, which I’ll charge before leaving on Friday. I wonder if the people next to me will find Athena very odd…