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By Lynn, on July 31st, 2010%
Statistically, any day could be a bad news day: the phone rings and a few seconds later your life’s crossed a threshold from which there’s no going back. And, statistically, the older you get and the older the people around you get, the better the odds are that any particular call will be that call.
Lately, by which I mean since Bob died in 2008, it seems I’ve been getting a couple every month and I almost got one today.
The phone rang about 5:30, which was a little unusual in and of itself – my usual crop of politicians, solicitors, and misguided debt collectors only call at dinner time during the week; on weekends they tend to call around eight in the morning. It was my mom. She sounded fine—and sometimes she sounds weary—but she told me I probably should sit down. And I did, though it was more like I contracted into the nearest chair. She hastened to tell me that she was, indeed, fine but that she’d been in a car accident.
Mom and Dad live in a very nice community just off US Highway 441 in Tavares. When they moved there in 1980, you could practically go bowling each day out on Highway 441, but that’s changed now. 441 is six lanes now and while just about every place lays claim to the worst drivers in the country, I think Lake County might actually have them. When Jane and CJ came to visit, they watched as the driver at the next gas pump, dragged himself out of the driver’s seat and down the length of his car, clearly a stroke victim, completely paralyzed on one side—with all that that means for depth perception and peripheral vision. Jane and CJ were agog, but I scarcely blinked—that’s an ordinary sight on Highway 441.
It’s the kind of road that drives you crazy and brings out the worst in every driver – including me and, today, apparently, including my mom. She was trying to make a left, which means crossing the three southbound lanes (never mind that they’re actually going due east), holing up in the median cut, then merging into the northbound lanes (which are going due west…love driving that road at sunset). And, somehow, she overlooked a semi in the outside lane and merged into its second axle – the rear wheels of the cab.
Somehow, she got the car back onto the median (from which I infer that it wasn’t so badly crumpled that its tires were no longer in contact with the ground).
And she’s not hurt. Embarrassed, but not hurt.
And I’m blogging rather than doing any of a great number of things that I’m really not looking forward to at all.
But a semi– The mind boggles, and cringes. I don’t think I’m going to sleep well tonight.
All in all, I’d rather have had a replay of last weekend’s crisis. That was when we lost Jane’s email archive. Seems she’d been archiving all her email (and all the Closed Circle email!) on the server and in the midst of trying to tamp down Carolyn’s spam torrent, I missed the warning messages (assuming there were warning messages) that her archive had grown larger than its server-space. She sent me this very plaintive message—did I have any idea why she couldn’t access her email archive?
I didn’t…until I looked at the server directories, then I did a swift OMG, ‘cause her account was gone, gone, gone. Fortunately, I had access to a full system backup of everything on our server. Once I got it downloaded, I started picking it apart. Ultimately, I found the missing archives and restored them (along with her email account which now has infinite storage!)
But it took a while and while I was working I apparently forgot to move because when I finally stood up I had a stabbing pain above my left hip. Ibuprofen didn’t touch it and I thought I’d done something not only stupid but serious. It’s still stupid, but it’s not serious: I managed to pull a groin muscle while sitting! For several days, I asked myself, How did I do that? all while grumbling to myself that it wasn’t really getting better. On Wednesday it dawned on me (one of those “dawn broke over the universe” moments) that the problem was my computer chair—my beloved Balans chair in which I’ve been kneeling for nearly thirty years.
I don’t know whether the fault lies with the chair or with my body (a bit of both, I suspect), but I rolled the Balans aside and sat myself down in a spare dining-room chair. The dining-room chair brought instant misery to my back, but my groin stopped hurting immediately. So I went on a quest for a new computer chair. I guess I’m glad that there are so many more choices now, but I lost hours figuring out what all the adjectives meant. After sitting in every chair at the local Office Depot, I concluded that I wanted (needed?) a mid-back chair with forward-tilt adjustment and a waterfall seat (waterfall seat??? Who knew???) None of the available local chairs worked for me, so I’ve ordered one from Amazon. It had gotten as far as Jacksonville by midnight last night and should be here, ready to assemble, on Monday.
