Living off windfalls

In Kris Rusch's series on why writers disappear, she mentions that many writers can't handle how differently money flows when you are your own boss than when you are an employee and you get a nice, predictable check every week or every two weeks.

She notes:

No business—not one—earns the same amount of money month in and month out. Employees do, because the employer guarantees the paycheck. But if the employer can no longer meet payroll, the employees get laid off.

The employees never see the business’s uneven income (unless that employee works in accounting), and so rarely understand how normal this is. Most people, in fact, have no idea how precarious their regular jobs really are. (Although, after this recession, more people know now than before.)

When people who’ve had steady work move to freelancing, they expect the freelance income to behave the way that their paychecks did. They expect regular and on-time.

Because indie writers get regular checks from their distributors, this problem gets compounded. The checks feel like a salary, even though they aren’t.

And so when the money decreases, or dries up, it feels personal. It hurts. What has the writer done wrong?

Nothing, except fail to plan for normal business ups and downs.

"Normal business up and downs" are why when credit dries up, it damages the entire economy--many businesses have a line of credit and borrow money to meet their payroll during the slow season in the normal course of events. It's not something they do only when business is bad; it's something they do every single year--because they don't make money in the summer, or they don't make money until the summer, or whatever. That's how their industry is, so they have developed methods to cope with it.

Most individuals haven't developed these coping skills, though. Most people are trained to expect a regular paycheck, and they have developed spending habits that align with that regular income. The way life usually operates for people with regular jobs is:

Regular money in => regular money out

Monthly rent or mortgage payments. Monthly car payments. Monthly bills. Every month, like clockwork, your expenses are X many dollars, and that number does not vary by much.

It makes total sense, because your income is Y many dollars a month, and that number doesn't vary much, either. Maybe you even get a little silly about it, leasing fancy cars and always making payments on everything because those things don't make the X number bigger than the Y number.

But what if Y is completely unpredictable? What if some months it's a HUGE number, and other months it's teeny-tiny? Well, then, you have to take a different approach.

(Actually, you don't have to--you can do what you want. I'm not your financial advisor, and I know SFA about your specific financial situation. In other words, if you go broke following my advice, that's on you--consider this my disclaimer.)

The strategy I used when I was a freelancer could be described as:

Erratic money in => strategic money out

What do I mean by strategic money? Well, I knew that my monthly income was going to go waaaaaay up and waaaaaaay down. So the goal was to get my essential expenses--the expenses that I absolutely had to pay every single month like clockwork or there would be some horrible disaster--down as low as I could.

Of course we're all human, and the temptation with a windfall (especially after a lean period) is to spend it on fun stuff. What I did was to allow myself one indulgence--something I really, really had been craving and feeling sorry for myself over. That usually took the edge off (especially if I wound up never using it, or using it and realizing that it kind of sucked). It couldn't be outrageously expensive, or something that would lead to greater monthly expenses (so, nothing I had to go into debt for). I also tried to buy it used if I could--pawn shops are excellent places to get jewelry, by the way, and there's a whole cautionary tale to be had by seeing really fancy crap that had to be hocked for 10% of what people paid for it.

The rest was spent strategically. Spending strategically meant that I took the windfall from the months with a big income and invested it into things that would bring down my essential monthly expenses. A good example of this is paying off a car--that's something that's usually pretty doable, and getting rid of that car payment is a big help for most people. Paying off debt in general also falls into this category--not only do you wipe out the payments, but then you have that line of credit available later if times get tough.

Paying stuff off isn't the only thing, though--you want to start living like some combination of a left-wing econut and a right-wing survivalist. Forget the arguments against buying in bulk--those apply to people with regular incomes. When you're flush, stock up on nonperishable essentials. Also, spend the extra money on energy-efficient appliances and reusable household goods--they will bring down your monthly expenses.

I realize that normal people with regular incomes sit around with their calculators and try to figure out when exactly these things will pay for themselves. That math is far less important to someone with an unpredictable income. If your income is erratic, getting your essential expenses down has value in and of itself, because it means that when you have very little income coming in, you'll still be able to pay your bills and live in a decent sort of way.

