Will digital publishing kill great writing?

Will the rise of digital publishing kill great writing?

No. It will only change the way it is delivered. In the same way a syringe is a delivery system for a vaccine, and a cigarette is a delivery system for a shot of nicotine, ‘the book’ is a delivery system for words. This process works in fiction and non-fiction, how-to and tell-alls, or an instruction manual for the new computerized, digital-interface washing machine.

Will the rise of self-publishing destroy major publishing houses?

Yes and no. It will force them to change their practices. Those that fail will fail because they failed to see the trend, and failed to adapt to new technologies. The same houses are still troves of intellectual property. Those properties are assets. They're 'properties,' and someone will buy the company or some of its assets and make use of them. Michael Jackson bought $47.5 million worth of old rights. He bought Sony/ATV music, who owned some Beatles song-rights. The company itself, we must assume, was on sale for some reason or other. (Not an apt term, but you get the idea.)

Whatever you thought of Michael as a person, that might have been a savvy business move, as those rights have now been valued at anywhere from $390 million to One Billion Dollars.

According to sources like Dean Wesley Smith, major publishers are wholly or partly owned subsidiaries of other corporations. What this means is that one division might be making money and another division losing money. When a limb rots, it is cut off and left to wither and die. This saves the rest of the organism. The word corporation derives from the Latin, ‘corpus,’ or body. It is a fairly good analogy.

When a late-night news parody host interviews a hot author, holding up their book in front of the cameras and touting it like any sidewalk shill in front of the carnival, I assume that nine times out of ten or greater that book is produced by an arm of the same corporation. This sort of thing is not going to go away.

Will self-publishing destroy the book?

No, it will only change the existing power structures. Insofar as they may adapt, and have every right to do so under current laws, the survivors may even come out of this in a stronger position.

Will Amazon destroy major publishing? No, it will become it, with a small coterie of other publishers who have little choice but to sell their books on Amazon. Because it is either that, or compete directly against them. Barnes & Noble may survive on the strength of a $300 million investment by Microsoft, with some probability of further funding to come. Microsoft won’t want to see its original investment go down the tubes, and with Apple a player in the game, with their very popular iTunes store, it probably was a no-brainer for them. I don’t think they can sit out of the game.

Also, Google has some interest in e-books, with their own war chest to work with, (presumably.)

If a half a dozen corporate entities wanted to each throw $50 million in a pot, they could theoretically start up a new company, one designed from the outset to compete with all the major players presently on scene. This is one reason why Amazon and other booksellers have their own publishing imprints. They would like to sew up as many intellectual properties as they can.

It’s all about grabbing market share, never mind what street-corner blog pundits have to say about quality or ‘gate-keeping.’ I’m trying to grab a teensy-weensy little bit of market share myself.

What does this mean for the average writer?

That’s a good question. No one really knows, but we can speculate endlessly. In the short term, I see fewer openings for new authors at most major houses, this is due to short cash flow and high costs for the most part. It’s not that they wouldn’t like bigger acquisitions budgets, far from it.

The opportunities for those willing and able to go it alone are limitless, and in fact things have never been better for the self-directed entrepreneurial sort of a writer. The world is your oyster, what are you going to make of it? Most of us don’t have that much drive and vision. In many ways, we still prefer to give things up so someone will look after us. This type of thinking won’t go away quickly, if it ever will. New answers will be found, from the vanity publisher who takes advantage of the idea that throwing money at it somehow guarantees success, to the people who simply don’t want to learn formatting so they pay $100.00 for someone else to do it. But safety nets always had to be bought and paid for one way or another.

In the long term, there may be fewer titles published by major houses. This is because of the risky nature of the investment. Those titles may go through an even more rigourous screening and editing process, but I think not. I think cost-cutting and speed of process will come to dominate as they try to adapt. This is not a moral judgment, I do the same thing myself.

In ten to fifteen years over ninety percent of publishing will be digital. We will look back and wonder at all the fuss that was made over the death of a business model that was clearly outmoded and had outlived any further usefulness.

This is particularly poignant in Canada, where taxpayers will continue to subsidize traditional publishers in order to prop up the pulp and paper industry, which creates relatively high-paying jobs for relatively unskilled people. Governments always take a short-term, expedient view of any situation. In a similar vein, provincial cultural grants will die a slow death, but then they have virtually no relevance as far as writing books in this modern era. Some say they never did.

