Book Reviews and Market Failures

I read this and it got me thinking. The folks there are all worth your time.

We live in a marvelously decentralized time. There is no pope or emperor telling us what we can and cannot read. Though traditional large press publication is centralized in a hand-full of giant corporate behemoths, only low-information readers confine themselves to their offerings.

Instead, we live in the golden age of indie and small-press publishing. Got a buck? Trust me. There are amazing ebooks being published right now for that price by genius authors. You just have to find them.

But, Steve--you may reply--I don't trust you. Very wise of you. I'll come back to that momentarily.

The trouble is finding these amazing works of genius. If you go to Amazon.com, everything is for sale. If you want some Evangelical Christian ripoff of Fifty Shades of Gray, I'll wager you can find it. (I haven't looked. I hope I lose that bet!) Amazon is also selling mystical t-shirts and groceries. So it is easy to get distracted before you can get to the good stuff.

Amazon has a good system of recommending new books that are like old books you've bought. This is helpful, but it's only a machine and state of the art machine understanding algorithms are liable to make mistakes. There are helpful blogs like Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit.com that often provide links to books.

Thus you click on an Amazon page for a book you know nothing about by a fella you've never heard of published by an outfit that's similarly obscure. Do you click on it to buy it? It's only a buck or three. Not much risk there. But I generally get paid more than a few bucks an hour, making my reading time relatively valuable. We live in a busy time with a lot of competing demands on our time.

Once you start reading a book, you hope it doesn't suck, because it's hard to stop mid-way. I would prefer a book be really good or really bad, because if it's really good, i'll enjoy it. And if it's really bad, i want to decide that the book sucks sooner rather than later. Thus the worst books aren't 1-star or 2-star but mediocre 3-star works.

Thus I want to know a lot about the book before I make a decision to buy it or not. If this is a known author, no sweat. I have to work when I see an unknown author. I am unsatisfied with the blurbs for many books, because they're out to tease interest in the story--not give away what it's about. I'm never happy with any of the blurbs I've written for my works, so I understand when another author has the same problem. When I'm unsatisfied with the blurbs, I look at the reviews.

Reviews are a key factor in the buying decision. I asked my beta readers to write reviews, provided they be honest--even if they hated the work. And I exhort those I know best to write reviews. I know I'm imposing, and I know these reviews won't be as brutally honest as the reading public deserves.

However, others have been known to hire folks to write reviews. And there are companies that market reviews to the writer desiring reviews.

Sure, there's a lot of talking and hand-wringing about ethics and morality. Some of it may be sincere, but the problem is a basic conflict of interest. I need you to review my work. The reading public needs you to review my work. You are not a sacrificial animal and nobody can demand you work without compensation.

Sure, I'll send you a free review copy. That's compensation in part. You are spared the expense of buying the work, but you are not spared the time to read it or write the review. That's not enough.

But as long as I'm directly paying you for that time there's a conflict of interest. Honesty demands that you tell the truth in your review. And the reading public deserves to know the weaknesses of my work that you might not want to include if I were paying you.

The result is a market failure. We need someone whose interest is in honesty paying you instead of me whose interest is selling books (and honesty, too, modulo conflict of interest).

I don't have an answer here. Just an observation and some speculation.

1. Maybe some indie readers' union could pool a few bucks to pay for reviews. This would be best, because readers' interest is in good reads.
2. Maybe vendor(s) like goodreads.com, smashwords.com or amazon.com could identify and pay reviewers for their time.
3. Maybe the government mental health board could identify ideologically pure works and commission favorable reviews on that basis.

OK, that last bit is a bad idea, which means it will most likely happen.

Seriously, we have a market failure here. I don't have a corner on good ideas. Do any of you have any idea(s) can fix it?

To The Author In Search Of A Publisher

I distinctly remember listening to E. G. Marshall trying to reboot radio drama. I would be driving home or back to grad school after a date with the delightful girl I eventually married, and the car radio helped keep me awake. Late night radio often has unsold air time and a certain class of vendors gravitate to this cut-rate advertising. 

One of which had a rather stuffy sounding guy talking about "the author in search of a publisher."

He was trolling for suckers for the vanity press. For a few thousand 1979-dollars you could have your manuscript turned into a real book and get it printed. Yay. 

Then what? You'd have a garage full of boxes of books. Then it was up to you to find a way to sell them. Good luck with that. Most of the time, this was not a wise investment of one's savings.

Time passes and technology advances. It is now completely feasible to realize camera-ready typeset pages using just your home computer and a laser printer. It's trivial to produce good looking book designs using just Microsoft Word or any number of other cheap or free tools. Good. We can now produce "galley proofs" at home.

