Let's do it better!

Camille LaGuire made a good comment on the Passive Voice. The post was another one about the never-ending paid-review scandal, but LaGuire points out that "simple group behavior" can trip up an algorithm, too:

Let’s say there is a large forum frequented by authors who are all interested in promoting their books, along with some book bloggers who are into the same culture....

They all review more than your average reader. And everybody who reads their books and interacts with them on blogs or elsewhere hears again and again how important reviews are to authors, so they also have a “bubble” in their reviewing behavior. They also all submit to the same book bloggers. And they all have an overlapping readership, and even though they avoid mutual reviewing… the authors and their fans tend to read a lot of books from other authors in the same forum. And so their reviews are clustered in the same pool.

From the algorithm’s standpoint, it sure looks like a mutual admiration society, and in some ways it is. It’s not intentional, but people are using leverage to get an unnatural number of reviews, and the reviews are created with a different pre-conscious agenda than most reviews are.

And this pattern shows up really obviously in an algorithm....

Your best bet is to not to work against what the goals of the algorithm are. The goals of the algorithm is to NOT favor one book over another but to make every book equally available to the people who would most want it. Therefore, the best way to work with the algorithm is to work on good labeling, appropriate covers, titles, blurbs — and, of course, good content.

Or alternatively, you can just keep coming up with new leverage strategies when Amazon cuts off the old ones. That’s perfectly legit. Just don’t be all surprised when Amazon cuts those off too.

I liked this because I think there's a temptation for indies to revert to the clubby sort of reviewing that marks a lot of traditional publishing--after all, that's what we know and what appears to have worked for them.

But the clubbiness of that world actually limits the usefulness of those reviews--a lot of people don't bother with, say, The New York Times book reviews because they know that paper only reviews certain kinds of books, so if you like, say, potboilers or romances or erotica, you'll never find anything useful there. Amazon works as a retail outlet because it's good at getting things in front of people that they actually want--it doesn't worry about who's in the club, it just offers up the goods. And readers have clearly responded quite favorably to that, which benefits us all.

What life is not like when you are a woman

Yeah, I’m reading lowest-common-denominator sci-fi again. You know, the kind of stuff where an omniscient narrator tells me repeatedly that a female character is sexy and desirable, even though 1. I thought it was “show, don’t tell,” and 2. I am never, ever going to want to have sex with your female characters, so please stop trying to make me.

Anyway, I thought I’d toss a couple of reality checks out there:

Reality Check #1: Men will NOT make major sacrifices for a woman just because she is cute.

It’s one thing for a teenage boy to “loan” soda money to a cute girl. It’s another thing for an adult man to risk execution or give up enormous wads of money for a woman he barely knows just because she's pretty. Teenage boys (and teenage girls, for that matter) have the high hormone levels, poor impulse control, and lack of life experience that makes them vulnerable to all kinds of sexual exploitation.

Adult men, as a rule, have it a bit more together. Even if they are willing to trade favors, they tend to be more skeptical. The women I know who profit financially off male sexual impulses do not simply bat their eyelashes, because that stopped working back in high school. They put out, and they make it very clear that they are willing to put out in exchange for X and Y. It’s about as subtle as any other fee-for-service arrangement.

Also, think about what you’re having them trade, and try to keep it within reason. Call me cold, but I don’t think there are a lot of men out there who would be willing to risk a bullet in the head in exchange for a blow job.

Reality Check #2: Sexual abuse is NOT normal.

The first time I was sexually harassed, I was 12. The first time I was offered money for sex, I was 14. I’ve been sexually assaulted; stalked via phone, on-line, and by foot; and sexually harassed at work. I have dealt with all manner of perverts, from frotterists to Peeping Toms.

These are not everyday occurrences. If they were, trust me, I would never leave my house, which I would have long ago outfitted with large and sturdy locking metal shutters. It’s not the majority of men who do this sort of thing, or even a large minority—it’s a small minority of unfortunately quite industrious individuals. In fact, a lot of men (especially those without a lot of life experience) respond to stories of sexual abuse with utter disbelief, because they would never do that sort of thing and can’t imagine that anyone else would.

Which is unhelpful, but anyway, my point is that if you’re going to have a female character be sexually abused every where she goes, there needs to be a reason for it. She’s a hated outsider, the institution she’s interacting with is profoundly dysfunctional, something. Otherwise it starts to read like maybe you get your rocks off on that sort of thing.

