So, it's done then. The Second Realm is complete.
What the hell do I do now?
Actually, before I get to the future (...he said as if he wasn't entering it right now), I'd like to take a moment to look back over the series and what it's done for me.
I never actually wrote a blog post at the start of the project laying out my aims for it (though somewhere in the past three years I've convinced myself I did). In October of 2011, I'd just published Heaven Can Wait (which I might finally get around to republishing soon, but I'm not sure), and was two years into my PhD, with the hard part very much still ahead of me.
I wasn't sure how much attention I'd be able to give to my writing and platform-building over the coming couple of years, a concern that proved well-justified. I'd made what felt like a good start, joining a warm, passionate and very active community of authors spread out across social networking and the blogosphere, but it was very early days - this blog, for example, enjoyed less than a thousand pageviews in the month that The Second Realm launched (this month is on course to be the first to break 50k).
I felt a bit like I was trying to kindle (see what I did there?) a fire in a high wind. Constant attention would be needed to maintain progress, during a period in which I would have little attention to spare. A serial looked like a good option - a way to write, publish and promote in small chunks scattered through my otherwise busy life.
This wasn't just about promotion and platform-building, by the way. It was also about practicing and developing my craft. In the thirteen months November 2010-November 2011, I wrote five whole novels, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that again any time soon. My technique had improved markedly over the time and I didn't want to start back-sliding.
So The Second Realm had two purposes, really; to keep me writing and to keep me publishing. It wasn't, initially at least, intended to make any money. Episodes went out completely free (except for the few that I pushed onto Amazon, where I couldn't set 'free' as a price), and I'm not convinced that my introduction of pay-what-you-like mechanisms from season 2 onwards was a well-thought-out strategy.
Given those goals, I think I have to consider The Second Realm a success. I finished the thing, so I must have kept writing. Indeed, my writing has definitely benefitted, not just from repeated practice, but also from regular, robust feedback. As a writer, I've not degenerated, I've advanced.
As a platform-building exercise, the analysis has to be a bit more complex. On Smashwords, episodes and samples have been downloaded a total of over 9000 times, but while the persistent growth of that number over time entails continuing (and even growing) interest, it's not clear how much of that represents people actually reading my words. The same goes for the traffic on this blog, which has shot up over the last year - there's a lot of page-viewing happening, but not much visible sign of engagement (I get over a hundred spam comments a day, but that hardly counts).
Still, my storefront on Smashwords has 32 book covers on it, and the number 9000 is a pretty good calling-card. Money has trickled in, though not yet enough to justify the expense of getting a passport so I can apply to the US IRS for tax treaty status and actually collect my earnings.
The test will be whether there's significant carry-over into whatever I publish next, and that requires me to publish something. Which brings us up to date. I have several options, and would love nothing more than to go for all of them (I can't, after all, out-compete myself), but the demands of earning a living make that infeasible right now. When I make up my mind, you'll all be the first to know.
One thing that can't be underestimated is the value to my self-esteem and self-perception of having finished this thing. I don't feel like I have to cringe anymore when someone asks me 'yeah, but are you really an author, or are you just saying that?'. I can give them a link. Hopefully soon, I'll be able to hand them a physical copy of (at least part of) The Second Realm, or maybe hit them with it if they get really uppity about it.
Thanks for taking this journey with me. Here's to the next leg!
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
Thursday, 17 July 2014
A Madness of Angels
This isn't really a book review, but if it is, it's a review of A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin. With that in mind, let me start by recommending the book, very highly, to anyone who likes reading... well, words, really. The words in this book are excellent, beautifully chosen, and the story they tell is pretty good too (I'm not sure about the ending, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually just generally ending-averse).
The book is a 'modern fairytale' sort of affair, something I'm very interested in but so far always disappointed by. Mark Chadbourn's 'Age of Misrule' was brilliant for about the first two chapters, then traded all its modernity for hippy hagiography. Even Neverwhere, a delightful story, felt backward-looking and nostalgic (though it has the excuse of being almost twenty years old).
A Madness of Angels has the advantage (you would think) of only being five years old. Well, probably six or so; its publication date of 2009 means it was probably written no later than 2008. It's set around that time, too - no earlier than 2005, and probably more like 2007-8ish. That makes it younger than Facebook, probably younger than Twitter, contemporary with the first iPhones.
I said this wasn't really a book review. What I'm actually getting at is how fast the world is changing. Madness felt (to me, specifically looking for a 'modern fairytale') hopelessly out of date. This is a book published after I became an adult, and not just in the legal okay-we'll-let-you-drive-now sense; by the time Madness came out in paperback, I'd started my flippin' PhD.
I don't remember a character in the novel sending an email (it's kind of implicit that emails are being sent in the world, but they don't appear on the page). Half-way through, the main character buys his first ever mobile phone - granted, he's been out of circulation for a couple of years, and prior to that lived quite a rootless life, but I was a relative latecomer to mobile phones and got my first when I was about fifteen (2002 or so). The internet as a whole barely figures in the story.
All of which is terrifying to me, as a modern writer trying to write (not always directly) about modern life. My first finished novel, which I wrote in late 2010, does feature tweets, emails and smartphones, but a lot of it takes place on blogs and online message-boards and yet there's no mention at all of Tumblr. By the time I get back to it to give it the heavy rework that any writer's first novel needs, there may not be much point.
The advantage of writing fantasy that cuts further away from reality (like The Second Realm, which I like to think has some pretty modern themes in it) is a level of insulation from this problem, but it does also put up a barrier to really engaging with new developments as people in my audience experience them.
I do, genuinely, recommend A Madness of Angels, but I'm not sure it lives up to its cover quote ("'Neverwhere' for the digital age"). But then, given the time it takes to write, edit, polish and publish any novel, I'm not sure that anything could ever live up to that billing.
The book is a 'modern fairytale' sort of affair, something I'm very interested in but so far always disappointed by. Mark Chadbourn's 'Age of Misrule' was brilliant for about the first two chapters, then traded all its modernity for hippy hagiography. Even Neverwhere, a delightful story, felt backward-looking and nostalgic (though it has the excuse of being almost twenty years old).
A Madness of Angels has the advantage (you would think) of only being five years old. Well, probably six or so; its publication date of 2009 means it was probably written no later than 2008. It's set around that time, too - no earlier than 2005, and probably more like 2007-8ish. That makes it younger than Facebook, probably younger than Twitter, contemporary with the first iPhones.
I said this wasn't really a book review. What I'm actually getting at is how fast the world is changing. Madness felt (to me, specifically looking for a 'modern fairytale') hopelessly out of date. This is a book published after I became an adult, and not just in the legal okay-we'll-let-you-drive-now sense; by the time Madness came out in paperback, I'd started my flippin' PhD.
I don't remember a character in the novel sending an email (it's kind of implicit that emails are being sent in the world, but they don't appear on the page). Half-way through, the main character buys his first ever mobile phone - granted, he's been out of circulation for a couple of years, and prior to that lived quite a rootless life, but I was a relative latecomer to mobile phones and got my first when I was about fifteen (2002 or so). The internet as a whole barely figures in the story.
All of which is terrifying to me, as a modern writer trying to write (not always directly) about modern life. My first finished novel, which I wrote in late 2010, does feature tweets, emails and smartphones, but a lot of it takes place on blogs and online message-boards and yet there's no mention at all of Tumblr. By the time I get back to it to give it the heavy rework that any writer's first novel needs, there may not be much point.
The advantage of writing fantasy that cuts further away from reality (like The Second Realm, which I like to think has some pretty modern themes in it) is a level of insulation from this problem, but it does also put up a barrier to really engaging with new developments as people in my audience experience them.
I do, genuinely, recommend A Madness of Angels, but I'm not sure it lives up to its cover quote ("'Neverwhere' for the digital age"). But then, given the time it takes to write, edit, polish and publish any novel, I'm not sure that anything could ever live up to that billing.
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
Wellll... *something* is definitely working...
I like graphs:
That's the graph (which has appeared several times before on this blog) of downloads of Second Realm episodes on Smashwords. Each data point is a week, and I've been tracking since late May 2012, so it's basically two years' worth of data. The particular thing I like about this graph is that bit where it shoots up on the right-hand side; traffic has rocketed over the last couple of months.
Last week, as you can see, was the biggest week ever for the series. That's the blue line, which is the simple 'how many downloads this week' line. Notice too, though, that the red and green lines, which are rolling averages, are up in a big way - that's a measure of how consistent traffic is, aiming to even out the spikes created by the fact that I only release one episode a month. The green average, which is the longer-term of the two, now stands at almost 150% of its previous peak, in August of 2012.
Hits on this blog are up pretty substantially, too; March is on track to smash the previous record (from last March). This is presumably because I'm updating regularly again - though it's worth noting that I'm blogging half as much as I did this time last year, to significantly greater effect. There seems to be more throughput from blog to downloads, too, so maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this blogging thing. I have tried to change my approach lately - aiming to be less preachy, less pompous, and to write more about my personal experience.
There is, of course, another relevant piece of information:
(Yes, I know I said I'd stop bitching about the damn PhD soon. Obviously I meant 'but not just yet' ;) )
Actually, that graph is slightly misleading, but it is true that the big dead spot which you can see through last summer corresponds to the most intense period of work I've done on the PhD; something similar goes for my failure to capitalise on the massive spike from the summer before. The PhD still isn't quite over, but I'm already starting to feel like I've been unleashed.
To cap it all off, I got a lovely 5-star review on Smashwords yesterday from Rebecca Whitlock (many thanks and I hope you continue to enjoy the series, if you're reading this). All in all, it's been a very good start to the year and I hope I can keep it up. That will, of course, require me to somehow manage to finish the next episode *and* my PhD in the next three weeks or so, but I'm getting there...
That's the graph (which has appeared several times before on this blog) of downloads of Second Realm episodes on Smashwords. Each data point is a week, and I've been tracking since late May 2012, so it's basically two years' worth of data. The particular thing I like about this graph is that bit where it shoots up on the right-hand side; traffic has rocketed over the last couple of months.
Last week, as you can see, was the biggest week ever for the series. That's the blue line, which is the simple 'how many downloads this week' line. Notice too, though, that the red and green lines, which are rolling averages, are up in a big way - that's a measure of how consistent traffic is, aiming to even out the spikes created by the fact that I only release one episode a month. The green average, which is the longer-term of the two, now stands at almost 150% of its previous peak, in August of 2012.
Hits on this blog are up pretty substantially, too; March is on track to smash the previous record (from last March). This is presumably because I'm updating regularly again - though it's worth noting that I'm blogging half as much as I did this time last year, to significantly greater effect. There seems to be more throughput from blog to downloads, too, so maybe I'm finally getting the hang of this blogging thing. I have tried to change my approach lately - aiming to be less preachy, less pompous, and to write more about my personal experience.
There is, of course, another relevant piece of information:
(Yes, I know I said I'd stop bitching about the damn PhD soon. Obviously I meant 'but not just yet' ;) )
Actually, that graph is slightly misleading, but it is true that the big dead spot which you can see through last summer corresponds to the most intense period of work I've done on the PhD; something similar goes for my failure to capitalise on the massive spike from the summer before. The PhD still isn't quite over, but I'm already starting to feel like I've been unleashed.
To cap it all off, I got a lovely 5-star review on Smashwords yesterday from Rebecca Whitlock (many thanks and I hope you continue to enjoy the series, if you're reading this). All in all, it's been a very good start to the year and I hope I can keep it up. That will, of course, require me to somehow manage to finish the next episode *and* my PhD in the next three weeks or so, but I'm getting there...
Friday, 28 February 2014
Patreon
You should totally check this website out, it's awesome. Also, it was totally my idea (Disclaimer: I'm not claiming that the actual creators of Patreon, who according to Wikipedia are Jack Conte and Samueal Yam, stole my idea. Just let the record show that I thought of the same thing about two months before it became a reality; it makes me feel all cool and progressive).
I should probably back up and explain. Patreon is a website that works a bit like Kickstarter, but directly for artists' careers rather than for specific projects. Artists who are producing work regularly, or running on-going projects like webcomics, can list themselves on the site and fans then pledge a certain amount per month or installment in support.
Why is this so great? It enables an artist's fan-base to act collectively as his/her patron, in the old-fashioned sense - a wealthy individual who pays an artist's keep for the prestige of association. It's another way for artists to make money from their work that doesn't rely on huge, inefficient corporate superstructures of the kind that have so badly damaged the publishing and music industries.
And, unlike Kickstarter, Patreon offers something I think is essential to any artist's work - the freedom to follow capricious passion. One of the nagging worries with Kickstarter (and last I knew, it still hadn't happened, but I may have missed it) has always been 'what happens if a big project fails?' - what happens if a million dollars' worth of funders don't get their pledged rewards? With Patreon, because the support is for the artist rather than the project, there isn't quite the same scale of risk involved in failure. Provided the output stays good, the artist is free to switch away from a struggling or stuck project to something more fruitful.
I think it has the potential to build some stronger bridges across the artist-audience divide, too. Patrons on Patreon get rewards based on how much they pledge, just like on Kickstarter, and Patreon make much of the fact that potential rewards could be things like Google+ hangouts and Q&A sessions. Being pathologically shy, I don't know if I'd get much out of it as a patron, since I'd probably just stay silent the whole time, but as an artist I'd love to talk to fans directly.
Of course, I'm not actually jumping on Patreon right now. That would be proactive, effective and sensible. After all, I'm currently publishing a serial on a monthly basis, which would be the perfect kind of project for this format. It's even doing quite well - due to hit 5,000 total downloads at Smashwords any day now (I was expecting it this week, but things have been slow).
There are a few reasons why I'm not going for it right now. First, and most painfully obvious, is the fact that the schedule for The Second Realm hasn't exactly been reliable the last few months. Life's pretty disorganised at the moment, and will be until at least Easter, and I'm still trying to deal with the tail end of the PhD. Finding the time to focus on The Second Realm - I work best when I can bury myself in a project for a week or two at a time - has been tricky and, yes, the episode that should be out tomorrow is going to be delayed (another) week. Sorry.
There are other problems, though. First off, I have no idea what I could offer as subscriber rewards. I don't have the technology to offer a Google+ hangout, and even if I did I'm sure I'd just be awkward. I don't have time to write additional episodes or related material - I still haven't compiled the bonus material I want to include in the print editions, which is a project that's been going on for a year and a half now.
Finally, there's the issue that The Second Realm is due to end in about eight months. Actually, I hope it will be somewhat less than that, because I'm starting to need a change of project. Don't get me wrong, I still love the world and characters, but I'm getting to the point where I'm really looking forward to the finale. Two and a half years is a long time to live with a project, particularly one which has been as out-and-out hard as The Second Realm.