The sticky wicket here is always housing. In the vast majority of cases, the windfall isn't going to be anywhere large enough to pay for a place outright, and the way mortgages are usually set up, you have to make a minimum monthly payment even if you've just paid off a large chunk of the thing. If you rent, you could pay a year's worth of rent to your landlord, but I wouldn't recommend it because in my experience most landlords will happily pocket 12 months' of rent, and then come back to you in three month's time wondering why you stopped paying your rent. (No, I've never had an intelligent landlord--and I know people who tried paying two or three months' rent at a time, and their landlords were too dumb or too dishonest to cope with it.) So I would just go with having a special account dedicated to housing. Try not to raid it because you simply must go to Tahiti this year.

Yet another thing to do is to take your erratic money and turn it into predictable money. If you know that once a year you need a bunch of money to [pay taxes, buy Christmas presents, whatever] then things like certificates of deposits can be very helpful. I know the rates are very low nowadays, but you can use a CD to put money you'll need in the future someplace where you can't get at it (at least not easily) until you have to have it.

Now, if you have a really serious windfall, you can actually turn that into regular monthly or quarterly income--that's called "income investing" or "investing for income." I'm not going to get into the specifics, because different strategies work for different people. But when you see some entertainer make $20 million one year and file for bankruptcy the next, a failure to invest for income is usually the culprit. 

Reviews, competition, and the whole soap opera....

Real life has come back to bite me in the ass--the roof is leaking again, in more than one place, so I'm bringing in the actual professionals. Ugh. This house is such an attention whore.

Finding a roofer is not something I usually do (it's a metal roof! Those things are supposed to last forever!), and I have other large house projects coming up that are beyond the ken of my regular contractor, so I signed on to Angie's List and was immediately faced with the are-these-reviews-bullshit-or-not? question. (Lessee, a bunch of A-grade reviews all posted at the same time, all by people who have only one review on the site. Hm....) So, I was happy to see that Yelp is actually conducting stings on companies that pay reviewers. That's nice to see.

There have been a couple of interesting stories on all the competition that's happening in the book industry now. Jaye Manus notes that competing standards make life hard for DIYers. I agree, which is why I don't plan to prettify my books past the chapter ornaments--every complication has the potential to...complicate things. I do aim for making the book look like it doesn't have mistakes in it, but I don't sweat having everything be a particular size or proportion, because that's never going to happen, and there's nothing I can do (or should do) about it.

The other story is a Wall Street Journal piece on how Amazon's imprints haven't been a slam dunk, at least not when it comes to paper sales. E-book sales may be doing fine, but of course there's no data, so.... Yeah. We don't actually know that Amazon's imprints haven't been a slam dunk, or maybe they've been a complete fiasco--it's a total mystery at this point, and unless Amazon starts breaking out its revenues in greater detail than they do now, it's going to stay one. What we do know is that Barnes & Noble's boycott is hurting paper sales, that other retailers are reluctant to carry Kindles, and that author Timothy Ferriss is plotting his revenge. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode of As the Publishing Industry Turns!

Composite heroes

HOWARD MOON: The thing is, we clicked, Vince, we just clicked, you know. And that is something you can't fight, you know--chemistry. Yeah, I've got the dark, fractured, broken, paranoid sort of side to me, and he had the light, sunny, simpleton feel. Together we made sort of one whole person--together.

VINCE NOIR: But that's our angle!

                                                         --The Mighty Boosh, "The Power of the Crimp"

It's notoriously hard to analyze comedy--or rather, it's supposed to be, but I feel that's more because the people who analyze literature tend to be pretty humorless and do a really horrible job with comedy, assuming they even recognize something as comedy to begin with. In fact, one thing that drove me crazy when Seinfeld was on the air was the assumption made by just about every cultural commentator out there that the characters were created and envisioned as serious role models--you know, of course the people who wrote the show thought the world would be a better place if everyone acted like George Costanza, and of course everyone was watching the show not to laugh at George's foibles but because they wanted to be just like him.

I guess if your job is to come up with reasons to bemoan The State of Things Today, that sort of "analysis" makes sense, but not otherwise. Another aspect of comedy that is often analyzed in a really dumb way is the prevalence of buddy comedies--instead of one protagonist, you have two (or many more). The "reasons" critics often give for this is 1. everybody is secretly homosexual, or 2. men hate women. (You're wondering about female buddies in comedies? Lucy & Ethel? Bridesmaids? The Bennett sisters? Oh, silly you, those don't exist.)

