Who do publishers think pays for all this?

This just amazes me--Amazon is forcing publishers to ship expensive art and gift books in single boxes, because otherwise the books get messed up and can't be sold. (Via PV.)

Why does Amazon have to force publishers to treat their high-end products so that they can actually be sold to people? Well, God forbid the publishers produce saleable goods!

Seriously, read this and marvel: "One frustrated publisher said, 'Isn't it Amazon's problem if their customers want their gift book [sic] in each individual box? Isn't their problem [sic] to deal with?'"

Wow. If you are wondering how far publishers have removed themselves from their readers, read that again. It's Amazon's problem that they can't sell what you sold them? Because once Amazon pays the publisher the wholesale price for that book, well, hey, everything's finished. There's no additional step past the wholesale level of sales--Amazon mints money itself for no other purpose than to hand it over to publishers.

There's certainly no reader involved in this, no consumer who shells out $150 for a beautiful-looking art book only to receive one that looks like it got jumped after school for its lunch money. Seriously, have these idiots ever purchased anything on the high end? Have they seen how expensive purses get treated so that they have no nicks or scratches? When people shell out for luxury goods--especially a gift or something to ornament a living room--they want something that doesn't look like it got run over by a truck.

(I mean, come on. Why did I stop shopping at The World's Worst Barnes & Noble? Because the books were damaged. It astonished and infuriated me that they would sell damaged good for full price. I wondered if any of them had ever actually bought anything before, ever. You don't walk into a clothing store and see a bunch of shredded clothes on the rack, do you?)

Of course it is, in fact, Amazon's problem that it can't sell these goods, which is why Amazon is going to kick these particular publishers in the crotch until they give Amazon a product that it can actually get paid for. And how publishers respond? By calling up a reporter and whining about how much their balls hurt! Because that's how business partners resolve a business dispute, especially when the dispute arises from the fact that you are making it so your partner can't turn a profit.

Honestly, who are these clowns? Are they 12 years old? Have they never gone shopping? Is this their first foray into business? Capitalism? I cannot--I mean, my mouth is literally hanging open as I struggle in vain to understand what they hell they are thinking.

And these are the experts who will save you from the pit of self-publishing....

Ugh, ugh, ugh

So, the sinus infection has been clearing up--I didn't take any medication last night or today, which made me very happy because medication always makes me groggy and tired.

Except that I was EVEN MORE groggy and tired today than yesterday!

You can imagine the length of time it took me in my present mental state to sort this out, but: This all started right after I got a flu shot. So I am actually in Flu-Like Symptoms Land, which is a part of the larger Kingdom of Your Immune System Is Trying To Kill You. Hopefully it won't last as long as the flu. It's certainly not as severe as the flu, but of course that's not saying much, since "more severe than the flu" for me would mean, "The person who found me dialed 911, and I went straight into the ICU."

Oh my God, Google

I'm trying to pull Trang down from Google Books--could they set that site up to be any LESS user-friendly? Obviously, the book never went up in their store, but I want the excerpts down from their free site, too. The problem is that I canceled out my account there, and now there is literally NO WAY their system will either let me take down my own book, or God forbid, actually contact a human being so that they can do it. Everything is scripted, and since my situation doesn't really fit the script options, I can't tell them what's going on. Instead, I was forced to re-sign up and act like someone else put my book up--crazy. And I have no idea if that's going to work or if I'm going to have to file a DMCA complaint against myself. Beyond stupid. I regret ever having engaged with these fuckwits in the first place.

Just because it's unpleasant doesn't mean it's not true

(A note: I do seem to be getting better from that stupid sinus infection, but I'm still a little under the weather. Hopefully soon I'll be doing actual novel writing again instead of just blathering on here.)

Last night as I was lying in bed, blowing my nose, I started thinking again about the whole kerfuffle over Amazon's KDP Select exclusivity program. Some thoughts occurred to me, and I resolved to write a blog post about them in the morning. Then morning came, and Passive Guy also had some thoughts on the kerfuffle, so at least I'm not alone in thinking this topic could benefit from a little probing (which will hopefully not degenerate into the beating of a dead horse).