Progress report

Yesterday was Halloween, and I wound up in charge of the kidlets, so nothing got done on the book. Today's pretty busy, too, but the microphone has arrived, I found my notes on that podcasting panel, and I got a book on podcasting from the library (five years old, so I'm assuming a lot of the technical advice is out of date, but advice on things like diction should still be valid).

The blog, if you haven't noticed, is being slow and buggy, which is presumably the fault of Sandy. I hope the Squarespace guys are staying safe and hanging in there!

False precision

When I was working as an encyclopedia editor (back when there were encyclopedias and dinosaurs roamed the Earth), one of the things the editors always got into a lather about was something called false precision. You know, stuff like "There are 1.24 billion stars in the sky"--where people would assign seemingly precise values to things when they could not possibly know what those values actually were.

They were ardently opposed to it, because the feeling was that simply by having a number (even if you noted that it was just an estimate), you distorted people's perception of what was possible. It's like anchoring--simply by my saying there are 1.24 billion stars in the sky, I have influenced what you consider to be the likely number of stars in the sky, even though we all know that I just made that number up.

Their opposition actually got kind of annoying--when the Hubble Space Telescope went up, for example, it drastically altered the estimated number of stars in the sky, but I wasn't allowed to write about THAT. But Dean Wesley Smith had a recent post that reminded me of why false precision is often a good thing to avoid.

Smith had posted earlier that e-books made up only 25% of the book market. People questioned that, so he cited other studies with similar results.

The problem is, a bunch of bad studies are not any more accurate than a single bad studies. And these studies are all bad, because the data is bad.

How is it bad? you ask. In two seemingly opposite ways!

Way 1: The data is too narrow. Smith is impressed by the fact that the Association of American Publishers responded to criticism of its methodology by reaching out to 1,200 publishers!

But that's a bit like being impressed by my survey, which I just conducted now in my imagination. I conducted a survey about who is going to be elected president next week.

Most people think it's going to be a close one between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. But my survey found a landslide win for Romney!

Of course, I only surveyed Republicans.

Oh, look at you complaining about my methodology. Fine. I'm doing my survey again--this time I'm going to survey many more Republicans. And I'm still finding Romney winning in a landslide! So there!

The problem is not the number of publishers the AAP surveyed. The problem is, they are publishers. I'll quote myself again, because I love doing that: "If Random House and Simon & Schuster lose e-book sales because all their writers have gone indie, the data will indicate that e-book sales have fallen, even if those newly-indie writers are selling e-books like gangbusters on their own."

But the AAP is including small publishers this time! (And moderate Republicans!) It doesn't matter. Why use a publisher in the first place? Because they are better set up to sell paper books to brick and mortar bookstores. That is an advantage most publishers continue to have over most indie writers. Surveying publishers is going to skew your results toward paper just as surveying indie writers (or Democrats) exclusively would skew your results in the other direction.

Way 2: The data is too broad. (I told you these would seem contradictory!)

There are certain kinds of books that, I think, will always sell in paper. Children's books, how-to books (I'm not getting The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing as an e-book, nor Auto Repair for Dummies), cookbooks (at least for the minority of us who actually cook with them), and art books will never move completely, or even just mostly, to e-books.

I'll go further and say that I wouldn't be surprised if an increasing number of publishers specialize in these paper-friendly genres, because paper is what publishers do well. 

Do I, as a writer of adult fiction, care? No. I'm not writing for people who aren't old enough to hold Mommy's iPad. I'm not writing for people who want a book that will stand up to hot grease and marinara sauce. I'm not writing for people looking for elaborate pop-up art.

Is there good data out there for me? No. But there are hints that suggest that the percentage of e-books in the market that actually interests me is much higher than 25%. For example, an unnamed publishing executive just said that e-books account for 30%-50% of adult fiction sales. And a recent story about HarperCollins said that, in the U.S. at least, e-books count for about half of that company's revenues.

So, now I've gone and given you another bit of false precision to glom on to--50%!--when what I really want you to do is to embrace the notion that we don't know what the real number is. We don't know. We also don't know what the future holds--although things are looking worse all the time for the national book chains.

And it wouldn't matter if we did know. No matter what percentage of the market is still paper, a paper book is harder and more expensive for an indie writer to create and distribute than an e-book. For most writers, that's what matters--what is what percentage of the book market is really an academic concern.

