[publishing] Amazon blinked
(Via @JeremiahTolbert)
Posted: 2:49 pm Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(3) |
[writing|cancer] Brain, brain, what is brain? Revising while on chemo
Just launched into revisions of Endurance with a ninety minute writing session today. I’m exhausted, but that’s pretty much my ground state during chemo, so too bad. My mind was focused enough to deal. But oddly, this was subjectively rather different than revising my collaborative novel with
I don’t know if this is because I’m working on my first draft instead of hers, or because the book is tight first person instead of a looser third person, or because of how the line level style choices I make as a solo author differ from the collaborative voice we’ve developed and been successful at in short fiction. But definitely different.
The biggest issue seems to be word choice. My solo style is wordier and more convoluted than our collaborative style. As noted elsewhere, chemo has not been kind to either my short-term memory or my longer term recall, and one thing I’ve been struggling with is anomia, especially with respect to proper names.
Normally I have an unreasonably large functional vocabulary and can pick words out of the air like a hunter potting birds on the wing. Now I am struggling to distinguish “mete” from “meet” (as in the adjective meaning “proper”), getting “rood” and “veil” confused, forgetting the various terms for grave-houses, and other such idiocies. I know I know it, I can go look up and sort out what’s missing, but it’s slowing me down a bit, and frustrating me. Not going to stop me, not for one damned minute, but grr.
Stoopid cancer.
Posted: 2:29 pm Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(1) |
[publishing] The nuts and bolts of Amazon vs Macmillan
If you’re interested in the business and economic issues underlying the Amazon vs Macmillan battle, some really great stuff to follow up with here:
Cory Doctorow (in a comments response to my post earlier today)
Posted: 10:03 am Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(3) |
[publishing] More on the Amazon vs Macmillan problem
First of all, here is Macmillan’s statement on Amazon’s withdrawal of all Macmillan print and ebook titles from sale. This is a letter from John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan’s US operations. (And to be clear where my own business interests lie, the upstream executive management of Tor Books, my own trade publisher.)
Shortly afterward, Amazon also removed all Macmillan print titles from sale on the Amazon site. This is what made me very angry and frustrated, for reasons I explained in detail yesterday [ jlake.com | Livejournal ], to much discussion in comments on both sides of the blig, as well as on my Twitter feed. (If you want to go Twittering, look for the #Amazonfail tag.)
One question many people raised in discussion yesterday was why I was so aggressive in blaming Amazon for pulling the titles from sale, when it might have been Macmillan that had done so. As I said at the time, I was prepared to be wrong, but I found it far more likely that Amazon would stop selling Macmillan’s products in a trade dispute than that Macmillan would stop selling their own products.
Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be the case.
Now we have not yet heard from Amazon. We may be told Monday that this was a “database error” that is being corrected. That would be what is casually known as a “lie”, but corporate PR departments do it all the time to get themselves out of corners where the paint has gotten too sticky. This assumes, of course, that Amazon considers themselves to be in a corner. Frankly, I can’t imagine that they care what me and a few hundred other Macmillan authors thinks. Nor even our readers and fans in their many thousands. In business terms, we aren’t a force to be reckoned with, not outside our noisy little piece of the Internet.
Whatever Amazon officially pretends on Monday,
I don’t know that I’d do anything different, at the strategic layer, if I were in charge of things at Amazon. For better or worse, in the American system, any corporation’s highest loyalty is to its stockholders. If you don’t believe that, do some research on “breach of fiduciary duty.” Stockholders. Not customers. Not suppliers. Not employees. Not even themselves. Stockholders. For Amazon to simply let go of their Kindle strategy and revenue stream because Macmillan said so could lead to shareholder lawsuits, investigations, and even charges under some circumstances.
But at the tactical layer, their response blows chunks. As I explained yesterday. I don’t think it’s wrong in a legal or moral sense — Amazon is free to run their business as they choose. But pulling the print titles is akin to me beating up your kid brother because you owe me money. It’s bullying, pure and simple, punishing readers and writers of print books because they can, to try to force Macmillan to back down on ebooks.