It's hard to think past that point, and I have no idea whether my next project will be as well-suited to Patreon. I prefer working in neat discrete bursts, which may after all suit Kickstarter better. I'll see what I decide to do next, but I'm very glad Patreon is available as an option.
I should probably back up and explain. Patreon is a website that works a bit like Kickstarter, but directly for artists' careers rather than for specific projects. Artists who are producing work regularly, or running on-going projects like webcomics, can list themselves on the site and fans then pledge a certain amount per month or installment in support.
Why is this so great? It enables an artist's fan-base to act collectively as his/her patron, in the old-fashioned sense - a wealthy individual who pays an artist's keep for the prestige of association. It's another way for artists to make money from their work that doesn't rely on huge, inefficient corporate superstructures of the kind that have so badly damaged the publishing and music industries.
And, unlike Kickstarter, Patreon offers something I think is essential to any artist's work - the freedom to follow capricious passion. One of the nagging worries with Kickstarter (and last I knew, it still hadn't happened, but I may have missed it) has always been 'what happens if a big project fails?' - what happens if a million dollars' worth of funders don't get their pledged rewards? With Patreon, because the support is for the artist rather than the project, there isn't quite the same scale of risk involved in failure. Provided the output stays good, the artist is free to switch away from a struggling or stuck project to something more fruitful.
I think it has the potential to build some stronger bridges across the artist-audience divide, too. Patrons on Patreon get rewards based on how much they pledge, just like on Kickstarter, and Patreon make much of the fact that potential rewards could be things like Google+ hangouts and Q&A sessions. Being pathologically shy, I don't know if I'd get much out of it as a patron, since I'd probably just stay silent the whole time, but as an artist I'd love to talk to fans directly.
Of course, I'm not actually jumping on Patreon right now. That would be proactive, effective and sensible. After all, I'm currently publishing a serial on a monthly basis, which would be the perfect kind of project for this format. It's even doing quite well - due to hit 5,000 total downloads at Smashwords any day now (I was expecting it this week, but things have been slow).
There are a few reasons why I'm not going for it right now. First, and most painfully obvious, is the fact that the schedule for The Second Realm hasn't exactly been reliable the last few months. Life's pretty disorganised at the moment, and will be until at least Easter, and I'm still trying to deal with the tail end of the PhD. Finding the time to focus on The Second Realm - I work best when I can bury myself in a project for a week or two at a time - has been tricky and, yes, the episode that should be out tomorrow is going to be delayed (another) week. Sorry.
There are other problems, though. First off, I have no idea what I could offer as subscriber rewards. I don't have the technology to offer a Google+ hangout, and even if I did I'm sure I'd just be awkward. I don't have time to write additional episodes or related material - I still haven't compiled the bonus material I want to include in the print editions, which is a project that's been going on for a year and a half now.
Finally, there's the issue that The Second Realm is due to end in about eight months. Actually, I hope it will be somewhat less than that, because I'm starting to need a change of project. Don't get me wrong, I still love the world and characters, but I'm getting to the point where I'm really looking forward to the finale. Two and a half years is a long time to live with a project, particularly one which has been as out-and-out hard as The Second Realm.
It's hard to think past that point, and I have no idea whether my next project will be as well-suited to Patreon. I prefer working in neat discrete bursts, which may after all suit Kickstarter better. I'll see what I decide to do next, but I'm very glad Patreon is available as an option.
Monday, 3 February 2014
It's Like Game of Thrones Without the Sex and Violence...
It's a good time to be a fantasy author. The Hobbit and Game of Thrones are riding high. For a broader conception of fantasy, one could also draw on the success of Harry Potter and (*shudder*) Twilight, but The Hobbit and Game of Thrones are much closer to what I'm doing.
I've been trying to work out how best to 'pitch' The Second Realm to potential readers. It's something I've struggled to do for a long time, because it's quite a difficult story to summarise - 'There's this world that's a bit like a post-apocalyptic version of ours, but the apocalypse was it crashing into fairyland, and...' It takes quite a long time to get to the characters, the real meat of the story.
And you don't get a long time to sell someone on your work, usually only a sentence or two. It would be great if I could say 'You like Game of Thrones? Well, you'll like my books!', but that's a long way from guaranteed. And if I say, 'Well, it's like Game of Thrones, but with less sex and violence', people say things like 'What does that leave?' (In truth, The Second Realm is like Game of Thrones but with no sex and far less violence).
Part of the problem is that fantasy, even if we limit ourselves to 'secondary-world' fantasy (fantasy not set at least partly in 'the real world'), is a very broad genre. It stretches from the Sword-and-Sorcery pulp of Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar to classic epics like Lord of the Rings and Michael Scott Rohan's The Winter of the World, to the character-driven political stories of Game of Thrones or Robin Hobb's Six Duchies and Rain Wild books, all the way out to contemporary deconstructionist works like Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles and Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards.
And most people have only heard of three things on that list - Conan, LotR and Game of Thrones. You can be a fantasy author and be writing stories which are nothing like what most people think fantasy involves. Indeed, arguably, since the tropes in Conan, LotR and Game of Thrones are somewhat played-out (no criticism intended to their respective authors), a good fantasy author should be trying to get away from those classics.
But that does make it very difficult to pitch your project. I need to get a pitch out of this summary of The Second Realm:
Set in a world somewhat like a post-apocalyptic version of ours, where technology has fallen back to medieval levels, this is the story of a group of elite warriors, augmented with magical superpowers, who must work together to protect 'ordinary' humans from both terrifying supernatural invaders and their own superpowered brethren, not all of whom see the business of 'saving mankind' in the same terms.
Actually, in some ways, I think the closest analogy from a storytelling perspective would be a superhero comic. Probably the X-men. I quite like the idea of telling people that I'm writing 'X-men: Middle Earth'.
If that sounds like your thing, by the way, The Second Realm starts here and is also available at Smashwords, formatted for all major ebook platforms. I hope to have print collections available later this year (he says, for the third year in a row...), but for now it's all free. Enjoy!
I've been trying to work out how best to 'pitch' The Second Realm to potential readers. It's something I've struggled to do for a long time, because it's quite a difficult story to summarise - 'There's this world that's a bit like a post-apocalyptic version of ours, but the apocalypse was it crashing into fairyland, and...' It takes quite a long time to get to the characters, the real meat of the story.
And you don't get a long time to sell someone on your work, usually only a sentence or two. It would be great if I could say 'You like Game of Thrones? Well, you'll like my books!', but that's a long way from guaranteed. And if I say, 'Well, it's like Game of Thrones, but with less sex and violence', people say things like 'What does that leave?' (In truth, The Second Realm is like Game of Thrones but with no sex and far less violence).
Part of the problem is that fantasy, even if we limit ourselves to 'secondary-world' fantasy (fantasy not set at least partly in 'the real world'), is a very broad genre. It stretches from the Sword-and-Sorcery pulp of Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Swords of Lankhmar to classic epics like Lord of the Rings and Michael Scott Rohan's The Winter of the World, to the character-driven political stories of Game of Thrones or Robin Hobb's Six Duchies and Rain Wild books, all the way out to contemporary deconstructionist works like Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles and Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards.
And most people have only heard of three things on that list - Conan, LotR and Game of Thrones. You can be a fantasy author and be writing stories which are nothing like what most people think fantasy involves. Indeed, arguably, since the tropes in Conan, LotR and Game of Thrones are somewhat played-out (no criticism intended to their respective authors), a good fantasy author should be trying to get away from those classics.
But that does make it very difficult to pitch your project. I need to get a pitch out of this summary of The Second Realm:
Set in a world somewhat like a post-apocalyptic version of ours, where technology has fallen back to medieval levels, this is the story of a group of elite warriors, augmented with magical superpowers, who must work together to protect 'ordinary' humans from both terrifying supernatural invaders and their own superpowered brethren, not all of whom see the business of 'saving mankind' in the same terms.
Actually, in some ways, I think the closest analogy from a storytelling perspective would be a superhero comic. Probably the X-men. I quite like the idea of telling people that I'm writing 'X-men: Middle Earth'.
If that sounds like your thing, by the way, The Second Realm starts here and is also available at Smashwords, formatted for all major ebook platforms. I hope to have print collections available later this year (he says, for the third year in a row...), but for now it's all free. Enjoy!
Sunday, 19 January 2014
Pricing and Giving Things Away
When Season 2 of The Second Realm launched, I decided to try releasing it on Smashwords' 'Pay What You Like' system, where users can choose any price (even free) to pay for a book. I thought of it as a sort of 'tip jar' - it's always been my intention that The Second Realm should exist primarily to be read, not to make money, but if people wanted to give me money for it, I wasn't going to say no.
Rather dishearteningly, no-one seems to have wanted to give me money for it. Worse than that, the number of people downloading Season 2 for free is much smaller than the number of people still downloading bits of Season 1 (which has always been and will remain free). While some season 1 episodes now have over 500 downloads, the early parts of season 2 have only even been *sampled* a handful of times each.
What this suggests is that most of the people accessing Season 1 are doing so out of curiosity, and then not coming back, or being put off by the fact that you do actually have to sign up for Smashwords to get at Season 2. I'd like to think that what's happening is that rather than click through a bunch of screens on Smashwords, people are coming here and reading The Second Realm on this blog, but that seems a little optimistic.
Anyway, the really nice thing about self-publishing is that there's no great faff involved in changing something that isn't working. This experiment has gone on for fifteen months now, with no positive results and some negative, so it's time to bring it to an end. As of now, Season 2 of The Second Realm is free on Smashwords.
I'm not recommending this as a universal strategy, by the way. As I said before, the purpose of The Second Realm has always been to get people reading stories by me, not to get them paying for stories by me (I'm of the opinion that I ought to have to prove myself - through something other than a blurb and marketing - before I can expect people to pay). Trying to put a tip jar system in place has ended up creating a barrier to that purpose, so I'm getting rid of the barrier.
It will be interesting to see whether anything very much changes in the performance of season 2. Episodes of Season 1 are still being downloaded at a pretty steady rate even two years after release, so unless the episodes of Season 2 have some sort of anti-downloading plague there should be quite a significant jump, but these things are always unpredictable.
Anyway, it's now even easier to get hold of Second Realm episodes. Go to! (And I hope you enjoy ;D)
Rather dishearteningly, no-one seems to have wanted to give me money for it. Worse than that, the number of people downloading Season 2 for free is much smaller than the number of people still downloading bits of Season 1 (which has always been and will remain free). While some season 1 episodes now have over 500 downloads, the early parts of season 2 have only even been *sampled* a handful of times each.
What this suggests is that most of the people accessing Season 1 are doing so out of curiosity, and then not coming back, or being put off by the fact that you do actually have to sign up for Smashwords to get at Season 2. I'd like to think that what's happening is that rather than click through a bunch of screens on Smashwords, people are coming here and reading The Second Realm on this blog, but that seems a little optimistic.
Anyway, the really nice thing about self-publishing is that there's no great faff involved in changing something that isn't working. This experiment has gone on for fifteen months now, with no positive results and some negative, so it's time to bring it to an end. As of now, Season 2 of The Second Realm is free on Smashwords.
I'm not recommending this as a universal strategy, by the way. As I said before, the purpose of The Second Realm has always been to get people reading stories by me, not to get them paying for stories by me (I'm of the opinion that I ought to have to prove myself - through something other than a blurb and marketing - before I can expect people to pay). Trying to put a tip jar system in place has ended up creating a barrier to that purpose, so I'm getting rid of the barrier.
It will be interesting to see whether anything very much changes in the performance of season 2. Episodes of Season 1 are still being downloaded at a pretty steady rate even two years after release, so unless the episodes of Season 2 have some sort of anti-downloading plague there should be quite a significant jump, but these things are always unpredictable.
Anyway, it's now even easier to get hold of Second Realm episodes. Go to! (And I hope you enjoy ;D)
Monday, 13 January 2014
Hardcopy (*snerk*)
Okay, in a couple of weeks I won't be a student any more and won't have the excuse of a PhD to hide away from pursuing my writing career. It's time to resurrect my plan to publish hardcopy collections of The Second Realm (my mother will buy one if no-one else ;D).
Anyway, that brings me back to the question that stymied me when I was initially trying to get this organised a year and a half ago; how much additional editing should I do for the hardcopy version?
There are two problems with writing a serial like The Second Realm. First, there's the simple fact that over the run, I've improved quite a lot as a writer. Some of the early episodes seem a little bit ropey and short on characterisation as I go back over them now. The second is that, inevitably, continuity mistakes creep in here and there. Sometimes I put something in an early episode that I forgot or couldn't stick to later on (at least one minor character's gender has changed at least once).
I think all of this stuff is still eminently fixable - there are no major changes needed. The question is whether or not I should make such changes. On the one hand, I want to put out the best book I can. I want to do right by these characters who've been with me for two and a half years now (and probably more by the time I get the damn books made up - also, Christ, that's nearly a tenth of my life 0.0). On the other, it feels a bit like cheating or rewriting history.
When I was in webcomics, I actually went back to the rather ropey first few chapters of my main comic and completely redid them; a full re-write in a much more recent version of my art style. I was very glad to have done it - the results, I felt, were worth it - but lots of the webcomic people I talked to thought it was a bad idea. The general viewpoint seemed to be that it was nice to see an artist's development over the course of a project (and I must admit, this is something I've liked about the print volumes of Gunnerkrigg Court that I've got).
However, that could be because most of the people I talked to about my webcomic were also webcomic artists, with a professional interest in the art. If I'm putting together hardcopy of The Second Realm, I want to sell mainly to non-writers (because there are a lot more non-writers than writers), and also, to a certain extent, to people who haven't necessarily been following the serialisation.
Either way, I'm not sure what to do, so I'm throwing open the question. Which would you rather see? A more polished book that's a little bit of historical revision, or a warts-and-all honest transfer (which may take a bit less time to produce, too). I should probably add that I have 'bonus materials' planned for the collections as well - extra stories, maybe some deleted scenes, that sort of thing.
Let me know what you think in the comments, or anywhere else you can get in touch with me for that matter. Thanks for reading.
Anyway, that brings me back to the question that stymied me when I was initially trying to get this organised a year and a half ago; how much additional editing should I do for the hardcopy version?
There are two problems with writing a serial like The Second Realm. First, there's the simple fact that over the run, I've improved quite a lot as a writer. Some of the early episodes seem a little bit ropey and short on characterisation as I go back over them now. The second is that, inevitably, continuity mistakes creep in here and there. Sometimes I put something in an early episode that I forgot or couldn't stick to later on (at least one minor character's gender has changed at least once).
