Most sci-fi readers and writers are familiar with the Fermi paradox, summarized by the question in the title, and the associated Drake equation that tried to resolve it. For those who are not, let me review that history first before going on to discuss a different take on the Drake equation that I found interesting.

The Fermi paradox first appears in my sci-fi books in the second book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In Sing a Samba Galactica, Earth colonists on New Haven, an E-type planet in the 82 Eridani system, have evidence for some local ETs and try to figure out how to communicate with them. Here’s the excerpt:

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They had an informal meeting in the bachelors’ dining area.  Takahashi watched as Malenkov, ever the showman, pinged his beer mug with a laser pointer and then stood on top of a chair.

“At Los Alamos, in 1950,” he began, in his best orator’s voice, “the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, as well as other physicists working on the atomic bomb project, this provocative question:  If life is so common in the universe, where are they?”

Malenkov waited for some chuckles to subside, gulped some beer, and continued.

“Fermi noted there are plenty of stars older than our sun.  If life were so plentiful, it would have begun on planets around these stars billions of years before it began on Earth.  In that case, shouldn’t Earth have been visited or colonized by a race much older than our own?  Even with slow means of space travel like what we used to come to New Haven, a civilization with a will to homestead could settle a large fraction of the galaxy in a million years or so.”

Malenkov looked out at his audience.  Takahashi, sitting in the cafeteria’s front row, smiled at him.  So which one of us is Holmes and which one Watson?

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One of the biggest mistakes I made as a writer is not to choose a nom de plume. I don’t know if Steven M. Moore is as common as Joe or John Smith, but it’s common enough that I recognize now the error of my ways. Here’s my original reasoning: I had nothing to hide! I knew my writing and name would be public, but I wasn’t writing porn, erotica, or steamy romances…as a guy (that Jack Nicholson character did in As Good as It Gets, but that’s Hollywood—not clear whether he used a pen name, though). My blog posts wouldn’t be advocating anything illegal or sketchy either (legality depends on the historical context, as Voltaire knew). So why not use my real name?

I even had a list of possibilities, long ago discarded, some quite clever and others too cute. I even thought about using a woman’s name because I fully intended to put smart, strong female characters into my stories. I’ve known a few and had no hesitations about portraying such characters, but I thought a woman’s name might avoid snide comments about how a male author shouldn’t pretend he can get into a woman’s head. I love and understand women probably better than most men and think the world would be a better place in general if they were in control (there are a few exceptions that couldn’t qualify—see yesterday’s post). I’m gender neutral—my choice of protagonist for a novel just depends on the story I’m writing.

Stephanie d’Amour might have made a good nom de plume if I were a writer of erotica and/or steamy romances. Esteban Mora might have worked for a writer of international and interstellar mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi (a dear friend in Colombia called me that, so why not?). They were on the list. French- German- and Spanish-sounding names and oh-so-very-English-sounding names were also on the list. My first criterion was uniqueness; my second was a name that was easy to pronounce and spell (the first two pen names I mentioned were disqualified under both these criterions.) I also considered variations on the names of famous scientists (one author friend made such a choice).

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There’s an insurance commercial where the company’s iconic spokeswoman takes on multiple roles at a family picnic. I don’t even remember the company that was advertising—that’s usually lost on me (sorry, Madison Ave wonks)—but I do remember noticing one actor took on multiple roles. Writing dialogue is a lot like that. An author with multiple characters shouldn’t speak in a unique voice that makes them sound the same. Each character must have her or his individual voice.

Newbie authors often don’t write good dialogue for that reason. An author has to adopt different personalities. Actors are trained to do that. Many creative writing programs neglect dialogue and emphasize narrative. That’s fine for literary fiction, I suppose (maybe that’s why it’s so boring for me), but not for genre fiction. Of course, the reason for a writing program’s emphasis on narrative is also due to the fact that it’s easier to teach. Indeed, unless an author is a wee bit schizoid and can assume different roles like the actor, writing good dialogue is almost impossible to teach.

