YorkWriters

Faster-Than-Life Travel

2012-01-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

Steve:

No, that's not a typo. When people bemoan the fact that faster-than-light travel seems physically impossible, and even travel at near the speed-of-light is phenomenally difficult, they somehow jump to the conclusion that humanity is forever denied the stars. That's just wrong, and I'll tell you why.

I am a child of the space-age, and I'm as reluctant as anyone to give up the visions of Heinlein and Star Trek; of heroic humans cruising almost effortlessly from star to star in space-ships made of rivets, steel, and atomic power. In fact, a bit of me isn't ready to give up on faster-than-light in some form, even if I regard this is more of a comforting illusion (and insurance against an often-surprising future) than a real possibility.

But let's assume it is impossible, and then consider, why do we need it?

Well, the answer may seem obvious. Captain Kirk can sail between stars in days or weeks (bedding down with a rainbow of alien babes at every one). He won't spend his entire lifetime getting to Vulcan, or be forced to start out, hoping his great, great, great, great grandchildren will survive to see the place that he won't.

Survival. That's the great stickler. It's the human lifetime that the real limiter here as much as the speed-of-light. Let's face it, mostly even our wild imaginations don't have us traveling at infinite speed.

Even on Stargate, they seem to spend several seconds whooshing through the wormhole before stepping out on another world. That few seconds constitutes an arbitrary finite speed. The four-plus years it would take, at the speed of light, to reach the nearest star is another arbitrary finite speed. Why is one worse than the other?

It's a simple ratio. 4 years is a significant percentage of a human lifetime. Eight plus years for a round-trip is a very significant percentage. And that's just the closest star, and not an especially inviting one to visit. More interesting places start out further way to vastly further away. And that for a speed we don't have a clue how to approach.

One solution that has long been proposed for this is the so-called "generation" starship, in which generations of humans will live, reproduce, and die during the voyage. It might work, but it seems most plausible to me as an act of desperation to me. If our sun were to suddenly show signs of going nova, we might well consider such a thing, but the idea that we might do it simply as a matter of exploration of colonization somehow seems more doubtful. Some large group of people has to step onto that ship into what will likely be a cramped, difficult life of limited-freedom and deprivation, knowing they'll never step off, and that they're likely condemning generations of their decedents to the same, or worse.

It also seems a brute-force approach to the problem. Any generation ship is going to be massive, since it has to be big enough to hold a sustainable human population and all the resources that (even with heavy recycling) they'll need to complete their voyage and establish themselves somewhere else, and the problem of interstellar travel isn't just one of speed, it's of energy. Mass equals energy, and the relationship becomes very obvious once you start traveling between stars.

There's also the possibility of suspending life, which in fiction, usually means shoving somebody in a plastic tube and freezing them (ala the Alien movies). But that's not the only way to do it, and in fact, we have a pretty workable technology for that right now. We can freeze embryos and later thaw them out. Currently, bringing that embryo to term requires a human mother to host it, but there seems to be no reason we can't think our way around that and create an artificial womb. So it's not difficult at all to conceive (no pun intended) of sending a small, robot ship to a distant star with some carefully preserved human embryos on board. On arrival, the robot finds a likely place with the necessary resources, digs in, spends years (or maybe decades) building a suitable habitat and support structure, and then brings one or more of its embryos to term.

Now, one could argue, with robots of this sophistication, why do you need humans at all? Well, for starters, this is a very tricky and slippery ethical question to be asking (one advocates of all robotic space exploration should be thinking about very carefully). If you don't need humans there, why do we need them here?

The obvious answer is that humans can do what robots currently can't. Robots can gather the data, but it takes humans to process it and appreciate it. But robots are quickly getting more sophisticated rapidly, and while true artificial intelligence is a more difficult problem than we initially thought, there's no reason to suppose it won't eventually be licked, and every reason to think it will be.

So, planetary scientists, the moment the computer here on the ground is better able to do science than you are, and to write poetry about what that science means, are you ready to take your suicide pill and get out of the way?

No?

Me either. So shut up.

I selfishly value myself, and by extension my fellow humans, and by extension whatever extended definition of "human" technology and society take us to, over any other intelligence we may create.

Maybe that definition will expand to include the intelligences we create, just as it extends to our children and the children of our fellow humans. I'm okay with that too.

But I'm not ready to have our machines go all Terminator on us and wipe us out, nor am I prepared to simply step aside for my betters. I am willing to accept them as equals and go forward from there.

But enough of that diversion (much as I think it's relevant to my long-term conclusions here).

Anyway, the "seed" ship crewed with embryos and robots seems viable, and in a lot of respects, a lot more reasonable than a generation starship.

It's also a crude form of life-extension, and so changes that critical ratio with the speed-of-light. Captain Kirk can not only take on a new world in the prime of life, he can grow up there and experience it in the prime of childhood as well. But once he's there, he's there. It's not a "brave new world," it's the only home he's ever known, and probably the only one he'll ever know (except in recorded history).

So what about just making humans live longer? Again, that's a much more difficult problem than science-fiction may have anticipated, but there are intriguing clues that the problem may be cracking. If humans can live hundreds of years, or maybe even indefinitely, that changes everything, right? Captain Kirk can jump into his one-man scout ship if he wants to, and spend a few decades getting to Vulcan, and still arrive there in his prime, no girdle or hair-piece necessary to impress the space-babes.

Well, the problem with that scenario is that it does change everything, and long before you start thinking about space travel. Before we get that far, we'd have to work out the problems of long-life right here on Earth. Suddenly you've got a logistic and ethical nightmare to deal with around such basic matters as resources, access to life-extension treatments, and the right (if such a right exists) to reproduce. And even ignoring that, it also is going to change how we see the universe around us. If we're looking at potentially hundreds or thousands of years of life ahead of us, are we going to be less willing to risk it all on something as dangerous as star-travel? Good question, for which I have no definitive answer.

But lets assume that all gets worked out somehow, and Captain Kirk climbs into his scout ships and heads off (at nearly the speed of light, somehow) with enough resources for his five-year-mission. What then? Hopefully, Captain Kirk bought his Kindle, because he's going to have a lot of time to read.

Okay, let's assume that Kirk has something more sophisticated than that. Let's assume he has a holodeck, or something like it, so he can live a full, rich and interesting life on his way to the next star. Maybe he gets to command a make-believe U.S.S. Enterprise and battle the Klingons (and bed the space-babes) all the way there.

But if it's that great, here's the next question: when he gets there, why does he want to get off?

Good question, and maybe that's the ultimate answer to the Fermi Paradox (if there are aliens in the universe, why haven't we encountered them already?). Maybe every civilization reaches a point where the enticements of their created inner-spaces override the limitations of the physical one outside.

At that point, the physical universe simply becomes the platform on which they build their own, more accessible and possibly more interesting, virtual universes. It becomes like the silicon substrate on which computer circuits are made. Necessary to the functioning of the device, but not terribly interesting.

Is that where our self-evolution is headed? Are we to be lumps of flesh, ever connected to the "real" virtual world, or maybe even cast that flesh off entirely? Such a creature could be long-lived enough, massless enough, to travel between stars with relative ease. But would it even want to? Would it even care about it any more?

My hope is, we can do both, to enjoy our created worlds without limits, and also to explore the natural one as well. Certainly, for the sake of our own continuation, I hope we go far enough to insure our own survival, just in case an asteroid gets out of line and heads our way, or our sun decides to blow up or burn out.

But I am hopeful, because one way or the other, and the laws of physics be damned, all we have to do is stay alive, keep advancing, and not kill ourselves. If we can do that, one way or the other, there's a universe just waiting for us to explore.

And maybe more than one.

If you found this post useful, interesting, or informative, please share the link with others. Also, consider that in writing it I took time out from writing the stuff that actually keeps me from starving. A small donation to my tip jar (button below) will help keep me in PB&J sandwiches, and encourage me to write similar posts in the future. Thanks! - Steve

Only the Brave

2011-12-28T00:55:00.000-08:00

Steve:

I've been in this storytelling business longer than I care to remember, and I've seen many comrades along the way come and go. You could credit this to a million individual stories that seem to have nothing in common. Business downturns. Failed books. Lagging series. Crooked agents. Bankrupt publishers. Money. Health problems. Family problems. Lack of sales. Imploding genres. Failed magazines. And on, and on, and on.

But mostly all those stories come down to one story: Somebody had, for one or more of a huge variety of reasons, a failure.

And they gave up.

Now, you could say the reason they gave up was failure. But you would, nine times out of ten, be wrong. I know this from experience. What stopped them was fear of failure. Fear of failing again.

I look at this myself, and I'm not always happy at what I see, and where I am as a writer. I've published a lot of books and stories. I'm a national best-seller twice over. But I'm not a household name. I'm comfortable, but not rich, and not as secure as I'd like to be. I've sure not written as much as I'd like to have written, and certainly not as much as I could have written.

And I've failed. A lot.

But the difference between me and those other folks is that, while I've often spent far too long laying in the mud, looking up at the sky and feeling sorry for myself, I've always eventually gotten up, dusted myself, and trooped on. And every time I did, it was with the full knowledge that I was going to fail, again.

Two things prompted this post.

First of all, my friend Dean Wesley Smith just did a post in his "The New World of Publishing" that touches on this subject from a somewhat different perspective, and in a much broader publishing context. But I'm going to keep this simple and direct (which I think, ironically broadens the application of what I'm saying to a whole range of endeavors beyond writing and publishing.)

The second thing was a list on THR, the Hollywood Reporter web-site, of "2011's Biggest Rule Breakers." What interested me most was entry #9, George Clooney. Here's what it said:

Nominated in actor, writer, producer and director Golden Globe categories for his work in The Descendants and The Ides of March, Clooney still admits he's "afraid of failure."

Clooney told THR, "I failed so many times, I have a much better understanding of the journey. It's how you handle the down part [that counts]."

That's what I'm here to talk about, Clooney's "understanding of the journey." Clooney knows, like me, that failure is inevitable. He also knows that sad truth that all of us who have made the journey have discovered: there is no magic point, no level of success, at which you're immune to failure. Remember that Clooney is a man who, having already achieved Hollywood stardom, headlined the movie that tanked the monster (a fair chunk of a billion dollars at that point) Batman franchise!

That one film would have been a perfect career killer, and for many an actor, it would have been. But here's the thing, when you say the name "George Clooney" to a random person on the street, a lot of things may pop into their mind. But it's highly unlikely that thing will be, "oh, that guy who killed the Batman franchise." In fact, you probably were reminded of this fact only after I mentioned it, and most likely, the memory created a momentary feeling of surprise. Probably you thought something like, "oh, he was in that turkey, wasn't he?" Then you will chuckle, and start thinking in terms of Clooney's many accomplishments, nominations, and awards since.

How did this massive failure turn into a relative footnote in a distinguished movie career?

Well, the first answer is that George Clooney didn't give up. As as he says himself, it isn't because he has no fear of failure. He does. But he's learned to deal with that fear and keep moving. He's learned that to let a failure stop you, even for a while, is to give it power, to make it bigger. The thing about failure is that it isn't just the kind or degree of failure that makes it significant, it's the position of the failure in the narrative of your career.

It's like punctuation. The most powerful punctuation in an English sentence is always at the end of the sentence. The most powerful failure is the one at the end of your career. The next most powerful punctuation is that in the middle of the sentence between words, the kind the represents a pause. Commas are important, but we brush past them without any conscious notice most times.

Other types of punctuation, a semicolon, ellipsis, or em dash, these represent longer or more significant breaks or transitions. But again, we move past them. The most powerful punctuation marks, the ones that define the entire nature of the sentence, are at the end. The exclamation mark! The period. And...the question mark?

Failure is a like a generic punctuation mark. Once it's happened, you can't remove it, but you do have some power to define which mark it will be. If you let it stop you for a bit, slow you down, throw you off, then it becomes one of those mid-sentence marks. The faster you move beyond it, the longer the narrative that follows it, the more likely it is to become a comma, passed over, significant but barely noticed.

Let that failure hang through inaction, and you give it power. I admit, my own career is a mess of semi-colons and em-dashes.

And woe, if you let it be the end of you, or even the apparent end of you. Think of it: "Batman and Robin, the movie that killed George Clooney's career!" Let that happen, let it stop you too long, and the termination mark will stick, even if you don't. If you move on beyond that career-killing mark, you will always be known as "that person who made (or at least attempted) a comeback." That's a very risky label to be carrying around.

What can we learn from this?

1. Not stopping is your greatest power over failure, your most effective means of damage control, and your surest path to recovery.

2. By not stopping, you take control of the narrative, which really isn't set in concrete till that final mark.

3. By not stopping, even if you drop off the radar and people forget you exist, when they do discover you again, it's apparent that you didn't stop with their lack of awareness. You continued to write (or act, or direct, or paint, or whatever). The failure to notice your good work and value becomes theirs, not yours. Even if failure means you can't immediately work in the same place, or at the same commercial level as you did before, it is the continued forward motion in your field that counts.

4. Even though you think the narrative is about you, you are not the entire narrative, and the rest of that narrative will continue to evolve without you, possibly to your advantage. While Clooney continued to work (often on less highly-commercial films) fending off the terminal mark, the Batman franchise didn't actually die. After a pause, it was rebooted to even greater commercial and critical success with Batman Begins. As Batman and Robin turned into an em dash for the franchise instead of an exclamation point, in turn lessening its impact on the narrative of Clooney's career.

5. Dwelling on past failure is pointless. Learn what you can from it, and move on. Obsessing about it further will only slow you down, or worse, stop you. Move on, as soon as you can, as fast as you can. No matter how massive the failure, it will be diminished by time and distance. You have no power over time, but you can stretch the narrative of your career away from it, limited only by the speed with which you can create new work.

6. Dwelling on future failure is even more pointless. It will happen. But take comfort, you are not alone. We all go through it, and we will all go through it again. It's not to be welcomed, of course, but it can be managed. If you are smart, if you know what to do, if you know how to handle it, and if you don't give up, you are in control.

Period.

If you've found this post interesting or useful, please share the link and consider making a small donation using the button below. It will encourage us to do more posts like it. Or better yet, purchase one of the many books written by J. Steven York and Christina F. York (who also writes mystery as Christy Evans and Christy Fifield). Ebooks are available on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords.com and most other major ebook vendors. Visit our Amazon Store.

The (Apparently) Forgotten History of the Personal Computer

2011-11-19T05:18:00.000-08:00

Photo: Bluedisk

The recent death of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs generated a huge amount of press coverage, much of it very bad. In particular, my sampling of this coverage made it obvious that many, if not most, of the people charged with writing about computers, technology, and their associated industries, have not a clue about the history of personal computers.

At every turn, people got it wrong. Jobs's (many) contributions to the computer industry were misstated, distorted, or exaggerated. Perhaps most egregiously, a post on a major newspaper's site credited Jobs with "inventing the personal computer," a statement so wrong, and so wrongheaded, on so many levels that my brain hurts just trying to count them all.

It's not surprising, really. Most of this stuff happened before many of these journalists were born. Many of them can't even remember a time when personal computers didn't come down to the "Macintosh and everybody else who runs windows, except a few hippies and nerds who run Linux." I on the other hand am a bit older, and was there pretty much at the beginning of it, as a hobbyist, salesperson, and later, as a writer for computer magazines (and computer software companies).

Fact is, Apple had a lot of history before the Macintosh came along, and the Macintosh, as influential as it was, was for most of its history a niche product that never came close to dominating the personal computer business. And that business existed before Apple did. Apple was an early player in the personal computer, but was a late bloomer that again, despite its niche success, was usually overshadowed by one competitor or another, several of which will probably surprise you.

Let's test your knowledge of computer history. (Are you out there, computer/technology journalists?) Here's a list of nine important, game-changing, ground-breaking computers, all of them predating the Macintosh. Do you recognize them and can you state why each of them is significant to computer history? We'll give you a few minutes here...

. MITS Altair 8800
. TRS-80 Model 1
. TRS-80 Model 100
. Commodore 64
. Osborne 1
.Compaq Portable
.HP 110
. Xerox Star
.Apple Lisa

Da-da-da-da
Da-da-da
Dada-dada
Da
Dadadadada

Da-da-da-da
Da-da-da
Dunt. Da-dunt-dunt
Dum. Dum. Dum.
Dadum!

Time's up! Keyboards down everyone! No? Not ringing any bells? Only ringing a few bells? Well, then perhaps your understanding of the history of the North American computer business isn't as complete as you think it is. A lot more could be written about these computers, their history, and significance, but here's a quick rundown.

. MITS Altair 8800 (1975)

The Altair was the first widely-known (it grained fame through hobby magazines like Popular Electronics) and available (it was sold by mail-order) commercial microcomputer. It's pretty much the spark that ignited the whole personal computer revolution.

The maker expected to sell a few hundred, but soon had thousands of orders. The Altair was also the subject of the first computer "clone," the copy-cat IMSAI 8080. Among its many contributions to computing, the Altair also introduced the S-100 buss, a standard system by which accessory cards and peripherals could be used interchangeably between various makes and types of computers. It's also significant as the hardware on which the very first Microsoft product ran, a version of the BASIC computer programming language written by Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

. TRS-80 Model 1 (1977)

Photo: Flominator

Radio Shack is best known today, if it's known at all, as that place in the strip-mall where you buy obscure cords,adapters and accessories for your electronic devices. And so it's hard to imagine that Radio Shack was once not only a major player in the personal computer business, but for a brief period actually dominated it, especially the business part of the market.

In the mid-1970s, Radio Shack was already a hang-out for electronic hobbyists, ham radio operators, and home-audio geeks, and was riding high on the popularity of the CB-radio craze, when they made the bold decision to go into the then brand-new microcomputer business. Now, three major players entered the market in 1977, all significant in their way: Apple, with its Apple II (yes, there was an Apple 1, a kit computer, but few were made, and it's a bit of a footnote), Commodore, then a major maker of pocket calculators with its PET Computer, and Radio Shack with it's Model 1 (then known simply as the "TRS-80," the other designation only being added when additional models were added to the line a bit later).

But the huge advantage Radio Shack had over its competitors was in its retail outlets. While the number of dedicated computer stores in the country was probably no more than a few dozen, there were thousands of Radio Shack stores spread through America's heartland and small towns. And every single one of those stores was shipped a single TRS-80 computer.

Again, the level of interest and demand was underestimated. While personal computers had been around for two years at this point, the TRS-80 was the first personal computer most Americans would ever see, much less touch or use. Radio Shack was a known and trusted name at this point, and walking into an established store and buying a computer in a box was much less a leap than going to a fly-by-night computer store in a major city, or ordering some unknown quantity by mail.

Moreover, the TRS-80 entry model was under $500, monitor included. Still a lot of money in those days, but far less than the $1298 entry Apple II (with no monitor).

Radio Shack's dominance of the market wouldn't last long. Commodore would soon dominate the home computer market, and Apple would finally take off as a business computer (largely because it ran the first, and for a while only, spreadsheet program, VisiCalc. Shortly thereafter, IBM would crush everyone in the business side of things, and break Radio Shack's back in the computer business. Apple would soldier on in the educational and high-end home market, and eventually make a slow comeback with the Macintosh, but Radio Shack never recovered. Still, in bringing the computer to Main Street, Radio Shack make everything that followed possible.

. TRS-80 Model 100 (1983)

Photo: NapoliRoma

While Radio Shack's dominance of computers was brief, it still had a few significant contributions to make to the history of computing. Though little-remembered today, the TRS-80 Model 100 is likely the most significant. The Model 100 was the first successful and practical laptop computer. (Technically, it was proceeded slightly to the market by the similar looking Epson HX-20, but hampered by a tiny screen and lack of build-in software, it never enjoyed the success of the Radio Shack competitor introduced later the same year.)

Innovative and forward-thinking, a few of the Model 100's specifications remain impressive even today (especially battery life). It was rugged, capable, weighed just over three pounds, came equipped with an LCD screen, a variety of build in software (including communication, basic word-processing, and spreadsheet), a decent keyboard, instant-on, and equipped with a modem for long-distance communication. It was capable of running 20 hours (and holding its memory contents for up to 30 days) on a set of four standard AA batteries, It became especially popular with journalists, scientists, engineers and others who not only needed a computer that could be used in the field, but sometimes beyond the reach of civilization.

Actually, the computer hardware was designed by Japanese company Kyocera, and Microsoft (the software), and other versions were sold under the Kyocera, NEC, and Olivetti brands, but it was Radio Shack and its retail presence that ushered the machine to success. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said it was the last Microsoft product in which he did significant programming, and one of his favorites. Interestingly, it's probably (certainly one of the first) the first successful consumer computer to use the now almost universal "cut" and "paste" metaphor.

. Commodore 64 (1982)

Photo: Evan-Amos

It's easy to overlook the Commodore 64. At the time, many computer enthusiasts (myself included) dismissed it as a "toy computer," and it mainly found its place in homes, not in offices or labs. But it was a powerful computer for the time, with more memory than many of its competitors (especially when compared with their base models) and built around an improved version of the processor used in the better-respected Apple II family.

The Commodore was produced continuously for over a decade, and has been produced in some form as recently as 2004. Over its lifetime, somewhere at least 12.5 million units (there are questionable claims in excess of 22 million) were sold, and it is probably still the best-selling single computer model of all time. Through several years of the middle 80s, the C64 dominated computer sales numbers. In 1983, in terms of unit sales, it had over 40% of the computer market (by comparison, the Apple II never exceeded about 16% of the market). Moreover, it held more than a quarter of the computer market for four years running, and kept a double-digit share of the market for a fifth year. For a generation of aspiring programmers, scientists, engineers, hackers and game designers, "computer" meant "Commodore 64."

So why no respect? In an era when computers were still primarily sold in specialty and electronics stores, the Commodore was a mass-market computer, sold in discount and department stores, often at discounted prices. In 1983 Commodore introduced a $100 "trade-in rebate" that was sensationally successful, and resulted in a huge shake-out in both the computer and video-game business, driving out or bankrupting several companies.

And history is written by the victors. While Commodore dwarfed Apple sales for much of its existence as a computer company, it was dealt a huge blow by the standardization around the IBM PC platform, and was ultimately killed by the market failure of its very-capable Macintosh competitor, the Commodore Amiga.

. Osborne 1 (1981)

Photo: Bilby

Everything about early computers was big. Big disk drives, big boards with huge numbers of parts, big monitors with big glass picture-tubes, and big power-supplies to drive it all. As a result, the last thing you'd called a computer in those days was mobile. The Osborne 1 changed all that. The Osborne was the first commercially successful portable computer. It wasn't a laptop, or anything remotely like one. It weighed 24 pounds! The category it created was popularly known as the "luggable."

The Osborne resembled a small suitcase, or a portable sewing machine. One end of the case unlatched to reveal two floppy disk drives and a grand 5-inch CRT screen! The lid of the case contained the keyboard. By modern standards it was huge. It was ugly, the screen was a joke, but it was portable, and that was a breakthrough.

The Osborne also broke ground in one other important area: it was the first computer to come with "bundled" software. At the time, most computers shipped with no software at all. Even the operating system was extra. The Osborne came with the popular CP/M operating system, the business-standard WordStar word processor, and at various times in its run, accounting software, database, spreadsheet, and even games. The bundle of software was worth almost as much as the machine's $1795 price.

