Monitor down

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Matthew Schick

I woke up this morning, turned on the computer, and the monitor refused to wake up.  This is a sad day.

I don’t make it much of a secret that I dislike the machines and tools that create and propogate our novels (ie, computers and the internet).

Primarily, I’m highly conscious of the days and weeks I’ve lost buried in one addictive game or fruitless search. I remember the “good old days” of using a card catalog and having my fruitless searches amidst the comfortable smells and temperature of a public library. Or playing an addictive game that left me sweaty with skinned knees and full of pizza and Coke afterward.

But, secondarily, there’s the time lost fixing, updating, and screaming at the machine when it’s not working even though, clearly, it should be, I just got you back from the shop, there’s nothing wrong with you, why won’t you launch Firefox? Why is the Internet so slow?  Why won’t my page load?  Why … why … why … *sigh*

Or, and strangely this is third, when the hard drive fries and eats all my work.  When Eric and I started writing, the Internet came to your house via 3.5″ discs in yellow packages every other day in the mail, and logging in involved wearing ear muffs or blankets covering the modem.  The concept of “backup” was understood, even then, but costly.  Our books run from 600KB to 1.5 MB, and a floppy was about 1.2MB.

So I’ve lost my fair share of work, usually a chapter here or there, rarely the entire novel (after the first few disappearances, we began trading discs more often).  At first, it was painful.  It always is.  You’ve slaved over this 6,000-word work for three or four hours, pouring your blood, sweat and tears into it (and then cursing as you go out to buy a new keyboard), and you come back, and it’s gone.

Stoicism creeps in fast, however, and at heart, I’m an optimist.  OK, the file was lost.  Get started on it again.  The second time this happened, in particular, I noticed that A) I was getting the story down faster and B) it was better.  Inadvertent though it was, it was a second draft.

I’m not certain anything else trained my brain as well as losing those chapters for really understanding the purpose of second drafts. High school English and literature classes want the students to do those drafts, but at that point, I had not been yet.

Seeing work that I loved already (and lost) get resurrected to be better was eye opening.  The second time around, I had the plot and characters in my head already.  I could improve the scenes, tone and dialogue, mostly because I had a vague impression of them rather than a clear view. The second time around, I wasn’t bogged down by research that had me stopping every few minutes to check things.

Despite my head-butting with these machines, therefore, I certainly have them to thank for their inadvertent aid.

RIP, monitor, anyway.  I’ve had you for six years, through three CPUs and a laptop.  Thanks for the displays.

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Research, Verisimilitude, and the Fantasy Novel

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Eric Zawadzki

It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to know that this blog is not the only place on the Internet where I talk about the art and craft (and business) of writing. I recently got into a discussion with some writers about the meaning of “write what you know” – that ancient author’s koan with a thousand interpretations (see also “show, don’t tell”). This led to me insisting on the importance of verisimilitude in fantasy writing.

Yes, that is probably one of my favorite subjects, and I’m quite fond of the word “verisimilitude,” too. It’s fun to say and is one of those words that means something specific enough that you really can’t just replace it with a shorter, more common word. So it makes me sound smart rather than like someone who got his unmentionables caught in a thesaurus. *smirk*

Anyway, what was I talking about, again? Oh yes. Verisimilitude in fantasy. How do you achieve it? First off, research is your friend.

Wait. Doing research for a fantasy novel? We’re talking about a genre that has wizards, unicorns, and telepathic dragons, here, not historical fiction or some such.

Yes, research. Everything we read and watch and experience as writers becomes potential material. No, that doesn’t mean, for example, that we put our friends in our books, switch the letters of their names around a bit, and pray we don’t get sued for libel.

My experience has taught me that specifics are generally worthless except as they reveal a larger subject. I don’t need to know the names of every orchid in the Amazon Basin in order to write a story set in a tropical rainforest, but I’d better have a grasp of the layers and what kinds of creatures live in each one. There should also be some rain in that rainforest. Sure, I’m going to add a fantasy twist to all of it, so if I want to invent a creature that is a cross between a parrot and a monkey, no one’s going to stop me. But Nature is  infinite in her variety, and it is better (and easier!) to build fantasy details on existing things than to create them from scratch.