I think all of this stuff is still eminently fixable - there are no major changes needed. The question is whether or not I should make such changes. On the one hand, I want to put out the best book I can. I want to do right by these characters who've been with me for two and a half years now (and probably more by the time I get the damn books made up - also, Christ, that's nearly a tenth of my life 0.0). On the other, it feels a bit like cheating or rewriting history.
When I was in webcomics, I actually went back to the rather ropey first few chapters of my main comic and completely redid them; a full re-write in a much more recent version of my art style. I was very glad to have done it - the results, I felt, were worth it - but lots of the webcomic people I talked to thought it was a bad idea. The general viewpoint seemed to be that it was nice to see an artist's development over the course of a project (and I must admit, this is something I've liked about the print volumes of Gunnerkrigg Court that I've got).
However, that could be because most of the people I talked to about my webcomic were also webcomic artists, with a professional interest in the art. If I'm putting together hardcopy of The Second Realm, I want to sell mainly to non-writers (because there are a lot more non-writers than writers), and also, to a certain extent, to people who haven't necessarily been following the serialisation.
Either way, I'm not sure what to do, so I'm throwing open the question. Which would you rather see? A more polished book that's a little bit of historical revision, or a warts-and-all honest transfer (which may take a bit less time to produce, too). I should probably add that I have 'bonus materials' planned for the collections as well - extra stories, maybe some deleted scenes, that sort of thing.
Let me know what you think in the comments, or anywhere else you can get in touch with me for that matter. Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, 30 July 2013
Amateur Publishing
Here's an interesting article. The author argues that we are or should be starting to shift from a 'published/unpublished' paradigm of writing to a 'professional/unprofessional' divide. I actually agree with most of what he says, particularly the bit about how, if you want to be a bestseller, whether you're self- or traditionally published, you have to have the best in professional-quality editing, design and marketing.
The thing is, those services all cost money. Altucher puts the cost at anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000 per book, depending on what you pay for and what you do yourself, and that sounds entirely plausible. People (like me) who don't have that kind of money to spare are stuck, if we want to publish 'professionally', with the traditional route.
One of the things I really love about self-publishing, that makes it really exciting for me from a global, sociopolitical perspective, is that it allows everyone to make their voices heard, irrespective of the arbitrary, capricious moods of New York. But if Altucher's right (and I think he is), professional self-publishing is closed to most of us.
Or at least, it is at first. Pretty much everything else I can think of that has a 'professional' division also has a thriving amateur community. There's no reason that publishing can't be the same (and, indeed, it probably already is, and has been since the dawn of the internet - it's just the tools have gotten better recently). Whether or not you think that's a good thing probably depends on your understanding of 'amateur' and your experiences of amateur activities.
It's true that 'amateurish' is a description applied to shoddy, sub-par work (usually by snooty critics). It's easy to assume that people who aren't benefitting from huge stacks of money cannot hope to compete with those who are. We make money so important in our culture that we fall into the trap of assuming it's all that matters.
But most of the actual amateurs I know are dedicated, enthusiastic, and highly skilled. My parents are amateur archers, which means they practice for 4-6 hours at least twice a week, compete for one or two full days most weekends, at least during the summer season, and spend long hours making sure that their equipment and technique are of top spec. Much the same, I assume, goes for most amateur sportspeople.
I'm also part of a thriving community of amateur bands (here are a few examples) who probably average 10-20 hours' work per week. Many of them are working towards becoming professional, but the fact that they're not there yet (which is all it means to say that they're 'amateur') doesn't reflect on their music at all.
Perhaps the most compelling example, though, is my experience with the webcomics community. Webcomics have the advantage of a clear separation from both graphic novels and newspaper comic strips - the two 'professional' spheres of sequential art. For whatever reason, people don't see webcomics as part of the comics industry (whereas all the fuss over amateur self-publishing is about the fact that it at least appears to be part of the same industry as New York), and that means that all webcomics are fundamentally amateur.
Well, they start out amateur. Those that work hard, produce top-quality material regularly, and communicate well with their fan-bases become professional. And it doesn't actually take that long; in mid-2006, a friend recommended I check out a newish webcomic called Gunnerkrigg Court. In 2012, its creator, Tom Siddell, quit his job to work full-time on the comic. My sister bought the first two (of four, all highly-recommended) hardback collections for me for my birthday this year; volume 2 has a back-cover blurb from no less than Neil Gaiman.
I highly recommend you check out the first five or six years of Gunnerkrigg Court if you think that 'amateur' necessarily means 'amateurish'. Nor did the perpetual flood of crap webcomics (the two I wrote and drew around that time included) stop Siddell finding an audience.
It's perhaps true that only professionally-published stuff should have access to the top channels in book marketing (Oprah, newspaper reviews, billboards in airports etc.), but then it's definitely true that only professionally-published stuff does have access to those channels.
Amateur publishing allows writers to develop their publishing skills, form communities, communicate with and learn directly from readers, and generally raise their craft to the level of professionals. It allows us to earn, through time spent and hard work, the services that otherwise must be paid for, for example by building a platform and then running the Kickstarter gauntlet. And it allows people who the world might otherwise never have heard from to speak.
So, I'm all in favour of a professional/amateur division in publishing (worth noting: this is a division that has existed at least since the dawn of the internet and probably since long before), provided that no-one is going to stigmatise 'amateur' as 'amateurish'.
The thing is, those services all cost money. Altucher puts the cost at anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000 per book, depending on what you pay for and what you do yourself, and that sounds entirely plausible. People (like me) who don't have that kind of money to spare are stuck, if we want to publish 'professionally', with the traditional route.
One of the things I really love about self-publishing, that makes it really exciting for me from a global, sociopolitical perspective, is that it allows everyone to make their voices heard, irrespective of the arbitrary, capricious moods of New York. But if Altucher's right (and I think he is), professional self-publishing is closed to most of us.
Or at least, it is at first. Pretty much everything else I can think of that has a 'professional' division also has a thriving amateur community. There's no reason that publishing can't be the same (and, indeed, it probably already is, and has been since the dawn of the internet - it's just the tools have gotten better recently). Whether or not you think that's a good thing probably depends on your understanding of 'amateur' and your experiences of amateur activities.
It's true that 'amateurish' is a description applied to shoddy, sub-par work (usually by snooty critics). It's easy to assume that people who aren't benefitting from huge stacks of money cannot hope to compete with those who are. We make money so important in our culture that we fall into the trap of assuming it's all that matters.
But most of the actual amateurs I know are dedicated, enthusiastic, and highly skilled. My parents are amateur archers, which means they practice for 4-6 hours at least twice a week, compete for one or two full days most weekends, at least during the summer season, and spend long hours making sure that their equipment and technique are of top spec. Much the same, I assume, goes for most amateur sportspeople.
I'm also part of a thriving community of amateur bands (here are a few examples) who probably average 10-20 hours' work per week. Many of them are working towards becoming professional, but the fact that they're not there yet (which is all it means to say that they're 'amateur') doesn't reflect on their music at all.
Perhaps the most compelling example, though, is my experience with the webcomics community. Webcomics have the advantage of a clear separation from both graphic novels and newspaper comic strips - the two 'professional' spheres of sequential art. For whatever reason, people don't see webcomics as part of the comics industry (whereas all the fuss over amateur self-publishing is about the fact that it at least appears to be part of the same industry as New York), and that means that all webcomics are fundamentally amateur.
Well, they start out amateur. Those that work hard, produce top-quality material regularly, and communicate well with their fan-bases become professional. And it doesn't actually take that long; in mid-2006, a friend recommended I check out a newish webcomic called Gunnerkrigg Court. In 2012, its creator, Tom Siddell, quit his job to work full-time on the comic. My sister bought the first two (of four, all highly-recommended) hardback collections for me for my birthday this year; volume 2 has a back-cover blurb from no less than Neil Gaiman.
I highly recommend you check out the first five or six years of Gunnerkrigg Court if you think that 'amateur' necessarily means 'amateurish'. Nor did the perpetual flood of crap webcomics (the two I wrote and drew around that time included) stop Siddell finding an audience.
It's perhaps true that only professionally-published stuff should have access to the top channels in book marketing (Oprah, newspaper reviews, billboards in airports etc.), but then it's definitely true that only professionally-published stuff does have access to those channels.
Amateur publishing allows writers to develop their publishing skills, form communities, communicate with and learn directly from readers, and generally raise their craft to the level of professionals. It allows us to earn, through time spent and hard work, the services that otherwise must be paid for, for example by building a platform and then running the Kickstarter gauntlet. And it allows people who the world might otherwise never have heard from to speak.
So, I'm all in favour of a professional/amateur division in publishing (worth noting: this is a division that has existed at least since the dawn of the internet and probably since long before), provided that no-one is going to stigmatise 'amateur' as 'amateurish'.
Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Freedom and Free Stuff
Today, I'm going to draw a connection between two interesting, but at first glance very different, studies.
The first suggests that books which are 'protected' by copyright seem to have a shorter shelf-life than those which end up ex-copyright or public domain. This runs counter to one popular argument for copyright, which claims that allowing publishers to hold copyrights for longer gives them a reason to keep them in print (i.e. to continue exploiting the copyright). It's easy to see why this argument might be wrong - publishers simply hold more copyrights than they can handle, and many older works are unlikely to justify what they'd cost a big corporation to keep in print.
The second suggests that promotions based on giving away ebooks for free can help print sales. It comes with a few big caveats, like being quite a small study and, crucially, being three years old now (it's plausible that reader attitudes to free books could be starting to shift in response to the deluge of rushed self-published material, though I'm wary of claiming that they actually have - more studies are definitely needed).
The link I want to make is that both of these studies seem to support a more liberal attitude to monetising your writing. It's not that all content should be free and public domain (though maybe in an ideal world where we didn't need money to live...). It's just that fighting to 'control' or 'protect' content against 'predators' may well ultimately be financially counterproductive.
And really, this should be obvious. Compare the number of readers out there with the number of people you think might be running piracy businesses specialising in books. Books have never been a hugely lucrative industry, and certainly aren't these days. DVD and video game piracy are everywhere - around these parts, you'll occasionally be pestered in a pub by someone trying to sell dodgy DVD rips - but book piracy?
It's certainly out there, as Scott Turow found out, but, as Techdirt found out, it seems to be a supply-side-only business. People may well be sticking huge file dumps of pirated ebooks up on the web, but that's probably not where people who actually want to read a book are getting their books from (and yes, this is one anecdote, but here's another one about the effects of piracy if you're going to make a fuss).
And honestly, we want readers to borrow and share books, generally speaking. It's the most effective way to reach new readers. By contrast, damaging incidents of piracy - incidents where we actually lose money, or have our reputations besmirched by shoddy copies - are low-probability events. The possibility of them is an easy one to get upset about, but that's at least in part due to the fact that we greatly overestimate how possible they are.
The thing we as authors don't worry enough about is languishing in obscurity forever. We've all got that little voice at the back of our heads which pops up periodically to reassure us of our vast genius and inevitable Rowlingesque success. We have to believe that the graveyard of total obscurity is an impossible fate because otherwise we give up - but it's the graveyard we need to worry about.
And the way out of the graveyard is to get people to try your work. If you keep raising the entry barriers to doing so - with DRM, or high prices, or other behaviours grounded in the fear of piracy - then you make it harder and harder to get people to take a look. Your work should be able to convince people to support you on its own merits - if they like it enough, even if they got it for free, the second study suggests that they'll contribute to you financially, whether it's by buying a copy for themselves or for someone else, or by recommending and/or reviewing it. If your work can't convince people to shell out, the problem is far more likely to be one of marketing or quality than of piracy.
Relax. Don't fight for control of your work. Let it stand on its own merits.
The first suggests that books which are 'protected' by copyright seem to have a shorter shelf-life than those which end up ex-copyright or public domain. This runs counter to one popular argument for copyright, which claims that allowing publishers to hold copyrights for longer gives them a reason to keep them in print (i.e. to continue exploiting the copyright). It's easy to see why this argument might be wrong - publishers simply hold more copyrights than they can handle, and many older works are unlikely to justify what they'd cost a big corporation to keep in print.
The second suggests that promotions based on giving away ebooks for free can help print sales. It comes with a few big caveats, like being quite a small study and, crucially, being three years old now (it's plausible that reader attitudes to free books could be starting to shift in response to the deluge of rushed self-published material, though I'm wary of claiming that they actually have - more studies are definitely needed).
The link I want to make is that both of these studies seem to support a more liberal attitude to monetising your writing. It's not that all content should be free and public domain (though maybe in an ideal world where we didn't need money to live...). It's just that fighting to 'control' or 'protect' content against 'predators' may well ultimately be financially counterproductive.
And really, this should be obvious. Compare the number of readers out there with the number of people you think might be running piracy businesses specialising in books. Books have never been a hugely lucrative industry, and certainly aren't these days. DVD and video game piracy are everywhere - around these parts, you'll occasionally be pestered in a pub by someone trying to sell dodgy DVD rips - but book piracy?
It's certainly out there, as Scott Turow found out, but, as Techdirt found out, it seems to be a supply-side-only business. People may well be sticking huge file dumps of pirated ebooks up on the web, but that's probably not where people who actually want to read a book are getting their books from (and yes, this is one anecdote, but here's another one about the effects of piracy if you're going to make a fuss).
And honestly, we want readers to borrow and share books, generally speaking. It's the most effective way to reach new readers. By contrast, damaging incidents of piracy - incidents where we actually lose money, or have our reputations besmirched by shoddy copies - are low-probability events. The possibility of them is an easy one to get upset about, but that's at least in part due to the fact that we greatly overestimate how possible they are.
The thing we as authors don't worry enough about is languishing in obscurity forever. We've all got that little voice at the back of our heads which pops up periodically to reassure us of our vast genius and inevitable Rowlingesque success. We have to believe that the graveyard of total obscurity is an impossible fate because otherwise we give up - but it's the graveyard we need to worry about.
And the way out of the graveyard is to get people to try your work. If you keep raising the entry barriers to doing so - with DRM, or high prices, or other behaviours grounded in the fear of piracy - then you make it harder and harder to get people to take a look. Your work should be able to convince people to support you on its own merits - if they like it enough, even if they got it for free, the second study suggests that they'll contribute to you financially, whether it's by buying a copy for themselves or for someone else, or by recommending and/or reviewing it. If your work can't convince people to shell out, the problem is far more likely to be one of marketing or quality than of piracy.
Relax. Don't fight for control of your work. Let it stand on its own merits.
