Direct-Publishing Dirge

This is Why Self-Publishing isn’t Taken Seriously

The way for self-publishing to get taken seriously on a large scale is not if a Dan Brown comes out of Lulu. Frankly, I don’t care if some potboiler hits it big in the mainstream. People here should know that’s where I’m coming from – I’m more “literary fiction” minded, as generic as that term can be. For self-publishing to really be taken seriously, works of “serious” fiction need to come out of Lulu, and Lulu’s poetry site shows that this is not the demographic they’re aiming for. I know terms like “serious” are subjective, but I think you can tell the difference when something is written with more ambition.

That excerpt isn’t the impetus for the post, but it’s the part I wanted to show here.

Aside from what he points out in that post, there’s this too:

Click = Big

Self Publishing Book Expo

Wow, with “friends” like that, producing HTML vomit like that, who needs enemies? It reminds me of those lines from Glengarry Glen Ross:

What you’re hired for is to help us — does that seem clear to you? To help us. Not to fuck us up … to help men who are going out there to try to earn a living.

I dread imagining the plaid-suited hucksters who would be attracted by that website.

Paper Books = Death

Following up on my prior post: The Horror Of Paper Books

Tessa Dick Needs Your Help!

Tessa Dick Needs Help

I’m losing my home, and they’ll probably turn off my electricity this week. I will therefore be out of communication for a while. I can sleep on my brother’s couch, but I will have to have my dog and cats “put to sleep”. Such a soothing phrase for killing my pets!

Please help and help spread the word!

A Very Dangerous Post

Post-punk publishing

This is one of the most thought-provoking writing/publishing posts I’ve read in a long time. Equating the current Internet/e/eBook writing scene with 1970s punk sets off all sorts of bells in my head.

Once you get into the statistics around publishing houses, they come to resemble the lottery. The odds are stacked hugely against the would-be author. Publishers, understandably, try to rig the game as much as they can, which is why they commission books by brand name celebrities and get professional ghost writers in to do the hard work. It’s why they pick a narrow band of titles each season and work with the media, wholesalers, TV book clubs and chain stores to market those authors within an inch of their lives. It’s the illusion of choice. And there are still no paths of certainty — even JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer can’t believe their luck. Faced with this, there are two options: despair or, as Joanna suggests, bypass the system altogether. It strikes me as the only sane option.

Christ, I’ve been in “the system.”

Never again. Not ever.

Both posts [cited within] reminded me of the late 70s/early 80s independent boom in music, the British post-punk movement catalogued in Simon Reynolds’ fine ’Rip It Up and Start Again‘. The impetus of punk and its DIY ethos splintered into hundreds of bands and labels across the country. Interestingly, this was also time of heavy social recession. The Pistols’ ‘No Future!’ slogan created a vacuum which was filled with an urgent sense of the present. You didn’t have to learn to play like Eric Clapton or wait to be signed by EMI. Suddenly anyone could do it. And they did. If you had something to say, you said it. Now.

Emphasis added by me.

The above post cites this other post — Punk Write! — which has this eye-opener:

When the people with the power to publish books set the standards of quality and when the people writing books internalise those standards to the extent that everyone involved even uses the same language to talk about it, it smacks of the kind of entrenched elitism that the punk rock movement was rebelling against. It feels like EMI and Sony and Warner telling musicians what is good and what is bad and musicians doing their best to live up to those judgements. It feels like we should be fighting it, taking a stand against it, starting a ‘punk write’ movement. Here’s a three-act plot, a website, and an iPhone. Now go and write a book.

The above post quotes from another post:

“There could be all sorts of reasons why good writing gets rejected. But if it’s good enough then it’s almost certainly going to be published eventually, so long as the writer (or his or her agent) persists.”

Unasked there: Will the writer be alive to see publication? A Confederacy of Dunces, anybody? Bueller? Bueller?

And what of writers who are “good enough” to actually be published by ink-on-paper publishers? Do you know how many I know who wonder if their current book is the final one their publisher will do?

You can be “good enough” — you can be downright excellent (and these writers I know are) — but be stuck with a publisher who does nothing but print a book and leave it at that. Or get trapped in a time — say now — when the economy is crap and the price of a book exceeds a McDonald’s Dollar Menu Survival Meal, so people just stop buying books.

