by | May 21, 2013 · 9:23 am

More from the publishing funhouse

Ah, publishing. The one industry where there’s never a dull moment. Between federal lawsuits against legacy publishers for price fixing to the feud between literary authors and genre writers to the battle to save bookstores even as e-books continue to gain popularity, publishing can be like the best — or worst — roller coaster you’ve ever ridden. This week is no different.

In the Department of Justice’s price fixing law suit against Penguin and Apple, the only remaining defendants to the suit, Penguin has filed a motion to compel arbitration “in the consumer class and state claims.” This is basically the same motion Penguin filed earlier in the life of the case and that was denied by the judge last July. Penguin has, I’m assuming, refiled the motion because the judge, at the time she denied the motion, didn’t actually rule on the state claims. That leaves the door open a crack for Penguin here. Basically, this is probably simply a means for Penguin to preserve the issue on appeal and not a real effort to have the judge grant arbitration.

Now, for once, I agree with Publishers Weekly on this issue. First, arbitration in this case would be prohibitively costly. Think about the man hours needed to enter into arbitration with every person who qualifies. How many people bought an e-book from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, for example, during the time in question? How many have opted in to the class action law suits? How many different states are involved? How many of these purchasers have become incapacitated or have died and the arbitration would have to be with guardians or trustees? How many of us believe this is just another attempt to drag out the suit?

As we draw ever closer to the June 3rd trial date, it is clear that the whole case comes down to whether or not the judge will buy Apple’s and Penguin’s argument that there is no “direct evidence” of a conspiracy or if she will see a pattern in the evidence presented to her. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the applicable federal statutes involved in the case, but I doubt there has to be only direct evidence. If there is an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence, or a so-called smoking gun, that isn’t rebutted by other evidence, then that can be just as convincing as finding someone standing over the body with the murder weapon in hand.

Remember, that person you find with the murder weapon may just be some poor schmuck who came upon the body and, hearing some sound in another room, picked up the gun to defend himself. Conversely, if you have an abundance of e-mails and sworn testimony describing meetings where the players discussed how they wanted to do in Amazon and the best way to do that was to prevent it from discounting e-books by refusing to sign contracts with it unless it agreed to agency pricing, then you pretty much have evidence of a conspiracy.

Yes, that is over-simplifying it, but you get my meaning.

And then there’s the news that broke over the last couple of days concerning Stephen King. King, who back in 2000 was seen as the champion of e-books — or the betrayer of the industry, depending on your point of view — has seemingly reversed his stance. Back in 2000, he published Riding the Bullet only as an e-book. Oh, the howls of outrage at the time. But even louder were the cries of derision by his fellow authors and others in the industry. After all, back then, there was no Kindle, no Nook, no iPad. E-books were still in their infancy. He was either an innovator or a betrayer.

Flash forward to next month and the release of Joyland. Some sites are hailing King as a hero of print. Others note that, while he has said the book will only be released in print next month, he isn’t completely closing the door on releasing it as an e-book later on. Frankly, it doesn’t matter one way or another. Not really and not in the long run because King has kept the digital rights for himself and that means the e-book can come out whenever he wants it to.

King’s rationale for not releasing the book as an e-book is simple: “I have no plans for a digital version. Maybe at some point, but in the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one.”

Now, am I the only one who sees a problem with that statement?

I doubt it. After all, his publisher for Joyland, Hard Case Crime, isn’t keeping the book off of online sales sites like Amazon or BN.com. As far as I have been able to discover, Hard Case isn’t cutting any special deals with indie bookstores to make it more cost-effective for those smaller, locally owned stores to stock the book. Remember, indies don’t have the buying power that the big box stores do simply because they can’t order in the same volume the bigger stores can.

There’s something else that will happen — and that some folks will use to condemn e-books. I can pretty much guarantee that Joyland will be pirated, possibly even before it hits the shelves. You don’t need a digital file to pirate a book. All you need is a copy of the book, or the ARC, and a scanner with the proper software. A prime example of this is the last Harry Potter book. It was available for download on a number of pirate sites days before the book was on sale. Don’t forget, those books were only offered as e-books within the last year or so.

But if King’s reason for withholding the digital version is to get folks into bookstores, this is probably too little and too late. Sure, he’s a best seller and his hardcore fans will go buy the book in print even if they’d prefer digital. Even though it is coming from a smaller publisher, there will be push for the book. After all, King is a “best seller” and he has more than enough money and pull to get push by simply picking up the phone and issuing a statement like the one announcing there would be no e-book version.  But this isn’t one of his trademark horror books. It isn’t coming out in hard cover.