Despite its initial success, Osborne sales plummeted when they prematurely announced an improved model, which allowed more capable competitors to move into the "luggables" market. But the practice of bundling software with computers continues to this day.

.Compaq Portable (1983)

Photo: Tiziano Garuti

Speaking of "luggables," the Compaq portable was another example of the class. It was even more expensive ($3590) and heavier (28 pounds), ut it was one with an important difference; one that would change the history of the computer business.

In 1981 IBM legitimized the personal computer with the introduction of the IBM PC. The PC was an expensive, and in many ways unremarkable (other than its 16 bit microprocessor) computer, but the IBM name suddenly made it conceivable for businesses, especially in the Fortune 500, to buy computers. It seemed inevitable the IBM would rule the high-end computer business for the foreseeable future.

But IBM made two critical mistakes. They built it from off-the-shelf parts, and they licensed their operating system from Microsoft and failed to secure exclusive rights to it. The Compaq portable may not have been the first cloned computer, but it was the one that broke IBM's potential monopoly on the business market. Even more brilliant, they put it in a luggable package, something that IBM didn't offer. All those offices that were finding their new IBM PCs indispensable, also needed a Compaq Portable for road trips. Their foot in the door, Compaq moved into the desktop market, and dozens of clone-building competitors followed. A diversified future for personal computers was assured.

.HP 110 (1984, with mentions to GRiDCompass, Dulmont Magnum, Sharp PC-5000, TRS-80 Model 200)

Photo: Oldcomputers.net

Of all the computers on this list, the HP 110's place in history is perhaps the most questionable, thus the other computers I'm listing above. All of them proceeded the 110 to the marketplace by at least a bit, and all had some version of the now-familiar "clamshell" laptop design, but the bunch, only the Sharp of them ran Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system. And it deviated from being a modern laptop in many ways. Its 8 line screen was too small to function as even a marginally useful MS-DOS computer, it had a built in printer, and used the interesting, but ultimately dead-end, technology of bubble memory.

The HP 110 put all the pieces together in a portable, battery-powered package. The initial model had drawbacks. It had a non-standard screen that displayed only 16 lines instead of the IBM norm of 24 (big enough to be useful, but a drawback until replaced in a later upgrade), the disk-drive was an external accessory, and the printer port used a non-standard proprietary interface. But I admit to being biased on this one. I tested a prototype (when it was still using its internal code-name of "Nomad") for a computer magazine, and I'll never forget the feeling of wonder when I was able to pop this thing open and use it while riding a Seattle city bus. It was life-changing, and the birth of the modern laptop did change the way we looked at computers forever.

. Xerox Star (1981)

Photo Al Lemos, via Wikipedia

One of the major things Steve Jobs was falsely credited with inventing is the GUI, the Graphical User Interface seen on pretty much all modern computers, be it in the form of the Macintosh Operating system, Linux shells, or Windows (and in a modified form, in mobile operating systems like Apple's iOS and Google's Android). We're talking about the use of a pointing device (conventionally, a mouse), a fully bit-mapped screen, and visual devices like desktops, icons, pull-down menus, overlapping program windows, etc.

But Jobs didn't invent these ideas and they didn't originate with the Macintosh. In fact, as we'll see, the Mac wasn't even the first Apple computer to use them! But the concepts didn't originate with Apple or Jobs, nor were they first brought to market by them. Credit goes to Xerox. Yes, the copier and laser-printer people.

In the late 1970s, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a major incubator of new ideas in computing. Ethernet, the foundation of most modern wired computer networks, was developed there during this same time period (and in fact, the Star came equipped with it, another innovation to its credit). Around this time, they produced the Xerox Alto, a workstation that pioneered the whole GUI concept. Though about 1500 were built for internal use and for distribution to government and university labs, it wasn't a commercial product. That honor went to the Xerox Star (AKA the Xerox 8010 Information System).

Now, at $16,000, the Star was hardly a personal computer. And it wasn't even intended to work as a stand-alone system. Ideally an installation would have several workstations, a server, and a printer, running at least $50,000 - $100,000. But I include it on the list because it's directly responsible for everything that came after it.

Xerox didn't really know how to market the Star, wasn't much interested in the computer business, and perhaps because of its high price and lackluster marketing, it was not a huge success. The company was distracted by anti-trust actions and the success of its laser printer and copier products.

The Star would fall by the wayside, largely forgotten. But its legacy lives on. See, there was this little company called Apple...

.Apple Lisa (1983)

Photo: German Wikipedia

As I said, the GUI at Apple didn't start with the introduction of the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh. But if Xerox originated it, how did it end up at Apple at all? Here's where Steve Jobs does take a role. He was one of several outsiders given a tour of Xerox's PARC in 1979. Among the things he was shown was the GUI interface, and he came away excited about the possibilities, many of which were incorporated into the Lisa.

The Lisa was, without doubt, a computer ahead of its time. It was powered by a 32-bit Motorola 68000 processor, and a large amount (for the time) of memory. It had a fully bit-mapped display, a mouse, and an interface that would look familiar to most modern computer users. It's memory, file system, and some technical aspects of its operating system were in many ways more advanced than the Macintosh models that immediately followed it. And unlike the early Macs, it was expandable and upgradable, with internal card slots and an interface for an external (and later internal) hard drive.

But the computer was not a success. It was hampered by its lack of compatibility with the "business standard" IBM PC, it's unproven design, and most especially by it's high (initially, nearly $10,000) price tag. And despite impressive hardware for the time, the demands of the Lisa's complex software and operating system slowed the machine to a crawl, making it seem sluggish and slow. The product went through several design revisions and serious price cuts during its three years of existence, but it never took off. Steve Jobs had long since become enchanted with the Macintosh design (correctly) thinking that it had greater commercial potential, and had focused his efforts there.

Some of the last Lisas were converted to run Macintosh software and sold as "Max XLs," and it's rumored that many simply ended up in landfills. But in introducing the GUI computer to the true personal computer marketplace, and to its eventual champion, Apple, the Lisa deserves to be recognized for its place in history.

The Lisa was followed into the marketplace by the Macintosh, which immediately took the computer world by storm! Not. That's another myth. The Macintosh made a disappointing launch, and attracted plenty of lookers, but not so many buyers. While interest was high from the very beginning, the lack of compatibility turned away business buyers, and the price (about $2000, later raised, a rarity in the computer business, to about $2500) was too high for otherwise interested home buyers, and some were turned off by its small, monochrome, screen.

But the computer found niche markets (especially desktop publishing and the educational market), Apple did well with the LaserWriter printer (many of which ended up attached to IBM compatible computers or to mixed-computer networks), and Macintosh was given time to find its legs. But despite all its press that would lead you to believe otherwise, Apple has never been dominant in the computer industry, rarely having over 10% of the market during the Macintosh era, and briefly peaking at about about 16% of the market with the Apple II. It's currently at just under 13%, which may be a Macintosh era high, still leaving it the number three computer company.

Unit sales and profits, of course, are two different things, and Apple has done well for itself. That doesn't make it dominant in the industry though (the iPod was probably their first truly market-dominating product, and Apple looks to be a strong, possibly dominant player in the post-PC era). But Apple popularized such concepts as GUIs, desktop-publishing, and networks, and provided a steadfast alternative that helped keep Microsoft competitive and prevented their having a monopoly position.

In these accomplishments Apple's place in personal computer history is assured. It just isn't quite the place that a lot of people seem to believe.

Publishing is "Moneyball"

2011-10-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

Steve:

Chris and I belatedly saw the movie "Moneyball" a couple days ago, and let me just say that if you're a writer, you definitely should see this if it's still playing in your area (or available on video by the time you read this).

If you haven't seen this, but have heard of it, probably what you "know" about it is that it's a baseball movie. Well, sorta. It's a book set in the baseball industry. (And if you had any illusions that baseball, or any other major "sport" is actually a sport and not an industry, this movie should cure you of that fallacy.) This is a movie about business, about problem solving, and about management.

If that sounds dry and boring, it isn't. It's fascinating, in part because it is a baseball movie. Not that I'm a sports fan. I'm not (though I come closer to liking baseball than pretty much any traditional sport I can name). It's fascinating because Moneyball has some great acting, good characters, snappy dialogue (courtesy of writer Arron Sorkin, who brought you "The West Wing," and "The Social Network," among other great things), and a compelling story to present its lessons in business.

Yes, it's an enjoyable movie for anyone with half-a-brain, an interest in baseball, or both, but why should writers care about Moneyball? Because Moneyball is about a very old industry in transition. It's about an industry bound by tradition and "conventional wisdom" which may not be so wise. It's about how all that falls apart when the economics don't work any more, when the fat-cats are fat and simply assume that the little-guys will continue to play the game as always, no matter how bad the deal for them gets. It's about how, when those traditions are challenged by new ideas, the "experts" are frequently the last to know.

If you think this sounds like the state of book publishing over the last few years, then you would be right, and this movie is just full of lessons and metaphors for understanding what's going on there.

On the face of it, Moneyball is about the turn-of-the-century Oakland As, a once-mighty team laid low by money. The team's new owners simply didn't have the money to buy players that major teams did. That wasn't fair, but that was the game as it existed then. Everybody bought players from the same pool, using the same methods, and so teams with deep pockets got good players (by the agreed-upon standards of good) and won most of the games.

By the behind-the-scenes rules of Baseball at the time, the A's were in a tail-spin with no way out. The wouldn't win games. They couldn't win games. And that should have been the end of that.

It's easy to think that an industry as old, as traditional, as hidebound as major-league baseball is inherently stable, but it's not. When you create an inequity, when you sit on top of the people who actually are the heart of your industry, that stability is an illusion. Even if the people on the bottom seem totally boxed in by the system, even if it seems the status quo can't possibly upset, it takes only one minor change in the system to send that all into chaos, perhaps even to topple the straw-fort that you've built for yourself. And moreover, it is nearly impossible for the people sitting on top of the heap to see this change from their perspective until it's too late.

In the case of Moneyball, the change comes when a few people running a baseball team realize that since they can't afford star players, they will need to find a way to win games without them. They think they've found that way, and they put it into motion, but of course, everyone thinks they're insane, until they start winning game after game. And then of course they -- still think they're insane. It's just luck. It will all be over soon. This streak they're on, it will end pretty much any second now. This can't be happening, ergo it isn't. Yup, that's publishing all right.

So, what are a few lessons we can learn about publishing from Moneyball?

Conventional wisdom may not be so wise - Many of my favorite scenes in Moneyball revolve around scouts, the old guys who are charged with going out to the minors, to schools, and sand-lots looking for future super-stars. There's a great scene where they sit around a table, combined centuries of baseball experience and wisdom, spouting increasingly bizarre nonsense about why a potential player choice is, or isn't, major-league material. They don't have a "good face," or a strong enough jawline, or they have the wrong body type. And my favorite among favorites is the "ugly girlfriend" rule. A player is rejected because his girlfriend is judged not pretty enough. "It shows a lack of confidence" announces one geezer with absolute authority.

It's so easy to transpose baseball scouts into literary agents, or book editors, since these are the people the traditional publishing industry trusts to choose potential best-sellers for them. Again, you have people with a fantastic amount of knowledge and experience often making dunderheaded decisions for absurd reason.

Why? Because, despite all that knowledge and experience, nobody really knows what's going to be the next "Hunt for Red October," or "Harry Potter" or "Twilight." But everyone likes to believe that they know, or at least pretend to others that they do. And there's not as much incentive to figure it out as you might think, because as long as everyone is playing by the same rules, failure is easily swept under the rug. On the other hand, any success is quickly capitalized on, and whoever brings home the prize (even if it's by blind chance" gets to be the hero for a while. If the prize is big enough, they can coast on it the rest of their career. They may even get to add some bit of nonsense to the body of conventional wisdom. ("Nobody buys books that have goats in them. Even one goat reference will kill a book!)

This is simply human nature. Science shows us that people in industries faced with uncertainty and lack of control are the ones most likely to resort to superstition or supernatural belief systems. That's why gamblers and sailors tend to be particularly superstitious. It's why the truism "there are no atheists in fox holes" may actually be true. It's why there are agents and editors out there questioning the worth of your manuscript because you used the wrong-color of paperclip.

Yes, writer, you've been rejected because your manuscript has an ugly girlfriend.

You don't need home-runs to win - The winning strategy developed in Moneyball is simply to throw out the whole star system in favor of a mathematical approach to winning games. Stars don't win games, especially when they require disproportionate resources to acquire and keep. Home runs don't win games. Getting on base, and doing so consistently is what wins games. Players that do that (especially if they have other "flaws," like an ugly girlfriend, or a weak jaw) may not attract attention or cost much to sign, and you can afford lots of these gems-in-the-rough instead of one or two "stars."

This applies to publishing as well. Traditional publishing, especially in the last ten years, has increasingly been about the best-selling book. Folks in traditional publishing will tell you this must be so. Increasingly retailers are stocking fewer books and stocking them for shorter amounts of time. Only "big" books get ordered. Only "big" books get reviewed (because there are fewer newspapers and magazines doing that) in order to become the "big" books that stores will actually order and stock.

A little success is not enough any more. It's more common that not these days to drop authors and book series that are profitable and have respectable and climbing book sales simply because they numbers aren't big enough, and they aren't climbing fast enough. If it's not a hit, cancel it and throw something else at the wall on the oft-chance it will be a hit. And if it doesn't pop the way you hope, dump it and start again.

Things are being dumped every day that could be earning an author a decent living and making the publisher a small-but-steady profit, because that's the way the game is played. And as long as the traditional publishing chain and traditional retail are the only ways to put books in front of the reader, writers had no choice but to play along.

But that's changed. There are options. Self-published ebooks. Self-published print-on-demand books. Smaller presses using new technology. The "because, because, because" of traditional publishing may still be true for them, but it doesn't have to be true for you, the writer (or for you, the reader either).

For most of publishing history, even successful writers have lived big-check to big-check. We're always waiting for the next big advance, the next big royalty check, the next big option money, and slowly starving a lot of the rest of the time. By tradition, those big-checks (and best-seller lists, major reviews, and awards) are how we judge out success and measure our worth. But in fact, we don't need them. What we need is a steady, dependable income over the lifetime of a career, and this new world is far more likely to offer it to us than traditional publishing ever is. And in fact, the new model can do this without ever having a break-out success. Readability and consistency win the day, not a plaque on the wall, a notation on a list in a newspaper that nobody reads any more, or a big check that never comes again. That's the new success.

It is more important to ask the right questions than to get the right answers - The mistake the old-guard made in "Moneyball" was to ignore what the As were doing because, by their yardstick, the As were obviously going to fail. They were asking the wrong questions. "Are they getting star players?" No. "Without star players, are they going to get lots of spectacular plays and home runs?" No. Ergo, they are going to lose.

The right questions in this case were, "Can we redistribute our player budget to get a better team, than a few better players on a team?" Yes. "Can these players consistantly get on base, even if it's only to first, and even if it's in an undramatic fashion?" Yes. "Do they have specialized strengths that we can deploy strategically to our advantage on the field?" Yes. "Can we live with their weaknesses if these are balanced out in other ways?" Yes. "Will we ultimately win games?" Yes!

By traditional publishing standards, it's very hard for indie publishers to win. Nearly impossible in fact. But that's because traditional publishing is asking the wrong questions: "Can you get into bookstores and major retailers?" Not so much, but given the costs, the returns, and the lack of support there, maybe I don't really need to.

"Will you have the force of a major publicity department behind you?" - Oh, you mean the publicity effort that you put behind a small percentage of your titles? In any case, I need those only if I need velocity of sales, a big spike to sell through the stores I'm not in anyway. I can drift along for years selling my ebooks and print-on-demand books through online-retailers. I don't care as much about how many books I sell in the next six weeks as a do the numbers I'll sell in the next six years.

"Will you get reviewed in major print publications?" - Probably not, but again, other than massaging my ego, those reviews serve mainly to get me into the stores I'm not getting into in any case, and to create sales velocity that I just explained I don't need for my business model.

Will you get on best-seller lists? - How much do those pay again?

"Will you sell as many books?" - Maybe but if not, I'm still making seven times more per sale, so if I sell 1/7th as many books, I'm ahead.

"Can you make as good and dependable a living as you can with traditional publishing?" - Uh, yeah, but only if I don't make an even better one!

If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, you can contribute to our good and dependable living goals buy buying one of our indie-ebooks. Search for "Tsunami Ridge Publishing" on any major ebook seller to find our titles! Or just click on the "donate" button below and send us a little something directly. Thanks!

Oh, and after watching the movie, Chris immediately ordered the ebook of "Moneyball," and finds it to be even more entertaining and informative!

Genre is the in Eye of the Beholder

2011-09-09T20:12:00.000-07:00

Steve here:

The other day I was listening to a story on NPR about the unlikely (to those of us in the U.S.) love of country music in the West Indies. The story is plenty interesting on its own merits, but one bit of an interview with a Jamaican writer Colin Channer really jumped out at me.

He tries to explain his people never never shut country music out. He explains that when he was growing up, there were only two radio stations, and to them, only two kinds of music, "local," and "foreign." They didn't recognize the various genres of American music, and simply picked the stuff that they liked (a lot of which turned out to be country).

That's a fantastic summation of how irrelevant seemingly solidly-defined genre categories, and this applies to publishing just as well as it does to music. Genres are handles for marketing and organizational purposes, not something handed down from above on a stone tablet.

But because of that long-time bastion of popular reading, the bookstore (and the publishers catalogs from which those stores took their stock) they've taken on far more substance and importance than they deserve. They've become not only labels to define what a book is, but also to define what it isn't. Each genre has become its own, walled, city state, with its own leaders, its own awards, its own rules, and its own keepers-of-the-faith.

Some are more strongly defended than others. (Perhaps none more bitterly than science fiction, where purists will still point at Star Wars, with its space-ships, aliens, and ray guns, and sneer, "that's not science fiction!") It's no surprise then, given human nature, that some of these genres have become ghettoized, isolated both from without and within.

But I don't think this is healthy for literature. I don't think it's healthy at all, especially in that it leads to the impression that if a book doesn't fit neatly into a familiar genre category, it doesn't exist at all. It's difficult to sell such a book to traditional publishers because "sales doesn't know how to sell this." ("This is a good book," apparently never occurs to them.) And even if it gets sold, and even if stores buy it ("we don't know how to sell this.") then it may go into a limbo where it is shelved in one (or sometimes multiple) departments where it is an uncomfortable fit, and where even readers actively seeking it will have trouble finding it.

As a recent example, a few years ago my wife Chris wrote a pair of novels using characters from the J.J. Abrams spy/fantasy/adventure/family-drama TV series, ALIAS. When we traveled, we'd often drop buy bookstores looking for shelved books to sign, and depending on which chain and/or store we visited it could be found shelved variously in mystery, thriller, entertainment, young-adult, fantasy or general fiction.

On the other hand, there are publishers and writers with literary pretensions very nervous about being shelved as, or even described as, genre books, even when by every definition of the word they are mystery or fantasy or science fiction.

The most chilling aspect of this genre isolationism is that it enforces an idea that the various genres define all the stories that are possibly (or at least worth) telling, ignoring the fact that the genres are like polka-dots on a pillowcase, covering less area that the white areas that surround them. Countless potential stories go unsold, unwritten, unconsidered, simply because they don't fit in someone's clearly defined circle.

There are also sociopolitical aspects to some genres. In the United States, many (if not most) of African ancestry shun country music because of its cultural association with southern racism and the legacy of slavery. But in the West Indies, there were no such cultural associations, and those of African ancestry simply judged the music on its own merits.

You might think this doesn't apply to fiction genres, but it does more often than you think. Many genres and sub-genres are strongly associated with women, to the extent of being minimized and ghettoized from the outside. Romance is the obvious example, but the Cozy Mystery sub-genre also comes to mind. Women like it, ergo it must be "trash," not "real literature," and have no possible interest to male readers. Not that these genres don't produce fine books, and not that men can (and don't) enjoy these works. But the stigma associated with them drives many readers away, and often makes those that partake secretive about their reading habits.

Likewise, there still a race line in books. Books overtly written by black authors, and especially those obviously featuring black protagonists, are often seen a "black" books, to be reviewed and celebrated perhaps, but mainly of interest to black readers (or to white liberals who are often more interested in displaying the unread book as a symbol of their openness, than actually reading them). And the flip side of this is that a book with an overtly black protagonist, especially if it deals with matter of race, can suffer a kind of reverse discrimination if it is written by a white author.

And I've already talked about the form of literary snobbery that considers true literature above and separate from all forms of "common" genre. This is an extension of intellectual elitism, which is in turn an extension of the English and European class system.

But story does not know of class and culture. Story is story. Later in the NPR interview, writer Channer says, "I think a good story is a good story. And Kenny Rogers is a good storyteller."

And ultimately, that's all that matters. Genre should exist to help us find books we want to read, not to hide those books from us behind arbitrary walls.

If you've found this post interesting, informative, or useful, please share the link elsewhere, and consider leaving something in our tip jar below. Doing so will encourage us to do more posts like it in the future.

Free Ebooks! (Our poor excuse for World Science Fiction Convention Promotion

2011-08-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

As we were getting organized for our Reno Worldcon trip this week, I had plans for the steps we'd take to promote our work during the convention, including special business cards and give-away coupons for free ebooks.

But unfortunately, family emergencies have pushed all our priorities around, and last week I decided this was one of many things I just had to let go. We made the decision to come to Worldcon, and hopefully we'll stay for all our scheduled programming appearances, but life is kind of rocky at the moment.

So, in lieu of that, here are some links and Smashwords coupons for a couple of selected free ebooks, so that we can just announce our webpage URL at the panels and maybe some folks will find their way here.

Meanwhile, those if you who are stumbling in from Twitter, Google+, Facebook or the interwebs at large are also welcome to enjoy the freebies. Coupons are good through Sept. 25th. Smashwords supports download formats for all major reading devices, but if you prefer, you can purchase direct to your device (for the regular 99 cents each, sorry) on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and other major ebook outlets.

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at Worldcon!

- Steve and Chris (Christy)

The Unwinding of Liberty Brass, A Clockwork Cowboy Story

by J. Steven York

"J. Steven York's Clockwork Cowboy stories aren't just 'weird Westerns.' They're quite touching, too. Yes, Liberty Brass is a metal man with a busted 'governor.' But he's got as much heart as any other hero you'll find riding the range."
-- Steve Hockensmith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Dawn of the Dreadfuls, and the Holmes on the Range mystery series

Throughout the west tales are told of a legendary Clockwork Cowboy, a restless mechanical wanderer who rode a clockwork horse, and whose bullets never missed. Some called him traitor, or monster, or murderer, but some called him hero. Some said he never stood by idle when the strong preyed upon the weak, and no bad men, mechanical or flesh, were safe while he wandered the plains.

But every story has a beginning...

Some say the Clockwork Cowboy was actually a Confederate Artilleryman called Liberty Brass. But for Liberty Brass, the trail seems ready to end almost before it begins. In a half-destroyed barn near the Gettysburg battlefield, on a dark, rainy night, two clockwork men, both damaged in war, meet. In the hours that follow, a terrible secret is revealed, a fateful judgment is made, and only one can survive to see the morning sun...

