Sandboxes and Romance Arcs

I've made it to Flinders Island, and am happily playing in the sandbox and re-discovering my inner child (as you can see from the attached photo).

Now what has been puzzling me has nothing to do with fishing for wrasse at Trousers Point (caught my first fish but had to throw it back - dang!) or struggling in and out of Dave's spare wetsuit - but romance arcs. I can't say I am all that into romance books per se, but I am a fan of romantic comedy movies. Something about them has niggled away at me and I thought it was time to throw this one out to all the romance experts out there.

OK. Here it goes. The movie starts out with the two romantic leads unknowing, or perhaps at odds with each other. Perhaps they are also separated by some sort of hurdle to the culmination of their ultimate romance - status, other commitments (i.e. already getting married) etc. Gradually as the movie progresses, they come closer together then 'find' each other. Things are great, then along comes something to separate them again - it might be the same thing mentioned above, or perhaps something different - this is the 'losing' phase. Gradually they work their way back together again and 'find' each other again, despite the odds and by bridging the gap of what has separated them up to that point.

Right. Straightforward so far. All the romance writers are asleep. What gets me is that in the typical romantic comedy, the ultimate point at which the two realise they are destined to be together, one of them (usually the woman) has to bare their soul in front of a huge audience. There is this in built end part of the whole arc where the final declaration and expression of feeling has to be public - i.e. the woman is at the isle about to be married, then along comes the romantic interest 'I object!' and in front of the shocked (but strangely accepting) former fiance and the whole church (who presumably got all dressed up for nothing), the erstwhile bride declares her feelings.

Now this last public expression and declaration. Is this a traditional part of the romantic story arc? Or was this added by Hollywood? Perhaps more importantly - does this serve a function in the romantic story arc, or is it just a cliche'?

OK you romance experts out there (I can see you there Rowena - and Sarah:)) What is going on?

The Harbingers of Paradigm Shift

Yes, it's another post about ebooks. No, it's not the same path we've trodden before - this time is something new, I promise. I'm not going to talk about what should be happening with ebooks or publishing, but instead what ebooks represent.

They and their parallels in the entertainment industry are the very tiny tip of a new paradigm, one humanity is utterly unprepared for. It's going to be a wild ride.

Here's the thing - until very recently, there was not one single resource that was completely unlimited. Nothing. There might be a huge amount of solar energy reaching the Earth, but at any given time, that amount is finite. More to the point, the amount of it we can convert to usable energy is even more limited. Everything we eat is finite - plants grow, but once you harvest part of it, there is no more until the plant has grown more or until you've grown a new plant from seed. A cow (or any other milk animal) can hold only so much milk at any given time. A chook lays a finite number of eggs. If you eat the animal, you can't get more until you get another animal - and if you eat all of them, too bad. There will never be more. Well, unless you get hold of some extant DNA and then make clones of your extinct animal.

We're intimately familiar with scarcity. Everything in every human society is built on scarcity - the idea that all things are finite. Supply and demand reflect this: if there is a low supply and a high demand, prices go up. Where the supply is much greater than the demand, absent intervention prices will fall. Most people understand this at a level that's almost instinctive, probably because until maybe a hundred, 150 years ago in the West, and still now, a scarcity in staple foods (a famine) meant the difference between living or dying.

There are two basic, interlocking rules of supply and demand in a world of scarcity. First, the greater the supply, the lower the cost. Breathing and sunlight cost so little energy they might as well be free - and breathable air and sunshine are both, while finite, sufficiently well-supplied we haven't managed to run out yet. Food is rather more difficult to come by, and costs us in money and energy expended (ultimately money can be considered to represent energy expended, via a number of abstractions I'm not going to go into - well, apart to point out that we wouldn't have so many figures of speech relating to hard-earned money, working for something and so forth, if that abstraction didn't exist). Second, the more effort required to get something, or the more difficult it is to create, the lower the supply and hence the higher the cost. Live concerts are both rare and represent a one-off combination of artist, music and venue, so are much more expensive than a recording of the same music by the same artist. Silk, as the product of a relatively rare animal with an extremely limited diet, and requiring careful treatment and processing, is far more expensive than nylon, which can be mass-produced for much less effort and expense per square foot of cloth.

