Stop Stealing From Your Customers! Eroding non-creator copyright protections hurts us all

The past week, I’ve been caught up in philosophical meanderings related to the digital goods business and the notion of copyright law. I’ve read quite a bit here and there around the web on the subject and I see more than a few disturbing things.

1. Most people, including creators, don’t really understand copyright

I am continually bothered by the number of writers, musicians, etc who seem to believe copyright gives them some sort of all powerful right to totally control what happens with their work, even after it’s been sold and is out in the world. Copyright doesn’t do that. It grants you a limited monopoly right to use your work commercially, nothing more. One of the primary reasons there is so much consternation about copyright is that those limitations are slowly being eroded away. Life plus 70 years is a flat-out joke that totally spits in the face of what copyright is all about. Think about this for a second and tell me that copyright’s ends of protecting the public interest even still exist: Not one single American creative work entered the public domain statutorially this year. None. Nada. Zero.

Things like the upcoming Kirtsaeng decision in the Supreme Court, depending on how they rule, and the intricate licensing schemes pioneered by the software industry and dove into whole hog by the media industry purposely erode first sale rights, giving creators control of secondary markets (or the ability to prevent them altogether). That also undermines the idea of limited protections. The newspaper industry fighting against Google News and aggregation is an all-out assault on fair use, yet another attempt to wipe away or severely lessen copyright law’s limitations.

I can’t totally blame creators who behave as though they have some kind of all encompassing powers under copyright, media companies have been working very hard behind the scenes to make it that way for their own benefit. But those limitations exist for a reason. Take them away, and the entire purpose of copyright gets perverted away from a protection that gives creators a fair chance at exclusivity for a while to try and make a buck and allows the public to benefit from these works in a way that promotes future progress. Without those limits, the very progress copyright law is supposed to promote gets stunted.

Copyright law grants you the opportunity to make money, it doesn’t guarantee it, and the value to society on the whole is supposed to be balanced against creator’s interests, protected from the very exploitation the erosion of those limits is actively causing.

2. Very few on the creator side seem to give a damn about consumer rights

This, to me, is the most disturbing trend I see emerging, especially when it comes from Indie authors. You can’t talk out of one side of your mouth about appealing better to readers, then ignore or argue against the idea that readers also possess protections under copyright law that we’re actively taking away through the licensing scheme ebooks are sold under. The digital goods market is built upon a foundation of taking away consumer rights. What’s worse, is that we also have creators out there throwing around loaded terms like piracy and stealing that aren’t accurate. Many times, they’re used to demonize people bahaving in ways they always have with regards to sharing material. Every man, woman and child in this country commits an infringing act on par with downloading a torrent file every single day. Probably several. We just don’t see it and most probably don’t even realize we’re doing it. The internet has brought part of that behavior out into the light of day. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening on a major scale before the internet. It absolutely was. It didn’t destroy these industries, in fact, I believe it made them considerably stronger. File sharing won’t destroy these industries today, either. What will, however, is if we continue on a path that makes copyright effectively infinite, steals rights from consumers at every opportunity, and tries to force unprecedented controls onto people for works they’ve already bought. It also doesn’t help if creators act like entitled assholes, throwing accusations of theft around while totally ignoring the fact that their entire business model is based on gutting consumer rights. Take a deep breath, go read up on the history of copyright and try to grow a little perspective.

And remember, the perversions of copyright are being driven by giant media conglomerates for their own ends. They don’t care about your rights as a creator any more than they do the rights of consumers. Don’t confuse your interests with theirs. When they’re done wiping out consumer rights, they’re very likely to turn to undermining yours, if they haven’t already. And don’t expect what fans you have left to sympathize when that happens.

3. Everyone seems to believe digital goods are infinite despite the obvious reality that they’re not

I still don’t understand how otherwise intelligent people buy into this heaping load of bullshit. A big part of the argument justifying swiping consumer rights is that digital goods are infinitely perfect. Come on! Do you really believe that we’ll be reading these same epub or mobi files on these same devices five years from now? Or ten? Technological progress is just going to come to a grinding halt, is it? We’re not going to have better, more capable devices in the future with improved or even radically different formats for these works?

If consumers don’t have any ownership rights in these products, what’s to stop an entire generation of culture from being essentially erased on the whim of corporate interests the next time a shift in standards or new technology comes along? One of the key arguments I’ve seen against second hand goods is the idea that no one will ever buy new if the used versions are identical. To begin with, nothing gets sold second hand without it being bought first hand. And don’t give me the line about people wholesale copying the same file and selling it over and over again. That’s a tech problem no one has bothered to solve because the entire industry was built upon the notion that readers were never going to have these rights. More importantly, when we do have a media shift of sorts, these current files will no longer be identical or the best thing going. If we have resale rights, I could be buying today’s epub files cheaply used or choose to buy the newest holographic version that hits the market in 2025. The long tail may be somewhat infinite, but that doesn’t mean the specific containers we’re using today are. I’m not a big fan of the notion that corporate interests can remove a giant swath of our creative culture just by switching standards or technology. Show me where in copyright law that kind of thing is allowed. It runs directly counter to its stated intent of benefitting the culture.