Perhaps this is King’s attempt to help the publishing house and to help support its other authors. Perhaps he really has had a change of heart. But, if that were the case, wouldn’t it be more effective to have Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, in only print and not digital formats? Wouldn’t that make more of a statement? It would certainly make more of an impact. Oh, wait, that would also impact his bottom line. Guess King likes getting those big paychecks as much I would.

Yes, I’m a cynic.

Let’s face it, if he wanted to help bookstores, he could do so without holding back the e-book version. Kobo has a program where indies can “sell” e-books. I’m sure there are other ways as well, including selling download codes for the book. I remember when audio books were making the transition from tape and CD to digital. You could find displays at the local big box bookstores where you could buy MP3 players with preloaded audio books on them. Publishers and authors could do the same with SD and micro-SD cards. As I said, download codes could be sold as well. There are a number of other methods that could be used as well. But each of them would require publishers, and some authors, to adapt and change their mindsets, something too many have shown a reluctance to do.

Too little, too late on King’s part? I don’t know, but I do know there were other things he could have done to make his effort more effective.

Before signing off, I’d like to ask everyone to keep the people of Moore, OK and the surrounding areas in their thoughts and prayers today and in the coming days. The devastation in the area is horrible and the loss of life is even worse, especially when you consider how many children died.

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by | May 20, 2013 · 6:46 am

I can’t afford an editor

This piece is, strictly speaking, aimed at authors eschewing the traditional publishing path and facing up to the parts that traditional publishing was supposed to add to your book or story, but sometimes didn’t.

Naturally, this piece is done without the benefit of an editor (I can’t afford it, and I don’t get paid for this) or even without the compensations I suggest. I don’t have time for them, if you want to read this today. It will be full of errors. Deal.

No matter what they tell you, the best training for writing novels is more writing. It’s no different in that sense from long distance running or long distance swimming.

Notice that I chose the long form of all three…

I don’t think any new writer ever starts without doubt about his basic skill in this profession (please think of it as that. It’s not a hobby, or catharsis. Not if you want to write enough good books. Hobbyists produce occasional books or stories, some very good, some good, mostly bad or average. Writing is no different to any other field in this respect, much as publishers might try to kid you otherwise. Hobbyists are cheap, unlike hobbits who are expensive and hairy footed.)

I take that back. No potentially competent writer starts without doubt. (I still have lots. If you would like some, I can spare it.) If you know that you are Heaven’s gift to the world of literature… you probably are. To modern literary fiction. And no amount of lack of sales despite the huge volume of marketing and display can change this. But if you are (or have the potential to become) the sort of story teller that many people love and remember the stories told by, and moreover part with money to read, you question yourself. Your direction, your skill.

And this, of course is the first stage of editing. Doubt.

If you have no doubt, you’ll never accept any editing, not from yourself or anyone else.

Of course where so many of us fall is that doubt overwhelms. Common sense, and self-confidence never get a look in.

But what if I really am rubbish? What if I am taking the wrong direction entirely? Surely the answer is that I need guidance, and that guidance is therefore beyond price.

(Sigh). There IS no wrong direction.

Repeat after me. There is no wrong direction in Independent Publishing. You want to write first person piano-dwarf sadomasochist erotica set in Weimar Germany, or a treatise on anti-Zorasteran tactics? It’s a big world and sooner or later the internet is going to put you in touch with others of like mind or interest. If you want to be popular and read by millions… well that’s a different matter. Don’t ask traditional editors, because they’re trying to pick (at the very worst) bestsellers, and based on the results they have a 99.9% failure rate. It’s something we (editors and the rest of us) lack the tools for, or the training for. All they have is instinct or the following the herd – and a lot of books to choose from. They can put you in the top 10%, but that’s still a lot of failing books for every great seller. An editor-for-hire is even less likely to be telling you that really, dwarf erotica, especially with pianos, is a limited market. And hell, I might be wrong. If it is bizarre or funny or even politically correct enough, millions of copies might get sold. (I spend a fair amount of time sneering at the ‘politically correct’ because I personally despise the unthinking mindless following of prescribed rules, many of which fail the most cursory extension of logic, but there seem to be a lot of people who like it and obey it slavishly. It might work for you.).