Revolution 8

Ruth Harris has a good post over at Anne R. Allen's blog on ways to improve your writing. Allen liked point #8, and I do, too:

8. Don't repeat yourself. Once is enough. This is a fairly common problem and not always quick or easy to fix because it involves actual thinking. Be on the lookout for places where you convey the same thought two or three times in different words. Usually, this kind of repetition means the writer hasn’t quite thought through what he/she is trying to say.

This has been on my mind a lot lately because I have little shorthand ways of describing my characters, but I'm thinking by book #3, I need to freshen that up and come at those descriptions from a different angle. In some ways, this falls under the category of Things That Are Different To Read Than To Write: A good deal of time may have passed for me between writing Trang and writing Trials, but for anyone who picks up the first book, likes it, and starts to plow through the other two--well, they're really, REALLY going to notice if I'm essentially cutting-n-pasting those character descriptions. I know this because Garrett did that on occassion in the Lord Darcy stories--I'm sure he thought it would work fine, because he wrote them over the course of several years, and it's not like they were even all originally published in the same place. But stick them all in an omnibus together, and...oops.

More on the merger--delusions ahoy!

This is a good backgrounder from the Wall Street Journal on the proposed Penguin/Random House merger. (There's also a follow-on here. Nothing about News Corp. coming back with a vengeance, but I'm not counting them out!)

Some interesting details: The talks began just a few weeks after the Justice Department filed its antitrust suit against Penguin and others. The companies could save costs by closing warehouses, so there are some economies of scale to be had. They're hoping that the deal could close by the end of next year, and Pearson doesn't want to sell Penguin because it would take a tax hit. And an unnamed publishing executive at an unnamed house said that e-books now account for 30%-50% of fiction sales, so any suggestion that e-books aren't such a big deal these days needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

So far, so good, but read on down and things start to get weird:

[Random House Chief Executive Markus] Dohle said the two companies were just starting to analyze the potential cost savings, including those in distribution, warehousing and information technology. But "this deal isn't based on synergies; it is based on future growth," he said.

[Penguin Chief Executive John] Makinson said the merger will allow the companies to invest more heavily in social media and other new technologies. With fewer traditional bookstores around, he said, "it becomes harder and riskier to take a chance on new writers because you can't be sure of finding an audience." Social media can help remedy that.

Wow. There's not a thing there that makes sense to me. They're merging so that they can Tweet better? I mean crazy me, I thought the purpose of merging was to cut expenses by consolidating operations, but according to them they haven't really thought that part through, except to decide that they aren't cutting any imprints. (Penguin not thinking things through seems to be a theme lately.) And what's this vague "other new technologies"? Don't they know that Calibre is free?

The end of the article spirals down into absurdist humor, including a quote from (you guessed it) Scott Turow, and a note that this joint venture could go public in five years! Sure! That'll happen!

Filthy, filthy promotions!

Passive Voice has a great rant today inspired by a pretty silly post bewailing how indie writers are devaluing their work with the 99-cent price point and freebies and giveaways in exchange for a reader promoting the book in some way.

The original post is very over-the-top and contains the hilarious line, "Traditionally published authors aren’t stooping to these tactics." (You know, like sock-puppet reviews and selling cheap books.) And PG comes back in a way I think is awesome, pointing out that if you actually value literature and reading, then the rise of indie publishing should make you very happy.

The funny thing is, the original post was written by a bestselling author who works as a consultant for other indie authors. And the other day I met a bestselling author who works as a consultant for other indie authors who has embraced things like the 99-cent price point and giveaways with equal if not greater stridency. And of course I can think of two authors right off the top of my head who credit their success in large part to the savvy use of freebies. (So, you know, there's a lesson about blindly following "experts" here.)

But the thing that really struck me about the original post was the writer's clear discomfort with the concept of promotions.

Which is odd, right? I mean, no one writes articles in Retailing Today that say, "For God's sake, DON'T PUT YOUR STUFF ON SALE!!! NO FREEBIES!!! DON'T OFFER YOUR CUSTOMERS A CHANCE AT A GIFT CARD IN EXCHANGE FOR LIKING YOU ON FACEBOOK!!! YOU'RE DEVALUING YOUR BRAND!!!!"