Too much specific knowledge can tempt the author to engage in self-indulgent description – what my wife describes as “I have suffered for my art, and now so will you.” If I spend paragraphs describing the markings of a particular flower to capture a vivid picture of its species, that had better be the most important flower in the entire book, or I’m going to be run out of town on a rail.

So, studying up on the plot devices and world building details you expect might be handy in the current work in progress is a good idea. That’s only half of the equation. The trick in any genre is to be at once familiar and fresh. Don’t call it a dragon and then make it a white horse with a single spiral horn, but don’t use dragons at all unless you can find a way to present them in a way other authors haven’t beaten into the ground in the decades since Smaug.

I do a fair bit of “style research” in the early phases of a new project.I knew Nosamae Ascending was going to be a cinematic caper, so I sought out books and movies that fit that genre. Why? Before you say it, no, not because I wanted to steal ideas from the best sources. Style research achieves two things: 1) It fixes in my mind how stories in the genre typically unfold and 2) it give me some idea of what has been done in the genre so I can avoid the most obvious plot twists and cliches.

As with turning to Nature and real world research for inspiration, other authors can give our own imaginations a boost. I’m not just focused on what they do well in the book except for thinking about how I can do it better or at least very differently. What did I least like about the book, and how can I avoid that in my work?

There are many reasons that Matt and I got away from prophecies and “heroes of destiny” in our stories. One of the biggest, though, is those tropes have been done to death in the genre. I’m not knocking the authors who have used them effectively, but the whole point of being a creative person is to create something new. Prophecies and shepherds/blacksmiths who save the world are over, as far as I’m concerned. The crap sack world whose crappiness is demonstrated by nonstop the rape and murder of innocent people is also on its way out, as I see it. I’m glad we had a bunch of authors write gritty fantasy worlds filled with grey heroes, but it is reaching the point of trying too hard to be edgy.

The tastes of readers of any genre are constantly changing, both as individuals and as a group. As my tastes as a reader change, so too do my interests as a reader. I’m really digging sort of pulpy stories with lots of action, witty dialogue, and tight plotting, lately. The current draft of Nosamae Ascending reflects that. I’m also interested in subverting the fantasy trope of violence as the primary way of generating action and drama in a story, and How I Destroyed Civilization is partially my exploration of that.

Real world research and style research are elements that feed into the principle of “write what you know.” A fantasy world that lacks verisimilitude is just as much of a problem as a modern setting book that includes unrealistic elements. Anything that prevents suspension of disbelief interferes with the success of the story.

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Effect of an arc

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Matthew Schick

At some point in my life, I sat down to write my “first book.”  Long before the papers for school, long before the penmanship and letter-writing lectures of early grades, I took a pile of my older sister’s wide-ruled loose-leaf paper and scrabbled down a story.  For all our sakes, that has been trashed, and given how much time has passed, potentially decomposed.  There are stupider worms for it, I am certain.

I don’t remember much of my early writing.  The first story I wrote that I still have was in fifth or sixth grade, and it’s on my shelf because I found it as I collected all my disparate possession during the move from Honolulu to Charlottesville.  I haven’t stopped to try to read it yet, but I know that from at least that point forward, I have been brimming with ideas and trying to get as many of them as I can down on paper.  Quite a bit of that, of course, has been directed into Kingmaker and Lesson of the Fire and the future books in the Four Moons universe.

My first stories were a lot like the diagrams of plot, body, rising action, climax, conclusion.  Linear.  A character was introduced who had a task, and (almost always) he performed that task.  Later, not only was a character introduced, but a villain was too.  By the end of high school, a novel was like a whole tangle of threads woven together into one great thread by partway up the first hill of the story’s diagram; i.e., varying for a while but linear for the majority of the book.