What there is, and you should worry about, is technique. Much though I disapprove of it, being nearly as gifted as Shakespeare at original usage of letters, spelling is a non-negotiable. Fortunately a spill-chucker can do the worst, although it does require you to know the difference between a beech, a beach, and a lady dog. The reason spelling is important is the same reason you need elementary grammar. (And I mean elementary. It will not matter to most of your audience if you decide to boldly go where no infinitive has been split before. Or, if you have sentence fragments.) Look, the grammar-grundies, who naturally love to emphasise their importance, forget the purpose of regular grammar and spelling. It is to make reading easier. That’s all. If your audience doesn’t know if they are an audience – “you’re audience” or whether they’re your readers – “your audience”, then they pause reading to think about it. And this really, truly, is a case of hesitate and they are lost. The purpose of grammar is to make communication between the writer and reader better. The grammar needs to be fairly consistent, and enhance your clarity. Anything else is pure vanity. It’s pretty, may make you look clever, but it’s not going to lose you thousands of readers if you split an infinitive. Grammar-grundies are relatively rare, along with dwarf-piano erotica fans. Most people read for the story.

The important parts of other techniques — and there are books full of them — are largely about not confusing the reader, and very often by following an accepted convention. People are used to them, so they work (which is what writers like Jeanette Winterson miss when they re-invent the wheel in sf). First, second, third person, omniscient POV. How change point of view. Tenses, correct capitalization, commas and quotes, not to mention ellipses… This is stuff you should have learned at school, and seriously, if you’re paying an editor rather than trying to learn them, you need a second job, and deserve to pay through the nose for it. Get a few books, study your favorite authors… and then work on picking up those communication issues.

The first, single most effective way you can do this…
.
…
…..
……..

………..Is to leave it be for a reasonable time.

Yes, really. Stories need to ferment. Well, it’s either ferment or get some distance from you, or you from them. I find immediate self-editing much, much less effective than hitting a story again after three months. That’s the period that works for small brains like mine. You may find weeks or years work better for you.

Secondly, if you really care, and can’t pay someone else to struggle… start at the back. Read each sentence, from the end of your manuscript. If you actually read the words backwards aloud, at double speed, it will tell you that Elvis is Satan and living in Poughkeepsie, but, while I am sure this is very valuable to you, reading the sentences the normal way around, but out of context lets you pick up many errors, in logic, and communication, plain old missing words and typos.

The next step is to get other readers involved. Unless you have a dedicated fan club… try trading favors. I’ll read yours, you read mine. And try getting at least three first readers. Five is better. Me, I always do odd numbers, and after applying logic, personal bias, and then looking things up (in that order) I still have doubts about a point… I go with the majority. Your system may differ.

At this point, if you can afford it, it’s worth getting someone who copy edits for a living to quote. The manuscript ought fairly clean and quick to do, and if their rates are based on time needed and suppressing the gag reflex, it ought to have helped a lot… and you will have learned a lot, which passing steps one and two and going straight to commerce won’t do (or will do much more slowly). If not, I’d advise repeat steps one and two.

Odds are your final product will be cleaner than most traditionally published stories, and the next piece you write will be better.

So: any tricks or ideas you have to achieve clean manuscripts?

Oh to pay for the sand in the arena – you might have a look in at my website, where SAVE THE DRAGONS is available – which has never seen a traditional editorial process, although some wonderfully talented people have edited it Or at one of the shorts

– edited as above, because the short will never make enough money to pay an editor.

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by | May 17, 2013 · 2:49 am

Juggling Molecules in Space

Hi, everyone. I’ve been totally flat chat this week. In the mean time, here is an old post that I hope you find interesting.

Chemical Engineering in Spaaaaaaaace. . .

So much of what we come into contact with is made of four elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen – the main elements of living systems. Add phosphorous and sulphur and you have what comprises 98% of all living systems.

The chemistry for juggling these four atoms – C, H, O, N – has been around for a long time.

Engineers and scientists have been confident enough in the chemistry and the various ways of manipulating them to propose various sets of reactions for use in gathering resources out in the vast reaches of space, as part of human exploration. This is part of a wider field of study called In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU), which has formed a key part of plans to explore other part of the solar system, particularly Mars, for the better part of two decades.

In the Mars Direct concept Robert Zubrin proposed using the well known Sabatier reaction:

CO2 + 4H2 => CH4 + 2 H2O

To react hydrogen with the Martian atmosphere to produce methane and water – very useful things to have on the red planet. The methane would be stored and kept for use as rocket fuel.

Methane and oxygen are a handy combination. In terms of chemical rocket propellant candidates, the Specific Impulse (Isp) of Methane and Oxygen at 3700 m/s is second only to Hydrogen and Oxygen at 4500 m/s (to convert to seconds of impulse multiply by 0.102).

Meanwhile the water from the Sabatier reaction would be split via very familiar electrolysis reaction:

2 H2O => 2H2 + O2

The idea was that only the hydrogen would need to be transported to the Red Plant. H2 weighs a lot less than CH4, freeing up space and payload for the 6 months transit to Mars.

