2012 Isn’t The End Of The World But It Is A Time Of Transition

For the past few months, I’ve laid back and soaked up the goings on in publishing, and the economy in general. Here are a few things I expect to see as we wrap up 2012 and head into the beyond.

1. Apple is in the process of cutting its own sizably profitable throat

I was once one of Apple’s biggest proponents. This was back when they produced the best computers going, especially when paired head to head with Microsoft’s crap-of-the-month they’ve spent the past 15 years cranking out. But no more. They are far too expensive in an atmosphere with downward pressure on device prices, and are showing far too many issues with signature devices like the iPhone. The iPad Mini is nothing if not a cannibal that has the potential to swallow the market for the full size (and pricier) model whole. Add to that the fact that, fairly or otherwise (I say fairly) Apple is a poster child for exploitative labor practices, offshoring of jobs and stashing large profits out of the country to avoid taxes, and I see a company who has reached its apex and is poised to begin the long decline down.  If Steve Jobs were still alive, I’d give them a shot to pull out of it, but he’s not, and Apple is in the process of becoming just another mega corporation focusing on profit at the expense of all else.

There’s a reason Apple is putting more and more resources towards patent lawsuits. It’s corporate complacency. Live off the value you have today, and do everything you can to stifle competition or progress beyond that point. It might work for a few years, but it’s a long-term loser bet. Much like Microsoft, the world will pass them by and they’ll learn that it’s much harder to play catch up than be the industry leader, especially after your corporate culture shifts from profit through new innovation to profit through exploitation of past innovation.

2. Consolidation amongst the largest publishers is a sign of desperation not forward-thinking strategy

Corporate consolidation and mergers come in many forms. Sometimes, they are aggressive, competitive moves, other times they are backs-to-the-wall defensive maneuvers. The Big Six mergers going on are in the latter group and, as such, are little more than time-buying exercises. The Disney purchase of Lucasfilm is just the opposite. The mouse didn’t snap up Star Wars to squat on the crazy-lucrative rights, they intend to use them. Publishers, on the other hand, are merging not as an aggressive bold move, but as a means of cutting costs and combining assets to add sheer bulk in some kind of misguided dick-measuring contest with the big retailer of the moment, Amazon.

I expect the Big Six will filter down to three, possibly even two within the next two years. The remaining giants aren’t going anywhere, they’ll still be raking in money, still produce bestsellers by the bushel, still be big name players, but while they get individually bigger, the overall share of the market once held by all six separate companies combined will decline.

While this consolidation will very likely appear positive on the accounting ledgers, in the real world, it means less skilled people employed in traditional publishing, less opportunities to get books published traditionally, less competition for authors between traditional houses, lower advances, lower royalties and more stringently pro-publisher contracts with increasing restrictions on writers. If you’re one of those people who still see a traditionally published book as something to aspire to, your work just got a lot more difficult and a lot less potentially lucrative.

If anything, I expect consolidation among the industry leaders will drive more writers to control their own destinies. In fact, I would not be the least bit surprised if, eventually, the bulk of the work coming out of the last of the giants winds up as work-for-hire ghost written material. Anonymous author-mills, basically.

3. Any improvement in publishing’s fate depends on a functioning economy

We just had an election that comes at a pivotal time for us and the one obvious problem that’s suffocating us went completely unaddressed. How, exactly, do we convince the corporate world to reinvest in its workforce through better pay and benefits, thereby investing in the market for its own products? Many corporations have become virtual crack-whores to ever-increasing margins, and the du jour move of the moment is to cut everything not nailed down from your employee base to improve the bottom line. We need to convince them to break that addiction, sacrifice some of those profits in the short term for the betterment of everyone, and mostly, their own long term bottom line.

The current system is clearly unsustainable. They need customers, and lots of them, which they’re not going to get if corporations en mass continue to bleed the workforce of any and all disposable income to pad their own criminally undertaxed capital gains. It’s doubly damaging condition because egregiously low wages also add to all of our tax bills. Walmart, for instance, made $15 billion in profit last year. Their employees, however, were paid over $2 billion in government assistance. That means we subsidized billions in Walmart profits with our taxes. But its the poor single mother on food stamps who’s the parasite, right? As things are now, obscene percentages of capital are being sequestered totally out of our economy, with more being drained every day. That has to stop, and it has nothing to do with tax rates. It’s a grab-the-cash-right-now strategy, and it’s sacrificing the future for everybody, rich and poor alike, to support gluttonous profits today.

It’s a common problem. Publishers suffer from it. They invest less and less into the actual productive areas of their business and more into their corporate structure. In doing so, the financial barons on Wall Street reward them for their stats on paper, which always look good right away but don’t reflect the long-term negative consequences of the cuts. Those come later, and inevitably lead to more cuts. It’s a death spiral writ large. Amazon, by contrast, does reinvest large chunks of profit back into its business, and Wall Street punishes them for it routinely. It’s a good thing Jeff Bezos doesn’t seem to care what Wall Street thinks or Amazon might never have been anything more than one of the online retail pack. Our financial system, where nearly all of our resources are controlled, rewards corporate behavior that is destructive to the real-world economy and punishes actions that help it. How a system that was originally intended to allow companies to raise money with which to expand business has been allowed to mutate into this self-sustaining casino game is one of the great disgraces of the late 20th century. Our ends are fundamentally at odds with the ends of the financial sector.

These things have to change, or our very basic social fabric risks being torn asunder. It’s not going to matter what ebooks cost if people can barely afford food. A severe rich/poor class system will rip itself apart in this country. And all it takes to fix it is if our corporate leaders give up a small percentage of profits in favor of better compensation for employees. Stop hoarding your money overseas, pay your damn taxes, and pay your employees a fair, living wage. Actually give something back to the market you’re getting filthy rich on. There’s nothing to harvest if you don’t plant a few seeds. I’m not sure how, or even if we can change our corporate culture from its current parasitical nature back into a sustainable one, but I do know that if we don’t, the changes we’ve seen the past few years are but small scratches on the surface of what’s yet to come.

4. I’m holding to my opinion that the smart money is for people to develop their own skills and use them entrepreneurially

We can no longer count on steady, good paying employment on a wide scale. Companies aren’t going to give up the exploitative profit margins they’ve grown used to without being strong-armed, and any means of forcing them will have immediate, very ugly consequences. So let’s not do that. People everywhere need to cultivate ways to make money outside of traditional employment. The get-a-job thing is becoming a worse and worse deal by the day for workers and unless we are all happy ending up as poverty stricken wage slaves, we need to start creating our own economic opportunities. For writers, this means get off the fence and learn publishing. “I just wanna write,” sounds great and all, but it’s becoming increasingly unrealistic. Not knowing the business side intimately isn’t going to be a matter of choice much longer, either figure it out or get stuck under the boot heel of a giant publisher. It’s not an intriguing little side-light to consider any longer, but a virtual requirement for your long-term survival interests.

And it’s getting to be the same with everyone else. Wide-scale employment is becoming a race to the bottom, creating bottom-rung, benefit-less, minimum wage level jobs in droves while shedding living wage jobs. Figuring out how to generate adequate incomes on our own is the next essential skill we’re all going to need. Getting started sooner than later is probably going to be a very good idea.

Dirty Tricks Are For Kids…and people who work in publishing

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the sock puppet, review buying scandal “gripping” the ebook world. I used quotes because, frankly, I’m fresh out of shits to give about whatever system-gaming tactics other people are engaging in. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the people using fake accounts to rip other writers and their work are cowardly bastards that deserve our scorn. I also believe faking an account or getting you friends and relatives to write glowing reviews of your stuff comes off as desperate and a little pathetic. As for buying reviews, I’m honestly a little indifferent to that. It’s not something I’d do, and it’s deceptive if you know the reviews are bogus. But marketing itself is far more frequently deceptive than not. We don’t bitch when our favorite athletes or movie stars take fat checks to hock cars, watches, fast food or what have you. That’s obviously fraudulent marketing, too. Why aren’t we railing against that? No, buying reviews doesn’t even register as something I care about in the least.

My primary issue is the self-righteous indignation that has exploded in some circles over this matter. Don’t you people have anything better to do, like writing a book or something? System gaming and pushing the boundaries to get ahead is the American way. Rules exist simply so we know where the lines are when we cross them for personal advantage. Sure, that’s a cynical attitude, but then I’m not the one sitting here spewing morality and lying to myself about human nature.

I am shocked by one thing, though, that there are so many people who seem to have no conception of what the publishing industry really is. It’s a shark tank filled to the brim with lies, deception, trickery and questionable ethics, same as it ever was. Stomping this set of tactics out will only serve to the advantage of whoever’s got the next system-rigging scam ready to put in play. Is it fair or ethical? Hell no! It’s publishing.

Anyway, the whole mess reminds me of a piece I wrote over 2-1/2 years ago when some well-meaning but naive folks tried to start a new daily newspaper in the Detroit area. When their effort failed in all of four days, they proceeded to launch a massive whine-fest about the dirty tricks their competitors played on them. I think many of my points about publishing then are still applicable today, and they’ll still be applicable a decade from now, too. So, here is that piece along with the new intro I wrote in italics for its inclusion in my book, The Decline and Fall of the Publishing Empire.

By the way, see what I did there? I plugged my book, complete with hyperlink. Is that ethical? In fact, is this entire post just an excuse to promote my book on the back of a high profile scandal? It’s not, I genuinely think this is a perfectly valid point that I’ve also made in the past. But can you be sure of that just because I say so? Do you want to spend all your time sussing out who’s being totally legit and who’s being manipulative? Is it even possible to tell with any degree of certainty? If so, good luck with that. I’ve got stories to write.

Dirty Tricks- December 1, 2009

I was part of a start up publication a little over a decade ago, taking on an established, much bigger entity.  They tried every trick in book to derail us.  They swiped our papers from store racks, they pressured printers to not do business with us, the threatened possible backers, even filed a totally and completely frivolous lawsuit that was designed to get us to spend on legal fees instead of actual competition.  That’s the nature of this business. 

Dirty, low down trickery is second nature in publishing.  Always has been, always will be.  We, however, were prepared for it, didn’t go under in four days like these guys I talk about here, successfully fended off the lawsuit and, in fact, quite completely kicked their ass head-to-head.  The lesson in all this is be prepared.  Just having some money and what you think is a good idea is never enough, especially in a fickle industry like publishing.