Amazon is using their marketplace power to advance their shareholder interests at my expense as both a customer, and as (ultimately) a supplier of their core product. That’s why I cancelled my Amazon accounts yesterday, pulled all the Amazon links off my Web site, and deleted my Kindle reader and Amazon purchasing applications from my iPhone. I don’t care what they say tomorrow, or in the future, or how they apologize should they bother to do so. This isn’t “just business”, and it isn’t a reasonable commercial dispute. It’s the big kid using his fists to intimidate another big kid by pounding on the rest of us.
However, in thinking about this yesterday and overnight, I want to offer two observations on this, despite my lack of expertise.
One, Macmillan wasn’t simply proposing to raise ebook prices. Macmillan was proposing a staged pricing model to run in parallel with the staged pricing model of print fiction which has existed for decades. Specifically: Hardcover releases first, at a higher price point when demand is strong enough to be willing to pay that price, followed later on by mass market paperbacks at a lower price point to meet wider, softer demand. The ultimate pricing of the ebook, per Sargent’s letter, could be rather lower than Amazon’s magical $9.99.
Two, people keep getting distracted by the cost of ebooks, as opposed to the price. I myself have spent a fair amount of time down this rabbithole. Ignoring the question of whether price should be based on cost, which is a never-ending issue in business economics, the simple fact of the matter is ebooks aren’t free for the publisher to provide. Cory Doctorow argues that incremental pricing on ebooks is zero. In a narrow sense, he’s right. Much as the incremental pricing on a telephone call is zero. Yet you don’t expect to get your cell service for free, do you?
Smarter people than I, with better information than I, have observed that the production cost of a print book is a tiny percentage of the cover price. I’ve seen various numbers thrown around, so I won’t try to quote one, but well less than 10% on the high side seems to be consensus. Everything else embedded in the cover price is cost of acquisition (ie, paying the author), editing costs, preproduction costs (copy editing, layout, art direction, etc.). None of that changes with an ebook. Just like the phone company has to recover all the sunk costs for switches, engineers, lines (or cell towers), billing systems, customer service etc., and so they charge you for the “free” phone call that bears no incremental costs, so the publisher has to recover their sunk costs in the ebook.
Books are a product. Ebooks are a service.
People resist ebook pricing because they have been told ebooks are a product, they perceive ebooks as a product, and the value of buying what amounts to electrons is difficult to perceive.
If you pay $26.95 for a hardback of Green, you acquire an object with heft and permanence. You can read it. You can re-read it. You can loan it out, take it to a used bookstore, give it your grandchildren, throw it in the trash, donate it to the school library, use it for kindling. It’s yours.
If you pay $9.99, or any price, for an ebook of Green, you acquire a license to download and view a specific software offering. The license can be revoked under some circumstances, cannot be freely transferred by you to others, and has no other value. You don’t own it, you’re renting it on terms dictated by someone else. It’s not yours.
The metaproduct here is of course the story I have to tell. You can listen to it on an Audible.com recording. You can read it in print and ebook editions. Soon you’ll be able to read it in Hebrew. But the editions aren’t just priced differently, they have profound functional and legal distinctions.
I’m not sure yet what this insight means. But if we can ourselves as writers, publishers and industry professionals, and more to the point, our readers and fans, to consider ebooks as a product rather than a service, much of this debate might shift in a more constructive direction.
Meanwhile, I also ponder, as I did yesterday, that to many readers with no need to be familiar with publishing industry issues, the outrage and frustration of us writers looks like so much greed. No writer published in the trade press controls our pricing or distribution terms. Most of us don’t even make a full time living at it, at least not in speculative fiction. And downward price pressure on ebooks means we ultimately get paid less, which means it’s harder for us to make the living we do, which means both our ability and our financial incentives to write the stories readers want to see are compromised.
Because to most readers we are the most visible public face of publishing, Amazon and Macmillan are making writers look like the bad guys here. And that is perhaps the most frustrating thing of all.
ETA: I retitled this post because the original title was misleading with respect to the content.
Posted: 8:48 am Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(30) |
[personal] Deranging Nuevo Rancho Lake
Yesterday was the Big Move here inside Nuevo Rancho Lake. Essentially, two rooms got swapped. This is part of a longer term plan to make the place less utterly bachelor and more friendly to houseguest, visitors and caregivers, most especially
It was exhausting. Well worth it, and the help of many kind and generous folks was amazing and invaluable, but woo. Everything I hoped for got done, and quite a bit more.
