Chinese culture goes back millennia.  Food for thought.  I salute all my Chinese readers, friends, and relatives.  Have a great celebration along with Detective Dao-Ming Chen of the NYPD!

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Martin McDonagh, writer, producer, and director. Who said a movie can’t tell a great story? Most can’t, or important story threads are left on the cutting room floor, but this one does. If this were a book, I’d call it minimalist writing akin to what I like to practice, because a lot is left to the viewers’ imaginations, allowing them to participate in the creative process. But this movie has a great plot and fantastic characters who are both flawed and heroic. Without being a mystery story, there are plenty of twists and turns that made me admire McDonagh’s skills as a writer.

Except for Woody Harrelson, I hadn’t heard of any of the actors, but Frances McDermott, Sam Rockwell, and Woody all deserve their Oscar nominations, especially McDermott, who is great as the frustrated mother of a wild daughter who was raped and murdered. After a year or more, the case still hasn’t been solved, so she creates three billboards that embarrass the local police department, headed up by Woody.

There aren’t many people who are all bad here, and they’re not who you might expect. And there will be scenes everyone will remember. The one with the dentist ranks right up there with the outhouse scene in Jurassic Park, comedy noir corresponding to physical justice.

Intense and clever, this movie is definitely among the best I’ve seen in the 2017 offerings.

***

Rembrandt’s Angel (a mystery/thriller from Penmore Press). To what lengths would you go to recover a stolen masterpiece? Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Inspector Esther Brookstone goes the extra mile. She and paramour/sidekick Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, set out to outwit the dealers of stolen art and recover “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” a Rembrandt painting stolen by Nazis in World War Two. Their efforts lead to much more as they uncover an international conspiracy that threatens Europe. During their dangerous adventures, their relationship solidifies and becomes a full-blown romance. This book is available in ebook format, including a .mobi (Kindle) version, at Smashwords and the latter’s affiliate retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo). It’s also available as a print version at Amazon, B&N, or your favorite bookstore (if not there, ask for it).

In libris libertas!

Quite a while ago, a reviewer of Aristocrats and Assassins (in the seven-book “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”) was generally positive about the book but didn’t like the coincidences. I’ve even had Detective Chen or Castilblanco say, “I don’t believe in coincidences”—this is a common statement from a cop in crime stories.

But coincidences are important in real life, so they’re important in fiction too. You wouldn’t have met your significant other but for coincidence, although I suppose a few people still sometimes marry their main squeeze from high school. Where we end up working is often determined by coincidence. Generally speaking, your world-line through the four dimensions of space and time is often determined by a series of coincidences.

In that reviewer’s defense, it seemed like quite a coincidence that Castilblanco just happened to be near terrorist attacks in Europe while on vacation. At the end of the book, though, that “coincidence” is explained away. Of course, it’s still a coincidence that the terrorist-mastermind of the royal kidnappings decided to also get even with Mr. C, but he was also an old nemesis from a past SEAL op.

Life is often full of coincidences.  Considering Clancy’s maxim that fiction has to seem real, there is no harm in including them in your fiction. Can a story start with a coincidence? My book mentioned above does, but because you might not have read it (shame on you!), Clancy’s Patriot Games offers a similar example (that novel convinced me that including European royalty in my book was OK as long as their roles are positive—the afore-mentioned reviewer seemed surprised that I made them so, but why not?). Jack Ryan was coincidentally in London to receive an award when he offs an Irish terrorist’s brother.  Every Jack Reacher book is an example too. Reacher is basically traveling around with just his toothbrush, but trouble always manages to find him.  Coincidences are essential to fictional storytelling.

Authors have to be careful, though. Coincidences have to seem real. If the story’s coincidences seem too improbable—Deus Ex Machina is an extreme case—the reader won’t swallow the storyline. If the majority of readers stop and say “Huh?” the author is in big trouble, especially at the beginning of the novel. Clancy’s coincidence defines the storyline and isn’t improbable. One can argue that the beginnings of most Reacher novels are also in that category.

