Ipad, intellectual property, and basic sanity

If you haven’t been living under a rock during the last week, you know that Apple has released this thing called Ipad. Ipad is a media consumption device, but the book industry has high hopes that it will deliver it from the clutches of Amazon’s monopoly in online book-shopping.

In a situation where only 20 percent of european consumers are willing to pay for ebooks online, the book indistry is moving fast in the conversion to digital, and they are pinning large hopes on the release of the Apple Ipad.

The Ipad is, the book industry hopes, one of the things that will save the market from the same kind of emotional and economic meltdown that we have seen in the music industry.

Thus they embrace one of the most intrusive DRM-proponents, which Apple is and has shown itself to be. The executives in the publishing industry seem to think that DRM is A Good Thing. They have learned nothing from the music industry. They have not internalized the biggest lesson, that DRM actually drives piracy.

Speaking of piracy, the DRM-nature of the Ipad has of course fueled the anti-copyright movement, which is strong in Europe – which is evidenced by the growth of the Pirate Party (Google translation) in Sweden, Germany, and in other nations on the continent.

Having gained representation in the European Parliament, the anti-copyright movement has acquired a wholly different political structure in Europe than it has in the US. If the US executives responsible for technological adoption does not watch their steps, you can very well see that the EU is lost from the cause, and you will find writers having to find mecenates in order to keep writng, or that they will take jobs in other industries.

That will of course dry up the source of content. Already, writing novels earns writers below the minimum wage. Without copyright protection, writing will be impossible to do for a living.

Merry Yuletide to all of you

I am not the only atheist that have a “dichotomous” relationship with this holiday, and I’m happy about that.

It is inevitable that friends get a smirky look when they see me going through the usual frenzy that everyone has at this time of year. You know, rushing this way and that to get presents.

I don’t really see why they should get all smirky on me, since I have no problems with the concept of getting together with relations, having good food, and being nice to each other for once.

We can get back to the family politicking later, and gossip about that uncle who’s looking a bit too deep in the bottle, or complain about that aunt that has got too good a job and getting to uppity about it, or whisper about that nephew that never seems to have a girlfriend but very many male “friends”.

How does this square with atheism then? Well, it’s simple really. None in my family is very religious, so any trappings of Christianity is more token than anything.

You can go zealot and exterminate all the religious trappings of it, I suppose, but what would be the point? That would be to bring it into focus, wouldn’t it? That would be to focus on the big elephant in the middle of the room.

I prefer just to meet the family, shrug about the whole thing, exchange the gifts, and then go home. Well, usually, since I’ve missed the big day as the weather has trapped me in the UK on the 24^th.

But in the spirit of the thing, happy yuletide to all of you, and a happy new year! And I hope you’re christmas is not like in the clip.

Musical obsession #2

 

Sometimes you get some song stuck in your head. This is what’s playing on repeat now. It MAY have to do with the fact that the snow is keeping me stuck in the UK over the holidays, rather than going home to Scandinavia to the relatives.

Non-christian jingle bells

 

In the spirit of the season, here is a non-christian Jingle Bells for your enjoyment. Who said Bollywood didn’t mix with Santa Clause?

DRM is wicked and evil, but…

DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a blight upon creation, an evil idea, an affront to the rights of property inherent in being human. But piracy of ebooks may destroy literature without it.

I have no solution to the dilemma that DRM vs. ebook piracy, except to list a certain number of objections to the comparison between the other IP-industries and the publishing industries, and to offer a reason to why you, dear reader, should be happy that there is a publishing industry at all.

Often when the debate comes up about DRM and copy protection of ebooks, you immediately have a comparison between the publishing industry and the recording industry. It is a fine comparison, I assume, because the publishing industry could learn a lot from the errors and mistakes that the music industry made.

But the comparison does not hold for a deeper transferable understanding of the stakes and the function of the industry as a whole. The publishing industry is not the music industry, and it has a different role and responsibility to the consumer – which is you, dear reader of this.

What the publishing industry is, first and foremost, is a screen against the awful crap that exist on the grass root level of actual composition. You have two gate keeper levels that prevent the novels about Bill Clinton’s moral subversion of the lettuce price that will bring an end to the Christian religion as we know it. You have gate keepers against the big breasted heaving bosoms of Amazon vampire sparkles.