In the meantime—and for the first time in a long, long time—I’m having ration my at-the-computer time, which meant I didn’t get to alert everyone to the shout-out that Closed Circle got on Tele-Reads last Thursday. It’s an interesting article, worth reading even without Closed Circle. We’ve moved into the next round of the publishing Kerfluffle – now an agent has their authors’ backlists and given them exclusively to Amazon. I’ll have more thoughts to share about this…once I’ve assembled the new chair…
By Lynn, on July 22nd, 2010%
I’ve been wrestling with some chronic vision issues caused by living in a part of the country that is too bright for my Britain-based genes so I missed this nice mention of Closed Circle over at the Dear Author blog.
Their tag line includes the dreaded word “romance,” but please don’t let that stop you from delving deeply into their archives. Genre boundaries are less meaningful than ever (less ghetto, more sprawl) and the “J”s have great insights when it comes to the evolution (devolution???) of traditional publishing
By Lynn, on February 4th, 2010%
The kerfluffle has gone another round. John Sargent, CEO at Macmillan, has penned an open letter to Macmillan authors and illustrators, with a CC to literary agents.
Already I’m confused. All agents? Just those agents with clients at Macmillan? There is a difference. But, since I’m definitely a Macmillan author, whose Amazon buttons have yet to reappear, I kept reading…
Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced. In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.
About that “we,” Mr. Sargent…. Exactly who are the “we” who’ve been deeply concerned, who’ve moved from a standing start to a new business model in just three weeks!? I assumed, through the first four sentences, that “we” was “you”—corporate Macmillan—rather than “us”—because why else would you be sending me a letter.
Then I hit the fifth sentence: …”our intellectual property”…
I checked, just to make certain, but there it is on the title page verso – copyright 2006 / Lynn Abbey. Rifkind’s Challenge is MY intellectual property. It is licensed to Macmillan/TOR under a contract that sometimes feels like indentured servitude (or maybe like the old Hollywood studio/contract system). License is not quite the same as ownership.
But, by golly, they’re going to be fair to “those who create.”
These are the good guys?
Is it any wonder I’m confused…and just a teeny bit skeptical?
Back in the Dark Ages—the mid 70s, the post Star-Wars period when Hollywood started optioning SF—the wise words were: Get all your money up front; and if that doesn’t work never, ever take a share of net anything, especially profits.
So, now I’m back to thinking about that Wall Street Journal article I linked to few days back. Macmillan’s got the same problem…a problem they can partially solve by sweetening current/future contracts and then offering to sprinkle the same sweetner on old contracts…all in the name of fairness….toward the creators of their intellectual property.
Yeah, there are going to be problems. Somebody’s going to have to come up with the publishing equivalent of United Artists. UA didn’t change the game because they won an anti-trust suit against the system; they did it by beating the system at its own game
By Lynn, on February 3rd, 2010%
This morning’s email brought me a message from the Authors Guild, of which I am a longtime member. You can read it for yourselves here—in fact, they’re encouraging me to “feel free to forward, post, or tweet.”
Clearly, my Guild is part of Team Macmillan. I’m not going to mail my membership card back to them, but I’m not joining the team, either.
Actually, I’m not joining either team.
Maybe it makes sense for some of my peers, but I stand by my original contention: my interests are quite different than either Amazon’s (the interest of a mass distributer) or Macmillan’s (the interest of a traditional publisher).
And I really don’t care which one of them “wins” ‘cause a larger share of nothing, last time I checked, was still nothing. For years now, my agent and I have pursued a strategy of negotiating the highest advance possible, ‘cause that’s the only money we’re going to see. My contracts—and I’ve usually seen middle-of-the-road boiler plate—are pretty much designed so that the books aren’t going to earn out. We dicker over terms and rights in the hope that maybe we’ll have an advantage down the line, but in twenty years, we never have.
(Speaking of contracts– Back in December, the Wall St Journal took note that Bertelsmann AG (owner of Random House and, by extension: Ballantine Books | Bantam | Delacorte | Dell | Del Rey | Del Rey / Lucas Books | The Dial Press | The Modern Library | One World | Presido Press | Random House Trade Group | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Spectra | Spiegel & Grau | Villard Books ) has decided that it “owns the digital rights to books it published before the emergence of an active marketplace for electronic books.” So forgive me, if I don’t feel all warm and fuzzy when I hear that Macmillan et al. are fighting for my rights.)
Once again, though, I’ve digressed.
Reading that Authors Guild letter got me thinking about what it would take to get me to sign on the dotted line with a publisher again. Short answer: Nothing. That bridge is burnt…charred…vaporized.