But I think authors can learn to do it. More on that later. First, let me show narrative isn’t as easy as writing programs think it is. What do Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea have in common? Boring narrative! Melville goes into boring detail about how to turn whale blubber into lamp oil, among other boring things; Verne dwells on all the wonderful undersea flora and fauna his protagonist is seeing. I’m being repetitive because I’ve mentioned these two “classics” before, but these 19^th century books often used to teach high school students to think they hate reading (Giants in the Earth, Silas Marner, and Jane Austen tomes are other examples) are good illustrations of HOW NOT TO WRITE interesting narrative.

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With apologies to Dylan (that phrase is justifiably part of American heritage now and probably international), I thought this would be a good title for an article about how publishing is changing in America and around the world. From readership to media and writers to retail, things are changing so fast that it’s even hard for people heavily involved in the business to keep up with things.

Readers have it good in general. With so many good books and so many good authors, in all fiction genres and non-fiction from how-to to memoirs, books for all ages and other demographics are being published. Given that even an avid reader maxes out at only 50 or so books per year, a single reader can’t hope to try them all. The only negative seems to be price—the traditional publishing establishment continues to expect readers to pay $10 or more, even for ebooks, but the indies, with most ebooks less than $5, solve most of that pricing problem.

Yet the number of readers is decreasing. If you’re on Goodreads, it looks like that number is huge, so my statement is a bit deductive and statistically flawed perhaps. I factor in the time people can spend on entertainment. People are generally working more and longer hours, so leisure time is decreasing. Yet the number of things they can do with that leisure time is increasing. Streaming video; computer games; YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other internet websites; sports, whether active or passive; and so forth—these all use up free time. People have to prioritize and curling up with a good book is becoming less of a priority with the multitude of other leisure-time activities available.

What number of books is too many, given this situation? The number of new books published each year varies from half a million to a million, yet most of them sell less than 250 copies per book, partly due to decreasing readership and partly due to simple saturation even if the number of readers were increasing. Google estimates that about 130 million books exist in the world, but that has to be ramping up considerably each year. The Bowker number for new indie books was 450k+ in 2013 alone (that counts both pbooks and ebooks), but Bowker only counts books with ISBNs—many get by just fine with Amazon’s ASIN number that’s assigned to an Amazon-exclusive ebook.

Ebooks are to pbooks what DVDs were to VHS tapes, CDs to LPs, and cassette tapes to eight-tracks. Media preferences often send shock waves through an entertainment industry. There are always hangers-on, of course. Many still prefer that LP sound (I still have a collection of 200+ classical music LPs, mostly because the performances don’t exist on CD). Some books—those doorstop biographies or graphics-intensive textbooks—don’t work well as ebooks, but trade fiction is better on my Kindle than weighing down my bookshelves with pbooks. There is no denying that the ebook revolution went hand-in-hand with the indie writing revolution, though. Ebooks don’t cost much to produce, a savings traditional publishers are loathe to pass on to customers as they continue to push their costly pbooks (environmentally unfriendly hardbounds and trade paperbacks).

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OK, maybe they’re not.  You might be in love with those “original screenplays” featuring gratuitous but steamy sex, car chases, main characters (MCs) hanging from helicopters, and so forth.  You’re an audiovisual person who puts aural and visual stimulation over everything else.  Maybe a person addicted to video games and YouTube videos?  Lots of gunshots, bomb blasts, and marching zombies going off to war?  Why in the hell are you reading this article then?

For the rest of us (presumably the majority of the readers of this blog), you like a bit more meat in your Hollywood diet.  You expect a movie to take a carefully crafted story from a book and add the audio and visual components.  You’ll still have to add the odors of bodies in sexual heat, blood from dismembered bodies, and bowel and bladder cadaveric releases mentally (I just did a pretty good job of that, right?)—at least until Hollywood figures out how to add an odortrack to complement the soundtrack.