If you haven’t heard, today I’m going to address the brief life and quick death of the new daily paper in Detroit, which lasted all of four days.  Now, when I first read about this, my thoughts weren’t particularly optimistic.  This is simply the wrong time in the wrong industry to try something so brazenly risky, but, hey, give ‘em points for effort.  Anyway, today, I read a lament about the paper’s demise, which largely blamed dirty tricks on the part of Detroit’s other two long-standing major newspapers.  You mean publishers actually engaged in dirty tricks against the competition?  Color me shocked.

How can anyone at this point possibly be naive enough to have not expected this?  Publishing is an industry built on dirty tricks.  If there has ever been a manipulative, back-stabbing, sneaky, dirty trick played in the business world anywhere, it likely had its start in publishing.  Just because you have a group of well-meaning people with good intentions and more money than sense doesn’t mean that everyone else will just step aside, congratulate you and say, “welcome to the game.”

Publishing is, and always has been, a screw or be screwed industry.  That doesn’t mean that you have to play dirty, but you do have to be prepared for it.  Expect otherwise and you’ll get eaten alive.  It’s part of what attracted me to publishing in the first place.  You have to constantly be on your toes because the minute you let your guard down, people will be lining up to burn you.  Everyone has an agenda, and part of the fun is in figuring out what that is, while keeping your own close to the vest.  Reading between the lines, figuring out the real motivations behind people’s actions and words; those are essential skills.  These dynamics exist everywhere in publishing; employee on employee within companies; company on company within markets, that’s simply how the game is played.  Whining about dirty tricks after the fact just makes you look even more unprepared than closing up shop in four days does.

When I first heard about the shut down, which has been called temporary (yeah, sorta like death is temporary) it suggested a few things to me.  The first is that they were either ill-prepared or seriously underfunded.  It’s probably both.  But to complain about printers charging you up front, and other competitors putting pressure on vendors to not do business with you?  Exactly what industry did you think you were getting into?  First off, I wouldn’t trust a printer that didn’t try to charge you in advance for a new start-up.  There’s a long-standing tradition in printing, passed down through the generations, of getting small publishers in hock up to their eyeballs in print bills just so they could take them to court and strip them clean of any and all assets.  Never, and I repeat, never allow your print bills to be secured debt and run up out of reach.  You’re much better off paying up front and shutting down before that happens.

Secondly, it seems that these folks were counting on a massive influx of revenue right out of the gate.  Apparently, they took the dissatisfaction of the community with the existing players to mean that just starting a new paper will bring them on board.  It simply doesn’t work that way.  It takes time to establish a solid revenue base, and if you don’t have the money to fund at least a year’s worth of production without earning back a dime, don’t even bother getting started.  It doesn’t matter how pissed people seem, they’re not going to throw money at you until you can prove that you’re a better alternative.  Four whole days isn’t even close to making that happen.  Four months isn’t long enough.

That being said, I appreciate their initiative, misplaced as it was.  The best we can do is learn from their mistakes.  Even a weakened print industry isn’t an easy target, and they will not go quietly into that good night.

Steal Your Face! The Grateful Dead disproves the notion that sharing is destructive

Get a load of this. Sometimes, I actually enjoy these little screeds that turn up now and again about copyright and the great internet menace. I especially like the parts where the writers pretend like anybody on the industry side really gives a shit about artists. Does anyone really believe the RIAA, MPAA or publishers’ interest in stamping out what they call piracy has even the slightest thing to do with protecting artists? That line is the media conglomerate equivalent of the great political deflection “won’t somebody please think about the children?” These are, after all, entities that have done some amazing work creating innovative accounting tricks specifically to screw over the various artists they claim to want to protect. In reality, their position can be far more accurately described as, “How dare you steal from the people we’ve been stealing from!”

But that’s neither here nor there. Those folks are the real crooks in this debate and just about everyone who doesn’t have a direct financial interest in allowing the continuation of their money grabs from actual content creators knows it. What I’d like to discuss is the principle reason I simply don’t believe that sharing is piracy, and further, why I don’t believe it’s harmful but in fact can be beneficial. All I have to do is look at the wall of shelves filled with cassette tapes in my house, and I see right through the corporate bullshit that has defined sharing as a steeply punishable crime, and re-christened the activity with the much more ominous and deceptive term “piracy.”

Admittedly, cassette tapes are very much a technology of the past, but this is the past I’m talking about here, how casual sharing has always existed ever since there was a widely available means of reproduction accessible to regular people. Far from destroying legitimate markets for creative goods, sharing has been very likely the principle means of discovery for consumers, and I believe it has done more to create demand for artistic works, as well as putting money into the pockets of both artists and media companies, than all the marketing dollars in the world.

To begin, there is absolutely nothing illegal about any of the two thousand or so tapes in my home. Every one is a copy of a live concert recording of bands that explicitly allowed that activity. Every one was either given or acquired by me in a straight trade of other concert recordings with no money changing hands, a behavior also sanctioned by the bands in question. It’s a large and varied selection of some of the best musicians we’ve ever produced, and all indisputably the result of legal, sanctioned sharing. I say this to head off anyone throwing accusations of piracy at me for this collection. But sanctioned or not, I still don’t believe it’s piracy, and I know that it’s far from destructive to the artists.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had been turned on to the Grateful Dead by a good friend when he gave me a few copies of some bootleg tapes of their concerts. This set off a life-long interest in music for me that has directly led to my spending tens of thousands of dollars on CDs, concert tickets, books, tee shirts, even digital music, thus far. I’ve been so appreciative of that act that I’ve returned the favor many times over by giving copies of some of this music to many different people over the years, turning numerous people into fans (and paying customers) for a wide variety of bands.

A few years ago, I turned a friend of mine on to a bluegrass jam band called Yonder Mountain String Band by giving him a copy of a concert recording I had acquired. Yonder also allows taping and the free sharing of such recordings. Since then, he’s bought their CDs, bought tee shirts, hats and seen them perform live at least three dozen times at venues up and down the East Coast, tripling the amount of times I’ve seen them myself. And that’s just one instance with one person and one band. I’ve turned hundreds of people onto hundreds of bands over the years. None of it would have happened if not for that first person handing me that first Grateful Dead tape twenty years ago. I can’t even begin to estimate what the total dollar figure that resulted from my sharing of this material would be, but my best guess is well into six figures, possibly more. Without that first tape, without that sharing, none of that spending exists.

Let’s discuss the Grateful Dead for a moment because, above all else, they are a fascinating case for how open sharing can generate buzz and a paying fanbase, turning a band that the mainstream music industry had little use for into one of the most widely recognized, influential and highest grossing music acts to ever grace a stage anywhere.

The Dead released 22 total studio and contemporary live albums during their 30 years. By contemporary, I mean live albums released as they went along in their various incarnations at the time. They’ve since released over a hundred live recordings from their archives, but the 22 albums I’ve sited are the only ones fitting the standard music industry album release pattern. Of those, only one ever reached the top ten on the charts, that being the 1987 album In The Dark, which peaked at number seven. Only three others even hit the top twenty. As for singles, the Dead had a grand total of one Top 40 hit, Touch of Grey, from In the Dark, which peaked at number nine. Not exactly the kind of success you’d expect to see from a band that ended its run as one of the highest earning bands ever. And unlike the current top grossing bands who charge absurdly high ticket prices, the Dead’s concert tickets were always affordable. I still have my stub from the very last show they ever played at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1995. I had field seats, row 30 from the stage that day, generally pretty fantastic seats. The price printed on the ticket was $33.50. Today, those kind of seats for a major rock band would easily be ten times that, maybe even more.

So if mainstream commercial success was virtually non-existent, how were the Dead able to build the empire they did? They built a large, enthusiastic community of followers unmatched in music history. Name one other band that had a following of tens of thousands of fans who would tour the country with them. Every show. Every tour. Every year. A Grateful Dead show produced a literal village at every venue they stopped at. Bands like the Dead-inspired Phish from Vermont, managed to replicate some semblance of that, but no one has ever fully embraced the notion of community like Jerry Garcia and the boys. It was those bootleg tapes I referred to earlier that were instrumental in building that community. They ended up with a large group of fans who were virtual archivists. I, myself, have over 500 Dead concerts on tape spanning the late ’60s right up to their final show. Honestly, that collection is one of my prized possessions. I’ve since digitized many of them, and I very rarely listen directly to the tapes themselves anymore, but I still can’t bring myself to part with them, and I’m pretty sure I never will. At least not willingly.

Dead fans were a unique group, most possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the band and its music. All of that stemmed from the enormous community they cultivated. And that community, in turn, grew out of the free and open sharing of their material. The Dead became immortalized not by selling records, not by an association with a giant record company, and not by any massive marketing effort. They did it by cultivating a community of fans based very much on the concept of sharing.

While it’s very true that times were different then, and that there are some very real issues with downloading that need to be addressed, I’ve always believed that their approach held many lessons that directly apply to today’s artists, musicians and writers. For instance, the Dead would allow the free distribution of concert bootlegs under one condition–no one tried to make money from them. I saw nearly twenty Dead shows in my time. Only twice did I ever see anyone trying to sell tapes in the parking lot. In both instances, the seller was essentially shamed into shutting down by the fans themselves. The band built such a strong community that they didn’t even have to police the distribution of those tapes, the community did it for them. How many of today’s artists have that kind of mutually beneficial relationship with their fans? I can’t think of one.

Sharing isn’t piracy, and it doesn’t have to be destructive. The Grateful Dead have proved that. Completely outside of the recording industry machine, they built a stunningly successful commercial entity. They did it by building a community with their fans, encouraging the free and open non-commercial sharing of their work, keeping the prices for their material affordable and by retaining all the rights to their recording masters and publishing rights. Seems to me like there’s a lesson or two in there that might apply these days, don’t you think?

The Big Picture: Should we be a nation of 300 million employees or 300 million entrepreneurs?