As I mentioned in my earlier post, one of the things that struck me about the comments were how upset people were that Kris Rusch challenged KDP Select (and challenged it mildly--she has books enrolled in KDP Select, so it's not like she's rabidly against it). And she notes, "The 'spirited discussion' . . . happens every time I write something even passingly negative about Kindle or Select."

Passive Guy touches on this in his post, where he notes that some of the comments on his site got "a bit heated," which he argues is "typical." The reason, he writes (emphasis added):

The certitude of small sample sizes leads authors to question or discount others who report much different sales experiences. If someone comments that 78.23% of their ebook sales happen on Nook, that person must be an outlier. Because, of course, I’m not an outlier. What happens to me must be what is happening to most authors.

And if I’m the outlier, I must be doing something wrong and I don’t like to think about that.

People don't like to think about the possibility that they might be doing something wrong. And they ESPECIALLY don't like to think about the possibility that they might be doing something risky.

So you wind up with lovely little logic tangles, like the comment on Rusch's post, "My short-term goal was to get to a place where I could reliably support myself and my family with my books."

Guess what? RELIABLY supporting yourself and your family is NOT a short-term goal, because you can't support your family really well for six months and then stop. That person made a gamble on KDP Select, it paid off, and now she's...wait for it...diversifying out of KDP Select (because she's not actually stupid).

Another wrote, "there is an objective way to measure the success of various approaches to self-publishing: revenue."

HOLY FUCK NO!!! God! That's like saying the "objective" way to measure the success of investing is by the percentage return on your stock. So if you have every last dime tied up in a stock with a P/E ratio of 2,000, you're in great shape because that stock has gone up 500% over the past three weeks! No problems there!

Remember--your time frame matters. A lot. Are you making lots of revenue now, but it's going to evaporate the next time Amazon changes its algorithms? (Sorry, kids, hope you ate your fill over the past six months!) Are you setting yourself up to have a broader, more stable audience, or are you setting yourself up to make a big SPLAT and wind up the centerpiece of a Wall Street Journal pity piece?

The question you need to ask yourself is, What happens if the plug is pulled on KDP Select? What if Amazon isn't available to me? What do I do then?

This isn't some cold-medication-inspired gloom-and-dooming. It's reality. Amazon will block books on the suspicion that there might be something funny with them--what do you do if that happens to you? Rusell Blake wrote about how, by simply altering its algorithm, Amazon dramatically reduced his sales: "Whereas I would see 150-200 books a day sold following a free promo in March or April, my May promos bumped sales to maybe 20-30 per day."

That's several hundred sales--gone! Poof! Hopefully Blake has other marketing strategies in the works and can make up those sales. Hopefully he wasn't expecting that revenue to "reliably support myself and my family."

Like I've said before, this is simply how life is when you own your own business. Depending entirely on a single source of income is always a huge risk. You may decide to take the gamble, but know that you are taking a gamble--if it pays off, your gamble paid off. That's all. Don't look back on it after the fact and say, "What I did was perfectly safe! Anyone who says it was a risky move shall taste my wrath!"

What I think people really don't want to think about when it comes to self-publishing is that it is largely dominated by a single player: Amazon. Like many if not most writers, I get almost all of my book sales through Amazon, despite not having made any kind of push there. (Of course, almost all of my income comes from the Illuminati, a proud example of a well-diversified secret society!) If Amazon stops selling self-published books, a lot of writers are going to be totally screwed. This whole little industry will experience some massive dislocation.

It's a very scary fact--it's the elephant in the room as far as risk is concerned. People really, really want to pretend it isn't there. When someone like Rusch points at it, even in passing, people freak out.

But it's there. It is there, and it is real. Ignoring this risk won't make it go away. Writing nasty notes to or about Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith won't make it go away. Pretending that it's not really a risk because Amazon is so cute and user-friendly won't make it go away. The risk will still be there.