Monday, 8 July 2013
Being Your Own Boss
This is quite a patronising article, but an interesting one. In particular, note the fifth claim on the list, that creative people should not be paid extravagantly. Cruel as it sounds, the science on this point seems to be moving towards a consensus: perceiving the value of your own work and being financially rewarded for it are not wholly compatible. To put it more simply, beyond a certain point, the more you're paid to do something, the less likely you are to feel that it is rewarding in itself.
Now, I've argued before that it's a dangerous game to measure the worth of your creative output in money, for all sorts of reasons, and I think this particular point supports that argument (or at least a very similar conclusion). But that's not the point I want to discuss today - I've harped on it enough that I doubt repeating myself again will convince anyone new.
What I want to discuss here is this article, linked by the first one, which ends by making the claim that "In fact, the biggest organizational cause of disengagement [in an employee] is incompetent leadership." The claim - and in this case, no clear scientific reference is provided, though the author has the relevant expertise, so may just have forgotten to put a link in - is that the thing that will really keep you both productive and feeling like your productivity is worthwhile is good management.
Most of us who are self-publishing authors (indeed, most freelance creatives in all fields) are our own managers. The reason I bring all this up is because I think the same lessons apply to managing yourself as to managing others. As such, the keys to your happiness are your own to command - and further, if you believe as I do (though this isn't uncontroversial) that you're more creatively and artistically successful when enjoying your work, the keys to your best work are also within your control.
I'm generalising from a single case here, but all this fits my own experiences rather neatly. When I try to place on myself an obligation to write, and force myself to write every day, my enjoyment of my writing suffers, and it feels as if I am writing less well. Before Easter, for example, I was struggling to finish an episode of The Second Realm and trying to 'power on through' it, forcing myself to sit down for an hour every evening and write at least 500 words, and I hated it. I hated it enough that I began to question whether I really had the determination to pursue this career.
Eventually, I gave up and let myself take a break. My creative energy is taking a long time to come back, but in the interim, I've realised I was thinking about 'determination' - the willpower to keep going - wrong. I was trying to force myself, and self-flagellating when I fell short; I was allowing myself to fall into the pattern of thinking of myself as a failure.
But willpower is not a rod that you beat yourself with, and thinking of it, or trying to use it, as such is poor management just as much as trying to manage a workforce of other people by beating them would be. Good management is about conjuring and nuturing internal motivation - making people care about what they do. If you stop caring about your own creative output, or you find your motivation slipping, sometimes you just need to allow yourself a break, or a change of project.
All of us, as writers, face situations where we're told our writing isn't important, particularly during the early stages of a career where there's no money and lots of expenses. But to write successfully, you must be able to treat your writing as important - and this means being able to feel that it is important. Your self-management needs to factor this in.
Now, I've argued before that it's a dangerous game to measure the worth of your creative output in money, for all sorts of reasons, and I think this particular point supports that argument (or at least a very similar conclusion). But that's not the point I want to discuss today - I've harped on it enough that I doubt repeating myself again will convince anyone new.
What I want to discuss here is this article, linked by the first one, which ends by making the claim that "In fact, the biggest organizational cause of disengagement [in an employee] is incompetent leadership." The claim - and in this case, no clear scientific reference is provided, though the author has the relevant expertise, so may just have forgotten to put a link in - is that the thing that will really keep you both productive and feeling like your productivity is worthwhile is good management.
Most of us who are self-publishing authors (indeed, most freelance creatives in all fields) are our own managers. The reason I bring all this up is because I think the same lessons apply to managing yourself as to managing others. As such, the keys to your happiness are your own to command - and further, if you believe as I do (though this isn't uncontroversial) that you're more creatively and artistically successful when enjoying your work, the keys to your best work are also within your control.
I'm generalising from a single case here, but all this fits my own experiences rather neatly. When I try to place on myself an obligation to write, and force myself to write every day, my enjoyment of my writing suffers, and it feels as if I am writing less well. Before Easter, for example, I was struggling to finish an episode of The Second Realm and trying to 'power on through' it, forcing myself to sit down for an hour every evening and write at least 500 words, and I hated it. I hated it enough that I began to question whether I really had the determination to pursue this career.
Eventually, I gave up and let myself take a break. My creative energy is taking a long time to come back, but in the interim, I've realised I was thinking about 'determination' - the willpower to keep going - wrong. I was trying to force myself, and self-flagellating when I fell short; I was allowing myself to fall into the pattern of thinking of myself as a failure.
But willpower is not a rod that you beat yourself with, and thinking of it, or trying to use it, as such is poor management just as much as trying to manage a workforce of other people by beating them would be. Good management is about conjuring and nuturing internal motivation - making people care about what they do. If you stop caring about your own creative output, or you find your motivation slipping, sometimes you just need to allow yourself a break, or a change of project.
All of us, as writers, face situations where we're told our writing isn't important, particularly during the early stages of a career where there's no money and lots of expenses. But to write successfully, you must be able to treat your writing as important - and this means being able to feel that it is important. Your self-management needs to factor this in.
Monday, 1 July 2013
Just how valuable is the modern bookshop?
I moved house a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit that on first sight, my new study/bedroom wasn't that appealing - it was dusty, not fully cleaned out, the floors were bare boards and not very well-finished. I worried for a while whether I would actually be able to get it to a state where it felt like home.
Then I put all my books on the bookcases in there, and suddenly everything was OK.
There is something powerfully attractive about a well-stacked bookcase, particularly for those of us of a literary persuasion (though I don't think it's limited to writers). My family home has always been a place of book-lined walls, a place where there were rooms that there wasn't much point wallpapering or painting because the decor was books, and it usually drew admiring comment from first-time guests.
So I understand why we hear so much love of and praise for bookshops, and why people are so upset about the possibility of them 'becoming extinct' (there's an argument to be had over just how possible it might be, but that's not my topic for today). One of the accusations levelled at ebooks is that the ebook will never be able to give you 'that bookshop experience'.
The thing is, when I go into an actual high-street bookshop these days, I'm not sure I get 'that bookshop experience'. The experience I get in the big Waterstones in the centre of Liverpool, for example, is more that of a coffee shop that happens to have some books in it, squeezed in between the board games, stationery and electronics racks. It's not exactly soulless, because there are still lots of books in there and you can't be soulless even with books as soulless as the rack of footballer 'autobiographies', but it's about as debookshopified as it can be.
Second-hand bookshops do a lot better from the point of view of 'that bookshop experience', though they're a sadly rare breed these days. Ask yourself this: which of the following two images is more pleasing from a bibliophilic perspective?
A modern Barnes and Noble:
or this:
That second one is actually a library, to be completely honest. I couldn't, on a quick search, find a good image of the inside of a second-hand bookshop. My point, though, is this: there's very little that a modern bookshop offers that a library doesn't.
And bookshops, unfortunately, are becoming a burden on the industry. It's just too expensive to run a high-street shop these days, which leads to bookshops - never a high-margin business - having to gouge publishers for placing, and having to return 50% or more of stock ordered. These costs go all the way up the supply chain, just as the costs of running publishing houses as if they're investment banks (New York rents, corporate investors, business lunches etc.) trickle all the way down. Small wonder, then, that actual authors get squeezed out so badly when it comes to the distribution of money.
There is a role for bookshops in the digital age, definitely, but it cannot be as the primary means of distribution for books. It's just too expensive. It's the same situation as with hardcopy books generally - there is a place for them, for high-quality, aesthetically beautiful, heirloom treasures, but clinging to them as the mainstay of the business is just costing far too much.
Bookshops can offer a tactile experience that an online retailer can't, and a human touch that an 'enter your VISA details here' box can't, but these are premium services, high-grade luxuries, and they belong with the boutiques of a fashion district, or the craft shops and art galleries of a tourist district, not the high street. Clinging to the bookshop in its current, gentrified form, and getting angry about ebooks 'destroying' it, is going to destroy the bookshop far more quickly than any technological shift can, by forcing us to forget why it is that we find bookshops so beautiful.
They say that if you love something, you should let it go... ;)
Then I put all my books on the bookcases in there, and suddenly everything was OK.
There is something powerfully attractive about a well-stacked bookcase, particularly for those of us of a literary persuasion (though I don't think it's limited to writers). My family home has always been a place of book-lined walls, a place where there were rooms that there wasn't much point wallpapering or painting because the decor was books, and it usually drew admiring comment from first-time guests.
So I understand why we hear so much love of and praise for bookshops, and why people are so upset about the possibility of them 'becoming extinct' (there's an argument to be had over just how possible it might be, but that's not my topic for today). One of the accusations levelled at ebooks is that the ebook will never be able to give you 'that bookshop experience'.
The thing is, when I go into an actual high-street bookshop these days, I'm not sure I get 'that bookshop experience'. The experience I get in the big Waterstones in the centre of Liverpool, for example, is more that of a coffee shop that happens to have some books in it, squeezed in between the board games, stationery and electronics racks. It's not exactly soulless, because there are still lots of books in there and you can't be soulless even with books as soulless as the rack of footballer 'autobiographies', but it's about as debookshopified as it can be.
Second-hand bookshops do a lot better from the point of view of 'that bookshop experience', though they're a sadly rare breed these days. Ask yourself this: which of the following two images is more pleasing from a bibliophilic perspective?
A modern Barnes and Noble:
or this:
That second one is actually a library, to be completely honest. I couldn't, on a quick search, find a good image of the inside of a second-hand bookshop. My point, though, is this: there's very little that a modern bookshop offers that a library doesn't.
And bookshops, unfortunately, are becoming a burden on the industry. It's just too expensive to run a high-street shop these days, which leads to bookshops - never a high-margin business - having to gouge publishers for placing, and having to return 50% or more of stock ordered. These costs go all the way up the supply chain, just as the costs of running publishing houses as if they're investment banks (New York rents, corporate investors, business lunches etc.) trickle all the way down. Small wonder, then, that actual authors get squeezed out so badly when it comes to the distribution of money.
There is a role for bookshops in the digital age, definitely, but it cannot be as the primary means of distribution for books. It's just too expensive. It's the same situation as with hardcopy books generally - there is a place for them, for high-quality, aesthetically beautiful, heirloom treasures, but clinging to them as the mainstay of the business is just costing far too much.
Bookshops can offer a tactile experience that an online retailer can't, and a human touch that an 'enter your VISA details here' box can't, but these are premium services, high-grade luxuries, and they belong with the boutiques of a fashion district, or the craft shops and art galleries of a tourist district, not the high street. Clinging to the bookshop in its current, gentrified form, and getting angry about ebooks 'destroying' it, is going to destroy the bookshop far more quickly than any technological shift can, by forcing us to forget why it is that we find bookshops so beautiful.
They say that if you love something, you should let it go... ;)
Monday, 24 June 2013
The War on Traditional Publishing
I haven't heard this particular complaint in a few months (I've been busy), but it's a popular refrain among the suffering trad-publishing mid-list that self-publishers are 'out to destroy' or 'waging war on' traditional publishing. We normally reply along the lines of 'Of course we're not, we just want more options for authors'. Then something like this bullshit happens.
Well, you might say, that's just someone getting angry about the standard of self-published work, isn't it? I mean, OK, they're making wildly inaccurate, baseless, sourceless allegations, but it's just so much hot air. Isn't it?
No, no it isn't. The implicit purpose of rants like that one (and I'll admit, it's a particularly extreme example) is to stop people reading self-published work. It's written to make readers not want to read our books, to make them pass us over without a second thought in favour of 'real' authors and 'proper' publishers. It's designed to put us out of business.
What I'm getting at is this: there is a war on here, but we self-publishers didn't start it. Trad authors like Kozlowski up there and their corporate shills like Scott Turow denigrate, belittle and insult us constantly. They rush to man the walls between the gates they keep, no matter how badly those walls are crumbling. Our business practices are 'corrupt' and 'predatory'; theirs are 'literary' and 'legitimate'. And they control, pretty much by definition, the mainstream media - they control the narratives and with them the attitudes of the majority of readers.
They can charge £9 for a paperback, pay authors maybe £1.50, and then give us the excuse that they've got businesses to run - businesses that pay needless rent on offices in one of the most expensive commercial districts in the world. They can reject an author as dedicated and talented as Joe Konrath 500 times, but publish two ghostwritten 'autobiographies' of Justin Bieber, and then accuse self-publishers of flooding the marketplace with crap. They can engage in an actual crime to force a (bad-for-everyone) pricing model on distributors, then accuse Amazon of 'monopolistic' practices.
So yes, we're fighting a war, in self-defence if nothing else. But there's a difference between fighting a war and aiming for the destruction of traditional publishing. When Britain declared war on the Nazis, or America on the Japanese Empire, we weren't out to destroy Germany or Japan. We were trying to force them to back down, to stop attacking us. The ultimate aim of war isn't destruction; it's peace.
Indeed, Germany and Japan have gone on to be immensely powerful nations, nations that now stand side-by-side with their WW2 enemies, nations whose strength is grounded in economic and cultural ties to former enemies. No-one wants the truly grand traditions of traditional publishing to die out. Traditional publishing has strengths that should not be wasted, and employs a huge number of immensely talented editors, designers and marketers, people whose skills this industry needs more now than ever before.
But until the vicious attacks on self-publishers stop, until the power of the traditional war-machine is broken and the marketplace evened out, until the only thing that matters is the quality of your product and the integrity with which you present it, this is a war, and we ought to be fighting it. We don't want to put anyone out of business. We just don't want to be put out of business ourselves.
Well, you might say, that's just someone getting angry about the standard of self-published work, isn't it? I mean, OK, they're making wildly inaccurate, baseless, sourceless allegations, but it's just so much hot air. Isn't it?
No, no it isn't. The implicit purpose of rants like that one (and I'll admit, it's a particularly extreme example) is to stop people reading self-published work. It's written to make readers not want to read our books, to make them pass us over without a second thought in favour of 'real' authors and 'proper' publishers. It's designed to put us out of business.
What I'm getting at is this: there is a war on here, but we self-publishers didn't start it. Trad authors like Kozlowski up there and their corporate shills like Scott Turow denigrate, belittle and insult us constantly. They rush to man the walls between the gates they keep, no matter how badly those walls are crumbling. Our business practices are 'corrupt' and 'predatory'; theirs are 'literary' and 'legitimate'. And they control, pretty much by definition, the mainstream media - they control the narratives and with them the attitudes of the majority of readers.