When I was an undergraduate, I read the comedic novel Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding. The full title of the book is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams--so, you know, it's a buddy comedy, and for me, it was the first buddy comedy I ever tried to analyze.

Joseph Andrews is a spoof of Pamela, with the hilarious premise being, Here is a young man trying to defend his chastity! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! OK, fine, that's hilarious mostly by 18th-century standards. But despite the unpromising premise, Joseph Andrews turned out to be a surprisingly worthwhile novel about a young man trying to navigate the world of sexuality--think of something along the lines of American Pie or Another Gay Movie, but far less explicit.

Like the characters in those movies, Joseph Andrews is trying to channel his sexual impulses in a functional way--he's very much in love, and he does not want to sabotage that relationship. He is, however, a young man with a full complement of young-man hormones (and apparently quite the looker), so he is faced with temptations on all sides.

Helping him navigate those temptations is his buddy and parson, Abraham Adams. Whenever Joseph starts to stray, Abraham pulls him back into line. Abraham isn't perfect either--he's super-gullible. If it weren't for Joseph riding herd on him, the parson would give away his life savings to the first sharpie with a sob story he met.

You see how that works for a comedy? You're never faced with Mr. Super Perfect Guy or some boring allegorical character. ("I am Chastity!" "Hello, Chastity! I am Charity!" "Hello Charity! Let us trod upon Sinner and walk up to Heaven upon the Path of Righteousness!") In fact, you're faced with quirky people who do wacky things that you would never do.

On the other hand, you're also not faced with a situation that turns so horribly serious that it is no longer funny--Joseph doesn't destroy his hoped-for marriage, Abraham doesn't starve to death after losing all his money to a con artist. It's not a classical tragedy, where a character's flaws lead to his destruction. In a buddy comedy, a character's flaws make him go awry for a little bit, but eventually his buddy gets him back on track.

I like this

Dean Wesley Smith notes that if a book sells well, perhaps that's because it's a good book.

Of course, we've all seen books we don't much care for sell well, but that's just further evidence that readers can't agree on what constitutes a good book. I would argue that once a book reaches a certain level of sales, there are people reading it just to see what all the fuss is about. But getting it to that level of sales is a group of readers who really, really like that book.

That's also why I think it's important to have a healthy dose of skepticism about one-size-fits-all marketing programs. Books are not all the same.

Struggling to respect the process

(I couldn't write today because of a family obligation, so instead I got angsty!)

Kris Rusch is doing a series on why writers disappear, and one of the things that comes up in a variety of forms is that many people, once they start writing, discover that they just don't like it much. They don't like the isolation, maybe, or they just would rather be doing something else.

I think in a way that's one of the dirty little secrets of writing (or, I suppose, any art form)--being able to do it all the time is privilege that generally must be earned, but sometimes once you reach a place of privilege, you realize that it's not where you want to be. In addition, you can be very good at something and still not enjoy it much. (Exhibit A of this phenomenon is probably Douglas Adams, but I'm sure there are others.)

For the most part, I enjoy writing, and sometimes I enjoy it very much. Other times it kind of drives me crazy. In particular, my process is something that can annoy the hell out of me. I throw out a shitty first draft, and then I beat it into something approaching a decent story.

When you're cranking out a newspaper story on deadline, that's actually a very efficient process--spit it out, revise, and you're done. When you're writing a 100,000-word novel...oh my God. I was a famously fast writer when I was a reporter. As a novelist...not so much. Most recently with Trust I cranked out a 100K-word draft, and then I had to cut probably about 30K words and add in about 40K more. That took time.

So it's bothering me that Trials isn't coming out perfect the first go around. Of course it's not going to--intellectually I know that. But the irrational part of me would just love to be able to spit out a perfect third novel in, oh, about a month, and give it to all the people who have expressed a desire to read the next book. (I guess this is the problem with starting to actually find an audience--suddenly there are people out there who have expectations. People you could disappoint. Yoikes. Before nobody cared!)

