How To Pay Writer Harlan Ellison

I can’t give a link to this directly. Explanation at end.

HARLAN ELLISON
– Saturday, January 23 2010 14:3:4

IMPORTANT !!!!!!!!! please read & REPOST HERE DAILY!!
I’ve been reading your posts since Thursday, and I know you mean well, but if you TRULY wish to do me any financial good, stop going to buy my books for hefty prices, in crap condition, on Amazon and elsewhere…

IF YOU CANNOT FIND THE TITLE YOU WANT IN A SIGNED MINT EDITION HERE AT THE ELLISON WEBDERLAND BOOKSTORE…WHICH MONEY COMES DIRECTLY TO ME AND SUSAN…

Then just go to E.READS!!! They have 33 of my books in handsome downloadable editions with a nifty Dillon cover! They are, in most cases, Preferred Texts. And I get a decent part of the minuscule price.

PLEASE!

Keep passing this on, or perhaps Rick can pull down the AOL banner, now long out of currency, and plug in the above.

Spreading ANY kind of word will be useful.

But this ongoing ignorance of how to PAY THE WRITER and not Google or Amazon or any other server doddering under the weight and onus of stealing from the primary creator…requires some shucking-off of the perpetual naivete and ignorance!

E.READS is my agent for books, after this board’s well-run (by Susan)booksearch as your first stop!

Whatever is convenient for you to do….but do stop wasting your money on my work as appropriated by smoothyguts entrepreneurs!

Quietly, I thank you.

Harlan Ellison

I sympathize with his desire, but his Internet presence is rather primitive. It’s all volunteer labor, as I understand it, so I can’t criticize. But others have pointed out on his message board (where the above is from, and which doesn’t link to individual posts at all), the lack of a direct transactional link at his site is an ongoing frustration to all the people — especially internationally — who want to Throw Money At Him.

Previously here:

Pay The Artist!

The Threshold

Every. Thing. Changes. Tomorrow.

Publishers Versus Readers

Avid Readers Want Both eBooks and Print Books

He also noted that a staggering two-thirds of avid readers surveyed were 45 or older. In contrast, only 28 percent were in the 18+ bracket. Publishers face two unique challenges: keeping the baby boomer readers as they retire and building new readers with a younger generation.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

I did that here: Apple’s iSlate Gives Book Publishers False Hope

What I have to add is this:

People grow up. Those who grow up with any sort of impulse towards self-direction and initiative understand that reading is important. They also grow up to understand that people need to be paid.

What I said in the prior post still stands, generally. Instead of selling to an existing — and shrinking — pool, enlarge it:

In a London pub, Studs meets a Welsh miner from the Rhondda Valley. “You’re from Chicago; you must know Nelson Algren.” Whiskey flows. Then the old boy sings out the titles of all Algren’s books in a mellifluous Welsh accent. — R.I.P. Louis “Studs” Terkel

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

How the hell was that miner reached?

Studs Terkel Will Save Publishing

Studs Terkel: Last words with a Voice of America

I went looking for an anecdote from Studs Terkel’s epic 1974 book, Working, and wound up with another and a different point to make:

“So when I did the book Working, there was in it a portrait of a waitress, Dolores Dante. She was a girl. And at the end she starts crying about her life and being a middle-aged woman when the kids have left. And much later a guy stops me in the street and says, ‘You son of a bitch. After reading about that waitress in your book, I’m never going to speak to a waitress again the way I did before.’ So I affected that guy. Dolores affected that guy. It was her moment of immortality.”

People are curious about other people.

Why doesn’t publishing use this fact to sell non-gossipy, non-trashy books?

It’s the same damned impulse — near-pathological, stalker-like curiosity — and it can be used to publishing’s benefit.

How would that guy have known what the lot of a waitress was like if he hadn’t read that book? How many people — especially in these Gotterdammerung me-me-me times — stop to consider what another person’s life might be like?

The young and callous look at a waitress with contempt, if they look at her at all.

