News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #26…
#149: Those readers who have read my Soldiers of God and, to a lesser extent, some of my other books, know I’m concerned with both kinds of terrorism, home-grown and imported. In fact, Soldiers portrayed the dangers of the home-grown kind long before the DHS made it a priority. In that book and elsewhere (including the articles in this blog), I have discussed the distinction between spirituality and fundamentalism.
Many people, from U.S. presidents to megachurch ministers, claim to talk to God, to have a one-on-one with the Old Lady who can explain everything science can’t possibly explain. I always thought this was part of spirituality and, in some sense, admired people who could do it, although I knew the Old Lady had to be really good at multitasking to talk with everyone. Now a new book by T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, paints this as something belonging to neither spirituality nor fundamentalism (by the way, the eBook breaks my price barrier since it’s priced at $14.99). From what I understand about Mr. Luhrmann’s thesis, the person who talks with God is simply having a schizophrenic conversation with a section of his mind he or she has created and called God.
Whether you swallow the theory or not, there is one interesting consequence of this sublime arrogance that is important to our justice system and mystery, thriller, and suspense writers alike. When the perp says, “God (or the Devil, or devils, or some famous person, dead or alive) made me do it,” should we automatically declare the person schizoid, slap him in a straitjacket, and put him in a padded cell? What about political leaders who have done something reprehensible, like seduce an intern or invade Iraq? In some sense, all murderers are crazy, for example, but we only send them to the loony bin on a psychiatrist’s say-so—otherwise, it’s life in prison or a lethal injection…or a cushy pension. Perhaps the psychiatrists should read Mr. Luhrmann’s book and put more murderers into the funny farms. Geez, we might end up needing more psychiatric hospitals than prisons!
#150: The NY Times’ anti-Amazon campaign continues! I wouldn’t mind it so much if the newspaper got it right. This time it only implicitly chooses sides with Apple and the legacy publishing paradigm, but the paper’s editors might as well headline their business section with the title “The New York Times Supports Apple” or, more truthfully, “The New York Times Hates Amazon.” The case in point was the story about Buzz Bissinger’s discovery that his little memoir/novella After Friday Night Lights, a short follow-up of his book, suddenly disappeared from Amazon.
Here’s my take: Bissinger is very much a legacy author. He had no idea about and apparently had no desire to follow what his publisher, Amazon, and Apple were doing. In short, your average self-pubbing author has a clearer idea about today’s publishing business than this man. Apple decided to promote his book—I can’t tell if the publisher knew about that promotion or not. For a short time, Apple charged $0 for it, although the author still received the promised royalty. Amazon responded by reducing their price to $0. Seems fair, right? The publisher, without telling Bissinger, removes the book from Amazon, to protect their author.
Who’s at fault here? It clearly isn’t Mr. Bissinger, who’s more a victim. I see Apple as the principal perp and the publisher as the accomplice in Bissinger’s mugging. The fault certainly doesn’t lie with Amazon! Yet the NY Times paints Amazon as the culprit. Talk about biased reporting! Either the paper feels nobody will read this article (I did, as an interested spectator), or they feel they’re big enough to get away with twisting the facts and blaming Amazon. I’m getting close to ending my subscription with the Times…but then I wouldn’t know when they come out with a spin-doctored report like this one…sigh….
#151: Speaking of the Times, ever wonder how they determine their bestseller lists? It used to be clear—they’d somehow glom together the numbers sold by bookstores. Online retailers then complicated that issue, and all the new formats, especially eBooks, have complicated it even more.
Perhaps in recognition of the impossible task of comparing apples and oranges (hardbounds and eBooks, for example), the Times now publishes various lists every Sunday in their Book Review section, taking up valuable space that used to be dedicated to book reviews and, frankly, just muddying the waters even more.
Moreover, all these lists have been completely biased by Oprah’s recommendations and others (both Stuart and Colbert, as well as other talk-show gadflies, often have authors as guests). In other words, you can eliminate the top five automatically as just being a fad promoted by someone who read the Cliff Notes version at best.