They can charge £9 for a paperback, pay authors maybe £1.50, and then give us the excuse that they've got businesses to run - businesses that pay needless rent on offices in one of the most expensive commercial districts in the world. They can reject an author as dedicated and talented as Joe Konrath 500 times, but publish two ghostwritten 'autobiographies' of Justin Bieber, and then accuse self-publishers of flooding the marketplace with crap. They can engage in an actual crime to force a (bad-for-everyone) pricing model on distributors, then accuse Amazon of 'monopolistic' practices.
So yes, we're fighting a war, in self-defence if nothing else. But there's a difference between fighting a war and aiming for the destruction of traditional publishing. When Britain declared war on the Nazis, or America on the Japanese Empire, we weren't out to destroy Germany or Japan. We were trying to force them to back down, to stop attacking us. The ultimate aim of war isn't destruction; it's peace.
Indeed, Germany and Japan have gone on to be immensely powerful nations, nations that now stand side-by-side with their WW2 enemies, nations whose strength is grounded in economic and cultural ties to former enemies. No-one wants the truly grand traditions of traditional publishing to die out. Traditional publishing has strengths that should not be wasted, and employs a huge number of immensely talented editors, designers and marketers, people whose skills this industry needs more now than ever before.
But until the vicious attacks on self-publishers stop, until the power of the traditional war-machine is broken and the marketplace evened out, until the only thing that matters is the quality of your product and the integrity with which you present it, this is a war, and we ought to be fighting it. We don't want to put anyone out of business. We just don't want to be put out of business ourselves.
Monday, 3 June 2013
How to Visualise Your Success
...in a non-self-helpy-buzz-wordy sort of way.
Being something of a nerd (you'd never guess ;) ), I keep detailed statistics on the performance of The Second Realm. This involves a huge 5-page spreadsheet, most of the content of which is obscure and unhelpful. What it actually boils down to is a handful of graphs, and I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about what they are and what I use them for.
The Most Important Graph:
This shows the running total across all (currently) 17 published episodes of The Second Realm. It's not actually very useful for telling me about how individual episodes are performing, or anything else really (though you can spot a few good weeks here and there). Why use it, then?
Well, the effect is psychological. This graph exists to take the sting out of bad weeks by showing how insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things - can you even spot the most recent bad week? It's not the dip in early January, it's the tiny little blip at the start of April. What this graph shows, more than anything, is that whatever momentum I have managed to establish isn't really diminishing at all.
In an ideal world, this would show an upward curve, indicating growing momentum, but I'll settle for what I've got for now. The reason this one is so important is that it keeps me going when all the other graphs turn discouraging.
Weekly Traffic:
This is probably the one I use most (and you've seen it before, a couple of times). The blue line is the number of total downloads across all episodes for a given week, and thus tracks overall performance on a weekly basis. The red line is a four-week rolling average (the total for the current week and the preceding three, divided by four), and the green is a twelve-week version of the same.
The red line is a bit obsolete now, but the purpose of the two averages is to even out the big spikes in the blue line (most of which represent the release of a new episode). What they reveal is that the end of last year went badly for me, but things have been picking up since the nadir in mid-February. It's worth noting, too, that the actual traffic nadir will have been earlier than the dip in the green line - this is the disadvantage of the rolling average measure.
The usefulness of this graph comes from the limit it places on what might be going on. A flat green line would mean steady traffic - losing as many readers as I gain. Crucially, it would also mean that my reach - the number of new readers trying out one of my stories for the first time - wasn't growing.
The slight upward trend means one of three things; growing reach (more readers trying me out), growing conversion (more reached readers coming back for another episode), or growing devotion (regulars coming back more often). Since all these cases indicate growing interest, they're all good things. Now, last time I made any predictions about the performance of The Second Realm, I was proved wildly optimistic, but I remain quietly content this time. We'll see how the rest of the summer plays out, which brings me too:
Traffic per Episode:
This is where things get a bit complicated. This is a graph of the total from the first graph, above, divided by the number of published episodes at the time. It's a slightly crude measure, because I didn't publish an episode at the end of November (some of the drop-off from then onwards is due to the effect of that artificial peak being spread thinner as time moves on). It also completely hides the massive jump (visible on both previous graphs) at the end of August last year, when episode 3.2 inexplicably brought in a massive slew of traffic. I still don't know why that happened...
Anyway, the red bars are basically the bars from the last few weeks superimposed on the equivalent weeks last year, which will in theory allow me to compare this year's performance to last year's. Hopefully this will allow me to start identifying seasonal effects (i.e. do people just download more free short stories in the summer? Is there a key popular time of year?), though obviously with only two years' data to draw on there's a limit to the conclusions I'll be able to draw.
As far as reading this graph goes, the important thing is the angle of the slope within a given segment. Each jag represents a new episode, and the angle of the slope tells me how well that episode did at generating new traffic for the series as a whole. There is a caveat to this, which is that because it's an average, as time goes on and more and more episodes appear, each individual download of an individual episode becomes less significant. I haven't quite worked out how to compensate for that yet.
A steady upward trend (such as appears for about the first third of the graph) would indicate that the increase in traffic each month was keeping up with this effect - and would actually be equivalent to a significant upward curve on both the previous graphs. Clearly that's not happening, but much of the drop-off in the last six months doesn't actually represent a lack of growth, just growth that's not keeping pace with the appearance of new episodes.
And finally, just for kicks, a graph that isn't useful at all:
I mentioned this one when talking about blogging as promotion last month, but didn't actually show it because, well, just look at the thing. It's a bit... chaotic, no? The blue line should be familiar, where it's visible at all - it's the same blue line as was on the second graph, above. The red and green lines here, however, are completely different.
What they actually measure is my activity on this blog (i.e. number of posts per week) as a proportion of my average activity (total number of blog posts divided by total number of weeks). The key lists them both as percentages, but the green line is actually per-fifty rather than per-hundred. Basically, towards the right-hand end of the graph, you can kind of see a trend line curving gently downwards - that represents weeks where I actually blogged twice. spikes above it mean three or four posts, below means one or two. The red line is just crazy and should be ignored.
What I was looking for was evidence that activity on this blog translated into traffic for The Second Realm, because I'd developed the conviction that whenever I had a week away from blogging, traffic really dipped. If that conviction had been correct, though, there'd be a consistent correlation between dips in the green line and dips in the blue, but for every week that appears to validate the belief, there's one that refutes it. I keep the graph going these days mainly out of aesthetic curiosity and chagrin.
Anyway, that's a few of the perks and pitfalls of maths for tracking your progress as an author. Don't feel you need all (or any) of these graphs, but if you think you'll find them useful, excel makes things fairly simple (although, apparently, too complicated for Harvard economists) to implement. Just make sure you've got plenty of data to draw on - the more data you have, the less discouraging an individual bad point will be.
I should add - these are very simple measures, and I'm no statistician. There are all sorts of other techniques I could use, except that I have no idea how to set them up or what they'd mean.
Being something of a nerd (you'd never guess ;) ), I keep detailed statistics on the performance of The Second Realm. This involves a huge 5-page spreadsheet, most of the content of which is obscure and unhelpful. What it actually boils down to is a handful of graphs, and I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about what they are and what I use them for.
The Most Important Graph:
Well, the effect is psychological. This graph exists to take the sting out of bad weeks by showing how insignificant they are in the grand scheme of things - can you even spot the most recent bad week? It's not the dip in early January, it's the tiny little blip at the start of April. What this graph shows, more than anything, is that whatever momentum I have managed to establish isn't really diminishing at all.
In an ideal world, this would show an upward curve, indicating growing momentum, but I'll settle for what I've got for now. The reason this one is so important is that it keeps me going when all the other graphs turn discouraging.
Weekly Traffic:
This is probably the one I use most (and you've seen it before, a couple of times). The blue line is the number of total downloads across all episodes for a given week, and thus tracks overall performance on a weekly basis. The red line is a four-week rolling average (the total for the current week and the preceding three, divided by four), and the green is a twelve-week version of the same.
The red line is a bit obsolete now, but the purpose of the two averages is to even out the big spikes in the blue line (most of which represent the release of a new episode). What they reveal is that the end of last year went badly for me, but things have been picking up since the nadir in mid-February. It's worth noting, too, that the actual traffic nadir will have been earlier than the dip in the green line - this is the disadvantage of the rolling average measure.
The usefulness of this graph comes from the limit it places on what might be going on. A flat green line would mean steady traffic - losing as many readers as I gain. Crucially, it would also mean that my reach - the number of new readers trying out one of my stories for the first time - wasn't growing.
The slight upward trend means one of three things; growing reach (more readers trying me out), growing conversion (more reached readers coming back for another episode), or growing devotion (regulars coming back more often). Since all these cases indicate growing interest, they're all good things. Now, last time I made any predictions about the performance of The Second Realm, I was proved wildly optimistic, but I remain quietly content this time. We'll see how the rest of the summer plays out, which brings me too:
Traffic per Episode:
Anyway, the red bars are basically the bars from the last few weeks superimposed on the equivalent weeks last year, which will in theory allow me to compare this year's performance to last year's. Hopefully this will allow me to start identifying seasonal effects (i.e. do people just download more free short stories in the summer? Is there a key popular time of year?), though obviously with only two years' data to draw on there's a limit to the conclusions I'll be able to draw.
As far as reading this graph goes, the important thing is the angle of the slope within a given segment. Each jag represents a new episode, and the angle of the slope tells me how well that episode did at generating new traffic for the series as a whole. There is a caveat to this, which is that because it's an average, as time goes on and more and more episodes appear, each individual download of an individual episode becomes less significant. I haven't quite worked out how to compensate for that yet.
A steady upward trend (such as appears for about the first third of the graph) would indicate that the increase in traffic each month was keeping up with this effect - and would actually be equivalent to a significant upward curve on both the previous graphs. Clearly that's not happening, but much of the drop-off in the last six months doesn't actually represent a lack of growth, just growth that's not keeping pace with the appearance of new episodes.
And finally, just for kicks, a graph that isn't useful at all:
What they actually measure is my activity on this blog (i.e. number of posts per week) as a proportion of my average activity (total number of blog posts divided by total number of weeks). The key lists them both as percentages, but the green line is actually per-fifty rather than per-hundred. Basically, towards the right-hand end of the graph, you can kind of see a trend line curving gently downwards - that represents weeks where I actually blogged twice. spikes above it mean three or four posts, below means one or two. The red line is just crazy and should be ignored.
What I was looking for was evidence that activity on this blog translated into traffic for The Second Realm, because I'd developed the conviction that whenever I had a week away from blogging, traffic really dipped. If that conviction had been correct, though, there'd be a consistent correlation between dips in the green line and dips in the blue, but for every week that appears to validate the belief, there's one that refutes it. I keep the graph going these days mainly out of aesthetic curiosity and chagrin.
Anyway, that's a few of the perks and pitfalls of maths for tracking your progress as an author. Don't feel you need all (or any) of these graphs, but if you think you'll find them useful, excel makes things fairly simple (although, apparently, too complicated for Harvard economists) to implement. Just make sure you've got plenty of data to draw on - the more data you have, the less discouraging an individual bad point will be.
I should add - these are very simple measures, and I'm no statistician. There are all sorts of other techniques I could use, except that I have no idea how to set them up or what they'd mean.
Monday, 20 May 2013
Digital Dandelions
More wonderfulness from Neil Gaiman. Watch it all, but the key point for today's purposes is just after the fifteen-minute mark where he starts to talk about being a dandelion.
Gaiman's idea is that in the new digital landscape, where the problem of monetising creative work is not about getting past the gatekeepers but standing out from the crowd (though this shift might actually be a bit of a chimera), what matters is exposure, and that exposure is best chased by diversification. Rather than committing monomaniacally to one project and frantically shopping it around to everyone who'll listen, you take on as many projects as you can sustain at once, in as many different fields as possible, reaching out to as many people as you can.
This suits me just fine - I'm a gallivanter by preference, and I enjoy having too many things to do with my time. It keeps things varied. Sure, I can focus like a madman when NaNoWriMo calls for it, but not for terribly long; I always find myself wanting to go and do something new after a few weeks, or months at most.
So I've started writing reviews for Liverpool Acoustic, a local music website. This brings me up to being four kinds of writer all wrapped up in one: author, blogger, academic and critic. Actually, depending on what counts, I can count six, since I'm also a lyricist and composer of music. All of which is great, if tiring - and there's a lot of synergy between all these different activities. Each of them is good training, one way or another, for all the others, and it's also feasible that there'll be some transfer of audience between some of them, too.
And this is a profitable business model in the long run (at least, it seems to be working extremely well for Gaiman), though perhaps it's wrong to call it a business model; it's not that complicated. It's just taking every opportunity that comes your way. Trying new things. Doing things because they're interesting, and not worrying too much if they fail to bring in any money.
It sounds, to me at least, like Heaven.
But there is one clarification that's needed. Gaiman contrasts being a dandelion with being a mammal. Mammals, he says, spend a huge amount of time and energy on each child. Dandelions don't care - they scatter their seeds far and wide, and don't worry if ninety or even ninety-nine percent of them fail to sprout. And if you're careful with how you interpret the metaphor, that's fine - the emphasis should be on not caring too much about the failures.
The thing is, I think not caring enough about our products is exactly the accusation being levelled at self-publishers by the trad establishment. The perception of us is that we're unprofessional and inexperienced, and as a result don't put in enough effort and produce work of lower quality. We're accused of generating a vast literary mess which produces very few flowers.
So we have to very careful to only take the best of both approaches. Being a dandelion doesn't mean being careless - after all, the dandelion's floating seed is a miniature triumph of engineering - it means not letting our failures discourage us. We need to be as professional and attentive as mammals, but as energetic and experimental as dandelions.
I can't think of a good metaphor for all that, though, so I'll just say 'Be digital-age writers!' and leave it at that.
Gaiman's idea is that in the new digital landscape, where the problem of monetising creative work is not about getting past the gatekeepers but standing out from the crowd (though this shift might actually be a bit of a chimera), what matters is exposure, and that exposure is best chased by diversification. Rather than committing monomaniacally to one project and frantically shopping it around to everyone who'll listen, you take on as many projects as you can sustain at once, in as many different fields as possible, reaching out to as many people as you can.
This suits me just fine - I'm a gallivanter by preference, and I enjoy having too many things to do with my time. It keeps things varied. Sure, I can focus like a madman when NaNoWriMo calls for it, but not for terribly long; I always find myself wanting to go and do something new after a few weeks, or months at most.
So I've started writing reviews for Liverpool Acoustic, a local music website. This brings me up to being four kinds of writer all wrapped up in one: author, blogger, academic and critic. Actually, depending on what counts, I can count six, since I'm also a lyricist and composer of music. All of which is great, if tiring - and there's a lot of synergy between all these different activities. Each of them is good training, one way or another, for all the others, and it's also feasible that there'll be some transfer of audience between some of them, too.