ebooks and their cousins MP3s overturn these rules. Now after the initial creation there is a genuinely unlimited supply. Our understanding of supply and demand says that this should mean they cost us very little, if not nothing. However, the cost to the creators is quite significant - an author might spend months writing a novel, then the manuscript must be proof-read and edited. A band creating a music track will need to first write the music (not exactly a trivial exercise), then hire studio space and/or high-quality recording gear, and often spend much more time mixing and editing tracks than was spent recording them in the first place. Not surprisingly, those who front these costs expect to be paid for their investment. Also no surprise, they'd like their costs repaid as soon as possible - which is at least in part the motivation for what seem to readers and listeners to be artificially high prices. I should note that I'm talking about electronic-only items here, not items released in hardcopy and electronic formats. There's a reasonable argument that the electronic copy there is a bonus item.

Just to complicate things, since most of the places distributing electronic media are corporate groups rather than individuals, there are rules relating to how long a loss can be carried for tax purposes (as a general rule, you can only consider it a loss in the year you spend the money), and what the accounting is supposed to look like. Putting something up for sale for almost nothing because you'll keep getting money from it forever gives accountants hives. As for what the tax people think, it's best not to go there.

So, we have our unlimited supply ebooks and music tracks out there breaking the supply and demand laws. As soon as you put the infinity symbol into any of the standard economic equations, you get nonsense. You can't calculate your running costs as a proportion of expected profit when you don't have any meaningful way to calculate expected profit, and worse, you can't calculate expected distribution because once someone buys they could make as many copies as they want and give them away. Guess where the much-loathed notion of DRM came from? It's ultimately an attempt to impose some kind of limit on supply so that normal business models work. After all, with electronic media, the concept of a limited edition is meaningless.

The DRM arguments, the Amazon vs Macmillan mess, the Google Books settlement - they're all problems arising from our inability to deal with abundance. And it's only going to get worse.

There are already 3D printers that are capable of reproducing everything needed to replace themselves. Right now the open source RepRap model is pretty limited in what it can do, but the tech is improving, fast. It's not going to be long before they can output almost anything from an input of almost anything, and do it fast. Quite possibly it will be available in our lifetimes - and you can build one of these for a relatively low cost. How long will it be before we can create an entire house worth of 'hard' furnishings with one of these things? How long before they can make cushions? Fabric? Food? Water? Breathable air?

When this happens (and it's not a case of 'if', it's 'when'), what allows those who create stuff to make a living? For that matter, what constitutes a living in this environment? Artists, authors, musicians, designers... the people who produce something new from what wasn't there before, they'll have a place. People being people, there'll always be leaders, or would-be leaders. Services will remain popular - but when you can effortlessly reproduce money, what value will it have? If everyone can produce the "stuff" they need and want, what will have value?

This is the big paradigm shift - and in a sense, a true singularity, in that we're not capable of understanding or imagining what life will be like afterwards. I personally find it incredibly difficult to imagine a world where most of the necessities of life are available in unlimited supply. I've focused instead on the relatively few things that do have limitations.

What books - if any - have you read that deal with this in a way that makes sense? And what do you think will happen when most goods have an effectively unlimited supply?

(p.s. The Darth Vader mask was made on a RepRap - I imagine that after polishing and painting it would look quite impressive)

The Toffs and Toughs

The Toughs and the Toffs, photo by Jack Sime, 1937

Peoples’ stories are at the heart of writing, by which I mean all good writing is about people, not events. I recently came across a superb article by Ian Jack, a Guardian columnist in the Intelligent Life, an Economist lifestyle magazine.

You can read the full article here:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ian-jack/5-boys

It concerns the photo above showing two upper class boys and three street urchins. This photo has been used over and over again to illustrate class and inequality in Britain. However, in 1998, Mail journalist Geoffry Levy took a different view. He looked at the story behind the photo. It was semi-staged, of course; the camera always lies.

The two Toffs are Peter Wagner and Tim Dyson from Harrow public school. It is the day of the Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lords and the two boys are required to attend in Sunday Dress. They are waiting at Grace Gates for the Wagner family to arrive by car.