This comment is especially important for eBooks, self-published ones in particular. The eBook has the advantage that it has staying power—you won’t find it on the shelves of B&N one week and returned to the publisher the next. It earns royalties for the author and his descendants forever. Call this trickle of royalties “the steady state.”
In contrast to the steady state, the eBook can also suffer spikes in sales. Call this a fad! The rise time preceding the spike (the evolving number going into the peak) is often faster than the decay, but it’s still a fad. Once it hits that steady state after the decay, that’s what’s important to an author in the long run.
These dynamics explain why I pay so little attention to the NY Times eBook bestsellers list—except for complaining about it, of course. For example, the Fifty Shades series is currently 1, 2, and 3. Nicholas Sparks schmaltzy The Lucky One (if ever a book shouldn’t have been made into a movie, this is one) is currently number 5. Conclusion: these eBooks sales numbers are spiking right now.
The first series’ popularity is due to the number of sexually repressed suburban women out there (yes, I know, it’s really their husbands’ fault!); the second is due to the same phenomenon that made Jane Austen so famous in her time, with periodic recurrences—unmitigated, schmaltzy romance. Another example of bestseller success that’s hard to understand is Lara Spencer’s (of GMA pop culture fame) I Brake for Yard Sales—but that’s non-fiction probably with a well-defined niche, although I suspect that many of those same fans of the Fifty Shades series are also fans of this one.
I have faith in readers, nevertheless—I firmly believe that they can progress from schmaltz and mommy porn to literature and even non-fiction that treat serious themes. If you know someone out there with the above proclivities, please work on them…otherwise, literature, whether serious literary fiction or fiction for entertainment, is doomed. The lack of a Pulitzer this year proves the former is the trend. The incredible success of Fifty Shades and its ilk proves the latter is also the trend. Maybe serious authors are just wasting their time?
#152: Have you received your offer from Writer’s Digest about their digital version yet? I opened this e-mail with trembling, excited hands (I can’t call it spam because I receive two newsletters from them, one by Kelms that’s often useful and another by Brewer that’s often useless). WD often has interesting and useful articles for writers—their last issue even admitted to the existence of self-publishing! I’ve occasionally expressed my desire for a digital version.
I guess I have to be clearer. I want a version that every month autodownloads from Amazon right onto my Kindle whenever the latter is on and close enough to my router—this means anyplace in my house. That’s what I mean by digital. I guess WD and I don’t speak the same language. They offer a PDF for $9.96/year “delivered directly to your e-mail 8 times per year.” That’s not a digital subscription. Even the NY Times, that old bastion of newspaper publishing, would not call that a digital subscription!
Sure, I can look at a PDF on my Kindle after going through two or three more steps to get the file from an attachment on my e-mail to a file on my Kindle (used like an external hard disk). Am I lazy? No, I just like convenience. For $9.96, I expect more. I can often download a full eBook for $5 or less—again, direct through my router to my Kindle. Moreover, PDFs like this often have notoriously small fonts that don’t work well with aging eyes, so I have to flip to landscape, a process which messes up everything else that I’m reading where the authors have done their formatting correctly for the Kindle. You see, “landscape” means rotating my Kindle ninety degrees—possible, but not exactly book-like.
In brief, WD is still living in the 20th century. It’s time for them to wake up and realize that they’re in the 21st. Moreover, their adherence to the old legacy paradigm, probably thought by the editorial staff to keep everyone happy, just manages to make everyone mad. They need a true digital edition for self-publishers (book formatting tricks, editing tricks, marketing ideas, other eBook services, etc) and perhaps another paper edition for those people sticking with the legacy paradigm (how to write query letters, how to find a publisher, how to find an agent, etc). The former should be about a tenth the cost of the latter. Guess which one will be successful in the long run?
In libris libertas….