My perusings through this issue, mostly because Amazon filed a patent they may never even use, have been pretty eye-opening. As much as I love ebooks, and the new digital frontier, there’s always been this nagging little voice in the back of my head and I finally figured out what it’s saying: “Hypocrite!” Despite the fact that I frequently argued against increasingly controlling software licenses during my years in the industry, I never really connected the fact that, when I sell an ebook to a reader, I’m engaging in the same activity that I felt was so exploitative from the other side. I’m starting to get a picture of the weaknesses in selling digital goods, and most all of them stem from the erosion of limits in copyright law. Economic karma, perhaps. It may seem odd that I, as a writer who earns money because of copyright, would argue against more power granted to me as a creator, but I take the long view. It’s simply bad business to rip off the people paying us, and that’s what we’ve been doing from day one. By advocating for or even turning a blind eye to the giant theft of customers’ rights we’ve all taken part in, we’ve created a system that is already doing damage to our culture. Copyright doesn’t just protect creators, it protects consumers and society on the whole in a fine balancing act. What it shouldn’t be doing is warping that balance in support of business models that wouldn’t function without the self serving perversions.

Say what you like about copyright, but its value is much more than simply protecting my rights as a creator. Our system has lurched away from any semblance of balance, and it’s getting more slanted every day.

Over the past few years, I’ve read many articles from creators containing a plea for people to “stop stealing” from artists through downloading. I’d like to end this by throwing that plea back at creators.

Stop stealing from your customers!

Here are the links to the other copyright related pieces I’ve written lately, for you reading pleasure.

The Benefits of Globalization Don’t Apply to the Little People

Second Hand Blues: First Sale Rights and Used eBooks

Amazon and the Mystery of the Great Used eBooks

Amazon and The Mystery of the Great Used eBooks

I am finding the notion of first sale rights and used ebooks pretty fascinating these days. I wrote a bit yesterday about how I suspect that taking away first sale rights from consumers has damaged the book business. Today, I read this piece by Marcus Wohlsen for Wired, completely wrapped in consternation over Amazon’s patent filing for a digital goods resale scheme. There’s a few points in the article I’d like to discuss. I’m not a lawyer, so these are simply my opinions on how copyright law, particularly first sale, might affect Amazon’s actions with regards to used digital stuff.

“Digital content is infinitely reproducible. No technological limit exists to how many times a single digital original can be copied and resold.”

No technological limit exists because nobody’s bothered to implement an effective one. And maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t all that fancy DRM we’ve had shoved down our throats a technological limitation to copying? Pretty sure that exists. It may not work very well, or might be crazy-easy to circumvent, but it exists. The entire ebook market has grown under the assumption that consumers had no right of resale, therefore no screaming need to invent one. But look, ReDigi is getting sued for its used digital business and they have a method to limit copying. Amazon’s patent here is another. If second hand digital goods becomes a reality, you can bet there’ll be numerous technical methods to deal with this post haste.

As for copying infinitely for resale, that doesn’t even apply in this case. What Amazon’s talking about here seems to be totally in-house. They already know who bought what and how many times. They’re suggesting a scheme to resell the licenses not so much the actual ebooks. There’s no way somebody copying an ebook bought from Amazon is going to be selling it over and over again without Amazon being willfully complicit. They have zero motivation to engage in something so risky and outright stupid. There is no chance anyone will be selling multiple copies of the same ebook in the system Amazon’s trying to patent.

“Just as with physical books, publishers would only have a say — or get a cut — the first time a customer buys a copy of an e-book. The second, third and fourth sales of that “same” e-book would be purely under Amazon’s control.”

That would totally depend on how this was executed. If a first sale use is exerted to allow the resale, then it’s actually the customer who has control of the resale. Amazon would, theoretically, either expedite a sale between two customers and take a small cut, or create a system where they buy the ebooks from the customers, then they would gain those resale rights. The alternative is if the resale was a product of a licensing agreement with the publisher, in which case, no first sale rights were exerted and Amazon would have as much control as the licensing agreement allows and no more. Publishers would have to be nigh-on-braindead to license resale rights to Amazon, though. They’d be better off just releasing first sale rights to everybody altogether and letting the chips fall where they may than giving Amazon more power to lock customers into their world. In fact, I think they’d be better off doing that than what they’re doing now, even if they maintain the good sense not to license away the second hand market.

Wohlsen then quotes Bill Rosenblatt, who he describes as “a consultant and expert witness in digital content patent cases”:

“If Amazon is allowed to get away with doing resale transactions without compensating publishers, then what they can do is say, ‘hey authors, sign with us and we’ll give you a piece of the resale.’”

If Amazon is allowed to resell without compensating publishers, then that means buyers would have regained first sale rights. That would mean Amazon, or anybody else for that matter, wouldn’t be able to control the resale of these goods. You can’t just say “Kindle owners have first sale rights but Nook owners don’t.” Amazon could certainly cut writers in on the resale of their books on their site, but in this hypothetical, they’d be far from the only place selling second hand digital goods. As a,writer, if would definitely be something I’d listen to, though.

There is no circumstance where Amazon totally controls the resale market and doesn’t pay publishers. Either they license the content for resale, in which case publishers get paid, or they invoke first sale, publishers don’t get paid, but the real control and resale rights would belong to consumers. (Unless, of course, a court somewhere warps copyright law to create such a circumstance. Not exactly an unheard of occurrence.) Amazon might build a nice little business with used ebooks, but it would largely have to do so by offering buyers enough incentive to exert their first sale rights with Amazon. Hardly a dominating position.

“Buried in the patent is language spelling out that the technology Amazon intends to use will have the ability to limit the number of times a digital good could be resold or loaned out. Amazon could use that constraint to strike bargains with publishers and authors to cut them in on used digital sales, which doesn’t happen with used physical media.”

And would only happen here if it were a product of a licensing deal. If they invoke first sale, Amazon couldn’t uninvoke it later. They wouldn’t have the right to put any limits on resale. They could buy the license, then willingly retire it, but they couldn’t prohibit a buyer from selling it. If it were licensed for resale, however, Amazon could do just that, per terms of the licensing agreement. But again, publishers…resale licensing with Amazon…braindead stupid.