Coupon Code for free download: SF89E (Enter at checkout. Expires Sept. 25th, 2011) DOWNLOAD

A Day at the Unicorn Races

Christina F. York

(AKA Berkley Prime Crime authors Christy Fifield and Christy Evans)

Bubbles lives her dream as a successful unicorn jockey. The upside? Fame, fortune, and a job she loves. Downside? Enforced celibacy. Unicorns, after all, can only be ridden by virgins. So what's a girl to do when she falls in love?

Coupon Code for free download: CP92P (Enter at checkout. Expires Sept. 25th, 2011) DOWNLOAD

Bridganomics: Build a River, and They Will Build a Bridge (Or how companies destroy their business and create their successors)

2011-07-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

I've been watching with a mix of grim fascination and alarm as both cable and phone companies, for somewhat different reasons, have been doing away with unlimited data plans, "throttling" heavy users, and finding other ways of either preventing heavy data usage, or making it prohibitively expensive.

This bothers me because I think it's bad for most everybody. It's bad for consumers because -- hey -- paying more, getting less. It's bad for innovation, since many new internet products depend on plentiful and cheap internet bandwidth. It's bad for the economy, since the internet is where consumer business is done these days. It's the engine of economy, and internet providers literally want to throttle it back. It's bad for my country (the U.S. of A.) because we already lag behind most of the rest of the world in terms of cellular and internet service, and further restrictions push us more in the direction of becoming a second (maybe third) rate technological and economic power.

In fact, it would seem that it's bad for everyone except cable and cell phone companies.

But the one thing about this that gives me hope is that I know this last statement is absolutely not true. These attempts to limit data usage will help them in the very short term, by increasing revenue and reducing the cost and necessity of network upgrades. But in the long term it will hurt them. In fact, in the long term, it will quite probably destroy them. And moreover, it's going to help create the very companies and technologies that are going to plow them under.

How do I know this? Well, it isn't because I'm an economist. I've never had a class in economics in my life. But I've been a keen observer of technology and the businesses that go with them for a lot of years now, and I happened to have lived long enough, and seen enough transitions (both of technologies, and of dominant companies in those technologies) to see certain clear patterns develop. And one of those patterns I call "Bridganomics." Simply stated, it means that if you build a river, and consumers want to cross it, then someone else will come along and build a bridge. Making the river deeper, faster, wider, doesn't help, and often only increases the demand for the bridge.

Now, like I said, no economics education here, so there's a fair chance here I'm only reinventing the wheel and applying a new name to a well known economic principle. But even if it is well known to economists, it clearly is not well known to those running American businesses, or if so, they're simply choosing to ignore it. There's simply no other explanation for the way they keep shooting themselves in the foot over and over.

So I'm giving it a sexy, marketable, name, the kind that could go on the cover of a New York Times best-selling book (if only I had an economics degree and a lot of questionable friends in high places) in the hopes that it might catch on.

Fundamentally, bridganomics means that in the marketplace, you can't build an impermeable barrier in the way of any consumer desire or trend. Any attempt to do so will be only temporarily successful at best, and will fuel the creation of bypass services, companies, or technologies that will render your business model (and possibly your business) obsolete. And it doesn't matter how dominant your company may seem, or how firm a grip you have on your monopoly, that dominance, that control, is only another part of the restriction to the market. In bridganomics, we call this the "river," but if it's easier for your mind to wrap around, think of it as a fence, or a wall, or a trench. Same thing.

Examples? I've got plenty.

The most applicable to the current internet provider situation is the AT&T breakup of the 1980s. Most people think of this in terms of the breakup of the phone company itself, and of access to a lower-cost and more competitive marketplace for phones, phone services, and accessories such as answering machines. That's true, but there was a smaller, yet ultimately more important, aspect of it dealing with data access and the creation of the internet as-we-know-it-today, and I was on the front-lines of that battle.

Along about the time of the antitrust action that broke up AT&T, the telephone modem came along; a device that allowed computers to trade data remotely over phone lines. Actually, modems had been around for quite a while, but what was happening then was that modems were finding their way into the hands of consumers, who were hooking them up to their residential phone lines and finding new ways to use them.

Keep in mind that there was no publicly accessable internet back then. If you wanted to share date between two computers, they had to call each other directly, using modems over a telephone line, and trade data. Or, they had to call an intermediary computer or computer network, again with a telephone line and modem, that would act as a middle-man and pass the data along.

The only alternatives in those days were physical delivery of a floppy disk (no thumb-drives, and CDs were in their infancy), or putting both computers in one place and connecting them with a cable.

Yet, despite these limitations, consumer services started showing up.

Initially, there were computer bulletin boards: small and simple store-and-forward messaging and discussion services. Often these ran on a single personal computer and phone line. One user would call in to read and post messages while on line. Anyone trying to connect while they were on would get a busy signal and have to try back later. Eventually they would finish and hang up, opening the phone line and the host computer for the next user.

You may be shaking your head at the crudity of it all, and the difficulty of use. And I haven't even mentioned that a computer could easily cost you $3000 in pre-inflation 1980s dollars, and the modem would cost you $2-300 more (that's a loaded iPad with app-money left over, kids), or that your current internet connection is almost certainly over a thousand (possibly several thousand) times faster than those old modems. Why would anyone possibly use such a thing?

Simple answer: Because there was nothing like it that was better.

Not that we didn't want better, even from the very beginning. We wanted multitasking host computers that would eliminate the busy signals. We always wanted faster modems. And over time, we got those things. Bridganomics applies to natural rivers as well as ones created by misguided CEOs. The desire was there, and the limitations of the technology caused bridges to be built. Multitasking operating systems for PCs. Faster modems. Mainframe-based dial-up information services like CompuServe, GEnie, and AOL. Dial-up internet. Broadband. The-Internet-as-We-Know-It.

From that dial-up 300-baud trickle a million companies were made, a million fortunate. Without it, there is no Amazon, no Google, no FaceBook, no Twitter, no Dot Coms, and ultimately no iPhone or iPad or Android.

So what was AT&T's role in this economic revolution?

They tried to stop it.

To their corporate eyes, those pesky phone modems were, at best an annoyance, and at worst a threat. They worked on ways to prohibit them, or simply price them out of existence.

There were proposals to put filters on residential lines that would simply render modems inoperative. There were plans to charge residential customers for locals calls by the minute, or to cap usage.

There were plans to require modem users to install a separate and much more expensive business line for data calls, since there was no legitimate use for a modem other than business.

Some of these plans even went into effect in various localities and among the various "baby-Bells" that came from the breakup of AT&T. Most met with protest and outrage, and none of them ever gained traction.

Various arguments for these restrictions and pricing models were used, may of which will be familiar to those who have been following the current "open internet" debate.

The phone system was designed for voice, not data. Simply because it's possible to use it for other things (data) does not mean it should be.

Our multiplexers, used to compress voice traffic over long-distance lines, are designed for voice, and won't work as well for modems. Our network capacity will be overwhelmed

We will be forced to make expensive upgrades to our network to accommodate this new activity, and we will need to pay for it.

Only a tiny percentage of our customers use modems and will be significantly impacted by these new rates and terms. Why should all be charged more to pay for the needs of a few? The rates for our "average" customer will actually go down under our new plans!

Didn't I read all this in a Verizon Wireless press release just a couple weeks ago?

We all know how this went down for AT&T. Even as they were being broken up and losing their dominance over the voice telephone market, they had a golden opportunity to build a bridge to a new world of digital communications and data services. Instead, it happened in spite of them. For a few years, their networks carried most data traffic, despite their objections and foot-dragging. Modems got faster and faster, and as prices for phone services dropped, people started ordering more phone lines to support their modems, fax-machines, and increasingly connected families.

But this was all short term gain. The phone system was still the river, not the bridge. By the time phone companies woke up and started rolling out their long-promised DSL broadband services, it was too late. They'd been out-performed and under-priced by cable and fiberoptic companies. Some phone companies are fighting to gain back that market, but they're trying to recover something that could have owned if they'd been the bridge, and not the river.

This mistake didn't destroy the phone companies (or at least, it hasn't yet). They had a more diverse business model, and were able to enter new areas such as cell-phone service and providing infrastructure for the internet, and so were able to survive. But they gave away one of the biggest business opportunities of all time in a simple moment of greed and ignorance.

This sort of things happens over and over again. Where businesses and industries build rivers instead of bridges, they kill the golden goose over-and-over again. For example, through high rates and poor service, dial-up ISPs (with plenty of help from the phone companies themselves) gave way to broadband providers.

When hotels and models started gouging business travelers through high room-phone charges, it helped fuel the establishment and growth of cell phones.

When hotels and motels again started gouging customers with high in-room internet charges, they fueled the development of wireless internet services.

When Blockbuster developed a dominance of video rentals and started taking their customers for granted with poor service and high late-fees, it opened the door for Netflix to slip in with an entirely new business model.

When the music industry kept gouging consumers with ever higher-prices on ever cheaper to produce product, enacted draconian anti-piracy measures, and showed general contempt for their customers, they fueled first mass-scale music piracy, and then lower price (and for them, lower profit) music download services such as iTunes and Amazon.

The pattern is pretty clear. So, how does one go about building a bridge? How does one go about not building a river? Some rules of thumb.

Build a Bridge

Follow consumer desire, don't resist it, even if that desire seems to be contrary to your immediate benefit.

When people want things, make it easier for them to find them. (Google)

When people want things, make it easier for them to find them. (Amazon, Netflix, iTunes)

When people want to meet and gather, give them a place to do so. (FaceBook, Twitter)

When people want to do things, make it easier and more fun for them to do them. (Apple)

Build a River

Take your dominance of an industry, technology, or market category for granted.

Take your customer base for granted.

Create bad-will through poor customer service.

When you sense consumer desire outside your current business model, attempt to squelch it, block it, or it price it out of existence.

Raise prices indiscriminately. Consumers will tolerate high prices so long as they judge them to be fair. A customer perception that your pricing structure is unfair immediately transforms even a bridge into a river.

Respond to competition not by competing with it, but by eliminating it through buy-outs, protective laws, and unfair trade practices.

And finally, there's the one way to build a bridge and a river at the same time:

Build a Bridge and a River

Build a bridge over yourself: While attempting to hold onto your current business model and core technology, build the Next-Great-Thing that will move beyond them.

The clear example here is Apple, which while it had never achieved dominance in the desktop computer market, had established itself as the clear, premium alternative to leader (and river) Microsoft, and there it could have been content to cost for years, if not forever. Instead, Apple built the iPhone (creating the smart-phone market) and the iPad (creating the pad market, and a clear alternative to the desktop computer for many of its most common uses). They're still the clear premium alternative to Microsoft in the PC market, but they've created a whole new market in which they are dominate, and their competitors (old and new) are all playing catch-up. That's smart business.

That's Bridganomics. Ignore it at your peril.

The lessons to be learned here are simple and obvious, and apply to a range of businesses and technolgies, from space flight, to fast-food, to the print-publishing industry to which I am intimately connected.

And if wireless internet is going to be restricted and over-priced for very long, then the river is there, and somebody will bridge it (and is probably already hard at work doing it).

Cell phone companies, you've got a very limited window to reverse course on this, maybe a year or two, tops. What will replace you? I don't know. Maybe a distributed frequency satellite system like Lightsquared. Maybe tennis-shoes with wireless routers in the heel. Maybe a plan to distribute data through drinking-water pipes. Maybe just a better business model using the same-old technologies (ala discount airlines).

Who knows? But if the river is there, and the people certainly want to cross it, then it will be crossed.

AT&T Wireless? Verizon Wireless? Sprint Nextel? T-Mobile? The rest of you guys? Let me know how this works out for you...

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New Ebook Fiction from Chris!

2011-07-30T00:08:00.000-07:00

Steve,

It's been a busy summer, but Tsunami Ridge has a lot of our new and reprint fiction in the pipeline, and some of it is starting to appear. Here's a great new short-story ebook release from Chris; a tale of high-school, cheerleading, mystery, and magic, "Cheer Witches." The blurb:

Some people think all cheerleaders are witches, which isn't really true. Except at Salem Township Public High School #4 - known to the student body as Witch High.

Regionals are coming, and Cassie wants to win. But not enough to cheat. Magic is strictly forbidden in competition, and by the coach. Still, a little magic seems to be creeping into their routines, and Cassie is worried. She prides herself on using her powers for good, and cheating isn't right.

If she can't find the hidden source of the magic before their next competition, they could be disqualified.

Or worse, in Cassie's mind, they could not be disqualified.

Then even if they win, they lose!

Find it on Amazon at the above link, or in all major ebook forms on Smashwords. Only 99 cents. Coming soon to Nook, Apple, Kobo, and all other major ebook outlets.

New eBooks from Steve

2011-07-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

Steve:

We've been really distracted here lately, what with book deadlines and family issues, so not a lot of posting has happened here, and we haven't had much time for Tsunami Ridge Publishing and our ebook original publishing projects.

Until now anyway. I've got two new ebooks for you today.

The first I'm very excited about, "The Unwinding of Liberty Brass, A Clockwork Cowboy Story." This is the first short-story in a series of "steampunk western" stories. Here's the blurb:

J. Steven York's Clockwork Cowboy stories aren't just 'weird Westerns.' They're quite touching, too. Yes, Liberty Brass is a metal man with a busted 'governor.' But he's got as much heart as any other hero you'll find riding the range."
-- Steve Hockensmith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Dawn of the Dreadfuls, and the Holmes on the Range mystery series
Throughout the west tales are told of a legendary Clockwork Cowboy, a restless mechanical wanderer who rode a clockwork horse, and whose bullets never missed. Some called him traitor, or monster, or murderer, but some called him hero. Some said he never stood by idle when the strong preyed upon the weak, and no bad men, mechanical or flesh, were safe while he wandered the plains.

But every story has a beginning...

Some say the Clockwork Cowboy was actually a Confederate Artilleryman called Liberty Brass. But for Liberty Brass, the trail seems ready to end almost before it begins. In a half-destroyed barn near the Gettysburg battlefield, on a dark, rainy night, two clockwork men, both damaged in war, meet. In the hours that follow, a terrible secret is revealed, a fateful judgment is made, and only one can survive to see the morning sun...

There's already a second "Clockwork Cowboy" story on the way. It will be in the upcoming DAW anthology, "Western Weird," and there will be more Clockwork Cowboy stories on the way from Tsunami Ridge.

Also available on Nook and Smashwords. Coming soon to other major ebook outlets.

My next new book is a mix of old and new. The title story of my science fiction mini-collection, "Walking the Virtch," was previously published in Analog Science Fiction magazine, where it was a reader's choice award nominee. In addition, this book also includes a previously unpublished novella length sequel, "God Mode, With Rockets." Here's the pitch:

From National Best-selling author J. Steven York -

LOST IN CYBERSPACE

In a stagnated and decadent future, the Virtch is all they have left. The Virtch is a world computer network, shared virtual-reality, and life itself. Life outside it, the Real, is only a colorless shadow by comparison. But humanity has lost itself in these virtual places, and nobody remembers how the system works. Even the Sysgods dare not touch the core-code, lest their virtual worlds collapse.

In virtual spaces where everyone flies, one man, Jodd finds the courage to bring himself down to earth, to walk beneath virtual skies, find lost secrets of the heart, and regain his lost humanity.

But if there can still be true-love in the Virtch, what about true-friendship? Jodd holds the keys to the lost secrets of the Virtch. To use them, he and his new love must reunite with three childhood friends. But one of those friends hides a terrible secret. And another wants only revenge; to destroy his old-friends and the Virtch itself!

The power to become Virtual Gods is within their grasp, to remake the Virtch, or to destroy it.

But only if they can avoid killing each other first!

Also available on Nook and Smashwords. Coming soon to other major ebook outlets.

That's it for today, but look for other new releases (probably next from Chris) coming soon.

A Response to: "How to Try in Publishing Without Really Succeeding"

2011-04-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

This post was written as a comment to a very funny and interesting post called "How to Try in Publishing Without Really Succeeding," made by my good buddy, mystery-crime-horror-humor-western-author Steve Hockensmith on his blog.

Unfortunately, when I tried to post the comment, I got the every helpful and informative error message: "We're sorry. We cannot accept this data."

Everybody's a critic

So, instead, I'll just post it here, and try to post a link over there. If you haven't read the original post, just trot (Har! It's a pun! He writes western mysteries!) on over and read it here, then come back for my response:

=====================================

Very funny post (I still break out in giggles every time I see, or even THINK about your mock cover for "Dear Mr. Holmes." (Now available where-ever fine ebooks are sold!)

And it's not really fair to comment on a humorous (if thoughtful) post with, like, seriousness, but I am anyway, throwing in some of my own thoughts (for what they're worth) on the self-publishing business:

1. Write a good book
Really, that's the ticket. Write a story that people want to read, and you've got a shot no matter how much you stumble on everything else. Without that, the most wonderful packaging and promotion in the world won't earn their keep.

2. Get objective eyes on your manuscript. This is where most self-publishers screw up. I admit, I'm past believing in the magic powers of editors. A good editor can do wonderful things for a book, but the reality is, even in New York publishing, not a lot of books get seriously edited these days. There just isn't the time or budget.

And when it comes down to it, most editors you'll be working with there are simply people (frighteningly, most of them young enough to be my kids) who happen to love books and maybe have a college degree related to -- ya know -- words somehow. Some of them have the benefit of experience, but most of them aren't OLD enough to have experience (unless Mad Libs in 5th Grade count as editing experience).

Anyway, I can find book-loving, college-educated, liberal-arts degreed, enthusiastic, young-people working in the fast-food industry right here in my town! And they'll work for cheap (if you don't make them wear the polyester orange pants and the paper hat, which is sad, because they're kind of fun).

That said, Amanda Hocking made a killing at ebooks despite the fact that (and she freely admitted this when signing her New York publishing deal) they really could have used serious editing. Story rules.

Oh, and copy-editors. You need them. Lord knows, I need them. Just look at this post!

3. I've got to admit, I do my own covers. I do so because I already know the tools fairly well, and I've got a long visual-arts background that I think makes me tolerably good at it. That doesn't apply to everyone, obviously. If you're style blind (if for example you can't see anything wrong with the "Dear Mr. Holmes" cover above), the for sure hire somebody.

Now, am I the BEST cover designer out there? Hells no. But here's the reality as I see it: covers aren't that important to sales. Really. Surveys in real-world publishing, where those covers are right out there, printed on big, glossy paper at a zillion dots per inch, show that covers (and more amazing to me, cover copy) are relatively small factors in buying decisions. People mostly buy books mostly because they already know the author, or their friends told them the books were good. That's it. They know you. Friends. (Also, it helps if the friend's name is "Oprah.")

I suspect the same applies in the ebook world, only more-so, given that mostly your wonderful cover is seen at about the size of a grainy postage stamp. (And often in glorious black-and-white!) Given that, here is what is important: Your name and the title should be large and readable. It should provide good contrast when viewed in black and white. Everything else is WAY down the list, no matter how wonderful it looks blown up, printed out, and hanging on your wall. (Go look at a book rack, if you can still find one, and you'll see New York has already adopted this model. Huge title. Huge author name (if the author has a name worth making huge). Nice typography (far more important than the art these days). Tiny-but-possibly-striking picture stuck in the middle somewhere, which you can see if you squint enough. Fancy, art-heavy, elaborate covers are out.)

4. Formatting your ebook. I don't know what to say about this one. On one hand, formatting an ebook does require some study, effort, and attention to detail. There is a learning curve. But it's really no more difficult than using a word-processing program to create a manuscript, format it, print it, and send it off to a publisher. In fact, it can be a lot simpler than that.

Recently some guy named Hockensmith posted his first "Holmes on the Range" story on his blog (now available in the new collection "Dear Mr. Holmes," where-ever fine ebooks are sold), and I'd been dying to read it. But I like reading things on my Amazon Kindle better than on the computer screen, so I tried an experiment.

I selected the story on my screen, pasted it into a Microsoft Word document, saved the document, emailed it to my Kindle. (Amazon allows you to send your own documents to your own Kindle, and it appears to go through the same conversion process as a "published" ebook.) To my surprise, it looked wonderful, far better than a lot of the books I'd purchased out of New York.

So, how much is it worth to pay somebody to do that? (To be honest, there's potentially much more to full-ebook formatting than that, indexing, chapter navigation, and the like. And an experienced hand can be very useful when things, as they sometimes do, go wrong.) But it isn't that hard. And yeah, if he's even reasonably smart and not a TOTAL stoner, the kid across the street could likely learn to do it in short-order.

Anyway, I think this is a very short-term problem. The tools to make ebook formatting easy are coming along, and I'm pretty certain the next-generation of word-processing software will create ebooks as naturally as it prints to a laster-printer.

The decision to hire folks to do things for you is an individual one, but the one thing I'd warn against is paying somebody a percentage of your sales to do it. It's just absurd to imagine your heirs decades down the road paying a percentage of sales on your work to some guy who spent a couple hours running your book through their web editor. Pay them a flat fee, an hourly rate, or learn to do it yourself.

(And mind you, I'm talking about ebooks here. Formatting for POD publishing is FAR more technically demanding, and really calls for expensive tools that I don't think it's cost-effective for most authors to own. I'm personally dubious that it's effective for most self-publishers do do POD at all at this point, unless they have an established audience who will buy them, or a platform through which to market them. While in theory you can get into bookstores, in practice, that ship is already sinking, and you're competing directly with major publishers who have all the advantages in the sinking-ship market. You'll likely sell a few books, but enough to make it cost effective? Again, this will be different for every author, and I could be proved wrong. But on the average, I doubt it.)

5. Promotion - One of the biggest mistakes epubbers is to expect ebooks to behave like traditional New York books, and to market them accordingly. Traditional book sales are ALL about velocity. The book is marketed and sold into a narrow window of time. It must sell a lot of books during the brief time it is alloted, or it will vanish and fail. Only by maintaining a brisk velocity of sales can it stay on store shelves. And traditional book marketing is about establishing and maintaining velocity. Sure, books can remain "in print" for years, but for the great majority of books, its success or failure is determined in just a few weeks on the shelves.

Ebooks don't need velocity. There are no shelves to get onto, or to be crowded off of. No returns to worry about. Once your book is out there, it's generally out there to stay. There's time for the book to build a following based on its own merits, or to float on the rising tide of your own reputation with readers. And while it may not sell many books today, it may still be selling that same number of books (or more) a decade from now.

Failure to understand that gives epubishers false expectations of what constitutes success, and what they should be doing to sell their books. Yes, with promotion, you can lead a few people to your books, and that's not a bad thing, assuming those readers actually like your book. But it's so easy to take it too far, and to suck up time and energy that is better spent on writing. And then to be disappointed when those efforts don't instantly lead to thousands or millions of sales.

And don't over-analyze. Nobody really knows what drives some ebooks to mega-success while others putter along selling one or two a month, if they're lucky. If one doesn't immediately seem to work for you, focus on the next one, and keep trying. If any of your ebooks break-out, it will drive the long-term success of the rest.

Patience. The little money will add up over time, and as you add titles, it will build.