But it's just something I have to go through--it can't be avoided, and attempts at aversion will just make the whole thing take longer. In addition, it's not like the first draft of Trust was a bust--one of the things I like about that book was how the A plot and B plot kind of merge at the end and help resolve each other. That was never in my outline--that was something that developed as I was writing the first draft.

Right now I feel like Trials has a lot of odds 'n' ends that aren't jelling into anything, or they're intended to become something in the fourth and last book, but I really don't want the third book to be one of those padder novels whose only purpose is to extend the series by another book (coughcough Order of the Phoenix coughcough), so I need to figure out what these things are going to actually do in the course of this novel.

And that's frustrating, but on the other hand, that's how it always is at this stage. That's my process--I throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, and later on, I see what sticks. It always works out eventually.

That sound you hear is me hitting my head against the wall

There's a guest post by writer Erin Kern (via PV) that was apparently designed specifically to give me a stroke.

The short version: Kern wrote a book. No one would publish it. She self-published. Following the patented Darcie Chan Method To Screw Yourself Out Of The Most Money Possible, she priced her book at 99 cents and left it at that price even after it took off. The book got huge--she sold 38,000 copies in a single month--despite Kern doing absolutely zero promotion. So she signed with a publishing house so that someone would do promotion, because obviously a book won't sell--certainly not to the tune of 38,000 copies a month--without promotion. Oh, and she wants to do a paper version of her book (because e-books are only a tiny fragment of the market, and when you're selling only 38,000 copies a month, you obviously have grounds to worry about your reach), and we all know that's completely impossible to do without a publisher.

Boy.

OK, for one thing its really obvious from her post that Kern loves the status of being published by a fancy house. And she doesn't want to do anything except write, so she is willing to sacrifice potentially enormous sums on the alter of I'm An Author (And That Is All I Do). So, you know, she's rather fond of prestige.

But the thing I want to look closely at is, What are the sums she is sacrificing? And that brings me to my major issue with the 99-cent price point as a permanent price for a longer work (promotional pricing or short stories are another matter).

Like I wrote about Chan, Kern found a gold mine, sold her gold at the going rate for nickel, and then convinced herself that she needed help with the business end of things because she's just a nickel miner. I can't help but think that if she had made $76,000 in the month she sold 38,000 copies instead of just $13,000, she would have been that much more reluctant to change business models. You look at $13,000 a month, and that averages to $156,000 a year--good money, to be sure, but for someone who is already pretty comfortable and perhaps is worrying about the long term, that might not seem like enough to bank on. (What if my books stop selling? Where's my nest egg?) But $76,000 a month means $912,000 a year--close to a million dollars. 

As I've mentioned before, people will throw away potentially huge sums of money if that money is not in hand. If it's abstract, future money? Forget it. That money's gone because in our minds, it never existed. We are hard-wired to hold on to what we have and to devalue what we don't have. That is called loss aversion.

You can see how loss aversion works with writers like Kern. First, they lock themselves into a situation where they are making as little money as it is possible to make from self-publishing.

Then as a result, they devalue their self-publishing business. Kern looked at her work and said, Oh, well, the most I could possibly hope to make on my own is $150,000 a year! That's no great shakes, and it's a lot of work--I want a traditional publishing contract instead!

She never saw the potential to be making $900,000 a year, because she wasn't actually doing it--it's too abstract, it's just me, some whiny blogger, second-guessing her and making projections that might never come to pass, yadda yadda yadda.

But if she had been willing to play with her prices just a little bit once sales took off, then Kern might have had a very different idea of how much her self-publishing business was worth. (Or perhaps she would have discovered that she could never make more than $13,000 a month--but at least she would know that for a fact, rather than just assuming that the worst-case scenario is the only possibility.) If it turned out that Kern could make close to a million dollars in a year--well, that's some real money. That's getting to having enough money so you can invest it and live comfortably off the investment income without having to work.

In that case, loss aversion would have started working for her instead of against her. Very few people, even rich people, are willing to throw a million dollars away, even if they love prestige and have long yearned for a traditional publishing deal.

And that, my friends, is the value of experimentation--with prices and with other things. Experiments = knowledge. Knowledge (like, how much is my self-publishing business actually worth?) is key to making good business decisions--both because you'll have the data to make logical decisions and because your gut will be telling you Don't let this go!!!