You see, writing is not considered “real work”. Whereas the public has a feeling that in order to be a musician you have to be able to play an instrument, or be able to sing, there is no such instinctive feeling for writing novels.

For that reason, every single agent and publisher in existence is inundated with 10 thousand or more submissions every year. Ninety percent of those submissions are written by people that have no command of the English language, does not know how to string three comprehensible sentences together, or does not know how to construct a story that you, dear reader of this, would ever want to read.

The role of the publishing industry is to make money for the owners, certainly, and it is to publish books that the industry thinks that you want to read. In order to do that, it will also take on the role as a screen, a quality assurance, and a vetting agency that will keep you happy or have you grumble about writers like Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer who do know how to write, but who do not – imho – write good books.

There is a trinity in the publishing world that does not exist in the recording industry: you have publishers that want to sell readable books for profit, agents that want to sell profitable books to publishers for big commissions, and writers that want to sell books, good or bad, profitable or not, to publishers by way of agents.

Both agents and publishers depend on writers for their livelihood, something that can get lost in translation as writers tip-toe in fear around agents for fear of offending and get the instant-rejection.

A rejection is a big deal for writers, because it means that we do not make any money on our art. If no one wants to buy our books, we have to get regular jobs that pays our rents and the food on our table.

We writers have no alternative means of getting paid, as musicians do. We can’t fill auditoriums, and a lecture circuit tour wouldn’t be attended by anyone. What are we really going to talk about in such a lecture? What could we say that people would want to pay money to hear?

Our only means of income is advances and royalties for selling copies of our books, and even now we don’t make the minimum wage even if we’re strong midlist sellers. We only make comfortable living if we have a best seller. Translated to the music industry, we can only make a comfortable living if we’re Madonna or Britney Spears.

The reason for this is the time it takes to produce a novel. Even a fast writer will spend half a year writing a novel. Most writers will take a year.

After you’ve written five-six drafts and got the novel into near publishable form, you have to give it another six months to two years for editors, copy editors, line editors, artists, typographers, marketers to finish their work. Only then is the novel ready to be printed, and delivered to your reading pleasure.

You really, really don’t want it to go any faster. Trust me on this, or you will have to wade through ten thousand variants of Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea before you find a novel that you enjoy reading.

And how do you as a consumer make sure you don’t have to wade through all that crap to find writing you like? I can’t see any other way than to keep buying books from traditional publishers, who may or may not employ copy protection to ensure that a novelist wants to continue writing his or her novels, which means the novelist has to get paid.

Or? What do you think?

Mopping up the last crumbs

I’ve been mopping up the last crumbs of work, so there hasn’t been much blogging lately, but it will improve.I still have my promised take on the second part of my “engaging fiction”-series, and today or tomorrow I will blog about my take on DRM, publishing and the rights-grab by Randon House in the states.

In the meantime, I’ll continue clearing the desk in increasing stress about actually managing to do it at all. Treacherous thoughts about cutting in on my fiction writing time has appeared, but that is an absolute last resort. BIC. Butt in chair. If you don’t follow that, you won’t write novels.

Still, I also have to work out an acceptable compromise between celebrating Christmas and not pandering to religious doctrine. Every attempt, however, never get past the fact that Christmas is ‘Christ’s mass’. I’m not a pagan, druid, new ager, hippie, either since that would be exchanging one religion for another.

It would be rather hypocritical. But then again, I’m not locking myself in my room, and like millions of others I’m busy mopping up so I can go home, meet the family, and gain ten pounds in two-three days.

Not so subtle giggles over query rejections

Writers tend to be such a worrisome lot. I’m still giggling over this post at one of my favorite blogs, Editorial Anonymous. If you don’t have it in your blog reader, it comes highly recommended.

How do you write engaging fiction?

Writing fiction is hard work. You know that, and I know that. There is no “golden method” that will churn out masterpieces that the publishers will throw money at. It means sitting down in a chair over several months, and work the proverbial butt to the bone.