The three Toughs are George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young, who lived close to Lord’s and were in the same class at St Paul’s Bentinck Church of England school. They had been to the dentist and decided to skip school and make some money in tips by portering at Grace Gates.

Levy probed beyond the social message to ask what had happened to the boys. What was their story? Did the rich boys live gilded lives of privilege while the poor worked until they dropped? Not exactly.

The Toffs
Peter Wagner read Natural Science at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was called up in’43 as a lieutenant in the Royal Signals but was invalided out due to poor health. He married in ’53, lived on a farm in Surrey, worked in The City and had three daughters. He suffered from mental illness in the 70s and died in an asylum in Hastings in ’84. He sent two of his daughters to state schools as he hated Harrow.

Tim Dyson went to visit his parents for the summer holidays in ’38. His father was an army officer in India. Tim contracted diphtheria a few days after arriving at his parents’ bungalow in Trimulgherry and died. Four years later his father was starved to death by the Japanese in a POW camp in Korea.

The Toughs
Jack Catlin’s family moved out of the London working class to the middle class West London suburb of Rickmansworth. He served in the Navy during the war and rose to a senior position in the Civil Service. He is still alive in comfortable retirement in Dorset with his second wife – he has two sons from a first marriage. He will not talk about the past.

The other two toughs were George Salmon and George Young. They stayed friends, leaving school at 14 and serving in the Navy. They married, had kids, and lived out their old age in smart and comfortable London flats. They died sometime between 98 and now. They had happy fulfilled lives.

So there it is, the story of five English boys whose lives touched for one brief morning in 1937 outside Lord’s cricket ground.

Nowadays, there is still an Eton-Harrow match at Lords but the Harrow boys will be dressed and look pretty much like the working class boys walking past. They will also have to do their own portering. The wealth gulf is as large as ever, and growing steadily wider as a new aristocracy of international corporate fat cats develops.

And the morale of this story? Damned if I know, except that it is far more complex than a simple tale of class, of privilege and deprivation.

Doing the Happy Dance

On the up side of publishing there is the 'First time you see your cover!' day and there is the day you launch your book trailer. So here it is, the book trailer for my new trilogy 'The Chronicles of King Rolen's Kin'.

King Rolen's Kin from Daryl Lindquist on Vimeo.

I must thank my long suffering husband, Daryl, who put the book trailer together. His web site is here.

Do book trailers sell books? I don't know. But they're fun!

There are now sites dedicated to book trailers. Here at Book Screening and again here at Preview the Book.

Writer and publicist Arielle Ford says:

'there is only so much marketing copy you can write about your book before you have saturated your target audience. But in one minute or less you can tap into the visual, auditory and emotional senses of your potential reader with a book trailer.'

Read her full article here.

As books become more interactive, the book trailer will grow and change. I see it as a chance to share the Resonance of the series with the readers.

How do you feel about book trailers? Would a really good book trailer make you remember the title or the cover? Would that translate into buying the book?

Anger management and the working author

Being an author is one of those unusual highly skilled jobs that have absolutely no application criteria and a 'you got the job' rate of about the same size as make it into astronaut training. Oh and an average income - last survey I saw - of something like 1/4 of the minimum wage... which among many other reasons is why I sometimes feel there SHOULD be one entry criterion (I don't _really_ because I believe in an open and fair-as possible playing field. The 'fair' part is why I actually mention it.)

Almost every author and wannabe author I know could probably have used an anger management course before they started. And probably, with a few exceptions, a refresher every few months. I spend at least 80% of my time on the edge of livid with myself for not writing better, thinking smarter, catching the right opportunity, for thinking I have written the best book that will change the world (or at least sf) and no-one seems to read it (so I am angry with myself for not doing a better job). And that's just the start - The waiting, the stupidity, the attitudes, the arrogance (some of it mine) conspire to make the most even tempered and nicest person angry to boiling over furious a lot of the time. The fact that no-one has yet gone bat-sh!t crazy and taken out their agent, editor, publisher, cover-artist, blurb-writer, proof reader, reviewer, various distributors, Neilson bookscan, retail buyers and even book-stores staff - let alone the fine upstanding gifted people who did this to newbies http://www.examiner.com/x-562-Book-Examiner~y2009m3d20-20-famous-authors-who-were-rejected-repeatedly-and-sometimes-rudely-by-publishers continues to amaze and perplex me. Because that's your BABY. Even with the best will in the world (and that, trust me, is sometimes just a little lacking) NONE of these people will give it the love and care you feel it deserves. And some of them are useless bastards, and some are unmotivated jerks (like that store-clerk who didn't put your book - which only has a month of face time, on the shelf for 2 weeks) and some of them are out to screw you. The paranoids just have no real idea how bad it actually is ;-).