Sure, a company can devalue a retail brand via promotions, but it has to be a VERY high-end brand for that to happen (or the promotions have to be so terribly mismanaged that they make people feel like they're being ripped off). To be vulnerable, the brand also has to thrive on recognizability--if I have an Hermès bag, you know I paid a freaking arm and a leg for it. That is a major reason why people buy Hermès bags. Hermès does not put its bags on sale.

I don't know how an author can possibly create that kind of brand. If I'm reading Stephen King on my Kindle, how the hell are you supposed to know? If I'm reading Stephen King in a hardback, it's not like you're going to look at that and say, "Ooooh, that's a Stephen King book! Gosh, I wish I could afford one of those!" You're not going to sneer if I got it on sale or--shudder--at an outlet. That is completely irrelevant to your perception of the book's worth. (It's true that books can be status objects, but they are supposed to be indicators of internal worth--I read poetry because I am such a sensitive soul, not because I'm mad flossing.)

All that is why book consumers are somewhat insensitive to price--for most readers, avoiding a bad book is more important than saving a couple of bucks.

As a result, if your book lacks reviews and recommendations, dropping the price probably won't help much. But it's also not going to hurt your brand--people might look at a dodgy 99-cent/free book, think "Looks dodgy" and avoid it. But they're not going to associate that with your name and refuse to buy all your books forever because six months ago one of your titles was 99 cents or free. (I know I've spoken out against always having books at 99 cents, but that's because I think it causes the writer to devalue the financial worth of their business, not because I think it causes the reader to devalue the literary worth of the books.)

If someone likes your stuff, or is curious about you because other people like your stuff, or otherwise thinks your book might be worth reading, doing a promotion can tip them over into buying. Which is a good thing.

Believe it or not, some people will argue that getting more buyers through promotions is not a good thing. These are usually big believers in finding your 1,000 True Fans, who apparently will give you all their money and will spend all their time promoting you and will carve your name on their foreheads with a screwdriver and will hide in your bushes chanting your book titles until the police come and haul them away.

I think it's fine to focus your attention on cultivating (non-scary) fans (who respect boundaries)! That's great! Read The Gift of Fear while you're at it!

But in addition to your True Fans, there are other audiences out there you can sell to. I wouldn't spend big hunks of my time chasing bargain-hunters, because your margins are going to be lower with them, but if someone will only buy your book if it is 99 cents, aren't you better off getting that 99 cents from them than getting nothing at all? For every tech company like Apple or Intel that make money catering to True Fans who will pay a ton of money for the latest thing, there are a dozen companies that make money catering to the more price-sensitive people in the mass market. And unlike a tech company, you can 1. tap into both markets, and 2. convert the tightwads into True Fans--there are very few people out there who won't pay more for a book they know they're going to like.

The magic of limits

Since this week has been a lost cause (I slept last night--huzzah!--but had too much scheduled to do today for writing), I've been reading a book called Lord Darcy by Randall Garrett. Lord Darcy is actually an omnibus volume containing Garrett's various stories about a guy named--you guessed it--Lord Darcy.

It was very entertaining to me as a reader, but it was also really interesting to me as a writer, because the Lord Darcy stories are probably the only truly successful marriage of the mystery genre and the science fiction/fantasy genre that I've ever read.

The problem with most other attempts at amalgamating those two genres is that mystery novels are basically puzzles--here's a dead body, let's figure out how it got there. Puzzles work because of there are limitations on the puzzle-solver, who doesn't just know all the answers but has to sort it out using only partial and often unreliable information.

Science fiction and fantasy, however, are genres where human limitations are usually greatly reduced or utterly eliminated through technology or magic. So they usually don't mix well with mystery: The wizard waves his wand or the robot taps into the database, and the problem is magically (and boringly) solved!

So limits have to be put on these things. In the Vorkosigan Saga (which is not strictly mystery, but there are occasional crimes as well as a great deal of espionage), there's a truth serum called fast-penta. But it doesn't work in everybody, some people are deathly allergic, and some people have been made deathly allergic specifically so they can't be interrogated.

Garrett handles this issue by having the magic be extremely rules-based and quite limited--it is, in the alternative history of Lord Darcy's world, scientific. Magic that would be really inconvenient in a mystery novel, like teleportation, simply doesn't exist. Instead, much of the magic revolves around the principle that things that were once whole wish to be whole again. So, for example, a forensic sorcerer (yes, that's a thing) could take blood from the scene of a crime and blood from a suspect, smear them on the opposite sides of a dish, and cast a spell. If it's the same blood, it will pool together, and you've placed your suspect at the scene.