And if you want to fill your garage with boxes of books, any medium-sized town will have several print shops who can obliged you.

The last two paragraphs enable any non-idiot to completely disintermediate the vanity press guys. The dirty little secret is that writers in search of a publisher could have disintermediated them back in the '70s, too.

But even if you did, and you saved thousands of 1979-dollars it was a sucker bet. How are you going to get those boxes of books out of your garage and into bookstores?

Then an amazing thing happened: Amazon.com. Now, all you had to do was hook up with Amazon to get those boxes of books out of your garage. The amazing thing got amazinger. Amazon came out with the Kindle. And they had the good sense to buy a print-on-demand publisher. Now, anyone could click a web site and your book in bits or printed-on-demand would be shipped to their door.

This made me think that self-publishing a non-sucker bet. (And I hope you'll vindicate my opinion by buying either The Aristotelian or Finding Time.) I think self-publishing is a viable route for any writer who doesn't have a book deal. But you gotta be smart about it.

I think the vanity press companies are still a sucker bet. I don't understand how they can still exist when they are so trivially bypassed.

What's truly amazing is the tangled network of ownership. The biggest vanity publisher is now owned by a traditional publisher. You can get the details here.

Why would a traditional publisher own a vanity publisher? In the former case, the publisher pays the author an advance and royalties. In the latter case, the author pays the publisher. Heh. If I were the publisher I'd quit with the advances and royalties. So, there are some conflicts of interest here.

I don't quite know what will come of these changes in book publishing. It looks to me like we aren't seeing the old sucker-bets going away. Instead I think we'll see a whole raft of new and improved sucker-bets to beware of. Let me know if you come across any.

Groucho And Me

I have read that in Groucho Marx’s letter of resignation to the Friars’ Club he said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

I have from time to time contemplated an organization to which I do not belong, the SFWA. Since I have been known to write Science Fiction (as seen here) and I do reside in America (as seen here), the thought of joining has occurred.

Like pipefitters or electricians, it makes sense that scribblers should band together to advance their common interest. I am a software engineer and maintain my membership in the I.E.E.E. for this reason. In fact, in my youth I served on the local chapter's board to advance my profession.

Yet, writing is less like a profession or even a skilled trade and more like something else. ...something that meets in a 12-step program.

Writers as many will tell you are commonly objects of abuse and exploitation at the hands of Publishers. Having some kind of collective bargaining unit might make sense. Or even some kind of warning system telling you who to stay away from, or what to avoid in contract negotiations.

I managed to maintain a healthy disinterest in the SFWA because I got the impression it does none of those things. Yet, they made themselves odious a while back by mau-mauing some of their own for thought-crime. I condemned their cultural Stalinism then went back to giving them the benign neglect of which I thought them worthy.

Then I heard about someone named Vox Day being drummed out of the SFWA. I've never met the fellow nor had any occasion to interact with him either positively nor negatively. Then I read this. And upon expending just a few milliseconds' more effort discovered that Stanislaw Lem had also been evicted.

OK, now I understand what's going on.

This is like academia. The politics is so vicious because nothing important is at stake.

Actually, that's not exactly true. There are people involved. People with feelings. The cool-kids-clique is bullying the unpopular kid to keep everyone else in line. This is inhuman. Come to think of it. It's a good thing that Harrison Ford never ran his anti-Turing-test on some kids I knew in High School.

Sell the Sequel

I often say that you use the last chapter to sell the sequel. Make it an aircraft carrier catapult.

There's a business to writing and the writer is wise to be mindful of business considerations while creating his or her dazzling work of stunning magnificence. And if you haven't gotten Max Perkins or his equivalent at one of the big publishing houses backing you with a book deal, you may be considering self-publishing. In self-publishing, you must be VERY MINDFUL of business considerations.

And the biggest consideration (even bigger than getting paid) is reaching your audience, which people prettier and smarter than I can attest is the big challenge in today.

Mindful of this, consider the sequel.

People who like one novel by an author are more likely to like another novel by that author. How many times have you noticed that the novel ends with a chapter or two worth of text to the right of the thumb on the spine only to discover that the publisher has thoughtfully provided sample chapters of similar works?

It should go without saying--but I'm saying it--that when a reader is reading your work, you have a free opportunity to reach one of the people most likely to buy another one of your works.

Have you ever felt that let-down when you finish a novel and wish you could enjoy it a little more? What better way is there to enjoy a little more than by picking up the sequel!

For this reason the author is wise to use this opportunity to sell the sequel. Sure, you should have links to your author platform and to your other works, but you have an opportunity within the body of your current novel to sell the sequel.