In these interesting times of course this paranoia (which isn't entirely unjustified) has knock-ons. Take this post: http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10006444/random-house-dodges-apple-ipad-to-keep-authors-in-the-dark/ Now, besides the fact that it is fairly obvious that, somewhere down the line the author has decided that he's prepared to risk burning his bridges with a very big publisher in order to poke it with a shark stick, the active dislike for large publishing does show through. It's largely hidden because authors are in an envidious position, where criticism of your publisher is a death sentence for your career - probably (a la John Norman) with all of them. Any gripe is either voiced in very private and trusted quarters, or couched in the most diplomatic terms possible. Of course for the industry's real darlings the opposite is true. Their income is thousands of mulitples higher than the average midlister (and no - there is no proportionality. Rowlings might be 50 times better than Joe Midlister, but she's not 100 000 times better and nor does she have a 100 000 readers who would enjoy her books for every one who'd like Joe's. The system is simply not very good at matching taste of reader and type of writer. It'd be good for readers and writers if it were, but fairly bad for our middlemen.) and so is the amount they earn for the publisher. Every whim is therefore catered to, and every effort made - more and better than they could have made themselves. There is a good reason financially for this... but did that ever stop the rest of us being as mad as cut snakes about it all? There is some justification in this too. There is plenty of evidence that extraneous factors besides the writing quality can and do push books into the public eye and make bestsellers of them. Most of these are not things that ordinary authors can afford to do, or have the skills or contacts for. I can't dispatch 20 people to go and buy every copy of a book in NY and place orders for more and buy those too and buy 40 000 copies and put myself on the bestseller list. But I believe it has been done. I have no control over pricing, over my cover, over my release date, over the push for retail buyers to make a big laydown happen, over book dumps over end displays, over tours to have dinners with book buyers, over appearances on Oprah etc. etc. Yet... these things do happen, and... some of the books they happen for are one-book wonders, because no-one will touch that author again. Quite often too they've lauched books that are, let's face it, good but no better and sometimes worse than Joe Midlist-and-staying-there's books. Remember Terry Pratchett was exactly that - Joe the ignored midlister for I think 20 years. Others have leapt from the starting gate to being on every shelf (though sometimes I wonder who BUYS them) on the basis of a subjective decision. This may be real life, but it does leave some very angry people out there.

Anyway - back to the knock-on effects of interesting times and e-books... It's fairly obvious to me that most White South Africans had no real idea of the depth of feeling of Black South Africans about Apartheid. And mostly they didn't really care. Some even kidded themselves it was really the best for them. And now the boot firmly on the other foot, it's very apparent that the Black and very wealthy powerful leadership are really, really enjoying schadenfreude and even it means hurting other black citizens, NOTHING is better than stomping and kicking those whiteys. They hero-worship the genocidal homophobic kleptocrat Robert Mugabe who has destroyed his country and has set the region back 50 years, because he kicked a few whiteys and spat in the West's eye. And that, I think, is the situation right now in publishing. Publishers probably are aware that some authors don't love them that much. But I think they have no idea of the years of deep bottled-up frustration and un-expressable anger that is seeting away in 99% of the midlist and newbies - and even higher up. So I think they also have no idea that most of these people would - given a chance - support a retail Mugabe (Amazon are no saints. And I wouldn't dish out halos over at Apple either). I don't think they realise that most of their midlist authors would take utter delight in leaving them and spitting in their eyes as they go. Apple has so far been kissing up to the big publishers. Amazon (and we don't love them, but they've been no worse for the little guys than B&N or most of retail) is taking an adverserial stance to them. I don't think Amazon is good for authors... but I can see that they will be bad for publishing. If they start winning, and offer a home (even with strings and nasties) to authors, watch. Authors will leave their publishers faster than rats leave a sinking ship, and they'll take glee in opening the stop-cocks as they go, even if it hurts their interests.