I try not to be political. I don’t try that hard, obviously, but I do stop myself for diving full on headlong into it most days. Politics just disgusts me so much and I can get enraged so easily. Sometimes, I just can’t avoid it, though. It’s election season, so it’s absolutely everywhere and it just annoys me to see all the people who think this pomp and circumstance makes a damn bit of difference. Even if your guy wins, the day after inauguration day isn’t going to be any different than the day before. I’ve seen enough presidential elections in my lifetime not to get taken in by the rhetoric anymore. They’re all reactive anyway. Government policy generally follows what people start doing on their own. I’ve always believed that the real strength of a President is how he would respond in a genuine crisis not how he governs. I haven’t heard that question asked yet this year. Have we gone so long without a genuine, far reaching crisis that we’ve forgotten that totally fucked up shit can come outta left field with no notice and how one deals with that can be a pretty important trait?

See what I mean? I wasn’t even thinking presidential politics when I started typing, but it just took over. Dammit! What I wanted to talk about was economics (I know, thrilling!) or more specifically, what kind of economy we need to have because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our’s ain’t quite cutting it any more. If I thought this was a typical slowdown or correction of some sort, I might be inclined to hang back till the tide turns, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ve got deep structural problems that tax cuts and/or spending cuts simply aren’t going to fix. Neither party has a clue what to do about it, either. Although I will say, frighteningly, the republicans are a little closer to understanding the implications of what’s going on than the Democrats seem to be, it’s just that their “solutions” are self serving policies for the already haves while discarding the have nots to a future of “Would you like curly fries with that?”

The simple fact, as I see it, is that the days of mass employment are ending. Companies will be functioning on 10% or less of the staff they traditionally needed, manufacturing businesses likely less still. That’s a helluva lot of people with no jobs or hope because they are never coming back. With shitty retail jobs being basically the only widely available growth sector, even that’s self-defeating. Eventually, when such a high percentage of the population is getting piss poor wages, they stop buying stuff. Besides, the internet’s kicking brick and mortar retail’s ass. How many fast food jobs can one nation reasonably support?

I bitch a lot about offshoring jobs, and I’m right, I think. It is exploitative, and it has been destructive to our economy. But I’m now realizing that it was going to happen anyway. Those factories will be fully automated in another decade or so, and even the third world workers raking in their 35 cents an hour will be out of work then. This is a problem we would inevitably have had to deal with, even if businesses on a wide scale hadn’t decided to openly screw their own workers for an extra something-something in their stock options years before it was necessary to downsize.

We’ve got an abundance of people with skills and experience nobody wants or needs to pay for any longer. A problem, I might add, that’s going to continue to get worse as technology gets better. Look at health care, for instance. You know why health care is so fucked up? Because we’re continuing to act like the 1950 model  (when you got a job in a company, health insurance was part of the package and you stayed there for 40 or 50 years, before retiring with a nice pension) is even close to relevant any more. People don’t work in companies for five years, let alone fifty any more. And that cuts both ways. Employers who began to treat workers as resources rather than people destroyed the concept of employer-employee trust, and as time went on, they paid less and less, kicked in less and less for insurance, converted the relatively stable pension system into the volatile 401k racket, all so more and more money could go upstairs. You don’t think the people working in these companies saw the effects, first hand, of their bosses reaping giant windfalls while they had to fight to get a 50 cent raise every couple of years? The whole get-a-job/career mantra has become almost totally exploitative to workers, and their loyalty went straight out the window, as well it should have. The natural outgrowth of this is that companies will automate as many jobs as possible, eventually having as few people on the payroll as is feasible.

Yet our entire economy runs on the foundation of getting-a-good-job/career. How the hell are we going to survive if there’s only 1 good job for every 5,000 or 10,000 people looking? That’s the description of a society poised to collapse in on itself. I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready to be living out scenes from Mad Max just yet. I still haven’t finished taking the tread off my old tires and tacking it on to some football shoulder pads.

What can save us? Probably the same thing that fucked us up, technology, specifically the internet. What’s the one big rallying cry on the Democratic side? Income inequality. Well, look at what the internet has done to media companies. Established newspapers and music companies got hammered. But look at what else happened. That money that newspaper lost is being spread around to hundreds or thousands of smaller outlets that made nothing before. The top music companies and the highest grossing bands lost ground, but there’s thousands or tens of thousands of smaller bands making money now that made nothing before. Books are heading the same way. As print loses ground, there’s now tens of thousands of writers making money digitally who made nothing before. You want income redistribution? That looks suspiciously like a free market based way to go about it. Can’t call that socialist. Certainly, this process created giants; Google from newspapers, Amazon from books, Apple from music; but giants will always exist. Besides, the old media companies existed as exclusionary forces. Amazon works with anybody selling ebooks, Apple with anybody selling music (and ebooks), Google with anybody producing content. It’s a simplification, true, but these new media companies generally don’t discriminate between giant multinational corporations and individual entrepreneurs. I’d be willing to bet that alone is the principal reason media companies hate the tech giants so much. It’s not that they revolutionized their industries, its that, in doing so, they failed to properly pay tribute to companies who got a little too comfortable perched on their unapproachable golden thrones.

This is just the media industry, too. Eventually, it’ll work across virtually the entire spectrum of commerce, and individual people will have direct access to a virtually unlimited customer base, helped out by tech companies that are happy to take their cut regardless of who’s selling it. My uncle, some twenty years ago now, well before the internet was widespread enough to be genuinely practical, tried his hand at building furniture for a living. This was no picnic table operation, he was a craftsman, making high-end wooden furniture, ornately carved, hand hewn, the best materials, intricate inlays of hand carved objects like crabs (we live on the Chesapeake Bay, after all) or oak leaves perfectly done. This wasn’t cheap IKEA crap.

And that was ultimately his problem. One that turned out to be a fatal one for his business at the time. Building the furniture; the time it took, the materials, etc; required a price above what the market could bear. The number of people around who could afford to drop that kinda coin on a hand crafted dining room suit was too small to attract a large enough customer base to make money. His work was exceptional, some of the best I’ve seen, certainly, but he just couldn’t connect with enough customers who could afford his rates.

Now consider if he had been twenty years later. What kind of access do you think he could get to high-end furniture buyers? How much do you think it would cost him to get that access, something that was quite simply impossible at the time he tried his business. I’m pretty confident he could’ve found more customers. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if he ultimately ended up with a waiting list of custom projects, keeping him in steady work, or maybe being able to hire a someone or two to help. The internet levels a lot of traditionally slanted playing fields.

The old ways of mass employment, companies who hired thousands of people at a time are dying off. The new companies coming in aren’t hiring on that scale, and thanks to technology, they never will. We can’t rely on the business community to provide the work we need, no matter how many tax breaks we give them. What we need is to transition from an economy dependent on large companies hiring mass numbers of workers to one where individual people create their own work, their own incomes, likely from multiple smaller sources. There’s never been a better time to be entrepreneurial, either. Modern possibilities are virtually endless, and affordability has opened doors into industries that were unthinkable just a few years ago. We have a society still living in the mass employment model, even though its failing. We need a country of 300 million entrepreneurs instead of 300 million worker bees.

I see two areas where we’re making crucial mistakes, two places where I think government could be useful, for a change. One is not pushing to make broadband internet a utility. Let’s be realistic here, the internet has already become virtually ubiquitous. It’s only going to grow more so as it continues to dominate communication and commerce. Everybody will need access to it and cheaply. Yeah, that means telecomms might take a hit but who among you doesn’t feel just a little exploited by the bills you’ve paid over the years for phones, cable, internet, what have you? Be honest, you know damn well they’re capitalizing on their advantages as much as possible. Considering they operate in a government regulated little monopoly playground, I wouldn’t exactly weep for their loss. Despite the current GOP mantra going around, sometimes things are important enough that for-profit businesses can’t sufficiently handle the task. They have no reason to expand access to outlying areas with few people. There’s no market reason where it makes sense for them to do so. Do we just leave those people in the dark ages? What if we had done that with the electrical grid? Your municipal taxes should cover broadband internet as a utility for all, wireless preferably.

Secondly, we should be expanding the postal service, not defunding it. Look at the direction things are going. How much stuff do people buy online? What happens when most of commerce comes to you rather than you to it? There’s going to be huge demand for delivery services. Sure, UPS and Fed EX would be none too happy, but if government’s role is to create an atmosphere of wide spread opportunity, what harm could possibly come from cheap internet access for all and cheap delivery costs? That sounds like a recipe for retail growth to me, primarily amongst segments who are currently blocked out by high-cost barriers to entry.

Just think, a nation of millions of individual business people, taking advantage of that atmosphere. The established businesses who have locks on the marketplace now will lose some ground, but possibly millions of people will be making money where none was possible in the old economy.

You want income redistribution? Here’s how you do it, you give as wide a swath of regular people the tools to compete in the open market with the big boys and earn that income away. More free and open competition. Some other things will have to change. Health insurance will necessarily have to sold individually instead of in group company rates, yet still be affordable, which it already isn’t even close to now. The tax code will have to be seriously simplified, as well. Can you imagine getting 250 million itemized tax filings from small, individual businesses? How many people essentially just staple their W2 from their one or two jobs to their 1040 EZ and be done with it now? That won’t happen much any longer. We’ll probably end up with some kind of progressive flat tax with higher rates at higher income levels or something like it. Otherwise, the tax preparation industry is set for a serious boom period.

Look, what I’ve talked about here is already happening. Do you really think all these out of work people aren’t finding ways of making a buck here and there to get by? Most of it is unreported cash, no doubt, but people are basically very resourceful creatures. Give everybody the tools and the opportunity and bring this individual resourcefulness out into the light of day.

The time of mass employment at a relative few large companies is ending. What we need is to shift to where the average person is a participant in the market from both sides, not strictly a consumer. The real money is in selling the stuff, or offshoots that assist in the process. Labor in a mass employment world will always get the short end eventually. And the way we’re heading, there won’t be enough of that short end to go around much sooner than later.

I Love A Good Challenge! Musings on whether live-blogging a short story’s a good idea

I’m thinking about live blogging a short story. Do you think that would be interesting? I’m really considering just writing one, basically live, updating every time I save, even keeping any changes visible. Then editing, also keeping changes visible. Hell, if it turns out well, I might even publish it.

Of course, the principal problem would be, “What if the story sucks?” I’m not going to vet it beforehand or take something I’ve already written and act like it’s brand new. I’m leaning toward not even starting with an idea and letting it just grow on the page. A bit risky, possibly, but I’ve always done my best work under pressure. What more pressure can there be than “don’t embarrass yourself by cranking out a piece of shit in public?”