Sometime in the past seven years, I began to perceive of our novels as how each character’s current timelines intersect; it’s not just the main character and villain who’s lives matter before and after they’re created, it’s everyone.  Each character has a story that is a line, with ups and downs, that weaves and meanders like a thread carelessly thrown on the carpet.  And all the characters in our story are threads, and they all intersect at some point; sometimes, for a few hours, sometimes a few days. But a lot of time, they are not intersecting.

That’s the novel we write.   The arc of the story is made up of the intersections of character threads.  If you step all the way back, and look at the tangle of threads on the carpet, you can see it’s just a short period in the complex lives of dozens of people.  But up close, it can be an intricate pattern of complicated motivations and desires, many of which are based on parts of a thread that aren’t in the story.

Learning this, well, really learning it, has made my approach to writing and editing grow in leaps and bounds.  I hope that you can feel the larger thread of our characters’ lives in Kingmaker and Lesson of the Fire.

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Gestation

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Eric Zawadzki

As those who follow us on Twitter probably know, I’m gearing up to start a new project.  My author-friend Keith sometimes has a bit of trouble remembering which project I’m currently rambling about. For that matter, so do my wife and most of my friends and family. For the sake of distinguishing one project from another in this blog post, let’s call this particular project How I Destroyed Civilization.

The story seed for Kingmaker came from its opening sentence – I fell – and from Matt’s idea of a race whose children lost their magic when they became adults. Everything flowed out of that pretty easily.

Lesson of the Fire, on the other hand, was the product of many years of tinkering, layering revision upon revision. Flesh out this character. Develop that theme some more. Expand this scene or plot. Replace that archaic bit of writing.

Nosamae Ascending is being flash-fried. Matt and I very quickly decided what we wanted the story to be, so now it’s just a matter of making it be that. It is, as Matt has said (usually with a kind of terrifying gleam of glee in his eye), the first genuinely new material we’ve written in many years. It’s great grandfather (Quiver to Quarry) is so far removed from the current material that the only things they have in common are a few character and place names. I’m sure Matt will talk about those aging photographs of long-dead relatives right around the time we release that book (hopefully in late 2012 or early 2013).

How I Destroyed Civilization has yet another completely different gestation story. Technically, there have been two completed drafts, both of them Matt’s and neither of them more recent than college. I’ve picked it up three or four times in the last 10 years, but I’ve never completed a rewrite. I’ve written outlines, character sketches, and chapters. Once I even got to about the 67% mark. But each time I stopped long before “The End.”

Why?

I realized that I was not yet a good enough writer to do the story justice.

It has been like the old video game RPG trope where an old man tells you that you cannot enter a particular part of the game until you master your powers. Sometimes it was even a game where you receive no warning until all of a sudden you’re attacked by random monsters who do twice your hit points in damage with every attack they make because you strayed into an area intended for much higher-level characters.

I knew from very early on that How I Destroyed Civilization was an incredibly ambitious project. The faux title is tongue-in-cheek, but the gauntlet toss it implies is real. Its protagonist is blamed for the collapse of his civilization – the most technologically advanced and most enlightened in the world. He is not a hero of destiny, does not hold a position of political or military authority, and does not wield any magic whatsoever. I’ve spent years trying to figure out how he does it and (more importantly) why. Heck, I’ve been fuzzy (and will remain vague to avoid spoilers) on whether or not he is actually guilty or just a scapegoat.

Ten years ago, this project seemed impossible. Five years ago, it seemed out of reach but worth thinking about. Now, it is intimidating as all hell, but the old man at the entrance to the mountain pass has stopped telling me I’m not ready. I’m pretty sure if I optimize my party’s equipment and make sure to bring enough healing potions I can complete a second draft. Even then, it will probably be like fighting a dragon.

If you don’t hear from me by the end of next year, give this lock of hair to the temple so its clerics can resurrect me. As the Ancient Greeks would say: “With my shield or on it.”

