the nameless horror

Minor, and probably fruitless, bit of plugging, but I’m experimenting with sale-pricing MURDER PARK since it’s mostly been very quiet for months. If you’ve not heard of it/bothered with it/gotten round to it, it’s terribly cool, and currently half off at Amazon (linkage: US & UK) & Kobo, and, more interestingly, variable from free to full price direct from me. I’d have loved to do a proper name-your-own price thing with it, but the particular WP plugin I use can’t quite stretch that far. It’s the same package whether you get it for nowt or pay full whack, so knock yourselves out.

What starts the process, really, are the laughs, slights and snubs when you are a kid. Sometimes it’s because you are poor, or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have anything are sitting on their fat butts.

Once you learn that you’ve got to work harder than anybody else, it becomes a way of life as you move out of the alley and on your way. In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances, and if you do your homework many of them pay off. It is then you understand, for the first time, that you really have the advantage because your competitors can’t risk what they have already. It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it because it is a part of you and you need it as much as an arm and a leg.

So you are lean and mean and resourceful, and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.

“The Nook thing” being reports that Microsoft are thinking of buying up B&N’s Nook arm and killing the hardware division.

• While B&N’s ebook sales have (presumably) been OK, hardware sales have been less than stellar. Kudos to them for doing it, but the Nook hasn’t made huge waves, except briefly as a cheap Android tablet before the market was swamped with such, and as an ereader-tablet-hybrid producer it can’t compete with Amazon’s financial clout (needed to keep Fire prices low and hardware decent) or Apple’s consumer demand (technically the iPad isn’t an ereader, but if you have one it certainly fills that niche).
• Dedicated ereading devices, with the possible exception of ultracheap original Kindle-style e-ink budget ones, are, and have been for some time, rapidly approaching the end of their consumer lifespan. They’ve done enough to create an ebook market. But now our other devices - phones and tablets - can handle reading perfectly well, as well as doing other things. Now there’s no need to keep producing hardware unless you’re desperately trying to keep your store locked down (Sony, AFAIK), or are trying to break into the full tablet market itself (as Amazon has with the Fire).
• The Nook store is cross-platform these days already. It doesn’t need a dedicated device.
• Microsoft has its own entries in the full-blown tablet market, and even if they’ve bombed (as they appear to), it doesn’t need to try breaking into the market again, and certainly not with Android.
• It therefore makes perfect sense that they’d kill the Nook hardware if they took control of the division. This would not affect the storefront at all. If anything, they’ll broaden it to give them bigger market spread.
• The loss of the Nook hardware would’ve happened anyway, even if B&N stay in business and all is well. They were losing money on them, and dedicated devices for a niche activity are mostly doomed.
• The money will probably help shore up B&N a little, and that’s a good thing.
• The only bit I can’t really fathom is why MS would see an ebook retail front (the part of the subsidiary they actually want to own) as something they’d fork out money for. Yes, they’re predicting a return to profit within four years, but that’s a risky horse to back given the shifting state of the ebook retail market and the amount of cash they’re fronting. Especially when you consider that their core OS business is looking shakier than ever with Windows 8 widely considered a flop. Is it just another attempt, as they’ve done with the Windows software marketplace, to find a way to emulate Apple and become content distributors to reap their 30% ad infinitum?

Aidan turns six today. In honour of the occasion I’m going to share something we worked on together a few months ago. The thing is, if he wants to play on the computer, he has to do reading and writing practice. And that means we write a story, consequences-style, Aidan writing what he wants to write, then having to read what I choose, in stages every morning. We’ve done four or five of them in the past eighteen months. Over time we’ve added refinements like pictures every four pages (I’m not much of an artist, so my side of these aren’t very good, and he was only five, so…). If I want to give him the chance to take things in a new direction, sometimes I’ll leave my last piece on a cliffhanger - “Something surprising was waiting inside!” / “There was a letter. What could it be?” etc. - and sometimes Aidan will take me completely by surprise with what he chooses next.

Here is one of those stories, Zombies Versus Humans. And while it started off as your basic survival piece (at least, your basic one as written by a five-year-old), it soon took a couple of completely unexpected twists partway through. I’ll leave you to guess which bits are mine (though obviously the name “Ash” should tell you that was me) and which are Aidan’s.

Tinta, who is still very much part of the cycle of violence, is more cynical: “All that talk about the number of murders having dropped is nonsense.” While he concedes that the official body count is lower, he doesn’t think the situation in the slums is any safer. “In this place, when one [community] calms down, another begins to shake,” he said. “That’s how it is and always will be.”

Before leaving, we asked Tinta if he would even like to live in a town where he didn’t have to murder people. He froze, thought about it for three long seconds, and replied. “But I can’t imagine a city like that… Now that you mention it, no, I can’t imagine it.”

Over the weekend, Barry Eisler put up a post summarising and explaining a talk he’d given on publishing at Pike’s Peak Writers’ Convention, and there has been a lot of to and fro on the net about it.