Besides, I’m not talking about a novel, just a few thousand word short story or so. I wrote two blog posts yesterday that were probably 4 or 5,000 words combined, and they were unplanned, off the cuff.

When I was in school, it used to annoy the hell outta me when a writing assignment required an outline. Those damn web diagrams were the worst. I recall asking myself at the time, “Self, how the hell are you supposed to outline something sentence for sentence if you haven’t written it yet?” That process always seemed backwards to me. Nobody else I knew ever saw it that way, and it was years before I finally figured out why.

To me, writing has never been a physical act. Everything I’ve ever put on paper or typed onto a screen was already written in my mind. In fact, the last step in the writing process for me is the actual, physical recording of the writing. The struggle hasn’t been so much to get the story together well on paper but to accurately transcribe the finished tale from my own head.
I’ve always wondered where the small little details come from. I never consciously created them. I happily go along, following the path of the plot, and when I look back, all these descriptive little side notes just appeared in there. Where did they come from? I’m now pretty sure they were already written and I was unconsciously copying them from the finished story in my head. No, for me, writing is an act done best inside the mind. Putting it on paper is simply scribe work and little else.

So, if I write from the position that the story, article, paper, what have you, is already done before the first word is typed, how does it make sense to do a paragraph by paragrah outline beforehand? And why bother? If I’m going through the trouble of breaking down what each sentence is about, why don’t I just write the actual sentence? If I know enough to tell you that information, I know enough to skip that step entirely and just produce it. Needless to say, I almost always lost points on the outline part of the assignment while getting high marks on the actual finished product.

I still don’t understand why my teachers never saw the flaw in their assignments. If I got an A+ on the essay while totally skipping the outline, doesn’t that in some way invalidate the point of teaching the outline in the first place? Why should I lose points because I didn’t see the need in engaging in unnecessary busy work that was actually more of an impediment to me getting the end product finished? The guy I was sitting next to or the girl in the back row might need to use an outline, but I didn’t, as was well-proven by the highest marks on the writings themselves. I even came to resent it. I also didn’t understand until years later that I have a latent problem with authority and being told what to do. Besides, I clearly knew better than my teachers in this regard. One-size-fits-all is true to the extent that the outliers to their rules allow themselves to be squeezed into a smaller box than they otherwise should have.

Even still, I never thought I possessed any kind of special ability. I still don’t. What I have might be different than some people’s gifts, but everybody has them, they just don’t realize in many cases. I’ve always cranked out surprisingly clean first drafts; few typos, consistent details, rarely if ever a flaw in story logic. I just thought that’s the way it was done until I got a look at some other writer’s first drafts. My way isn’t better, per se, though for me it is. It’s just my way, and I developed it intuitively.

Watch an NBA basketball game sometime and take note of how many different variations of a jump shot you see. The common purpose is to put the ball in the basket, and each one of those guys developed their own methods for doing so, on a scale successful enough to earn a spot on the floor with the best basketball players in the world. Some are so-so shooters, some are streaky, some are consistently good and some are great. But each one found what ultimately works for them born of their own innate physical abilities. Writing’s the same way.

I have a mind that runs quick, fills in details on its own to flesh out actions, and is capable of refining and keeping track of complex ideas with little conscious input. My brain just works that way. Always has. So when I first decided I wanted to write a story, I took advantage of the innate tools at my disposal without even knowing I was doing it. All writers do the same. You may not have a mind that works like mine, your skills may reside in other places. Things I struggle with, like convincing dialogue, for instance, may just flow from you naturally. That skill affects how and what you write, and the style you use, whether you realize it or not. There truly is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.

I often wonder, very likely because my issues once a story is drafted tend to be in the “minor details” department rather than grand story elements, if our modern writing culture of beating a dead horse through re-writes, re-drafts and over-editing isn’t stealing a bit of the writer’s soul in a way. It seems a little odd to be saying I think we sometimes over-edit when the principle complaint in publishing these days, particularly indies, is a lack of editing. But that’s how I see it. Whenever I read a writer talking about spending months or years rewriting or editing a specific piece, I find myself wondering one of two things: Are you doing all that extra work because you feel it needs it or because someone told you to, and at what point does the continued necessity of rewrites indicate that the original was just too flawed to begin with?

Music has always been a big influence on me, holding even more inspiration than other writers in some cases. I tend write rhythmically, and use sentence structure to drive pace sometimes in lieu of action or in the service of it. My musical tastes have always run toward the exceptional instrumentalists, particularly those who can jam. There’s nothing like a musician who gets in the moment and just lets it rip. Conversely, the live shows I’ve seen with bands who essentially replicate their studio album note for note bore me to tears. It’s too precise, too processed, lacking in the emotion an artist should display. Are we killing more than simply a few typos by editing everything to within an inch of its life in the search for unattainable perfection? I tend to think we are.

This isn’t to say that a pile of typos and plot flaws big enough to drive a dump truck through is acceptable, just that there’s the law of diminishing returns to consider. At some point, continued edits don’t really improve the story, just shifting the deck chairs, as it were. If you’re re-writing four, five, six times or, god forbid, more, maybe that story just isn’t fixable. Like trying to keep an old car you’re attached to on the road can nickle and dime you to death, a story can do the same. Eventually, you have to break down, write it off and spring for some new wheels; call it as finished as it’s gonna get and move on to the next story.

Writing is such a tenuous, indefinable thing. The best parts aren’t created out of overt structure and control but rather emerge organically. The real issue is the down parts or the transitions between the high points and getting them to mesh properly with the great stuff, or at least not conflict or detract from them. When we over-edit, our tendency can lean toward lessening the good parts rather than raising the quality of what surrounds them. Basically, we can fall into the trap of mediocritizing the whole thing for some unnamed standard of conformity. It’s much like my old writing teachers holding me and others like me back by forcing unneeded outlining assignments on us, teaching for all at the lowest common denominator level. At least, that’s how I see it. But, as I said, my skills are particular to supporting that worldview, your’s may not be.

Anyway, I’m thinking about live blogging a short story. I hope it comes out well or at least publishable. Imagine, I’d have a record of the first draft, the entire editing effort, and the thinking behind every stage. The eventual ebook could be both a piece of entertaining fiction (god willing and the crik don’t rise) and a please-pay-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain look at the writing process itself. I think that sounds at least potentially interesting enough to take a swing at. Don’t you?

The Fraudulent Society: A world of bogus book reviews, statistics & cyclists

We live in a fraudulent world. Everything around us every day is fake. The economy is in the dumps because of financial sector fraud on a scale so large that it can hardly seem possible. This November, we’ll be asked to select which major political party’s dishonest, pandering, self serving pack of lies gets to run the country for the next four years. Hell, even Lance Armstrong has stopped defending himself from doping charges. I know, it doesn’t make him guilty. But it doesn’t make him innocent, either. Given the track record for honesty and integrity I’ve seen around me in my lifetime, you’ll excuse me if I’m a wee bit cynical of the guy who used steroids to return from a virtual cancer death sentence, then goes on to pull off probably the most far fetched athletic feat in my lifetime, going from an also-ran to winning seven Tour de France titles in a row. Sure it’s possible his brush with death motivated him to develop the drive to push himself to never before seen athletic accomplishments. It’s just as likely he discovered the wonders of drugs, or most likely, some combination therein. Either way, the guy who should be the most inspiring athlete in the world doesn’t exactly scream legitimacy. But then, what does anymore?

Certainly not the validity of the customer review system that much of the retail web works under. Read this piece from the New York Times and try not to throw up in your mouth. Now I’m reasonably sure most of us know some kind of questionable practices have been going on in terms of reviews. But the scale this suggests is frightening. This is one guy, subcontracting out “reviewers.” If he made $28,000 a day, as he claimed, that’s a ton of bogus reviews scattered out there. In fact, at that rate, this guy would’ve disseminated a half a million fake, rose-colored reviews in a year’s time. One guy. How many more review services are there out there? How many private groups trading quid pro quo positive reviews amongst their memberships? And what’s the percentage of “sockpuppets” that sellers are using to contribute glowing reviews of their own stuff clandestinely?

The short answer: a royal shitload! Certainly enough that it calls into question the validity of any customer review system. How exactly are reviews weighted in Amazon’s discoverability algorithm? If they’re counted at all, doesn’t this disclosure seem to indicate their removal may be called for? I mean, the information is tainted. Worse yet, so long as reviews directly count toward helping products be seen and possibly drive sales, there’s virtually no reasonable means of stopping it from becoming that way.

So who availed themselves of this “service”? Well, John Locke, for one, reportedly bought 300 reviews from this guy. Somewhat less to Locke’s discredit, he didn’t seem to actually care if the reviews were good, bad or indifferent, just that they existed. Maybe he legitimately thought he was getting people who were going to actually read his book and give an honest critique. Of course, that would mean a man that’s been held up for his business acumen for rising from unknown to self publishing icon would be dangerously naive. What was I saying about cynicism earlier?

But at least Locke didn’t stoop to the level of UK best seller Stephen Leather. Leather, rather incredibly, openly admitted to having a network of fake online identities he used to promote his books, or sockpuppets, as it were. Further, he implied that he also has a group of friends and associates all engaging in the same sham marketing. Here’s a breakdown of his situation.

As appalling as these instances are, really they’re just ham handed attempts to replicate conduct the corporate world has already perfected. Does anyone really think the Big Six don’t have someone posting glowing five star reviews on their books everywhere they’re available? Realistically, they’ve been paying for reviews for a long time, either directly or through back scratching deals with review publishers along the lines of buying ads in said publication with the expectation that your offerings get reviews. At least this new payola actually goes to the people writing the fake reviews and not just the newspaper or magazine printing them. Making the world of review fraud more democratic! That’s something, I suppose. Nauseating, but something.