Let's jump up to 10,000 feet, or maybe even Low-Earth-Orbit and view your writing project very abstractly: It starts out introducing a setting and characters, then proceeds to a climax, then winds down through a denouement. The End.

Mindful of your reader, I hope you have maintained a steady stream of story questions and you've answered them faithfully enough to maintain the reader's trust.

If you have no sequels planned for this work, you are wise to make sure no story questions remain unanswered. (Unless you have some cool ambiguity thing you're working where maybe the supernatural stuff is a hallucination or maybe not. But ambiguity works better for short stories than for novels.)

But if you do have one or more sequels in mind, you'll want to devise just a few story questions you intend to leave unanswered in this novel, but that you intend to answer in a sequel. Be careful not to annoy your reader with too many of these.

Consider the first of the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, you see a shadowy figure who was obviously pulling the strings of this movie's antagonist, but you don't see who that figure is. You'll have to wait until Game of Shadows to find out.

In Science Fiction the writer does a fair bit of world-building and this creates a LOT of backstory that the writer is wise to regard as scaffolding and share only the essentials. Use something in that backstory to stimulate a story-question. Make it big and make it vague. THEN in the last chapter of your novel, add a reminder of this unanswered story question to intrigue your reader. That's what you're going for. Don't do a cliff-hanger, I've griped about that earlier.

Be careful not to annoy your reader with something gratuitous without any foreshadowing. The second novel of the Evan Gabriel trilogy ends fairly well, then somebody gets kidnapped in the last chapter. No foreshadowing. No set up. It just happened. Now you know the hero has to go rescue the kidnap victim and in so doing destroy the evil conspiracy that's been pulling the strings in the prior novels. That's a bad job of selling the sequel. I disapprove.

Instead, I think you should be as subtle as possible giving just a whiff that something's up in the first third of the novel, then just a sound like a rustling leaf in the middle of the novel, and then make it clear in the last chapter. Elliot Kay did the setup fairly well in Poor Man's Fight. BUT the last chapter led me to believe that the sequel might undo the hero's main accomplishment in this novel. We'll have to see.

You can write your whole novel, then review it figuring out how you want to set up your sequel in a way that'll appeal to your readers. Then add just a touch here, and a sentence there to set up your last chapter where you make it clear that such-and-such is not a dangling thread, but the reason why your dear readers MUST buy the sequel.

Create Marketing Pieces

(This is step #15 of my How To Publish An eBook thang)

What's the number one thing you can do that will sell your ebooks?

You could get an interview on Oprah Winfrey's show, but that's hard since I think that show is off the air. And all the other forms of mass marketing and merchandising can also drive sales. If you can get Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh to read your book and talk about it on the air, you'll sell a boat load of books to their listeners. Same goes for not just right wing radio commentators, but for anyone who has a big broadcast voice. If you can do this, God bless you. And you're buying lunch next time, OK?

Before I got distracted by that last paragraph I had in mind the simple process of one-on-one selling. You've done a great thing writing a book and you should be proud of it.

If you were raised right, you learned it's not nice to toot your own horn. Let another person sing your praises and all that. Yet there is a time and a season for putting your best foot forward and you've got to be ready where it concerns that ebook you've published.

The big advantage of going with a traditional publisher is marketing and distribution. Amazon has done a good job of empowering you where distribution is concerned, but you still have to proactively engage the demands of marketing.

Even if you are as bad at marketing as I am, someone is going to ask you what your book is about. You will need to have your elevator pitch ready: cast your work in its best light in the span of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This elevator pitch cannot be composed too early in the writing process. You may run into an editor or publisher with a suitcase full of money to induce you to NOT self-publish your work after you wow them with a boffo elevator pitch.

If that goes well, the person you are talking to may not be able to buy your work immediately.

You want to put something in hand that serves as a reminder so s/he can go back later and buy your work.

For The Aristotelian I had a local print shop make up a bunch of  postcards. That was OK, but I found that most times when I was having a conversation about it were times when I did not have any of those postcards on my person. Thus, when it came time to make up something like that for Finding Time, I decided to have business-cards made up instead.

You'll want to put your cover art on the front, and you'll want to put some kind of contact info on the back. I was going through a QR code kick a year or so back and I decided to have the hyperlinks in the last two paragraphs encoded as QR codes and fit my name and email beside it. Next time I'll probably quit the QR code business. It's cool, but nobody uses it.

It's very easy to keep a dozen of your work's business cards in a holder you keep in your coat pocket so that after you deliver your elevator pitch, you can give out your card.