That said, there are techniques that makes it easier, and in a small series I’ll try to tell the techniques that I use, and if they are useful for you then so much the better.

I don’t really know which techniques I’ll talk about yet, because I’m sort of writing this as a challenge from a friend, and I’ll see where it goes, but let us start with the most basic technique imaginable which may help you write better fiction. The MRU.

Ready?

Stimulus and response

At the most basic level of writing fiction, you have a character that is acting and reacting to his or her environment, to other characters, and to events.

The acting-reacting can be studied in a formal way, and then employed as a technique in your writing. The technique is about employing something that is called MRUs.

You don’t HAVE to do it, but it is a useful technique to know, and it will be helpful for those days when you don’t feel particularly inspired to write anything. Just get into the MRUs, strain against the block with it, and you’ll write something good.

MRU is an decidedly clumsy acronym, and it means Motivation Response Unit. I call it Stimuli-Response. And it works like this:

1. There was a bang.

2. Jana dropped to the ground, looking around for threats. Her heart was racing, a warm ache around hear heart spread.

3. But she could see no threats; all she could see were the surprised onlookers who stared down at her. They weren’t Lebanese. They talked English amongst each other. She was in a bloody bank in Croydon, and not in Beirut. Get a grip, she told herself.

4. Shaking she got up on her feet.

I’ve number-coded this passage (see below) to indicate that the passage is built in different parts. The standard MRU has four distinctive parts.

First comes the Stimulus (1), which is an external happening: a bang in this case, or a character saying something. The Stimulus is always outside the character, in the world. If you were looking at the character through a CCTV camera, you would be able to see the event.

Following the stimulus, you have the response. The response is the interesting part, because it is internal to the POV character. You can not see this in the CCTV-camera – though you can see the effect of the response. In the case of the example, you can see Jana drop to the ground.

It is in the response part that you display the character reacting to outside stimuli, according to the characters basic setup.

To complicate matters further, the response part is divided into three different parts

· Reflex(2) is the snap, instinctive reaction. The reptilian brain. Jana hears a bang, and her reflexes make her drop to the floor. It is not conscious. The character cannot control this.

· Feeling(3) is your higher mental functions; your awareness. Reaction is when you think about the bang, and what it means. In our example, Jana realises that she’s not in Beirut but in Croydon, and becomes embarrassed about dropping to the floor.

· Lastly, you have Action (4). That is your willed body response. In this case, Jana stands up again.

The order is very important when you use MRUs, and the sequence must always be: Stimuli, followed by reflex, feeling, and action.

You can remove one or two parts of the response. For instance, if you have a character speaking to a friend, there is no point to constantly show her reptilian-brain reflex about what her friend is saying. So, you can remove the reflex. But the remaining two must be in the correct order.

Or you can remove the feeling part, and keep the reflex + action. But the MRU must come in that order. The reason is quite simple, really. Reflex is instant, immediate. Acting is slow and dependent. You can’t have Jana be standing up again before she has dropped to the floor.

So, Jana stands up now. What then? You immediately put in another MRU. An example, again:

1. 1. “You all right, luv?” A woman said.
   2. Jana looked at the speaker. (Reflex)
   3. It was a little lady that looked both worried for her and frightened of her. Jana wanted to laugh, of hysteria. Did she look alright? She was mistaking Croydon for bleeding Beirut, and even if Croydon might be crappy, it was not that crappy.(Feeling)
   4. She shook her head. “I’m fine”. (Action)

Around it goes. You put in MRU after MRU after MRU until the scene ends. It can be thought of as breathing: you inhale a stimuli from the outside world, and then you exhale the characters reflexes, feelings and actions. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And when you do, you will find that you actually write some decent fiction, and the level that the fiction should be written – deep down on the POV character’s level.

Next time I’ll talk about the next layer of this onion. You write MRUs upon MRUs until the scene ends. But what is a scene? That’s what we’ll talk about in a day, or two, or three.

Vanity publishing is selling snake oil at the cancer ward

The debate about “vanity publishing” continues in the states after the major romance publishing company Harlequin decided to add a pay-to-play arm to its franchise in partnership with AuthorSolutions.