The pattern is, people stumble onto an author they like. They look for other work by the same author (you have a bunch out for them to find, right?), and then they tell their friends. And there, you've tapped into the two biggest selling points for books: author familiarity, and friend recommendation. Sure, a little marketing to prime the pump, especially in the beginning, probably won't hurt.

But you're absolutely right that there's nothing more pathetic than people promoting in blog posts.

Except maybe for people who promote in comments to blog posts. Or blog posts that are only comments to other blog posts... ("Dead Ringers, a Short Anthology," by J. Steven York Tsunami Ridge Publishing, only TWO-NINETY-NINE!!! where-ever fine ebooks are sold.)

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Publishing in Transition

2011-03-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

The Wall Falls

Steve: The publishing world was shaken this week by an announcement by New York Times best-selling thriller writer Barry Eisler. Eisler has let it be known that he is walking away from a half-million dollar deal with a major New York publisher in order to self-publish his work. Eisler's reasoning is that he could make more money, and actually make money faster, by going the direct route.

I'd heard rumors this was coming before it went public, and in a more general sense, I've known it was coming for years. It was inevitable, given the way the economics of ebook and print-on-demand publishing that a major writer would one day look at the balance sheet and say, "why am I giving all this money away?" The only question was, what writer would it be, and when?

Now we have an answer.

Quickly voices rose of from within the industry calling Eisler wrong-headed, misguided, a fool. What they were really saying was that his actions represented a threat to the already fragile status quo on which their employment, well-being, or sometimes just illusions, depend.

But no sooner had this announcement started to sink in, no sooner had the responses begun on what it meant to publishing, when another stunning news item broke. Self-publishing phenomenon Amanda Hocking, who is already selling hundreds-of-thousands of books every month, is reportedly about to cross the other way, to sign a seven-figure deal with a traditional New York publishing houses.

Many of Eisler's detractors have jumped on this story as vindication, or at least as proof that his decision was the wrong one. Some news outlets have treated the second story as though it canceled out the first. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Far from canceling each other out, the two stories are sides of the same coin. For most of the time I've been in the publishing business, a vast chasm has existed between traditional publishing and all forms of self-publishing. Even just a few years ago I wrote some strong essays on the subject myself.

But things have started to change in recent years. Increasingly good, cheap, and flexible print-on-demand publishing systems have been a factor, the but real game-changer has been ebooks, and the turn-key systems that allow almost anyone, with a little initial effort, to become a publisher, and with essentially no effort to continue being a publisher, allowing a self-publisher to quickly back to their primary job of being a writer.

But the stigma remained even as the growing ebook audience and increasing ebook royalty rates blurred the practical lines from the author's perspective. Self-published books were inferior, shoddy, amateurish, tainted by the very fact of their origins. They weren't real.

Maybe there was no longer a chasm between traditional publishing. Maybe they ran in parallel, growing closer and closer until they were practically touching, almost overlapping. But not quite. There was still a wall, between them, tall, solid, and immutable. Guards stood watch on its towers, and few had the courage to cross. Certainly, nobody of notice made the crossing.

But both these stories, that of Eisler and that of Hocking show that not only is that wall breaking down, people of note are beginning to cross it. And they're crossing in both directions!

They're the first, but they aren't the last. As long as self-publishing offers a vast potential audience and generous return on sales, authors will find themselves drawn into small-source publishing. And as long as print remains a viable means to distribute books, successful self-publishers will find themselves turning to the efficiencies and market penetration of traditional publishers. And yes, as long as self-publishers appear who are able to demonstrate sales and access to an established audience, traditional publishers will cross over to court them.

For those who value the status quo, for those who fear change, there is no good news for you in Amanda Hocking's publishing deal. Quite the contrary.

The wall has fallen.

(Since this was posted, it's been pointed out to me that the news of Amanda Hocking's deal may actually have broken slightly before Eisler's announcement went public. Though it's rather moot to my point, I regret the error.)

If you found this article useful or informative, your contribution, large or small is appreciated and will encourage us to do more like it. Thanks in advance!

Writer's Horoscope #6 - It's Written in the Stars! (But Edited in New York)

2011-02-11T23:20:00.000-08:00

Steve:
Welcome back for another installment of Writer's Horoscope When reading this feature, it's important to remember that as writers, we're all professionals at making sh*t up. But this is REAL. It must be true! You read it on the internettytweetyfacewebs!

If, however, you don't find that your entry in this horoscope seems to apply to you, it's entirely possible that your parents lied to you about your birth-date. It's also possible they lied to you about your name. And your species. (Please remember where you got this tip when the saucer-invasion takes over Earth and returns you, their exiled king/queen/kingqueen to power over their new colony.) So feel free to try another sign and see if it makes more sense to you.

Also, it's come to our attention that, according to experts, there are now thirteen signs of the zodiac, and every horoscope for the last 2000 years is incorrect. We think the new sign may be called "Snookie." Or, according to other, no-more-crazy-looking experts, not. Maybe you'd better check our earlier installments just to be sure. Find them here and here and here and here, and here.

Note that we've adopted the new world universal writer's astrological symbols in place of the ones you may be more familiar with. But we've still got twelve of them, until somebody less nutty-looking tells us otherwise.

Arial (March 21 - April 19) - Why are you spending your time and energy spreading gloom and doom, and complaining about how terrible things are in publishing, when you could could be taking positive steps to improve your situation? Things are changing, sure, but change means opportunity.

Thesaurus (April 20 - May 20) - If, like our Arial friend, you're finding yourself mired in negativity, maybe it's those people you've been hanging out with. Maybe it's time to put some distance between you and that old workshop or writer's circle. It's hard to take on a new world-view when the old one is being constantly reinforced by your peeps.

Galley (May 21 - June 20) - Who's that there in your writing office with you? Nobody you say? Are you sure? Because maybe you're letting other people in by worrying what they'll think when they read your work. Do you think about how your friends will react to your writing? Your editor? Your agent? Your mom? Self-censorship is the worst kind. Kick them out and write your own mind.

Copyright (June 21 - July 22) - Look around you all the good people there that you've been neglecting; the people who have helped you, your mentors, the people you admire, the people who have supported you, the people whose work inspires you. It's payback time. Tell them how you feel. Help them in their endeavors. Your positive energy will multiply and return to you.

Litho (July 23 - August 22) - Find your voice, both figurative and literal. Don't be afraid to speak your mind, in your writing, and in real life as well. You've worked hard. You've studied hard. You're entitled to your opinions. That doesn't make you right, but it's no reason to be shy.

Verso (Aug 23 - September 22) - Have you lost the spark? Maybe you've let goals, business, marketing and high expecations creep into your writing too much. Remember when writing was fun? Remember when you wrote what you wanted when you wanted, with no concern who was going to buy it, or when, or for how much? Give yourself permission to go back to that this month. Your best work comes from your heart, not your business brain.

Library (September 23 - Oct 22) - Recess is over. Don't lose your focus till you type "-END-." Keep your focus, and get 'er done.

Slush (Oct 23 - November 21) - It's time to make new connections. Explore a new market. Look for new ways to get your words out there. Try something new.

Sans sarif (Nov 22 - Dec 21) - "They" say that good things come to those who wait. "They" would be wrong. You snooze, you loose.

Caption (December 22 - January 19) - You may be thinking about doing something to draw more attention to yourself. Yes, you can inflate sales in the short-term through energetic promotion. You can inflate your own image, even build a little cult around yourself as the "hot, new, thing." Of course, if you flap your arms fast enough, you can fly. The problem is, the instant you let up, it's time to pay the gravity bill. Best to be standing on something something just then. It's like that in your writing life. Sooner or later you have to let up on the puffery and promotion, and you'd better have some solid work to stand on.

Apostrophe (January 20 - February 18) - Do you know what you're agreeing to? Did you read the contract? Did you understand the contract? Don't trust simply because your agent read it, or even you lawyer. You're the one signing it. Understand it, and try to understand what it means to you, not just for today, but for any possible future.

Pica (February 19 - March 20) - A writer's life is about feast and famine. There are possibilities that a future dominated by electronic publishing may change that, smooth out the cash-flow for working writers. But for most of us, that remains in the future. It's hard to live within your means when you don't know what your means are. Keep your expenses low, and when possible, err on the conservative side of things. Nobody ever lost sleep over having too much in reserve.

If this is your birth month: This could be the month where everything breaks loose for you! But don't celebrate yet. Are you ready for success? Do you know what to do when you get that phone call or email from that editor or agent? It's too easy to make bad choices and rushed decisions in the heat of the moment. The time for research and planning is now. Don't wait!

Did you find this article useful? Your donation, big or small, will encourage us to do more like it. Every little bit helps and is appreciated. Thanks in advance: Chris and Steve.

Chris has a new mystery out

2011-02-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

"Drip Dead," the third installment in Chris's (writing as "Chrisy Evans") Georgiana Neverall, plumber-mystery series is out this week from Berkley Prime Crime.

When Georgie finds her mother's fiancé dead in the crawl-space under mom's house, the police see her mom is the prime suspect. Georgie has to put aside their differences and put on her best detective's coveralls to track down the real killer through a maze of lies, secrets, deception, and dusty bottles of vintage wine.

This isn't Chris' only recent publication. She also has new romance ebook releases. The first is an ebook original from Tsunami Ridge Publishing, "Loaves and Kisses." Here's the description:

Beth Little certainly didn't need Frank Welch pointing out problems in the operation of her bakery. In fact, she didn't need Frank Welch at all - until she did. But Beth doesn't fit into Frank's master plan. When Beth's dream crashes down, it's going to take more than candlelight and a bottle of wine to resolve their differences. Can these two somehow bake beautiful bread together?

"Loaves and Kisses" is available on Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and and in all major ebook formats at Smashwords.com. It also is (or will soon be) available on Kobo, iPad, and other major ebook outlets.

Next is a the first ebook release of Chris' first published romance, "Dream House." "Dream House" has previously been published in hard-cover and trade paperback by 5-Star, but until now, it's been a no-show for ebook readers. Now, thanks to Tsunami Ridge Publishing, that's changed. Here's the description.

Successful real estate saleswoman Marty Francis vowed she would never depend on anyone after her divorce, and she hasn't. But Marty didn't count on meeting a tall, dark - and dripping wet - stranger in coveralls when she's trying to sell a house.

She can't forget the house, or the handyman. Each time she returns there are more improvements. Which would be great, except the turmoil keeps killing her sales.

Will Hart is a man with secrets, haunted by the death of his wife, and buried in his work. The remodeling is a labor of love for the developer, a way to help an old friend.

When these two meet, sparks fly. But learing to live and love again is daunting, and it will take more than a little remodeling to make a house a home.

Like "Loaves and Kisses," "Dream House" is available on Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and and in all major ebook formats at Smashwords.com. It also is (or will soon be) available on Kobo, iPad, and other major ebook outlets.

That's a lot of books, but Chris isn't standing still. She's currently in final negotiations to do a new mystery series for Berkley. We expect to be able to share the details here soon.

Twitter 101: A Beginner’s Guide for Writers (and Other Creative People)

2010-11-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

Twitter 101: A Beginner’s Guide for Writers (and Other Creative People)

For modern writers, social media is an important, if not the most important, promotional tool available. Major publishers all but insist writers have a substantial social media presence, and they often evaluate the marketability of an author they’re considering based on the size of that author’s online social network.

The two most important social networks are Facebook and Twitter. While everyone including your granny seems to find Facebook easy to grasp, for some reason Twitter is much more intimidating. It’srelative simplicity - text-messages, readable by everyone, but limited to only 140 characters - provides little structure or guidance as to how Twitter is best used. It can leave even the most prolific and confident of writers staring at the screen asking, “What should I post?”

For Twitter users, simplicity translates to flexibility, and that means there are multiple approaches to any goal, infinite strategies available to put your message in front of other people. As such, I can’t show you the one-true-way to become comfortable on Twitter and use it to your advantage. It doesn’t exist.

But I can show you some of the high points of the way I use it, and offer some less-than-obvious tips that will help you build a quality following and share your message with them using methods that won’t chase them away. Once you’ve gotten started, you’ll undoubtedly develop tricks and strategies of your own. It’s getting started that’s hard.

Let’s take it one step at a time...

Get a Twitter account.

Go to www.Twitter.com. Sign up. It’s free, it’s easy, and all you need is an email account. There are lots of instructional materials there to help you get started. Take advantage of them.

By the way, this would be a good time to talk about your Twitter name. There are several important considerations in picking one, and here are a few tips.

First of all, if your intent is to promote yourself on Twitter, your name needs to lead people back to you and not look too silly or out of character with the public image you want to present. “LoLTinkiePoo” might not be the best choice for a writer of legal thrillers, for instance.

One bit of common wisdom is to use your name (or your pen name, as the case may be). Problem is, if your name is at all common (and maybe if it isn’t) there’s a good chance it’s already taken. Another problem is that names can be very long. Take my friend, writer @DeanWesleySmith, as an example. The problem with this is, you not only want people to read your tweets directly, you also want them to be passed along (“retweeted,” or “RTed”). Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, and when people retweet things, especially when they add their own comments, your user name has to fit in that 140 characters too. Longer user name means more editing of your words to make it fit. Or maybe the fact that things won’t fit without editing will cause a potential retweeter to decide, “Never mind!”

An alternate approach to creating a user name is to use some combination or part of your name with a related word, like @WriteRCastle (fictional TV mystery-writer Richard Castle), or @ChristyMystery (my wife Christina York, who writes mystery as both Christy Evans and Christy Fifield).

Whatever you choose, make sure you’re happy with it. Once you’ve established yourself under a name, it’s hard to change.

Profile Yourself

Twitter provides a public profile that helps define your identity on Twitter. Check this as soon as you open your account, and make a habit of checking and updating it on a regular basis. The three most important things here are:

Picture: Put a picture here -- immediately! I don't care how camera-shy you are, a picture of you (or a painting, or a cartoon, but of you) is usually the best idea, and any picture is better than no picture. Leaving the default icon (which as of this writing is a picture of an egg, screaming "newbie!") marks you as, at best, a know-nothing newcomer, and at worst, a spambot (programs that create fake Twitter accounts to deliver spam and malware links) to be blocked immediately.

Bio: You've got a very short space here to present an image of who you want to be seen as on Twitter. For now, say something interesting about yourself, and maybe mention your interests (which should never include words like "marketing," "selling," or "promotion").

Link: This should be a link to your web-page or blog where people can find out more about you and your work. It should not be a link to a social media page like Facebook, Myspace, or your own Twitter page. If you haven't got a web page or blog, do it now, and put some content on it. If Twitter is fishing, then your tweets there are only bait. Your web presence, and the links to it (from your profile, and your posts) are line to reel them in.

Follow interesting people. Observe.

Twitter will help you to find some people to follow, and that’s good, but you’ll want more. Here are a couple of tips to help you find people worth following:

Once you find someone interesting to follow, go to their Twitter page and see who they’re following. It’s a good rule of thumb that interesting people often follow other interesting people, and often these are people that you might never have heard of.

Likewise, pay attention to who interesting people are talking to, or talking about. You’ll find interesting people to follow.

And mind that, when I say "interesting" I don't necessarily mean "famous." Yes, it's okay to follow some of these, but remember that celebrities with tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of followers operate under different rules than mortals like us. Emulate them too closely, and you'll just end up looking like a pompous fool. You can start acting famous when you actually are famous!

Check your favorite web pages for Twitter icons. Many news sites, magazines, newspapers, etc., also post regularly to Twitter. Find out about things as they happen, not long after the fact.

Once you’ve found people to follow, sit back and watch for a while. People who are popular and well followed are usually doing something right. Study them and try to figure out what it is. Learn from the best before choosing to put yourself out there.

Divide and conquer

By now, you’re following enough people to be seeing quite a stream of incoming Tweets. Maybe an overwhelming steam, like drinking from a fire-hose. Relax. It’s all manageable.

The first secret is to live in the moment. If you haven’t been on for a while, never try to catch up with everything. If something interesting seems to be going on you want to catch up on, check the Twitter feeds of key players to get the high points of what you missed. But in general, this isn’t like email. Anything that happened more than a couple hours ago is over, and can usually be ignored.

The next step is to divide the people you’re following into categories, so you can manage and prioritize what you chose to read at any given time. Twitter has a built-in function to allow you to this called “lists.” Use it.

Make a habit, every time you follow someone in whom you have more than a casual interest, assign them to one or more of your lists. I, for instance, have an “inner-circle” list for close friends and associates, one for general news sources, one for science, space, and technology folks, a list for publishing professionals, one for professional writers, one for mystery, one for booksellers, one for entertainment people, and so on. Come up with your own list topics based on your interests and needs.

A Twitter application, like Tweetdeck (the one I use, there are others) can help you managing these lists and handling other Twitter tasks. I’ve got Tweetdeck on both my computers and on my Android smart-phone. Like any tool, these Twitter applications magnify your efforts, to make a doable job easier. Do some research and find your own, or just jump in and try Tweetdeck on my recommendation. Find it at www.Tweetdeck.com, or at you phone’s app-store.

Decide who you are

Maybe you think you know who you are, but despite any illusions of intimacy you may have, Twitter is a public forum. While I recommend being genuine in what you present to your public, what you’re presenting should necessarily be an edited, packaged, targeted version of yourself. I can’t tell you what that persona should be. You’ve got to decide that for yourself. But it should be someone that people will be compelled enough to follow and interesting enough to read. It should also be someone you’re completely comfortable with, like a favorite pair of shoes. Remember, you could be living in this persona for a long time, so be happy with it. This is marketing, but it's marketing you should be able to wear like your favorite pair of old sweats.

Decide what to share

Likewise, you need to decide how much of your personal life to put out there. This is an important area to consider. It can be endearing, for example, to talk about families, relationships, and children, but remember that you’re dealing with not only your own privacy, but the privacy of those around you. And if your relationships change, if you end up in a divorce, or a child ends up in trouble with the police, or a family member passes away, then your private pain becomes public as well. If you share your travel plans, you’re also alerting any thief that your house may be vacant and easy pickings. As in law enforcement, everything you say can and will be used against you.

Don’t let that put you off completely. That’s the cost of any kind of public presence. Just be aware of it, and control what you put out there. A little misinformation or misdirection may also be a good thing in the interest of security. For instance, when I mention I’m going out of town, I also mention that I have scary cat-sitters equipped with guns. This happens to be true in my case, but if it weren’t, how could you be sure?

It’s also important to realize that personal information can be off-putting. If your intent is to promote yourself and/or your work, then consider carefully how open you want to be about your politics, and your positions on controversial topics. Again, how you handle this is up to you. One writer friend of mine chooses to keep her strongly-held politics completely to herself. Other people wear their politics on their sleeves, and happily limit their following to like-minded people.

My personal approach is not to hide those opinions and leanings I find most important, but I don’t define my persona by them either. Occasionally, when I feel it’s important, I speak my mind (and in so doing, risk losing a few followers), but it doesn’t happen often enough to dominate what I have to say. Anyone who can make it over the occasional political or ideological speed-bump can follow me even if we disagree on some things.

Other aspects of your life can be off-putting as well. It’s easy to scare people off with the details of a health problem, personal tragedy, or life-challenge. Maybe “cancer survivor,” “crime victim,” “angry divorcee,” “parent of a missing child,” or “former cult member,” is the persona you’re presenting to the world. Maybe that’s the package you’re trying to sell to your followers. But there’s a fine line between sharing and over-sharing, and it’s easy to send people running for the exits.

It’s equally true that, once you’ve released your privacy on a sensitive topic like this, you can’t easily take it back. Consider your options carefully before you proceed.

Engage with others

Now that you’ve decided how to put yourself out there, it’s time to do it. It’s natural to assume that means posting, and you should do that. But simply standing on a soap-box and shouting won’t get you attention in a place where everyone is standing on a soap-box shouting.

Interaction is the key. Comment on other people’s posts, even if they don’t seem to respond. Retweet (share) posts that you find interesting, informative, or enjoyable. Engage people in conversation.

Be positive. This isn’t high-school debate. Find points of commonality with other people and build on that. Disagreement is fine, but bitch-slapping strangers is no way to make friends.

Figure out who to follow

There are several schools of thought on following.

First, a common lazy-approach to getting a lot of followers is to follow a lot of people, sometimes thousands of people. This is done with the knowledge that some people will automatically follow anyone who follows them.

I don’t recommend it. People who “auto-follow” generally don’t have time to actually read anyone they follow. The scatter-gun method of following lots of people will get you numbers without actually getting you attention.

As I’ve said, some people follow back anyone everyone who follows them, and in some circles (not the circles I care to travel) failure to do so is considered rude. I recommend choosing your follow-backs carefully. I don’t see much point in following people whose tweets you’re not actually interested in reading.

It’s also a harsh reality of Twitter that first-impressions are important, and potential followers are usually going to make judgments about you based on limited information. The first thing a savvy Twitter user will do before following you is to check your Twitter profile, and the first thing they’ll see are your Twitter numbers. Do you have many more followers than people you follow? You’re probably someone important, or at least interesting enough to follow. The masses have spoken! But if you follow a lot of people, as many - or worse, more - people than follow you, then your character is suspect. (Unfortunately, that’s an area where I’ve gone wrong. Because I find so many people I am interested in following, scientists, astronauts, writers, editors, and other potential news sources, my numbers are currently way upside down. I don’t want to unfollow anyone, and even though I’m trying very hard to follow as few people as possible for a while, it’s still going to take several hundreds of new followers to even things out. Learn from my mistakes.)

Become an expert in your field

People are drawn to experts, and everyone is at least a potential expert in something. If you aren’t an expert, make yourself into one. It’s not as difficult as you may think. Just pick something you already know a lot about, something that you’re passionate about, and that you may have dismissed as unimportant because you’re too close to it. If you’re passionate about it, it’s likely other are as well, and these people can become your loyal followers and supporters.

What is this thing or things you're an expert in? Only you can answer that question. It could be your profession, or some aspect of your workplace. It could be a cherished hobby or craft. It could be your favorite sports team, your favorite classic author, or your favorite sport. It could be something you collect, or some charitable cause you volunteer for, or even your own home-town. But your passion for the subject is what’s important. People are drawn to that passion, and through it they will know you. It’s a way of sharing yourself deeply with others, but in a way that’s still fairly safe for you, and that maintains a screen of privacy and personal space.

And yes, you can be an expert in just yourself, or your own work, but if so, it helps if your work is already well known, and your personality is near to a force of nature.

In my case, I’ve built on a few of my favorite things. I’m a life-long science geek, and I read widely on all aspects of science, but especially space flight and computer technology. I’m very interested, not just in science, but in the people of science, and the way that science interacts with society and everyday life. I’m also interested in science education, and inspiring young people to care about science as a part of their lives. Being a bit of a nerd, I occasionally tweet about pop-culture. And I also talk about my work (writing), the publishing industry, and especially the cutting-edge aspects of that industry, such as ebooks and electronic publishing (again, something I’m professionally involved in).

Once you’ve figured out your area (or areas) of expertise, use it to make yourself an expert worth following. To do that, leverage what you already know…

Find your sources

What makes an expert isn’t knowing everything. It’s knowing where to find everything. If someone asks a question, know where to find their answer. Know where to find the latest news in your area of expertise to share with your followers. You don’t have to know everything. You just have to know interesting things that your followers don’t know.