Various test rigs were constructed on Earth, using analogues of the Martian atmosphere, which has been well characteristed since Viking. Mars has a lot of CO2 – more than 95% of the atmosphere – and a nice analogue of the Martion atmosphere right down to the low pressure could be similated for the rig. The CO2 is initially absorbed onto zeolite (an ever popular sorbent) under conditions simulating the Martian night. During the Martian ‘day’ the CO2 desorbs and passes into the Sabatier reaction vessel with the H2, which is heated to 300C. Reaction then occurs in the presence of the right catalyst (in this case pebbles of ruthenium on alumina). The water from the reaction is condensed out and passed to the electrolysis unit.

Still awake?

OK. Not surprisingly scientists and engineers planning Mars missions were concerned about overly complex systems forming such major part of a critical path.

Current plans for ISRU on Mars revolve around direct dissociation of the Martian atmosphere i.e.

2 CO2 => 2 CO + O2

[BTW if you could pull off this reaction at room temperature on Earth you would be an instant billionaire]

The current Mars Design Reference Mission proposes the production of oxygen on Mars through direct dissociation. Methane will be transported directly from Earth, with the ascent vehicle still using the tasty combination of methane and oxygen in its rocket engines.

So how is the CO2 pulled apart? There are many contenders, all of which uses a lot of energy. On Mars that energy is currently planned to be delivered by a 30 kW fission power system.

The front-runner for CO2 dissociation is thermal decomposition, followed by isolation of the O2 using a zirconia electrolytic membrane at high temperatures.

This system was developed for its first flight demonstration as the Oxygen Generator Subsystem (OGS) on the defunct Mars Surveyor Lander, which would have been launched in 2001 (but was cancelled following a string of Mars mission failures – Mars Climate Orbiter (1999), Mars Polar Lander (1999), Deep Space 2 Probes 2 (1999). That was a bad year. ).

The OGS was to demonstrate the production of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere using the zirconia solid-oxide oxygen generator hardware. This unit was designed to electrolyze CO2 at 750C (1382 F). The Yttria Stabilized zirconia material – once a voltage is applied across it – acts as a oxygen pump allowing the O2 to pass through it and be collected. The plan was to run the unit about ten times on the surface.

As I mentioned there were various contenders for the process. Such as molten carbonate cells, which operate around 550C with platinum electrodes immersed in a bulk reservoir of molten carbonate. Personally, the engineer in me shudders at the thought of trying to manage any sort of molten system that remotely.

The final system for CO2 decomposition used on Mars is probably still a work in progress. It will be interesting to see what develops there.

The fact is the initially proposed Sabatier reactions did not produce enough O2 to react with the methane, so some form of CO2 splitting process was still required.

So there are some things we can do to juggle molecules when we get to Mars.

Is everyone out there looking forward to getting to the Red Planet and grappling with what we find there? Who thinks we should not go? And why not?

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by | May 16, 2013 · 7:00 am

The Power of the Conspiracy

It should come as no surprise that a lot of writers tend towards conspiracy theory – as do a lot of other highly creative types. After all, humanity in general is wired to lean towards finding patterns where none exist, and a conspiracy theory is nothing more than imputing some unseen guiding hand in events that should be unconnected – finding a pattern, in other words. We’re also generally wired towards finding meaning – even if there isn’t any. Meaning is the tool our brains use to navigate our world – which has the interesting result that most people would prefer a universe run by an evil mastermind than one that operates on a set of rules and random events (which, incidentally, does not mean what a lot of people think it means. Randomness is one of those concepts that doesn’t gel terribly well with human nature).

People who spend their lives – or any significant portion thereof – bringing new order from something that wasn’t there before are going to be even more attuned to patterns, and therefore conspiracy. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, paranoia. Working in a field where the outcome bears next to zero relationship to the quality of the creator’s inputs (once you get past the “good enough” bar, anyway – and that one’s been creeping steadily lower what with the creative industries busily devouring their young) will do that. I fight the tendency all the time – to the extent of reminding myself repeatedly that when there’s a choice between a conspiracy and stupidity – even the most breathtakingly unbelievable stupidity on par with putting one’s dong in a hornet’s nest – go with stupid every time. The people I want to accuse of masterminding some grand conspiracy usually don’t have the brainpower to manage even a small one.

All of which means that the last few weeks in US politics have been really really bad. It seems like every time I turn around there’s another conspiracy hitting the news after having lasted some time despite the obvious lack of competence of those involved. So are they really conspiracies run by evil masterminds?

Actually no – and this is something to keep in mind when plotting. Combining the groupthink effect (the tendency of people to go with what appears to be the consensus view in order to fit in) with a lack of diversity of opinion and a sense that retribution is unlikely (and who is less likely to face retribution than the tax man?) will get you to the same place as a grand conspiracy with a lot less effort on your part. The effect of people doing what people do (namely trying to do what they think their perceived superiors will reward them for) compounds itself in all sorts of fascinating ways.