Go and read it (it’s too long to quote in quantity here); it’s an interesting bit of writing. The key to the debate really comes from the first two points on his summary:

• Up until roughly six years ago, the only viable means of book distribution was paper. Accordingly, a writer who wanted to reach a mass audience needed a paper distribution partner.

• The primary value-add offered by legacy publishers has traditionally been paper distribution. Certainly legacy publishers offer many other services (much of which is outsourced) — editorial, copyediting, proofreading, book packaging, and marketing, to name the most obvious — but the primary service, the one the others are built on, has always been paper distribution.

And I largely agree with him (taking care to note the context provided by everything else he says; the talk/post seems to be pretty balanced). Much of what he says is hard to argue with (one little wince at the by-now-standard use of royalty percentages as a stick to tickle publishing’s underparts with aside; I’m pretty sure quoting the difference in an ebook-related post which isn’t actually about percentage royalties should qualify for some kind of Godwin-esque internet law). There is, for me, one minor point of not-quite-truthiness, and one absent thing very much worth mentioning. Let’s deal with the former first:

As I’ve noted, an author who wants to reach a mass audience in paper needs a paper distribution partner. But an author who wants to reach a mass audience in digital needs no distribution partner at all. It is simply a fact — a fact — that a lone author can distribute 100% as effectively by herself as she can with the assistance of a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate (again, editing, marketing and all the rest is a separate story; for the moment, we are talking only about distribution).

To put it another way: a publisher offering an author digital distribution services is like someone offering me air. I already have it and I don’t need to pay extra for it. I know it can be unsettling in some circles to have the matter stated so baldly, but I really don’t think the matter is disputable, either.

It’s not a fact that a lone author can distribute 100% effectively as a publisher in digital. Not quite, or at least not the way it’s meant.

Yes, anyone and everyone can publish to Amazon and Amazon is 90% of the digital market. The other 10% can be trickier, and in some cases, notably iBooks and Google (if anyone ever bothers to buy anything from that part of the Play outfit), having a publisher and their pre-agreed publishing channels on those platforms makes access far easier.

If you’re outside the US, AFAIK even though the Nook store has expanded to the UK, you can’t self-publish through B&N. You have to go through a quasi-publisher aggregator, and that means Smashwords, and until the start of this year that meant .doc files and Meatgrinder and hellish formatting struggles. (Especially if you’re on a Mac. In which case, forget it; OS X’s handling of font styles is incompatible and unless you sacrifice to the blind monkey god in the exact right way you won’t have italics or bold text, just default-rendered fallback font because Meatgrinder can’t find a font named “Georgia Italic”. But I digress.) Now you can at least upload epub files only. But then, whichever way you do it, no certainty with some of the outlets SW feeds to that what you’ve uploaded will be accepted, with no reason given if it’s not. You can go to iBooks direct, but you have to stump for an ISBN and channel it through iBooks Author, which again is another hurdle to jump.

It’s not impossible, certainly, and the differences are small (a little larger if you include some discoverability in distribution, where a publisher may give you greater profile by seeding little ‘also in our line of magnificent horse porn books…’ cross-author advertising shoutouts in their editorial lines), but distribution is certainly a fair bit easier if you have a publisher, even if the results are the same. (The same argument also holds, of course, for the various other services that go into book publishing, but we’re leaving those aside for now.) It’s less like being offered air for money and more like being offered the chance to ride the elevator up 15 floors for a small fee instead of taking the stairs for free. Yes you can do it yourself, but it may be a slog.

(Note, though, that the control you can exert on distribution - and the freedom not to have DRM etc. - is also not to be underestimated on the self-publishing side.)

The thing that isn’t mentioned, but is worth remembering, is that traditional publishing offers one other thing that self-publishing doesn’t: money up front.

Yes, it may not be much, it may be on an insulting, trifling percentage compared to the vast riches of that thar interweb, it may mean sealing your rights away in a locked vault protected by fiendish traps for as long as your line endures, but if you don’t have much/any cash, or you need a reliable (ish - scheduling changes can futz with advance payments as I’m very well aware thanks to my third Penguin book) timeline of income because you’ve got a family, commitments, all that jazz, the value of advances beyond their huge/middling/tiny monetary figure shouldn’t be ignored, and neither should publishers’ willingness to pay those advances irrespective of current sales if you’re starting out and they believe you have a crack at the long term. If you write a couple of novels and hardly anyone buys them, you can justify to yourself and those depending on you the time it takes to write more if someone’s willing to keep footing the bill. If you write a couple of novels and self-publish them and hardly anyone buys them, tough shit. That advance investment can and does make it easier to keep writing more cool stuff and hopefully then to get it into more hands and eyeballs and heads. Which, surely, is the aim.

Small points, but worth making, allowing for the rest of what Barry says being largely agreeable and quite measured, at least IMO.