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Reload or reboot, pick your metaphor

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Matthew Schick

Now that Lesson of the Fire is on sale, and the galleys and proofs and revisions are filed and backed up and, most importantly, put away, you’d think there’d be time to celebrate, breathe, take off, relax or even vacate the apartment to a warm, sunny destination with mai tais and lemonade. Knowing this is all metaphorical, of course, we can ignore that there’s an actual 40-hour-a-week job that pays the bills.

But alas, no.

As soon as Kingmaker was out the door, we bent all our efforts to finishing Lesson.  And now that Lesson is available for popular consumption, there’s another draft beginning the process of cluttering my desk and desktop.  It’s a small desk and and even smaller desktop, so I don’t imagine that will take long.

It’s important to keep writing, to keep reading, to keep talking about the genre and the process, even during this period where also we as authors must promote our existing works.

What makes the next book interesting is that it was begun largely with Kingmaker and Lesson ready to be published.  Where the first two books have gone through revisions and rewrites that date back to 1991, this story is entering its official third draft in 2012.  A couple of years ago, when I sat down to push out the rough draft, it was nothing more than a lot of notes and remembered conversations (and one completely useless manuscript that it is, in an extremely technical sense, based on, but in a real, literal sense, was used to prop up my monitor).

This story is crafted with all of our adult knowledge and worldliness, and in its second draft, is much farther along than our other stories were in their 2004 forms; that is, what took us seven or eight years to accomplish with Kingmaker and Lesson took us just about two years for this story.

I’m looking forward, as well, to applying the processes and practices I learned while preparing the first two books for publication to this new story. Eric and I have talked about schedules and deadlines since Four Moons Press was launched, and have just about successfully blown every one of them, though as we got closer to today, we’ve gotten closer to realizing our deadlines.  There’s nothing like a public face to make you realize that if you say “we’ll be published April 30″ that you have to hit that date. “Coming Soon” is my new favorite phrase (I’m even using a derivation of that vagueness in my wedding plans).

I’ll probably be noting those processes and practices in future blog posts.

Also, beginning in a couple of weeks (see? Coming soon!), I’m going to start posting short stories set in the Lesson environment.  Yes, they’ll be, for the most part, edited versions of the ones that were on caligrean.com.  If you’ve never been to that site, then they’ll be brand new!  If you’ve been haunting us for all these years, then you can reminisce with me.  … Or whatever.

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The Simple Joys of the Indie Author

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Eric Zawadzki

First, a brief announcement: Lesson of the Fire is now available on Amazon and the CreateSpace Store in paperback for $15.99. I have a box of them on the way to hand sell and autograph, for those of you who see me in person. On with the blog entry!

Back in my teenage years when I had a subscription to Writers Digest, I read an article about how book release days were incredibly anticlimactic for the author. Back then it was just some nebulous day when your book is for sale, but no one has actually read it, yet. Like so many of my “old Writers Digest stories,” things are a little different for today’s authors, and especially for indie authors.

We can watch sales happen in real time, see our Amazon sales rank rise and fall like a storm-tossed ocean. We can run around the Internet like Wee Willie Winkie, announcing the release of our book via Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, Google+, our blogs, other people’s blogs, review blogs, reading forums, writer forums, [insert hobby here] forums. Does it help our sales? Maybe, but I’m not convinced that’s why we do it. Mostly I think we’re just excited to be done with editing and formatting, thrilled that now people can actually start, you know, reading our shiny labor of love.

So, first simple joy of indie authorship for which I’m grateful – release day.

Thing number two is an insightful review from a total stranger. Yeah, yeah. Authors with the backing of publishers get these, too, and I’m sure they dig them, too. But we are the marketing staff for our books. We are almost entirely at the mercy of word-of-mouth advertising, which is a powerful tool over which we have almost no control. We can tell our friends and family and people we meet about our books, but we can’t make them buy it, can’t force them to read it, and certainly have no control over whether they tell anyone else about it.