It's very clever because it lets the investigators know some things (whose blood is that, what gun did that bullet come from) without knowing all things.

If it sounds like forensic sorcerers aren't much more useful than forensic scientists, well, they're not. And Garrett goes even further: Because magic is scientifically understood, actual science--chemistry, physics, biology--isn't understood very well at all, so technology has suffered greatly. While the books are set in the years Garrett wrote them, the technology mostly comes from the previous century. Far from magic being something that solves all problems, magic is something that has effectively created more limits.

For example, at one point Lord Darcy is secretly searching a room at night with the help of "a special device."

It was a fantastic device, a secret of His Majesty's Government. Powered by little zinc-copper couples that were the only known source of such magical power, they heated a steel wire to tremendously high temperature. The thin wire glowed white-hot, shedding a yellow-white light that was almost as bright as a gas-mantle lamp. The secret lay in the magical treatment of the steel filament. Under ordinary circumstances, the wire would burn up in a blue-white flash of fire. But, properly treated by a special spell, the wire was passivated and merely glowed with heat and light instead of burning. The hot wire was centered at the focus of a parabolic reflector, and merely by shoving forward a button with his thumb, Lord Darcy had at hand a light source equal to--and indeed far superior to--an ordinary dark lantern.

That's just so wonderful on so many levels. Not only is a plain old flashlight a source of awe (you merely have to shove forward a button with your thumb!), but it's repeatedly compared with things the reader isn't familiar with (various lamps and lanterns), because of course in Lord Darcy's world, that's what used. My most-favorite bit is the fact that they solve the major engineering puzzle of the incandescent bulb--how do you prevent the filament from just burning up?--by using magic. Of course. Because that's what they use to solve all their problems. It just doesn't work that well.

Seeking beta

You know, after writing Wednesday's post on what to do when you can't write, it occurred to me that I don't really have any beta tasks going on right now--production on Trust and Trang is wrapped up, and while I have some marketing plans (I'll be moving Trang to KDP Select at the beginning of December), it's nothing that's should be very time consuming.

I had two potential beta tasks in the back of my mind: changing the layout of the paper books and producing a Trang podcast. Changing the layout is going take a lot of time, involve doing a lot of something I do not enjoy, and the end result (a paperback that costs $9 more than the e-book instead of $10 more) doesn't strike me as something that will move the needle on sales. Doing a podcast costs a little money, will take a lot of time, and may or may not be something I enjoy, but it has the potential to reach a new audience.

Long story short: Yesterday I ordered a USB microphone. The Blue Snowball is less than $70 now!

THAT'S interesting

Well, Penguin and Random House are in merger talks!

I found out via PV (of course), but I think the most-detailed report on this is in The Guardian, which also has the advantage of being in English and not requiring registration. Apparently if the deal goes through, Random House's parent company, Bertlesmann, will have the majority stake.

It's interesting because the combined entity would control more than 25% of the UK book business, which would trigger an antitrust investigation. The Guardian quotes an optimist who notes that, since Amazon is eating everyone's lunch anyway, antitrust probably won't be a concern. But the Financial Times notes that, hm, Penguin is already in trouble with antitrust authorities in the United States....

Thinking, writing, thinking, writing

I'm not getting anything done today--after not sleeping well one night, I had a night of REALLY not sleeping well, courtesy of my decision to find out what the big deal is about Starbuck's Pumpkin Spice Latte. My report: It tastes truly horrible (avoid unless you just love artificial flavors), it hurts your stomach, and the stupid barista won't give you decaf when you ask for it. I got some more sleep last night (after taking a Benadryl to counteract all the caffeine I drank so I could stay awake and look after my niece), but not shockingly I'm still a groggy mess today.

The irony is that I had been thinking of doing a post on what you can do on days you can't write, which was somewhat inspired by this post by Midge Raymond on the Creative Penn. That one's pretty vague, and honestly I don't get the PROMPT thing, but I liked the idea.

Obviously, there are the beta tasks--whatever marketing and production chores you may have on your to-do list. But if you're in the middle of writing, and all of a sudden circumstances force you to stop, there's other stuff to do that can help when you get back to it.