What can you do about it? You can take some of those lovely KDP Select revenues and start (say it with me) diversifying the hell out of Amazon. At the very least, diversify your marketing so that the next algorithm change doesn't gut your sales and bankrupt you. Diversify into non-e-book sales channels. Make serious, long-term efforts to build audience in other retail outlets. Don't act like Amazon is the be-all and end-all in publishing, and for you, it won't be.

DRM and the visually impaired

This (via PV) is an aggravating article by a fellow who is losing his sight about how using DRM really screws him. It's something to think about before you check that little DRM box on Amazon (hint: I don't). DRM is something that tech-savvy people (including actual pirates) can break in about a minute, so it really serves no purpose except to punish granny for her macular degeneration. E-books have the potential to be a huge boon to the visually impaired, so please don't do things like add DRM (or set your fonts so they can't be changed) that make life even more difficult for people.

Science unravels the Internet fuckwad!

This is pretty much off-topic for this blog, but you know, if you feel like jumping into an online fight, think twice--it's probably not going to bring out the best in you. (This is specifically about Facebook, but I think it can apply just as well to having a blog.)

Most of us present an enhanced image of ourselves on Facebook. This positive image—and the encouragement we get, in the form of "likes"—boosts our self-esteem. And when we have an inflated sense of self, we tend to exhibit poor self-control.

"Think of it as a licensing effect: You feel good about yourself so you feel a sense of entitlement," says Keith Wilcox, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and co-author of the study. "And you want to protect that enhanced view, which might be why people are lashing out so strongly at others who don't share their opinions." These types of behavior—poor self control, inflated sense of self—"are often displayed by people impaired by alcohol," he adds.

The poor self-control spills over to other areas of life: People who spend lots of time with uncritical friends on Facebook are more likey to go on eating binges and to have more credit-card debt. The article goes on to say (emphasis added):

We're less inhibited online because we don't have to see the reaction of the person we're addressing, says Sherry Turkle, psychologist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of the social studies of science and technology. Because it's harder to see and focus on what we have in common, we tend to dehumanize each other, she says.

Astoundingly, Dr. Turkle says, many people still forget that they're speaking out loud when they communicate online. Especially when posting from a smartphone, "you are publishing but you don't feel like you are," she says. "So what if you say 'I hate you' on this tiny little thing? It's like a toy. It doesn't feel consequential."

Arguments, arguments, arguments!

Well, that post of Rusch's that I linked to earlier has led to an enormous spate on on-line debates about the merits and shortcomings of Amazon's KDP Select exclusivity program. (Am I overly cheery? It's just that my immediate gut reaction to that post was "happy dance!" and other people's reaction was...NOT happy dance. Maybe it's just evidence that you'll be happier if you don't take everything personally.)

Passive Guy noted the discussion on his link to the post, so he made a special post for it. Worth a read if you want proof positive that EVERY BOOK IS DIFFERENT. Yeah, sorry about that--this is why stuff like this can be argued forever and ever. Some people make big sales on other retail sites, so exclusivity with Amazon would be a fiasco, while others do marvelously well with KDP Select. And just to complicate matters, still others have some books of theirs that do really well on other retailers and other books of theirs that do really well on KDP Select, or they had no sales on other retailers for a long time, but now all of a sudden, they're seeing sales. It's insane.

It's also something to keep very much in mind whenever someone offers up an easy-peasy one-size-fits-all process for marketing your book.

Anyway, the Rusch post did generate a lot of thought-provoking comments, as well as some of the other kind. (I'll just say that one of my least-favorite Internet fight tactics is to bluntly insult someone, and then to insist later that you never insulted anyone and that anyone who interprets your blunt insult as an insult is crazy and stupid, but somehow calling such people crazy and stupid isn't an insult, either. All of the troll tactics are low, but trying to gaslight people is really low.)

One comment that's a bit off the topic but still worth talking about was this one by someone worried about their financial situation. Rusch and some others have some really good, realistic advice--I mean, it does all kind of boil down to "get a job," but they are not the least bit douchey about it. I liked Camille LaGuire's metaphor about writing not being a financial life raft--that's what I mean when I talk about protecting your core income and diversifying your sources of income. Writing is great, freelancing is great, running your own small business is great, but secure and predictable? Oh, no, it is not that.