The story from the book pays more attention to plot, settings, characters, and dialogue than any “original screenplay”—and that’s the problem.  That screenplay is an outline for the director to follow, no more.  If it comes from a carefully crafted book, that director has another tool to use, a source that will fill in details the screenwriter cannot hope to include in her or his screenplay.  That additional step, if done well, can make a great movie out of a great book.  In some cases it can make a good movie out of a terrible book or a terrible movie out of a great book.  But that screenplay step is fraught with danger.  Yet not having a carefully crafted story available sends a movie to the plate with already two strikes against it.

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[This post is an elaboration on several themes I’ve presented in earlier writing posts, my little course on writing fiction, in particular. BTW, I’ve compiled the lessons from that course into a PDF. You can receive it for free just for the asking. Note that I don’t keep your email addressed. My newsletter, out most Fridays, is completely online.]

I suppose “gurus” (agents, editors, publishers, PR and marketing experts, and even other authors) have been telling authors for decades (maybe centuries?) that the key to having a successful book is “writing to market.”  In our internet age, it’s almost become a mantra or an idol to worship and pray to. Many successful books prove it’s a false idol. Sure, authors can jump on a bandwagon.  (I don’t know how many stories about young magicians, mysteries titled Gone Something, or space operas that almost plagiarize Star Wars, itself almost a plagiarism, are out there).  That bandwagon might even carry them along to some success as far as book sales go.  But the whole thing just reminds me of those cute little lemmings that often commit mass suicide.

The counter to this sophistic advice from so-called gurus can run from the practical to the idealistic.  Let’s start with this quote: “Your best marketing is a book that sparks enthusiastic word of mouth….”—Mark Coker, Smashwords founder. On the surface, “writing to market” seems to mesh quite well with that, but that’s the wrong interpretation.  “Writing to market” implies there are already successful books out there you should emulate.  Coker’s advice is directed to how YOU can create a NEW market, getting people to talk and write about your book.  “It’s just like X’s” doesn’t create a market for your book; it’s an admission that you write parasitic literature that’s not original.

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[Last Friday in my newsletter, I strongly advised authors to avoid the Indie Authors Coop.  Here’s why.]

OK, I’m not talking about Mr. Trump here, but there is a wall involved: I’ve been banned from Indie Authors Coop!  That’s an e-wall designed to keep me out.  Warning: it’s an exclusive club; no struggling authors wanted!  The line I crossed was saying that having a successful book is like winning the lottery—that there’s luck involved (I said it again in my last post).  Apparently, the narcissistic authors who have banned together in this forum don’t want to hear any of that—they call it negativity.  The truth hurts, I guess.  I’m banned, and I say, “Good riddance.”  I don’t need to associate with people who don’t remember what it’s like to struggle as an author, and even less with people who don’t realize how lucky they are.  Their attitude?  They’re successful, so screw the rest of us.  That attitude is typical of Big Five authors—the Authors Guild is full of them—but are these indies any different?

Yes, I was told that I crossed the line by mentioning that luck is involved.  Luck is involved—writing a book is one thing, but having its readership grow into an avalanche is a rare phenomenon.  I’ve been saying this for years.  (See my course on fiction writing.)  It seems like a fair warning to starry-eyed newbies who think they’re going to be the next Hemingway.  It’s simply a dose of realism.  Hard work only gets you so far.  Having a successful book is like winning a lottery, not PowerBall—one hopes that the odds for the book are better than 1 in 292 million—but a million-dollar scratch-off.  And that goes for traditionally published authors as well as indies.

And it’s not just sour grapes on my part—or negativity, as some IAC members call it (“some” means enough to get me banned).  The stats show that it’s rare that a book becomes a bestseller (whatever that means—the NY Times keeps their formula as secret as the formula for Coke, but it’s biased to hell because it includes big book barn purchases).  The biggest retailer in the business, Amazon, has stated that most books sell less than 500 copies.  They have more access to the stats than I do.  Maybe Amazon is wrong, but it’s the best info I have.  And you really don’t need to believe Amazon; you can see it in their rankings (new books have biased rankings, so check out those published more than six months ago).