They are almost entirely political patronage of the bourgeois, (I say that because people on disability are protected by law from receiving any benefit from them,) but the smoke and mirror artists have always been in the business of promoting mediocrity. They deeply fear anyone with any spirit at all. I’ve written all kinds of books without a penny of public support, other than a very small pension which any citizen is entitled to receive. For the most part, with rare exceptions, the books produced by the provision of cultural grants do not go on to become popular best-sellers. They are prime examples of vanity publishing at its worst, and for all the wrong reasons: pandering to the uptight sensibilities of the middle class. They believe that ‘literature is sacred,’ or some such ilk. These tools of literacy must be prevented from falling into the hands of the wrong sort of people—poor people, although they will never express it in exactly those terms.

The most important part of any book produced via a cultural grant is the part where the author(s) thank the government for the support, ‘without which this book could not have been written.’

Some of them do win awards, and are highly-praised by critics. Unfortunately, no one can remember their names or what they were about.

Will self-publishing destroy editing, the English language, or make profound changes happen in our nation?

In a recent unscientific poll conducted by Shalako Publishing on Kindle Boards, over ninety percent of respondents indicated they had a college or university education. In answer to your question, “I sure hope so, but I have my doubts.”

If publishing is in a state of transition from one mode to the next, so is the craft and business of writing. As Smashwords founder Mark Coker says, ‘Writers are going to have to become better publishers.”

According to the article, under the previous model, 0.5 percent of authors would receive the support of a traditional, professional publisher. For the other 99.5 percent, it simply didn’t matter except for making the usual submission where you submit the first three chapters or write a proposal.

All of that has now changed as well, hasn’t it? In my opinion, the rise of digital publishing will not diminish the pool of talent or make life easy for lazy and untalented people. What will surely happen, now that we have the opportunity, is that hard-working, talented authors who otherwise wouldn’t be getting a shot at it now have a fighting chance of succeeding on their own.

Overall, taken as a trend, the quality of writing and of books and stories in general will actually go up. That’s because of the increased competition in a marketplace which is only going to get so big so fast.

Considering the stultifying attitudes of some commentators, who constantly make anonymous complaints about books 'riddled with typos,' change is both welcome and necessary. This is a great time to be alive, especially if you enjoy writing and cherish your independence.

Your fate is in your own hands, which is just where it ought to be.

Obscure Notes:

A book is composed of words, and using ‘phonetic literacy,’ the arbitrary symbols link together in a hierarchical system of building blocks to tell a story or impart information. Phonetic literacy allows more precision of expression compared to hieroglyphics or picture-writing. Any philosopher will tell you that they are trying to define their terms with ever-greater precision. That’s because without writing as we know it, philosophy, ‘all of which since the dawn of time is not worth a moment’s trouble,’ as someone once put it, is simply impossible to express without the gift of written language.

News from the Future: Brane-Sex toy controversial.

Couple having brain-sex burns to death in Lennoxville as neighbours hammer on the door.

Lennoxville, Ontario, Canada: (Reuters-Al-Jazeera)


The Ontario Fire Marshall’s office is investigating after a young couple, Mark and Patricia Boyle, both twenty-four, were found dead in their bed after an early-morning fire at their home in this normally placid southern Ontario community. While faulty wiring has been found to be the cause of the fire, the grisly deaths have raised a whole host of issues.

Their two children, Michael, age thirteen months, and Sarah, two and a half years old, were rescued by a passerby who then alerted emergency services. The building was fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived on scene. There was no hope of attempting a rescue according to sources.

“You really haven’t lived until you’ve pried apart two charred and blackened young lovers, in the prime of life and with a lot to look forward to,” said Fire Chief Robert Magillacuddy, with an uncharacteristic note of anger evident to this reporter. “This was so senseless. They still had the wires hooked up to their heads.”

While the deaths have not been ruled suspicious, nor is there any suggestion of foul play, an inquest has been called in order to find out if the tragedy could have been prevented, and to make recommendations on how the province might best cope with what has become a rash of such incidents. There have been seventeen incidents in Ontario alone since the product was introduced to much fanfare earlier this year. Hundreds of incidents have been reported worldwide, according to credible consumer watchdog groups.