What kind of sources? Well, since you’re already there, start with Twitter. Use your expertise to search Twitter and track down people who are experts in aspects of your chosen area, then follow them. You know enough to dig beyond the obvious sources, to find the ones that others miss. Retweet them. Engage them. Interact with them. Network with them. When you can, make them your friends.

If you’re passionate about your subject, you probably already have your own sources: clubs, professional organizations, magazines, web-sites. But it can help to organize these sources, and make them more accessible. Put those web-links in an easily accessible folder, and make checking news sites and journals part of your routine. Put those magazines in a file, or give them a shelf. Keep a file or notebook of your contacts in your field. A little advance work to put things at your fingertips will save work as you’re looking for answers or interesting things to tweet about down the line.

One final tip is to make use of Google, and especially Google News and its Alert feature, to track down information and find interesting items to link or tweet about.

You’d be surprised how many people who have a question about your chosen subject area won’t even bother to try a simple Google search. Even if they do, your knowledge of your subject will allow you to make deeper and more targeted searches to find their answers. If you don’t know the answers, you know the questions to ask to get those answers.

If you set up a Google account, you can also set up custom sections on your Google News page. So, for example, you can set up a news section for “Georgia History,” or “Horses,” or “Model Boats,” or “Plumbing Regulations” or anything related to your “expert” area. As you check the day’s headlines on your computer, you can also be checking for news-worthy items to share with your followers.

Even more useful is Google’s “Alert” function. With this you can set up a standing search of news, blogs, or the web in general, using any search terms you desire. When it finds something, it will email you. You can choose to have these sent immediately, or as a handy daily or weekly digest.

Take advantage of these tools, and you’ll usually be one-step-ahead the pack, and as any news person will tell you, it often isn’t who reports best, but who reports first, that gets all the credit.

Share something interesting every day

This is simple, but important. Now that you’ve got something to tweet, tweet it. Not all at once. Just make this your motto: “I will tweet something interesting at least once a day.” If you can manage that, you have just left 90% of the people on Twitter eating your dust.

Interesting how? It can be informative, funny, amazing, or provocative, but it’s got to engage people’s interest.

Tag and Be Found

A “tag” (also known as a “hash-tag”) is simply using a pound symbol (#) in front of a key word or a string of text to mark it as a search target. A tag can be a general topic word like #dogs, #sports, #politics, or something longer and more specific like #ThingsMyCatSays or #TheBigGameTonight. Putting that “#” in there says, “this is a key to what this message is about.” Tags are designed to be searched for by other Twitter users, and serve to connect like-messages together.

You can add tags at the end of the message, or you can insert the “#” in front of significant words already in your message. Examples:

“Message from my cat overlords: I must leave the windows open, even when it gets cold. #ThingsMyCatSays"

“Message from my #cat overlords. I must leave the windows open, even when it gets cold.”

Those single word tags are a way to tap into people looking for popular topics, and if you can imbed them in your message, they take up very little of your precious 140 characters. But longer tags have the advantage of being specific and potentially unique. They can help people find and follow a series of messages you post on the same topic. It’s also possible that others may adopt a tag you’ve created and use it in their own posts. This will tie their messages to yours, and potentially lead their followers to follow you as well.

Likewise, you can use popular hashtags to lead people into reading your messages. A lot of “get famous instantly on Twitter” schemes hinge on various manipulations and exploitations of tags. But you should use caution before engaging in such schemes. Tags can be a useful tool, but they can be off-putting as well, if your posts are so littered with them that it’s obvious you’re fishing for followers, or chasing popular “trending topics” where you have nothing to contribute.

Don’t tweet too little

Of all the things you can do wrong, this is the least serious. If you miss a day, a week, maybe even a month, odds are you won’t be missed, and it probably won’t hurt much.

Twitter isn’t about the moment. If you aren’t tweeting, you aren’t moving forward, and if you aren’t moving forward, you can’t make progress on Twitter. You want to make friends, to network, to build a following and recognition, and the way to do that is to put yourself out there, again and again, long enough that people take notice.

Don’t tweet too much

But that doesn’t mean you should tweet everything. People don’t need to know about every meal you eat, every errand you run, every bathroom break. Even if you’re tweeting entirely on your area of expertise, you want to be part of your follower’s information flow, not the flow itself. Nothing will get people to unfollow you faster than looking at their twitter feed and seeing nothing but your tweets.

Tweet at the right time

Twitter can be a time sink, and so it’s important to maximize the return on your efforts. You want the tweets you make to appear at the time when your followers are most likely to see them. When this is may depend on your target audience, but it’s been my experience that most Americans, at least, seem to do their social networking during office hours (no commentary here, just reporting facts). My posts made Monday through Friday during work hours (in some mainland U.S. time zone) seem much more likely to get retweets and comments than those made during evening hours, or on the weekend.

So, if you have a blog post, public appearance, new book, contest, or other "event" post you'd like to be sure people see, try to post it in the middle of this "prime time" for your target time-zones.

Give that ye shall receive

One great way to make it about you is to make it not about you. Offer up “Follow Friday” recommendations for people you follow. Be supportive of other people’s work and projects, retweet other people’s links, and don’t even think about getting anything in return. But in doing these things, you‘ll make friends, earn good will, and build support that will come back to you in unexpected ways.

Don’t be a marketer

Even if your major reason for being on Twitter is to promote yourself and your work, going at this directly is the quickest way to turn people off and to chase followers (and potential followers) away. Strictly limit your directly promotional tweets to, I’d say, no more than one in ten tweets. Even then, try not to be overly direct, and never use a hard sell. Try to direct interested people to what you’re selling, not push them. Keep your announcements informal, personal, and soft-sell.

Wrong: "Don’t miss the greatest thriller of the year! 'Blood on Toast!' You’ll be on the edge of your seat! Now in stores!!!!"

Better: "Exciting day! My new thriller novel “Blood on Toast” is out. Hope you’ll check it out: (publisher, web-site or bookseller link)"

Keep in mind that people who follow that link are expressing an interest, and should be receptive to a more direct sales pitch.

Once you’ve made a promotional post, never directly repeat it. If people see the same pitch twice without explanation they’ll be running for the exits. If you must repeat, do something like this: “In case you missed it earlier this week, my new novel “Blood on Toast” is out. More info here (link).”

If possible, any further post shouldn’t come without presenting some contextual reason for it.

For example: “Very pleased today to see a stack of my new novel “Blood on Toast” at the front of the bookstore. That just never gets old! (link)”

Enjoy Yourself

Yes, if your intent is promotion, this is work, but if it starts to feel that way, people are going to sense that in your posts. People who are having fun are fun to (virtually) hang around with. You’ll be most successful in your promotional activities if you’re enjoying what you’re doing on Twitter.

And finally…

Be Patient

Though things can happen quickly on Twitter, that’s usually not how it happens. Be prepared to stay with this for the long-haul. Don’t expect to have a thousand followers in a day, or a hundred. Most of the time, building a following is like compound interest. It starts out glacially slow, but it move faster over time, and with patience, it can lead to big things.

You shouldn't be obsessed with the numbers anyway. Numbers aren't everything. Quality of followers and the relationships you have with them is as important as quantity. 5 good followers are worth 5000 drones who read nothing and care only about building follower numbers for themselves.

Have fun, and I’ll see you on Twitter. (Just don’t expect me to automatically follow you any time soon!)

- Steve (@JStevenYork)

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Sketch a Novel in an Hour (Orycon)

2010-11-12T01:20:00.000-08:00

Steve's Orycon Programming Schedule

2010-11-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Here's my schedule for the Orycon Science Fiction convention,November 12-14, 2010 at Portland Doubletree Hotel.

Sat Nov 13 1:00:pm	Sat Nov 13 2:00:pm	To the moon! Or ...?
Hamilton		The Augustine Commission is deciding the future of space flight. Where we're going and how will we pay for it?
()Dan Dubrick*, Elton Elliott, J. Steven York, G. David Nordley

Sat Nov 13 3:00:pm	Sat Nov 13 4:00:pm	Workshop: Story Outline in an hour
Roosevelt		Bring something to write on and write with. You'll have an outline (or a good start) to a story by the end of this panel. Bonus--this would be a great head start to that creative writing class homework you're ignoring over the weekend.
Christina F. York; Christy Evans, J. Steven York, Video Projector

Sat Nov 13 7:00:pm	Sat Nov 13 8:00:pm	Promotion in the Information Age
Jefferson/Adams		Corporate websites, Facebook, mass emailing, contests, twitter, ads, spam: What works, what doesn't, and why just 'drumming up business' is even more important now than ever.
()Cat Rambo*, M.K. Hobson, Sheri Gormley, J. Steven York

Sun Nov 14 2:00:pm	Sun Nov 14 3:00:pm	1 cup F, 2 cups SF, 1 tsp H in blender ...
Hawthorne		Combining genres--What readers want from blended genre stories, and why some editors and agents have trouble with them.
Jessica Reisman, ()J. Steven York*, P.N. Elrod, Seanan McGuire

More Things Writers (might!) Need from Publishers

2010-09-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

Steve writes:
I recently posted here my response to an article in the Huffington Post by writer Philip Goldberg. In his article, Goldberg champions writers continuing need for publishers in the ebook and print-on-demand (POD) age, where self-publishing has become an attractive and available option. Goldberg based this on two major points, functions the publishers provide, and that he regarded as indispensable, namely advance payments and editing.

I agreed that writers need editing, but questioned what form this editing should take, and that it necessarily had to be provided by editors. As for advances, well, go back and read the first post if you haven't already...

But these are hardly the only important functions provided to writers by traditional publishers, and it didn't take me long to think of three others that Goldberg's article didn't mention, including one that I (for a while, anyway) considered a possible deal-breaker, a function so important and irreplaceable that it made self-publishing, at best, a highly calculated risk.

Well, turns out I was wrong. The more I look, the more I see that for every "indispensable" function of traditional publishers, there are alternatives. They may not be the best options, and they may not even be advisable options for many writers, but they are there for those with the desire and the will to use them.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's my short-list of additional vital functions provided to writers by publishers:

Publicity/Advertising/Sales Support
Copyright Enforcement
Legal Protection from Nuisance Lawsuits

Let's look at each of these in turn, and see how they have to be reexamined in this new digital age of publishing.

Publicity/Advertising/Sales Support
The clear advantage to writers in selling their own work through electronic and print on demand self-publication is a return of 40-70% of retail vs. the 10% or less (often far less) provided by traditional publishers. The problem is that this is not a zero-sum game. Does this dramatic change in royalties mean 4 to 7 times the income for writers? Not unless the sales and retail prices remain the same, and that seems very unlikely.

We'll get back to this "new equation," but let's deal with the obvious: Traditional publishers have marketing and sales resources available to them that small publishers, much less individual authors can never touch: magazine advertising, trade publications, trade shows, catalogs, television ads, radio. They have the ability to push a book into the public eye with a force and speed that small-source publishing can never match.

Does this make the question a no-brainer? Must authors stay with traditional publishing as the only way to maximize their income, no matter how small it currently seems? Not necessarily. First, let's look at the weaknesses in the traditional marketing behemoth.

The first problem with the traditional marketing machine is that it isn't applied equally to a publisher's line. Only a few lead titles get the full marketing push.

While nobody has an infallible way of telling which books will sell and which won't, it's a curious fact that the success of a book is, to some extent anyway, defined the moment the contract is put on the table. The reason? A spreadsheet called a "Profit and Loss" statement. Really, it all comes down to the "advance," the advance payment against future sales royalties.

Negotiations aside, the advance amount is set by the anticipated sales of the book. The intent of the P&L is that the publisher doesn't lose money on the book, and hopefully makes a profit. If that projection doesn't work, the publisher has a Bad Day, and possibly so do some of the people who made the decision to go forward with the project. Asses are on the line. No matter what the projection of the P&L statement is, most everyone at the publisher has a vested interest in making it come true.

What that means is that, when the advance is plugged into that P&L, a lot of things are predetermined: the print-run size, minimum promotion budget, catalog placement, ad placement, and on down the line. A book with a huge advance goes to the top of the promotion list because it has to. It will sell a certain number of copies because the machine will make it sell a certain number of copies. It will get the best cover, the best cover copy, the best advertising, the best placement, and the biggest push to the stores from the sales department.

Of course, there are limits to the machine. Once the books are stacked in the front of every major bookstore in the country, the machine can't make people buy them. Suggest, remind, nag, yes, but they can't be made to buy. But still, the books are there, right where they can't be missed. They're there in such quantity that they aren't likely to sell out (and if they do sell out, the promotion department goes into overtime). And if you build it, usually, they will come. A good number of them anyway.

But what about books with lower advances? Well, if the advances are just a little lower, the print run is smaller. Maybe the display doesn't go right at the front of the store, or maybe it's shared with another book of equal stature, or maybe it ends up on the bottom of a display under that month's lead title. Maybe it's featured on page two of the catalog, but not the cover. Maybe there's no TV or radio ad budget. Maybe it shows up in a house ad rather than having its own magazine ads. The machine knows that this book needs to make a little money, sell some copies, but not that many copies. So long as the P&L is satisfied, so is the machine.

At this level, the small publisher simply can't compare. Not only can't they afford to throw money at electronic media and slick ads, not only can't they position their books in stores, they're at a huge disadvantage getting their books in stores at all.

But what we're described so far covers only the top few percent of a major publisher's catalog. For the great majority of books, the machine hardly works at all. In fact, what service it offers is mainly a side-effect of its service to bigger books. Most books can only hope to surf the wake of the big-machine's passage.

Just to be in the catalog, just to be at the bottom of a house ad, just to have the publisher's logo on the spine offering some endorsement of average quality and professionalism; those things have value. With those things behind them, it's hard for a book not to sell a few copies. A few. Usually enough to satisfy the meager numbers on a P&L. Usually.

Really, it doesn't concern the machine much. It isn't likely that anybody's job will hang on the success of a little book with a $5,000, and a major publisher spits out a lot of books like that every month. The risk on each is low, and what risk there is, is easy to spread around. One little book is pretty much the same as any other little book. The machine doesn't care. Only the author of the little book cares...

Well, they care a little. Which is why publishers are now increasingly expecting authors to do their own promotion. In fact, it's a purchasing criteria. See, traditional publishing has heard about this new thing called the interwebs -- or something. Anyway, they've heard that Tweety pages and Facespaces are important, and they like authors who have lots of followers and friends. Because while they understand that social media is now important, they aren't very good at doing it themselves. That's the author's job.

So for most authors, they're mostly on their own for publicity and promotion. Does that mean publishers are completely useless unless you're one of the lucky few at the top of the food chain? Well, that depends on what you consider important, because traditional publisher have one huge advantage that small publishers can't match: the ability to place books in bookstores.

Yes, that door has cracked open a bit. Small and self-publishers can get print-on-demand books into some of the major distributors that stores order from. But does that mean they will order books? No. No it does not. If publishing in print books, and selling through traditional stores is your goal, then there's still just one choice that makes a lot of sense. (Talk to me again tomorrow, this situation is still in flux.)

But if, on the other hand you're willing to go after a different model, if you're willing to look at ebooks rather than print as a primary outlet, or you've got a plan to sell your own print-on-demand, then the picture is much different. Not only might it be possible to do without traditional publishing's publicity machine, that machine might actually be doing the wrong thing for the non-traditional publishing model.

A Question of Velocity
How can that be?

Well, what do you think publicity is about? Sales?

When we're talking about traditional publishing, the answer to that question is no.

Well, yes, but...

No.

Actually, it's about velocity.

That's the important part anyway. Sure, they're hoping they'll sell a lot of books, but to some extent, the number of sales is predestined, by that P&L sheet, by the initial print run, by the publicity budget. If it sells less than this "destiny," then it's a failure.

If it sells more, it's good, but it means that somebody make a mistake. It's a mistake which they have limited short-term ability to respond to. It's a mistake they'll try to correct. When they print the paperback. When they print the sequel. Anything they can do now is just damage control.

What they want to do is sell the predestined number of books very quickly, because that's all the time a book has. It's only in the stores a short time. The machine of publishing is always running. It waits for no book. Each book must march forward at its appointed time, sell its appointed number, and then get the hell out of the way for the next thing.

Everything in traditional publishing is about velocity. Even best-seller lists, even the sales rankings on Amazon, they aren't about numbers of sales so much as they're about velocity of sales.

Velocity is a necessary part of traditional publishing's business model. But as a writer, it doesn't have to be a part of yours. Ultimately, what the writer wants, especially the career writer, is numbers, not velocity.

When you don't have to worry about velocity, the game changes. You don't necessarily need reviews in major publications. You don't necessarily need ads. You can work small, with social media, with readings, with web-presence, with web reviews, with sale-site reviews, with word of mouth. You've got the luxury of letting sales grow, of letting good work rise on its own merits.

That can be bad, of course, if the book doesn't have those merits, or at least, if it doesn't find an audience. But that's okay, because then at least you know. It isn't a matter of some destiny rubber stamped by a sales manager with a crystal ball that doesn't work. And if it doesn't work, then nothing is lost. If the book isn't good enough, you still have a change to fix it another day. If it doesn't find an audience today, maybe that audience will come along later.

In this world, books don't go bad like grocery-store tomatoes. Time isn't your enemy. It's your friend.

Books, all kinds of books, need promotion. But the kinds of promotion that the small and self-publisher needs, even the goals of that promotion, are different than the ones needed by traditional publishing. The worst mistake a small publisher can make, the worst trap they can fall into, is to dump money and effort in an attempt to emulate traditional publishing's promotional model.

Small publishers and self publishers should play to their strengths, not their weaknesses. Personal interactions with readers, social media, and small-scale publicity that builds over time, not all at once by brute force.

Leveraging the Numbers
Small publishers also have one other sales tool that traditional publisher can't (over the long term, anyway) match: Price.

Logic would seem to dictate that since a small-source published book might sell less than a New York book, it has to be priced at least as high in order not to make far less money. But that's not necessarily the case. It's been demonstrated again and again that low priced ebooks with no publicity can compete effectively with high-priced New York offerings, frequently appearing on Amazon's Kindle best-seller list. But even if the sales are the same, a cheaper ebook makes for less money, right?

No. It should be obvious, but it isn't to a lot of writers. Get three times the royalties, cut the price by 2/3, sell the same number of copies, and you're even. Get seven times the royalties, cut the price by 5/7ths, sell the same number, make twice as much. Even if you sell half as many, you still break even.

The point is, the small-source publisher has lots of cost-based promotional room to play with if they don't get greedy. Probably you've heard the old story of the monkey and the jar. The monkey reaches into a jar full of treats and takes a whole handful, making their fist too big to take out of the jar. If they just took the treats one at a time, they could empty the jar, but because of their greed, they get nothing (not even their hand). That's how too many self-published writers and small-source publishers approach pricing.

That doesn't necessarily mean cheaper is always better. It just means you can discount over traditional publishers with no strain at all, and you have lots of room to play beyond that. There are many options and strategies open to you (for example, making the first book of a series very-low-priced or free, while putting the rest of the series at higher price points). Don't hamstring the strongest promotional tool at your disposal because you're locked into obsolete ideas about pricing.

Okay, this post has run long again, leaving me with two remaining functions provided to writers by traditional publishing: copyright enforcement, and protection from lawsuits. We'll save those for another post, coming soon.

Stay tuned.

What Do Writers REALLY Need?

2010-09-02T03:23:00.000-07:00

Steve writes:

In an article in the Huffington Post, writer Philip Goldberg champions writers continuing need for publishers in the ebook and print-on-demand (POD) age, where self-publishing has become an attractive and available option.

His premise is based on two main points. The first, that writers need advances. The second is that writers need editing. Here's the link so you can read the article yourself if you'd like

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-goldberg/who-needs-publishers-we-a_b_689763.html

I don't totally disagree with what he has to say. There are some valid points in the article, but I think they're used to support a very flawed conclusion. Traditional publishers offer many things in their deal with writers. Some of those things we'd rather not have. Some we might want, but don't really need. And some we definitely need, but publishers may not be the only, or the best, way to get them.

I think it's important when thinking about publishing these days to deconstruct it and try and rebuild the system from scratch. Just because we need Thing-A and Institution-B does Thing-A in the current system does NOT mean we NEED Institution-B unless Institution-B is the BEST and most cost-efficient way of doing Thing-A. This applies strongly to both of his points.

Let's go to point two first, that writers need editing, since this is far-and-away his strongest argument.

And actually, I'm going to skip to the past part of the second point, just to get it out of the way...

The need for editing, fact-checking, etc. in general applies much more strongly to non-fiction books than to most novels. Sure, novels need editing and fact-checking as well, but if a novel trips over a fact it's usually just an embarrassment (and usually one that most readers will completely miss). If it happens in a non-fiction biography of a contemporary person, then you might just have a lawsuit on your hands, or at least something that necessitates (as has happened several times in recent years) a recall or cancellation of a book.

In fact, in general the requirements for a non-fiction book are so much different than the requirements for novel that I'd argue that the two are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS. In the physical-book world, the two share so much infrastructure and production commonality they they're usually done by the same companies in overlapping facilities. But other than that, there isn't any logical reason to cram them together than there is to combine a company that makes corn-flakes with one that makes soap-flakes, just because they both come in upright cardboard boxes of similar proportions.

Now, many of us, maybe most of us, will be writing non-fiction books at some time or another, but I'm assuming that MOST of the writers reading this blog consider themselves primarily novelists. In any case, I'd simply say that the lesson here is not automatically to think the same assumptions apply to a non-fiction project as one of your novels. They are different beasts, and as the market evolves towards ebooks and POD, those differences will become far more obvious and important. Consider their requirements on their own merits.

Now, getting back to the first part of the second point (confused yet?), I think he's made a very good case. But it isn't a case that we need a publisher, it's that we could almost always use some editing, and those two aren't the same at all. Books aren't edited by publishers (speaking of the company, and not the job-title here), they're edited by editors, and editors are just employees of publishers. Editors could be employed by anyone: themselves, the author, a temp agency, the Geek Squad at Best Buy. It doesn't matter. They're still editors, and if they're good ones, can still provide the same function. A publisher is NOT required.

And any of us who have been around the business for a while know plenty of good editors that we've enjoyed working with who are currently out of a job (or at least, an editing job). If I want a good, experienced editor, and I'm willing to pay the right price, I'm certain I can get one.

But let's deconstruct this some more. What IS an editor? What is a GOOD editor? What element or elements separate a good editor from the average Joe/Jane on the street? Is it a matter of education or experience? Talent? Love of books? To be honest, I'm not sure, and I'd be interested to hear what people have to say about it.

The article describes a typical copy editor as "an underpaid English major who loves books." But that describes a lot of the baby editors most experienced writers have dealt with as well. For those of us a of a certain age, it can be disconcerting meeting our editor and learning they're young enough to be our child (or grandchild!).

Yes, if they work for a New York publisher, they presumably have had the benefit of training and advice from more experienced editors. Maybe they're worked on many books in a support capacity before stepping up as a solo-editor. Presumably even a typical junior editor has had the experience of doing a good number of books (though SOMEBODY has to be their first book, and it might be you).

Still, I keep thinking of that basic description. Underpaid (or underemployed) English Majors who love books aren't hard to find in most any town in the country. In fact, there's almost always an excessive supply. If you need an editor, how difficult would be be, really, to recruit and train your own?