When I start out, things tend to be rough, and sometimes (as happened the day after I wrote that post, in fact), not being able to write for a day can be helpful, especially if you can spend the time thinking about what the problems are in what you've written and how you can fix them. Often when you're writing something and it's off, the emotion ("This isn't any good") registers, but that's so general that it's not useful and can even be discouraging. Actually taking the time to sort the problem through analytically (what, specifically, did I not like about that part) leads you to solutions (well, in that case, I should do X--and, hey, that solves another problem, too).

I also find the thinking-writing-thinking-writing process more useful than trying to plan out everything at the outset (although I definitely do plan), because as I mentioned in the comments, a lot of stuff doesn't become clear until you start writing it out. In that case, there were pacing problems, which are not going to show up in an outline. I also find that in an outline, I'm more likely to have a character do something just because the plot needs for it to be done. Once I start writing in a character's voice, I deepen my acquaintance with that character, and that helps me either to make sure the character's actions are organic to their personality, or to realize that the event needs to be triggered in some other way. The writing drastically improves the thinking, which is yet another reason why you do have to start putting words on a page if you want to get anywhere.

Don't get too relaxed

There's been a couple of things that caught my eye lately because they have been interpreted as suggesting that things in the publishing industry aren't going to keep changing.

Traditional-publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin (via PV) did a little victory dance over the news that Amazon's publishing ventures are being affected by the Barnes & Noble boycott. I'm sure it was very soothing to his clients to hear things like:

Big publishers are reporting that ebook sales are now approaching 30% of their revenue, which is about a 50% increase from what they said last year. That follows several years when ebook uptake increased by 100% or more.

The problem with this is that, as Tom Simon pointed out, a slowdown in uptake is inevitable as the share of the market that goes to e-books increases.

Let us assume, strictly for convenience, that the total size of the trad-published book market is fixed. This past year, ebooks represented 30 percent of their sales. That was a 50-percent increase over the previous year: therefore, in that year ebooks represented 20 percent. If that in turn was a 100-percent increase over the year before, then in that year ebooks would have been 10 percent.

Exponential growth curves (especially when expressed as percentages of a larger market) cannot continue forever.

The growth in e-books will slow or maybe stop and even reverse itself one day, but that doesn't mean much. For example, if we pretend that the book market is fixed (which it isn't really), and if one day e-books represent 100% of the book market, then the share of the market represented by e-books will grow no more, because it can't. But that lack of growth is not going to help companies built around the sales of paper books. Likewise, if e-books make up 95% of the total book market, and one year that they drop to 94%, that's still not going to be especially helpful.

Another idea that is getting tossed around is the notion that, just because everyone and their dog is buying a tablet computer, that won't increase e-book sales--instead e-book sales wiil remain flat. Why? Because current data indicates that people who buy tablet computers read fewer books than people who buy e-reading devices.

Isn't that shocking? People who buy dedicated e-reading devices read more books than people who buy all-purpose tablet computers! Next thing you'll tell me is that people who buy juicers drink more juice than people who buy all-purpose food processors!

The relevant question is, do people who buy tablet computers buy more or fewer e-books (not books in general) now than they did before they bought the tablet computer? What is going to happen to that number over time as these all-purpose device owners realize (as I did with my smartphone after a few months of ownership, depite the fact that I love to read) that, hey, you can read books on this thing, and, wow, it's beyond easy to buy a book with it?

In other words, things are still changing, and they are largely changing in a way that will increase the e-book market. And the data we're forced to use to measure that change still blows.

It's also possible to overestimate how much things are going to change and to have false certainty in that direction.

For example, let's look at Barnes & Noble. Definitely a troubled company, no argument there. But even if Barnes & Noble's e-book business collapses entirely, does that mean that all Barnes & Noble stores are going to disappear, like Borders did?

I don't know, and neither does anyone else. Obviously it's a possibility--it happened to Borders, after all. But there are others.

Let's say that the e-book business collapses entirely and Barnes & Noble is reduced to a company with 1. a chain of paper bookstores, and 2. a ton of debt.

Believe it or not, there are people who would see value in that. To recap the optimist argument from last January:

While the bookstores are likely to go into gradual decline as e-books grow, they can probably generate at least $300 million in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. A conservative multiple of three times values the bookstore business at $900 million.

The thing is, that while the sexy large-scale growth businesses dominate Wall Street, there are many, many businesses out there that just plug along, generating a relatively-predictable amount of revenue a year. And there are many private investors who are happy to have a piece of a revenue-generator like that, even if it is (slowly) declining.

