Unabashed

I just finished reading Little Brother, and like just about everyone else who’s read it, I loved it. There’s been a lot of commentary about this book, and I agree with most of what I’ve read (especially this one), so I won’t add to it here. I’ll just say that this is a book people need to read. And it’s good. Really good.

Interestingly, I began reading the free PDF Cory posted on his website and liked it enough that by the time I was halfway through it went and bought the old hardback. Interesting the way that works, eh? Coincidentally, that’s exactly the way Doctorow legitimizes his tradition of posting free copies of his ebook, figuring that people don’t really like reading books on electronic devices, and if the reader likes the material they’ll go out and buy it (I know he thinks that way because he says so in the PDF’s introduction). Me, I didn’t buy it because I don’t like reading on an electronic device; I like reading ebooks on my Palm T|X or my Blackberry. I just bought it because it’s that good, I want my wife to read it, and I want it in my house for posterity’s sake. I want my children to read it one day. 

By the way, Little Brother is also a NY Times bestseller, so evidently giving away free copies of a book isn’t a death knell. It isn’t even a cold sore (Suck it, copyright proponents!). It would be interesting to know how many times a download led directly to a book sale.

Anyway, I look forward to more books like this from Cory. He’s already established as a great blogger and an activist for liberalizing copyright laws, and, though this isn’t his first book, it is his best, and it is the one that officially made him an author whose books I will buy from now on.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: author, authors, bestseller, copyright, Cory Doctorow, e-book, ebooks, little brother, piracy

From Cory Doctorow, quoting Matt Mason:

Pirates are out there figuring out all the ways that products and services might catch on, outside of the realm of the managed, slow-moving corporate environment. It turns out that there’s a market for DVDs sold on blankets on Canal Street; that the public likes using BitTorrent even if it starts slow and doesn’t stream; that there’s a bottomless appetite for short, embeddable clips, and that the audience wants to do all the work of selecting, converting, uploading and tagging them.

If you want to get rich off the pirates who are leeching off you, just copy their best ideas.

“The problem for artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Cory Doctorow, piracy

That Cory Doctorow is one smart cookie. And I realize I’m posting this right after I just said I don’t like to repetitiously cover content that Boing Boing has already put out there, but here’s the exception: This is original content, not just a link to something discovered, and it’s on an issue that I’ve got a lot of interest in right now.

It’s funny that in the name of protecting “intellectual property,” big media companies are willing to do such violence to the idea of real property — arguing that since everything we own, from our t-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.

As far as ownership of media is concerned, this is a pretty big deal. As Cory points out, right now if you buy a book you can turn around and give it to a friend after you’ve read it, or donate it to a library, or just outright sell the thing on Ebay or at your Spring yard sale. But with electronic content that’s all going to change, regardless of corporate policies. The publishers don’t want us to own the material–they want us to lease it. And–in a stroke of absolutely, monumentally stupid proportions–they don’t want us to be able to loan out the material we’ve “leased” or sell it ourselves. I can still sell my reader, of course, I still own that property, but the content–they want the content rights to end once I’ve read it.

I cannot stipulate enough how little sense this makes in the real world. Sure, when you’re calculating your profit margin it might look like a coup against you if you know that someone’s given away something that you own the rights to, but at the same time, looking at the bigger picture (something done all-too rarely these days), if the person the content was given to becomes a fan and purchases other works by that publisher or writer, then it’s win-win for everyone involved.

But here’s the catch: electronic content isn’t going to be something that you’ll go to a used book store to buy. And as adamant as I am that these are really stupid ideas from a consumer perspective, if I look at it from their point of view–the publisher–I realize that they are not only against the selling of unregulated content, they are likely terrified of the prospect. You won’t convince them it’s a good idea because, well, no. 1, their pricing scheme has to change, and it can’t, much. Not enough to make electronic content more attractive to a consumer, at least. Sure, their publishing expenses drop when working with e-formats, but to keep their bottom lines intact they’re still going to have to charge a premium for the work. They still have to pay the staff and the writer, and they still have to be profitable. Besides that, with an e-format, I can “loan” out a copy of my book that’s not protected and still keep a copy of it. You can’t do that with a printed book. You loan it out and it’s gone until you get it back. With e-formats, I can essentially give away a million copies if I wanted to and it wouldn’t hurt anyone but the publisher. And I’ve still got my copy. And that is where, I believe, the true terror of the ebook strikes the hearts of publishers. From their perspective, they’ve got to regulate it, or they’ll go straight out of business.