All my characters will be...the same!

I was watching an anime series the other day--it was a telenovela-type show that was actually pretty entertaining. The problem was, most of the action took place on a train. On this train were no fewer than three criminal gangs. (It wasn't like the train had some valuable cargo that all the gangs were after--it was just a coincidence that the three were there.) The majority of the people on the train who weren't in one of these three criminal gangs were affiliated with the Mafia.

Making it worse, one of the gangs was a gang of...homicidal maniacs! Yes, an entire gang of homicidal maniacs, because there are just that many out there. Some of the non-gang-affiliated characters also happened to be homicidal maniacs.

By the end of it, I was VERY tired of hearing people make speeches about how much they enjoyed killing people. (Homicidal maniacs are apparently a verbose lot, who never tire of prattling on about their hobby.) That sort of thing is unsettling and effective the first time you hear it, but the twelfth time, it's just boring.

When I'm bored, I start asking logical questions like, Where are the normal people? Is pretty much every train ride like this? Who would take the train, then? The train had two conductors, one of whom was part of a criminal gang and the other of whom was a homicidal maniac--doesn't the railroad screen its employees at all?

It's not just this show or anime. I've read fantasy novels where every spot in the entire planet is plagued by evil magicks. That's swell from a putting-characters-in-peril point of view, but if the very air and soil is going to kill you wherever you go, how do people farm? Why are there cities and industries and rich people and a high level of political organization?

Regular, non-telenovela type TV series get lousy with this kind of thing. You have a plot revolving around someone secretly being a spy/mutant/alien/vampire/Mafioso/werewolf, and a few seasons later there isn't a character on the show who isn't secretly a spy/mutant/alien/vampire/Mafioso/werewolf--and every unveiling (you know, of the exact same thing that has been unveiled many times before) is presented as something shocking!! and dramatic!!!

I think even if you're writing about things going on that are unlikely and fantastical, you have ground it in some kind of realism. You need the normal people to set off the freaks. Otherwise it's like eating an entire meal made solely out of habaneros--it's tedious and unpleasant, and it just doesn't work.

"I’m an author and I’m not good about this stuff"

Passive Voice has a post on Penguin suing authors for not delivering books that they received advances for. Obviously Penguin is a troubled company, and suing is kind of an odd decisions, since unless the advance was huge, suing costs more than just writing it off as a loss.

But forcing people to feel sympathy for Penguin is...Elizabeth Wurtzel! She gave an interview with NPR that contains the hilarious line:

I think at some point they did send me a letter about this. I mean, I think it’s one of those things that I probably should have dealt with and didn’t because I’m an author and I’m not good about this stuff.

She then goes on to say that Penguin shouldn't sue her, because having a relationship with her (you know, the kind of relationship where they give her $33,000 and she give them bupkis) is worth so much more. Sooooo much more!

The whole "I'm an author and I'm not good about this stuff" bit is especially implausible because, as Peter Winkler pointed out, Wurtzel used to be a lawyer. She also graduated from Harvard, was a journalist before getting fired for plagiarism, and pretended to be a lawyer before she actually was one! A woman of many talents, it seems.

And, you know, many problems, most of which appear to stem from her having an ENORMOUS sense of entitlement. Still, that attitude that if you are an author and an artiste, then you don't have to worry about piddly little crap like, I dunno, actually writing books is one that obviously has some traction with people who aren't as pathologically self-indulgent as Wurtzel.

It's an attitude that traditional publishing has encouraged--you don't ask authors to deliver clean files because they'll think it's beneath them. You keep the authors removed from the publishing process, that process remains an intimidating mystery to them, and then they won't run out and self-publish. Everybody wins--as long as "everybody" doesn't include writers or readers.

One of the many things I like about self-publishing is that it forces authors to not be snotty little prima donnas about everything--I mean, you can be, but it's going to cost you. Explicitly. Don't feel like leaving out that junk code? Hope you feel like paying a formatter two or three times as much as you would otherwise! Don't want to think about how you're going to position your book to readers? Get ready for poor sales and angry reviews by people who feel misled! Too brilliant to worry about the "technical" details of spelling and grammar? Be prepared to have many, many readers fail to understand your genius!