And this is a profitable business model in the long run (at least, it seems to be working extremely well for Gaiman), though perhaps it's wrong to call it a business model; it's not that complicated. It's just taking every opportunity that comes your way. Trying new things. Doing things because they're interesting, and not worrying too much if they fail to bring in any money.
It sounds, to me at least, like Heaven.
But there is one clarification that's needed. Gaiman contrasts being a dandelion with being a mammal. Mammals, he says, spend a huge amount of time and energy on each child. Dandelions don't care - they scatter their seeds far and wide, and don't worry if ninety or even ninety-nine percent of them fail to sprout. And if you're careful with how you interpret the metaphor, that's fine - the emphasis should be on not caring too much about the failures.
The thing is, I think not caring enough about our products is exactly the accusation being levelled at self-publishers by the trad establishment. The perception of us is that we're unprofessional and inexperienced, and as a result don't put in enough effort and produce work of lower quality. We're accused of generating a vast literary mess which produces very few flowers.
So we have to very careful to only take the best of both approaches. Being a dandelion doesn't mean being careless - after all, the dandelion's floating seed is a miniature triumph of engineering - it means not letting our failures discourage us. We need to be as professional and attentive as mammals, but as energetic and experimental as dandelions.
I can't think of a good metaphor for all that, though, so I'll just say 'Be digital-age writers!' and leave it at that.
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Blogger It
So, I mentioned in yesterday's recap of progress so far that there are things to be said about my blogging and this blog. Let's start with a quick apology for having been AWOL last week and inconsistent for a couple of weeks before that. I was simply extremely busy and struggling to keep up. Things have settled down now, and I'll be making up for lost time this week with at least a couple of extra posts, of which this is the first.
These inconsistencies may not matter terribly much, though. I've now been tracking the performance of The Second Realm at Smashwords for almost a year, and a quick analysis of available data shows no clear correlation between activity of any kind on this blog and Second Realm traffic. To whit:
The top graph shows pageviews on this blog (apologies for the scaling - Blogger's stat tracker isn't terribly good at graphs); the bottom graph shows downloads of The Second Realm each week (the blue line), plus four- (red) and twelve-week (green) rolling averages. They don't match up perfectly, but the big spike on the bottom graph is for the end of August 2012, so they're lined up pretty well.
The big spike on the top graph is for March, and represents the peak of an assault by Swedish spambots which is also responsible for a big chunk of January and February traffic. The total drop-off at the end is a bit of an illusion because while April was at about the same level as February, when this screencap was taken, May was only three and a half days old and is actually on-course to outdo April by a small margin. The red line represents a rough guesstimate of what the non-spambot traffic has done.
If blogging (or at least, my blogging) was an effective way of marketing fiction, we would expect the bottom graph to resemble the top one, or at least not show the slight downward trend that it appears to show. If you squint hard at the green line, it does look like there might be the beginnings of an up-turn, maybe, but it doesn't look terribly significant compared to the big rise in blog traffic.
I have another graph which plots my activity (in terms of posts per week) on here against the blue line measure of Second Realm figures, but there's such a severe lack of correlation on it that it's almost illegible, so there's little point my sharing it.
So the bad news is that this blog doesn't appear to be doing much to help the performance of my fiction. I'm sure that's not the case for all blogs, but I suspect that my growing focus on non-writing-related issues, and possibly the way I write, are not attracting people who are looking for the kind of fiction that I write.
That said, there is a definite rise going on in blog traffic since I started blogging regularly and carefully again. It remains to be seen whether the dip in activity over the last couple of weeks will have produced a visible dip in pageviews (or indeed, whether this week's burst of extra will produce a spike), but there's no denying that since late December and my New Year's resolution to put out at least a hundred blog posts this year, there's a clear upward trend.
Blogging, it seems, is a pretty good way to promote a blog at least. It's been good for me in other ways, too - good discipline, good writing practice, good thinking practice while I've been too busy with day-jobs to work on my thesis and so on. It's also pushed me to engage more with the world at large, and I can't discount the effect of the positive feedback I keep getting either.
So whether or not my blogging here is effective promotion (and I'll check in again on this later in the year, just in case that green line is on an upward trend), I'm going to keep blogging. I enjoy it and it's both a useful habit and a useful outlet. If you're looking to use blogging to promote your fiction, though, it might be better to use me as a 'what not to do' than a 'what to do' guide.
If you have any suggestions about how I could strengthen the link between my blogging and my fiction, by the way, I'd love to hear them ;).
These inconsistencies may not matter terribly much, though. I've now been tracking the performance of The Second Realm at Smashwords for almost a year, and a quick analysis of available data shows no clear correlation between activity of any kind on this blog and Second Realm traffic. To whit:
The big spike on the top graph is for March, and represents the peak of an assault by Swedish spambots which is also responsible for a big chunk of January and February traffic. The total drop-off at the end is a bit of an illusion because while April was at about the same level as February, when this screencap was taken, May was only three and a half days old and is actually on-course to outdo April by a small margin. The red line represents a rough guesstimate of what the non-spambot traffic has done.
If blogging (or at least, my blogging) was an effective way of marketing fiction, we would expect the bottom graph to resemble the top one, or at least not show the slight downward trend that it appears to show. If you squint hard at the green line, it does look like there might be the beginnings of an up-turn, maybe, but it doesn't look terribly significant compared to the big rise in blog traffic.
I have another graph which plots my activity (in terms of posts per week) on here against the blue line measure of Second Realm figures, but there's such a severe lack of correlation on it that it's almost illegible, so there's little point my sharing it.
So the bad news is that this blog doesn't appear to be doing much to help the performance of my fiction. I'm sure that's not the case for all blogs, but I suspect that my growing focus on non-writing-related issues, and possibly the way I write, are not attracting people who are looking for the kind of fiction that I write.
That said, there is a definite rise going on in blog traffic since I started blogging regularly and carefully again. It remains to be seen whether the dip in activity over the last couple of weeks will have produced a visible dip in pageviews (or indeed, whether this week's burst of extra will produce a spike), but there's no denying that since late December and my New Year's resolution to put out at least a hundred blog posts this year, there's a clear upward trend.
Blogging, it seems, is a pretty good way to promote a blog at least. It's been good for me in other ways, too - good discipline, good writing practice, good thinking practice while I've been too busy with day-jobs to work on my thesis and so on. It's also pushed me to engage more with the world at large, and I can't discount the effect of the positive feedback I keep getting either.
So whether or not my blogging here is effective promotion (and I'll check in again on this later in the year, just in case that green line is on an upward trend), I'm going to keep blogging. I enjoy it and it's both a useful habit and a useful outlet. If you're looking to use blogging to promote your fiction, though, it might be better to use me as a 'what not to do' than a 'what to do' guide.
If you have any suggestions about how I could strengthen the link between my blogging and my fiction, by the way, I'd love to hear them ;).
Monday, 6 May 2013
Two Years On
It's a little bit over two years since I decided (arbitrarily and with little experience to inform the decision) that self-publishing is the writerly route for me. It was an unwise decision, in the sense that it was made with little wisdom, but it seems to have been a fortuitous one all the same. I certainly wouldn't retract it. Anyway, as I did last year, this seems a good moment for a little analysis.
The angle I want to take is considering what might have happened had I decided differently - this seems to me the best way of evaluating the decision I actually made. I hope that in doing so I can get a little closer to pinning down exactly why this route is right for me, and why it might (or might not) be right for you.
Let's start with where I'm at in reality. The Second Realm is approaching 3,000 total downloads at Smashwords, and presumably there are also some people reading it on this blog (though it's hard to estimate how many). This has been achieved with very little in the way of promotion - nothing more than a handful of tweets around the release of each new episode, plus this blog (on which more tomorrow) - but the downside to that is that it hasn't made very much money. Immortal Remains has made a few bob with even less promotion, but generated very little persistent interest - an average of 2 'sales' and 5-6 samples per month.
In some ways, it's a bleak, penurious picture - whether or not there's any money in writing, there doesn't seem to be any in how I'm doing it. On the other hand, some of those 3,000-odd downloads represent actual people actually reading my writing (I know this because very occasionally one of them will tell me so, and it always makes my day). Remember this, because it will be important later on.
Now let's turn the clock back to March 27th, 2011, and the start of this blog (no, I'm not going to link to the first ever post - I daren't even look at it for fear of how terrible and naive it probably is...). And let's pretend that I ignored, dismissed or lacked the guts to follow up on the Konrath/Eisler dialogue 'Be the Monkey' which put me on this path.
At that time, I had two novels drafted, one unmarketably bad (The Death of John Collins, a.k.a. the death of physical description) and the other unmarketably weird (Bad Romance, a.k.a. the one about stalking Lady Gaga). I had no platform to speak of and very little awareness of the flaws in my portfolio.
There was some light just around the corner, though; about a month later, I started work on Heaven Can Wait, which is probably the first publishable thing I ever wrote. Still, the first draft was bad enough that I've now done seven redrafts of varying levels of severity, as I've learned and grown as a writer. The book is currently on submission to a smallish new publisher whose business model I like the look of.
We'll go with a 'best plausible case' scenario. I decide on the strength of initial feedback to start shopping Heaven Can Wait to agents. I get lucky; someone takes an interest in the first six months despite the first draft's bloated first act and helps me chop the whole thing into shape (and has the patience to deal with my inevitable temper tantrum when confronted with the weaknesses of my writing). We spend six months on this part of the process, that being the least amount of time I can imagine three or four harsh editing passes taking.
Duly whipped into shape, the manuscript goes on submission and gets lucky again - it lands on the right editor's desk on the right day, the beginning grabs them and I come away with a sale. Say another six months. A standard advance (about $5,000?). By this point, it's coming up to Christmas of last year. If the publisher takes the standard year or two to get round to actually publishing my book, it might be out for Christmas 2013.
All of this, of course, assumes that I don't get fleeced, scammed or ripped off anywhere along the line, and all the relevant businesses manage not to collapse. It also assumes that no part of the process is so stressful that I give up (I have some anxiety issues which would probably have made contacting and dealing with agents hellish).
Right now, in May 2013, I'd have some money in my pocket (though how much, I have no idea), but no published writing. The only people who'd have read any of my work would be beta readers, agents and editors. The publisher would be expecting me to start building my platform, but probably giving me very little support to do so.
And I'd still be between six and eighteen months away from having anything published. On a best plausible case. It could easily be several years more. I'm not saying that makes the indie route better all round, but it's definitely better for me. I think if I felt it likely that I'd have to wait five years to show anyone my stuff, I probably wouldn't bother trying. My writing would just go in a desk drawer. I suspect I'm a lot freer to write and do what I want - and to learn at my own pace - than I would be on other models.
So yeah, self-publishing might have been a decision made with little wisdom, but it was definitely the right one. Not that I haven't made some mistakes along the way, but that's a post for another time.
The angle I want to take is considering what might have happened had I decided differently - this seems to me the best way of evaluating the decision I actually made. I hope that in doing so I can get a little closer to pinning down exactly why this route is right for me, and why it might (or might not) be right for you.
Let's start with where I'm at in reality. The Second Realm is approaching 3,000 total downloads at Smashwords, and presumably there are also some people reading it on this blog (though it's hard to estimate how many). This has been achieved with very little in the way of promotion - nothing more than a handful of tweets around the release of each new episode, plus this blog (on which more tomorrow) - but the downside to that is that it hasn't made very much money. Immortal Remains has made a few bob with even less promotion, but generated very little persistent interest - an average of 2 'sales' and 5-6 samples per month.
In some ways, it's a bleak, penurious picture - whether or not there's any money in writing, there doesn't seem to be any in how I'm doing it. On the other hand, some of those 3,000-odd downloads represent actual people actually reading my writing (I know this because very occasionally one of them will tell me so, and it always makes my day). Remember this, because it will be important later on.
Now let's turn the clock back to March 27th, 2011, and the start of this blog (no, I'm not going to link to the first ever post - I daren't even look at it for fear of how terrible and naive it probably is...). And let's pretend that I ignored, dismissed or lacked the guts to follow up on the Konrath/Eisler dialogue 'Be the Monkey' which put me on this path.
At that time, I had two novels drafted, one unmarketably bad (The Death of John Collins, a.k.a. the death of physical description) and the other unmarketably weird (Bad Romance, a.k.a. the one about stalking Lady Gaga). I had no platform to speak of and very little awareness of the flaws in my portfolio.
There was some light just around the corner, though; about a month later, I started work on Heaven Can Wait, which is probably the first publishable thing I ever wrote. Still, the first draft was bad enough that I've now done seven redrafts of varying levels of severity, as I've learned and grown as a writer. The book is currently on submission to a smallish new publisher whose business model I like the look of.
We'll go with a 'best plausible case' scenario. I decide on the strength of initial feedback to start shopping Heaven Can Wait to agents. I get lucky; someone takes an interest in the first six months despite the first draft's bloated first act and helps me chop the whole thing into shape (and has the patience to deal with my inevitable temper tantrum when confronted with the weaknesses of my writing). We spend six months on this part of the process, that being the least amount of time I can imagine three or four harsh editing passes taking.
Duly whipped into shape, the manuscript goes on submission and gets lucky again - it lands on the right editor's desk on the right day, the beginning grabs them and I come away with a sale. Say another six months. A standard advance (about $5,000?). By this point, it's coming up to Christmas of last year. If the publisher takes the standard year or two to get round to actually publishing my book, it might be out for Christmas 2013.
All of this, of course, assumes that I don't get fleeced, scammed or ripped off anywhere along the line, and all the relevant businesses manage not to collapse. It also assumes that no part of the process is so stressful that I give up (I have some anxiety issues which would probably have made contacting and dealing with agents hellish).
Right now, in May 2013, I'd have some money in my pocket (though how much, I have no idea), but no published writing. The only people who'd have read any of my work would be beta readers, agents and editors. The publisher would be expecting me to start building my platform, but probably giving me very little support to do so.
And I'd still be between six and eighteen months away from having anything published. On a best plausible case. It could easily be several years more. I'm not saying that makes the indie route better all round, but it's definitely better for me. I think if I felt it likely that I'd have to wait five years to show anyone my stuff, I probably wouldn't bother trying. My writing would just go in a desk drawer. I suspect I'm a lot freer to write and do what I want - and to learn at my own pace - than I would be on other models.
So yeah, self-publishing might have been a decision made with little wisdom, but it was definitely the right one. Not that I haven't made some mistakes along the way, but that's a post for another time.
Monday, 22 April 2013
Sample Me!