Terkel’s book shows the human being behind (or stuck in) that occupation.

I’m not going to lay out examples of how this can be done. Earn your damned marketing salary, dammit.

Paper Fetishism And eBook Prejudice — In 1987!

Let me set the history for you. In 1987, the Apple Newton was still two years away and the Palm Pilot was still nine years away.

So consider the foresight it took to have this little exchange in the third episode of Star Cops:

Chandri: You’re impressed with my library, Commander.

Spring: Yes. Yes, I am. I’m more impressed by the weight allocation it took to bring them — and all of this — from Earth. You must have friends in the freight business.

Chandri: It was all paid for, I assure you. I don’t like electronic books. Something about poetry particularly which needs to be read from the page. It dies when you put in on a viewing screen.

It takes place in the first minute in the video after the break.

Philip R. Cable: Make Movies That Make Money!

Make Movies That Make Money! — The Low-Budget Filmmaker’s Guide to Commercial Success by Philip R. Cable

The term “low-budget” can refer to anything from a $10 million indie flick to a student film produced on borrowed equipment with little or no money. Low budget filmmakers can range from seasoned auteurs attempting to shed the shackles of major studio control to novice talents trying to break into the industry.

Designed for would-be filmmakers of all experience levels, this book explains how to make a good, commercially successful, low-budget movie in the current multi-million dollar Hollywood climate. The purpose is not only to show how to get movies made and distributed, but also how to maximize a film’s potential for significant profit.

Written in practical, understandable terms, the book covers everything from commercially viable genres to the most efficient film and video formats, along with tips on hiring stars, pursuing investors, distributing and marketing a film, and keeping track of expenses.

Philip and I have spoken to one another now and again since the late 1970s.

Apple’s iSlate Gives Book Publishers False Hope

Disney bought Marvel for over four billion dollars.

Four billion dollars!

In my lifetime I have seen a comic book company aimed at children go from being printed on rotten paper with the worst four-color printing and a rotten distribution system to something that became worth four billion dollars.

Marvel. Comic books. Adults were ashamed to work in comic books!

Marvel! Home of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Thor, Hulk, Man-Thing, Ant-Man, X-Men.

Think about those characters.

Actor Timothy Hutton Leverages Books

Timothy Hutton: Literary Sex God

The title sounds smarmy but it’s actually one of the better posts I’ve read about books and Twitter.

Timothy Hutton is an actual reader and is savvy about books. This is probably something you’d never find out about him given the current crass state of TV talk shows. Hmmm… maybe PBS should jump on this with a Famous People Who Read books discussion program? (The late Steve Allen would have been a natural host for that!)

Hutton stars in an ensemble series on TNT called Leverage. I watch the show and did several posts about it (see here). It airs Wednesdays at 10PM EST. Hey, that’s tonight! Just in time for you to set the DVR. It’s also available at the iTunes Store.

Book Funding Drive

Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed

The lack of good storytelling about sex in print feels ridiculous, bizarre. And now that we have on-demand publishers, Kickstarter, and an internet community of contributors and supporters and potential audience looking to fill the very same void, there is no longer any excuse.

— via Warren Ellis

Layoff Lit: Spare Us!

Crunch Time: Selling Tales of the Great Downturn

This is exactly why we all hate you, New York Times.

The new George Clooney film, “Up in the Air,” hit a nerve with its portrayal of an unmoored corporate executioner who makes his living by firing people. Now several writers and their publishers are hoping to catch the same wave with a cluster of forthcoming memoirs and novels that describe the fallout of losing a job, losing a house or losing an investment account.

Call it layoff lit. Next month will bring “The Bag Lady Papers,” a memoir by Alexandra Penney, the former editor in chief of Self magazine, who said she had lost all her savings to Bernard L. Madoff. In May Dominique Browning, the former editor of House & Garden, has a memoir, “Slow Love: How I Got Kicked Off the Fast Track, Put My Pajamas On for a Year & Found Happiness.”

Wait. There have never, ever, ever been books like this before?