Of course, I could be wrong and there could be a grand conspiracy afoot – in which case my flabber will officially be gasted.

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by | May 15, 2013 · 8:55 am

Expose It Yourself

Just don’t do it by unzipping your clothes.  Okay, fine, not by unbuttoning them either.  And on no account wear a maniacal grin.   And, if you absolutely must do any of the above, do NOT tell them Sarah Hoyt said to it.

Because Sarah Hoyt is, of course!, talking about literary information.  A concerned fan (mostly concerned I’d run out of blog topics), recently sent me the following Heinlein quote:

The door dilated. – Beyond This Horizon (1942)

This offhand mention has become the simplest (three words!) and often-quoted exposition of the wonders of a different world, where what would be novel today has become simply the way things work.

 

Because of the way the  paragraph with the quote came at me, I’m not sure who said it, but it sounds like something out of a writing manual.

However, the point bears making, and I’ve seen it in a dozen how to write books, quoted as the example to emulate.

Heinlein was, of course, the master of writing this sort of thing, which is why he bequeathed us the term “Heinleining” for how to introduce exposition to anything.

So, how do you do it?  Well…

A few techniques:

 

The sly – you can think of this technique as a cat sneaking up behind people and stealing food from their plate before they realize he’s there.  The door dilated might be perhaps the best example, but you can contrive your own less spectacular ones:

 

The car took off, low altitude at first, then rising.

Every morning at six am, the Mars launch rattled the house and woke me up.

My suit needed reprogramming.

 

The misdirection – you simply present this as something everyone knows but focus the attention of the sentence elsewhere. Let’s try:

It seems like all the representatives of the fifty planets were fixed to give us their sort of law, again, long on graft opportunities and short on substance.

The corn crop was going to be terrible, of course.  They’d been terrible the last fifteen years, since the Mage War had devasted Krevalen.

Mina was not going to use a magespell to make herself prettier.  She always thought the girls who did that and got elected Queen of the Prom should be flayed with a butter knife.

 

The matter of fact – which you need to be careful about, so it doesn’t become ridiculous, with characters telling each other things both of them should know.  You know, the “As you known, Bob, we were invaded by Martians in 1945.”  The way to do it is by combining the previous techniques.

 

 

It probably was going to come to war, and when fifty civilized planets get in a war, every world was likely to get time-bombed out of existence.

 

You see what I did there?  Of course, other bits of hidden exposition have to tell us what the heck those things mean, but for now try those for yourself.  Give me more examples in comments, and forgive me the short post.  There’s a workshop in town which I’m getting a chance to audit, (Which you should take as a minor lesson.  Yes, I have 24? 25? – I haven’t counted lately – books out, but I still take every chance possible to listen to more successful professionals telling how they did it.  I’d have paid for it if I could, but this one is really very expensive, so getting a chance to audit is nothing to sneeze at.) and my deep freezer just gave up the ghost.  It’s always something.

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by | May 14, 2013 · 10:00 am

Tuesday morning thoughts

Last week — was it only last week? — I wrote about how I was finding myself forced to take some downtime after finishing a novel. That need has pretty much passed, only to be replaced by the body numbing exhaustion that came from a weekend filled with graduation and commissioning activities for my son. Much as I’d like to be able to sit back and bask in the pride I feel for my son, I know I can’t. So I’m pushing through. The only real problem today is there simply isn’t enough coffee in the world to get my brain going enough to blog.

But I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that sanity has yet to find its way into legacy publishing. How do I know? Well, the price fixing suit filed by the Department of Justice against five of the Big Six as well as Apple has yet to be settled by all parties. In fact, it looks like it will go to trial early next month, barring some last minute settlements or postponements. It is going to be interesting to see how that plays out in court, assuming it goes all the way to verdict. Of course, if the court finds for the DoJ, we all know there will probably be appeals and that means no final result for years to come.

Then there’s this article from Publisher’s Weekly about the increase in e-book sales last year. What’s interesting about it is that it, like so many of the other studies, goes by the number of dollars spent instead of number of units bought. This is an important distinction. Going by the number of dollars spent, e-books represented 11% of the market. But when you consider how much cheaper e-books are — at least if you are talking about non-legacy published e-books — than paperbacks, much less novels, you have to wonder exactly what the numbers of units sold are. I have a feeling that if we had accurate numbers, we’d see figures nearing 50% of the market for e-books. But that’s just my feeling.

