I used to participate in discussions on Goodreads and LinkedIn. I no longer do so. The reasons are many. Here’s one: both have gone downhill since Amazon and Microsoft bought them, respectively. That might explain why there seem to be some moderators who are little tyrants; I’m open to discussions, but they aren’t. Same for members of their discussion groups.

In Goodreads, these few moderators assume their group is their little fiefdom; in LinkedIn, they’re often against indie authors and small presses and favor big publishing conglomerates and their associates. Sour grapes? No. These moderators are rare, but there’s no regulation from either Amazon or Microsoft who give the despots free rein to cancel anyone they please. They offer some “Terms of Service” discussion group members must follow, but the latter often ignore them. (And you thought it was just Facebook and Twitter?)

I’ve already cancelled ALL my memberships in Goodreads discussion groups (it was cathartic to do so from my Kindle, because Amazon bears most of the blame for not cleaning up Goodreads’ act.) I just don’t have the time to discover the bad apples hiding in the barrel among the many good ones. I will avoid any discussion on these sites. Same goes for many reading forums where you’ll find this us v. them mentality (us = readers and/or some publishing professionals, and them = certain authors they like to bully). I’m first and foremost an avid reader—always have been—so that turns me off, to put it mildly.

To be fair, some authors abuse their privileges on these sites. I never have, except for giving “discussion group” its literal meaning “discussions invited.” When thin skins, agendas, and pride get in the way of intelligent discussion, I bail. I’ve also been bullied, lied to, and even threatened by other group members. (Perhaps I should name names, but I’m not that kind of guy.) From what I’ve seen, I’m not unique in having these experiences. It’s sad that we have come to this!

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This giant retailer has expanded so far beyond books that now books are only a small part of Bezo’s business. The company can no longer be considered a friend of readers and writers as a consequence.

Let’s start by listing some recent sins: they offer only one format for ebooks—theirs, of course. While they compensate for that by offering the Kindle app, available for most devices, readers with older ereaders can’t be too happy with the situation because the app isn’t universal.

In fact, Amazon has destroyed the competition as far as ereaders go. They’re putting a lot of print-on-demand companies out of business too with their Create Space print-book publishing option. Bookstores almost universally refuse to stock Create Space books for a multitude of reasons; that affects readers who might like to read an author’s book in a print version, and it obviously diminishes an author’s distribution options.

The borrowing option with Prime is potentially a source of income for authors, but they’d make more selling the entire ebook; even when a reader reads the full book, it’s a way for Amazon to pay writers fewer royalties. Another negative for authors is that to offer a book at a sale price on Amazon, the book must only be available on Amazon! That is detrimental for an author’s marketing options.

There are other pros and cons. One positive point is that Amazon is the largest retailer in the world. Unfortunately books are only a small part of that retail business now. And people can often find better deals at a mom&pop bookstore or even a B&N book barn, as well as other online book retailers like Smashwords. The latter retailer offers almost every ebook format, including Amazon’s .mobi. It also has affiliates, both retailers and book lenders. It allows authors a variety of marketing options, including special sales on ebooks. And it allows an author to set a lower price for public library purchasers. Best of all, it’s all about books, just like any bookstore in your neighborhood. Amazon fails to compete in most of these venues. In fact, in shuns them with despicable snobbery.

For once I agree with Douglas Preston. He’s rather famous for his on-going feud with indie authors, Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath, in particular, and his blatant rants in support of Big Five publishing conglomerates—forget those small presses, of course. But in his recent (Thursday, October 12) op-ed in the NY Times, “Publishing’s Unfair Gray Market,” his title is a wee bit misstated and certainly unexplained. “White market” refers to legit booksellers and distributors who do NOT scam the reading public; “black market” presumably refers to book piracy (see my previous article about that subject). “Gray market” refers to the ambivalent—perhaps legit but most certainly unethical.

Some of what Preston describes has been going on a long time, but a lot of what he says focuses on Amazon. The retailer has sneakily changed its book merchandising policy to match their policies for other products it sells, where third party vendors can actually compete with Amazon and sell used and returned items as new. Their review process has always treated books as products like shoes and hairdryers (I received one negative review from a person who mainly reviews women’s apparel!). Now they’ve gone too far. And you wonder why my books are no longer exclusive to Amazon and I only offer sales on Smashwords? Any author who’s exclusive to Amazon is shooting her- or himself in the foot!

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This post is a follow-up on my post “Book Marketing—Anecdotes v. Real Stats.”  In that article I was ranting against people treating anecdotal evidence about book sales as reliable statistics.  Now I have something else to be riled about: Jellybooks.  This reader analytics company based in London makes studies of book reading habits and passes the results off as reliable stats.  Sound harmless?  Please, please, don’t bury your head in the sand—it isn’t harmless at all!  Both readers and writers should be concerned.  All readers, not just ebook readers, and all writers, not just indie writers.