It’s unfortunate, but I can see their dilemma.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , Cory Doctorow, e-book, ebooks

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, selected shorts now available online.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Apocalypse, Cory Doctorow, e-book, Elizabeth Bear, online, shorts, Tobias Buckell, wastelands

There aren’t many success stories out there, that’s for sure. John Scalzi, Cherie Priest and David Wellington are the few that pop to mind who’ve put their work on a website and then sold the work(s) for print. I know there are others, but they are few and far between, and the numbers of writers getting published in the traditional manner is still the steady king as far as sheer numbers are concerned.

But it’s just so hard, and I’m just so lazy, and hey, I’m 38. If I have to wait six months to get my rejection from Tor and then another six to get my rejection from (publisher #2) and then a year to get one from (publisher C) then I’ll be 40 and still sitting on my book. Worse, unagented works rarely get a fair shake, so the really real route to ramble through would be to shoot for an agent and hope she’ll sell the book. I just don’t know if I have it in me. The patience, I mean. We all know rejections are a part of the writing life; I don’t fear rejections, I just don’t want to get bored in the waiting.

It might be different if I was doing this for a living, but this is my hobby. Sure, I want to be a published author–and I am, in short stories–but it’s not like I won’t be able to feed my kids if I don’t sell this book. Having sold a few short I at least have enough confidence to say “I do not suck” with some authority. At least three editors have liked my stories enough to publish them, and one of them did so three times. Some considerations:

• The positive: Publishers will and do buy books that have been posted online. They may ask you to remove it immediately, but if they like it, and if it has any kind of readership, they’ll buy it. It’s proven.
• The negative: I’ll be missing out on the valuable editing process. Sure, some writers churn out work that doesn’t need any editing, but I’m not those writers. For a publisher to take me on she’d almost certainly have to refine my writing. I’ve got style, oh yes, but I’ve got some bad habits too, that have been hard for me to kick. I know I wrote a story that I’m proud of, and it’s something I would read myself, but then I’m invested in it. It’s my baby. You, though, you are the ones who would–or wouldn’t–read it. An editor could ease me through that process, help me fashion it to suit the market. But. But.
• The other negative: People don’t respect web-published authors. I’ve seen sites myself and sneered at my screen for having the audacity to show me a web-published author.
• The what if: I found David Wellington’s books through a BoingBoing post. David is a good writer who sold his books, which are still posted on his website. Linkage from a site like BB would be huge. Huge. But very unlikely. Their safety net intelligently requires that they read any fiction before posting a link to it, and as you can imagine, Cory is swamped with requests and isn’t accepting any new ones for the foreseeable future.

So I’ve got a positive, two negatives, and a what if. In dealing with the first negative I can only say that I would have to really focus on editing it down myself, and that if it’s a good enough story it’ll sell itself. Right? And I can edit; of the five shorts I’ve sold every one was posted/printed in the shape I submitted them in. I’m just not particularly good at it and, again, I’m basically lazy.

For the second negative I can say that when I saw David Wellington’s site I didn’t sneer. Why is that? Why does he automatically garner special attention as a web-published writer? And this was before I’d read the first word of any of his stories. Was it because I’d found it through the BoingBoing link, and therefore it was automatically presumed to be a “qualified” read? Or maybe it was because it was presented very well, with a cool dedicated graphic header. I don’t know, but something about the site said “writer” all over it, and therefore I bookmarked the link and referred back to it later. After reading some of his stuff, I found it to be very good and I gladly recommend it. So.

To self-publish or not to self-publish. All I know is I’m building the website now, and I’m dreading the prospect of querying this thing till I’m on the shady side of 90. The Down in the Cellar story will appear March 1st, so that should draw a lurker or ten, and maybe one of them would have liked The Ghost of Tom Johns enough to give my book a go. Plus, this blog is beginning to get noticed a bit more. Most of the hits bounce almost immediately away, but some of them stick around and read a page or two.

Any thoughts? Comments? Would you read it, or at least give it a try? Note: The excerpt I posted the other day was very gory; I should note here that that was one of the few examples of graphic violence in the book. I just particularly liked that scene, so I shared it with you.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Cory Doctorow, David Wellington, ebook, Indie Writer, self-publish, self-publishing