I do believe we need to return first sale rights of digital goods to consumers. I believe there will be a technological means developed that is simple enough to make this happen without unduly encouraging piracy. Even so, no matter what you do, somebody somewhere is gonna rip you off. Publishers are just gonna have to accept that reality. Taking away first sale rights devalues the product in a very real monetary sense to the buyer. That is simply bad business.

What Amazon’s patenting here sounds to me like an attempt to strengthen its walled garden. I’m not sure this method would hold up or work in an atmosphere where first sale rights are truly implemented by consumers. So it seems as though licensing resale from publishers is the point of this. But what publisher in their right mind would give Amazon this ability? On second thought, don’t answer that. Like with most things, some idiot(s) will.

Second Hand Blues: First Sale Rights and Used eBooks

That sound you just heard was the collective heads of everyone in the traditional mass media industry exploding as news of Amazon filing a patent for a process to resell digital goods spread. Many of them are having enough trouble keeping their heads above water in the current digital marketplace as it is. Now, suddenly, they might have to deal with competition from an area they thought was locked down, resale rights of customers. Oh shit.

Personally, I’m all for this development, although I would much rather someone other than Amazon be the one to push this possibly emerging market. However, the fact that they’re taking steps to be prepared for it again shows why they have essentially made fools of the traditional industry. They think ahead, they pay attention, they prepare and, most of all, their business model adds value for their customers instead of taking it away.

I’ve long been a proponent of an aftermarket for digital goods. I believe it’s lack is the one key flaw in the ebook market. In fact, I’ve started to develop a little theory about this. Far from being just simply a loss of value for consumers, I’m starting to get behind the notion that the lack of an aftermarket is a primary cause of three of the most troublesome issues with ebooks and other digital media; piracy, discoverability and the downward pressure on prices.

1. Piracy

I usually take issue with even defining the activity of file sharing, even obviously infringing file sharing, as piracy. I just don’t think it is. I also think it clouds the issue by broadening the scope of conduct corporations would like to monetize into a individual crime, which hurts efforts to combat actual, destructive commercial-scale piracy. But for the sake of brevity, I’m just going to use the term piracy here. It’s easier to type than “possibly infringing and much maligned but potentially fair use protected file sharing,” which would be a far more accurate description of the conduct to which the industry objects.

The biggest joke of all from the anti-piracy brigade is the assumption that every download is a full price lost sale, complete with lost royalties for the creator. That’s obviously a skyscraper-high pile of horseshit I’m not going to waste time refuting. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s somewhat true, who’s to say that lost sale would have even been one that affected the industry or artists at all? It’s easy to suggest that someone downloading an ebook wasn’t going to buy it anyway. But what if they were going to buy it, only a cheaper second hand version? Even if it was a lost sale, it wasn’t one that would have earned the industry a dime anyway. Or any royalties for the artists. Amazon routinely lists used alternatives to new versions right on the product page, always significantly cheaper. Is it really a stretch to think that people who choose downloading for free over buying full price wouldn’t also choose to buy cheaper used than new? Even if every download were a lost sale, if those sales were going to be of the cheaper, used variety, the industry and artists lose nothing. And it’s perfectly legal under the first sale part of copyright.

Ebooks circumvent first sale by being sold as a license for use. When that happens, customers lose the ability to resell those goods (among other things). It’s why I can’t just sell the ebook I bought last week from Amazon to somebody else on eBay. But the book publishing industry has long existed side by side with its used counterpart. There has always been a place to buy books at a significantly discounted price. When eBooks took off, however, there was a vacuum left where that discounted market used to be. Isn’t it possible that piracy grew to fill this very gap that the loss of first sale left in the digitized side of the market? We went from a system where you could get books full price new, heavily discounted used, or free from libraries to a system where it was full price new, extremely limited and inconvenient from libraries or free through piracy. The industry, through the means it chose to sell ebooks, removed the discounted option completely, hamstrung the legal free option and then loudly wondered why people pirated.

I think a lot about rights, I am a writer, after all, and I spend a fair amount of time complaining about rights grabs from publishers. But it just dawned on me that I’ve essentially missed the biggest rights grab of all. The way ebooks are sold protects publishers under copyright law, protects authors under copyright law (although I would argue in too ancillary of a way through publishers but that’s for another day) and takes away almost all the rights of consumers under copyright law. It is pretty egregious when you look at it. The first theft was committed when publishers agreed to the licensing scheme and took away customer rights. Then they turned right around, started pointing fingers and yelling, “Thief!”

Removing first sale rights created a vacuum in the ebook market and piracy was what grew in its place. Nature does, indeed, abhor a vacuum.

2. Discoverability

Here’s another thought that’s been kicking around in my head: what if, instead of causing the drop in sales, piracy actually prevented that drop from being significantly worse? Think about it. When digital music hit the scene, that industry panicked, fought the rudimentary early age file sharing spots like Napster and Limewire tooth and nail, right down to suing their own damn customers. At that point, broadband was slower, not nearly as widespread, and most people didn’t know how or have the capacity to download sometimes large music files. As first sale rights fell away, the secondary markets thinned, discovery was hampered and sales dropped precipitously. When ebooks hit publishing, there were well-established file sharing networks in place, broadband was much faster and more ubiquitous. The discovery hit from loss of first sale was mitigated somewhat by piracy and the drop in sales was much lower. Book publishing, quite possibly, was somewhat protected from itself by the very pirates it so loves to demonize.