I’m always thrilled to see someone I know add one of our books on Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing, or wherever. I love the feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions they might have – even if it is the inevitable “when is the next book coming out?” Pro tip: every author loves this question. I generally prefer my close friends and family not write reviews simply because even when they’re genuine, they can look like a shill to an outsider who is aware of our relationship. If you like what you see, though, please, please, please pass it along – buy it as a gift, loan it out (did I mention recently how DRM is doomed?), and talk about it to people who might be interested.

But seeing a complete stranger do the same sends my mind spinning as I try to find some connection, however tenuous, between this person who has never met me and this book of ours that they have decided to read. I want to know how they found out about our writing. Do we have a mutual friend? Did they pick us up from a retweet on SampleSunday? Did they read some of my random posts on one internet forum or another? Are they lurkers who read our blog posts but never comment?

I mean, I guess it doesn’t really matter. What really matters to us is that people are reading Kingmaker, and hopefully many of them will read Lesson of the Fire, too. It means that people are finding us somehow, and some of them seem to be enjoying what we’ve written.

I came home tonight and glanced at the day’s sales figures as I was sitting down getting ready to blog. I checked our books’ sales rankings and was pleasantly surprised to see someone posted a new review for Kingmaker. Moreover, it was an incredibly thoughtful 4-star review – pointing out strengths, weaknesses, and matters of personal taste. It was really a review after my own heart, useful to both authors and other readers. So Clem, whoever you are, if you’re one of our lurkers, thank you for your kind and honest review. It was a most pleasant and much appreciated surprise at the end of a very long day.

These are the real reasons we decided to go the indie author route. We aren’t in it for the money (though it would be awesome to be able to do this full-time). We write to be read and to entertain people who have never met us (as well as those who have). And this marvelous Internet-driven, indie writer revolution gives us an opportunity to engage readers in a way that would have been unthinkable to authors a decade ago.

Even on release days.

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Lesson of the Fire Live for Kindle!

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Eric Zawadzki

Lesson of the Fire is now live in Amazon’s Kindle store. You can buy it for $2.99 or, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow it for free. The paperback version should be available in a couple days, so watch this space.

We chose to go with KDP Select to extend our reach through the Amazon Online Lending Library. Borrows probably won’t earn us quite as much per reader as sales, but it should be pretty close, and there is no downside for readers. We’re really hoping this will coax people out of the bleachers and into our books.

What that means is you won’t be able to buy the ebook anywhere except Amazon for the first 90 days. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t read it on your Nook, iPad, or other ereader. First, Amazon has a Kindle app for most devices. Second, there is no DRM, so you can convert the file to your device of choice using Calibre. And if neither of those are very appealing to you, we’re only planning to stick with KDP Select for those first three months before opening up a wider distribution.

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Cartography for Marrishland

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Matthew Schick

Sometime in the past, Lesson of the Fire developed three basic archetypes of people.  There were the magocrats, who are the wizards and ruling people; the mundanes, who are the normal, everyday, run-of-the-stream folk who support the ruling people; and the mapmakers, who are the frontiersman, the explorers, and the mundane messengers and tradesmen.

Magocrats and mundanes may be nearly complete opposites, but they both crack the same jokes about the mapmakers, who generally either don’t get them or ignore them.  There’s both a romantic, fantastic element to the mapmaker, as well as the extreme pragmatism that is necessary to survive in Marrishland, and that disparity is as unlike the majority of the Mar population as Turuna is to Marrishland.  Where magocrats, in general, can forget practicality because of their magic, and mundanes must live by common sense and thrift, mapmakers often throw such caution to the wind under the delusion that “someone else has done it, it must be safe.” It would be like a farmer in Oklahoma seeing a picture of the moon, seeing NASA up there, and thinking it was now safe to go.  Odds are, he won’t succeed on his own.

So like everything else with Lesson of the Fire, the map, cobbled together from dozens of other maps, gathered by Finn Ochregut and agreed upon by a small council of practical mapmakers (with only minimal bloodshed), comes with the following warning(s):

When magocrats teleport everywhere, they have little concept of true distance, and because mundanes rarely travel, they have vague notions of how close the nearest town is.  Two or more mapmakers who take the “same” road from Flasten Palus to Domus Palus may arrive days apart and get into a bloody dispute over a discrepancy in the miles traveled, and a third one will have a completely different time/distance.