Let’s deal with the general situation first.  It always amazes me that people froth at the mouth when they read or hear that the government is allegedly violating their privacy.  The amazement comes from the fact that they let data-mining corporations and private firms peer into their private lives all the time on the internet.  Private companies also manipulate people with false advertising and false endorsements.  A recent case where Lord and Taylor paid bloggers on Instagram to rate a dress highly all at the same time created outrage, but folks, don’t be naive—that goes on all the time.  Any product endorsement is suspect these days, and book reviews are examples of this.

Data-mining firms sell—ho hum, ain’t it obvious?—data they collect about you.  They collect data about your personal lives, your consumer lives, your health histories, whatever.  So does Google, Apple, General Motors, Microsoft, almost any big firm.  (Have a gmail or Google+ account?  You’re handing over all kinds of data about yourself to Google.  Anyone online does.  Wise up.)  This process is far more insidious than what the U.S. government does.  The government’s alleged purpose (I only say “alleged” because I can imagine  abuses—I’m a mystery and thriller writer, after all) is to protect us.  The purpose in the private sector is more insidious—they want to exploit us.  That exploitation is usually associated with making money, and, because consumers in our consumer society have few protections, the perps usually get away with it.

Enter Jellybooks.  Forget the “books” part of the name; I’m tempted to call this company Jellyball, because it’s like a jellyfish with stinging tentacles that are about to grab you and do you damage.  Let’s analyze their business model, ripped right out of the data-mining firms’ playbooks.  The people in charge saw a niche.  What the hell?  That’s free enterprise, right?  They saw that traditional publishers really don’t have a clue about the readers they’re selling to or their reading habits.  Up to now, publishers didn’t give a rat’s ass because they live thirty years in the past where there wasn’t much real competition.  But Jellybooks is convincing them to care.  While the publishers obviously have data on their own sales, that data is about purchases, not how people read.  Jellybooks wants to look at readers’ reading habits in the same way the techie Billy Beane in Moneyball looked at baseball players’ habits so smart product design and sales strategies can be found (and now you know why I’m talking about balls, and they’re not Trump’s).

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People are addicted to their smart phones, so much so that they walk into fountains, kill pedestrians and other drivers, and expose themselves to scam artists, muggers, and perverts.  Beyond that, or bloviating about trivial matters, or being a narcissistic showoff on social media, what can a smart phone do for you?  Depends on who you are, of course.  I’ll turn the question around and discuss what your smart phone CANNOT do.

ID a song.  I heard an oldie the other day.  I could hum the melody.  Loved the piano riffs.  But if I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the performer, I could have never answered the question: Who’s that performer and what became of him?  (It was Richard Marx, by the way.  He’s going on tour and has a new album.)  Song recognition isn’t covered by voice recognition.

Make par in golf, or catch a fish.  It might know what those things are, but it can’t do them.  And it can’t help you do them either.  Smart phones are just limited little computers, apps are just limited little programs, and neither of them are really smart.

Write a novel.  Beyond mentioning the obvious that your smart phone can’t create any of the elements necessary to spin a good yarn, try writing a novel with your thumbs!  Voice recognition technology, you say?  Try it.  You’ll be spending so much time editing that you’ll scream for your laptop.  Or join Jack in the Cuckoo’s Nest.  But maybe all those badly edited ebooks are written this way?

Help you find God or inner peace.  It might hook you up with the latest online quack who calls her- or himself a preacher, but God doesn’t answer a smart phone call and the internet offers no inner peace, just a bunch of random stuff that obeys Sturgeon’s Law, not God’s.  You can obtain more peace by putting your phone on a tile floor and stomping it into pieces.

Make popcorn.  Tres important, mes amis!

Offer a substitute for a loved one’s hug or kiss.  You might find a dating site or attract a pervert on Facebook (is that what the new “love” emoticon on FB is for?), but your smart phone is not much of a companion, in spite of your obsession with it.  Moreover, anyone who kisses her or his iPhone or Galaxy screen is just asking for a major bout with the flu, unless s/he puts hand sanitizer on that screen often enough.  That would have the advantage of making it slippery so thieves couldn’t grab it as easily…or make it drop to that tile floor and shatter into pieces!
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This was part of a two-part question in a discussion thread on Linked In—the two questions were this one and whether Author Guild serves self-published authors.  There are good discussions on this social media site about the book business, but I’m usually a lurker because the monitors often have obvious agendas I find annoying (many aren’t writers, of course, but PR reps and marketers, cruising for clients).  I came out of the shadows for this thread and answered the person’s two questions with no and no.