Look at it this way, when I buy a print book, I can go sell it to someone else. They in turn, can sell it again, the next owner can sell it, then that owner could donate it to the library where it can be checked out over and over again. That one book could pass through numerous hands, all legal and all based on one sale, the first sale, from which publishers and creators reap their proceeds. The rest of that book’s lifespan constitutes exposure, or discovery, if you prefer. Now, if I buy an ebook, other than a limited ability to share with a few people under specific conditions, the life span of that ebook essentially dies immediately after the first sale. All of that exposure and discovery that was present with print books sold with first sale rights is washed away. And again, the industry is perplexed about why people aren’t finding new books as easily as in the past. That kind of thing happens when you destroy the primary mechanisms of discovery by swiping rights from customers.

I’ve seen numerous polls that suggest bookstores are the number one place for discovery of new works but I’ve never seen one differentiate between what kind of bookstores they’re talking about. Is it more likely you’ll try out new authors in Barnes & Noble where you’re paying $10-25 or so on average per book, or in a used bookstore where hardcovers are $2 and paperbacks can be had for 50 cents? I suspect discovery has been done far more at bookstores selling heavily discounted used books (and libraries, where it’s free) than at stores selling only higher priced new books.

Everybody seems to be wondering why online book discovery is struggling so much. Could it be because publishers have hamstrung libraries and blocked the development of discounted used ebook stores by eliminating consumer rights to resale, places where discovery is far more likely to happen than full price, brand new alternatives? Nah, couldn’t be that, must be the pirates, you know, the only place actually emulating the primary means where book discovery was done in the past.

3. Downward Price Pressure

Taking away first sale rights from consumers does one other key thing, it takes away the customer’s ownership stake in the product. If you can resell something, that has value, and when you buy a print book, it retains that value because of first sale rights. But with ebooks, the monetary value drops to zero immediately after you pay for it. Don’t think for a second people don’t understand this basic fact. The loss of an ownership stake, and the instant elimination of any monetary value necessarily degrades a product in the customer’s eyes. By swiping first sale rights, publishers have devalued their own products. It’s the reason why so many people complain so loudly about ebooks priced anywhere near what print versions cost. We’re not stupid out here, we know damn well you’re selling us a product that doesn’t have anywhere near the tangible value of a print book, and that has nothing at all to do with the quality of the book. I can’t sell it and its uses are limited. I possess significantly fewer rights with ebooks. Consequently, it makes no sense to pay print prices for way-less-than-print value.

Then, there’s this. With the aftermarket for ebooks nonexistent, wiping out a highly discounted layer of sales, it created a huge gap between the prices of trad pubbed ebooks and indie books. That, in turn, created a situation where indie books could be priced much cheaper and attract significant sales through super-low prices alone. That, then, set off a race to the bottom fight for those sales, culminating in 99 cent novels, and generally increasing the downward pressure put on all ebook prices. But consider, if there were a used layer there where trad pubbed ebooks could have been picked up for $2-3 or so, the massive gap in prices between indie and trad books never would have happened, the severe price advantage wouldn’t have sparked the uptick in sales that set off the race to the bottom. Indie authors would have been forced to compete on factors beyond simply super-low prices, and the downward pressure they’re experiencing now declines appreciably. Also, if those same customers now bitching about $15 ebooks knew that could get a few bucks back on them through resale, they wouldn’t be so likely to complain about price. They’d retain their ownership stake, and very likely, not balk at paying a few dollars more. There’s two key elements right there driving prices down that go away if customers hadn’t had their first sale rights taken from them.

First sale rights are hugely important. I’m of the mind that swiping them from consumers as ebooks have is responsible for most of the biggest problems in a growing industry segment. An aftermarket isn’t something to be afraid of, it aids discovery, maintains value in the product chain and gives your customers not just a right to resell, but an actual ownership stake in the product, albeit a small one, relatively. It now becomes in their best interest to maintain the value of ebooks because they have some skin in the game. Take them away, and it seriously damages discoverability, drives prices down as the reality of lost value sinks in, and it drives possible customers to alternatives like piracy.

Whatever the technical difficulties in creating a digital goods aftermarket, or giving consumers back the first sale rights that have been swiped by the ebook licensing scheme, the consequences will be far less severe than continuing to treat customers as naive dullards who don’t mind being gouged by higher prices for a lesser product. There’s a good reason first sale exists as part of copyright law, free markets don’t work when one party has too much control over economic activity. If we don’t change course soon, the ebook market will find out exactly how dysfunctional things can get when the playing field gets unfairly slanted. Customers have rights, too, and it’s high time publishing remembers that.

Bookish: New publisher-backed retail site is game-chan…eh, whatever

I was checking out Bookish today, the new Big Six backed trojan horse, supposed to look like some kinda Goodreads/retail store hybrid thing but really is a not-so-subtle attempt to build their own little walled garden only sans the hardware. Yeah, I’m not a fan, what can I say?

Actually, I don’t really see too much to get worked up about anyway. There’s nothing really new here, and it’s pretty clearly an attempt to regain gatekeeper control by imitating various popular book-related internet properties they could have innovated a decade or so ago if they’d have pulled their collective heads from their assess even temporarily. Late to the party doesn’t usually fly. That and this is traditional publishing trying to be forward-thinking, after all. So forward that the debut was about two years after it was supposed to be. I’m not encouraged by the vision or support behind this if things don’t go instantly great and end up even the slightest bit challenging.