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First, let’s clear away some misconceptions.  Traditional publishing means the old publishing business model of finding an agent, hoping that agent finds you a publisher/editor, said publisher/editor hands you off to the staff (other editors and cover artists), and maybe sets up a book signing or two when your book is finally out (it can take a year or more).  You could even enjoy seeing your book in a Barnes & Noble book barn for a few months after it’s published and get your local bookstores to order a few copies (but not the ebook versions).  Once you find an agent, you can pretty much wash your hands of the rest, right?  Wrong!

Unless you’re an old mare or old stallion in the Big Five’s stables of bestselling horses, or have a lot of leverage (your father was an author, your uncle owns an imprint, and so forth, what my Latino friends call la palanca), you’re pretty much on your own after your book is published.  You’re now a midlist author, even if you’re publisher is one of the Big Five.  They place only safe bets on those old horses—new voices are generally ignored and the bulk of all that PR and marketing aid you thought you were going to get, and especially those expensive video trailers in prime time and full-page ads in the NY Times, go to the old authors who grind out their formulaic bestsellers.

That means that you have to promote your own book, just like an indie.  The main difference with your fellow indie author is that s/he reaps a lot more for money invested and time spent on promo efforts than you do, 35% or 70% versus your 10% or 15%.  Over time (sometimes as short as a month), bookstores will no longer stock your books and your publisher won’t even want to talk to you—unless your book wins the lottery, of course, and the publisher moves you temporarily into the winners’ stables.  And, if bestsellerdom doesn’t smile on you, oh the hassle when you want your rights back so you can go indie.  That’s life in the publishing world of the 21^st century.

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As more and more planets are discovered, some in their star’s E-zone (Earth-like conditions stretched a little, but always with liquid water), it becomes almost a certainty that life exists “out there.”  Earth isn’t the center of the Universe, it might not be all that special, and human beings better start giving any gods they’ve created a little more credit, or create new ones with a more universal outlook.  That said, what about intelligent life?

Fermi’s paradox, summarized succinctly by “Where are they?”, isn’t really a paradox.  If you assume the ETs are subject to our same physical laws—in other words, they’re limited by the speed of light and the immense distance even to nearby stars—they can’t visit us anymore than we can visit them.  Many ET civilizations might have come and gone.  Their people might have wondered if there’s someone “out there,” or they didn’t give an ET rat’s ass—maybe they were so xenophobic they didn’t want to meet anyone else, or their planet was shrouded by thick fog and they didn’t even know anything outside the atmosphere existed.  Intelligent life just might not be that intelligent.

Or, it might be a lot more intelligent and technically more advanced than we are, pushing beyond the limitations of physical laws as we currently understand them.  In my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (CCT), I postulate some colonization in near Earth-space via trips lasting hundreds of years, followed by an ET-Human collaboration that figures out to hop around the multiverses, a type of faster-than-light travel that doesn’t make old Einstein turn over in his grave.

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[Consider this to be part two of last week’s “Forget that Audience.”]

One answer to this question would be some magic formula that guarantees an author s/he’ll have a bestseller.  I’d be the first person standing in line to buy that formula, but I’m also enough of a realist to know that it doesn’t exist!  What do Fifty Shades, The Martian, and Harry Potter have in common?  They surprised the hell out of every agent and editor who thinks they’re privy to that formula, that’s what!  Even Amazon admits that most books don’t sell many copies.  Translation: most books don’t seem to give readers what they want.

Most authors’ books do poorly.  I’m in that club.  I probably should win a prize for being the least successful author.  But, as a reviewer of other authors’ books, I can’t figure out why some authors achieve success and others, like me, walk in a desert that seems to be devoid of readers.  Maybe it’s a saturation problem—too many good books and authors, not enough readers.  Maybe it’s a time problem—there are people who want to read more, but they’re busy with other things.  Of course, those other things might be the latest TV soap opera from Amazon or NetFlix; in other words, people choose to spend their free time elsewhere, not reading.

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