Nobody wants to watch you flagellate yourself

(OK, fine, I lived in NYC, I realize that there are people who DO want to watch you flagellate yourself. But there aren't very many of them, and do you really want to encourage that sort of thing?)

There is a comedic television show I recently discovered, and I liked it so much that I got the DVDs, in no small part because I wanted to watch the commentary and get some insight into how such a delightful show was created. And I thought that the show would likely have decent commentary because it was created, written, and directed all by the same guy, who was also the guy doing the commentary. Sounds promising, right?

But, no. Nooooo. Nonononono. Turns out that this guy is one of these self-flagellating writers, the sort who has decided that the best way to head off any criticism about his work is to hate every last aspect of it with a virulent passion himself. And apparently I am a stupid asshole with absolutely no discernment whatsoever, because if I had any, I would never have liked the show--in fact, the fire of my loathing for that show would have immolated the very Earth itself.

Seriously, do you think that sort of thing is pleasant to listen to? Not only did I come out of it feeling like my taste had been repeatedly insulted, but I felt really horrible for anyone who has to work with this guy. There's one scene containing this priceless bit of physical comedy, and he shuts up to watch it for about a second, and then he screams because (brace yourself) there's a poster on the wall in a funny place.

Given that kind of supportive workplace atmosphere, I'm amazed the entire cast and crew didn't commit suicide.

I've seen this sort of thing before--people being unrelentingly negative about their work--and it's always extremely unpleasant. There's no point to it: If I like the work, it's insulting and depressing, and if I don't like the work, it doesn't help to listen to someone beat themselves up about it. (For example, I didn't care for that fellow's commentary, but when he started whinging on at the end about how awful his commentary was, shockingly enough that didn't change my opinion about it.)

Of course I go through periods of feeling like I can't produce anything good--in fact, that happens reliably whenever I'm about to release a work. But I know what that is, so I don't wallow in it. And I especially don't wallow in it in public.

Why not? Well, for one thing, I obviously don't like reading or listening to that sort of thing, so I'm not going to impose it on others. But the other thing is that I have sense of purpose about this blog--this blog is to help writers.

To my way of thinking, it's helpful to say, "Yes, I made a mistake and am learning from it, or I'm unhappy with this part of the book and have to fix it, or I'm nervous and it's affecting my judgement," because everyone deals with that--and I think it's important for writers to realize that it's normal to do things like make mistakes or suddenly doubt the worth of your entire output. These things happen, you deal with them, and then you move forward.

Acting like it's the end of the world--"This is imperfect!!! AIIIIGGGGGHHHH!!! MY ENTIRE LIFE'S WORK IS RUINED!!!!! RUINED!!!!!!!!! MY DREAMS ARE DESTROYED!!!!!!!!!"--is supremely unhelpful, both to me personally and to anyone reading this blog who might be influenced by it. And you do have to think about how your words will affect others: I never want to do to anyone what William Shawn did to Jospeh Mitchell. Writers are dramatic and perfectionistic enough without my adding fuel to the fire....

Writers are not consumers!

So, PV has a story about the recent dismissal of a class-action suit brought by writers against Publish America.

Given how notorious Publish America is, why was the lawsuit dismissed? Because it was brought under a consumer-protection law. And as Publish America noted in its brief, "Plaintiffs are not consumers; they have entered into a commercial enterprise with PA."

The court, of course, agreed--wholeheartedly! Remember: Consumer-protection laws do not apply to writers entering into contracts with publishers. When you sign with a publisher, you are regarded by law as a business entity entering into a commercial enterprise with another business entity. The law provides you with no special protections. It assumes you and your publisher are equals--which means you'd damned well better have a lawyer, because you can be sure your publisher does.

Short term v. long term

Edward Robertson has a thought-provoking post on whether or not relying on Amazon's KDP Select is a viable long-term strategy.