But the mystery/thriller author, or even a sci-fi writer, must get his characters involved in the action. In the case of crime fiction, that’s generally more coincidental than if the main character is called upon to solve the crime. Most of the time, that’s Chen and Castilblanco’s fate—Aristocrats and Assassins is an exception. But even Inspectors Dalgliesch, Gamache, and Rebus get involved in some cases because of coincidences.

Bottom line for authors: manage your coincidences, but you don’t have to avoid them!

***

Rembrandt’s Angel (a mystery/thriller from Penmore Press). To what lengths would you go to recover a stolen masterpiece? Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Inspector Esther Brookstone goes the extra mile. She and paramour/sidekick Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, set out to outwit the dealers of stolen art and recover “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” a Rembrandt painting stolen by Nazis in World War Two. Their efforts lead to much more as they uncover an international conspiracy that threatens Europe. During their dangerous adventures, their relationship solidifies and becomes a full-blown romance. This book is available in ebook format, including a .mobi (Kindle) version, at Smashwords and the latter’s affiliate retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo). It’s also available as a print version at Amazon, B&N, or your favorite bookstore (if not there, ask for it).

In libris libertas….

[Note from Steve: A. B. Carolan has completely rewritten and reedited my YA sci-fi mystery The Secret Lab and is finishing up YA sci-fi mystery based on my short story “Marcello and Me,” The Secret of the Urns. The first novel will be published in the first quarter of 2018, the second in the third quarter. Here’s one of his YA short stories set in one of my sci-fi universes. There’s nothing that says a story for young adults can’t have some meat to it….]

Exchange Student

Copyright 2018, A. B. Carolan

Truhan had no problem with immigration and customs at the spaceport on Wendall’s Planet. He followed other passengers into the arrival lounge and saw a tall woman with a sign bearing his name. He accessed a computer file with the implant in the side of his head. Misdak Bron from my host family. Mother of Kalin and Roh, wife of Set. Why is she alone? He’d expected the whole family to be there.

She waved at him and approached. “Welcome to Wendall’s Planet, Truhan.” She looked around. Why is she nervous? “Follow me.” They walked out of the lounge to a road filled with cars.  A sleek one pulled up. “Please get in.”

“My luggage?”

“I’ll have someone pick it up for you.” She tapped on the dull green icon next to the red; it turned bright green and the red one dimmed. The car moved out.

“Is there something wrong?” said Truhan.

“A bit of political unrest, I’m afraid. My people have elected a new leader who wants to banish anyone not born on Wendall’s Planet. They’re voting on the bill right now in our planetary congress.”

Truhan was familiar with xenophobia. Even on his home planet, some Humans barely tolerated non-Humans. “But I’m Human,” he said.

“He doesn’t care. He campaigned on cleansing our planet of all foreign elements, including Humans, blaming them for all our problems. It’s an old tactic of autocrats wanting to ensure their power, but too many voters agreed with him.”

“I wouldn’t have come if I’d known there was a problem.”

“No one believed he would win. He’s already arrested many people. Set and the children are in hiding because Set and I spoke against his policies. You were already on your way here, so I came to meet you. You might have ended up in jail…or disappeared…otherwise.”

“What am I going to do? I’m supposed to start classes in two weeks.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that. Too many students sympathize with the new president and are attacking anyone who’s a foreigner, especially ETs, but also Humans. And their parents encourage them. It’s as if the president created a mass hysteria.”

“How could this happen?”

“As you know, Set is a cultural anthropologist, but even he can’t understand it. I’m a microbiologist, so it’s way beyond me. All I can say is that Humans can be crazy sometimes.”

Truhan nodded. He knew Human history well.

***

Most of the remainder of the trip was spent in silence. Truhan would have enjoyed the majestic scenery if he weren’t worried about his and his hosts’ futures.

The road wound into the mountains towering over the capital city. After another hour, the robocar turned off the main road and followed an old dirt road into the woods. After another ten minutes, they came to a clearing with a rustic A-frame cabin in its center.