The DRM insistance sucks but not at all unexpected. We’re still quite a ways from the biggest of publishers’ conglomerate masters getting the memo that they’re cutting their own throats with it. The part of the terms of service saying they own all rights to any user generated content is troubling, but again, publishers are behind this. Never met a right they didn’t try to grab. There appears to be a pretty stark “no refunds” policy on ebooks, too, enforceable after download, which, I guess, means store-credit-only if something’s messed up? Of course, shit-out-of-luck is a distinct customer service possibility here, too. Wouldn’t surprise me. By comparison, Amazon gives you seven days to “return” an ebook for a no-questions-asked refund. Not exactly a compelling reason to buy through Bookish rather than Amazon.

I would typically link to their site here, but apparently I would be violating their terms of use if I did so, it containing a provision allowing them to block your link if you disparage them. Lord knows I wouldn’t want to run afoul of their terms. So, good job, guys! Here’s at least one less link to you in the world.

At the end of the day, Bookish to me loses points precisely for what it’s trying to do, be a limiting factor in book shopping, and serve in a gatekeeper type capacity. It’s not so much what’s seen or recommended on their site, it’s what’s excluded that’s the problem. It’s allowing material in from sources which meet some sort of standard of approval, apparently dependent entirely on the publisher. It’ll be interesting to see if this ends up with the big boys getting all the prime, algorithm-tweaking real estate. There doesn’t really seem to be much in the way of involvement for authors, either. But, I’m willing to give most things the benefit of the doubt, so I clicked on the “I’m an author” link in their FAQ. Here’s what I got:

How can I have my book(s) added to Bookish?

Authors should ask their publishers to confirm that their respective titles are in the data feeds provided to Bookish.

That’s it? I’m an author. I’m interested in becoming involved with this innovative new method of doing the same thing other people are doing just more self-servingly and the only acknowledgement or words of advice you have for me is “go ask your publisher”? Is it me, or is the tone of their suggestion reminiscient of when you were a kid and annoyed your mother with some question she didn’t care about to the point she’d say, “go ask your father?” Seems a bit dismissive and condescending. I also find myself wondering at what point the lawyers took out the “If you’re a self-published author, go fuck yourself!” line that I’m pretty sure was in the first draft.

It’s not a bad thing for publishers to try to get some sort of more direct retail channel. But they can’t even get all the big players to back it. Hell, Apple talked them all into breaking antitrust law together, but something that could actually be a practical benefit to the industry if done right? No way! This should have been done years ago. Now, it’s just chasing, piggy-backing on other people’s hardware, yet still trying to build that mystical walled garden through DRM. Authors are pretty obviously an afterthought, and they certainly aren’t treated as any kind of business equals, more like underlings to their publisher masters. I’ll withhold judgement on whether this is useful to readers until we actually hear from some, but I’m not optimistic given what I see so far. If I had to guess, Bookish will err too far toward crass commercialism over genuinely social interactions with readers. Basically, I’m seeing a site that’s talking at readers, not with them, and that’s going to be its biggest problem.

Data Overload: Reader behavior data lacking in crucial context

I just read this piece on NPR about whether the data collected on reader behavior from ereaders is useful to writers. My gut reaction is, “nope,” but upon further reflection, I can see some circumstances under which some data along those lines could be of use. It’s not a simple, black or white question, however. It all depends on who has the data, and who’s using it and how they overcome the problem of lacking proper context.

I can easily envision a circumstance where a publisher says to a writer, “Our ereader data suggests 63% of your readers were more engaged in the portions of your last book where the hero fought werewolves. We’d like your next book to include more werewolves.” That’s not appreciably different than it is now, only with more data that appears to reinforce their beliefs. Publishing has always been an industry that, when success strikes, beats every ounce of that success into the ground. Fifty shades of erotic romance, anyone? If werewolves are showing signs of being the hot new thing, bring on the werewolves!

But is that interpretation of the data correct? Were those readers more engaged because of the werewolves or because it was a high-tension, exciting sequence that just happened to involve werewolves? That’s a pretty important distinction. The problem is, we can’t say without more data to properly explain this data.

Here’s a point made by author Scott Turow that raises a similar concern in mind:

“I would love to know if 35 percent of my readers were quitting after the first two chapters because that frankly strikes me as, sometimes, a problem I could fix.”

Possibly. But what if that 35% is industry-standard for readers dropping books after the first few chapters? How do we know? I know my reading habits often have me starting books, putting them down for other books, sometimes coming back later, sometimes not. There’s no rhyme or reason related to quality for it, either. Some of my favorite books were started three or four times before I finally followed through. And I’ve read some total tripe cover to cover.

We need a whole lot more information before making any creative decisions based on this. What if we come to discover that 35% is actually better than average? What if 40-45% turns out to be the figure? Would Turow no longer have a problem to fix? He’d still have a third of his readers not getting past chapter two, but he’d also be outperforming the industry. What if we discover this having similarities to baseball, where failing 7 times out of 10 makes you an All Star? We are lacking the frame of reference to make useful decisions based on this data. Finding answers from data lacking adequate context is like reading tea leaves or interpeting ancient religious texts; anybody can do it and find a justification to point to as evidence, even if another person can credibly interpret the proofs you site the exact opposite way.

Turow also said this:

“Would I love to hitch the equivalent of a polygraph to my readers and know how they are responding word by word? That would be quite interesting.”

Frightening might be another word for it. Hell, I sense a dystopian novel where corporations have hitched everyone to a giant monitoring device to record their every impulse and give them back only products that serve their immediate desires, sort of a permanent cultural feedback loop. I don’t see how that much data is even useful. Writers, generally speaking, have varying degrees of OCD. I can easily see the hypochondriac impulse taking over, and some writers getting obsessively lost trying to make sense of this mass of often conflicting information.

He does make a cogent point here, from a publisher’s point of view:

“Why should we publish this book if 11 readers out of 12 can’t make it past page 36?”