It's probably realistically too late for large publishing to mend the relationship. Throwing a lot more than just crumbs (and so far all they've done is point to gouging more, as thanks for helping them against Amazon) at the midlist could make a difference, but only if they're prepared to make big bold steps too - firing a few people, and improving the equity of spend and effort - neither of which are going to happen. Moving a few deck-chairs might. So... watch this space. I think that Amazon have started with moves to steal publishers only real assets. If Apple - or Google or any other player start too, we're in for interesting times. Small houses with some personal loyalty from their authors might survive. But the rest will die. It might not be any better for writers than Bob Mugabe has been for Africa though.

So where do you guys think its going?
And how do you cope with being frustrated and angry?

Don't We Wish It Was April Fools?

This week has been a busy one in the publishing world. Two major events have occurred. The first is the advent of the "agency model" of e-book sales. The second is the release of the much heralded iPad. Being a techie and curious about the iPad even if I don't see it as an e-book reader so much as a mutli-use device, I'd love to get my hands on one to play with. Still, I don't think it will be the kindle-killer as many have suggested. There are still going to be a number of consumers who will want a dedicated e-book reader like the kindle or the nook. But the iPad will, in my opinion, force Amazon to adapt if it wants to continue being the leader in the e-reader field.

A couple of links of interest concerning the iPad came to my attention Saturday. The first, by Cory Doctorow, appeared on Boing Boing. The basic gist of his article is about why he won't be getting an iPad and his reasoning why no one else should either. But one thing he wrote jumped out at me: But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even a stellar iPad sales performance isn't going to do much to staunch the bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia for the good old days of lockdown won't bring customers back through the door.

The link he cites refers to magazine subscriptions and how ad revenue from the new subscriptions generated by the iPad will take years before having an impact. But the same logic applies to traditional publishing. As long as publishers don't recognize that e-books are a growing segment, a viable segment of their sales, no gadget on the market -- no matter how fancy, how easy to use or how much it costs -- will be the savior the industry is looking for. Moreover, even if such a gadget existed, until publishers throw out their old business models and adapt to new technologies and new demands from the buying public, nothing will change.

(For reaction to what Mr. Doctorow had to say, check out The Digital Reader and Gizmodo.)

With the advent of the iPad is the beginning of the "agency model" of e-book sales. Until this week, e-books were bought and sold much like dead tree versions were. For one of the best explanations I've seen about the differences between the old model, or the "wholesale" model, and the agency model, check out I Love My Kindle. Buffo Calvin has written an easily understood piece about what the differences are and how they may affect e-book sales. An over-simplified explanation (my words here, folks) is that the publishers now set the price and Amazon, et al, are merely facilitators for the sale of the e-book.

So, what has this meant so far for owners of a kindle, or nook or Sony e-reader? The first, and most surprising, is that some customers are finding that they now have to pay tax on their purchases from the publishers who have opted for the agency model. Sure, it's not much. Most folks, even, don't seem to mind since this money isn't going to the publisher and might help ease at least a little the financial problems of their state of residence. But this change has been noticed and everyone is looking for more add-ons they weren't expecting.

The second change is that Amazon is identifying those books sold by publishers who have insisted on the agency model. For example, if you look up any of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, you will find the following notation:

Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
This price was set by the publisher

From what I've been able to tell, this same disclaimer has been placed on all books that fall under the agency model.

The third change that has occurred is the increase in price of some books that had sold prior to the agency model for $9.99 or less. Again, going to I Love My Kindle, there is a breakdown of book price changes. Take a look and see what's happened so far in these early days of the new agency model. The look at the following article on the blog and you will see what my concern has been from the moment the agency model was announced. Some e-books now cost more than their paperback counterparts. Please, someone explain this to me. What reasoning is there for charging more for a DRM'd book that you can only read on a limited number of devices than for a physical book you can loan to your family and friends, resell to a second hand bookstore or in a garage sale, etc? Have the publishers lost their fricking minds?