Then there’s the simple case of the Digital Book World ebook bestseller list. Purported to be an accurate depiction of ebook sales, closer inspection reveals something that smells worse than a suddenly-abandoned fish market three days after the ice has melted. Is it a fraud? I don’t know for sure but my internal bullshit detector goes haywire whenever something produces generally surprising results that would be exactly what you’d expect if the fix was in. First, the somewhat contemptuous tone toward the lower price points in the promotional material for the new list seemed prejudicial to indies and immediately set me to awares. Then, the initial list had publishers prominently displayed but no authors. Hmmm…who would put a greater priority on the publishers being referenced rather than the actual authors? I wonder…Third, the results came out not only unpredictably but almost irrationally anti-indie and pro Big Six. One of the big tells in statistical fraud is when they overreach and results come out far stronger on one side than is actually reasonable. Last, the guy who developed the secret algorithm we know nothing about turned out to be employed as a VP at a Big Six publisher. Not only that, it was kept hidden from all materials until he was outed by a blogger and had to fess up. Hiding possibly pertinent information is usually a big tell in fraud, too. So is it a fraud? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well, sometimes it turns out to be a goose, but mostly, it’ll be a duck. And I’m sure you’ll excuse me if I’m fresh outta benefit of the doubt these days.

So, with all this obvious review fraud going on everywhere, will Amazon or someone else yank review data from any meaningful purpose? Nope. One other thing about our fraudulent society is that, far more often than not, the perpetrators of the fraud suffer no consequences from it. No bankers have been called to task, lying politicians are such a cliche now that we don’t even bother to call them on their bullshit anymore, lest we get buried by an even bigger pile of bullshit defending the first load. This review-pimping guy will be back to slinging bogus five-stars before you know it, and in the meantime, the ones who haven’t been outed yet will keep plying along unfazed. John Locke and Stephen Leather will be momentary blips, and very likely won’t suffer a bit from their questionable ethics (or naivete, if you’re feeling the Locke apologist vibe).

Lance Armstrong is getting his Tour de France titles stripped, though. That’s something, right? It would be if it weren’t being done by an agency that 1) has pretty questionable authority to strip them in the first place and 2) has no real evidence of doping at all and the somewhat inconvenient fact that Lance never once failed a drug test. See, when someone does get even the slightest comuppance, it, too, ends up done fraudulently.

But, oh well. I hear Roger Clemens is making a comeback.

The Editor Fallicy…Falacie…Fallacy…yeah, that’s it, Fallacy

I’d like to take a contrary position to the whole of the literary establishment for a moment, if I may. Much has been written, and will continue to be, on the rift between traditional and indie publishing. Hell, many traditional supporters throw a little shit-fit with just the use of the term “indie” as a moniker for self publishers. Some days, it seems like World Peace is a more attainable goal than bridging the gap between the established and emerging segments of the publishing industry.

But there is one area where both sides are in complete agreement. That is the absolute, irrefutable necessity of having any and all writing vetted by an honest to goodness editor. And who could argue with that, you ask? (If you didn’t ask, I apologize for putting words in your mouth but I kinda need that rhetorical response from “you” to keep the narrative flow going. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do this next thing) Who could argue with that, you ask? I can!

Now before you get all up in arms and pissy, nostrils flaring, uppity defensive of something everyone seems to agree on but the implications of which very few people actually consider, let me explain. If you can’t or won’t edit your own work, both for polish and content, you’re not only lazy, but you’re not a complete writer, either. Three…two…one…ok, now you can get all beside yourself with righteous indignation. I mean, come on! Everybody knows that even the best writers churn out barely literate crap until the sainted editor gets his/her red pen into it. Plus, who would want to live in a world where writers are able, or even *gasp* encouraged to release their work bypassing the filters of the all-seeing, all-knowing editor? I shudder to think of the implications of seeing the raw, unfettered power of the writer’s creative muse. I imagine it would be a little like looking directly at an angel, their transcendent light far too bright, burning mere human eyes right out of their sockets. Our minds would turn to jelly without editors to properly harness all that writerly power.

Seriously, though, I am really sick of reading about how writers can’t possibly string together so much as a tweet, let alone an entire novel without someone else hanging over their shoulder steering the course. That’s what editors do, after all. Were you fully aware of that? Editors take other people’s material and structure it to suit either their own preconceived notions or the fiscal necessity of the platform they’re editing for. That’s the gig. Book editors are a little different than periodical editors in that they tend to shape the content to their perceived needs in their particular market sphere rather than a homogenized “style” or publication “brand.” Same difference to the writer in the end, though. I’d still like someone to explain to me how an editor who steeped within the structure of traditional publishing is going to be all that helpful to an indie. Sure, they can shape your book up into something that might resemble something else that once worked in the traditional realm, but if you’re an indie, you’re not really selling into that distribution area. You know how much real world market experience those former and current trad editors have selling digital independently? About as much as my great grandfather, and he’s been dead since 1954.

Then there’s the little matter of whether many editors are even qualified to dick around with an actual creator’s work in the first place. Let’s not kid ourselves, the phrase editor, in some circles, might still hold a bit of prestige, but from my experience, that editor you’re working with is, more often than not, a result of the “those who can’t, teach” school of thought. People become editors for one of three reasons, generally: 1) they’re a failed writer and had to pay the bills somehow, 2) they don’t have the balls to be the writer and it’s much easier–and usually pays better–to manipulate the work of others than produce it yourself, or 3) they are a successful writer who developed their own skills after years of dealing with semi-competent half wits who likely suggested adding some foreshadowing to the table of contents or some other such absurd idea at one time or another. There may be other ways to get that editor title next to your name (some folks go to school for it, I hear) but those are the three big ones. If you’ve got a #3, then you’re golden, but the other two are sure-fire paths to fucking up whatever artistic vision you lacked confidence in so much you turned to a stranger who’s primary claim to career fame is “I fixed some typos in so-and-so’s #1 bestseller back in 1996.”

Editor is the very definition of a fallback career option. Just like nobody ever says, “I wanna be a junkie when I grow up,” nobody says, “I wanna be an editor when I grow up,” either. Editor is the consolation prize in the literary job market. Ask yourself, is that the kind of person you really want impacting your career, someone who slid into a position filled with tedious shit-work just because it was kinda sorta in the same neighborhood as the dashed and discarded dreams of their misspent youth? Not me and you shouldn’t either.

The editor fallacy is willfully perpetuated by the traditional industry. It’s a ruse designed to keep writers down. I’m not kidding, read some of the criticisms floating around. You would seriously think writers turned out little more than random chunks of directionless text that no mere mortal could possibly make sense of if an editor didn’t mold it into shape first. Are you gonna take that? I mean, you fancy yourself a storyteller yet you don’t know if the story you’re telling sucks or not without third party involvement? Why should I plunk down my hard earned cash for the offerings of your literary vision when you don’t even understand or have confidence in it?

My point is that the notion of the infallibility of the editor, and their necessity in shaping a writer’s efforts can be an insidious one. It devalues the writer. If a book is a house, it makes the writer’s output akin to raw lumber and lifts the editor to the role of carpenter. The traditional industry thrived on this relationship dynamic for years, it helped keep writers in their place at the bottom. Otherwise, they, as a group, might have wanted something outrageous like being fairly compensated for work that produces every single dollar in industry revenues.

It’s a new world now. You are the raw material, the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician and the painter. At best, the editor is the day laborer who comes in and sweeps up the leftover dirt off the floor before you move in. Do you think carpenters ask the advice of a broom jockey on hanging joices joists? Would an electrician appreciate getting notes from the sweeper detailing how he could run the wiring to the ceiling fans more efficiently? Don’t get me wrong, writers aren’t infallible by any stretch, either, but there’s one key difference…you’re the fucking writer!

In the old model, the perception in a lot of ways, was that the writer works for the editor, true or not. In the new model, the editor unquestionably works for the writer. Big difference. Now, when your editor suggests that you rewrite chapters 8 through 14 and add a talking sewer rat as comic relief to break up the tension in your drama about an unjustly convicted man’s experiences with prison rape, you can feel free to snort coffee out your nose, laughing hysterically as you work on cancelling the check you paid him or her with. The old way, you’d laugh a bit then cringe at the inevitable realization that you’ll probably end up doing it if you ever wanted to retain any hope of seeing that book in print.

Look, it’s your book, it’s your story, no one on the planet knows it better than you. If you’re going to be a storyteller, believe in the stories you write. That doesn’t mean don’t seek out input or listen if somebody offers up some interesting ideas. But even then, ideas are just that. You’re the one who has to take the grains of inspiration from those ideas and shape them into the story you want to tell. You can’t rely on anyone else to do that for you, otherwise, it’s not your story anymore.

I’ve been a bit harsh on editors here, unfairly so in some ways, but I’m making a point. The editor is no longer among the gatekeeper class you need to appease. You don’t have to do everything they say, and you definitely don’t work for them. Editors are a tool for indie writers that, if properly utilized can be beneficial. Got that? The editor is at the service of the writer. And even then, they’re still only one tool of many. And don’t ever forget that they work for you now.

A truly great editor is almost worth their weight in gold. My descriptions of editors in this piece are obviously exaggerated, but make no mistake, those people exist. Very likely in far greater numbers than anyone will openly admit. Where a great editor can add quite a bit to your efforts, a lousy editor can do just as much, if not more to destroy and detract from your work. And there are an abundance of lousy editors out there, more than not, I believe. Editors are no different than any other field of endeavor. There’s four or five bad to mediocre ones for every good one, and out of every 50 or so good ones, you might see one reach exceptional status. The key is to recognize the difference. If you’re not confident in your storytelling prowess, if you can’t defend the merits of your work and the artistic choices you make, you’re actively making your work susceptible to the heavy hand of a bad editor.

Despite what you might think with my prior insults, there are quality editors out there available for hire, and in the right circumstance with the proper context, they can help polish your work. But any old editor isn’t necessarily a good editor. One of the worst things that can happen to a person is to fail on someone’s terms other than your own. Giving an editor, any editor, even the good ones, carte blanche to screw around with your story is setting yourself up to fail through no fault of your own. Unless, of course, you consider changing key elements of your story against your artistic judgment to appease an editor a fault of your own. I do.

Editor skills aren’t some magical capability that’s unattainable to writers. Anyone with the right motivation can learn quality editing. It’ll surprise you how much improvement creeps into your work just by having an editor’s mentality in the back of your mind. This isn’t to say you should do everything yourself, although I am one of the apparently few people who believes you can successfully do it that way if you’re willing to be meticulous and put in the time. It’s always better to have multiple sets of eyes go over your work. Just don’t ever forget that you’re in charge. It’s your story, your world, you make the rules.