Therefore, if their are inaccuracies in the map, it’s more likely the consensus source was wrong.

Anyway, here’s the map for Lesson of the Fire:

As compiled by Finn Ochregut for "Lesson of the Fire"

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Follow-up Post

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Eric Zawadzki

So, Tuesday I blogged about several things, one of which is my firm conviction that eventually the publishing world will reach the same conclusion about DRM that the notoriously stubborn, litigation-happy, and draconian RIAA did: it doesn’t help.

First, it pisses off customers to be treated like criminals. This is especially true of well-educated customers familiar with the practice – such as, um, many of the voracious readers upon whom publishers rely.

Second, it doesn’t actually prevent piracy. Piracy will always find a way, and most people are content to pay what they perceive as a fair price for content that is made as easy for them to purchase as possible. DRM costs lots and lots of money to produce, and that means only enormous companies such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple can afford to engage in the largely futile pursuit of developing it as a security blanket against those mean old pirates who wouldn’t pay money for a book it the bestsellers all cost a nickel. Seriously, these guys are customers the way someone who robs a bank is a customer of the bank he’s robbing. Doesn’t mean all my withdrawals from the ATM come complete with dye bomb, you know, just in case I turn out to be a bank robber.

Third, it hinders competition among retailers. With all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Amazon it in danger of locking in a monopoly on ebooks, you’d think someone would have noticed this sooner. Customers, once invested in an ebook platform are discouraged from deserting it, because if you change devices, you lose all your books.

For this third point, let’s go back to the example of mp3s. Let’s say you had a Zune but had some gripes against it or its manufacturer – poor customer service experience, higher prices, discovered to be constructed from the blood of children, whatever the case may be. If all your music was DRM-locked, you’d think long and hard about buying an iPod simply because you’d have to buy your entire music collection again. But because we live in a post-DRM world when it comes to music, if Zune no longer suits your needs, you can replace it in a heartbeat without losing your content. And let’s face it, the only reason anyone wants an mp3 player or an ebook reader is to consume their content.

For the last 2+ years, the publishing world has been living in a world that apparently never heard about the endless litigation of the RIAA in the late ’90s and early ’00s – how it achieved nothing except to create enormous PR disasters as they sued grandmothers, small children, and your best friend’s dog for hundreds of thousands of dollars for 3 minute songs.

But I’m not going to get into too much of a rant on the subject (too late). The reason I’m posting on a Wednesday night is today Tor/Forge, one of the largest publishers of fantasy and science fiction in the world announced that they’re doing away with DRM by July of 2012. Why? For many of the same reasons I cited – it annoys their authors and readers and forces their customers to be loyal to a specific platform, especially because fantasy and science fiction readers tend to have very strong opinions about technology. This is a big deal, and I’m calling it as the first step in the process of eliminating this futile and insulting “security” measure throughout much of the industry.

Hopefully this will spread like wildfire over the course of the next couple years. Then people just need to pull their heads out of their asses about libraries, and I’ll actually believe this old media learned something from the mistakes of the music industry ten years ago. I believe in publishers. They can be a bit cautious, but they are also quick studies, and I suspect their marketing folks have been shitting their pants over this transition far more than their editors.

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Worms in the Apple

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Eric Zawadzki

Last week I talked a bit about my contention that shock was not the most reasonable response to the Department of Justice’s investigation into alleged price fixing by Apple and five of the Big Six – the 5/6ths. Recognizing that no one can even predict how the investigation will turn out, much less the exact consequences such a decision will have on the publishing world, the potential implications are pretty interesting. Some would even say worrying.

The Big Six

Without the easy guarantee that they will control the price of their product, these guys are going to struggle for as long is it takes them to realize that ebooks are an opportunity, not a tragedy. Even then, their business plans aren’t exactly going to turn on a dime. It has been observed that because of their established model of selling books to bookstores that retain the right to return as many of those books as they want for a full refund, it will be extremely difficult for them to make that transition.