“This place has been a get-away for my family for generations,” said Misdak. “We’ve always called it that, but the word has a new meaning now.”

“How long will we stay here?” said Truhan.

“Until they find us or until people come to their senses and overthrow the despot.”

“What would they do to us if they find us?”

“Unknown. All of us were born here, except you, of course. It’s our speaking out against the new administration that got us into trouble. Some people who were protesting have disappeared. Our new leader is a narcissistic psychopath, so his actions have become erratic. He belongs in a straitjacket and confined to a padded cell.”

“That’s a bit strong,” said Truhan with a smile. “It true, didn’t people know about his condition before the election?”

“Of course. Too many voters turn a blind eye. Set says it’s interesting how otherwise intelligent people can lack logic and reason. Despots are good at manipulating those weaknesses.”

“Throughout all of Human history.” He looked at the darkening sky. An omen? “And ET histories too. It seems to be a galactic-wide curse. We’ve had Human colony planets destroy themselves.”

“You’ll enjoy chatting with Set about all this,” said Misdak. She hesitated. “Maybe ‘enjoy’ isn’t the correct word. Would you like to meet the rest of your host family?”

***

The daughter Kalin was Truhan’s age, sixteen standard years; the son Roh was three years younger. The father Set looked older than Misdak, but Truhan knew they were the same age. He recognized the remainder of Misdak’s family from their holograms, of course, but that was never the same as meeting someone in person.

Kalin towered over Truhan; she was already as tall as Misdak. She seemed shy at first. A natural reaction when meeting someone new, Truhan thought. She had the bright eyes, ready smile, and sunken cheeks of her mother, but the dark hair of her father. Roh was much shorter, taking after his father; he also seemed to have excess energy and was ready to take Truhan on a tour of the area around the cabin.

Set’s piercing eyes seemed to be x-raying Truhan for a moment, but then he offered to shake hands.

They were all dressed plainly. Did they have to leave their home in the capital quickly to avoid arrest? Truhan decided to save that question for later.

“I’m sorry we have to put you through this, young man. I suspect your aunt and uncle will be worried. Our esteemed leader still believes in trade, as long as it’s on his terms. He’s very selective, of course, but your home planet will have heard about our political unrest by now.” He winked at Kalin and Roh. “While Mom and I prepare some lunch, why don’t you two show Truhan around? Don’t go far, of course.”

“I’m the leader!” said Roh. Kalin winked at Truhan. “I’ll show you the river and the falls first.”

***

The exploration didn’t quite take Truhan’s mind away from Wendall’s Planet’s political problems, but it helped.

“When it’s hot, we go swimming here,” said Roh when they arrived at the falls. “That’s six meters deep just out from the falls. I can bring up rocks from the bottom.” Roh was almost shouting over the noise of the crashing water.

“My planet’s mostly desert with artesian wells. All our mountains are barren. It’s beautiful around here.”

“We like it,” said Kalin. She found a rock to sit on. “We’ve never been off planet. Tell us about your home.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Social media is addictive. Computer games are addictive. Streaming video is addictive. Writers can be addicted to these technologies as well as readers. Or should I say ex-writers and ex-readers? As a consequence, the number of readers dwindles, and writers will stop writing books.
The ultimate casualty in this depressing scenario is human imagination. When someone reads a book, s/he turns words into real scenes, real people’s dialogue, and real action, especially while reading fiction. Writing is the reverse process: the author’s imagination turns those elements into words. Imagination is the common denominator, and losing it makes all of us less human.
Social media doesn’t take hardly any imagination, as a famous Twitter addict has shown, so I won’t dwell on that. Gaming and streaming media need even less, as the players and viewers participate passively in something audiovisual a company’s multiple workers have toiled to create, usually each contributing a piece. That process is formulaic and more geared to encourage the addicted to buy more of the same type of product. The storytelling, if it happens to exist at all, needs no imagination on the part of the viewer, only their attention.
As imagination dies, all those wonderful gizmos so many are addicted to, especially young people, will no longer improve, and new ones won’t be created either. Creation needs imagination. If you think that an iPhone or Space-X rocket is created without imagination, you don’t understand science and technology. You’re just a technological savage, an addicted user of technology and completely dependent on those who supply your daily fixes. It’s not all about imagination, of course. I can imagine a different kind of thermostat, for example, but I don’t have the engineering skills to make it. But the first step is to imagine it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Skeleton Crew