“The product is safe if instructions are followed and as long as love-gamers remain aware of their surroundings,” said Branesex Corporation spokesperson Griff Measly when contacted by reporters. “There are all kinds of safety warnings, both on the packaging and in the manual.”

Staff members here at News From the Future examined the product recently and found there are indeed plenty of warnings, and more than the average number of disclaimers included in the product packaging.

Lennox Fire Department Chief Magillacuddy is adamant.

“This is just plain nuts. The thing should be outlawed. What the big corporations are getting away with these days is just outright murder.”

Two months ago, police were stunned to follow up on an anonymous tip and discover a ‘brain-sex orgy,’ in a ‘love-pit,’ which was a kind of dugout, roofed with cardboard, in a local hang-out park. While the eleven teens and pre-teens involved in that incident were “fully dressed and not touching each other,” according to police, the incident caused a local uproar and global mass media carried the story round the clock for about nine days. All the youths were plugged into the device. Authorities in some jurisdictions are treating such young people as victims, and in other jurisdictions, as malefactors.

“Police were shocked by the images projected by the young people’s brains,” according to Bernie Jacques, of the Lennox Prosecutor’s Office.

“We’re still trying to determine a legal basis for charges against someone, well anyone, really,” according to Jacques. “The real problem, and a big gap in the law, is the fact that there really is no such thing as an illegal thought or an unlawful dream. Sometimes new technologies come along, and it takes the law quite some time to catch up. Governments should be more responsive to these new technologies.”

Local parents have formed a committee which is looking for ways to keep the ‘brane-sex’ toy, which resembles a pod-type music box with multiple outputs and inputs, from the hands of children and the disabled. In a bizarre twist, another committee wants to distribute them in old-age homes so that old people won’t be so lonely. The Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Smoking Drugs, and Other Naughty Things Party has condemned the devices and is lobbying the government for the product’s removal from the market. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice activists, as well as Free Tibet and Chiropodists Without Borders have also chimed in on the debate.

“We’re against pretty much everything,” said MADD-et cetera’s Fearless Leader Matilda Griswold as she dashed past reporters on her way to a meeting of the Continental Caucus, where she leads El Presidente’s Extremely Loyal Opposition.

The device works by wireless electronic stimulation of the brain’s limbic system through a set of electrodes resembling the earphones on any music box. Two of these are attached by sticky pads in the area of the temples of the gamer, with another attached at the back of the skull. By transmitting false signals to the visual and other sensory centers in the brain, a hypnotic effect is induced in ‘love-gamers,’ according to sources.

According to confidential sources, the effect is said to be ‘totally real’ to participants.

“With all kinds of fresh downloads coming out, and plenty of new worlds to explore, manufacturers are pumping them out like so many hot rolls,” according to one source who requested confidentiality. “Love-gamers always have that little shaved patch on the lower back part of the skull, just behind the right ear, and little pairs of puffy red marks at the temples. That’s how you can always tell. Quite frankly, dollar for dollar, the wireless version, at only twenty bucks more, is your best gaming buy on the market today.”

Mr. Ramon.

“I’d like to make a complaint.” A tall, well-dressed gentleman rapped his knuckles on the counter.

The lady at his side nodded.

“It’s unconscionable.” She stood clutching a white cardboard box with blue text and a picture of a corn-popper on it under her arm.

One end of the thing was all taped up.

“Well, our complaints department is Mr. Ramon.” Sylvester oozed sincerity. “But you really don’t want to meet Mister Ramon.”

“Oh, yes.” The lady was all firm dignity. “I want to speak to this Mister Ramon.”

“Oh, no, Blondie, you don’t want to meet Ramon.”

The man thumped his fist down on the countertop.

“Yes. I want to speak to Mister Ramon."

“Very well then.” Sylvester led them into the hallway, reaching for the handle to let them in to see the Complaints Manager.

***

“I demand satisfaction!” The man was angry still.

A tall, slender, fortyish man in a black suit stood there beside a desk with nothing on it.

“And you shall have it!” Mister Ramon beamed at them. “Would you step this way, please?”

Straightening up upon this pleasant greeting, and giving a significant look to Emily, his wife, Samuel Wilson looked in the indicated direction. A door on the far side of the room was open.

He confidently stepped into the doorway ahead of the gentleman. To his shock, he saw the room was little better than a broom closet with one bare bulb hanging in the ceiling. H halted suddenly.