As of Saturday, I've adjusted the settings on the Season Two episodes of The Second Realm at Smashwords to allow people to sample the first 20% without 'buying' (you can still pay what you like, with no minimum price).
Sampling was disabled because I guessed that most of the people downloading episodes from Smashwords would be people who'd found the series here and gone there to get it in e-reader-friendly formats - people who know that you can sample the whole series completely free on here.
To put it bluntly, that guess appears to be dead wrong. The four episodes of season 2 (don't forget the newly-released fifth) have generated a grand total of 14 downloads/sales over the last four months. In the same period, the eleven episodes of season 1 produced 500 downloads. Alright, the first season episodes can be downloaded in full without a Smashwords membership, but even averaged out that's ten times as many downloads per episode.
I need to do something to get those 500-downloads-worth of readers reading season 2, and wherever they're coming from, I think some sampling may help. Immortal Remains, released five months ago and barely promoted at all - in particular, lacking the benefit of subsequent releases in a series - has generated almost as many sales as the four Second Realm episodes put together, and, counting samples, more than twice as many downloads.
I'm not expecting this to be a magic bullet, obviously. There are no magic bullets in this business. But it is important to keep tweaking your strategy - this is one of the pieces of advice you'll hear most often from the old pros who've gotten into self-publishing (particularly Joe Konrath). If what you're doing doesn't work, change what you're doing.
BUT, and this is very important, it takes time for anything to work. I put this sampling strategy to the test for four months (because I forgot to change it last month, but still, three months). I'm still not sure I'm not jumping the gun a little bit by not giving it six months. The thing is, time feels a lot longer to live through than to talk about, and it's very easy, when the numbers climb at the average rate of one a week, to feel like you've been 'trying something' for ages with no success when really, it's only been a month.
Remember always - a successful author is one who kept going. The only way to definitely, absolutely and forever fail in this business is to give up. Try new things, but don't panic and abandon them when they take a few weeks to work. They may never work - but give them a chance.
Sampling was disabled because I guessed that most of the people downloading episodes from Smashwords would be people who'd found the series here and gone there to get it in e-reader-friendly formats - people who know that you can sample the whole series completely free on here.
To put it bluntly, that guess appears to be dead wrong. The four episodes of season 2 (don't forget the newly-released fifth) have generated a grand total of 14 downloads/sales over the last four months. In the same period, the eleven episodes of season 1 produced 500 downloads. Alright, the first season episodes can be downloaded in full without a Smashwords membership, but even averaged out that's ten times as many downloads per episode.
I need to do something to get those 500-downloads-worth of readers reading season 2, and wherever they're coming from, I think some sampling may help. Immortal Remains, released five months ago and barely promoted at all - in particular, lacking the benefit of subsequent releases in a series - has generated almost as many sales as the four Second Realm episodes put together, and, counting samples, more than twice as many downloads.
I'm not expecting this to be a magic bullet, obviously. There are no magic bullets in this business. But it is important to keep tweaking your strategy - this is one of the pieces of advice you'll hear most often from the old pros who've gotten into self-publishing (particularly Joe Konrath). If what you're doing doesn't work, change what you're doing.
BUT, and this is very important, it takes time for anything to work. I put this sampling strategy to the test for four months (because I forgot to change it last month, but still, three months). I'm still not sure I'm not jumping the gun a little bit by not giving it six months. The thing is, time feels a lot longer to live through than to talk about, and it's very easy, when the numbers climb at the average rate of one a week, to feel like you've been 'trying something' for ages with no success when really, it's only been a month.
Remember always - a successful author is one who kept going. The only way to definitely, absolutely and forever fail in this business is to give up. Try new things, but don't panic and abandon them when they take a few weeks to work. They may never work - but give them a chance.
Monday, 15 April 2013
Those Pesky Academics... (like me, for example)
Scott Turow's been making public statements again! That should keep me in blog topics for a while...
Actually, Techdirt, David Gaughran, Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath have done a pretty good job of responding to Turow's latest steaming pile of paranoid, vitriolic logorrheia. However, they've all missed out one particular paragraph, which was the one that really made my blood boil.
It's this one:
The statement that academic copyrights hold little financial value for academics - this is certainly true, but not because scholarly publishing has become unprofitable. With a new academic monograph tending to go for something like £50 (yes, you read that right - and don't expect them to come much below £20 in paperback), you can bet someone is making money off these things. It's not the authors - most likely it's the desperately-struggling academic presses, who have the most to gain from switching to the lower-overhead business models of the new digital publishing but, being part of the entrenched university system, are perhaps even more resistant to change than the big six.
The claim that copyrights 'often inhibit scholars who want to quote freely from those works or use portions in class' is just flat-out false. There are extensive, well-defined and generous protections for fair use. The only prohibition is about providing photocopies of a copyrighted text to students, where the limit is generally no more than one chapter per book - and I've only once encountered a situation where this was a problem, in eight years of university life.
The one that really got the steam coming out of my ears, though, was the last sentence. Mr. Turow is accusing those of us who oppose the modern copyright framework of doing so purely for self-aggrandisement. Did you notice the strong implication that this is a deliberate attack on other authors? I guess to Turow it looks like that, since his world apparently revolves around the Author's Guild and its 8,000-odd members, who are probably the authors with most to gain from copyright as an institution.
First off, the accusation is very patently untrue. The arguments I, and many others more eloquent and forceful than myself, have offered are much deeper and more thorough than 'high-minded slogans', and are the product of conviction, not cynicism. The problem goes far deeper than that, though - after all, why is Turow laying into academics?
It's clear he's desperately searching for villains to fit his narrative of 'real authors' versus 'the new publishing'. In the rest of the article, he attacks libraries, Amazon, Google, and the Supreme Court of the United States of America, for crying out loud. Why is it to his rhetorical advantage to add a group as cuddly and harmless as academics to that list?
Because 'academic' is a poweful, loaded label. It still conjures up images of stout, bearded old men cloistered in luxurious, book-filled offices, growing fat on their tenured professorial chairs. People don't really seem to know what 'academics' do - outwardly, I think, it all seems to be caps, gowns and very little heavy lifting.
Well, I am an academic (or at least a very-late-stage-trainee). I can assure you that this picture of academic life is an anachronism, a vision constructed in the late 19th or possibly early 20th century. The most painful inaccuracy is encapsulated by this description of the working conditions of the average US academic.
Okay, it's not sweat-shop stuff, but while the pay is better per hour than behind the counter at McDonalds (far fewer hours are available), the insecurity, stress and oppression are much the same. And these adjunct professors are the best and brightest minds of their generation, the Einsteins of tomorrow, the people who lead the fight against the most profound challenges of our time - global warming, overpopulation, peak food and water, and so on.
And yet, academics get to bear the brunt of a campaign of marginalisation by the political right (you've heard the cries about 'the intellectual elite', I'm sure), which is exactly what Turow is playing on here. Academics are no threat to Scott Turow, to Author's Guild members, or even to authors in general - in fact, it's spurious to treat academics as if we're not authors. We're authors in greater need of some unionisation than most, since the legacy publishing model works least well in small niche markets and ours is the most niche of nichey niches.
Turow's looking for enemies to demonise because he doesn't want anyone identifying the real problems in publishing. I have a couple of theories about the identity of those problems, but they'll have to wait for another time - expect painful reading. Until then, just remember that... well, just remember Scott Turow's an idiot. It's not just academics he's wrong about.
Actually, Techdirt, David Gaughran, Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath have done a pretty good job of responding to Turow's latest steaming pile of paranoid, vitriolic logorrheia. However, they've all missed out one particular paragraph, which was the one that really made my blood boil.
It's this one:
"The fracas with the Hathi libraries is emblematic of new fractures in traditional literary alliances. For many academics today, their own copyrights hold little financial value because scholarly publishing has grown so unprofitable. The copyrights of other authors, by contrast, often inhibit scholars who want to quote freely from those works or use portions in class. Thus, under the cri de coeur that “information wants to be free,” some professors and others are calling for copyright to be curtailed or even abandoned. High-minded slogans aside, these academics are simply promoting their own careers over the livelihoods of other writers."Three out of five of these sentences are problematic (by which I mean 'misguided, misleading and in some cases outright hateful'). To whit:
The statement that academic copyrights hold little financial value for academics - this is certainly true, but not because scholarly publishing has become unprofitable. With a new academic monograph tending to go for something like £50 (yes, you read that right - and don't expect them to come much below £20 in paperback), you can bet someone is making money off these things. It's not the authors - most likely it's the desperately-struggling academic presses, who have the most to gain from switching to the lower-overhead business models of the new digital publishing but, being part of the entrenched university system, are perhaps even more resistant to change than the big six.
The claim that copyrights 'often inhibit scholars who want to quote freely from those works or use portions in class' is just flat-out false. There are extensive, well-defined and generous protections for fair use. The only prohibition is about providing photocopies of a copyrighted text to students, where the limit is generally no more than one chapter per book - and I've only once encountered a situation where this was a problem, in eight years of university life.
The one that really got the steam coming out of my ears, though, was the last sentence. Mr. Turow is accusing those of us who oppose the modern copyright framework of doing so purely for self-aggrandisement. Did you notice the strong implication that this is a deliberate attack on other authors? I guess to Turow it looks like that, since his world apparently revolves around the Author's Guild and its 8,000-odd members, who are probably the authors with most to gain from copyright as an institution.
First off, the accusation is very patently untrue. The arguments I, and many others more eloquent and forceful than myself, have offered are much deeper and more thorough than 'high-minded slogans', and are the product of conviction, not cynicism. The problem goes far deeper than that, though - after all, why is Turow laying into academics?
It's clear he's desperately searching for villains to fit his narrative of 'real authors' versus 'the new publishing'. In the rest of the article, he attacks libraries, Amazon, Google, and the Supreme Court of the United States of America, for crying out loud. Why is it to his rhetorical advantage to add a group as cuddly and harmless as academics to that list?
Because 'academic' is a poweful, loaded label. It still conjures up images of stout, bearded old men cloistered in luxurious, book-filled offices, growing fat on their tenured professorial chairs. People don't really seem to know what 'academics' do - outwardly, I think, it all seems to be caps, gowns and very little heavy lifting.
Well, I am an academic (or at least a very-late-stage-trainee). I can assure you that this picture of academic life is an anachronism, a vision constructed in the late 19th or possibly early 20th century. The most painful inaccuracy is encapsulated by this description of the working conditions of the average US academic.
Okay, it's not sweat-shop stuff, but while the pay is better per hour than behind the counter at McDonalds (far fewer hours are available), the insecurity, stress and oppression are much the same. And these adjunct professors are the best and brightest minds of their generation, the Einsteins of tomorrow, the people who lead the fight against the most profound challenges of our time - global warming, overpopulation, peak food and water, and so on.
And yet, academics get to bear the brunt of a campaign of marginalisation by the political right (you've heard the cries about 'the intellectual elite', I'm sure), which is exactly what Turow is playing on here. Academics are no threat to Scott Turow, to Author's Guild members, or even to authors in general - in fact, it's spurious to treat academics as if we're not authors. We're authors in greater need of some unionisation than most, since the legacy publishing model works least well in small niche markets and ours is the most niche of nichey niches.
Turow's looking for enemies to demonise because he doesn't want anyone identifying the real problems in publishing. I have a couple of theories about the identity of those problems, but they'll have to wait for another time - expect painful reading. Until then, just remember that... well, just remember Scott Turow's an idiot. It's not just academics he's wrong about.
Monday, 25 March 2013
The Post-Copyright Age
Okay, someone has to call it, so I'm going to: copyright law is dead (apologies if you've already called it elsewhere, or you know of someone who has - send me a link?).
We're still in the 'violent death-throes' territory, to be sure, but well past the point of no return. Let me put it this way: an unenforceable law is no law at all, and nothing has proved copyright law unenforceable so thoroughly as the ham-handed and inconsistent attempts to enforce it. Digital sharing is here to stay, unless and until the internet itself goes away. Anything which can be digitised is fair game, and the only things that are safe are those that end-consumers can't use yet (like designs for hi-tech devices etc., but even their days are numbered).
And I don't honestly have a moral objection to this. I do, however, have a practical objection. Let's group all artists, designers, writers, etc. under the heading of 'intellectual property creators' ('IP creators') for want of a better term. My problem is this: IP creators need to be able to make a living from their creativity. It isn't just the rate of one's work but also the upper bound on its quality which is limited by sharing time with a day-job.
This isn't just self-indulgence, by the way. I take it as axiomatic that the purpose of intelligent life is intelligence, and that no human should have to do a job which could be done by a mindless automaton. We all have talents, and a moral duty to use them; all I'm saying is that we should get as many of the biological hurdles out of the way as possible. Sportspeople ought to be able to make a living from their sporting talents, and any other genuine and meaningful talent that falls outside IP creation ought also to be a source of livelihood.
I believe it should be possible to make a living from your talents; in fact, I believe it should be much easier than it currently is. It's a much-lamented fact that the corporate systems by which IP creators make money are at best bloated and at worst outright predatorial. Not all people who work for any given creative-industries corporation are a waste of money, but the corporations themselves add a lot of baggage to what, in an ideal world, would be a relationship directly between creator and audience. Copyright law is fundamentally an artefact of the corporations.
What we need is a new model for how audiences can support creators, one which doesn't waste millions on Manhattan office rents and bonuses for board members.
If we look at things from a purely creator-audience viewpoint, the benefit of corporate capitalism has been its ability to pool audience money. Very few people have enough spare income that they could fund a creator's career by themselves, but we can each buy an author's book or a musician's album, and the sum will support that creator (in theory) after it's filtered through the corporate system.
Let's say that an IP creator, being a skilled worker but working in the job of their dreams, is worth something along the lines of £40,000 (~$60,000) a year - comfortable but not extravagant (yeah, okay, there's a whole massive argument to be had here, but can we leave it for another time?). Using authors as an example, since it's probably the one we know most about, we know that on a £9 paperback, an author's going to end up with maybe £1 of the sales revenue (numbers greatly simplified, of course). That means that to make your £40k, you're going to need to generate £360,000 in sales revenue.
Now, some of that £360k is going to people who are equally important in the process - editors, mainly, but also designers, typesetters etc. But a lot of it is going on the rent on the publisher's city-centre offices, corporate hospitality and shareholder profits, stuff in which an audience has no interest at all.
My point is not just that corporations are bloated and wasteful. I want to float an idea for an alternative model.
In times of yore, many IP creators (though no-one thought of them as such; they were 'artists', 'composers' etc.) were supported by patronage from the wealthy. Lords, kings and even sometimes high clergy would pay an artist's keep in exchange for the prestige of association and first call on the artist's services. Obviously, the system was far from perfect, but many of the greatest creators history has known benefitted from it.
