And – alas – no, not the gem of a movie or the gem of a book it was based on. No, this neverending bloody soap opera is the ongoing saga of Amazon vs Hachette, complete with New! Exciting! Dubious! Claims (yeah, yeah, so what else is new).
Exhibit 1, on the side of the megamultimedia giant with the teensy weensy publishing arm (of course I meant Hachette, who the heck did you think I meant?): Publishers Weekly spins a claim that Amazon is begging authors to shut up. Note that this is described as a phone conversation, so it will inevitably come down to who believes whom. Given that Hachette is playing dirty pool as dirty as it gets, and has done so in the past, I rather suspect that this is another exercise in disinformation eagerly gobbled up by those who want to believe that the massive multinational content distribution megacorp is on the side of the little guy. Sounds kind of dumb when you look at it that way.
Exhibit 2, a claim that a teensy weensy survey (come on, since when is 5k-ish representative of something like American book buying habits?) performed by an organization that depends on the publishing industry and especially the Big Howerever-the-hell-many-it-is-now for its news is more or less accurate about book buyers being turned off Amazon because of the dispute. With the fine record of disinterested comment from these guys I’m hardly surprised Amazon hasn’t returned requests for comment. “When you stop showing ridiculous levels of bias” isn’t really going to work with this lot.
Oh, and the author of the article making this claim? Well, he’s the Editorial Director of one Digital Book World, owned by…. non other than the owners of Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Market, both of which would have more than a few problems should the Big Publishing Babies not be there any more.
Exhibit 3 is actually rather balanced and doesn’t skimp on the facts. Since it’s explaining why Amazon scares the bejeezus out of the Big Publishing Babies this is a good thing. Of course, much of it is anecdata, but we all know the hard data that lies behind all of this. Yeah. That. The survey that says clearly that indie isn’t just eating trad’s lunch, indie is eating trad’s breakfast as well, and probably a good chunk of dinner on the side.
Now that you’ve all had enough of the soap opera for now, here’s a nice little example of what one little typo can do… (Alas, I don’t have the image. When the typo was pointed out the creator pulled it to fix… It’s advertising a paranormal romance).
Imagine a toned male torso, low slung jeans that look about a quarter inch shy of indecent exposure. Presumably the droplets on said torso are sweat. Male hands rest lightly on the things, most likely belonging to the owner of said torso. Female hands possessively caress the stomach (the owner of those must be standing behind the guy). Pic doesn’t go high enough to show nipples. Background is a dark stormy blue with lightning in the distance. Pretty much standard, so far.
Now the text… And I quote (emphasis is all mine): “Damn the gods. The fell of her solid form blasted through his petrified center. He hadn’t realized how much he missed this. Human contact. The simple act of ouching and being touched. Warmth and the softness of a woman. So long denied, now he feasted.”
Without that typo it would be pretty good copy for that style of book. And – inevitably – the creator is a tad pissed that it slipped through. Proof that a) one letter matters. A lot. And b) you can proof-read something a dozen times and you still won’t see the mistake until you publish the bloody thing.
Oh, and many thanks to Amanda for the links. Without those, all I would have had to offer was the typo.
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Neverending Story”
Two typos; shouldn’t ‘fell’ be ‘feel’?
OTOH, why fix them? I’ve already been exposed to far more of this exposition than I want!
Proof that the Iron Law of Typos applies to me, too. “fell” is my typo. Oops…
“The act of ouching”
I’m told there is a market for that sort of writing too.
Judging by how much the Erotica section has grown lately, a big one! 😉
And upstanding, too.
Oh, yes. A rather special subset of erotica… (and damn I wish I could figure out how to bloody write the stuff. The $$$… so tempting… but every time I try something stops me, cold.)
*walks by table* Oh, hi. That’s a lovely salad! Um, were you going to eat all that? *stabs porterhouse steak with belt knife, keeps walking while chewing* Mmmmm, medium rare and very well marbled.
Hehehe… feast happily…
One of the better articles I’ve seen on the negotiations is calmly pointing out that any company playing the “victim” card has failed to innovate, and thus is failing. Link to Passive Voice’s excerpt for better readability: http://www.thepassivevoice.com/07/2014/innovation/
On another subject entirely, you said something at LibertyCon about increasing book sales using keywords. Can you do an article about that?
Seconded!
What, more than this one?
http://wingandawhim.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-place-for-everything-keywords-and.html
Pretty much, yes. They’re failing in what passes for an open market (they were failing before Amazon opened the market), so they’re screaming for special consideration.
“come on, since when is 5k-ish representative of something like American book buying habits?) ”
In fairness, 5,300 samples is far more than sufficient to perform a statistical analysis of a population the size fo the US. Assuming the sampling and follow-on analysis was done correctly. That last is the rub, of course. But I wouldn’t throw it out solely because of the sample size.
Therein lies much of the trouble of statistics in analysis of human societies. Particularly heterogeneous societies.
Using 5,300 samples to represent 314 million Americans. The series of assumptions necessary to validate the sample size corrupt the survey.
Yup. American society is “clumpy”. You can take a random sampling in, say Philadelphia and a random sampling in small town PA less than 50 miles away and get totally different outcomes. Cross state lines, and it gets even more diverse. (Real diversity, not the skin-deep type).
Which is why I don’t trust surveys and statistics. I know just enough about sound statistical research to know how much almost all of them do wrong.
Considering who did the survey, I have my doubts on that. A sample of that organization’s readers is going to be rather heavily biased towards traditional media.
An online survey is going to have serious self-selection bias issues.
And of course, you could get 5k-ish responses from NYC alone, which would be far from representative.
I’d be taking my numbers from actual sales figures, in this situation. Amazon’s next quarter numbers, and the numbers from the bookstores and publishers should be.. shall we say, “interesting”?
Lies, damn lies, and statistical analysis come to mind.
Indeed it does. The lies you can tell with statistics are truly astonishing.
My mom use to do a lesson on statistics when she subbed for science classes.
It started with “100% of those people who have eaten a carrot are, or will be, dead.”
Thanks for the link to the Forbes post.
As an author who does business in both worlds (Big Five and Amazon), I’d like to believe that everyone’s going to calm down and get this sorted out at some point. It does puzzle me how much some authors can get frightened by the notion that Amazon is “big.”
Gosh, I’ve spent a lot more time worrying about the perils of “small.” I’ve been on small radio shows where hosts loved my book and had just 1,200 listeners. I’ve chatted up employees at small bookstores where getting onto the front table means there are five copies of your book instead of one. I’ve seen publishers try to get anything of value from a “small” marketing budget — and ending up with a tiny, tiny ad in the Sunday NYT book section plus a tiny, tiny mailing list.
There’s a lot of personal warmth and rapport when working in “small” territory, and there’s always the hope that if enough small things go right, they might add up to something big. But in terms of actually making a living at this, I’m glad that Amazon has a well-known URL, lots of up-to-date apps for all platform; well-stocked warehouses, fast reorders, and a willingness to let all of us create author pages for free that match a lot of what we’d otherwise have to do for $1,000 or more of our own money on a self-built website.
Can’t we decide that big isn’t the enemy of small?
I certainly have no problems with the idea that big isn’t the enemy of small. Amazon is currently using its “big” in the internet sales domain to allow “small” authors and publishers to flourish. That’s a good partnership.
The big publishers are trying to crush the competition because they can’t actually compete in the mass market. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things they do better than small press or indie. It means they’re not doing popular fiction well and it’s killing them.
Welcome to the Mad Geniuses, and thank you for your thoughtful commentary. We can be a fractious bunch, but we do appreciate sensible intelligent commentary.