For that matter, what level of editing is necessary for a given writer and project? Does a person who has written a dozen novels or a hundred need the same level of editing as one publishing their first book? (My thought is, usually not.) And if an experienced author needs less editing, do they need a full-fledged editor at all? Maybe what they need is that copy editing (I sure do!) and fact checking, plus an objective voice to spot weaknesses in the work. Maybe all they really need is a good first reader, or a couple of good readers. Is it even possible that, at some level, a strong and involved editor working with an experienced and confident writer becomes more of a hindrance than a help?

So, I agree that most all of us can benefit from editorial assistance. But I think it's quite open to debate what form that assistance should take for a given writer or project, or where it can (or should) be obtained.

Now, let's go to his first point: Advances.

As writers, we're used to advances, and who doesn't like getting big checks (commas!) in the mail? But do we NEED them? I'm not so sure, and in fact, I think we might just be far better off without them.

First of all, what IS an advance, anyway? It's a loan. It's a loan against presumed future earnings (or actually, royalties on future earnings) on a book that the publisher has purchased rights to. In general, the terms on this loan are pretty terrible. In general, the term where the bulk of the loan will be repaid (or not) is generally no more than a few years, often not much more than a year. But during that period, we can expect to pay no less than 90% of earnings on the book.

Okay, okay, that's not fair. The total income on the book isn't yours, and never would be. The publisher is taking their production expenses, retail mark-up, overhead, profit, etc., out of that 90+%, PLUS the usual interest and cost of a loan, so maybe it isn't as bad a deal as it seems. But actually, what kind of deal it is really depends on the book.

We presume that the publisher is smart enough, based on their long and vast experience, not to advance more than they expect to make on a given book, but that isn't always the case. We know that a lot of books don't (at least as far as our royalty statements are concerned, we really don't know about the publisher's internal P&L) ever make a profit. The loan isn't repaid.

Of course, that happens with conventional loans too. Some loaned money doesn't get repaid. There's risk, and presumably the cost of that risk is generally understood and built into the cost of the loan. (Not always, as the current financial crisis shows, but it SHOULD be that way, and most of the time, it is.) Some loans will not be repaid, but enough will, and with enough associated interest and fees to make the system profitable.

So, if your book earns back its advance, and not much more, than maybe it isn't a terrible deal. If your book doesn't come close to earning out, then quite possibly it's a GREAT deal. But the more successful the book, the more questionable the deal becomes in some ways. The more books you sell, the less significant the production costs and overhead become. Printing, warehousing and shipping costs should also benefit from scale. But you're still getting charged a relatively huge rate against the income you're generating.

Worse, while the advance money presumably shows up before the income stream starts, royalty income is often long-delayed. The nature of modern publishing is that the fate of most print books is decided within a few weeks, or at most a few months after it hits the shelves. But the byzantine nature of the publishing and bookselling business is such that the income may lag YEARS behind. The publisher loans you money on the front side, but on the back side, you're loaning money to THEM, and the writer is STILL paying a high interest rate on every bit of return!

That's probably part of the push amongst established best-sellers for huge advances. (Sure, there are a LOT of other factors, but...) I'm assuming that agents, and may authors, have decided that it's a far better deal to get the money up front, even if you know the publisher is going to lose out on the back-end of the deal. But that moves the problem around, because when the publisher loses money on a project, it comes from somewhere else, probably a worse deal for smaller writers who don't have as much clout.

But let's look at the other end of the spectrum. There are lots of reasons a book doesn't earn out, and as I said earlier, you'd presume that the publisher manages this risk and would never INTENTIONALLY buy a book they don't expect to pay its advance back. Unfortunately, I don't think that's always the case either. I think publishers buy a lot of "quality" books that they don't expect to earn out, books that feed someone's ego rather than the bottom-line. I think they sometimes buy vanity projects from successful authors that are far less commercial than their typical projects. I think they sometimes buy bonehead books that don't have a chance-in-hell of commercial success because somebody in the company had the clout and ego to push it through. Maybe I'm overestimating how often these things happen, or how significant the losses are, but I'm pretty confident they DO happen.

And when they do, the books have to be balanced somewhere. It won't be off the best-seller with the inflated advance. No, it will probably be in the big, gray, middle-area where most of us live.

Whatever is going on, publishers have the ability to slide risk (and profit, and loss) around a vast range of books, both in terms of volume, profitability, and type, and while I think it's safe they'll do this in a why to offer maximum benefit to themselves, there's no reason to assume that they'll do it in a way to benefit YOU, as an individual.

There's also the issue of how "advance" the advance is, anyway. If you're getting money for a book not yet written (either one you sold on proposal, or a follow-on book in a multi-book contract), that's good. At least some of the money may show up well in advance. But we know, publishers have always tried to minimize this, and they're squeezing it harder than ever. Smaller advances, broken up into more and smaller payments, coming later in the publication cycle. Even when the trigger for a payment occurs, we have to wait. Even assuming business-as-usual, the check may not be paid for weeks or months. It may have to clear through an agent. Our banks may sit on the checks for two weeks before releasing the money. If you see actual money within two months of "on signing" on "on delivery," or the dreaded and vague "on approval," then its a red-letter day.

If things AREN'T as usual, you may not see the money until months or even years later, if ever. We've all been there.

Okay, let's just assume I went too far up the crazy-tree on that rant and put it aside. Let's just agree that it's a loan, and that the terms are, at best, somewhat somewhat questionable. Now, in what business school do they tell you go borrow money for your business from the first loan provider that makes an offer, and not even INVESTIGATE other options? Yet, that's exactly what we do when we take an advance. At least we (or our agents) have a chance to negotiate the terms, but we all know that our ability to alter them is pretty limited. The basic assumption is fixed, even that we take the advance. From what I've heard, several successful authors have tried to negotiate away their advances in return for a larger and more immediate royalty payout, and I've never heard of a publisher welcoming those terms. They LIKE the way things work now. They WANT you to take an advance, so they can game the system the way they always have. They just want the amount of the advance to fall within a narrow range provided by their own P&L.

So: Loan required. Terms of loan only marginally negotiable. The only loan provider is the same guy who sets the terms for all other aspects of the agreement and reports all the costs and incomes to you. That describes a company-town setup to me, and company towns are rarely favorable to the workers.

For pretty much every writer I know, and I suspect even for people at the top of the field, publishing is a world of feast and famine. Even for people at the top of the game, it seems to be long stretches of nothing between large and unpredictable paydays.

That's just not a good way to do business. It makes it difficult to plan, and difficult to manage cash-flow. Failure to manage cash-flow can get VERY expensive, as you're often forced to borrow MORE money at outrageous fees (and yes, late fees on your utilities and overdraft charges at your bank are just a VERY expensive way of borrowing money). It makes it even harder to keep health insurance in place. It makes it hard to make cash-outlays (both personal and business) at the most advantageous times, under the most advantageous terms. And for all but the most disciplined of us, I think there's a natural tendency to go splurge-crazy when the big checks show up.

Currently, publishing is all about what my friend Kristine Rusch has quite-wisely called "the produce model." When we write something, it's produce. It's polished up, put on the shelf, and it either sells quickly, or not at all. After a few weeks or months, it stinks up the place. You sell what you can at huge discount, then dump the rest and move on to the next fresh thing. This is fine for publishers, who have no shortage of fresh things. Not so good for writers who usually would be content to ride the slow-boat of income as long as it continues to sail.

The more we move into ebooks and POD, the less we're forced to be tied to that model. We can write a book in the anticipation that it will earn money (a lot, or a little) over a long time. Write more books while still getting income from the first. Write sixth and tenth books while you still get a little income each from ALL your earlier projects. The more you write, the quicker you write, the smoother and more predictable your paydays become. If you need to borrow money, shop for a loan. Don't take whatever deal the company store will offer you.

Yes, we'll miss the big checks. Yes, it's wonderful after a long time as a starving writer to get your first advance check. But in the big picture, do we NEED that advance? Probably not. Would most of us, on most days, be far better off with a smaller, steadier flow of cash? I think we would.

This post originated as a message I posted on a private writer's message list, and has been revised slightly for blog use. But in doing so, I've thought of several additional important functions for writers currently served by traditional editors, and which were not covered in Goldberg's post (including the one I think is most compelling of all as a reason to stay with traditional publishing). After some thought, rather than appending discussion of them to this post and muddying the waters, I've decided to deal with them in a follow-up message. Look for it soon. - Steve

eBook Sales Level Off in April. Is the iPad to Blame?

2010-06-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

Steve:

While eBook sales remain a modest percentage of the total dollar-book business, sales have been skyrocketing at triple-digit rates that pointed them towards gobbling a significant chunk of the business in the next few years. The question has always been, would this growth rate increase, maintain, or at some point taper off. Until now, there's been no sign of faltering.

But Publisher's Weekly has just released sales number for April, and growth as 127.9 percent. Now, that sounds pretty big, but it's the lowest monthly rate of the year, and the first big stumble in eBook sales in a long time. What happened?

Well, it's hard to be sure, but one really significant thing also happened in April: the iPad was released.

Yeah, the iPad, the mega-selling, wonder-eBook platform of the age. The horse that major publishers decided to saddle-up in their effort to corral Amazon's Kindle. The device with the color, the flash, and the technology (oh, sorry, but not the Flash) to take us roaring into the eBook age.

I've been warning since it was just a rumor that the iPad isn't as great an eBook reader as its made out to be, especially for novels and serious prose works. In short, it's too heavy, battery life is too limited, the screen is difficult or impossible to read in bright light or direct sun, the LCD screen may not be as suited for long-term reading, and it's too large and expensive to drag around in the habitual and casual way you'd want for a reading device.

I've also warned that, even to the extent is is useful as an eBook reader, the wealth of entertainment distractions it offers (and for which is is much better suited) may actually discourage people from reading.

Now we've got another data point supporting my premise.

To be fair, the only evidence that the iPad caused the slump is proximity. There's no firm connection yet, and other factors could be at work. But it does make you go, "hmmm."

I should also point out that there could be one other explanation as to how the iPad could have created a slump that will only be temporary. Anticipation of the iPad's release was so strong that many consumers would might otherwise have bought an Amazon Kindle or other dedicated eBook reader such as the Nook or Sony Reader, may have instead delayed their purchases to get an iPad. Since Amazon doesn't release Kindle sales figures we have no way of knowing if reader sales were down in April or in the months preceding.

If that's the case, and these consumers have instead bought iPads, and if indeed they do begin using those iPads as book readers, than sales could rapidly surge back and even increase in the months that follow. (It should also be mentioned that Apple's iPhone 4 has also just been released, with a vastly sharper screen that makes it potentially a much better eBook device than its predecessors).

I'll say what I've said before. The real test of the iPad's influence on the eBook market will only come over the long-term. Will iPad owners adapt to reading on their new devices, or will they use it for other functions and consciously or unconsciously cast its eBook functions aside? And if the iPad doesn't entice people to read eBooks, will they continue to go to dedicated readers like the Kindle for that function, continue to read dead-tree books, or reduce their reading overall.

It's this last possibility that's most worrisome, though I consider less likely than the others. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to eBook sales numbers in the coming months.

Although here's one more fact to consider: we're heading into Summer, the time of the "beach read," and this is the area where the iPad really falls down as an eBook reader. That James Patterson book is going to be a complete wash-out as you sit there in the sun on your beach-towel. But on the other hand, so are any of the other reading distractions that the iPad can offer up.

Maybe a lot of iPad owners are going to sitting in their deck chairs this summer, iPads stowed away in their beach-bags, reading good, old-fashioned, dead-tree books like always. And that that would suit a lot of traditional publishers just fine.

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Twitter 101 for Writers, Part 1

2010-06-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

Steve:

(This is the first -- and only -- part of what was intended to be a multipart post on mastering Twitter. Unfortunately, it ran away with me, and the specific details of Twitter's interface and operation moved on before I could continue it. I've left it up, as there may still be a few nuggets of useful information, but in general, if you're hear, move on to my later single-part post on the same subject. Find it at http://www.yorkwriters.com/2010/11/twitter-101-beginners-guide-for-writers.html )
Probably you've heard that for a writer to succeed these days, it's necessary to actively promote yourself on-line. You've heard (and I'm pretty sure that, at least in some cases, this is true) that publishers will check a writers on-line presence -- their web page, number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers -- before taking on a new project.

It can be an overwhelming prospect, and it's far too big a subject for one blog post, but I'm going to try today to help you with one small part of it: establishing a presence on Twitter.

Why did I pick Twitter? Well, of all the on-line options of potential PR value, I think it has the steepest learning curve.

Facebook is very easy to get into. Yes, it gets complicated later, dealing with all the privacy options, filtering out all the noise, and navigating the ever changing user interface. But in the beginning, it's a snap, part of why it's so popular.

Blogs or web pages? These can both be complicated, but for getting started, there are a number of instant ways to set yourself up with a pre-fab blog or web page. Anybody can get on-line in about five minutes, and most of that is just filling in your account information into forms.

Twitter is even easier to sign up for. All you need is a name and an email address. The process is very quick. But when you're through, you find yourself looking at a bare bones page with not much on it. Lots of stuff about messages and following people, but you have no messages, nobody to follow, and not much guidance as to what to do next. (By the way, if you haven't signed up for a Twitter account yet, DON'T DO IT NOW! I'll have some tips later you'll want to read before taking that step.)

Twitter can be confusing and overwhelming for new users. Things seem poorly organized. There are no easy menus or commands to help you along. The messages are full of strange shorthand, and the users have strange customs among themselves. Even if you do figure out how to follow others and find the messages, it can quickly bury you in information. It's like trying to drink from a fire-hose. So many message, so fast! How to pull any meaning out of the noise?

But in my opinion, Twitter is worth the trouble. It's much more a "broadcast" medium than Facebook, one that lets you potentially reach a lot of people you'd never talk to otherwise. It's instant, immediate, and feels personal in a way that Facebook or a blog or web page don't. It's potentially the best single promotional tool a writer can have.

Okay, let me say here that I don't claim to be a Twitter expert. I've only been using it about a year. As of this writing, I have just over 700 Twitter followers (and thanks to following my advice, my cat has about 400 followers!). This is a fair number, but it doesn't make me a major Twitter personality by a long shot.

There are major Twitter marketing gurus everywhere (you can't avoid them, one drawback of Twitter) who will claim to get you 65-zillion followers instantly, and they might be right. There are all sorts of fancy marketing programs and tools to help you get followers. But near as I can tell, mainly what they do is funnel money to their creators and assist you in becoming annoying on a really massive scale.

What I'm talking about is a process of going for quality over quantity, of having followers (and following people) where you have some actual commonality and hope of a connection. I'm talking about engaging people rather than impaling them on a meat-hook.

Okay, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. I'll start by assuming you know little or nothing about Twitter beyond the name. First question, what is it?

AN INTRODUCTION TO TWITTER

Like Facebook, Twitter is a social networking service. It's a way of connecting with and communicating with other people. Potentially a lot of other people, though that doesn't seem to have been the original intent.

The thing to know about Twitter is that, unlike Facebook, it's very simple and bare-bones (though Twitter has been adding new layers of sophistication lately, it's still pretty Spartan). The original idea, far as I can tell, was that it was intended intially for use by people texting on their cell phones. That's the reason for one of the signature features/limitations of Twitter, the 140 character message limit. 140 characters is the length of a cell-phone text message.

Lots of people still use Twitter from their phones, but you don't have to use a phone all the time, or at all. I don't text and don't own a smart-phone yet, so I've never used Twitter from a phone, only from computers (and occasionally from my Amazon Kindle, but that's another story). I'm eager to add phone access to my twitter tools, but it just hasn't happened yet.

Okay, so you sign up for a Twitter account. This gives you an empty Twitter page on the web, and a Twitter name. If you go to someone's Twitter page on the web you'll see a little basic information about them if they've entered it (known as a "profile"), some statistics about their usage, and a list of their recent messages, known as "tweets." Not "twits." Not "posts." "Tweets." Sounds silly at first, but you'll get used to it.

TWITTER NAMES

A Twitter name or handle is the way by which you and your Tweets will be identified on Twitter. As so, it's important. As a writer, it's double-important, as it's also how people have to associate your Twitter presence back to your writing. That can be trickier than it seems. We'll go into that in a bit.

Basic fact here, when used in a message, Twitter names normally have an "@" in front of them. The "@" serves many functions on Twitter, but most commonly it means "at" or "attention," often both at once. Example: My Twitter handle is "JStevenYork", but you'd normally you'd type that as "@JStevenYork".

Examples:

Just talked to @JStevenYork about some novel projects he has in the works.

In this example, the use tells people who you're talking about, that they're on Twitter, and that people can check them out or follow them using that handle, all without interrupting the message itself.

@JStevenYork Great talking with you about those novel projects.

Putting the name at the beginning this way says "Attention Steve, message follows!" Be sure you're aware. This isn't private email. Anyone can read! It's just to draw my attention to the message to be sure I'll see it. It's more like a conversation at a cocktail party than an email.

Thanks for the comments! @JStevenYork @BadAgentSydney @SinkTrap

A lot of thanking and acknowledgments go on on Twitter. More on that later. But know that it's frequent to see lists like this. Given the limited space in Tweets, it's customary do leave out the separating comma. Every space counts!

PICKING A TWITTER NAME (AND AN INTRODUCTION TO RETWEETS)

The obvious thing is just to use your name or byline. That's what I do. But there are plenty of reasons not to do that, especially if your name is longer. Why is the length significant? After all, it doesn't come out of your 140 characters.

No, but it comes out of everyone else's 140 characters, and for PR purposes, you want your Twitter handle repeated as often and in as favorable a context as possible. You want to not only be a person who talks, but one who is repeated and talked about.

Which brings us to another important (yet unofficial) convention of Twitter, the "Retweet." Retweeting is simply repeating some else's Tweet, with attribution to the source, the source being the original sender as identified by their Twitter handle. Example:

RT @JStevenYork I'm thinking it's time for a vigorous unmanned Moon program!

or with a comment added:

Good idea! RT @JStevenYork I'm thinking it's time for a vigorous unmanned Moon program!

As you can see, my 12 character handle comes out of the 140 characters anybody else has to Retweet my post and add (hopefully positive) comments. If my initial post is longer than 127 characters (140 less my handle plus a space), then they're going to have to edit or truncate it to fit it into a Retweet, and they won't have ANY room for comment.

My handle is already fairly long, but what if I wrote under the name Alexander Colorado Okefenokee the III?

@AlexanderColoradoOkefenokeetheIII drops a potential Retweeter down to 105 characters before they've even started. That's definitely time to look for a shorter name. @Okefenokee would be better and still recognizable. But as are many, if not most, one-word or common-name handles, it's taken. You could go more descriptive, @OkefenokeeWrites, but that's getting long again, or creative like @AOkieWriter (fictional TV mystery novelist Richard Castle posts on Twitter as @WriteRCastle). You if you write series books or characters, you might also mine that for potential recognizable Twitter names.

In fact, you may well want more than one Twitter name. For example, you might want one for yourself, one for each book series, or series character. You might also want an account for your public writer persona, and a "secret identity" just to chat casually and anonymously with your close friends and family. Be aware that you'll need a unique email address for each account, but with Hotmail, Gmail, and the many free and pay places you can get an email address, this isn't hard.

So, the three main things you want in a Twitter name:

1. Short, distinctive, and recognizable

2. If possible associates with your writing name and/or your work.

3. Disassociates you from well-known individuals with similar names, or from unintended meanings (so if you have an open pseudonym writing "as Sam Holeman," your Twitter handle should not be @assholeman).

Since we're talking about associating your Twitter activity with your work, let's talk about your Profile.

CUSTOMIZE YOUR PROFILE

Your profile is the mini-biography and picture that appear on your Twitter page. When one of your Tweets (or Retweets) catches someones attention, or if you follow someone and they're looking to see if you're worth following back, this is what they'll see. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT!

First thing is, put a picture up there, and any picture is probably better than none. If you don't put a picture, the little default icon brands you as a newbie. At best you'll get ignored, at worst you'll get targeted by scammers and abusers. So get SOMETHING up there quick.

Probably what you want is a head or face shot of you, with as much background cropped out as possible. Most of the time, people will be looking at a tiny icon version of the picture, so a full-length shot, a head-and-body portrait, or a picture with a lot of extraneous stuff around the edges isn't going be recognizable. Don't upload a postage-stamp sized picture. Twitter will shrink it down to an icon for you. And don't upload a 12 mega-pixel shot straight from your new camera. Go for something mid-sized, 600-800 pixels high is good. The reason for the larger picture is that visitors to your Twitter page have the option of seeing the full-sized picture. Let them get a good look at you (or, as we'll see, your book).

Yes, many writers also use a book cover or a cropped version of their cover art (often featuring a lead character) as a profile picture. Nothing wrong with that, though it can cause some people to confuse the writer with the character they write about, which can be scary at times.

Some people use professionally done cartoons or caricatures of themselves. Again, that's okay if they're well done and recognizable.

I've heard it said that you should change your profile picture often, and I don't think that's a bad idea, but I find it jarring if the new picture isn't recognizable as the same person as the last picture. That little picture is your FACE on Twitter. Putting on a new mask every 15 minutes is at best off-putting, and at worst, it causes people who like you to lose you in the noise.

You also get 160 (Why not 140? I don't know.) characters for a brief profile. Try to sound interesting. Be sure to tell people that you write, that you're published (assuming you are), and what kind of things you write (genre, target-age, etc.). You don't need to include a web address, as Twitter has a separate entry for that.

Be sure to enter a web address! If you don't have a blog or web page, get one and at least put your basic information and publication history there. Putting a web address on the profile page creates a clickable link on your Twitter page. Anyone who clicks that link should IMMEDIATELY see that you are a writer, what you write, and easily be able to find what you've published and where to buy it. Don't hide this information (or links to some) down the page. This is your primary sales tool once you've got people interested in your Tweets! Don't waste it!

FOLLOWERS

You won't see anybody else's messages unless you do one of two things: visit their Twitter page, or "follow" them. A "follow" is like a subscription. Once you follow them, everything that person posts will show up in your twitter-stream.

And nobody will see your posts unless they visit your Twitter page or choose to follow you. That's part of what makes Twitter intimidating to get into. You start out cold and lonely. The fun comes later.

Don't worry about getting followers yet. Worry about finding good people to follow. Where to start? Well, start by seeing if you have friends and associates on Twitter. Go to your Twitter page, use the search function, and start entering names. But if you find someone, don't follow immediately, especially if the name isn't an unusual one. There are so many people on Twitter than all the vaguely common names are duplicated many times.

I you think a search result may be a friend, go to their Twitter page. Check their picture, bio, recent posts, and web-page link if any to be sure it's really your friend. Then follow them.

Once you've followed some friends, presumably they'll follow you back, and you're up and running. That's step one.

Step two is to follow some strangers, or at least casual acquaintances and associates. As a writer, start with other writers doing work similar to yours or working in your genre. Also look for editors, publishers, magazines and if you want, agents, working in your area too.

Follow them, and maybe they'll follow you back. Don't read to much into it if they do. Some people routinely follow anyone who follows them. It doesn't necessarily mean you're BFF's, or even that they'll ever read your posts. Be nice if they contact you, and don't act like a creepy stalker.