What I would do, though, is purchase services…a one-stop shop where I could get whatever pre-pub services I felt I needed and could afford, peer review, and bona fides. And of those, the bona fides are probably the most important.
Reading this, you may never have heard of me, but if you Google, you’ll see I’ve had a couple dozen books published. Some editor laid out company money so you could lay out your money to buy my prose. It gives me valuable credibility.
Jane, CJ and I couldn’t think about Closed Circle if we hadn’t already earned our bona fides. We’ve already been approached by writers who’d like to be a part of Closed Circle because they think we might be a way for them to earn their bona fides. It’s a problem we’re ducking for now (we didn’t chose the name “Closed Circle” by accident), but one we’ll have to face, especially if we (and by “we” I mean not just the three of us, but every DTB author who’s planning to fly solo) are successful.
Five stars at Amazon or Goodreads are nice, but nothing compares to the cachet that “Publisher: Macmillan” confers on a title. (At least you’re sure it’s not going to be the Eye of Argon…well, reasonably sure…) So long as that’s true, Macmillan’s got leverage, but I suspect that Amazon aspires to cachet and leverage, too.
Which brings me back to my topic: Now would be a good time for some Bill Gates/Sergey Brin/Don Wollheim type to come up with a new way to convey cachet and bona fides that doesn’t depend on royalties.
By Lynn, on February 2nd, 2010%
Today I got a taste of the power of the social side of the Internet. Intellectually, I’ve been aware of it for quite a while, but today I learned it in my gut.
Last night I was moved to hammer out some opinions on the Amazon/Macmillan/iPad/etc event. I expected to share them with about twenty people….this is not a high-traffic blog. But Elaine, who usually knows my opinions before they show up here and who has been quite thoroughly seduced by her Kindle, offered to cross-post my opinions onto KindleBoards.com.
Seeing no downside, I accepted the offer and within minutes, I had new readers…readers who left comments here and over on KindleBoards. Readers who found resonance in my opinions.
Trust me on this: the thrill of being agreed with never grows old!
I also learned that what I’ve taken on faith for a number of years is, in fact, demonstrably true: given the opportunity, readers want to support authors. They have preferences among publishers, marketplaces, formats, and devices, but their passion is reading itself and their primary loyalty is to storytellers.
This should be self-evident: no one arranges their library by publisher or point of sale. (Some people arrange their books by color and size for greater decorative effect….call me prejudiced, but when I see such a display, my assumption is that I’m not standing in a reader’s home.)
Speaking for myself, I’m not the life of the party. I’m shy and a bit of a loner. I live in my head a lot. There are gregarious writers, but I’m fairly typical of the breed and for literally centuries publishers have taken advantage of this. Sit up there in your garret, they’ve said, spin your tales, and we’ll do the rest.
(It’s possible to imagine Charles Dickens blogging, but Emily Bronte? Ernest Hemingway—yes; William Faulkner—probably not.)
It’s a deal with the devil….but one that’s been entered into knowingly, because it’s been the only deal around. I’ll accept pittance royalties and get sucked into living off advances for books that can’t earn out (because the publisher won’t print enough copies for the book to earn out.) I accept what amounts to a sharecropper’s existence because I’m really, really lousy at self-promotion.
So, what did I learn today?
That I haven’t lost my fire when it comes to storytelling. I want to spin my tales with an enthusiasm I haven’t felt in more than a decade. And that’s all I want to do. I like blogging….but it’s like having a deadline every twenty-four hours! I want to let people know about my stories; I want people to buy my stories (‘cause Rice Krispies are no fun when you have to eat them with water rather than milk), but when I think of covers and advertising and marketing and all the other things that go into turning a story into a book, my eyes glaze over.
In short, I’d still be willing to let a publisher handle all that…and as maddening as editors can be, there’s a real place for them in the prose-to-book department….. If only they would treat me a little better.
It’s pathetic, but true: I’d give up a lot for the simple freedom of writing my stories.
I did give up a lot. It’s taken a lot of neglect and abuse to convince me that I’ve got to get vertical and do it all for myself. If once burned is twice shy, then I’m about a hundred shy, but ready for the challenge.
By Lynn, on February 1st, 2010%
When the dust settles, whenever that may be, and the publishing paradigms have completed their shift, the events of the past few days are likely to merit a footnote or two….or maybe they’ll be the proverbial Guns of August.