There was nothing in there but a hole in the floor and some heavy-looking sacks lined up against the wall.

“What’s this?” He gasped in shock.

“It's an oubliette, my good man.” Ramon kicked him in the kidneys.

As the gentleman writhed on the ground, Ramon booted him in the throat. He wrestled him into position, and then shoved him in headfirst. Rising, he dusted off his hands, looking pleased.

He saw the lady, standing in the doorway with a vacant stare on her face.

“What—what’s that?”

“An oubliette, Madam.” Ramon was ever so polite.

She made a funny little sound and goggled at Ramon. He crooked his finger at her and she stepped forward jerkily, eyes all white around the edges. She was like a marionette, walking on its own but balancing on the strings.

“Ugh…ah….peep…” She shuddered in anticipation.

Water dripped to the floor from under her skirt as she stared at him with disbelieving eyes.

He put his left hand on her shoulder. Then Ramon punched her in the guts. She collapsed in a heap and he stuffed her in headfirst as well.

There was a frothy, wet sound from her kicking. He hefted a sack full of sand and then dropped it into the hole to force them down. Opening up yet another door, he pulled out the mop and bucket.

***

“No, seriously, ma’am.” Sylvester was speaking to a tall, auburn haired woman standing at the counter holding onto a clear plastic bag with colourful linens in it. “That’s our Mister Ramon. I promise you! You really don’t want to meet our Mister Ramon.”

***
 
Note: 'Mr. Ramon' originally appeared in Dark Valentine, an online horror magazine that has since been closed by its editors.

Research 101: The art of murder

You have to admit ‘les poules dans un photo’ are cute.

‘I need another mystery novel by Xmas.’

This is a matter of opinion, yet it is one of my goals, and I might even succeed. That being said, one wonders what the next Maintenon mystery book will be. On the spur of the moment, I started Googling things like ‘sensational crimes Paris 1926’ and such ilk.

At the present time I don’t have a particular plot in mind, although dark themes will naturally arise. It is murder after all. I still don’t have a specific crime from the headlines or anything like that.

Not too many sensational crimes came up on the first page of links. For that I would need to browse the ‘Paris 1926 newspapers,’ or whatever. Yet some interesting things did come up. Here are the first few links I followed up in no real order:

Paris Jazz Age: (New generation explodes in Paris (1920s.)

Look at the clothes, look at the interiors. Look at the shoes. Look at the hats, and the hairstyles. All kinds of encyclopedic information is available to us nowadays. We have all these resources. Reading this stuff is more fun than wrestling with plot points, which ultimately resolve themselves in some 5:00 a.m. moment of cynicism and decisiveness. Think of the bars, the vehicles. Plenty of background materials. We could squeeze in some Paris mobsters, with guys hanging off of running boards with machine-pistols blazing and hot blonde molls passed out in the back seat. I need a good chase scene…

Check this one out:

Paris in 1926 had an art scene, a scene that affluent characters might be familiar with and interact with.

I don’t have a plot for my story yet. Certain things suggest themselves: art, jazz, American expats, lots of heroin, opium-eating, living the high life, and of course some kind of homicide to stir the reader’s more visceral instincts.

Considering our well-known penchant for hetero-eroticism, what sort of women will be in the story? And how will they behave? Should they be scantily-clad?

So my last book was light-hearted, this one, another mystery in some putative series, should be dark.

How to work in the Algerians, smugglers, white-slavers and a lot of drug references as well as full frontal nudity and some social commentary relevant to the 21st century remains to be seen.

See ‘Surrealism and the art of crime.’

That was the one that set me to thinking. And you have to admit, that guy has one hell of a good title.

(Paris Match.)

There must be a lot more stuff out there. In any case, some kind of inspiration will surely strike.

The first Inspector Maintenon story was ‘The Handbag’s Tale,’ available here. This led to ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery,’ available here and elsewhere.

Social Marketing: Content Creation

The search optimization specialists are always telling us to create content of value, and to use multiple key words to engage the search engine’s interest. They tell us to stick to the message, which keeps your content in a tighter category—this avoids some guy Googling ‘brake pads for a 1990 Chrysler’ and hitting on your blog post about ‘formatting a 5 x 8 paperback and I also put brake pads on my 1990 Chrysler lately’ post which you put on your blog five months ago.