But okay, here's the secret force-multiplier. When you follow these folks, go to their Twitter page, look over on the right for the number of people following them, and click on the "followers" under it. This will give a list of the people that they follow. Since you already share some interests and commonality, some of the people they follow are certainly people you'll want to follow as well.

How to identify? Jump on over to their Twitter page. Check their bio and web page link. Check their recent posts and see if they're talking enough business (or at least about some random thing you're interested in) to be worth the follow.

Once you've added a number of new followers, it's time to check their follow lists, and leapfrog yourself across the wonderful work of connections that is Twitter.

How many people to follow for starters? Don't get carried away. No more than 50-100 people to start. Then get your virtual sea-legs before adding more than a few more.

Time to go back to your own Twitter page. There it is, a scrolling list of every post by everyone you've followed! Congratulations! You've opened the fire hose!

Overwhelmed? Too much to read? Too much to process? Don't worry, this post has gone on too long, but we're not through yet.

NEXT TIME:

Next post we'll show you how to find software that will help sort, organize, and filter the flow of message on Twitter, and how to use Twitter's own features to do more of the same.

We'll teach you the basic conventions of Twitter society, and how to use them to get followers and develop connections with your followers.

We'll also tell you how to deal with the people who follow you. Should you follow them back? Should you not? When should you block them from access to your account completely? We'll warn you about some of the bad-apples on Twitter that you should watch out for and avoid (or at least not encourage).

Finally, we'll deal with the thing that seems to most vex many of my writer friends on Twitter: posting. What to post? How to deal with "I don't have anything to say" syndrome. When to post. When not to post. How to promote your work without driving followers away. And why you should post, even if you don't feel like talking, and even if you aren't sure if anyone is listening. We'll even show you how you can use your posts to pick up a little honest spare-change.

See you back here soon in part 2...

Writer's Horoscope #5 - It's Written in the Stars!

2010-05-12T00:02:00.000-07:00

Steve:
Welcome back for another installment of Writer's Horoscope When reading this feature, it's important to remember that as writers, we're all professionals at making sh*t up. But this is REAL. It must be true! You read it on the interwebs!

If, however, you don't find that your entry in this horoscope seems to apply to you, it's entirely possible that your parents lied to you about your birth-date. (They may also be aliens. Or robots. Or robot aliens. Just remember next time you visit home, it wasn't our idea to cut them open and see what's inside!) Try another sign and see if it makes more sense to you. If it still doesn't seem to apply, keep in mind that they may not only have fudged the date, but the year, and possibly our earlier installments will fit you better. Find them here and here and here, and here.

Note that we've adopted the new world universal writer's astrological symbols in place of the ones you may be more familiar with.

Arial (March 21 - April 19) - Your word count is down and you're disappointed in your output. We all have our bad days, but there's no one-size-fits-all solution. The question to ask yourself is, where does your energy come from? Take the time now to figure out where that place is, then go there and recharge your batteries. It's worth doing now, even if it costs you a little time, because next time you'll know to go there immediately.

Thesaurus (April 20 - May 20) - Feeling the networking blues? You're better connected than you imagine. Don't dismiss the value of casual acquaintances, of people you wouldn't think of as having publishing connections, and remember that friends of friends can be of value as well. The key to finding these less-obvious connections is communication. Talk candidly with your friends and associates about your work, interests, and goals. They can't help you if they don't know what you need.

Galley (May 21 - June 20) - Publishing is changing too fast for you to fall comfortably back into your preconceived notions. Assume nothing. Keep your eyes and your mind open to changes and new developments. Caution and forethought will be rewarded.

Copyright (June 21 - July 22) - You'll profit from a positive environment and that positivity starts close to home. If you're spreading negativity and ill-will you're poisoning the water you swim in. Cast off the gloom and doom, break out the optimism, and give your positive support to those around you. In time, it will return ten-fold.

Litho (July 23 - August 22) - If you're excited about a project, don't put it off. If you write it down, the idea may still be there when you get back to it, but the energy may well be gone. Ultimately, the energy may be more important than the idea.

Verso (Aug 23 - September 22) - Stop staring out the window. That daydreaming is killing your productivity. Pull the drapes and get back to work. You can open them again when the job is done and the urge has passed.

Library (September 23 - Oct 22) - You're having doubts that your flavor of work fits in out there. Relax. Publishing is a big machine that needs parts it doesn't even know exist yet. Your job is to keep doing what you do, and keep looking for the unfound empty spot where it goes.

Slush (Oct 23 - November 21) - Don't spend too much time obsessing about your mistakes, missed opportunities, and fumbles. Nobody is perfect, and the best and most successful writer you can think of certainly has made their share of screw-ups. Learn what you can from those mistakes, resolve not to make the same ones again, and move on.

Sans sarif (Nov 22 - Dec 21) - Perhaps you've heard of a new opportunity, a new book line, or an editor looking for the sort of writing that you like to do, and decided that it's way out of your league. You might be wrong about that. The only way to find out is to try. You've nothing to lose, and something wonderful might just happen.

Caption (December 22 - January 19) - The only certain thing about publishing is uncertainty. In times of plenty, it's tempting to think that things will go on that way forever. Rarely is that true. Plan accordingly. Minimize your expenses, chose your luxuries carefully, and always, always, keep something in reserve. Security is the best form of living well.

Apostrophe (January 20 - February 18) - They say you are what you eat, but it's more than that. You're also the sum of your environment. Maybe its time to live some of the trappings of what's in your head. Change out how you dress, the music you listen to, the lighting in your office, anything to shore up the story developing in your head.

Pica (February 19 - March 20) - Be careful putting your heart into a project that isn't your own. That project could break your heart, and you'll have nothing to show for it. There are things worth risking heart and soul on, but they're the things that are yours to keep. Use caution. Choose wisely.

If this is your birth month: Writer's organizations can provide education, networking, and support. But they can also be quagmires of politics, battling egos, and dueling time-sinks. Maybe you've been thinking about becoming a joiner. If you think the benefits are there, go for it, but beware the pitfalls, and keep your bearings. It's too easy to slide into the traps gradually without knowing it. If you see yourself slipping, get out, and give yourself some time and distance. Don't worry that you're missing anything. Time spent writing is never wasted...

Did you find this article useful? Your donation, big or small, will encourage us to do more like it. Every little bit helps and is appreciated. Thanks in advance: Chris and Steve.

Do iPad Buyers Read? There's Reason to Doubt

2010-05-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

Steve:

The publishing industry has been looking to the iPad as some kind of savior to them in the eBook Wars. I think that's a pretty dubious proposition for a lot of reasons, starting with Apple's poor track record of being a friend to anyone but Apple. (Just look at what's happening to Adobe right now, and a huge part of the Mac's success, even its survival, can be attributed to Adobe products.)

But now there's reason to think otherwise, at least for that part of the industry that would just like to see eBooks go away, or at least, stop their rapid growth. Many predicted that the iPad would immediately steal the eBook market from Amazon's Kindle and everyone else as well, and embracing the agency model of purchasing books, head off Amazon's $9.99-and-lower price-points.

But though the iPad is so far a success, outselling the iPhone in its early days, it's far too early for publishing to count their chickens. Because, and I have to keep reminding people of this, the publishing industry is not in the business of selling iPads. It's in the business of selling books, in whatever form, electronic or print. And early numbers suggest the iPad isn't selling that many ebooks. In fact, you could make the case that it's actually hurting ebook sales, and in a more speculative way, hurting print book sales as well.

Let's look at some of the numbers that have hit the press in the last few weeks. First of all, we're told that iPads sold about a million units in its first month. That's quite a few iPads, and since there's been no end of discussion about what a snazzy ebook reader the iPad, that should translate into a lot of ebook sales, right?

Well, not really. About the same time we were told that the iPad app store had sold 1.5 million ebooks. That sounds like a lot, but any idiot can do the math. In that month, that exciting month, when a million people were trying out their new iPads, finding out what it can do, and showing those things off to their friends, the average iPad owner purchased 1.5 books. Not so good. Worse, this number apparently includes free books! What owner who ever intended to ever use their iPad as an ebook wouldn't download at least a couple free books just to trying?

Even if every iPad owner downloaded at least one book, it means that no more than half of them ordered a second one. If you assume that many avid readers ordered at least three or four or five or more books, and it you assume that the people that bothered to order a book at all probably ordered at least two or three then it starts to look like a lot of iPad readers may have little or no interest in using their iPads as ebooks at all. Ever.

Let's look at another set of numbers that just came out, a survey of iPad owners on the subject of market cannibalization. (You can read the details at AppleInsider.) According to the survey, 28% see the iPad as an eBook reader replacement. More view it as a replacement for a netbook or an iPod Touch.

But let's assume that the 28% are the kind of serious readers who have apparently been buying the Kindle and Nook, the kind of people who order lots of books. If we assume that only that 28% (let's call it a third, just for ease of math, and on the assumption that a few others were buying books as well) bought books on their iPad, then suddenly we're up to 4.5 books per iPad user that actually uses their iPad as an ebook. Given my unscientific observation of myself and other Kindle owners, that doesn't seem hugely far off the mark.

But come on, don't you think a larger percentage than that at least tried the ebook function, at least with a free book? So the numbers are probably lower. It's all guesswork, but it could mean the average serious ebook customer who bought an iPad on average bought only 3 or so books. Maybe less. And some unknown number of those were freebies that didn't generate revenue for anyone (except Apple).

Why should that be happening? Well, it could be that, despite the mostly glowing reviews, the iPad simply isn't that great a reading experience. Remember that the problems don't have to be glaring or obvious. They just have to cause people, consciously or not, to choose not to read (and therefore to buy more books). It could be that the iPad is too heavy, that its LCD screen is causing eye-strain or (as some researchers have warned) insomnia, that the screen is washing out in the sunny locations where people want to read, or that its too large to haul around conveniently, or even that those animated page turns and 3D shadows are getting on people's nerves after the novelty wears off.

Honestly though, if those things are a factor, I'd expect them to shake out over more time. You'd see them in the first quarter's numbers, maybe, but not so much the first month.

It's far more likely that iPad owners, even those who purchased it with the idea it would be used as an ebook, are just distracted by all the other wonderful, flashy, animated, loud, cool, interactive things that it can do. Publishing, already suffering (especially among male readers, as shown in this essay by Tom Dupree) from competition by our plugged-in modern lifestyles, has just signed-on with a big-ol'-slab-O-distractions.

So, what do we have? The average iPad owner possibly isn't much interested in using their iPad as a book. Even among those that do, they're getting distracted and not buying a lot of books. Meanwhile, the iPad apparently has convinced somewhere between a quarter and a third of a million people not to buy a relatively-distraction-free Kindle or Nook or Sony Reader instead. So they may have hurt ebook sales overall in a number of ways. And you can bet, if those new iPad owners are too distracted to read books on their iPad, then for sure they're too distracted to put down the iPad and pick up one of those old-fashioned hardcovers that the publishers are so hot on moving. So it's fail, and fail for the publishers.

Of course, there's a way that all my assumptions could be totally full of fluff. That 1.5 million books apparently only includes books sold though the iPad app store. It presumably doesn't include books sold through third-party eBook reader apps.

And though the app-store may be the easiest and most obvious way to get books on your iPad, it isn't the only way. There are lots of ways. But the way people are most likely to go for, the way whose numbers I'm betting will dwarf all others, is the Amazon app for iPad.

Uh-oh. Weren't we supposed to be freezing those people out?

And if most of the ebook sales for the iPad are going to Amazon anyway, the publishing industry has accomplished what exactly? They've (probably temporarily) broken Amazon's $9.99 price point for new-releases and top-sellers (though it looks like a lot of those will end up being $9.99 in the iPad store anyway). They've also alienated a lot of Kindle owners through those price increases and unavailability of books, and lost a lot of ebook sales as well. (Penguin, who has published the great majority of the novels written by my wife and I, has yet to come to an agency agreement with Amazon, and all of their new titles remain unavailable on the Kindle.) I'm not sure how any of this is greatly going to benefit the industry.

In any case, these numbers will change over the long haul, and that's what really counts. Not how many iPads sell, or even how many sell to people who intend to use it (at least in part) as an ebook reader. What counts for publishing is how many ebooks will iPad owners buy? And not just today, or this month, but over the long haul. Check back in six months or a year and we'll see where things stand.

Maybe it will turn out that early adopters read less. Maybe seasoned users will get bored with the novelty of all that noise and color and finally settle down to read a book. Maybe those low sales averages will improve.

Or maybe iPad users won't like reading on the iPad as much as they expected. If so, they'll quietly vote with their credit cards, and they may not even realize why. And if so, the biggest losers could be those of us who write, edit, and are in the business of selling, books.

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Things Writers Need to Know

2010-04-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Steve:

Life of a Writer Department

One of the things that non-writers (and sometimes beginning writers as well) don't understand about writers is the sheer volume and randomness of things you need to know about. I'm not talking about storytelling tricks here, or rules of grammar, or the etiquette of the publishing industry. I'm talking about real-life things, the sort of things that will come up in your story, or that your characters will encounter in the course of a novel.

These are the sort of things you take for granted.

Some of these things can be pretty esoteric. You may need to know what the view from the pilot seat of a US Marine hovercraft looks like, what equipment an Oregon smoke-jumper might strap on before leaping out of a plane, or the shift pattern for an exotic Italian super-car, or what it's like to walk into the delegate's entrance at the United Nations, or six ways a martial-artist might respond when attacked with a folding chair.

Some of them are far more mundane. I can recall multiple occasions (to the point where it's almost become a party game) when male and female writers sit around and compare notes about how people of their gender behave in public restrooms. This is a far more complex and fascinating subject than you might imagine, and subject to endless variation. For instance, how people behave in the bathroom of a posh night-club or a gay-bar might differ considerably from how they behave in the trucker's bathroom at a truck-stop or a subway station in a former Soviet-bloc country. It's armchair sociology at its most entertaining, and of the sort that only writers would feel comfortable discussing in a public place.

Yes, these bits of information may seem trivial, but sure as you get even the smallest detail wrong, some reader out there is going to notice and get kicked out of the story. Worse, they're going to let you know about it. So you research odd stuff in the course of writing, and you keep your eyes open for useful bits you can weave into a story to increase the authenticity. One of the tricks of writing is that if you get a few obscure things right, and the reader notices, they're much more willing to trust you on the details they're less certain about, sometimes to the point of believing what you've written even when it conflicts with their own experience or knowledge.

After a while of doing this thing, your brain become attuned to esoteric information that be useful in writing some day. When you stumble upon them in your research, or in your day-to-day activities, they stick out like a shiny pebble on the beach. You can't look away, and sometimes you just can't resist bending over to pick them up.

Here's the random example of this that prompted today's post. I was looking at something entirely unrelated on YouTube (a romance book trailer I think) when something on the suggested video bar catches my eye. I glance it it, think, "hmmm, that could be interesting, but probably not useful" then look away.

Then I look back. When will I ever see something like this again? What if I need it some day. Will I be able to find it, or something like it? But I can't imagine when I'd ever need it. Look away.

But if there's very small odds that I'll ever need, it, there's a much greater chance that somebody I know is going to need it. I know lots of people writing romance, fantasy, historicals. Surely one of them will find it useful. I should look just to see if it's informative enough to pass along...

What am I talking about? A tutorial video (aimed at brides, or maybe wedding planners) on the mechanics of wearing a hoop-skirt. Not the sort of thing guys are supposed to be interested in, but hey, I'm a writer...

So I click on it. And I'm a little embarrassed, but then the introduction tells some of the issues that will be covered, and there, they have me. How to deal with the hoop skirt in -- the bathroom! It must be shared! Trouble is, how?

My first instinct is to post it to Twitter, but that will never work. Not everyone (or even most people) reading it will be fellow-writers who will understand. How do you post this thing without looking like you're either insane or some kind of perv? It needs context... Thus this post.

So here, fellow writers, horrified non-writers, and the idle-curious, is Hoopskirt 101. After all this, I hope to hell that somebody finds it useful!

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Decent Proposal

2010-03-26T01:33:00.000-07:00

Belling the Cat

2010-03-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

Steve:

People ask me, where do you get the ideas for "Bad Agent Sydney?"

For those not in the know, Bad Agent Sydney is a fictional character I created based on the assumption that anyone can print up some cards and call themselves a literary agent, even my (real) cat Sydney. It's a parody of the many, many ways unscrupulous people acting as agents can screw you up or rip you off, and the way the business relationship with even competent and semi-competent agents can go horribly wrong.

You can visit Bad Agent Sydney's blog and read her posts HERE. You'll also find links there to her twitter account, where you can get updates on her activities and notices of new posts.

Agents occupy a central role in our cultural mythology of what it means to become a writer, and as such, people feel very strongly about them. They buy into the traditional role of agents (the traditional myth of their role) with almost religious fervor. Try to communicate that the mythology might be flawed, and people get their back up.

Bad Agent Sydney is a gentle, sneaky way of coming at the issue. Through her sterling bad-example, people can be giving something to think about in a way they can more comfortably absorb.

So, this is a fictional cat with an evil mind who speaks in baby-talk. I'm making all this stuff up, right?

Shockingly, no. Every nasty, unethical, under-handed, crooked, mean, stupid thing I've had Sydney do came directly from a real-life agent, or at least, an individual using that title. And these aren't apocryphal, legendary stories that "really happened" to "somebody, once upon a time." Most of them I've heard first-hand from one of the people (usually the writer) involved. If not directly, then second-hand with some certainty that what I was hearing was accurate.

Not only do I hear these things, I'm often shocked the casual way they'll come up in conversation at some writer gathering or dinner. "My old agent did" X, or "I've been trying to talk my friend into firing their agent because they did Y" or "I once lost out on a big Hollywood deal because my agent forgot to do the Z." Usually it doesn't come out with rage or venom, which might make it somewhat suspect. Usually it's more like, "I stubbed my toe on the bath-tub last week, and boy did it smart!"

I keep thinking that Bad Agent Sydney is kind of a one-note-kitty, that I'm very quickly going to run out of things for her to do and say. Then I'll end up repeating myself a lot, and that it's quickly going to get old. But it hasn't happened yet, and every time I think I'm close to the edge, someone will drop another one of those story bombs that lets me take it just a step further. Yeah, I still think I'll run out of stuff to do eventually, but so far, that's only a theory, and there's no end in sight.

Just today, I read a blog post (from an agent, surprisingly) talking about how a major publisher would no longer be sending out contracts email as locked PDF files via email. They're going back to the older, slower, more cumbersome print method because one, unnamed agent screwed it up for everyone. This idiot agent picked the digital lock, doctored the contract, had it signed, and tried to pass it off as the original. That's an act so blatant, so criminal, so stupid, that I can't even justify Bad Agent Sydney

Anyway, Sydney is a character (and a real cat), and so she's developing her own voice and personality. Some of that is made up, but some of it is drawn from the personality and behavior of the "real" Sydney. It's long since passed the point where I tell the character what to do, and along to where the character is telling me what to do. I'll swear, the whole "all writers should adopt a cat" campaign was Sydney's idea, not mine!

The other thing people ask is, "do you hate agents?"

The answer is, "no," I've had some bad agent experiences, and I have to admit that I'm deeply skeptical of the role agents currently occupy in the publishing business. But I see the value and utility of having an agent, even if I parted company with my last agent some time ago, and haven't hired a new one.

But fact is, Chris recently took on a new agent, and since I'm shopping original novels, I'm hoping to be agent shopping myself pretty soon (no sense getting an agent to my mind, until there's an offer on the table).

It's going to be interesting, because probably the first thing any agent I approach is going to do is visit my our web-site to check me out, and one of the first things they're going to see is a link to "Bad Agent Sydney."

Is that going to drive good, potential agents away? Maybe, but I don't think so. I'm hoping they'll get the idea that I'm a professional with very definite expectations about what I want an agent to do, and what I expect them not to do. At best, I hope they'll be amused too, secure that I'm mainly talking about people who stink up the agent business and make life more difficult for everyone else. I'd like to think that any good agent would like to see the business cleaned up and crooks driven away.

Bottom line: I've got to wonder if I'd even want an agent who was offended by "Bad Agent Sydney," at least to the point of not taking me as a client. If anyone is put off, I've got to think that isn't an opportunity lost, it's a bullet ducked.

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Being Wrong in the Right Way (Why the Kindle is Still a Better eBook than the iPad)

2010-03-10T01:24:00.000-08:00

I've owned a Kindle for about seven months now, and that's plenty of time to develop a real feel for its advantages -- and it's shortcomings. It has plenty. The screen is great for text, but very poor for pictures. It's lack of a folder-file system quickly turns your eLibrary into a hard-to-navigate jumble. And speaking of navigation, it's tiny 8-way joystick is sometimes tricky to use, and hard to click without moving the cursor.

And of course, an eBook is pretty much all it is. No apps (yet, in a clear response to the iPad, Amazon has announced a developer's kit and an app store.) It has a primitive browser, but it's pretty limited by its poor grapics, slow processor, and lack of support for Flash and anything else animated or video. But for the most part, it reads books, newspapers, and a few magazines.

The iPad, on the other hand is new, sexy, and fast. It has color. It has a big, backlighted, touch-screen. The user interface is a joy. Its graphics are beautiful. And other than Apple's refusal to support Flash, it will have a full featured browser, plus access to tens of thousands of iPhone apps.

Cool huh? Yeah, it's a pretty neat device. But it's got a couple of shortcomings that, despite all this coolness, make it a piss-poor ebook. Oh sure, it's close, and at first glance, it might seem much closer to the ideal than the obviously more primitive Kindle. But while both devices deviate from the ebook ideal, the iPad deviates in the wrong ways.

The Kindle if the Kindle gets more wrong, it gets it wrong in all the right ways.

Huh?

Well, certain aspects of the iPad's sutability will only be proven with time and hand's on experience. Like the pretty color screen. Is it sharp and flicker-free like the Kindle, or will its subtle defects result in eye-strain after long reading sessions? Will it be be readable outdoors? Will it wash out in indirect sunlight? Will you need to turn up the brightness to compensate, and if so, how much will it reduce the already short battery life?

I'll give a pass on these potential screen issues, because I simply don't know. Instead, I'll focus on what I think are three deal-breakers that in themselves make the iPad a poor ebook, even if you buy it for other reasons.

First issue is battery life. Serious book readers need lots of it, and they need it to spare. There's nothing more frustrating than having the power go out three pages from the end of a murder mystery or thriller. The battery on the Kindle currently (it was recently extended considerably by a software upgrade, and it's at least vaguely possible further refinement is possible) allows for up to a week (even more with the wireless turned off).

In my opinion, that's overkill. But I figure that as a minimum, a good ebook reader should last an extended work or school day, plus commute time, with a comfortable reserve. Call it twelve-fourteen hours at minimum. Now, at first glance, the iPad isn't terribly far off this mark. Battery life is said to be "up to 10 hours." Assume that the work/school day isn't extended, the commute is short, and you live without reserve...