It’s hard to argue that. Publishers need to make money to survive. So do writers but on a different scale. If data suggests a book isn’t attracting an audience sizable enough to support publisher overhead, then why should they publish? From the other side, if a book is not showing scale that befits a relationship with a publisher, maybe that’s a way for writers to help determine if a work is better served as an independent release. After all, the term “hybrid authors” is all the rage these days. You have to choose your publishing approach somehow.

But again, this only works if the data means what we think it means. Besides, there’s also the paradox of the fact that the book has to be released in order to collect reader data on it. So, at best, unless we’re talking about turning books into software and releasing beta versions we fix after getting customer feedback, this ereader data is only really useful in a predictive sense for future work. Which means that all we’ve done is pile a lot more data into a decision we’re already making based on an already-existing pile of considerations today. Will it improve end results? Maybe, maybe not. But what it will do is provide justifications to make the initial decision more defensible, regardless of outcome. I’m not certain that’s a good thing because it has the distinct potential to provide pseudo-evidentiary cover for making bad calls on whether or not to publish.

Books will still succeed despite data that suggested beforehand that they wouldn’t. And books will still fail despite having all the indicators of a sure thing. This data is nice, but there are numerous factors at work in a successful novel, reader behavior while reading is a small part of that I can’t definitively say holds much significance. I can’t say it doesn’t, either. We just don’t have enough data. In the future, we’ll fix that, I’m sure, and be awash in all the facts, figures and statistics we can stand on reader behavior. But we’ll still be lacking the context. Without that, I’m not convinced we’ll ever be able to interpret this information properly. Short of Turow’s all-encompassing polygraph or some piece of future tech that reads minds, that context isn’t readily accessible and likely never will be.

More and accurate data is always a good thing, but who wields it and how is crucial. I have a feeling that this will turn out to be little more than echo chamber material. Anyone making an argument will be able to find the numbers somewhere in the increasingly vast data pool to support it, no matter how outlandish.

Will I use this data for something, if available? Absolutely. I can totally see its value from a marketing standpoint. Will I change a character, story or rewrite portions of work based on this information? Absolutely not. I have little confidence that any of this data means what I think it means. I have even less confidence it means what other people think it means. If it only serves to reinforce already existing opinions, then it brings little of value to the table. Maybe I can glean a way to sell more books with this data, and that’s worth a shot, but changing the actual work in response to it is a bridge too far.

Editors Redux

A while back, I wrote this. Needless to say, I pissed off a few editors, some so severely that I began to wonder if they missed my point. Hey, maybe I needed an editor to help me make it more clear to editors why I think they’re overrated and, far too often, a detriment to the writer rather than a help. That would be kind of ironic, maybe, if anyone actually understood what irony means.

Anyway, I let it drop after that as, essentially, my point was that editors aren’t higher on the literary food chain than writers and, given the new realities taking hold, are little more than a supplemental contractor, as it were, serving at the writer’s discretion. Yet still, nearly every day, I see the same old arguments made. Writers can’t produce publishable work without editors. You need an editor. Editors are essential. Yada, yada, yada.

Editors are a tool at the writer’s disposal, one of many. Depending on the type and skill level of the editor in question, the trick is figuring out if they’re a tool that can help finish the job well, or an extraneous tool that seems shiny but ultimately is little more than one of those cheaply made pieces of junk you find in the “As Seen On TV” aisle that doesn’t quite live up to the game-changing hype on the infomercial.

Anyway, for clarity’s sake, I decided to revisit my point.

1. Most editors suck at their jobs

Most editors didn’t really appreciate my observations on this. There are so many different kinds of editors, and different jobs within publishing that carry the word “editor” in their title. It’s become a catch-all, pseudo-management title used more often to give an employee an air of higher standing without actually having any of said standing. In book publishing, there’s acquistion editors, copy editors, line editors, content editors, etc, etc. The magazine/newspaper world’s even worse, with offices in many cases employing more people with editor after their names than writers. One of the things I said in my original piece was that most editors are simply people who are wannabe writers who are either failures at it or lack the courage to be the creator. It’s always easier to manipulate the work of others than create it in the first place. This doesn’t mean that a good editor can’t add value, they can. It means there are a lot more mediocre-to-bad editors out there than good ones. I stand by this point completely.

Writers almost always exist in the grey area of uncertainty called self employment. Editors, on the other hand, usually collect a regular paycheck (modern publisher downsizing is changing this but it still holds as a generalization). Do you really want someone who chose the illusion of job security that comes with a regular paycheck over the risk of chasing their dreams dicking around with your attempt to chase your dreams? Again, this isn’t all editors, but it’s more of them than not. Keep in mind, as well, if your editor is one of these people, their motivation lies necessarily on the side of making your work fit the standards of the publisher who’s paying them rather than making your work the best it can be in a vacuum. Sometimes, those goals dovetail nicely. More often than not, however, they don’t.

This isn’t a blanket indictment against editors, it’s their job. They work for the publisher. They’re first order of business is necessarily serving the needs of the entity paying their bills. This is really a question for writers to answer. Do you want your work to conform to a publisher’s standards or to your own? The notion that these two ends always coincide is a fairy tale. In the old traditional market, all the sacrifice was on the writer’s shoulders simply because we had no leverage otherwise. It really and truly was my way or the highway at its root.

I’ve done my share of commercial painting over the years. It’s a nice skill to have and I’ve paid my bills through some lean years with it. The biggest trouble I had was contractors who’s motivations differed from mine. Contractors want to be max profitable above all else. I wanted to produce the best quality job for the person buying the house. Occasionally, this led to conflict when the contractor advocated something half-assed to support their profitability. Publishers are like contractors, editors either conform to their standards and demands or they’ll be looking for work elsewhere. I believe it’s crucial for writers to understand these dynamics. It’s pretty important to know if the editor who’s tinkering with your work is serving two masters. In those cases, when push comes to shove, the master with the fatter wallet wins almost every time.