Trying to recapture everyone who had been here (why didn’t I take notes…), I will essay a thank you. If my addled brain has left people out, please tell me!
But, erm, many many thanks to
This patient, able group of people with no help from me whatsoever swapped my two rooms, moved unreasonably heavy objects, organized my stuff, cleaned my garage and much of the rest of my house, repaired some damaged furniture, transported a sofa across town, finagled my network architecture, brought food and drink with them, went out to the store several times for supplies, rubbed my head and feet, let me sleep when I was dozing, listened to me repeat myself with redundant instructions from time to time without ever getting grumpy, and generally left both Nuevo Rancho Lake and me in much better shape than they’d found us.
I cannot possibly thank everyone enough. The amazing generosity of my family, friends, fans and total strangers is overwhelming.
You guys are awesome.
As for today, I shall finish blogging, work on Endurance for an hour or two, and then otherwise Do Nothing.
Posted: 7:58 am Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(3) |
[photos] Your Sunday moment of zen
Your Sunday moment of zen.
Great Northern Railway depot, Great Falls, Montana. © 2006, 2010 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 7:28 am Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(0) |
[links] Link salad plans to go nowhere this Sunday
APOD with a squib on the Voynich Manuscript — I’ve always loved this thing.
Gotham Underground: 1904 — Shorpy with the City Hall subway station in NYC. What a photo…
Supermarine S5 — That is one beautiful airplane. From x planes.
Word of the year? Spokespirate — Um…
Distilled Geography: Europe’s Alcohol Belts
New math — Hahahahahaha.
Texas BOE: Paine or No Paine? — In case you don’t understand why having Christianist conservatives in charge of the nation’s school textbooks (via the Texas state procurement process, which sets de facto standards nationwide), check out this bit. These clowns are controlling what your children learn.
Group Receives ‘Tsunami of Vile Hate’ After ABC Exposé on U.S. Military ‘Jesus Rifles’ — Like the hymn says, “They will know that we are Christians by our love.”
?otD: Where will you go today?
1/31/2009
Body movement: 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 8.5
This morning’s weigh-in: 223.6
Currently reading: [between books]
Posted: 7:23 am Sun January 31 2010 | Comments(1) |
[publishing] Three more comments on Amazon and Google Books
I am about to spend most of the day offline moving furniture. (Or more to the point, having it moved for me.) Y’all have fun in comments on the Amazon post [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. Lots going on in my Facebook page on this topic as well.
There are three thoughts I want to leave with before I drop off a while. First, as several people have pointed out, it’s possible Macmillan pulled the print titles rather than Amazon. I find this unlikely for a number of reasons, but I’m prepared to be wrong. All the available information to date indicates Amazon did this. Such a move would be consistent with several prior Amazon incidents (including the Friday night timing). And simple logic suggests that Amazon is far more likely to stop selling a disputed product than Macmillan is to stop selling their own product. If I’m wrong, I’ll speak to it as fully as I spoke to the issue this morning already.
Second, a problem I’ve noted several times in discussing the Google Books Settlement is that for most people, including virtually all readers who are not themselves authors, GBS is an overwhelming benefit. Indexed searches of virtually all print material, access to orphan copyrights, one-off sales of out of print titles. It’s pretty hard to argue with the basic goals. To someone who doesn’t understand (or need to understand) copyright law and the economics of making one’s living from publishing, it’s very easy to perceive copyright holders as being short-sighted and greedy. Basically, from a generic reader’s point of view, we’re arguing over sixty dollar licensing fees and holding up the progress of one of the most important print literature projects since Gutenberg.
Third, this same problem is already occurring in the Amazon fail. To a reader who is not themselves an author (and specifically a trade press author, where this dispute is occurring), what Amazon is doing is defending low priced e-books, and availability. The business nuances of control of the e-book channel, licensing rights, platform and so forth are invisible. There’s already a lot of reader resentment over existing e-book pricing. For Macmillan to be holding out for higher prices on Apple’s iBooks platform is patently ridiculous in their eyes. Again, an author like me protesting their print books being pulled in this dispute (and please read my original post carefully if you think I’m nattering about wanting higher e-book prices) looks short-sighted and greedy.
These are fights that we as authors didn’t pick, can’t control, and have PR implications that we lost before we ever open our mouths. That saddens me.