But the operative words here are "up to." Experience with the iPhone and other such devices (even the Kindle, which burns its battery much faster when using its simple web-browser to surf the net) shows that battery life is highly dependent on what the device is doing. And that's the problem with the iPad. Unlike the Kindle or Nook, it isn't a dedicated ebook reader. People are going to use it for other things, surfing, games, apps, social media, video, all of which are likely to be more power hungry. Expect 10 hours to turn out to be closer to 8 in practice, maybe less. Very little of which, on average, is going to be spent reading books, newspapers, or other "old media." In fact, for most iPad owners, I predict reading will be "tail-end Charlie" on their priority list.

So in terms of battery life, the iPad falls far short, and the Kindle (and the Nook) hit it out of the park.

Next problem is weight. The Kindle weighs just under 12 ounces. That doesn't sound like much, and it isn't, but as a Kindle owner, I can tell you it sometimes feels like a lot more. When you're holding it in your hand for an hour at a time, it can almost seem too heavy.

I'm aware of its weight just often enough to think that the Kindle is close to the upper limit on weight for an ideal ebook. I certainly wouldn't complain if it were even lighter. Wife Chris complains that when she reads in bed with the Kindle propped up on her chest, that if she falls asleep, the Kindle hits her in the forehead and wakes her up. For an ebook in the field, a little difference in weight makes a big difference.

But if the Kindle is close to the limit, the iPad is way over-limit. It weighs over twice what the Kindle does, a pound and a half. That's a lot of weight to hold in one hand, much less for any length of time. It's a lot of weight to hit you in the forehead when you fall asleep. It's too much weight to haul around without thinking about it. No doubt, for use as a primary ebook, the iPad is just too darned heavy.

But the final deal breaker is probably the most important, and not in the way you'd expect. I'm talking about the price. The Kindle and Nook currently sell for $259. I'll say right now, that's too much. And the iPad isn't $259. It isn't close. The low-end iPad model sells for $499. That's just way too much.

Now maybe you're saying to yourself, "it's not really that much. Not considering all the iPad can do! The Kindle and Nook are just ebooks, but the iPad is a lot more, and that's worth $499 or more!" And in that, you'd be right.

The issue with cost actually isn't buying the iPad. Not entirely anyway. (eBook chip maker Freescale claims that dropping ebook prices by $50 will double the potential market, and dropping it another $50 will double it again.) But even assuming you're buying an iPad anyway (and many of you will) price is still a deceptively important factor, because price effects how you treat a device, and for ebooks, that's important.

Fact is, while many people can afford the $500-700 to buy an iPad, not many people will consider it a trivial amount of money. An iPad is valuable. You're going to be careful with it. You're going to be protective of it. And fact it, the iPad is going to be an attractive target for thieves, especially when it's a hot, new, product.

And this isn't like an iPod or iPhone where you can simply slip it in a pocket and keep it out of sight. The iPad is going to be big enough, obvious enough, valuable enough, and fragile enough, that you'll probably want to carry it in a big, obvious, case.

If you own an iPad, you're going to think about taking it with you. You may be nervous carrying it on the subway at night, or leaving it in a locker at the gym, or in your desk while you're away from your cubical. You may hesitate to throw it in your backpack when you go biking, or to take it camping with you. Even when you do take it with you, you'll still be thinking about it. There's going to be a small, but perceptible mental burden on you every time you take your iPad out into the cruel, dangerous, world.

Now some of this is true of the Kindle and Nook as well, but to a far lesser extent. First of all, the price is far lower. Not trivial, but lower. The devices are still a bit cumbersome, fragile, and beyond pocket sized, but they're small enough and light enough to slip in a purse, briefcase, or notebook. And let's face it, when the average 15-year-old with larceny in his or her heart looks at an iPad, the'll be thinking of what they can do with it. When they look at a Kindle or Nook, they're probably only wondering how hard it will be to fence. It isn't just directly how much the iPad costs, it's how valuable it is in a broader sense, and how attractive it is to someone who might be tempted to take it.

But a burdensome device is not how serious readers want to read. A serious reader needs their reading material handy. They need to be able to haul it along with them everywhere, and have it available at a moment's notice, sitting in a waiting room, stuck in traffic, strap-hanging on the bus, in the taco stand where they have lunch, standing in line at the grocery store. Even the most dedicated iPad fan is unlikely to lug their iPad along to all those places, just in case... (But they will have their iPhone, which is why I still maintain it's a more significant factor in the ebook market than the iPad is, or is likely to be for at least a couple of hardware generations.)

That's the bottom line. The iPad may be a great device that will be used for some ebook (and magazine, and newspaper) reading, especially around home, but it's not a good general-purpose, primary, ebook. It's possibly a good secondary device. It's a great ebook for people who don't actually read, or at least, not much anyway.

The Kindle and the Nook are far from ideal ebooks in many ways, but the way they're imperfect are the right ways to make a the best device currently possible for ebook readers. You might think the iPad is closer to perfect. It does other things. It has a bigger screen. It has color. It does video. It can do magazines, newspapers, and technical books with illustrations, charts, and complex layouts.

But none of that does you much good if the iPad is sitting at home or locked in your car when you need it. None of it does you any good if the battery is dead. None of it does you any good if it's too heavy to read the morning newspaper with one hand while you shove your morning cornflakes into your face with the other.

All these devices are imperfect, but for ebook use, the Kindle and Nook are wrong in all the right ways. The compromises made were made with the reader in mind. Not so with the iPad, which is clearly aimed at a much more general audience.

And while the iPad is new and unlikely to come down in price soon, conventional eBooks like the Kindle are becoming mature technology. I mentioned Freescale. They're company that is making new processor chips specifically designed for ebook use. Current ebooks need two general purpose processors to run the epaper display and generate text. The new chips will be specifically designed to run ebooks, and combine both functions in one chip. This will save weight, power, cut costs, and improve performance. Predications are that a device similar to the Kindle 2 could be selling as low as $150 by year-end.

The real future of ebooks isn't with bigger, fancier, more expensive devices. It's with smaller, lighter, cheaper ones. This iPad is great, just for different things. Sure, you can deliver pizza in a Porsche, by why in heavens would you?

Someday, some descendant of the current iPad may evolve into that kind of cheaper, lighter, device. But we're a long way from that. And by then, the grandsons of Kindle may be in your box of cornflakes -- as the free prize.

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Things I learned from my Cat

2010-02-20T14:43:00.000-08:00

Steve:
Yes, we haven't been posting here much lately. I'm hoping to change that.

It's not that I haven't been working on posts. You can't see it, but from this side, the blog is a nest of incomplete drafts of ambitious essay-posts that never quite seem to get completed (often before the issues they're covering are already old news).

Since I started blogging, I've always subscribed to the idea of "quality over quantity." I hated the early blogs where people reported every detail of their lives. "Had peanut butter and honey for lunch. Bread dry." "Difficult bowel movement this morning." "Cat looking at me funny again. Think they are plotting to kill me, or possibly start literary agency." You know, the sort of thing that has since moved on to Twitter (where I also hang out, as @JStevenYork, and where I also don't do think kind of over-sharing).

It's an admirable sentiment, but damnably difficult to do if you aren't a full-time blogger or journalist, which has never been my intent.

Recently, in another one of those run-away side-projects that I tend to have, I helped my cat become a literary agent.

No, really. Sorta.

See, some writers and I were talking about how unregulated agents were, how many scam agents were out there, and how anybody who called themselves an agent and printed some business cards effectively was an agent. So I joked that anyone could be an agent, even my cat.

Famous last words.

People started asking where to send submissions, and was she taking on new clients? So, before you knew it, the cat had tee-shirts, and mugs, and a Twitter account @BadAgentSydney and a blog (http://www.BadAgent.Me) and I found myself (since the cat doesn't type well) with another blog to fill.

So I decided to do things differently. I started posting "Bad Agent Wisdom" on a more-or-less regular schedule. Three times a week. All the posts are short, often only three or four sentences. But each one is complete, carries a little hidden message or lesson about the writing business, and they get done.

So I'm going to try that for a while. Short. Complete. Done.

And no bowel movements. I promise.

Writer's Horoscope #4

2009-12-15T01:19:00.000-08:00

Steve:
It's been a while (we're as regular as a fiber-deprived broken clock), but it's time again for another "Writer's Horoscope." When reading this feature, it's important to remember that as writers, we're all professionals at making sh*t up. But this is REAL. It must be true! You read it on the interwebs!

If, however, you don't find that your entry in this horoscope seems to apply to you, it's entirely possible that your parents lied to you about your birth-date. (They may also be aliens. Or robots. Or robot aliens. Just remember next time you visit home, it wasn't our idea to cut them open and see what's inside!) Try another sign and see if it makes more sense to you. If it still doesn't seem to apply, keep in mind that they may not only have fudged the date, but the year, and possibly our earlier installments will fit you better. Find them here and here and here.

Aries (March 21 - April 19) - It's party season! Sure, you could stay home tonight and write, but why do that when you can go out and talk about writing to strangers who might just be impressed and feed your ego. This will work great until you ask the electric company to cash an ego check.

Taurus (April 20 - May 20) - If you're feeling in a writing rut, perhaps this would be a good time to try a collaboration. They say two heads are better than one, and you might benefit from having a sounding board for your ideas. Or maybe it will just remind you of how much better it was writing your own, and get you the hell back to work.

Gemini (May 21 - June 20) - Today could be the day you succeed. Today could be the day when your dreams are realized. Who knows who is reading your work, right this second? Who is thinking about it? Who may be reaching for a phone, or typing that all important email? This could be the day that everything changes. Or not. But every day could be that day, and today should be rich with possibilities. If it isn't, maybe you should have more work circulating.

Cancer (June 21 - July 22) - Networking isn't about chasing the most important person you can track down and shoving your manuscript at them under the bathroom stall door. It's about finding those unanticipated connections that turn out to be important to you, and it's just impossible to anticipate those. Spread kindness around, and treat everyone you meet like they're important. One of these days, some of them will be.

Leo (July 23 - August 22) - Avoid cliches like the plague. Stop chasing after things that others have already been successful at. A wise person once said, if you can see the bandwagon, it's too late to get on. Be a leader, not a follower. It's harder and riskier, but the potential riches, and the certain satisfaction are much greater.

Virgo (Aug 23 - September 22) - It's the nature of writers to lie. We make stuff up for a living, after all. But keep the lies in your fiction. Untruths told in business have a way of coming undone and biting you in the ass.

Libra (September 23 - Oct 22) - While it's important for a writer to shield their ego from criticism, praise, especially false praise, can be just as dangerous. Beware such praise. It can disguise ill-intent, or come at a hidden cost. Or it can simply over-inflate your ego and see you up for a fall.

Scorpio (Oct 23 - November 21) - Your patience may be getting thin, but you don't find a pearl without opening a lot of oysters first. Persistence pays.

Sagittarius (Nov 22 - Dec 21) - Sure, you're a dreamer! It's your gift! But it's also your curse. Don't look so far ahead. Think of the future and the big goals, yes, but keep your eye on the next step to getting there.

Capricorn (December 22 - January 19) - Don't call me Ishmael, but you may be chasing a white whale. Is there a project on your desk that has gone on far too long and taken far too much of your resources? Maybe it's time to either put a harpoon it in or let it go.

Aquarius (January 20 - February 18) - Never sell yourself short. Never eliminate the biggest, best, or most profitable option because you think it's out of your league. Go for the best until that option firmly eliminates itself. Then move on to the next best, and so on until you things find their level. You may not get the top, but never assume!

Pisces (February 19 - March 20) - One advantage of being a writer is that you set your own schedule. Yes, that means you can choose when to start, but if things are going well, expect they'll have their own ideas about when to stop.

If this is your birth month: You're a fortunate person! You understand that December isn't the end of the year so much as it is the quiet before the dawn. This is the time to prepare for a new year of opportunities and possibilities. Editors and agents have cleared off their desks, the holiday interruptions will soon be over, and thoughts will everywhere turn to the coming spring, rebirth, and new projects. Finish off that slice of birthday cake and get ready. A new journey is about to begin!

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Four Reasons Why Apple's Tablet is Irrelevent to the eBook Market

2009-12-09T23:43:00.000-08:00

As if there wasn't enough confusion and uncertainty over the development of the growing eBook market, it's still common to hear people making grand predictions about how Apple's long rumored "tablet" is going to sweep in, take over the market, and make everything that's happened before (especially Amazon's Kindle) obsolete and irrelevant.

Well, I'm here to put that to rest. It isn't going to happen. Whatever happens in the eBook market, Apple's tablet is going to be almost completely irrelevant. Here's why:

1. It may not exist

Okay, I wouldn't put big money on this one, but remember, this is just a rumor we're talking about here. Now don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that Apple has some tablet prototypes floating around somewhere. It's a concept they've toyed with for years.

But having a prototype is a long way from shipping a product, and Apple is far too smart to just shove a product out the door unless they think they have a winner. (Not that Apple hasn't had it's share of failures. Anyone remember the Newton? Or the Pippin? No? Google them.) Companies often invest large sums in prototypes and designs, tease them around, and never bring them to production. Anybody remember Volkswagen's "New Minibus" of the mid-90s. It was shown at car shows, announced for production, and even hatched a number of toys (including die-cast cars and a Barbie vehicle) before it vanished with no explanation.

There could be any number of reasons for Apple to not bring it out, or at least delay marketing it. Maybe they're waiting for just the right display or battery technology or price point to come along. Maybe they're waiting for more wireless data capacity to come along (since the iPhone has already logjammed large parts of AT&Ts network). Maybe they're worried it will compete with existing product lines that are already highly profitable. Maybe they don't want to launch a major new product line into a dead economy. Maybe they just don't think it will sell.

So, while I think it's likely that Apple will sooner or later ship something like the rumored tablet product, it's not a certainty. (And for that matter what is this "tablet?" Is it a souped up iPhone with a really big screen? Is it a new flavor of Macintosh? Is it the sort of unheard-of new-category product that Apple is famous for? People seem to be assuming it has something to do with eBooks based simply on the shape. Certainly it will have a screen, memory, and processing capability, which means it can display an ebook. So can your existing laptop or cellphone or the Jumbotron at the stadium. Doesn't necessarily make it an ebook game-changer.)

2. It costs too much

Okay, assuming that the rumors are true (and I'm going by the very latest rumors I could find), the Apple tablet will sell for about a $1000. That's way too much to be a significant factor in the eBook market. The entry-level Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Nobel Nook sell for about $250, and a slew of other eBook readers (mostly without wireless capability, and some with LED screens) are on or entering the market at even lower prices.

Given the rumor-factor, that price could be wrong, but we can make a couple of safe assumptions about this myth-product, whatever it is, if it is. It almost certainly won't close less than an iPhone, and probable will cost more. AT&T is selling no-contract iPhones for $600-700, and new MacBooks start at $1000, which seems to put $1000 somewhere in the sweet-spot for this product. Unless the rumors are completely wrong, it definitely isn't going to sell for under $500, and that just makes it a non-player.

The future of eBooks is with products cheaper than the current front-runners, and with non-eBook-specific products that huge numbers of people are already carrying with them anyway (primarily phones and computers at this point). To make significant market penetration, a eBook reader either needs to be in peoples pockets and purses already, or to be cheap enough that they won't hesitate to carry it everywhere with them, or to be cheap enough that they'll own several and keep them handy where-ever they might want to read.

Of course, while it's pretty certain this product may be used as an ebook, it's also pretty certain Apple won't be marketed as one anyway (Steve Jobs is on record as saying nobody actually reads any more, and relative to the kind of financial numbers he's going for, he might be right). If people buy this product in large numbers, and they might, it will be primarily for reasons totally unrelated to eBooks. All of which means that, if the tablet does hit the marketplace, it will likely sell in far larger numbers than a $1000 eBook would.

It doesn't matter. At this price, this isn't going to be an "everyone has to have one, now" product like the iPhone, and it's going to be priced way above most people's impulse threshold. There's no way it will sell (in the near term, anyway) in the kind of numbers needed to remake the eBook market. Of the numbers that do sell, many will be to people with little or no interest in eBooks, and it's going to be to valuable an item to carry around in a the casual way an eBook needs to be used.

3. It's Too Late

Going back to the rumor-well, latest word on the street is that the tablet might ship in the spring. By that time the Nook will have shipped in significant numbers, half-a-dozen new eBook readers will be on the market, and the Kindle 2 will have been on the market for well over a year. Amazon has a commanding, but perhaps not unshakable, lead in the market.

There's a short list of candidates to unseat them, all of them already in motion: Barnes and Nobel with their Nook, Sony with their Reader line, newspaper and magazine companies that might offer reduced price reader hardware as part of subscriptions, phone companies, who might offer reduced price devices as part of a contract deal, and who already have eBook-capable smart-phones flooding the market in Kindle-smashing numbers. Apple's Tablet isn't even close to making this list.

Which brings us to the final reason...

4. Apple's eBook game-changer shipped a long time ago

The most significant development in eBook readers isn't an eBook reader. It's the iPhone. Not just for the phone and its market penetration, though these are significant factors, but for popularizing the full-featured smart-phone market and the app-store concept. Over 30 million iPhones have already have already been sold, all with instant access to multiple eBook apps (including Amazon's).

According to an article at MediaBistro.com, Android-based phones (which include the hot new Verizon Droid) are projected to sell 6.5 million units this year, increasing to 31.8 million units in 2013. According to the same article, Android users have already downloaded just one eBook app 120,000 times. These are huge numbers, relative to the most optimistic projections of dedicated eBook readers.

Current generation smart phones like the iPhone and Droid are far from ideal eBook readers. The screens are too small, too hard to read, and the battery life just isn't there. They're definitely too small for the older audience who are currently the early adopters of eBooks. But they don't have to be perfect. They're already in people's pockets, they're there when people need them, and if they aren't ideal as a primary eBook reader, they're perfect as secondary ones. They're also a great way for people to sample eBooks without making the major outlay of a dedicated eBook reader.

As for the future, it's only a matter of time before smart-phones add larger fold-out or roll-up screens. Battery life will probably improve, Streaming video and web-browsing will be the driving forces here, but eBook apps will come along for the ride, and that could be a the biggest game-changer yet.

When will we see these big-screen phones? Maybe the next iPhone? You know Apple. Always the game-changer.

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Hello, Orycon Folks!

2009-11-28T23:40:00.000-08:00

Steve here: Though scheduling required us to keep our stay short, we enjoyed our visit to Orycon this weekend. Thanks to those of you who attended our panels.

For those of you still there (or Portland locals), if you'd like a signed copy of Chris' new mystery "Sink Trap" (written as "Christy Evans") it wasn't available at the convention, but before leaving town, Chris visited the Barnes and Nobel store across the street from the convention hotel and signed the 11 copies they had in stock. Look for it in the "New Releases" paperback rack or in "New Releases" in the mystery section.

You'll also find copies of "The Trouble with Heroes" anthology I signed in New Releases in the SF/Fantasy section.

For those of you looking for the text version of our "Novel in an Hour" free-writing exercise, you'll find it by clicking HERE.

Uncovered: A Hidden Down-side for eBooks

2009-11-07T00:07:00.000-08:00

Steve here:
If you've been following me here and on Twitter, you know I'm an ebook advocate. I was before I got my Kindle 2 a few months ago, and I'm more so here. I think we're on the verge of the biggest revolution since Gutenberg, and I think it's generally a good thing.

But with any change, things are lost, and they aren't always the obvious ones. Let me share a little story with you.

My friend Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a new science fiction novel out called "Diving into the Wreck." The other day she had one of those nice little promotional accidents happen. One of the producers of the Stargate Universe (and several of the earlier Stargate Series) Joseph Mallozzi has a blog, and on that blog he has a "Book of the Month Club" where he showcases one book a month for reading and discussion.

He also seems to have a lot of followers (producing a cult-favorite TV show will do that for you) so while this won't likely put her on the Times list or anything, it will probably sell quite a few books for her and put her name in front of a potentially new audience. I remains to be seen how big a win this is, but it's a win none the less, and at a key time for demonstrating the strength of the book (in hopes of turning it into an ongoing series). It may sell five copies, it may sell five-hundred, but it will move some books and create some awareness, and that's a Good Thing.

The life of a book is full of these little incidents that build sales. This is a rarity in that the author was actually aware of it. Most of them go unseen and undiscovered until the sales figures come one. But I have a suspicion that a lot of these happy accidents have something in common with this one. That thing is the way that Kris's book came to be a Book Club selection on this blog. It has to do with the Cover.

Here's the dope straight from Mallozzi's blog: "The last time I flew to Montreal, I was seated beside a guy reading a science fiction novel. The cover caught my eye and I made a mental note to check out the author the next time I found myself in a bookstore. A little over a week later, I was on a flight back to Vancouver when I happened to glance across the aisle and notice a woman reading an SF title – different book, but same author. What were the chances? THIS, I decided, was fate –"

Fate? Perhaps. Or maybe just a good cover at work. Admit it. How many times have you been on a plane, or a bus, sitting in a waiting room, and looked over to see what another person was reading. It's human nature. It's a way of peering into the mind of a stranger, to seek some insight, or to find some commonality, or maybe just to find a good read to look for next time you're in a bookstore. But your eyes are drawn to that cover.

It's more than just a wrapper for a book, and it's more than a sales tool for the book while it's sitting on a store shelf. There's another aspect to it that we forget about. It's free advertising, the gift that keeps on giving.

Now, it's easy to dismiss the importance of this advertising effect. Sure, you may see a stranger reading a book or author that you'll later look for. Maybe you'll strike up a conversation in the DMV line that will lead to an enthusiastic recommendation for a book. But that's only a book here, a book there.

Well, don't dismiss that. A book here, a book there, it ads up. And sometimes, it isn't just a book. Sometimes a book can be seen in good company and the results can be spectacular. Oprah has only to hold up a book to a camera to turn it into a best seller. Both Ian Fleming (James Bond) and Tom Clancy became best-sellers on the basis of casual Presidential endorsements. Movie deals have been made because someone in power spotted a book cover that got their attention. Let's face it, few people in Hollywood ever even get past the cover!

Well, ebooks don't have covers, at least in the sense of a little full-color billboard that tells everyone what you're reading. (Sometimes, as I complained in an earlier post, they don't have covers in any sense at all.) If ebooks, as I suspect, start to push out paper books in the coming years, that fundamentally changes a social dynamic of reading.

In someways, that may be good, especially for certain genres and types of books. People will feel comfortable reading ebooks in public they'd never have been caught with if they had a glossy cover wrapped around them. I suspect that more men will read romance, for example, and erotica will get a boot. Science fiction, men's action aventure, most any kind of fiction that might carry some sort of stigma, real or perceived.

But in the larger sense, everybody loses, just a little. Book covers are a way of connecting readers with readers, and readers with books, and with ebooks, that's gone, and there's nothing obvious to replace it. And that's a shame.

It's not going to make in difference in when or if ebooks will push out paper books though. Things will happen as they happen. We lost something wonderful when vinyl records and those big, gorgeous covers were replaced by postage-stamp sized tape and CD jewel-boxes. There's nobody who grew up with them who didn't love them. But they vanished anyway.

Maybe something will come along to replace some of the secondary functions of book covers. I'm thinking some kind of social media site or store function that will let people display and share their reading lists and recommendations.

Of course, it won't be the same. Nothing ever is. But if we can't stop the future, we can at least take steps to mitigate the damage when we understand what it is we're losing.

And hey, buy Kris's book!