From op-eds in this blog, readers know why I say no to the Author Guild question.  They are first and foremost an org promoting traditional publishing and traditionally published authors—in other words, they feel threatened by indie writers and attack them and their favorite media, ebooks, whenever they can.  They supported the Big Five and Apple in the agency-model price-fixing lawsuit launched by the Justice Department.  They have launched repeated attacks against Amazon, recently in support of Hachette.  They’ve let old has-beens like Patterson and Preston lead the charge against ebooks and indie writers.  So enough for that question.

The other question can’t be answered because there’s a dearth of reliable stats (nothing about the Guild is reliable, of course, including the stats they pull out their you-know-whats).  The genesis of my no can be found in the fact that almost every prize you can sign up for on your own is an award in a contest that’s merely a money-making scheme for the organizers of the contest, from the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Awards to the Writer’s Digest contests.  I get invitations to submit all the time.  They immediately go into the email trash bin on my computer or physical trash bin if they come via snail-mail.

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Design your campaign to your book.  Determine the audience for your book.  Use social media.  Give away freebies.  Start a book blog.  Accumulate hundreds of reviews.  Turn your website into a sales engine.  These are platitudes book PR reps and marketers throw at authors everyday.  And not just at indie authors.  Traditionally published authors who aren’t the prize stallions in traditional publishing’s stables—in other words, authors without the brand names (and formulaic output) of Baldacci, Child, Deaver, Grafton, Higgins-Clark, King, Koontz, and so forth—often have to create their own PR and marketing campaigns, while traditional publishing spams readers with full-page ads and TV promos for the afore-mentioned cash cows (yeah, I know, stallions and cash cows make for an amusing mixed metaphor—I just need the cowboys to have a Chisholm Trail).

Book PR reps and marketers give a lot of sophistic advice that’s often worthless, although they make promises like “Do it my way, and your book will make you rich.”  DIY and how-to books, ditto.  So-called marketing gurus running discussions on LinkedIn and elsewhere, ditto.  Always the SOS, and to be nice, let’s say that means “Same Old Sophisms” (I know—I’ve reviewed a few of these books and read the gurus “sage advice” on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and I’ve concluded that Sturgeon’s Law applies well here).  Most of these people don’t care what they say as long as what the platitudes they spew sound good enough to attract unsuspecting authors into forking over lots of money.  The X-files advice rings true here: trust no one!

Not all PR reps and marketers are jerks, but Sturgeon’s Law does apply to most and their advice.  You can gamble big and you can gamble small (they prefer big, of course), but beware the guru who says, “X is a bestselling author and s/he did Y; if you use Y, you’ll do well too.”  Sophism or platitude is a polite name for that.  X wrote a book that unpredictable readers loved.  Ask those readers if they read X’s book because of Y, and you’ll be surprised at the answers.  As a corollary to Sturgeon’s law, I’d be surprised if 90+% didn’t buy the book because someone told them about it—friends, family, or on social media (but not ads).  Readers see most self-promotion via ads and so forth as spam; authors see it as spamming.

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What’s the optimum price for an ebook?  Depends on whether you’re a reader or a writer, of course.  For readers, the optimum isn’t $0!  You might think it is, but it isn’t.  Writers are going to stop writing if you expect them to give away their ebooks.  Sure, you might find an ebook in promo for $0, and, given the number of ebooks available at that price, you might read for a lifetime without paying for any ebooks.  But there are authors you might be missing (I’m one of them) if you’re waiting for their ebook to be $0.  And no author is going to give ALL his ebooks away for nothing.  Even indies have costs they have to cover.

Promos ($0 or reduced prices) are often only for first books in a series too, no matter the price, so, if you finish that $0 ebook and want to read the next one in the series, you’ll be paying more than $0.  Moreover, the meaning of series is changing.  I don’t condone this, but authors are writing series now that are really one big story arc—individual ebooks in such a series don’t stand alone; they’re not complete stories, and to complete them the reader has to fork up money to continue.  (Yesterday, I reviewed such a book.)  If I’m in that situation as a reader, no matter the cost of the first installment, I won’t continue, but many readers will want to do so, and they’ll pay for it.

In a stable economic system (ebook publishing might not qualify as stable, of course), there’s a tug-of-war between producers (authors, in this case) and consumers (readers, in this case).  This settles down to some stability point where the consumer is willing to pay what is needed for the producer to keep producing.  Unless that stability point is found, one side or the other is going to remain dissatisfied.