There’s also been another warning for authors about the danger of posting your material online. Author Lillith Saintcrow has been posting Squirrel!Terror on her blog for some time now. Imagine her surprise when she is tipped off that someone has been posting her work, with some of the names changed, as their own over on Daily Kos. She went to the posts, made sure she had gotten good information and then posted that these were her work.

And she was attacked by followers of the purported plagiarist, being called liar and other things.

While I understand her upset at being plagiarized, and I agree that she received at best a non-apology from the other party, I have to take issue with a subsequent post she put up and that has been echoed by other writers. She basically lumps piracy with plagiarism and that is my problem. In the world of e-books, piracy is not the same thing as plagiarism (although they are certainly closely related). As she noted in her original post, whole blocks of text were lifted by the other person and the only real changes in the text were names of the characters. Plagiarism clearly, as any student who has had to write a research paper will attest.

Piracy, on the other hand, is taking your e-book and putting it up for download without permission and without giving the author/publisher the appropriate proceeds. No one likes having their e-books pirated. There are differing opinions on whether it helps or hurts sales. As most of you know, I happen to fall in the camp that it helps. I guess this is where I admit that I have been brainwashed by the late Jim Baen not only about the viability and importance of e-books but that folks might pirate one e-book, find they like it and then they will go out and buy others by that author. Why did he believe that? Because he’d seen it work that way and, frankly, I happen to agree. Of course, if you happen to believe that readers are inherently criminal, then you won’t believe this and there is nothing I can say to change your mind.

Frankly, this debate reminds me of a situation that arose several years ago when the author of the then hot YA series discovered that someone she’d given a copy of the manuscript for the next book had leaked it on the internet. She stomped and screamed and pitched a royal hissy fit — in public. Because she just knew it would kill sales of the book — and remember, this was the latest hot YA series and it is still a big seller — she withdrew that book from her publisher and went back to work writing yet another book for the series.

Now, her hissy fit was a marketing windfall for her because it kept folks talking about the series. But it also delayed, iirc, the release of the next volume because she had to go back and write something else. Can I blame her for being mad? No. But at the rate the book was selling, the leak wouldn’t have hurt her. Not really. It didn’t hurt the Harry Potter books — and they were leaked as pdf files before the print books were available and years before legal digital versions were. But she was convinced no one would buy her book.

Sigh.

The lesson from what happened to her and from what happened to Saintcrow is that we have to be vigilant. If we post excerpts, or entire stories or novels, online, we need to periodically do searches for key phrases or passages. We need to search for our titles to see if they have been put up on some torrent site. Then, if you find you’ve been pirated, send a take down notice. It may or may not work, especially if the site is hosted outside of the country. If you find you’ve been plagiarized, do a take down notice and also let the offending party know that you will be talking with your attorney, especially if they are selling your work as their own.

Your thoughts?

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by | May 13, 2013 · 7:07 am

The Value of Editors.

The trouble ‘a maxim tremendous’ is that it does become ‘trite’ in time (yeah, I will send a copy of Dog and Dragon to the first person who successfully identifies the source of that cheerfully abused quote, and gives us a few lines to prove it. You should recognize it. If not, report to your dear pater and mater and tell them you were deprived. Possibly depraved too, but that is none of my business. In this these degenerate times you can probably claim victim points for their cruelty.)

In this case I’m not referring to England (although, ladies, I have been told, find her very exciting when they close their eyes and think of Albion.) but to editing, which has little resemblance to England – except that it is the rump of an old Empire.

If I’ve heard ‘Editing is essential before you publish’ once, I have heard it expressed in different ways, at last count seventeen thousand three hundred and twenty three times. Including this one … 17324… and counting. Just as soon as any writing/writer’s group/site/blog runs out of useful things to say, sure enough someone will dig up this chestnut, which isn’t just hoary, it’s Precambrian (which is quite an achievement for a chestnut).

It’s also one of the ones that everyone feels bears repeating, because we’ve all been subjected to swill that never saw a spill-chucker, let alone a first reader, and has never been within cannon-shot of an editor. These days, as anyone can upload their stories onto the net, with no form of filter, you might even have paid for it.

In most cases, however, the best an editor could have done is said ‘start again.’

I’ve read slush. I think Matapam (and probably several others here) will confirm: Slush submissions are 90% bad. Unpublishable. Not something anyone would read for pleasure. And 75 % of those could not be made better, short of a rewrite that might easily take three times as long as the original writing did. The other 25% could be edited into something which is good enough to join the top 10%.

The top 10% contains about 0.01% which are just jewels, would shine out of any muck-heap. There are maybe a further 0.1% which require a quick wipe and they gleam. The rest of the 10% would take a greater or lesser degree of polishing/cutting/changing/adding (or all of these) to make good enough to read and in some instances as good as the ones that needed no polish.