Posted: 7:17 am Sat January 30 2010 | Comments(1) |
[publishing] Bug off, Bezos. And take your damned bookstore with you.
Ok, I’m furious about this: Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement. (For more intelligent publishing-focused commentary than I can put together right now, John Scalzi has a very good take here. As usual, the dirty rat.)
Over what appears to be a dispute regarding e-book pricing, Amazon has pulled all Macmillan titles in all formats from their US web site. This includes Tor books, and includes my own Green as well as the Mainspring series. Yes, third party sales are available, they haven’t de-listed the titles completely, but this is still quite significant.
To be clear, I don’t believe for a moment Amazon has any moral or legal obligation to sell my work, Macmillan’s titles, or anything else in particular. As a private actor, they can do whatever they want with regard to stocking and vending inventory through their system. I certainly can’t buy all the same products at the Safeway and the Albertson’s which are equidistant from my house. This causes me no outrage, only occasional mild annoyance.
But as a brand they have a trust relationship with their customers. And books lie at the core of their brand, regardless of their diversification into selling damned near everything these past years. The recent 1984 fiasco was a very good example of How Not to Manage Your Consumer Facing Brand.
This Macmillan issue isn’t going to bother consumers much. The 1984 problem was that they withdrew content for which people had already paid. Regardless of the underlying issue (and there was a serious underlying issue, Amazon just handled it very badly), that’s pretty much unacceptable. I believe we call it “theft” when you and I do it.
Declining to sell someone a book isn’t theft. It’s commerce. There are bookstores all over the world, both bricks-and-mortar and online, that won’t sell you my books. I am not outraged by this. But having the most prominent book retailer in the world remove my print titles from public sale over a behind-the-scenes business dispute concerning a slightly related product line (Kindle) is arrogant, offensive, and just plain maddening.
It’s not wrong, as much as I’d like to pretend it is. They can do what they want. But it’s stupid and troubling.
In a larger sense, so close on the heels of the 1984 issue, what this does prove is that Amazon will always favor boardroom level business issues over the interests of their consumers. Again, their privilege. It’s a free country, the Supreme Court assures me that Amazon is a corporate person. Bezos’ bozos can party on.
But they’ll have their party without me. I’ve removed all Amazon sales links from my author Web site at jlake.com. I will no longer link to them from my blog when I discuss my titles or other people’s work. I have closed my Amazon account this morning. I will never purchase anything from them again, I will especially never buy a Kindle, and I will use reasonable means (including my substantial blogging and social media presence) to discourage my friends, family and fans from doing any business with Amazon.
Because if they’re going to choose to toss me overboard in a business dispute over which I have no influence, control or participation in, I can choose not to do business with them. Even if Amazon rolls this back this morning, it doesn’t matter to me. They’ve proven they can’t be trusted to maintain even a neutral perspective on my interests as either a consumer or an author. They’ve shattered my brand loyalty. I won’t play Lucy and the football with them.
Bug off, Bezos. And take your damned bookstore with you.
Posted: 5:36 am Sat January 30 2010 | Comments(74) |
[personal|cancer] The day that was
Not much to say about yesterday, except it was a bit too much. Everything happened in a row. Day Jobbery was more intense than usual, so by the time the workday was over, I was too out of gas to work on Endurance as planned. Early, light dinner with Mom and Dad last night, then an early bed time. Other than the usual ongoing fatigue and lower GI nonsense, chemo side effects were minimal, which makes sense as yesterday was the ‘off’ Friday and the beginning of my non-infusion week.
Met almost none of my productivity goals this week outside of the mandatories — sleep, heal, time with
Today is the Big Move. A collection of kindly friends and strangers will be arriving at Nuevo Rancho Lake later this morning. I’ll be buying a lot of pizza and staying out of the way as much as possible. My absolute lack of preparation for this room swap within my house is embarassing, but that’s the whole point of asking for the help. I can’t do that stuff without burning every spoon I own and going deep into deficit.
It’s probably just as well this is Big Move day. Otherwise I’d spend all my time ranting on Twitter about the Amazon-Macmillan fiasco. Wait, that’s what I’ve been doing. Never mind. Carry on. As you were.
Posted: 5:14 am Sat January 30 2010 | Comments(0) |