It will probably not surprise you to know that I think that it's not, for many reasons, but of course I also think it's a totally reasonable short-term strategy. I'm a fan of experimentation, as long as people stay nimble and don't lock themselves in (and one of the nice things about KDP Select is that it is a short-term agreement--three months instead of the life of the copyright or something like that).

Diversifying is always difficult, which is why even in the realm of personal finance, there are people who think you shouldn't do it. When you diversify, you are almost always forgoing easy money now in favor of security later.

For example, when that long-suffering encyclopedia editor wanted me to work for him all the time, that encyclopedia was paying better than my other clients. I didn't have to prove myself to him or spend a lot of time sending out pitch letters for people to ignore--he was happy to give me more work than I could possibly do.

And yet, none of that changed the fact that that project was very suddenly shut down (another case of "we don't want to pay to print this"). Had I been solely dependent on it for income, I would have made a lot of money in the short term--and been deeply screwed, with no contacts and no clients, in the long term. The problem wouldn't have been simply one of income--it would have been the fact that I hadn't kept in touch with my other clients, who sensibly enough, would have found other freelancers to do their work.

In the world of finance, it's really easy to make a decision look good or bad by fiddling with the timeline: If you bought your house in 2004, by 2007 you looked like a genius, but by 2009, you looked like an asshole. It's the same thing with diversifying: For the first--oh, I can't remember, 12 months maybe?--I looked like an idiot for spending time on other, less lucrative projects. But two months later, I looked a whole lot smarter.

My point is that KDP Select is a tool that seems to work pretty well for some people. But it's not a perfect tool, and it doesn't work for every writer or for every project (and has never, even before the changes to Amazon's algorithms). Most important, there are other tools out there, especially when it comes to marketing, and many of these tools (garnering reviews, advertising campaigns, pushing paper books to stores) can be explored while a book is on KDP Select--it's not always a case of either/or.

If one day your KDP Select tool suddenly vanishes, you'll be happy you went to the trouble of figuring out what other tools work for you.

Ugggghhh....

I've been feeling kind of tired and headachy lately, and couldn't quite figure out why, but now the answer is clear: Sinus infection. Yuck. Obviously this is going to adversely affect production of anything other than yellow mucus.

Random bits

Life stuff is interfering with writing, but with any luck, I'll start tomorrow. A couple of interesting tidbits.

1. The Foolscap flyers: Since response to the GeekGirlCon flyers was not what I had hoped, I decided to modify the flyers by removing the "it's free!" message from the header. The thinking was that maybe that message gave the book a bargain-basement type odor--you know, "I'm making it free because I know it's no good!"

Well, maybe it does, but apparently people don't mind a bargain--I have had NO redemptions of the free coupon on the Foolscap flyers. None whatsoever. "It's free!" is back in the header for Norwescon!

2. The Meetup: That went well, I thought--I enjoyed it, and people seemed happy with it. And something interesting came up: I mentioned that it's important to have a clickable table of contents in an e-book, and one woman said that she will not buy e-books that don't have them, because they are just too difficult to navigate. Something to think about--yes, it's a pain to do them, but IMO well worth the effort.

Yet another example of the economics of self-publishing

Kris Rusch has a thought-provoking blog post in which she looks at Joe Konrath's sales numbers. What's interesting is that she makes the case that he is still, even today, basically a mid-lister--his sales are good, not great.

And yet, he's making buckets of money.

I know I've brought this up before, but I just feel like doing the happy dance whenever I see something like that--writers making a living (or waaay more than a living) off of sales that would be of zero interest to large publishing houses. There's a big difference between 70% of the pie and 10%.

Progress report

No progress today, alas. Remember how the printer died, but it was under warranty, so they sent me a replacement? Yeah, the replacement died (a Hewlett-Packard Pro8000, if you are wondering what to avoid) shortly before I left for Peru. It was probably still under warranty, but I think at a certain point (you know, like when the same model dies twice in six months) you need to acknowledge that you have purchased a lemon. It's not like the kids were attacking it with hockey sticks or anything, either--it died twice under normal use.