Now, there has been on interesting by-product of all this. Whether it is an attempt to entice iPad purchasers to buy their books, or an attempt to show they really aren't the bad guys, but HarperCollins issued the largest selection of free books I've seen since I was given my kindle in September. At last count, there were something like 25 e-books being offered for free by HC. These included non-fiction books ranging from self-help to a Mars-Venus book. I believe there are 10 of the Lemony Snicket books available for free. There were a couple of new books. A book by Sheldon Leonard and another by Agatha Christie. In all, it was enough to take some of the sting out of increase in prices -- at least for the day.

So, what can we do about the agency model and the increase in prices for e-books? How do we get e-books released at a reasonable time in relation to the release of the hard cover or trade paperback? First, don't give a book a bad review because of the price -- especially if you haven't read the book. However, you can write the publisher and the author to let them know how you feel about paying as much, or more, for an e-book as you do for a hard copy. Buy books by other authors, those who publish through houses that haven't adopted the agency model.

What do you think? Is the iPad going to revolutionize e-book readers or not? And what about the future of e-book sales under the agency model? What are you going to do to voice your disapproval -- or approval if you think the agency model is a good thing -- to the publishers? The floor is now yours.

To Whom The Dorians Pray

Since Kate has gone down the rabbit hole in pursuit of evil overlords, I shall go after religion. What? Oh, come on – Passover, Easter, Spring Equinox... it’s the stuff that binds our lives.

So, let’s talk about religion on this beautiful Saturday.

First, how most science fiction and fantasy books get it wrong. I think this can be approached through the lens of a panel I was at in some World Fantasy convention. He was a nice man, perhaps twenty five – what do they teach him in schools these days? – and he said “of course, my world has these priests who make these people build towers to the gods, to distract them from pursuing science.”

I don’t remember what I said in reply. I know the words “marxist twaddle” were involved. Because, Ladies, Gentleman, Friends, Beetles and Pterodactyls, that’s exactly what it is. Yeah, yeah, the vile priesthoods of the past all connived to fool the people so that they could make off with the sweetmeats of the of the sacrifices. Right.

The truth is from what we can tell, in all the religions of the past, as in those of the present, we had exactly the same panoply of belief, disbelief, manipulation and devotion as in today’s religions – or today’s political movements which are often the functional equivalent. This is why the past has given us both manipulators hiding beneath the cover of religion – Richelieu! – and saints and even martyrs.

Yes, I know the school books say that this was done to calm the masses, or to keep them quiet, or to... Other very utilitarian things. Sorry kids, Marx was a dumbass and not just in economics (where he thought distribution was exploitation.) And people looking at things a posteriory do not get a true picture.

There seems to be in humans something that needs religion. If you’re not a believer, you’ll say it is the inbuilt need for an all knowing leader, developed by pre-human and barely-human creatures in their earliest associations. If you are a believer you’ll say it’s the way we were designed. I say it doesn’t matter which, but when you are writing, you need to take in account your character’s need for belief and transcendence, or his annoyed and forceful rejection of them. You can’t show a society in which no one believes in anything beyond the everyday. It doesn’t work. When that niche is vacant, ideology moves in and heaven help us. If there’s something the twentieth century proves it is that “Imagine no religion” does NOT lead to “Nothing to kill or die for.”

My characters tend not to be believers, but others around them often are. And I try to make the balance of belief and disbelief workable in my societies.

I find it particularly offensive when fantasies have a world without religion. I always get bogged down in how my supernatural effects work with the religion of the time. But without it, fantasy seems hollow.

My favorite treatment of religion is fantastic literature is The Tombs of Atuan. It’s so believable and so creepy.

In Science Fiction it’s Revolt in 2100, when MOST of the insiders are cynical manipulators, but where there are still true believers.

What is your favorite treatment? What do you think are some of the pitfalls of showing religion in your fantastic world? Why would you choose not to do it? And if you could design a religion from scratch, what would you do?