Barnes & Noble may go bankrupt (which can actually be helpful because it usually wipes out a company's debt); it may go private. And despite all that, it may remain what it is today: The nation's largest chain of bookstores.

Or it may vanish off the face of the Earth. Who knows?

It's hard to plan for uncertainty, but it's at least possible to not be caught flat footed by it. That's why I think it's important to preserve nimbleness--to stay away from long-term contracts, to not lock yourself into (or out of) any particular position. These days, it's all up in the air, and you have to able to respond.

A technical note

If you wonder why, when you post a comment here, it sometimes doesn't show up for, like, an entire day, that's because it gets caught in the spam filter. I have no idea why--the person's having commented before and, you know, the comment CLEARLY NOT BEING SPAM does not seem to assuage the spam filter's suspicions. I get an alert when you comment, but the alert doesn't actually tell me, "Oh, and BTW, the spam filter's holding this one hostage, so come on over to your blog and let it go ASAP."

Do I smell opportunity? Or rotten fish?

Last night I met someone who is a big believer in the 99-cent price point. This person has had tremendous success with their own books, and feels the price point was a major factor in that success. (Don't worry--once the books started to take off, the person raised the price, thereby sparing me more cerebral trauma.)

Their further evidence in favor of that price point was the fact that they help writers with largish backlists put out e-books, and the 99-cent price point has been very helpful in driving sales for those people as well.

The person was very adamant about the virtues of that price point, which was odd to me, because 1. they were not John Locke, and 2. my experience with the 99-cent price point was much more negative. I had Trang at 99 cents for a fairly long time last year, and I don't think it sold a single copy during those months. And you have people like Elle Lothlorien who saw sales increase every time she raised her book's price. Enough writers have had similar experiences that there's even a whole theory that the 99-cent price point is actually harmful, tainting your work with the odor of off-price sushi.

But then I thought about how I respond to the 99-cent price point when books by an author I am interested in are offered at that price. I jump all over those suckers.

And that's what I think is happening here. The type of writer this person services has a backlist of several books. In other words, these are writers who have already done the work of building a fan base.

In that case, the process presumably goes something like this:

1. Author releases backlist as 99-cent e-books.

2. Author's fans go, "zOMG!! SQUEEE!!! That's a great price!" and BUY BUY BUY.

3. Author's books shoot up Amazon's charts.

4. Amazon's algorithms do the rest.

But I think for somebody new...eh. Then I think you do run the risk of smelling a little fishy. You'd need to get a lot of "this book is good"-type indicators before dropping things to 99 cents is going to move the needle.

Zzzzzz

I didn't sleep well last night, and I was trying to work on the novel today but...yeah. Not gonna happen. Hopefully I won't be a total zombie at the Meetup tonight.

Ironically, I feel like I've finally hit the point in Trials where I have a good idea of how things are going (how the book is going to get from point A to point B), so it's just a matter of filling out the scenes. It's that nice, calm, confident feeling that will doubtless go away soon, but it's nice while it lasts.

We're all tainted....

As I mentioned, I recently joined Angie's List, where you review contractors. My house is a fixer-upper (as in, within a couple of years, I will probably have replaced everything except the interior walls and the foundation), and there's a general contractor who I've used on many of these jobs over the years, because he rocks.

So of course my impulse upon Angie's List was to be sure to leave a review about him, telling people that he rocks.

The problem is, when I was sniffing over the reviews there, a place with one A-grade review smelled pretty funny to me. This contractor hasn't been reviewed before (it's kind of a side business for him), so by trying to do him a favor, I may be creating a situation where he looks really dodgy.

I hope not, and I don't think it will help him to not leave the review--at least this way the next person who reviews him won't look so much like a shill.

Apparently something similar has been happening now with Amazon, where fans are getting mistaken for sock puppets. It's the larger problem when fake reviews become the norm--the whole reviewing system starts to break down, and all of it gets viewed with suspicion. Or, worse, it doesn't get viewed at all, because it's all seen as a waste of time, and that marketing path is lost.

Of course, as the Amazon case shows, policing this sort of thing is pretty difficult--maybe the Yelp sting approach has more promise, although it's clearly labor intensive. But I'm glad this is at least on the radar as something to police, and I hope it puts an end to reviewers openly soliciting money in exchange for reviews, or at least to sites recommending reviewers who openly solicit money in exchange for reviews.