So I ordered a new printer (a Canon this time), and it came today. Hopefully it will last longer, and it has a built-in scanner, which presumably will take care of that issue as well. Anyway, it took a long time to set up (why these things always take so long, I'll never know), and then I had a big backlog of stuff that needed to be printed and sorted. So that plus some other errands pretty much ate my day--tomorrow hopefully I can get stuff done before I have to go lead my first Meetup as organizer. 

Why did he do that?

I recently finished Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld. It's a fascinating non-fiction book, and I feel like it contains a valuable lesson for writers of fiction as well.

The book is about the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, and how it basically went off the rails and dedicated enormous resources to hassling hippies in the late 1960s. (They have long hair! LOOOONG HAIR!!!) Now, I knew that that had happened--I've read Steal This Book and Soul on Ice and a ton of other 1960s counterculture "classics" that to be honest are for the most part incredibly boring to the contemporary reader. (Yes. You smoked weed and got laid. That is so fascinating.)

But I'd never really gotten any insight into why it happened, other than Hoover was The Man, and The Man can't handle having his mind blown by young people smoking weed and getting laid, man! (I feel obligated to point out here that Hoover was probably gay, and some of the people he worked with quite closely for a long time were most certainly gay, so I don't think his problem was Puritanism.) Rosenfeld spent more than 20 years fighting the FBI in court for access to its files, so he has a lot of letters and memos and whatnot that provide insight into Hoover's thought process.

And a fascinating thought process it is! For starters, Hoover surrounded himself with people who thought exactly like he did--proof that the echo chamber existed long before the Internet. So by the time the late 1960s rolled around, assumptions like "Democrat = Communist" were widely accepted within the FBI, because it's not like anybody in the Bureau knew any Democrats or, God forbid, actually was one. In other words, there were no reality checks taking place, and no speed bumps on the road from Legitimate Security Threat Land to Crazy Town.

What was the legitimate security threat? Well, the Comintern was indeed a real thing, and in the 1930s and 1940s most Communist parties in the United States were actively managed by the Soviet Union and supported Soviet interests over American interests. In the late 1940s, people working for the Soviets were spying on the American atomic-weapons program. So that sort of thing was a totally legitimate area of interest for law enforcement, which is why the FBI got involved.

Unfortunately, as the level of Communist/Soviet activity in the United States waned in the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI just assumed it was better hidden. The way the Communists operated really helped stoke the paranoia--remember, this was a political movement that developed under the totalitarian regime of the czars. So Communists had a policy of 1. lying about who they were, and 2. surreptitiously taking control of organizations that were largely not Communist by having a small number of Communists enter the organization and take leadership positions.

The secrecy meant that if a group had few or no people in it who were openly Communist, you still couldn't be 100% sure that it was not a Communist front organization that would promote the interests of the Soviet Union. And indeed, Hoover and his people were, in general, 100% sure groups that were making trouble were Communist front organizations, even if the vast majority of the people in those groups were clearly not Communists.

So when the free-speech movement started at UC Berkeley in 1964, Hoover did not see a bunch of college kids agitating to pass out flyers on campus (yawn). He saw a Communist front organization (!!!). I was surprised about how sincerely Hoover believed this--I'd always assumed that the people making these sorts of allegations knew they were pretty ridiculous. But Hoover's underlings obediently produced a report saying that the FSM was a Communist front organization, and then Hoover himself was genuinely quite surprised when that report was discredited.

At this point, Hoover's thought process went like this:

Q. Why are these kids acting so weird?

A. Soviet infiltration!

Within just a couple of years, though, even the FBI knew that the Soviets had SFA to do with what was going on at Berkeley. Unfortunately, at this point they didn't care. Hoover's thought process had devolved to:

Q. Why are these kids acting so weird?

A. Who cares? They must be destroyed!

And that's when the FBI became an instrument of straight-up political oppression--hippies, peaceniks, Democrats, they were all subversives and all the enemy.