Maintaining a high gloss

I like mysteries, but my sister LOVES them, so I'm always on the lookout for good ones to recommend or get for her.

In the past several months, I've come across two indie mystery books that I thought were really good. Coincidentally, each was the first book in a two-book series. In both cases, I liked the first book so much that I decided to buy a paper copy of it for my sister, and I went on to read the second book.

And, in both cases, I will not be buying a paper copy of the second book for my sister.

I think the same thing happened with both series. Two talented writers each wrote a mystery novel and spent the next, oh, five or ten years trying without success to have that novel traditionally published. Those years, while frustrating, weren't wasted--the writers, each assuming that their book wasn't quite good enough to get published, spent a lot of time gathering feedback and improving the books. The result was a pair of books that were very fine indeed--but still not published!

Enter self-publishing. Our two mystery novelists self-publish their by now EXTREMELY good books, and readers LOVE them! Reviews are ecstatic, sales are grand, and our two writers realize that their debut novels didn't get published not because they weren't good enough, but because traditional publishing is an industry in crisis.

They each say, A-ha! I am a writer of talent! And of sales! I'd better crank my follow-up novel out in a great big hurry!

So, they each crank out novel number two. Maybe they give it to a beta reader who is really more of a friend or a fan than an editor, and this person tells them that the book is awesome and they are a genuis--or maybe they don't even bother with that.

The result is a very frustrating read, because in both cases, Novel #2 is something that with a little more work could have been just as good as Novel #1. Things are bad in a way that is annoying and fixable: Lengthy and original descriptive phrases are repeated word-for-word in different places in the book; climactic events happen off-stage; sub-plots (and since these are mystery novels, there are a lot of those) are wound up in ways that are opaque and confusing. Both books need a serious edit--not a fluffy, "You're so great! I love your stuff!" kind of thing.

A good edit is always somewhat brutal. The job of an editor is to yank all your failures out and rub them in your face so you can fix them. If you're not feeling like someone could be a little kinder to you, or if you're not feeling like, Holy crap, this is going to be a lot of work, you're not getting a proper edit. There's always that moment of wounded ego and despair.

I totally understand writers not wanting to go through it--hell, I don't always want to go through it--especially after they've seen through the whole traditional-publishing lie that their book is not quite good enough to sell. If you've been in a situation where people have been stomping all over your talent for no other reason than to get you to shut up and go away, it can be hard to acknowledge that there is such a thing as legitimate criticism.

But no matter how talented you are--and these writers are both quite talented--you need to be edited. A real edit, not a love-fest, done by someone who does not care about your feelings and who is not afraid to tell you the stuff that's hard to hear.

Just a rat with a button

Anyone else get an e-mail about Amazon's Author Rank program and roll their eyes? Oh, goodie, another set of numbers to make you feel inferior! This time you're listed by name, so you're SURE to feel inadequate!

Amazon is very good at handling authors, and that has a dark side. Camille LaGuire did a recent post on how Amazon's immediate feedback is so compelling that LaGuire thought her books had stopped selling, when in fact they were selling fine at other retailers.

Writes LaGuire, "[Amazon's] whole site is optimized for you, to reward you and make it easy for you to just focus on them and forget everyone else.... [B]y giving you that little hourly reward, Amazon conditions you to watch Amazon's stats and keep doing things to make them move."

And yet, people want more. There was a recent post on FutureBooks by a Web designer complaining about how little data Amazon and the other e-book publishing platforms give you when compared to, say, a Web site. Passive Guy linked to it with the note, "PG seconds this complaint. He understands far more about the visitors to The Passive Voice than he does about the people who purchase Mrs. PG’s books."

As a practical matter, yes, I understand the issue. But, wow, I feel deeply ambivalent about all the data I can access regarding visitors to my blog (although is it hilarious at times). A big part if it is that I want writing novels to be a higher priority than writing the blog. But you know, I've been sick lately, so I've been writing blog posts rather than working on Trials. And when I do that, I gain a lot of traffic to this site.