Going back to the first post I cited:

A fortuitous chain reaction caused a number of elements to coincide. There were all these bands and labels, of course, but there were also sympathetic DJs on national radio. most notably John Peel. Furthermore, the record shop and label Rough Trade set up an independent distribution network, which channelled all these new records to the new record shops that were opening around the country. Taken together, there was an infrastructure which connected everything. The synergy enabled things to work that much faster with further reach. A band could have a record pressed, Peel would play it, Rough Trade would distribute it and thousands of late night listeners were able to go out and buy it. Records by the likes of Scritti Politti would have information printed on the sleeves breaking down the costs and details of recording and so on. When people bought the record, it empowered them to make their own.

This is what’s lacking.

What’s the equivalent of a DJ for a writer or book? A reviewer? Which reviewer and where?

Distribution? What, those cowards at Amazon or at Apple? Don’t cite any Print On Demand place to me. I won’t buy paper any more. And people won’t wait for a mail delivery in this Instant Internet Age.

There’s also a big difference between music and books: It takes longer than 3-5 minutes to experience a book (although, granted, most people should be able to tell on page one if a book is good or not — or at least whether or not it speaks to them).

There are still pieces missing before writers can be liberated from the existing system. These pieces need to be created by people who aren’t writers but who want writers to succeed.

Where are those people? Bueller? Bueller?

Update/additional:

I’d forgotten the lesson of comic book publishing.

Once upon a time, you would go to a neighborhood candy store or drug store and once or twice a week the racks would be filled with a new delivery of comics.

As circulations dropped, stores closed, and fandom matured, independent comic stores sprung up. This led to an explosion in comic books publishing divorced from the DC/ Marvel/ Archie/ Dell/ Gold Key/ Charlton and Comics Code Authority model. Suddenly artists and their friends could pool some money and launch a comic. New distributors sprung up to serve the new outlets. Even the mainstream comics jumped in with special editions to be sold “direct” (as it was called).

I’ve said it again and again: the Internet is like SF/comic book fandom. Most sites and blogs are equivalent to fanzines. Some of these online fanzines have become prozines and some have become “real” publications.

I’m just jotting notes here (thanks to Warren Ellis for that idea!), so not really running towards any conclusion right now.

#amazonfail

Amazon hard at work reclassifying books.

Reclassified authors in new Amazon-furnished company home.

Gore Vidal is awake:

What kind of a childish game is this? Why don’t they just burn the books? They’d be better off and it’s very visual on television.

It’s Tuesday. Where is Amazon’s official policy statement?

Gigabyte Touchnote: Moriah’s Next eBook Device?

Poor Moriah Jovan.

She is hooked on her eBookwise antique:

But lately she’s been agitating for a machine that was actually born in this century.

And she thinks that machine will be an Asus EeePC.

The silly lass.

No, Moriah. You can’t haz.

Instead, look at this:

That’s a PDF in portrait mode on a ten-inch backlit color screen.

And it’s a netbook too. It’s the Gigabyte Touchnote T1028M 10” Touchscreen Netbook.

It has one of those screens that twist and flip over to become a tablet. It does landscape and, as shown, portrait.

If you have to get a frikkin clunky-ass netbook for your next eBook device, get that one.

Here I am bugging Chippy to demo a PDF on it for me:

Click = big

The PDF he chose was formatted to display two pages on one sheet, so that’s why you’re not seeing the edge-to-edgeness of a one-sheet PDF.

But still.

The CrunchPad: For Home Only?

This weekend I stopped in J&R to see what was new.

I happened upon one of those hp notebooks with a 12″-inch screen that twists around to form a tablet.

Conveniently, someone had already twisted it into a tablet, so all I had to do was pick it up to get a taste of what it would be like to hold that 12″-screened CrunchPad.

Uh… um… it’s rather big.

I’m not going to count weight because the CrunchPad won’t have the heft of that hp.

The size of it, however, tells me a CrunchPad is something I’d keep at home and not tote around on my shoulder.

Which I really think is the market they’re aiming at: couch-surfing.

I’d use it for that as well as reading the ton of free PDF-formatted eBooks that have been sitting on my hard drive.

For $300, it’d be worth it. But if it was $300 for eBook-reading only, I’d go with a Sony Reader.

The Universal eBook Catalog

I really hate having to think up things that people who make a huge multiple of my yearly income should be bright enough to envision and propose on their own, but it seems this is my curse in life, so here goes.