The traditional publishers’ agency model isn’t stable in that sense.  Many avid readers (my definition of avid reader is one that reads at least one book every two weeks, on the average) won’t pay traditional publishing’s ebook prices, especially when they see hardbounds and trade paperbacks at $14.99 and the corresponding ebook at $12.99, for example.  Everyone knows it costs less to produce an ebook—the price should reflect that.  Moreover, because most indie ebooks are $2.99 to $4.99, the reader will often prefer foregoing the traditionally published ebook and buy three or four indies.  In addition, those traditionally published authors are often formulaic old stallions who should be sent to the glue factory—the smart reader knows he can find new and exciting entertainment at a better price.

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I don’t know about you, but my love for animals, tame or wild, stops with worms in my apple.  Hence the title; it describes two cases where the tech giant Apple was stopped cold.  Both these are wins for indie artists and negative publicity for this monster of the corporate world.

The little company that started in the garage was never one of my favorites.  In the beginning, Apple computers were just toys.  We taught high school teachers from the Colombian provinces about computing using early Apples with mixed results (the course was based on our book, La Revolucion Informatica en la Educacion—not available in the U.S.)—they learned, though, in spite of the machines’ limitations.  If you wanted to do any real computing work back then, you used a DEC, Cray, or CDC machine.  Even the early MS DOS PCs were more powerful.

The old toasters, still toys, had some success because Apple “borrowed” a GUI from Xerox; the little boxes practically created point-and-click and user friendly, albeit limited, computing experience compared to the command line-based interfaces of the other computers I mentioned.  One paid dearly for that ease of use, though, and not until Apple put that GUI on top of UNIX did you get anything close to a powerful computer (the success of the various versions of LINUX with their own GUIs might have had something to do with that change).

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Part of being nice (Rule #1 from my article “Rogue Waves in Calm Seas”) is being ethical about how you treat readers and other writers.  One of my interests is scientific ethics, but this is a little more general and more complex.  Let’s say you receive a bad review from person X.  Is attacking that person online ethical?  If X is a writer, is it ethical to write a bad review of X’s book in revenge?  I hope you agree with me that it isn’t.

I’ve been on both ends of this little debate.  I received a questionable review and made the mistake of saying something like “I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy Y, but I can offer you a free copy of Z.”  (I won’t go into details here because I have so few reviews you might be able to figure out who it is.)  On the other hand, one person called me to task for a review I wrote, saying that I hadn’t even read the book (exactly what the first person did—he admitted it).  Again, I apologized (I’m human and read a lot, so there’s a small probability I mixed the book with another—that’s about as likely as winning the lottery, though).  But I also stuck by my guns (that’s Rule #2), and added the experience to my list of reasons to stop reviewing on Amazon and return to my mini-reviews for booksI casually read.  (BTW, if I review a book, I’ve read it.  For casual reading, I often only read it once.  For my Bookpleasures reviews, I usually read the book twice, once as a casual reader and again with a critic’s eagle eye.)

If I sinned, it isn’t at the level I described in the first paragraph.  But we can go farther.  I once discussed a plot idea with an author who didn’t express any interest in the idea (I was thinking we might become the next Preston and Child).  Later I found he’d written a book using basically that plot idea.  Is that ethical?  Whatever your opinion, it taught me a lesson that I’d better not discuss my plot ideas with other authors.  I’ve worked hard over the years to accumulate what-ifs, story and character ideas, and possible venues for my novels.  I’ve learned now to keep them to myself.  (When you see an excerpt for the next ebook in a series at the end of the present one, be assured that novel’s done and in editing mode at least—it will be released before another writer can release her/his with the same plot idea.)

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I had just finished Scott Dyson’s short story collection Dark Windows on Monday night a week ago, so I decided to cruise a bit through the 999 Comcast channels we pay so much for and so seldom use (anyone believe that the planned merger with TWC will make that any better?).  I came across Mike and Molly, a sitcom, on one of the traditional network TV channels.  I remembered an episode from a few weeks ago I watched under similar circumstances (rather than launch into a new book and stay up late, I often watch TV to make me drowsy—that and a finger of Jameson whiskey often works to cure insomnia).  In that episode, Molly, the ex-teacher, was finishing an erotic romance—it sounded better than Fifty Shades, though (that was parody #1).

In the new episode, Molly’s picked up by a big-time editor (publishing company not named, but the fancy, uncluttered desk implies he has plenty of minions to work through his slush pile).  He’s suave, sophisticated, and sociopathic (like that alliteration?), i.e. a snooty know-it-all.  He tries to convince Molly to rewrite the book.  She rebels, but he says he owns her (she signed a standard author’s contract, you see, complete with advance).  We now have parody #2 that offers a humorous critique of the traditional publishing paradigm—and maybe a painful reminder to midlist authors?

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