I’ve said before that many people, probably most, don’t truly understand the dynamic shift going on right now. Many of us still approach the new possibilities as simply an extension of the way things were always done. It’s not. Digital is a genetically different business than traditional, though they may appear similar today in the early stages, they really are quite divergent, and growing more so as time and technology expands. Old models can be adapted and find a niche, but nothing translates easily and without effort. Don’t hold to any particular dogma, and that especially includes slavish devotion to an editor.

Tell your stories, the way you want. It’s been a long time since writers have had that ability on a wide scale. And don’t listen to the naysayers screaming in comments sections all over the web about having your work “properly vetted”. That’s a holdover from a past that, quite frankly, limited and exploited the writer. It also served to homogenize much of the content. You ever wonder why so many cookie cutter books, both in substance and tone, exist? That, my friends, is the work of editors. Nobody can steal a writer’s voice more effectively than an editor. Nobody can suck the life out of a story better than an editor. That’s not to say editors don’t have a place, they do. It’s just a far less influential one than it has been.

Editors are not higher on the literary food chain than writers. They are little more than a hired hand to provide a specific service on the writer’s terms. They are your employee. You’d do very well to remember that, even if you have to block out the shouting of those who don’t yet see that things have changed.

Oh yeah, about that “lazy and not a complete writer crack,” sure, I was shooting over the top, just trying to get your attention, but I’m sticking to it. Prove me wrong. Please.

The Great Lie Behind DRM: Just like that, a little truth seeps out…

Yesterday, I ran across this piece by internet maven (and author) Cory Doctorow detailing the contents of a letter sent by HatchetteUK and its imprint Little Brown to its writers who also publish in other territories with publishers who don’t use DRM, principally Macmillan imprint Tor, presumably. It set off a bit of a pissing contest with Little Brown’s CEO Ursula Mackenzie. In the letter, Hatchette makes a rather interesting demand of its writers, that they force their publishers in other territories to place DRM on their ebooks. Here’s Doctorow:

“I’ve just seen a letter sent to an author who has published books under Hachette’s imprints in some territories and with Tor Books and its sister companies in other territories (Tor is part of Macmillan). The letter, signed by Little, Brown U.K. CEO Ursula Mackenzie, explains to the author that Hachette has “acquired exclusive publication rights in our territories from you in good faith,” but warns that in other territories, Tor’s no-DRM policy “will make it difficult for the rights granted to us to be properly protected.” Hachette’s proposed solution: that the author insist Tor use DRM on these titles.

“The letter also contains language that will apparently be included in future Hachette imprint contracts, language that would require authors to “ensure that any of his or her licensees of rights in territories not licensed under this agreement” will use DRM.

Let’s forget for a moment that territoriality, once essential in publishing, is quickly becoming threatened by digital encroachment, and will soon be little more than yet another publisher-inflicted hindrance between readers and the books they want, if it isn’t already. (It probably is.) Primarily, I was a bit taken aback, as was Doctorow, by the audacity of a publisher dictating in pretty forceful, albeit polite, terms to writers what they can do with rights the publisher doesn’t own. Doctorow himself said, “Hachette has balls the size of Mars if it thinks it can dictate what other publishers do with titles in territories where it has no rights.”

He’s absolutely right about that, and, if it had been me who received one of those letters, I’m pretty sure my two-word reply would consist of the terms “piss” and “off.” If you’d like to tell me what I can do with the rights to my work, then buy them. Otherwise, you’re entitled to your opinion and I’m entitled to laugh at it.

Anyway, Doctorow went on with his usual anti-DRM line, one I personally find a lot to agree with. This, in turn, spurred Mackenzie to release a statement clarifying their position, taking a few jabs at Doctorow in the process. Here’s Mackenzie, as reported via The Bookseller:

“In the statement, Mackenzie confirmed that the publisher did plan to change the wording in its
contracts, but said the modification was designed to make the position clearer and that “variations” on the boiler-plate could be negotiated.

“Our new wording is clearer and we will, as always, negotiate variations of that wording with the many parties with which we trade, nearly all of whom agree with the basic principles of our DRM policy.”

So Hatchette is going to make you follow their terms whoever you publish with, in whatever territory, whether they own the rights or not, but don’t worry, it’s only negotiable boilerplate. Go back and read that second paragraph from Mackenzie again. I’ll wait. Sounds negotiable, doesn’t it? Especially the parts about variations of that wording and the various parties who nearly all agree with their position. Sure, you can negotiate to your heart’s content, you just can’t actually change anything substantive. Sounds perfectly reasonable.

Mackenzie goes on, and here’s the kicker, for me at least. In her spirited condemnation of Doctorow, she let slip a dirty little secret about said DRM and what its real purpose actually is. (Hint: it’s not fighting piracy):

“Mackenzie, who is also president of the Publishers Association, was critical of Doctorow’s position on DRM, saying that it contained “the usual long list of anti-DRM arguments”. Mackenzie stated: “We are fully aware that DRM does not inhibit determined pirates or even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to download DRM removal software. The central point is that we are in favour of DRM because it inhibits file-sharing between the mainstream readers who are so valuable to us and our authors.”

You get it now? They know DRM has no effect on piracy, and they know it doesn’t stop people with the moderate technical knowledge to do an end-around. They use it specifically to handicap what their good, paying customers can do with their legally purchased ebooks. Nice. At least, for once, I can say someone from big publishing was actually honest, for a change. If I owned that company, Mackenzie would have a pink slip on her desk this morning, along with a security guard standing by to make sure the front door didn’t hit her on the ass on the way out. Even if I willfully supported using technical means to screw the people buying my products, I would be incensed that the head of my company openly admitted it.

There, in a nutshell, is the giant lie beneath the concept of DRM. It has nothing to do with anything but creating constraints on the majority of the ebook buying public, then profiting from those artificial restrictions. If readers really were valuable to them, as she says, they wouldn’t treat them so poorly. Their value isn’t in a loyal customer relationship sense, but in an overtly exploitative one. Most of us out here paying attention already knew that, of course, it’s just a little surprising to me to see someone perpetrating the DRM fraud to openly say as much.

Mackenzie goes on:

“We are glad that we have adhered to a model of selling e-books one by one at fair prices and protected by DRM. This model is working very well; although some would like us to change it, the risks are huge and the upside is negligible.”

Of course she’s glad. She’s not the one paying overpriced rates for intentionally handicapped products. Fair prices from who’s point of view? Again, she let something slip. It’s their higher than needed pricing structure that’s protected by DRM, not the IP itself. How can you even begin to justify ebook prices anywhere near print prices in the same sentence that you admit to purposefully limiting them, effectively removing much of the tangible value that exists with a print book? You can do it because this has a lot to do with defending print. Charge higher prices while offering less value with ebooks makes print look better by comparison. That’s the theory, anyway.

Doctorow, apparently always thinking ahead, actually had a response to this in his piece before she even wrote her’s:

“If the Big Six thought Wal-Mart and the other big-box retailers had them over a barrel, just wait until the DRM vendors do to them what they did to the music industry before it abandoned DRM in a Hail Mary attempt to get some competition back into the music retail market.”

Yes, by all means, let’s follow in the music industry’s footsteps with DRM, because, you know, it only very nearly wiped out their business, but hey, this is publishing, we know best, right? Who was it that spurred all that damage to the music industry, again, after DRM locked themselves into a platform? Oh, that’s right, it was Apple, who leveraged their dominance in the mp3 player market with the iPod to redefine digital music sales. This is also the same Apple who’s iBookstore agency pricing arrangement has gotten publishers into serious, potentionally deathly hot water with anti trust investigators.

It’s also the same Apple who’s currently dominating the tablet market with the iPad. In 2012 alone, Apple is responsible for 64% of the the tablet sales for the entire planet, more than six times as many as the second place company, Samsung. By the way, Apple is also suing Samsung for those tablets, with chances of a win looking pretty good while doing it. Smartphones are also fast becoming an ebook reader of choice for many. Guess who’s a major player in that market too? Apple’s iPhone. Oh yeah, let’s totally lock ourselves into DRM in an environment where Apple is the dominant device manufacturer. What could possibly go wrong?

Not only is DRM ineffective against piracy, and easily circumvented, its only effective use seems to be exploiting paying customers who lack the expertise to get around it, as Mackenzie basically admitted. But much like publishers exploiting these poor, unsuspecting readers, DRM also serves Apple’s purposes as the dominant device manufacturer, which they will use to exploit publishers much like they did with the iPod and music companies. And all the while, the entire industry ties itself in knots over Amazon, just like the music industry did with Napster while simultaneously handing the keys to the store to Apple. This would all be hilarious if it weren’t so damn serious.

It reminds me of a line from the recent remake of Battlestar Galactica, “This has all happened before and it will happen again.” Unfortunately, while it had a good, often great run, the finale of that show ultimately sucked. Hopefully, publishers will wake up before it’s too late or find themselves facing an ending much like it.

Correction: Originally, I stated that the iPhone was the leader in smartphone sales. Turns out, they are actually third, trailing Samsung (who Apple is suing over their phones, as well as their tablets) and Nokia, who is falling precipitously but still a good ways ahead of Apple in marketshare. My confusion was probably spurred on by first hand observation. Of the 30 or so people in my immediate circle with smartphones, easily 2/3 have an iPhone (I don’t. I have an HTC. I’m contrary like that) and I’ve heard most of the holdouts suggest that they’ll be getting an iPhone on their next upgrade. Maybe they’re just more popular here in Maryland, I don’t know, but everybody and their brother seems to have one, particularly younger people. Also, I can count the number of Nokia smartphones I’ve seen folks with on the extended fingers of one hand clenched in a fist. Even so, my point stands. Apple’s marketshare on phones is growing, even if they’re not yet at the top. They’ve got Samsung tied up in court on patent related issues and Nokia is falling backwards. It’s not out of the realm of possibility the iPhone could reach #1 in the not-too-distant future. Their tablet is unquestionably dominant, however, and when talking about ebooks, the tablet is king.

Two Theories: Why can’t we in publishing all just get along?