You don’t want to waste the man’s time or your own.

They also tell us to go for ‘back-links.’ If you can get someone with a good following, in your genre, to back-link from his site to your content on your site, this will generate traffic to your own site as readers look for more interesting content that is relevant to their wants or needs. You need to be ‘quotable.’

(Or at least presentable, Louis. -ed.)

That’s what a back-link is: he’s using your content to back up, with its additional moral weight, something he is saying himself.

If your buddy is a writer, his readers are interested in other books and other writers. They may not be too fascinated with formatting, but so many readers also write, or aspire to write, that the formatting article is not too far off topic. More popular topics would include news about upcoming events, book reviews, writing tips, bargains, author interviews, fiction, and similar content. They don’t care about your brake job.

Search engine optimization and cross-linking has many applications. When you tweet about your book, you get traffic going where you sent them. Other readers, authors, editors, begin to follow you and your twitter chat. You follow them back. After a while, someone skimming through their follower list, perhaps an electronic engineer in Djakarta, follows you. Engineers are literate—they read books just like anyone else. You have a new potential customer. The more times your name comes up in posts, the more the search engines have to chew on, and them little bots are always hungry. The eat data for breakfast. They also draw conclusions about your weight.

Once you follow him back, some enterprising person who is looking for someone to follow goes on Twitter and searches a category, say ‘books.’ Or even ‘engineers.’ The more followers you or they have, the more weight you and they have, and the more likely either one of you are to be ‘presented’ to them. This way you pick up new followers without having to browse lists and follow them first. This is important, because only about 50-60 % of ‘cold-clicks’ follow back and many of them are in fact spammers who aren’t interested in your message. This cuts your effectiveness, especially when you come up against the 2,000-follow limit on Twitter.

To follow someone who is not following you clutters up your feed and they’re not seeing your message. If they don’t follow you, they are not linked to you and carry no weight in the search engine that Twitter uses to ‘present’ potential follow choices to those prospecting for someone interesting to follow. That’s why I used ManageFlitter recently to un-follow a number of non-followers. I had 1,143 followers but had run up against the 2,000-follow limit. I cleared off 850-plus people, some of whom were interesting, and then simply clicked on another seven or eight hundred people. You don’t have to drop them all. Some sources are worth listening to for their own sake, e.g. the BBC. I don’t honestly expect them to follow me back. The goal here is to crack the follow limit (if I can,) and then do the same thing with other accounts.

This has other ramifications when a follower re-tweets one of your posts. You can tell this when a ‘high-quality’ follower shows up in your notifications. When Thony Soprano or Joe Satriani shows up in your inbox, you know that they (or their social media manager) must have been presented with your name as a follow choice, even though you did not follow them first. And this is good, because if your content is good, Thony or Joe may just re-tweet you to their tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. In the meantime, you’re still tweeting and posting for Thony and Joe, so keep producing that content of high value in your category and you really can’t go wrong. All of this weight accumulates over time.

I’m not too interested in being famous, but it might help to sell books. Everyone I know was educated out of books, and if we can bring enough books into the world, things will eventually get better. Right?

This is a good thing.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Google +, Facebook, Digg, or whatever. The ‘presentation’ algorithms are going to do their job.

Now, when I post a Smashwords link on Kindleboards, or a Kindleboards link on Facebook and Digg, I lead people back to the other site, where I and other authors receive some benefit from the exposure. Other people or entities such as Smashwords and Amazon receive benefit as well from our efforts.

It’s a kind of pyramid scheme turned into a game. The longer you are in it, the more active you are, the better you play, the more quickly you rise to the higher levels, and the more rewarding it becomes in every sense. It’s not all about money and selling.

Having met someone in the virtual sense, you begin to like them, to care about them, and to interact with them in some way.

We can be friends with people all over the world. Everyone learns something from one another, and the world will eventually be a better place due to all of this communication.

This is a good thing.

For an interesting slant from the corporate world on content creation strategies, you might consider reading this article.

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, has a free e-book in all sorts of formats, and I thoroughly recommend it. It deals with related subjects. It’s called ‘The Secrets of E-Book Marketing Success.’

I plan on implementing some of these techniques myself, focusing at first on that which is easiest to fix, and also what needs doing most. After this post is done, I'm going to fix a marketing image and re-write a product description. We'll see what happens after that.

Comments are always welcome.