A quick recap….in case you’ve been vacationing out beyond the orbit of Jupiter:
First, after about a year of rumor and anticipation, Steve Jobs, on behalf of Apple, played with an iPad. Personally, the iPad is not the convergence device I’ve been waiting for….which is no surprise: I haven’t been an Apple person since they dumped the Apple ][GS in favor of the Mac. I’ve withstood the seductive advances of the iPod, the iPhone, the iTouch and iTunes….probably for the same reason I still drive a stick-shift car: I’m a control freak and I like making decisions. OTOH, it’s a much-demonstrated fact that I’m so far out of step with mass-market taste that it’s doubtful I’ve ever even heard a drummer much less marched in step with one.
Anyway, the iPad, which is not really an e-book reading device, apparently connects to the iBookstore and Steve Jobs is caught on-the-record saying that the iBookstore’s prices will be in line with other ebook purveyors — which seemed to be taken to mean that the iBookstore would be more like Amazon than unlike it, at least with regard to pricing and DRM.
Which was kind of odd, because it wasn’t all that long ago that a quintet of traditional NYC publishers (Macmillan among them)made it known that they weren’t at all happy with the way Amazon was configuring the 21st century publishing marketplace and had plans to do something different.
Anytime I encounter “publishers” and “plans” in the same sentence, I cringe. The traditional publishing business plan (and I’m quoting one of my editors here) can be described as “throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.” When my first book came out in 1980, a 40% sell-through was considered a success (that is, six out of every ten books in a print run, never sold….maybe never made it to a bookstore). Five years ago, my editor (at Tor, btw) said they were trying to make peace (and profit) with the idea of a 20% sell-through.
One might have thought that publishing, as a whole, would have embraced e-books which, after all, have a de facto 100% sell-through. But, no…with a few exceptions, they’re convinced that they live in a zero-sum world where every e-book sold is a cannibalized dead-tree book and their plan is to make e-books inconvenient, restricted, and expensive, in the hope that misguided e-book readers will repent of their digital delusions.
So, I’m not surprised that the big-name publishers would ally themselves with the iBookstore to create expensive product for a device that’s not really an e-book reader. And I’m not really surprised that Macmillan lobbed the first salvo at Amazon. Macmillan is owned by a German holding company (Holtzbrinck) that’s made no secret of its antipathy to e-books in general and its preference, if e-books cannot be eliminated altogether, for strong DRM, delayed release, price points at or near DTB levels. (They’ll tell you that it costs as much to produce e-books as it does to produce DTB books, without taking into account how much anything costs when you’re lucky to sell 20% of it.)
When Tor took tentative steps toward supporting e-books back in 2006, Holtzbrinck said No in unmistakable terms. Their business is paper and their goal is to get back to 40%.
I’m a little surprised that Amazon capitulated last night and more than a little suspicious of the over-the-weekend timing. Then again, if Macmillan et. al can make the $14.99 price stick, Amazon wouldn’t complain. OTOH, almost as soon as Amazon pulled the “Buy Now” button, there were whispers that AUTHORS (that scary, flakey bunch) might have grounds for anti-trust action against Macmillan—‘cause we have contracts with our publishers and one of the few things that those contracts require of the publishers is that they at least attempt to publish, market, and sell our books….and when Macmillan tried to strong-arm Amazon, they were also saying they’d rather not sell their product (our books) in the largest market on the planet.
I already had my breach-of-contract letter written, because it’s not like either Amazon or traditional publishing has my interests at heart, either as a reader or an author. They may well be willing to go to war with each other (and I read Amazon’s capitulation letter as a clear indication that they plan to fight another day on a field of their choosing), but they share a common perspective: books are bowls of spaghetti, readers are sheep to be herded and fleeced; and authors are wells to be pumped dry.
That’s why CJ, Jane, and I have formed Closed Circle: goodbye and good riddance to everything that stands between authors and readers. I don’t know if we’re going to be successful (although I can’t see how I can fail worse on my own than I have in the tender care of my publishers), but at least we’re going to be in charge of our own fates (that control-freak thing again) and when you buy one of our books, we’ll do our level best to produce it in whatever format you need now…or in the future.
Our plan is to be small and agile—like mammals avoiding dinosaurs.
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What I'm working on these days
Exiled on Main St.
Short Story
Status: Active
Word count: 5500
as of: 7-12-2010
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Look Who’s Talking…