Do you see how much more interesting that kind of thing is that the simple-minded "Hoover is The Man" or "Hoover is evil" or "Hoover can't handle freaks"? It's a story, and a tragic one--a guy starts out in trying to protect people's freedom, but thanks to certain flaws in his character (an unwillingness to associate with anyone who does not agree with him; an unwillingness to adapt to change; a willingness to break the law to pursue an investigation), he winds up becoming quite possibly the most serious threat to that freedom. The slow decline in his ideals, the gradual sense that there are no rules that apply to him, the creeping belief that anyone who disagrees with him is evil--you can see how it could happen. You can relate to it even if you think you would have handled things differently.

It's so much more engaging than just having a two-dimensional villain plopped before you, along with instructions to hate him. Bad guys who are just bad--you know, one day they just decided to become evil, as you do--are such a wasted opportunity.

OK, OK....

Today I made the mistake of actually checking up on what's going on with Trang and Trust. People are 1. buying them, and 2. reviewing them favorably. I am grateful for it, of course, but what are they saying in the reviews? THEY WANT THE NEXT BOOK!!!

All right! I'll get on that..not today, please, I'm tired still, and tomorrow I have to get up at the crack of dawn and look after a four-year-old. But Wednesday--Wednesday I shall resume writing. I'm not promising a productive day, but it's on my calendar and everything.

A weak-ass report from Foolscap (but I have artists!)

Yeah, with one thing and another I basically had to shine Foolscap on. I had too much stuff to catch up on, and at least one thing I wanted to do was scheduled late at night, which just wasn't going to happen with this jet lag.

Anyway, I did drop off flyers and cruise through the art show as part of my ongoing quest to find fantasy and sci-fi artists people can potentially use for book covers. There was some overlap with the Westercon artists, so I'm only listing the people who weren't at that show and who have Web sites where you can see their work and contact them. (And seriously, artists, you really need to have Web sites. Especially if you have a common name that makes you impossible to find on Google. I'd love to help you, but there is only so much I can do.)

Lela Dowling and Frank Cirocco

Chris Sumption

Laura Cameron

Raven Mimura

Konrath gives the numbers

Konrath breaks out his sales, in detail. It's really interesting, and I'll say again that I really, really appreciate that he does this.

And he says some things that I think are really important when it comes to signing deals with publishers, especially e-book only deals, so I'll quote them here. Emphasis is added:

On a $6.99 legacy ebook, the author makes $1.04 after agent commission. The publisher makes $3.67. So let's play the advance game.

A publisher pays an author $20,000 advance. Author keeps $17,000 after the agent is paid. There is no paper version. The ebook, priced at $6.99, sells 12,000 ebooks in five years, which is what my legacy ebook Dirty Martini has sold.

The author would still owe $7520 on the advance before earning another nickel. In the meantime, the publisher has made $44,000. Minus the $20k advance, the publisher has pocketed $24,000, and still will make money for a few more years without paying the author any more.

If the author self-pubbed his own book at $6.99, and sold 12,000 copies, he would have made $58,880.

If publishers keep signing authors for ebook-only deals, at the current royalty rates, they'll get richer than they ever have, at the expense of authors. Authors will still be living advance to advance, never earning out, and publishers will be printing money by doing nothing more than providing cover art, proofreading, and editing services--all jobs that can be freelanced for fixed costs.

If you are thinking about signing an ebook-only deal with a publisher, crunch the numbers first....

Tread lightly. There's a big difference between taking $1,000,000 because a publisher thinks you're the next James or Hocking, and taking $20,000 that you'll never earn out.

You see?

In today's Wall Street Journal: Three out of four start-up companies backed by venture capital fail.

Venture capitalists "bury their dead very quietly," Mr. [Shikhar] Ghosh[, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who researched the subject,] says. "They emphasize the successes but they don't talk about the failures at all."

There are also different definitions of failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail, based on Mr. Ghosh's research.

Failure often is harder on entrepreneurs who lose money that they've borrowed on credit cards or from friends and relatives than it is on those who raised venture capital.

Just making the point that venture capital isn't the golden ticket some people who liken it to traditional publishing would like you to think it is. Big expectations + tight deadlines = high likelihood of failure. Doesn't matter what industry.