Most of the sort of writers who finds their way to writing websites like this already know this. In fact they’re probably obsessive hyper-polishers, who try, and try, and try again to make every story perfect. Who are always looking to learn, and willing (possibly too willing) to take advice, and make their work better. Most of them were in the upper half of the top 10% anyway, but don’t believe it of themselves. The 75% who make the Eye of Argon look like a work of genius (which it is in its own little way) already believe in their overwhelming talent. Besides, publishers have people who do that trivial spelling, sentence construction, tenses, continuity, punctuation and all that boring stuff (they have. They’re called ‘Authors’.) And if they’re independently publishing they’re sure readers will be just as purblind as they are to the faults, and be dazzled by their re-iteration of LotR/Star Wars.

You can repeat the maxim to them until they turn puce (it’s easy. You chew betel-nut while doing so and spray it rather than say it) it will no effect except on their color and possibly health. It won’t change the tide of swill running into KDP or filling the few remaining slush submission intakes. They’re not listening. They have no idea what you could be irrigating about.

To the rest of the writers… we are like adolescents in middle-grade. Desperate to stand out and desperate to do so by fitting in. We’re as much of a sucker market for editorial services as those kids are for the right labels. And for some of us, it’s the difference between our beloved story/book being a jewel or just more dross. And we are the worst of judges, as the best of us tend to think all our work is dross (or fear that everyone else will think it dross), even though we love it. Millions of great books rot under beds or in bottom drawers. As readers we’re all poorer for this.

Ah. ‘Poorer’. Now you may have noticed that so far that money hasn’t entered into all of this… which is odd, because as a society we seem to have settled on that as a way of measuring worth. Besides, it buys kitty kibble and chocolate, which are essentials to my life (yes, I am ruled by my cats. Aren’t all cat-owners. That’s why – to borrow from a favorite author (who gets it?) We call the cat a Bastet.)
Of course, that’s how traditional publishing worked, and was its one strength, for readers. It washed out the 90%.

The problem of course is it washed out almost all of the other 10% too, and there is little real evidence that it did so brilliantly, giving us only the best. And from the author buying the kitty kibble point of view, the author got to keep (if he or she was lucky) 10%, with the other 90% being divvied up between publishers (who, in theory at least, provided editing, proof reading, cover copy, cover design, cover art and marketing) distributors, and retail. The rates varied a little from 6% for Noobs in paperback (8% being more normal), to for e-books 25% of net (or a LOT less of gross as the book industry learned nasty tricks from the music industry – 14-15% if you were lucky). In the rare instance of Baen, that got to 20%. The author didn’t have a lot of choice about it. The traditional publishers had almost total control of access to retail space. It was what is called an oligopsony – where many sellers compete for few buyers, and the buyers can pass most the risks and costs to the producers.

It’s an economic position which, even for the most desirable product, isn’t good for producers or buyers. If it is a product – such as books or sugar which people love but can, sort of cut back on or even do without, once they’ve got used to cutting down… then those middle-men had better do a very good job, because if the number of users declines, the share they’ve left the producers is disproportionately hurt. The oligopsony’s response to their own inefficiency is always to do exactly what it had – it passes more of the expenses on to the producers, to keep it’s own margins. So for example, authors increasingly had to do their own marketing, and take a cut in income too. It’s one of those examples – like sugar under Venetians back in the Renaissance – and chocolate and tobacco in the US – producers and consumers have little or no influence, and when things go pear-shaped, they all suffer. Ending an oligopsony is not always easy on anyone, but the middle hurts most.

Enter Amazon KDP, and on its heels Smashwords and all the other e-book retailers. Paying around 70% of gross… a long step up from the 15% you would be very lucky to get otherwise. Only… all you got for that was distribution and retail space. The remaining 55% of the cover price is equal to what the publishers were taking for their work – the editing, the proof reading, the cover, the marketing and publicity etc. and of course NY premises, and interest on those advance payments and a few other things besides a profit, which is what they could take as an oligopsony. In reality, they had themselves outsourced often many of these functions, on a work for hire basis, for some time. Remember that is not what it cost, but what, under an oligopsony they could extract from the system.

Now for those of us deciding to go Indy — it’s over to us. Which brings us to the tremendous maxim, ‘Editing is essential before you publish’.

I hit up against the fossilized but true unicellular chestnut late last week on an Oz writers list I belong to, which is principally writers, but has a sprinkling of editors – freelance and small press, because the great ones do not concern themselves with this sort of thing. One of the freelancers was touting their wares, telling the audience just how essential editing was before you published. Just how VALUABLE it was, and how authors didn’t realize this.