Copyright 2017, Steven M. Moore

Mandy Wang was the first of the six to awake. Others soon followed her from their cryosleep tanks to the shower stalls.

“I feel like shit,” said Guillermo Rivera, the Chilean, sitting on a bench while waiting his turn.

“The shower helps,” said Mandy. “I’ll soon be done.”

When she exited and started toweling off, she smiled at Guillermo. “Don’t get any ideas. We have work to do.”

He shrugged. “In those tanks, it’s like being under anesthesia. You can’t even dream. Cut me some slack.”

Abdul Hakim and Judith Allan looked at each other, smiled, and then laughed. Sam Roberts and Sheila Townsend frowned. The first two waited patiently in their birthday suits. Sam and Sheila had covered themselves with towels.

“Mandy is correct,” said Sheila. “We must follow protocol.”

***

Protocol meant checking all the ark’s systems with the help of the AI, outside and inside the hull of the huge ship. Two readouts that were the most important were the integrity of the huge ten-square-kilometer forward hydrogen scoop and the aft reactors that not only slowly accelerated the ark but provided all the power for life support, even though all flora and fauna except for the six humans was in cold storage, including millions of frozen embryos.

Unless there were problems, that protocol would take six Earth days. After that, the six would rest one day, and then they would return to the tanks for another twenty years.

This was the first wake-period after leaving the solar system. The AI had monitored the events happening on Earth all the time, though. They watched the video records in horror as those events confirmed the necessity for launching the five arks. Most of Earth was now nuclear slag.

“I guess the Christian Union got its wish for Armageddon,” said Abdul. “Crazy bastards. And to think they criticized radical Muslims. Those SOBs now have their Second Coming and reward in Heaven, I guess.”

“It takes two to tango,” said Sheila.

“More than two,” said Mandy. “The tipping point was Christians trying to retake Jerusalem from the Jews and Muslims.”

“We Buddhists,” said Mandy, “aren’t attached to Jerusalem. I never could understand the big deal.  Couldn’t Christians, Jews, and Muslims share the city?”

“Don’t wrap this all up in religion,” said Guillermo. “We all know unscrupulous leaders use religious fervor and hatred and bigotry to further their own fascist agendas. Ever since that crazy U.S. president was elected with that kind of base, we started our descent into the maelstrom.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” said Sheila.

“Earth’s descent into populist tribalism was worldwide,” said Judith. “And those leaders go at least back to the 20^th century where millions of my people were sent to Nazi ovens.”

Abdul looked around the group. “Shall I turn the video off? I’ve seen enough of this collective insanity.”

The others nodded.

***

Governments had tried to stop the international group that had financed the arks, but it had many rich financial backers who were more frightened of how worldwide disputes were going every day that passed.  That group had carefully chosen the six to monitor the ship during the wake-periods. Some in the group of financial backers felt that the powerful AI was sufficient and more than six could sleep through the journey and take over when the ship reached its destination, but others, arguing for an insurance policy, had won the argument for the periodic checks on progress.

But no screening was perfect. All the compatibility measures on Earth hadn’t predicted the psychological stress of interstellar space travel and its effects on the six.

Read the rest of this entry »

Readers of this blog know I’ve recently doubled my storytelling power. I’ve entered a collaboration with A. B. Carolan. He is rumored to be a descendant of the great Irish harpist and troubadour Turlough O’Carolan. Whether true or not, he was a child who was stolen and raised by leprechauns, who either taught him or honed his skills at storytelling. He now lives in Donegal, Ireland, where he communicates frequently with me, as all good collaborators do. We don’t always agree and argue about turns-of-phrase and the bons mots, but we both favor Jameson whiskey, a mighty fine drink.