Now, however, independent publishing has changed things a bit. Writers are the ones cutting the check now. Yet I still see editors with a “I know best” attitude, behaving as if the dynamic hasn’t shifted. The most important thing I said in my previous piece is that the editor works for you now. Listen to them, certainly, otherwise you’re wasting your money, but the ultimate decisions rest solely with you. You are in charge. I wonder if this isn’t why some editors were unhappy with my opinions. In the old traditional mechanism, editors were higher on the ladder than writers. Nobody likes to feel their skills are being maginalized, or declining in influence or authority. I feel bad but editors never should have gotten higher than writers in the first place. Editing is a supplemental activity to (theoretically) benefit the writer. The only reason that structure happened was so publishers could marginalize the importance of writers (and their ultimate compensation, let’s not forget that). Editors became what they did because publishers willfully used them to add a layer between creator and market that only they could successfully navigate, and to infantalize writers so they’d be less likely to rebel against a system that earns all its revenue on your back but only pays out a relative pittance in return. That strategy of infantilization has worked so spectacularly well that writers, en mass, have essentially self-imposed that structure. I still see good, talented, independent writers touting the value of these obstacles willingly put in their way by publishers, like agents and editors. Stockholm syndrome at its finest.

2. All editors aren’t awful

My rhetoric against editors in the original piece was over the top. I admitted as much in the article. Every editor doesn’t suck at their job. Most of them do, though. It’s crucial to find one who doesn’t, and that largely depends on what specific skills they possess and how they choose to wield them. A good copy editor is worth every penny. By the way, I define copyeditor as line by line, typo and grammar editor. This is painstaking, tedious work. I suspect a big part of the reason writers have willfully gone along with the editor fallacy is precisely because copy editing sucks and we just don’t want to be responsible for it. Where do you suppose the notion of “I just wanna write” comes from? Writers who only want to do the fun, easy parts and dump the difficult actual work on someone else, that’s where. Now I’m going to do what I neglected to do but should have in the original piece, I’m going to lay the wood to writers.

If you’re a writer who subscribes to the above-mentioned theory, you are lazy. I just wanna collect royalty checks as a super best selling author. Someone else can handle the actual writing, I just want to cash those fat checks. That’s the same as saying “I just wanna write” while engaged in a business atmosphere. If you truly just want to write, there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes you a hobbyist, but that’s fine. But far too many writers saying this are actively seeking publishers, or actively self publishing. You can’t behave in a businesslike way but pick and choose to do only the parts you think are fun. To begin with, that attitude puts you at a severe disadvantage in dealing with people committed to the actual business and they will screw you every time on the contractual end given the opportunity. I’m pretty sure their mouths get to watering whenever a writer walks in saying “I don’t want to worry my pretty little head with actual complex professional business issues, I just wanna write!” If you don’t want to deal with the actual business end, then do everybody a favor and get the hell out of the business. You’re poisoning the waters for everybody else. By willfully signing over all rights, agreeing to onerous non-competes, accepting pittance royalties with little or no accountability to back those up and basically abdicating any and all responsibility for the business side of publishing, you’re helping establish standards that those of us who do actually care about the business side have to fight through every day just to try and get a remotely equitable contract out of a publisher. Everything worth doing in life comes with a heaping helping of things you don’t want to do. Suck it up, it’s part of the program. By not doing so, you’ve opened the door to publisher exploitation of writers wide open. The “I just wanna write” attitude has done more to infantalize writers than all the actions of all the publishers in the world combined. It’s like with most things, it can only screw us over so long as we allow it to.

Let’s say publishers are vampires. When you, sitting on your cushy little couch, utter the phrase, “I just wanna write,” you’re inviting the blood sucking parasite inside. More often than not, by the end of the evening, the vampire strolls away satiated and you’re left a pale-white, dessicated husk drained to the bone. Too strong a metaphor? Depends on who you ask.

3. But unedited work is awful

Yes it is. But here’s the thing, editing is a task. You don’t need a person with a title for it. Like the “I just wanna write” notion, “writers can’t edit their own work” is another dangerous and inherently lazy attitude to hold. Of course you can edit your own work, you wrote it for Christ sake! It’s like saying a master carpenter can build a chest of drawers but he shouldn’t sand or finish it. “Carpenters can’t paint their own work.” Doesn’t that sound absurd?

Woodworking and painting are simply learned skills that are a means to an end, in this case, a sweet new dresser. Writing and editing are learned skills that are a means to an end, a great novel for instance. No different. Are you going to tell the chef that he’s great at preparing the meal, but the table presentation should be left to someone else? I didn’t think so.

The key here, however, is that the carpenter knows going in that the finish for his chest is a crucial part of the job. The chef understands that successfully plating the meal is a crucial part of the job. Therefore, they learn how to do those things and do them well. Writers, on the other hand, by being told “I just wanna write” is okay, and “writers can’t edit their own work” drummed into us like Moses carried it down from the mountain, don’t even try. There is actually truth in saying writers can’t edit their own work today because we’ve bred generations of writers who never bothered to learn how. It’s a crucial skill that’s part of the job and we, on the whole, ignore it. Writers became unable to edit our own work because the industry actively minimalizing our skills so they could make more money told us so. They also, not coincidentally, had a ready solution of people who could take care of that for us so we could stop worrying our pretty little heads and just write. They’re called editors.