Which of course led me to the thesis of today’s post: Many of us DO realize how valuable editing is (some need it much more than others, most of us would like to have it). On the other hand: the freelance editing market is burgeoning. Not only do a stream of graduates in English Lit. fail to find jobs every year (and some are specifically training to edit) but the publishing world has slashed thousands of jobs in most of the areas that really add value to writers and readers (copy-editors, proof-readers, graphic designers) knowing that in the current awful economic climate, they can get these former employees to do the job for less, without benefits or leave. So: Do editors realize what their value is, in terms of what a writer earns? And more importantly, HOW the e-book publishing writer earns – which is slowly. I hope, for instance, based on present revenues, to realize about 10K for a book – as an established midlist author with a following… over the next 10 years. A new start-up might aim at half that. Yes, I might get lucky, and we really don’t know what the actual figures are yet, but it’s a monthly (or less often) low figure per book for a number of years, provided the author keeps writing. The author doesn’t have large (for certain values of large) amounts of money up front as with an advance. Editors I get the feeling have no idea of these harsh realities or value themselves at the salaries they got in traditional publishing, when it was an oligopsony. I wanted to put a figure on it (and actually I have several. Most of which are too much for the Indy author to bear).

A small press editor, who doesn’t freelance, and who has never tried to make a living writing, but is a very important (in the small pond that is Australia) literary arts figure (with all that that implies – I will probably never sell a book or eligible for an award in Australia again, because just as in the US this is very… shall we say close group, who are not used to anyone daring to do more than agree humbly and kiss their feet.) promptly informed all and sundry that it didn’t matter. You had to have editing and editors had to be able to earn a good living… If you had to take a day job and save up for however long it took.

To a part-timer or a hobbyist perhaps it made sense. To anyone with any hope of being a full time professional, none at all. (And, in the end, _I_ want my favorite authors to be that, because then they can write more. Writers are not interchangeable widgets. No one reads quite like Sir Terry Pratchett or David Weber, or Sarah Hoyt. If they can’t earn a living, they write less. And they already write much slower than I read.) If it costs more than it benefits you: it’s vanity publishing.

What’s more that makes editing – for all but very well-to-do or with supportive second incomes from the trust fund or partner or mumsy – unaffordable. Something for the hobbyist only. I can’t afford to stop writing to earn extra to pay the editor, publicist, cover artist, designer… unless each of them increases my sales by more than they cost me. Which – as the number of would-be editors is growing means a lot of them will end up jobless, because the number of well-to-do hobbyists is about the same size as the old vanity publishing market. Lucrative, but not that vast. And, not to make too blunt a point of it, the one piece of advice that those editors cannot give is ‘start again’. What they get to edit and have to be tactful about is going to include what is worst about slush, with little redeeming pleasure from polishing books that start not needing much. It won’t help Indy books one bit.

In the end this means I – and many other midlisters taking to indy can’t afford the editors. We work around this as best as possible, and that’ll be a topic for next week’s post. It also means a lot of people who choose to be editors can’t get work and will have to take something else – be it flipping burgers or working in finance – but not in the area they wanted to be in. A lose : lose equation, with the only winners being the traditional publishing industry – which is good for neither writer, readers, nor people who actually like to hands on work with polishing books. Great for NY real estate and the arts establishment.

Unless of course we do things differently. Authors and editors need to be able to make living. So do graphic designers and proof readers… the issue is 1) They have to be paid according to value added. 2) They need to add enough value to make it possible for them to do the job. 3) There is no way that most authors accept that when we’re talking about dollars per hour, and final outcomes, they get less than anyone else, or less than they get without them.
It’s an idea which is coming –
Although to be honest I don’t think their rates are competitive yet. Sorry, the accounting does not add up, unless for e-books for example sell (at their 20% for the author and assuming the author would make 10K without them) –
Without them the author would have to sell 14.2K worth of books or at $4.50 each 3174 copies.
With them… to earn the same amount – 50K worth of books – 11 111 copies.
For this to be viable win for the author (their saving in time, stress and effort being worth something too, but the loss of control and delays inevitable) the publisher will have to sell more 12K. I can see the publicist and the cover artist adding quite a bit… but how much the editor adds will depend on how bad the book was to start with. And her/his earning must surely depend on how many hours it took to make it better.

Here is my idea to toss into the wind. The editor/cover artist/ proof reader, just like the author, need some basic cost covering. They also need some motivation to make that book work. Surely the answer would be a short term higher percentage share to the ‘publishing team’ – say for the first six months of the book’s life to let them recover costs, and thereafter a small but appreciable share of the monthly royalties.

And that could end up as win for everyone.
Or what other ideas do you have?

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