Storytelling dates from human beings’ pre-history. It makes us more human.  If readers and writers disappear, we will be less human.  Cultural anthropologists (I almost became one) and other scientists often study the hunter-gatherer foundations of civilizations and use the few remaining hunter-gatherers as test groups for their theories. They predate agricultural society and got us started down that long road to where we are today. Stephen Greenblatt in the Times’ op-ed column “Why Our Stories Matter” (12/21/17) asks: “How did humans learn cooperative behavior such as food-sharing, the care of others, the coordination of tasks, [and] the acceptance of [social] norms?” His answer: it “…has everything to do with the stories we tell.”

I suppose many of these stories originally were pantheistic myths to explain the world around the hunter-gathers: day and night, sun and sky, the seasons and weather, flora and fauna, and so forth—simple stories that acted like social glue. Fast forward to the wandering minstrels of the Middle Ages, troubadours like O’Carolan and his predecessors, and even the singers in Harvard Square, MA, where Joan Baez acquired fame as a folk singer before she became political. These were often poets as well, creating sagas of romance, heroism, and war and conflict. And let’s not forget those Irish monks who preserved the great classic stories that would have been lost as warring Viking hordes burned and pillaged their way across Europe.

Storytelling is as old as any cave painting, I’m sure—it’s the oral/aural part of ancient art while those paintings are the visual, but they probably often told similar stories. No fiction writer should ever forget this tradition. No fiction reader should either. The ability to tell stories, listen to them, and read them, is quintessentially human. While one can argue that plays and movies tell stories too, they start with and depend on the written word. When I saw the movie The Shape of Water, I noted that Guillermo Del Toro, the director, had written the story and collaborated on the screenplay, and immediately thought, “That’s why this movie is so good!” All plays and movies start with the written word; the great ones carry on the storytelling tradition that makes us human.

I like to think I tell good, entertaining stories. Some are better than others—that’s a given—and some readers will never see because I don’t think they’re good enough. Note that I don’t say that agents or publishers think they’re not good enough. Too many of them don’t know a good story when they read one, and too many care more about profits and representing publishers, not authors, than great storytelling.

That’s what we’ve come to these days. Too much of our entertainment is passive drivel that can’t even compare with the most pre-historic oral myths or cave paintings. That’s sad because humanity is becoming less human in the process. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is effectively occurring now as reading and literacy take their nosedives into irrelevancy, and we humans will have no one to blame except ourselves.

Have you read a good book lately?

***

Last chance for my Smashwords sci-fi sale! More than Human: The Mensa Contagion is about the strangest first contact you’ll ever encounter in your sci-fi reading. A benign ET virus creates homo sapiens 2.0, and society goes through major change. One consequence is that this new society becomes more motivated to colonize Mars.  Rogue Planet is the story about a rebellion against an oppressive theocracy. It has “Game of Thrones” fantasy elements, but it’s still hard sci-fi. If you missed either book, now is your chance to download some good reading to cure the cabin fever caused by all this bad winter weather because these ebook prices are reduced from their already low prices. All formats are available, including .mobi. Use the Smashwords coupon codes at checkout.

In libris libertas….

(M. J. Neary, Wynfield’s Kingdom, Crossroad Press, ASIN B01LM3QZT8, ISBN 978-1519020086)

Novels should have more than good plots.  They should have meaningful themes interweaved reflecting on problems humanity faces.  I don’t read fluffy romances or cat mysteries.  Thank you, author Neary, for writing an excellent one that is more than fluff…a lot more!

The British aristocracy and government never historically promoted slavery per se, but they exploited other ethnic groups in their colonies and allowed the latter to exploit them and have slaves. And Britain effectively exploited their own people in the poor city slums they created from medieval times to the present day. The worst aspect of this was the exploitation of women and children, especially the children.