Do you know when I lose traffic to this site? When my blog posts are all titled "Progress Report" and are all boring one-liners about how I wrote X many words today. In other words, the more productive I am with the novels, the less of a reward I get from my blog stats.

That's just something I have to inure myself to, but I know that subconsciously it's working away at me. That's part of why I occasionally go read reviews--I need a different kind of prodding, the kind that comes from readers, not other writers.

I feel like having access to lots of sales data is also a two-edged sword--I mean, yes, it indicates whether or not you're reaching readers, plus of course it's money. On the other hand, it is so easy to get all wrapped up in that world. You do need to act like a publisher at times--thinking long and hard about how you want to position your book, for example--but a lot of that stuff is easier and less intimidating than writing novels, and at least for me it can become just another form of procrastination.

Book discovery nowadays

This is an interesting article (via PV) on how book discovery has changed in recent years.

Of special interest: 

Two years ago, 35% of book purchases were made because readers found out about a book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, the single-largest site of discovery. This year, that figure has dropped to 17%, a reflection both of the closing of Borders and the rise of e-readers.

I have to stop and say WOW to that one--the percentage of books discovered via bookstores has dropped that much in only two years!? Holy crap. I mean, I know things are changing, of course, but I am constantly amazed at how fast it's happening.

Anyway, the article goes on to say:

In the same period, personal recommendations grew the most, to 22% from 14%. . . . A problem for publishers and authors of new titles is that the vast majority of personal recommendations are backlist titles. Only 6% of books recommended personally have been published in the past half year--and just 2% were published within three months

Yeah, more backlist recommendations would be a big problem for publishers, because they are rapidly losing their ability to monetize those titles. That's an unpromising confluence of trends right there.

And if you don't want to spend all your time flogging social media, that article provides you with an excellent rationalization: "[D]igital mass media, including Facebook and Twitter, rose just to 4.5% from 1.9% as a place people learned about the books they have bought." Music to my ears....

Fairness, monopsony, and other unhelpful concepts

Some people are taking great umbrage at Amazon for forcing publishers to provide them with books they can actually sell. What apparently is at issue is not the basic concept that Amazon need saleable inventory (although that is a concept that seems rather lost on the publishers themselves), but the fact that Amazon is going to punish these suppliers by not selling ANY of their goods, rather than simply not selling the goods that arrived damaged.

This, it seems, is not "fair" and is an example of Amazon using its "monopsony power."

Yeah, that's a bunch of crap. I'll start with the idea that Amazon has a "monopsony." Just like Amazon isn't a monopoly because it can't shut out competing online retailers, it is not a monopsony, because it (say it with me) can't shut out competing online retailers. You can sell your books other places.

On to "fair." "Fair" is one of those terms that kind of drives me crazy, because it doesn't really have any agreed-upon meaning when you start talking about specific situations. Is our current tax system fair? Is the percentage of tax paid by wealthy people fair? If it is unfair, is it unfair because wealthy people pay too much in taxes, or because they pay too little?

I don't (NO I REALLY DON'T) want you to actually answer those questions. Why not? Because there are people who are completely, 100% convinced that the current system is unfair because wealthy people pay too little in taxes--and they have many long, self-righteous justifications "proving" that they are right. And there are other people who are equally convinced, and have equally tedious "evidence," that the current system is unfair because wealthy people pay too much.

That's "fair" for you--it means whatever you want it to mean.

But what does "fair" get you? Not much. Say you decide (what with your long rationalizations and your many friends who agree with you) that the tax system is unfair, and that it is specifically unfair to you, because you shouldn't ever have to pay any taxes. So you don't.

You can protest the unfairness of the system until you're blue in the face (and people do), but you will still get fined and perhaps even imprisoned (and people do). That's because the government has a different idea of what's fair, and unlike you, they have cops and prisons. (I once heard a young man on the bus discussing his many drug arrests, the latest which was felony weight. He objected bitterly it being classified as a felony, because it was--you guessed it--"not fair." Oddly enough, these magic words did not have any noticeable impact on his situation.)

What is Amazon? Amazon is a major retail outlet. If you sell books on Amazon, you are a supplier to that company. To be a supplier to Amazon, you must agree to their terms: You price your book a certain way. You get a certain cut. You use certain file formats. You can't put up certain kinds of material.