The deal between Harlequin and AuthorSolutions (AS) has angered the writers’ associations in the States, and three of the big writers’ guilds have pulled accreditation from Harlequin after the move: SFWA, RWA and MWA; who represent science fiction and fantasy writers, Romance writers and Mystery writers respectively.

The deal between Harlequin and AS was, shortly described, that any writer who was not deemed to be suitable to be published by any of the Harlequin Imprints would be steered over to the new vanity imprint. There the rejected authors would be offered to get their books published for a fee.

So, in essence, Harlequin decided to try and monetize their slush pile. If a writer was not deemed good enough to be paid for his work, the author would be advised to pay out of his or her own pocket to be published. Rightly, this is considered by the writers’ guilds to be predatory.

Getting published is a big deal for novelists like me. It is a mark of quality to have a book in the bookshelves, and novelists get very emotional about their books. We love our books, and if we get into a point where our books are constantly rejected it becomes easy to start to believe that we’re not getting published because of a conspiracy.

The big evil publishing industry is doing something to keep the struggling author in his place. Why else don’t they publish my book, which is wonderful, and which everyone in my family says is wonderful? I tend to joke that a novelist has to be a kind of compulsive obsessive disorder-sufferer because we certainly aren’t writing our books for money. And we’re not. We’re often writing because we want to be published. And often we want to be published so bad that it hurts.

And in that moment, you have a corporation like AuthorSolutions, or PublishAmerica, that comes to you and says:

– You can be published! It’s not your books that is unpublishable; it’s the industry that is keeping you down, but we have the solution — for a fee. We’ll even pay you royalties for the books you pay to print!

This is predatory behaviour. It is chasing ambulances to get clients for medical malpractice suits, it is selling snake oil at a cancer ward, and it is hard-selling bereavement plans at a funeral. It might not be illegal, but it is the same ethical territory.

Today AuthorSolutions stepped into the lime-light to present its side of the hot debate in the States, and it is necessary to keep the above in mind, to keep you in a sceptical frame of mind. Video from the AS CEO below. Notice how he presents vanity publishing as an opportunity for you to pay tens of thousands of US dollars to have your book published.

What he does not tell you is that you as a writer will, most likely, be the only buyer because vanity publishers do not, as a rule, have access to distribution of books. Your vanity published books will never get in front of readers in normal bookshops.

Foreshadowing the slush pile

Every year one of the minimal titles I edit have a contest: write an article about something in your community. It’s been a staple for ten-eleven years, from long before I took over the cardboard box that is the chief administerial tool of the title.

The deadline is always December 1^st, and the winners will be published in January to greet the new year. Going through the submissions is always the sort of chore you groan about, and put away until the clock on the wall becomes a tick-tock death-clock in your mind.

This year I had 139 submissions, of which exactly 18.5 were within the competition guidelines of 1000 words. The rest crept from an overshoot of about 300 words to a whopping 5.000 word magnum epos. Yes, the half submission was literally that – the last page(s) were missing.

Intrepid and dutiful as I am I set to work a few days ago, and emerged myself in the strange and psychotic world of the slush pile. I hesitate to use the word, and apply the term strange to the majority of the pieces, and the term psychotic to a few.

But, general wisdom of the submissions seems to indicate a grand conspiracy afoot in the world, run by either unethical politicians/journalists/priests or a by aliens from outer space bent on enslaving humankind as food or slavery.

I exaggerate. There were very few submissions like that, but they were there. Mostly it was submissions written in appalling English, with no standard of grammar or spelling, and thus nothing of the vital credibility needed for the pieces. However, the crazed delusions overshadowed the bad pieces like Chernobyl overshadows Ignalina.

I’ve done the selections. 136 outright rejections. Two are sent back for edits by the authors, and one was so delightful it will go into the title with the minimal alterations.

Thinking about all this, I have much better understanding of what agents and publishers must go through. If I end up with a slush pile like this competition for a title with a readership of about 2000, then what mustn’t a major publisher have to deal with in a country that spawns 120 000 titles each year?

May my current WIP be spared the ordeal of butting shoulders with too many conspiracy theories about lizards running the White House.