This is the setting at the beginning of this novel, gritty historical fiction (mid 1800s) that makes Dickens’s stories (Dickens is mentioned as a Wynfield contemporary) and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (made famous by Hauptmann and Weill’s Threepenny Opera) seem like sugar-coated visions of a much grimmer reality.  Dark and gloomy doesn’t really begin to describe it.

Life is hard in Bermondsey, a London slum. Dr. Tom Grant, a physician black-listed by a rich patron, retreats from medicine and saves two waifs, a boy Wynfield and a girl Diana, from evil experiments linked to their orphanage; the two become the author’s main characters. Wynfield and Diana have their own separate pathos created by an uncaring British society as they struggle to survive clinging to the underbelly of London propriety. Their lives seem more than fictional. Instead, they’re a dark biographical indictment of an empire where aristocracy still reigns and lies heavily on its people, especially on the middle class and poor.

Poverty is where revolutions, be they good or bad, are born; that’s a lesson we shouldn’t forget even today. People who are pushed too far and have nothing left to lose can justifiably cope in many ways, as this novel shows. When men, women, and children are treated like street mongrels, they have a tendency to bite back. With their absurd monarchy, the British have never realized this. I’m not sure the rest of the world has either.

But I digress. Let’s summarize the story. After Dr. Grant saves Wynfield and Diana, the two foster children grow up and become closer.  Diana becomes sick and Wynfield becomes the king of the slum, a rowdy rake of a fellow without many scruples when it comes to minor crime. The two become close, but he meets a ship’s captain named Kip who befriends Wynfield; the latter becomes obsessed with Kip’s girlfriend who leads Wynfield on a bit. Kip and his girlfriend have a hidden agenda, but I offer no spoilers here. When a gun Wynfield stole from a local cop is used to kill that cop, Wynfield is arrested and faces the gallows as the cop’s replacement tries to use the case to make his mark so he can move up to a Westminster beat. Things get hectic from there, as the author takes the reader through many twists and turns in the plot, leading to a surprising ending that involves none other than Victor Hugo.  There’s a bit of nuance here: Dr. Grant is to Wynfield as Jean Valjean is to Cosette, and the wretched in Wynfield’s Kingdom live squalid lives similar to those in Les Miserables.

Some interesting scenes that captured my attention: A play about Cromwell performed by Wynfield and friends is important for its portrayal of the Irish people’s nemesis as seen through the eyes of a Brit. The confrontation between Wynfield and the old thief, who was his mentor yet sold him for experiments as a child, is a curious coincidence. There are also some interesting quotes too: With respect to child labor, Henry Mayhew, a founder of Punch, states: “…since crime was not caused by illiteracy, it could not be cured by education…the only certain effects being the emergence of a more skillful and sophisticated race of criminals.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In my blog post “The End Game,” I discussed what back material should be at the end of an author’s books. While Big Five authors in their arrogance mostly ignore this, indie authors and authors published by indie publishers (small presses) shouldn’t. I was imagining a reader who had just finished a book, a complete entree, but still wanted some dessert.

The front material is more likely to get the reader to read the book, so it’s more important in that sense. It represents the appetizer. Here are the key elements:

Title. Too many authors don’t spend enough time creating their title. Here’s a list of titles that have recently turned me off: Darker, Artemis, Restless Hearts, Lizzie Borden Zombie Hunter, Good Girl Gone, and Leaving Earth. If the title doesn’t work for an author’s readers, the book has one strike against it. S/he should come up with something that catches the reader’s attention and won’t find annoying. In the latter category are titles too close to the title of a successful book.

I’ve seen so many books with titles that have “…Girl…” in them, trying to mimic Girl with the Dragon Tatoo and Gone Girl (the quality of the first book is far superior to the latter one, by the way), that I cringe when I see such a title. But only one of the titles I’ve listed made me cringe in that sense. Some are ambivalent, fluffy, and/or do absolutely nothing to grab my attention.