If you don't agree to their terms, there are other suppliers out there. (And, since Amazon doesn't actually have a monopsony, there are also other retailers out there who might be more accommodating to you.)

Now in book publishing, suppliers actually have a relatively large amount of power--larger than in most other industries. Stephen King gets really nice contracts because he is the sole supplier of Stephen King books, and people really want those and don't want anything else. It's a stark contrast to, say, supplying Wal-Mart, whose customers are so price-conscious that they'll happily switch brands if something cheaper comes along, which really puts the suppliers in a position of weakness.

Even so, the power of book suppliers has it limits, as those art-book publishers are discovering. Amazon is having such a problem with their stock that it's willing to stop selling their books altogether, which suggests that Amazon thinks readers won't really miss those books and will be able to find suitable substitutes.

And guess what? Amazon has a perfect right to make that call. It's not the government censoring people--you have no First Amendment right to force a retailer to carry your product.

People seem to constantly want to have some kind of reciprocal emotional relationship with Amazon, which makes them lose sight of the fact that it is simply a business and a retailer. If a business partnership is unprofitable, Amazon will drop that partner. This is how business works--it's about making money, and if pairing with someone doesn't make a company money, the company will terminate that relationship.

Is that "fair"? Hell if I know. I just know that's the way the retail business works, has always worked, and will most likely work in the future.

Is that scary to you? Well, maybe it should be, because if you've put all your eggs in the Amazon basket, then you are taking a risk. Amazon's not your mom, it's not your friend, it doesn't love you, and it's under no obligation to take care of you. It's a major retailer, you are a supplier, and that's all. If they don't like what you do, they'll terminate the relationship--and if you don't like what they do, you are free to do the same.

Hey, that's a joke!

Recently I watched the "Gangnam Style" video, which has become something of a Internet sensation. Watching it was kind of an odd experience. I have a really hard time laughing at people who aren't trying to be funny. I'll do it--I'm only human--but I feel odd about it, and I don't make a habit of seeking out stuff that's really bad or unintentionally campy when I feel like having a good laugh.

So the first time I watched "Gangnam Style," it really perplexed me. Then I read the Wikipedia entry on it and twigged that, oh, it's supposed to be funny. Psy, the South Korean rapper who created the song, is making fun of people who are trying way too hard to be classy, so he runs around terrorizing the upscale Seoul neighborhood of Gangnam with his silly dance. The odd-looking and -acting men in the video are Korean comedians. They're not trying to look cool--they're trying to look like people who are trying to look cool and failing miserably.

And then I watched the video again, and I laughed and laughed. Because it was OK.

I'm not the only person who responds this way--Mel Brook's The Producers is about two guys trying to create a Broadway show that is sure to fail so they can make off with their investors' money. But they do too good a job, and everyone assumes that their awful show, Springtime for Hilter, is a hilarious parody of the Third Reich. The show becomes OK for the audience, they laugh and laugh, and the hapless producers have a monster hit on their hands.

It's also interesting to see situations where there's a joke (the histrionic "I am NOT drinking any FUCKING Merlot!") and people don't realize that it's not meant to be taken seriously (sales of Merlot fall). One of the funny things about Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is the level of effort they went to in order to ensure that the whole thing looks and sounds like a crappy low-budget '80s TV show--one of the actors even went through and re-dubbed all his lines so that they don't quite match up with the movements of his lips. But the problem, of course, is that some people didn't understand that it wasn't really a crappy '80s TV show. You also see this in some responses to Richard Ayoade's movie Submarine, which is deliberately pretentious, because it's about an adolescent, and adolescent pretension is funny, see?

I think this is where is helps to have a brand (and to also make sure a humor book is actually filed under humor and possibly has "humor" or "comedy" or "parody" or "It's OK, you can laugh at this" on the cover)--when Koreans see Noh Hong-chul doing what Wikipedia calls "his trademark 'lewd dance,'" they're expecting it and find it far less baffling and unsettling (What is that guy DOING!?!) than I did the first time I saw it. If you don't realize that Ayoade is a comedian, and one with a special interest in visual world-building, then the pretentious French New Wave-style cinematography of Submarine just seems like...pretentious French New Wave-style cinematography.