For a while now, I’ve been trying to understand the resentment toward self publishers by some in the traditionally published writing community. I get why publishers don’t like it–it’s opened up massive amounts of new, lower-priced competition that threatens not just their sales figures but the entire cost structure of the industry their large infrastructures depend on. Simultaneously, it’s also given writers, who were essentially a captive supplier, leverage to fight against potentially onerous contract terms and even the capacity to walk away from a deal, which was virtually unthinkable even five years ago. I totally get the rhetoric from publishers.

Writers who dismiss or otherwise demonize self publishing, on the other hand, I don’t get at all. These are new opportunities for you to make money. They are opportunities that can get you better terms in your contract, or more money if used properly. It also has the potential to drive the industry toward more writer-friendly terms for a change. There is more access to more readers the world over than ever before and it can all be done keeping most of the proceeds in the actual creators’ pockets, something else virtually unheard of on a wide scale until very recently. As a writer, it makes very little sense to me to fight against this tide.

So I figure there has to be a reason for this. I’ve had two somewhat conjoining theories bouncing around in my head lately and I can’t decide which is more likely. It may well be both, or it could just be as simple as abject fear of change.

My first theory is of the writer’s ego. One of the most commonly referred to benefits of traditional publishing is the validation factor. In some circles, being chosen by a publisher is worn as a badge of honor and used equally as a bludgeon against those who either haven’t yet achieved that contract or who eschew that entire process. Imagine all those years of effort trying to convince the gatekeeper set of your worth, all the mountains of rejection, humiliation, restrictive contract deals you’ve subjected yourself to just to get inside those walls.  Then one day, very suddenly, a whole bunch of other writers start skipping that path altogether, and worse yet, a significant and increasing number of them are selling books and making money at rates only the upper echelons of traditional writers exceed.

What good is that validation you slaved away earning when another writer who doesn’t have it can sell books right next to yours with almost no definable difference from the reader’s point of view? The strength of that validation certainly isn’t what they’d been led to believe it was their entire working lives. Even more, the new ways are much more democratic. It doesn’t matter what school you went to, or if you even went to school at all. It doesn’t matter how many prestigious writing programs you’ve been involved in or how many literary awards you’ve won. A poor housewife from Nebraska who penned her first novel eight weeks ago has a (relatively) equal chance of being a best seller as the most critically acclaimed writer out there.

The writing world has always had an ugly elitest side to it. That was never an issue when virtually all the successful writers were part of the same pipeline, born of that shared experience. But now that large numbers of writers outside of that framework are finding success, it’s not only threatening the business model of their publishers, it’s threatening their very self image.

When outside validation becomes crucial to your worldview, anything that undermines those doing the validating becomes a target. So theory number one is that some writers are resentful because self publishers are finding ways to avoid the crap they were forced to subject themselves to, and their memberships in the exclusive traditional publishing club no longer carry the same cache they once did, and may well be declining by the day.

The second reason is simply laziness. Well, not laziness, exactly, but complacency and a lack of desire to try new and different things. Given the proliferation of comments I’ve seen coming from trad writers characterizing self publishing as a short cut and a lazy choice (Google Sue Grafton for the most recent example) I am beginning to believe they’ve got it backwards. Look, the stark reality is that it’s much more difficult to do this stuff essentially by yourself than with the backing of a giant corporate publisher. To suggest otherwise is to be purposely naive. If you happen to be one of the fortunate writers inside the gates who moves books, you get lots of support the other 95% of traditional writers don’t even get, let alone self publishers. The notion of tossing that off and self publishing is to take on significant responsibilities you currently pass on. In that respect, it’s the traditional writers who are shying away from extra work. Not saying they’re wrong for doing that, given their situation, they’re not. My problem comes when they cast aspersions on the work ethic of others when they, themselves, stay away from these activities because of the added risks and extra effort necessary.

Let’s be honest here. Writers like Grafton, Ewan Morrison and Scott Turow do little more than just write. Even the smallest one-person self publishing operation is doing much more than just writing. Criticizing other writers as lazy or taking shortcuts looks like sour grapes when their paths are far more ambitious than yours, requiring more effort in numerous directions than simply writing a book and sending it to your editor (I know, I’m oversimplifying, but just look at the bitching by trad writers about publishers making them actually, god forbid, promote themselves more to readers. Self pubbed writers accept that as a matter of course).

For serious self pubbed writers, it’s not simply about writing the book. It’s also about publishing the book. And it’s about selling the book. Three inter-related but very different activities. And, to top it off, writing the next book and starting over again. That’s a lot of interconnected hats to wear, and the ones who do it successfully wear them all very well. Lazy’s got nothing to do with it. Lazy writers who flock to self publishing will find themselves discouraged, overwhelmed and out of the picture soon enough. Self publishing is not an easy answer, a shortcut or the lazy way. It’s incredibly difficult to do well. For top tier trad writers to point fingers and call self publishers lazy shows their ignorance of what’s actually involved. Or maybe it’s not. One of the oldest political tricks in the book is to accuse your adversary of the very weaknesses you fear in yourself. But why are we adversaries in the first place? It doesn’t have to be that way. And you certainly don’t have to be openly resentful to those looking to blaze new trails you have no interest in, and willfully taking on the extra work that entails.

Do these writers have a point that there are a lot of shitty self published books out there? Do some writers take the relative ease of getting something live and for sale now and abuse it? Absolutely no doubt. But in case you didn’t notice, there are people like that in every industry and every walk of life, even traditional publishing. I’ve read a lot of shitty books, seen a lot of shitty tv shows and movies, heard a lot of shitty music on the radio over my lifetime, and you know what they almost all have in common? They were vetted by a media company gatekeeper. Shitty work happens in all creative pursuits, no matter how big the bank account of the producer. No one is immune to it. The ratio of great work to crap is always gonna lean heavily on the crap side, no matter the system. Basic human taste and subjectiveness guarantees that.

I think the problem can be illustrated with a simple mental image. Imagine Grafton, Morrison and Turow kicking back catching some rays by the pool inside the gated publisher walls. Suddenly, the gates swing open, and all the outside rabble comes pouring in, doing cannonballs, splashing water everywhere, their shouts and laughter almost deafening. Just generally throwing the relaxed, exlusive poolside scene into chaos. Now, those three are no longer the fortunate few who get the pool to themselves, but just a couple folks in the big crowd diving in. If I were in their shoes, I might resent that kind of development, too. Ah, who am I kidding? I’d be grateful for the company. I’m sure the conversations at that poolside were getting kinda stale before those gates burst open.

Moaning and Groaning: Publishers’ supporters get more hard line after being shot down by the DOJ

So I’m catching up on my reading of industry news and I noticed that, since the DOJ pretty much laughed off the anti-settlement brigade’s rhetoric, the tone in some circles has gotten even sharper, more filled with doomsaying than it was before, and it was already pretty severe. Personally, I found a lot to like about the DOJ’s response to comments, which is something I very rarely say about any government agency. I especially appreciate that they weren’t swayed by the 10 to 1 ratio against that the traditional publishing backers’ letter writing campaigns generated.

I still believe there was a fatal flaw in their logic. In encouraging people to parrot the anti-Amazon party line, it created a raft of letters that failed to address the principle matter of law in the case, worse yet, it may have vindicated it. Very few, if any, of the letters substantively refuted the claims of collusion, instead using unsubstantiated claims of Amazon’s predatory pricing as justification for the publishers’ actions. In this way, many of the comments, while attempting to defend the publishers, essentially admitted collusion took place. It’s like saying, “Yes, your honor, we did it, but we’ve got a really good excuse.”

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that this kind of approach carried no water with a group of prosecutors. If anything, the arrogance of it seems to have further emboldened and entrenched the DOJ in its beliefs. This could end up being extraordinarily bad news for Penguin, MacMillan and Apple if they actually force an annoyed DOJ into court.

But that’s an issue for a later date if the holdouts don’t come to their senses and settle before they end up spending absurd amounts of money defending a pricing scheme likely to be obsolete before the first witness is ever called.

I’ve got two articles I read this week that, I think, illustrates both the attitude of superiority and the over-the-top, end of days hyperbole that’s making the rounds now that the industry seems to be realizing Uncle Sam isn’t going to do their bidding, no matter how many campaign contributions they make to Chuck Schumer. It’s a sad commentary on the state of things these days when buying a congressman is an easier accomplishment than competing in the market.

I’ve taken five points from each of these two articles to discuss. The first is a particularly single-minded post by Dennis Johnson, co-founder of the publisher Melville House, a staunch traditionalist.

Before I begin, let me say that I find it odd that such a virulent supporter of publishers founded a company named after Herman Melville, a man who largely had a tenuous if not outright bad relationship with publishers. Most of his books had to be published in London initially because American publishers wouldn’t touch them, and even then, they were never able to generate significant sales despite the fact he wrote some of the greatest works in the English language.  Rather infamously, Melville was paid a grand total of less than $600 for his masterpiece Moby Dick. I’m sure if he were to rise from the grave today, Melville would have more than a few choice words for publishers, particularly considering his actually burnt the unsold copies of an epic poem he wrote after he couldn’t pay for them. Comforting to see some things never change, like publishers’ contempt for writers.

1. “At the start of agency, for example, Amazon controlled 90 percent of ebook sales. There’s nothing “highly speculative” about calling that a monopoly.”

Except for the fact that Amazon’s large share came about because they took a then-under utilized ebook market and drug it into the mainstream essentially by themselves. No major publishers paid much heed to it at the time, very few competitors showed any interest in jumping in before Amazon charted a course, and certainly none on their scale. Once Amazon started making real money, though, that 90% share dropped significantly, just as you’d expect a trendsetter would when a previously empty playing field started filling up. It wasn’t like Amazon entered a thriving ebook market and swiped that giant share of business from others. They essentially created the market when almost no one else had the interest, desire or the balls to do it. He’s right, though, partly. It’s not “highly speculative” to call Amazon a monopoly in that instance, it’s outright bullshit to do so.

2. “The Sherman Antitrust Act, and its descendent the Robinson-Patman Act, clearly define loss-leader under-pricing as a predatory tactic rather obviously intended to “drive out competition and obtain monopoly pricing power.”