Appropo of my prior post, emphasizing freedom of buying choice, I propose the formation of the Universal eBook Catalog.

This would list any eBook available for sale.

It would be searchable by all possible elements: title, author, publisher, price, subject matter, genre, file format (ePub and the rest), DRM, hardware, etc.

This would be a catalog that would list everything. Nothing would be verboten.

If it’s on the Internet in eBook format with a pricetag, it would be listed.

The primary thing about this Catalog is that it’s just that: a catalog.

It’s not a bookstore.

All it does is show what’s available and then offers links to where the eBook can be bought.

This would be akin to the function of, for example, The Pirate Bay, which has links to items but does not offer that content itself. (In fact, it would probably be in the best interest of everybody to have The Pirate Bay do this. Point to another group of people who have been as fearless as they have been and are!)

Listings would be absolutely free.

I see this as being underwritten by advertising.

Advertisers would be eBook makers, eBook Stores, and publishers. (I can also see TV shows and movies based on books — or that have book spinoffs — as advertisers.)

There’s recently been a proposal for a cataloging format — but that is only to formalize how publishers should structure their information.

This catalog would aggregate all that information in one place.

Given the actions of Apple and Amazon, I think it’s time for something like this if only as a matter of self-defense.

eBooks are too important to be given up to monopolistic interests who cringe in the face of political or moral opposition.

Brave New Bluenoses

Preface: Before publication, I stopped to do some background reading. A hacker is taking responsibility for this mess. Someone else is backing him up.

I don’t buy that as a complete explanation. What about the writer who sounded the first alarm back in February? What about Amazon’s own public statement on the matter?

And now onto the post as originally written:

I took two days off Twitter and during my absence a huge scandal erupted over Amazon banning certain books from search results, rankings, and lists.

Why should anybody be surprised?

Apple was the first to ban a book. And it seems it has managed to do so with impunity too! (So much impunity, in fact, they did it a second time!)

Given that action, why shouldn’t Amazon have been emboldened to act similarly?

We’ve all be hypnotized by convenience for the sake of our own good.

Everyone is in a selfish swoon over the immediate gratification the abominable Kindle offers.

That selfish pleasure comes at the cost of screwing publishers and turning direct-publishing writers into Amazon’s indentured servants.

When you give up your power and assist a monopoly, don’t cry later on that you’re being abused.

This is what it’s about: No one company should ever have enough power to deform the marketplace to its liking.

Not Apple, not Amazon, not Palm, not Microsoft, not Google, not Barnes & Noble, not Sony.

I’ve stood against the tide of Kindle worship because I could see what it would lead to: exactly the kind of behavior Amazon has revealed itself to be capable of committing.

This is why I’ve stood against everyone in favor of the Sony Reader. You might have to be inconvenienced right now to load books onto it via old-fashioned cable, but Sony is in this for the long run and sees its Reader as a universal eBook device.

That means when wireless of the Kindle kind is finally built into it, it will offer owners a freedom of buying choice that we have only seen a sneak preview of with Stanza Reader on the iPhone.

Each publisher, each author, can sell directly to readers without surrendering power to a colossal intermediary such as the Apple App Store, Amazon’s Kindle Store, or even Sony’s own eBook Store.

Freedom of choice in the eBook marketplace should be the vision in the forefront of every reader’s mind.

Screw having your eBook right now.

When you go for that, you’re giving up the power to have all possible choices later on.

Exactly what kind of future do you want to have?

Will This Change The Entire eBook Market?

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch — who I’ve raked over the coals a number of times — last year proposed an inexpensive basic touchscreen tablet with a target price of $200.

The above photo purports to be some sort of production mockup of the final product.

If this goes on sale even at $300 — 50% above the target price — it could change the entire eBook landscape.

Suddenly, all those PDFs that have been irrelevant for portable reading rise from the dead. They would look incredible on that full-color roomy screen.

Browser-based ePub eBook readers such as Bookworm suddenly become useful too.

And if this baby is hackable — which I suspect it will be — even gorgeous LIT might come back to life.

It’s about time for me to drop off the Net for the day, so that’s all my weary mind can think of at the moment.

But really, who wouldn’t want this?

I’m in. I want to buy. Take my damned money, Arrington!