My sense of this is the big authors probably aren’t going anywhere. I can’t imagine that any writer making enough money from writing that s/he barely even thinks about money anymore jumping ship unless those checks suddenly stop coming. I’ve been watching the midlisters and backlisters and first-timers, though, and those folks are at least willing to experiment. Some of them are getting quite good at it, in fact. If the publishers are willing to woo these folks, those authors are likely to continue using trade publishers as a hedge even if they continue speculating in indie publishing (those advances are nice even if the royalties aren’t guaranteed).

That said publishers have a lot of work to do before I’d say they’ve adapted to the new technology. I could talk about DRM, which didn’t do anything but piss off music customers a decade ago and is turning out to be an anchor around the necks of ebook buyers, binding them to a single ebook platform. Guess what else – the $20+ prices on many ebooks aren’t sustainable, especially when they can’t be loaned, given away, or sold.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have some epic loathing for “traditional publishers.” They’re trying valiantly to manage huge technological changes in their industry. That said, the industry insider happy talk (“ebooks are the future we are embracing!!!”) is often undercut by actions taken in fear to protect rights instead of selling books (“libraries are the enemy and must be stopped from lending books!!!”). It’s often like listening to a guy eating a shit sandwich while trying to convince you of the merits of the sandwich he is eating.

Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores

Boy does it gotta suck to be these guys. I read an article just about every day about how some independent bookstore founded by Ben Franklin or Abe Lincoln’s widow has closed down after so many decades of service to the community because they couldn’t compete with e-retailers and their infinite catalogs of ebooks. Those stories are sad, but they’re also nothing new. Ten, fifteen years ago, I constantly read about small bookstores being wiped out by competition with big box retailers like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Those little guys who survived this long are tough. They’ve mastered their niche and sell an experience, not just books. I don’t doubt they’ll continue to suffer casualties, but if anyone can do for book lovers what the vinyl-selling record stores have done for music lovers, it’s the independent book stores.

The big box stores are in a world of hurt. Contrary to what some seem to think, Borders wasn’t killed by ebooks. Its death was the result of better than a decade of bad management, revolving door executives, and a shortsighted strategy. Borders didn’t even twig to the idea that the Internet was real for several years and actually hired Amazon to run their online bookstore. Ebooks certainly pulled the plug on their life support, though.

Big box booksellers that don’t have Borders’ problems are struggling, though. Books-a-Million has seen better quarters. Even Barnes & Noble, despite the success of the Nook, is feeling its brick-and-mortar stores as an anchor holding them back. In fact, several of their big investors are trying to convince B&N to spin off its Nook business into a separate company unimpeded by those mega bookstores.

And why not? We saw what mp3s did to record stores. Despite all the protests about the magic of a book in your hand, the writing is on the wall for the big chains. The independent bookstores are more likely to fill the niche of “cute little specialty stores” than huge stores with tremendous overhead.

Libraries

These fine folks have gotten caught in the crossfire. Publishers want to keep them from loaning books except under often draconian restrictions. Retailers like Amazon would love to use them to help sell ebooks. Local governments strapped for cash don’t seem to believe we need libraries anymore.

This annoys me because I pretty much grew up in my local library. Libraries provided me with the opportunity to discover books when I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I could dabble in subjects until I found something worthy of obsessing over. Rather than being punished for reading lots of books (as those of us with a reading addiction ultimately are when we have to buy our books), I had an all-you-could-read buffet of content. If I didn’t like what I was reading, I could put it aside and return it with no tears shed or pocket money spent.

If it weren’t for the toxic environment they’ve been plunged into, I actually trust librarians and libraries to adapt to the new technology far sooner than I expect publishers to.