I am not, repeat not advocating that writers just throw unedited stuff out there. Someone has to do it. I’ve already mentioned that a good copy editor is well worth the expense, with all the emphasis on good. What I’m saying is writers not only can but should learn to edit their own work. It’s not rocket science. It’s a relatively easily learned skill. By comparison, it’s a helluva lot easier to learn good editing skills than to learn good writing. It’s not often fun, it can be tedious if done right, but it’s an essential part of the job. Learn it. Now.

Self-edited work is not unedited work. This pisses me off more than almost anything when I see these terms used interchangeably. As a writer, I find it personally offensive. Why is my edit somehow less valuable than someone else’s? Where is the mystical line where the person with the skills to create something in the first place magically loses all capability to refine it?

My opinion is that it’s always better for multiple sets of eyes to look something over. It’s always preferable to see points of view other than your own. But the traditional editor/writer dynamic gives too much voice to the editor. Again, what I’m advocating here isn’t that writers should just say, “Fuck you, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want!” Well, sometimes, maybe. But for the most part, I’m saying we need to look at conditions and re-evaluate the role and importance of editors. That can’t be done if writers don’t also pick up the slack and re-learn the tasks we willfully abdicated long ago.

In the traditional setup, writers were essentially selling books to editors. We weren’t selling them to readers. Editors, in turn, were selling those books to the publishers who employed them. Again, not readers. Hell, even publishers were selling those books to distributors or chain stores, not readers. The only people actually selling books to readers were at the retail level. Should it surprise anyone that it was a retail company (Amazon) that rose up and finally kicked publishing in the balls? Today, it’s more important than ever to sell to readers. Nobody in the old chain knows how to do that, including writers and editors. Is it preferable, when selling to readers, to seek content feedback from actual readers or editors, who, like writers, have been kept several degrees of separation from readers for the publisher’s advantage? That’s rhetorical. The answer’s pretty obvious.

So there it is in a nutshell: editors suck, writers are lazy, we’ve both been made that way by publishers parasitically exploiting us for profit and we’re all screwed anyway because none of us knows the first thing about selling to readers. Wait, was that my point? Aw shit, maybe I do need an editor.

Editors Note: No I don’t.

Containers

I was just reading this summation of the Nick Carr-Clay Shirky battle royale over whether the book is a valuable cultural artifact or simply a container for content that, in its physical limitations, shaped the forms of that content and could be dying out for good, digital or otherwise. To be honest, I was actually glazing over a bit reading it. It’s fascinating, don’t get me wrong, in a high-minded philosophical way, but I think I’ve intellectually moved past all these discussions of form and transition. Why are we still arguing any of this?

Anyway, one particular comment attributed to Carr temporarily pulled me out of my glazed meanderings:

“In response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.”

I think Carr has a fundamental misunderstanding about how, exactly, each of these forms of creative effort reached a point of widespread acceptance and popularity. He’s got something of a cart before the horse kinda argument, seemingly implying that media companies arbitrarily decided one day, possibly for higher profit, that CDs were better than LPs, and stopped making LPs. It was the people buying CDs en mass that made that decision for them.

Nothing, not one thing is stopping anyone from making LPs today. In fact, they’ve become quite the successful boutique business for some artists, Jack White comes to mind. But in doing so, you have to either admit that you’re creating a form with a notably smaller market to sell to or you also have to undertake efforts to build a market to go along with the product. The form isn’t obsolete or diminished in any qualitative sense (other than the strictly cumulative monetary decline from the height of the wax album era. But surely, Carr’s discussing high-minded art here, so simple free market economics can’t be what he’s referring to, can it?). The only problem the LP has is that most of its paying market has moved on to other content forms more convenient to their lives.

It’s not up to me as a writer to decide what the optimum forms of creative expression are, nor is it up to Carr, Shirky or any of thousands of other media industry pundits. Even publishers, movie studios and music companies (who have discovered this truth sooner and far more harshly than the others so far) despite their capital reservoirs and strengths of distribution and marketing, have only a limited, minuscule ability to direct those choices.

In fact, there is no one person who can make this decision. The forms of content that reach any level of social application do so beneath a critical mass of regular people deciding in unison what they’d like to spend their money on. CDs overtook LPs because the buying public wanted it so, because CDs had advantages that fit more cleanly into the conditions of their lives at the time. For that same reason, CDs have been usurped by almost totally ethereal electronic forms. Books, print or digital, will live or die by the same hand and there’s nothing Carr, Shirky or anyone else can do about it.

It seems more and more like the publishing industry is missing a very essential point of its existence: we all live at the whims of the people who buy the product. They seem to be forgetting that we in the creative fields of endeavor have to produce both content and form that large numbers of people value enough to pay for. Not just enough to want to watch, listen to or read, mind you, but actually lay down hard cash for. That decision is, has been, and will forever remain in the hands of our audience. The creative forms that service their needs, and most ably makes the case for that aforementioned exchange of currency, will win out. The ones that don’t will end up tacked on to Carr’s list of lost art forms. 

Frankly, I’ve always believed culture belongs to the people. If large enough numbers want print, there’ll be a market for it. The same for digital. And if a super-majority develops that wants some form of the written word that hasn’t been invented yet, usurping both print and ebooks, that’s as it should be.

Every new form that comes along adds new possibilities for the artist. Every old form pushed aside becomes part of a rich tapestry of history and experience that helps shape the use of new forms. LPs didn’t die, they become a foundation upon which mp3 players were eventually built.

If art is your only intent, the old forms still exist, have at it! But if you’re also trying to pay the bills, you’ve got to go where the money is. And that money is scattered about in the pockets of every person out there who’s looking for something to read. Nothing else really matters.

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?