The best title is like a short blurb of the book. Rather than use any of my own titles as examples—not all good, by the way—let me give some famous examples. Crichton’s Jurassic Park immediately said to me that the story is about dinosaurs that are in an amusement park, but I’ll confess that I assumed the park was in the past where rich time travelers went to gawk and play. Baldacci’s Absolute Power told me right up front that the book was about some VIP abusing his power to do bad things. That it was POTUS was a surprise, though (probably not so much today).

Cover. Abstract covers are sometimes OK, but I don’t like abstract art and prefer ones that, like the title, tell me something about the book. For example, I just finished a reprint of Chad Oliver’s classic sci-fi tale The Winds of Time. The title is bad enough, although it contains “Time,” an important theme in the book, but the original book couldn’t have had this awful cover. It looks like a still taken from some 50s B-movie with iconic bug-eyed ETs from abduction accounts. Terrible, especially considering the ETs in this book are just ordinary men, not something some conspiracy theorists would have in Area 51.  Rampant anthropomorphism if you will, but not bug-eyed ETs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Amazon is anti-indie: Part Two…

Now that I have your attention, in Part Two, I’ll belabor the point that Amazon is anti-indie. We can see that right away when we compare how the retailer compares to Smashwords. Let’s forget how negative Amazon’s KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited are for indie authors for the moment.  Amazon has many other problems that work against indies.

They restrict the author to the propriety Kindle .mobi format for ebooks.  They always try to create monopolies, of course, and this is only one example.  But one format does keep things simple. They offer DRM for that .mobi format, which allows some protection against piracy, but at a cost—most authors turn it off (and should) because it requires one file per reading platform, so it doesn’t permit readers who are family members to share an ebook easily (an advantage of print, of course). The author can create a print version with Amazon (usually the proprietary KDP Print or Create Space) along with the ebook version and take advantage of Matchbook. And Amazon offers some marketing help to authors—for an inflated price, of course (they have sneaky ways to take people’s money, even the money of their content providers).

Millions of users visit the Amazon site, but they’re not all readers, of course.  And reviewers of your ebook are probably writing product endorsements instead of reviews—in fact, they and Amazon will treat your book just like any other product because that’s what Amazon wants. (I once had a review from a person who specialized in lady’s apparel and women’s shoes.  You can imagine the quality of that review!)

Smashwords is a better place for authors—no doubt about it! It offers a lot more. It’s only a retailer and distributor of ebooks (Amazon retails but doesn’t distribute)—people visiting there are only interested in buying books, not other merchandise. There’s no competition from Big Five publishers either. While Amazon treats the Big Five with kid gloves and coddles them more than indie authors and publishers, Smashwords’s ebooks on the site generally originate with those indies. There are good reasons for that.

Smashwords offers ALL ebook formats, and the author can choose (I always exclude plain text and PDFs, the easiest formats to pirate). It has affiliate retailers (Apple, B&N, and Kobo, for example) and lenders (Overdrive, Scribd, CloudLibrary, for example)—in fact, Amazon has no affiliates beyond a few greedy sites that sign up to be screwed by Amazon.

Amazon forces readers to their proprietary services (that monopolistic tendency again)! The author can set up special library pricing at Smashwords too (I do so because I’m a big supporter of public libraries and have donated my print books on both the East and West Coast as well)—Amazon doesn’t give a rat’s ass about libraries or bookstores because they would like to eliminate them!

Best of all, Smashwords doesn’t try to force an author to be exclusive (Amazon is the only bookseller that does!). Along with this comes the opportunity to offer sales via coupons, either general site-wide sales or targeted ones (to reviewers, for example). While I find gifting a reviewer an ebook in return for an honest review easier via Amazon’s Whispernet, it’s really not a problem to do so via Smashwords. And reviewers often want some other ebook format Amazon can’t provide (I don’t hand out PDFs anymore—every pirated ebook of mine has its origin in PDFs).

Read the rest of this entry »