Online Retailers

Amazon would obviously win big if the Department of Justice rules against Apple and the 5/6ths. They’re a force to be reckoned with and not just because of the predatory practices their competitors accuse them of. They have, hands down, the best selection of ebooks and the best site for finding them. No one else even comes close. Barnes & Noble’s online store is a 1980s-era library card catalog by comparison (it’s all there if you know exactly what you’re looking for), and Apple’s iBookstore is the magazines spread on the table in the waiting room of the dentist’s office (there for the benefit of anyone who has 20 minutes to kill and doesn’t feel like playing Angry Birds).

This, incidentally, brings me to those same non-Amazon retailers. In the short term, this might be a setback for them, but I sincerely hope they’ll regard it as an opportunity to take a hard look at their ebook sales model. Amazon didn’t build its vaunted near-monopoly on ebook sales on underselling the competition. They did it by finding innovative ways to convince people that an ereader was a good idea and encouraging them to buy tons and tons of ebooks. Competing with that is going to take more than “favored nation” and “price matching” clauses. In fact, those shenanigans are really just holding them back from doing something innovative of their own.

Indie Authors

I touched a bit on authors with books published through trade publishers. I’ll admit to some small reservations about how a decision against Apple will impact self-published authors.

I remember all too well that the now fairly standard 70% royalty rate came into being shortly after Apple made its deal with the 5/6ths and forced Amazon to accept the agency model. The immediate effect of that change was a kind of gold rush as tens of thousands of authors flocked to self-publish with Amazon. Other retailers soon matched that rate, and now all those authors – successful, failed, or otherwise – regard it as entirely normal.

This is a huge change from the 10-15% royalty authors earn from sales with trade publishers. It doesn’t help that there have been several high-profile examples of publishers misreporting ebook sales to the disadvantage of the authors. We’ve seen a few authors jump ship, and some of those (*cough* Konrath *cough*) have gone on to preach self-publishing convincingly to the entire Internet. There has been no small amount of speculation about what will happen the first time a big name author decides to self-publish simply because it pays so much better (an argument I don’t entirely agree with, though it isn’t without merit, either).

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Amazon was trying to achieve a few things by offering this huge royalty. 1) Bring in a flock of books in the $2.99-9.99 price range to convince readers that this is a reasonable price for an ebook. 2) Lure established authors to self-publish, allowing Amazon to cut out the stubborn middle men (i.e. the publishers). 3) Create their own stable of authors who, having proven themselves at self-publishing, can easily be persuaded to join Amazon’s publishing arms. So far, events seem to lend credence to this.

What happens if Amazon wins in all this? Will they continue to be so generous to indie authors? It’s not like indie authors are in a position to collectively bargain with Amazon. If Amazon says royalty rates are dropping back to 35%, by gum that’s what will happen. Will they put the screws to the publishers, forcing more concessions from them, or will it be largely business as usual?

Readers

In the end, it seems like readers have the most to gain – especially in the short term. If Apple and the 5/6ths lose this battle, the price of ebooks will almost certainly go down. It will make indie authors less attractive to the average reader. A $3 book seems like a bargain when its competition costs $12.99-$14.99, but that is less the case when the gatekeeper-approved and edited book costs only $5 or $7.

In Conclusion

In the early part of 2010, I started telling people the next five years of publishing were going to be extremely interesting. We’re only about halfway through those five years, now, and while this has been an endlessly fascinating 30 months, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of these changes. A few things I expect we’ll see before things stabilize:

End of DRM: Eventually this old media will learn the lessons it took the RIAA ten years to figure out. This stuff locks customers into a single ebook platform, which is bad for everyone except the one who owns that platform.

Subscription Models: Speaking of libraries, the super-readers out there would pay good money for an all-you-can-eat model. All the books I can read for, say, $10-15/month? An end to buyer’s remorse? Yes, please.

A Sane Library Policy: The current state of affairs is silly-broken. Someone needs to meet the libraries on their own terms. Libraries breed future customers – not to mention future authors and employees. Punishing libraries for letting patrons read books is a bit like mandating nationwide sterilization and then wondering why there aren’t any young workers to replace workers who have to retire. An institutional subscription model might go a long way to help with this.

That’s my read of the tea leaves, in any case. There are plenty of people arguing about this stuff, right now.

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