So when does the DOJ actions start up against every retail business in this country? Loss Leader pricing is so commonplace we barely even notice it any more. Its use is far from being “rather obviously” about driving out competition, either, far more commonly used on a day to day basis virtually everywhere things are sold, as a means of bringing customers into your store.

On the other hand, what the publishers did with the agency scheme was retail price maintenance, which up until 2007, was illegal in essentially all its forms. A Supreme Court decision (which overturned damn near a century of precedent, by the way) granted a limited allowance for the behavior under the “rule of reason” which Apple and the publishers flaunted by colluding pretty much in public and gloating about how their plans were going to screw Amazon, inhibit the ebook market and raise prices on ebooks. The publishers are only in legal trouble today because of their egos, stupidity and total lack of discretion. That and, unlike Amazon, they actually broke the law.

3. “The DOJ cited arguments from David Gaughran, writing on behalf of 186 self-published authors who thanked Amazon for ‘creating, for the first time, real competition in publishing by charting a viable path for self-published books. But when was it, exactly, that publishers prevented authors from self-publishing?

Is he kidding? Certainly, anyone with the money could publish a book, but getting that in book stores or retail outlets dominated by traditional publishing was an entirely different story. Publishers’ entire business model was one of dominating the channels of distribution. What good was publishing a book if you were essentially locked out of the principle sales channels?

Preventing writers from having any access to the market was their stock in trade, creating a ready supply of material they could pay as little as possible for, which is why writers get such a low portion of revenues today when they are principally responsible for the product. And, really, anyone who thinks there was anything close to a viable path to self publish pre-Amazon is either dangerously ignorant of reality or purposely being disingenuous.

4. “The process of public involvement was, apparently, meaningless. But there are better things to remember right now. For one, take this for what it is: The DOJ has found its own case sound. The good guys, meanwhile, have yet to have their day in court.”

So the DOJ was supposed to take a vote and ignore the law because a large number of traditional publishing’s disciples said so? The truest thing in the DOJ’s response was that the overwhelming majority of anti-settlement comments came from people and businesses profiting directly from the price fixing scheme. Like I said, I’m actually impressed they saw through it.

In truth, I think the public involvement stage was very useful. It illustrated the biases of those supporting the publishers who, despite their numbers, produced no compelling arguments for a lessening of terms. It also showed that the truly independent voices who, not coincidentally, are finding success without the need to break the law, were heard even though they could have been swamped by traditional publishing’s comment generating machine. If anything, unlike many other areas of life these days, this looks like the powerful corporations flaunting the law will be held to task while consumers, innovators and legitimate competitors in the market will win the day.

5. “The ludicrous charges, the fact of such paltry and pitiful support for them, the wide variety of opponents — the entire industry and then some — roused to speak out — all provide reason for hope.”

Yeah, reason to hope you guys hurry up and go bankrupt. Seriously? Ludicrous charges? Pitiful and paltry support? No and no. The charges look pretty damn sound to me. And evidently, those of us who choose to disagree don’t matter. Hell, we’re not even in the industry, apparently, despite selling books professionally. For money. To actual readers. See, it’s not that public input didn’t matter, it’s that public input he disagreed with didn’t matter, and it certainly shouldn’t have mattered enough to beat back their superior numbers and unsubstantiated inflamatory rhetoric. How dare the DOJ side with the law and actually aggreived parties who have paid tens of millions more for ebooks than would have been possible without collusion! They sent 800 carbon copy, Amazon-is-evil letters, didn’t the DOJ get the memo? Won’t somebody please think about the culture?

Shortly after reading that piece, I read this one by John Barber of the Globe and Mail. The hits just keep on coming in this one, including cameos by everbody’s favorite bitchy traditional writers, Ewan Morrison and Scott Turow, proving that even the Atlantic Ocean can’t keep arrogance and stupidity apart.

1. “Authors are losing income as sales shift to heavily discounted, royalty-poor and easily pirated ebooks. Journalists are suffering pay cuts and job losses as advertising revenue withers. Floods of amateurs willing to work for nothing are chasing freelance writers out of the trade. And all are scrambling to salvage their livelihoods as the revolutionary doctrine of “free culture” obliterates old definitions of copyright.”

Being as he made several points here, I’ll address each in order. First, ebooks are only royalty-poor because publishers want them that way. And, to be fair, print books are pretty damn royalty poor in most instances, too. Next, do you know who’s not seeing pay cuts and job losses as advertising flees newspapers? The CEOs, who are “suffering” with giant bonuses and golden parachutes for all those job losses they’ve instituted while simultaneously playing the fiddle on any kind of digital transition as their industry segment burns to the ground.

Third, as conglomerates bought up any and every publication they could find during the acquisition rush years ago, many publishers began getting tight with freelance budgets. Even at the height of profitability before the bottom fell out, prices paid to freelancers were stagnant or negative. Once the advertising revenue started to fall, they used it as a convenient excuse to put the screws to writers even more than usual. The flood of free content he refers to was largely spurred on by publishers looking for ways to spend as little as humanly possible on content, quality be damned. The issue isn’t that there’s work out there available for free, it’s that publishers refuse to pay even modest wages for quality writing despite the fact that content is the only reason they have the ability to attract any advertising at all.

And, finally, who’s perverted the concept of copyright more, the “free culture” people, as he calls them, who advocate sharing and the rights of consumers or the media companies, who lobby for laws like DMCA and SOPA, and push through things like the Mickey Mouse rule that now has copyright extended to life of the creator plus 70 years?

The extensions and increasingly stringent punishments for even minor infringement has created an atmosphere where it makes a lot of sense to argue that copyright needs to be looked at anew. The parts of copyright law that support derivative works and allow creators to build off of the progress of those before, fair use and the first sale doctrine, and the public domain and furtherance of culture have all been imperiled by the steady rights grabs of media companies who have been engaging in a systematic effort at maintaining copyright in perpetuity for decades now. If you’re going to cry about copyright being broken, don’t do so while advocating for those who actually broke it.

2. “(According to best-selling UK author Ewan Morrison) The result will be the destruction of vital institutions that have supported “the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years.” In short, he predicts, “There will be no more professional writers in the future.”

I’m sure when Morrison uses the term “professional writers”, he’s referring to people like himself. We can only hope for a future with as few of those kinds of “professionals” as possible. It’s not his writing talents I have issue with, I’ve never actually read any of his work, it’s that he has some ridiculously backwards, elitist ideas along with a generous helping of contempt for anyone who circumvents the traditional getekeepers.

Morrison has said some pretty crazy stuff, for instance, this piece in the Guardian where he argues against social media but makes some larger points about traditional and self publishing. Be sure to read the comments because he has numerous additional points there, including a rather entertaining discussion with Joe Konrath. My favorite part is when he excoriates Konrath for daring to encourage others to eschew traditional and embark in self publishing by saying, “It is unfair and cruel to propagate a model for others which can only ever work for the few.” After I stopped laughing and wiped the tears from my eyes, the full audaciousness of that comment really sunk in. After all, Konrath has a long, long way to go to rate with traditional publishers in propagating models that only work for the few. The sad part is that it seems Morrison doesn’t even get the rich, creamy irony.

These statements are what I’m talking about when I say the rhetoric has gotten more severe. The highest institutions of culture will crumble and working writers will totally vanish. Talk about self-important! Publishers largely gave up their mantle of cultural protectors, if they ever had one in the first place, when they became little more than profit engines for larger conglomerates. It’s pretty obvious, too, yet Morrison seems to believe that writers should willingly accept lousy royalties so these publishers can keep exploiting them to the benefit of their parent company’s bottom line. Being self published and actually keeping a fair share of what your work earns is selfish, according to Morrison. Of course, he just might see it that way because more and more writers earning outside of traditional may jeopardize his next advance. Besides, if publishers weren’t portrayed as purveyors of culture, then there’d be no moral argument for their survival, and that would make for even more specious rants, if that’s possible.

3. “(Author Scott Turow) has drawn heavy criticism from digital partisans for defending the diminishing rights of “legacy publishers” currently under U.S. Justice Department investigation for allegedly fixing ebook prices.”

Diminishing rights? I wasn’t aware publishers had the right to colluded and fix prices. Didn’t know they had the right to rip off authors through shady corporate finanglings like Harlequin just got sued for. Wasn’t aware they had the right to snatch digital rights from contracts signed 30 years before anyone had ever heard of an ebook. Most of all, I didn’t know they had the right to operate largely free of genuine competition.

If publishers are diminishing, it’s likely for two reasons; writers have other choices now and are sick of being treated like chattel and paid slightly worse; and they’re clinging to a business model that is servicing a shrinking percentage of their customer base. But that’s the common denominator in the anti-Amazon camp, the stark refusal to admit publisher’s culpability for their own problems because it’s so much easier to make excuses for your own failings when you can pretend to be a victim.

4. “Nor is self-publishing profitable for the majority of authors, according to a recent British survey. It found that half of the writers – many no doubt lured by well-publicized tales of spectacular success achieved by a handful of fellow novices – made less than $500 a year for their efforts.”

No one was ever lured into traditional publishing by the tales of success of other writers, right? I’m sure that’s never happened. And let me just reiterate an earlier point: Herman Melville made less than $600 in total on Moby Dick. Using dollar figures in this way, especially with no context in comparison with traditionally published writers, makes for compelling soundbites while providing very little actual insight. Besides, there are a whole lot of self published writers. That survey means half of them made more than $500 a year. I’d be willing to bet that percentage isn’t far removed from traditional but I’m sure we’ll never hear about it.

5. “The livelihoods of serious writers will continue to depend directly on the health of traditional publishers, “the venture capitalists of the intellectual world,” according to Turow.”

So only writers with traditional contracts are serious? The rest of us are just dicking around out here then, huh? Writers like Turow and Morrison may have their livelihoods depend on the health of traditional publishers, but there seems to be a large and growing infrastructure that’s circumventing their control. That means the health of said publishers isn’t really a major concern in that segment. In fact, it may be just the opposite.

With fewer market obstructions from the traditional end, and less product from that side, it could well increase opportunities for success amongst those who aren’t dependant on them. But that doesn’t matter because those people won’t be serious, of course. Everyone knows you can’t be a serious writer unless you give up most of the proceeds, all creative control and any conceivable rights to your work until your great, great grandchildren are old and gray. It’s just crazy talk to say otherwise.