Obviously, very few of us could hope to be patron to even a single IP creator. What I'm envisaging is a system of charitable 'patronage trusts', to which consumers could donate small amounts anually, and which would provide stipends to IP creators and cover publication expenses. As an example, our £40k-a-year author could be supported by just 8,000 people giving £5 each once per year; costs on a per-book basis are difficult to estimate, but an extra couple of thousand supporters ought to cover it.
Creators would apply to trusts for part or whole stipends on a model somewhere between applying for a regular job and applying for the kind of government and/or charitable grants that support many museums, theatres, academic research institutions and projects, and independent creative organisations. Trusts would have to operate on a fairly market-sensitive sort of basis, but without the burden of a corporate infrastructure and shareholder dividends to pay.
To get around the piracy problem, trusts could offer the bulk of the work they support for free and provide premium services to subscribers - this is a model that works well for a number of webcomics, I know, though I don't know whether that holds good for experiments with it in other fields.
This is all just a vague proposal at the moment, and I don't really know what the first step in pursuing it might be (except, obviously, finding a flagship creator likely to be able to create enough attention to get the idea off the ground), but given how difficult it is to predict what the creative industries will look like in ten years' time (or even next month), it's worth some sort of experiment, surely?
We're still in the 'violent death-throes' territory, to be sure, but well past the point of no return. Let me put it this way: an unenforceable law is no law at all, and nothing has proved copyright law unenforceable so thoroughly as the ham-handed and inconsistent attempts to enforce it. Digital sharing is here to stay, unless and until the internet itself goes away. Anything which can be digitised is fair game, and the only things that are safe are those that end-consumers can't use yet (like designs for hi-tech devices etc., but even their days are numbered).
And I don't honestly have a moral objection to this. I do, however, have a practical objection. Let's group all artists, designers, writers, etc. under the heading of 'intellectual property creators' ('IP creators') for want of a better term. My problem is this: IP creators need to be able to make a living from their creativity. It isn't just the rate of one's work but also the upper bound on its quality which is limited by sharing time with a day-job.
This isn't just self-indulgence, by the way. I take it as axiomatic that the purpose of intelligent life is intelligence, and that no human should have to do a job which could be done by a mindless automaton. We all have talents, and a moral duty to use them; all I'm saying is that we should get as many of the biological hurdles out of the way as possible. Sportspeople ought to be able to make a living from their sporting talents, and any other genuine and meaningful talent that falls outside IP creation ought also to be a source of livelihood.
I believe it should be possible to make a living from your talents; in fact, I believe it should be much easier than it currently is. It's a much-lamented fact that the corporate systems by which IP creators make money are at best bloated and at worst outright predatorial. Not all people who work for any given creative-industries corporation are a waste of money, but the corporations themselves add a lot of baggage to what, in an ideal world, would be a relationship directly between creator and audience. Copyright law is fundamentally an artefact of the corporations.
What we need is a new model for how audiences can support creators, one which doesn't waste millions on Manhattan office rents and bonuses for board members.
If we look at things from a purely creator-audience viewpoint, the benefit of corporate capitalism has been its ability to pool audience money. Very few people have enough spare income that they could fund a creator's career by themselves, but we can each buy an author's book or a musician's album, and the sum will support that creator (in theory) after it's filtered through the corporate system.
Let's say that an IP creator, being a skilled worker but working in the job of their dreams, is worth something along the lines of £40,000 (~$60,000) a year - comfortable but not extravagant (yeah, okay, there's a whole massive argument to be had here, but can we leave it for another time?). Using authors as an example, since it's probably the one we know most about, we know that on a £9 paperback, an author's going to end up with maybe £1 of the sales revenue (numbers greatly simplified, of course). That means that to make your £40k, you're going to need to generate £360,000 in sales revenue.
Now, some of that £360k is going to people who are equally important in the process - editors, mainly, but also designers, typesetters etc. But a lot of it is going on the rent on the publisher's city-centre offices, corporate hospitality and shareholder profits, stuff in which an audience has no interest at all.
My point is not just that corporations are bloated and wasteful. I want to float an idea for an alternative model.
In times of yore, many IP creators (though no-one thought of them as such; they were 'artists', 'composers' etc.) were supported by patronage from the wealthy. Lords, kings and even sometimes high clergy would pay an artist's keep in exchange for the prestige of association and first call on the artist's services. Obviously, the system was far from perfect, but many of the greatest creators history has known benefitted from it.
Obviously, very few of us could hope to be patron to even a single IP creator. What I'm envisaging is a system of charitable 'patronage trusts', to which consumers could donate small amounts anually, and which would provide stipends to IP creators and cover publication expenses. As an example, our £40k-a-year author could be supported by just 8,000 people giving £5 each once per year; costs on a per-book basis are difficult to estimate, but an extra couple of thousand supporters ought to cover it.
Creators would apply to trusts for part or whole stipends on a model somewhere between applying for a regular job and applying for the kind of government and/or charitable grants that support many museums, theatres, academic research institutions and projects, and independent creative organisations. Trusts would have to operate on a fairly market-sensitive sort of basis, but without the burden of a corporate infrastructure and shareholder dividends to pay.
To get around the piracy problem, trusts could offer the bulk of the work they support for free and provide premium services to subscribers - this is a model that works well for a number of webcomics, I know, though I don't know whether that holds good for experiments with it in other fields.
This is all just a vague proposal at the moment, and I don't really know what the first step in pursuing it might be (except, obviously, finding a flagship creator likely to be able to create enough attention to get the idea off the ground), but given how difficult it is to predict what the creative industries will look like in ten years' time (or even next month), it's worth some sort of experiment, surely?
Monday, 18 March 2013
'Pirate'
Piracy is always a hot topic in the post-digital creative industries. Views differ, sometimes on generational lines, sometimes not. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that piracy increases (or can increase) an author's (or other creator's) sales and revenue - here's one notable example - but many people have an instinctive reaction against their work being stolen or pirated.
I'm not here today to weigh in on that (though given that you can have all my writing for free at the moment, it should be pretty clear where I stand). Instead, I want to take a step back and look at the language we use about copyright infringement, and specifically the terms 'piracy' and 'stealing'.
I got onto this topic because I realised I couldn't see the clear connection between piracy-on-the-high-seas-type-piracy and copyright infringement. Old-fashioned as it might be, I take it as a principle that we should only accept a 'new' meaning of a term if there's a good reason for using that term rather than coming up with a new one, so I felt this question bore some looking at.
At first, I thought it might have something to do with so-called pirate radio stations, at least some of which did engage in the unlicensed broadcasting of copyrighted material, but it's actually much older than that. The complete OED (which I can't link to, because I only have access through my university) lists the earliest use of the term 'pirate' to mean the making of illegal copies of something as dating from 1603.
But why? 'Piracy' (or its etymological stem) has meant robbery at sea since Roman times, though it comes from a Greek root variously translated as 'to attempt', 'to experience' or 'to assault'. Now, the writer using the term in 1603 may well have been aware of the Greek link to 'experience', but I can't believe that was foremost in his mind in using the term. It seems to me far more likely that this was a figurative use, cognate with 'vagabond', 'brigand' or 'scoundrel'. In other words, the term was being used to dismiss and belittle the people to whom it was being applied.
That may have been unproblematic (quite possibly even fair) in the social climate of the 17th century, but times have changed. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we're in the middle of a serious cross-cultural debate about the balance between creator and audience rights. We can no longer afford loaded and pejorative name-calling. It will cripple the debate.
Fair enough, you might say, but it's not that pejorative in this case. After all, piracy is robbery at sea, 'content piracy' is robbery online - there's a connection there, isn't there? Copyright infringement is still stealing, isn't it?
Well, that's a more subtle question than it might seem. The digital copyright infringement that we're talking about is certainly the taking of something without the legal right to do so, so from a legal point of view, it's stealing. But if we define 'stealing' in purely legal terms, then we can't use the term outside of a legal context, and so we can't explain why the law prohibits stealing. Remember, it's the legal context which is being questioned here. Much of the debate about copyright is about what legal measures should be taken to protect the various parties with an interest in digital content.
Law should follow from principle, otherwise any law is as good as any other. What does 'stealing' mean outside of a legal context? If we can't define it as 'taking something illegally', what can we define it as?
Well, the principle underpinning the concept of stealing is the concept of property - the idea that individuals can own objects (not a universally popular idea, by the way). Stealing, then, is most naturally regarded as the taking of something from someone against their wishes (no, libertarians, taxes don't count - you consent to taxes by continuing to live in the country levying them).
Here's where it gets tricky. If you make an illegal copy of one of my stories, what have you taken from me? You haven't taken the story - I still have a copy, indeed a potentially infinite set of copies, of my own. And I can't say you've taken the money I would have made if you'd paid for it, because that money has at no point been my property. All that's been removed is the possibility of my making some money from selling that story to you.
I won't bring up the (somewhat facile) question of whether a possibility can be property - it's rather more abstract than I need to be to make my point. My point is this: we can't be sure that possibility has been removed, for two reasons. First, we can't be sure that it ever existed, since it might be the case that the only way you'd ever consider looking at my work is if you could get it for free. Second, we can't be sure it's ceased to exist, since you may subsequently love my work enough to decide to pay for it later.
Let's now go back to the question of legal framework, working up from this discussion of principle. The law requires you to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty, otherwise they are presumed innocent. If we build our concept of copyright theft on this principle, then to prove theft, you have to prove that there was a possibility that you might buy my book (relatively unproblematic), but that now there is no such possibility (which I can see absolutely no way at all to do - if nothing else, to prove this, I would have to prove that my book isn't good enough to inspire your future loyalty to me, something that strikes me as a very poor marketing decision).
Maybe we're getting a bit far away from anything resembling a practical contribution to the debate. Let me bring it back to this point: the terms we use to brand people are powerful, problematic things. In the copyright debate, the law is far too cloudy, and too much of the lobbying actually carried out on behalf of vampiric third parties rather than the creators and audiences who have legitimate stakes in the matter, for us to be able to afford terminology that's going to put people's backs up.
The whole principle of a writer's life should be to never use words without thinking about them. Think about 'piracy' and 'stealing' before you start getting worked up about them, whether you're applying them to others or they're being applied to you.
I'm not here today to weigh in on that (though given that you can have all my writing for free at the moment, it should be pretty clear where I stand). Instead, I want to take a step back and look at the language we use about copyright infringement, and specifically the terms 'piracy' and 'stealing'.
I got onto this topic because I realised I couldn't see the clear connection between piracy-on-the-high-seas-type-piracy and copyright infringement. Old-fashioned as it might be, I take it as a principle that we should only accept a 'new' meaning of a term if there's a good reason for using that term rather than coming up with a new one, so I felt this question bore some looking at.
At first, I thought it might have something to do with so-called pirate radio stations, at least some of which did engage in the unlicensed broadcasting of copyrighted material, but it's actually much older than that. The complete OED (which I can't link to, because I only have access through my university) lists the earliest use of the term 'pirate' to mean the making of illegal copies of something as dating from 1603.
But why? 'Piracy' (or its etymological stem) has meant robbery at sea since Roman times, though it comes from a Greek root variously translated as 'to attempt', 'to experience' or 'to assault'. Now, the writer using the term in 1603 may well have been aware of the Greek link to 'experience', but I can't believe that was foremost in his mind in using the term. It seems to me far more likely that this was a figurative use, cognate with 'vagabond', 'brigand' or 'scoundrel'. In other words, the term was being used to dismiss and belittle the people to whom it was being applied.
That may have been unproblematic (quite possibly even fair) in the social climate of the 17th century, but times have changed. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we're in the middle of a serious cross-cultural debate about the balance between creator and audience rights. We can no longer afford loaded and pejorative name-calling. It will cripple the debate.
Fair enough, you might say, but it's not that pejorative in this case. After all, piracy is robbery at sea, 'content piracy' is robbery online - there's a connection there, isn't there? Copyright infringement is still stealing, isn't it?
Well, that's a more subtle question than it might seem. The digital copyright infringement that we're talking about is certainly the taking of something without the legal right to do so, so from a legal point of view, it's stealing. But if we define 'stealing' in purely legal terms, then we can't use the term outside of a legal context, and so we can't explain why the law prohibits stealing. Remember, it's the legal context which is being questioned here. Much of the debate about copyright is about what legal measures should be taken to protect the various parties with an interest in digital content.
Law should follow from principle, otherwise any law is as good as any other. What does 'stealing' mean outside of a legal context? If we can't define it as 'taking something illegally', what can we define it as?
Well, the principle underpinning the concept of stealing is the concept of property - the idea that individuals can own objects (not a universally popular idea, by the way). Stealing, then, is most naturally regarded as the taking of something from someone against their wishes (no, libertarians, taxes don't count - you consent to taxes by continuing to live in the country levying them).
Here's where it gets tricky. If you make an illegal copy of one of my stories, what have you taken from me? You haven't taken the story - I still have a copy, indeed a potentially infinite set of copies, of my own. And I can't say you've taken the money I would have made if you'd paid for it, because that money has at no point been my property. All that's been removed is the possibility of my making some money from selling that story to you.
I won't bring up the (somewhat facile) question of whether a possibility can be property - it's rather more abstract than I need to be to make my point. My point is this: we can't be sure that possibility has been removed, for two reasons. First, we can't be sure that it ever existed, since it might be the case that the only way you'd ever consider looking at my work is if you could get it for free. Second, we can't be sure it's ceased to exist, since you may subsequently love my work enough to decide to pay for it later.
Let's now go back to the question of legal framework, working up from this discussion of principle. The law requires you to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is guilty, otherwise they are presumed innocent. If we build our concept of copyright theft on this principle, then to prove theft, you have to prove that there was a possibility that you might buy my book (relatively unproblematic), but that now there is no such possibility (which I can see absolutely no way at all to do - if nothing else, to prove this, I would have to prove that my book isn't good enough to inspire your future loyalty to me, something that strikes me as a very poor marketing decision).
Maybe we're getting a bit far away from anything resembling a practical contribution to the debate. Let me bring it back to this point: the terms we use to brand people are powerful, problematic things. In the copyright debate, the law is far too cloudy, and too much of the lobbying actually carried out on behalf of vampiric third parties rather than the creators and audiences who have legitimate stakes in the matter, for us to be able to afford terminology that's going to put people's backs up.
The whole principle of a writer's life should be to never use words without thinking about them. Think about 'piracy' and 'stealing' before you start getting worked up about them, whether you're applying them to others or they're being applied to you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)