Someday, you may find yourself manning a table at a book fair, trade show, or convention. You might want to get bookmarks printed up. I haven't done that, but some of my friends have. Other writers I know have had pens, calendars, and key rings made. You'll want to have these little bits of swag for you to hand out. It's also a good idea for you to have a few book-on-demand printed paper copies of your book for sale. If you're really ambitious, you can have those huge six-foot-high by two-and-a-half-foot-wide banners made to hang up behind your table. Or maybe set up a big-screen TV with your book trailer running on continuous loop.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Makers versus Takers

Depending upon how you look at it, this fat cat represents either a corporate tycoon--one of the 1% who gets his GOP buddies to vote subsidies to his business and swing sweet-heart deals his way.

Or if you swing the Democrat way this fat cat represents a welfare queen who's never worked a lick in her life and is just riding the gravy train nursing at the public teat.

A pox on both your houses. I'm for the Whigs.

This morning an email arrived at my inbox from Sarah Hoyt who is most definitely NOT a poopy-head. Her ire was raised by some concern troll on another blog and this moved her to utter some inescapable truths. It is not safe to utter inescapable truths.

When she said "The 'government' is not some disinterested entity run by angels," I was reminded of a debate between Milton Friedman and Phil Donohue about greed wherein Friedman points out that government officials are not angels.

At this writing, publishing is in transition. Certain fat cat publishing companies have enjoyed joint monopoly powers that they have wielded to their own advantage and not necessarily to the advantage of the reading public or those who write books.

When cats get too fat they cannot catch mice and find alternate sustenance. Like using the government to hobble the thinner, faster cats.
Independent publishers and writers have the means to circumvent fat cat publishing companies who will use any means necessary to save their phoney-baloney jobs.

Sarah Hoyt is has written down inescapable truths that are most definitely worthy of your time. I most strongly suggest you read them. She believes the future hangs in the balance.

In Love With Linda Chorney

Yesterday I attended the TEDx Grand Rapids event. If you've ever seen a TED talk, you know they present stimulating ideas and I derive the most value from a talk when agree-or-disagree I get some new idea from it.

The talk I loved the most was given by a delightful woman named Linda Chorney. Her incandescent personality filled the auditorium and I was smitten. She is a musician who does not have a Record Deal.

She says, "she's so indie, she's an outie."

Just as there are zillions of writers toiling in obscurity, there are zillions of musicians nobody's ever heard of. But just because you've never heard of Linda Chorney does not means she's not insanely great.

There's an entire ecosystem of lampreys, remoras, and pilot fish swimming alongside the sharks of the Record Companies whose job is to make you hear of the artists they promote. They serve as gatekeepers keeping the riff-raff out. You want to stay on their good side, because they'll make or break your career. (Does this sound familiar to any of you writers out there?)

She described how she used just a little bit of social media savvy to wage a successful Internet campaign to win a Grammy Nomination for her last album. (She played for the TEDx crowd and she sounded great.)

The main reason why I love Linda Chorney is that she demonstrated that someone that nobody's ever heard of can upset the apple cart. She managed to disintermediate all those middle-men by going directly to the members of the Academy and requesting their consideration.

But because she did so without the lampreys, remoras or pilot fish, they were not amused when she was nominated. In the words of Governor William J. Le Petomaine, "We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen!"

Then they launched a campaign of hate.  (I think that the bipartisan effort to utterly destroy Sarah Palin was similarly motivated by her ability to disintermediate the legacy media and GOP apparatchiks, but I digress.) Ms. Chorney showed the TEDx audience some of the nasty things written about her.

She showed us the T-shirt she made and sells quoting the hate and turning it against itself.

I was primed for Linday Chorney's talk by a recent blog post by Sarah Hoyt describing the publishing industry going about its own process of destroying writers' careers to vindicate the opinions of traditional publishing's lampreys, remoras, and pilot fish.

If you've followed the writing careers of John Locke or Amanda Hocking, you know they've had good success through non-traditional publishing and they've also endured a lot of hateful "hrumphing" from traditional lampreys, remoras and pilot fish.

The bottom line is that the world is changing. If you listen to a lot of people saying, "hrumph" it is the end of the world as we know it. But if you're willing to be so indie that you're outie, you'll feel fine.

A Proposal For Improving eBooks

Every book can have typos. Sadly, the rate at which typos occur--especially in ebooks--has increased at just the time when it might be easiest to report them. Books today are written on word processors with spell checking, but even the best spell checker won't catch a substitution of one valid word for another valid word--like there and their, or where and wear. And repairs

There are systemic reasons why ebooks often have a higher rate of typos than conventional books. This can be traced to the workflow of typesetting and printing that catches typos without propagating fixes back to the writer's original manuscript. This file is in turn converted to ebook formats.

I think we should turn the workflow inside out. Let's produce ebooks first, put them in front of a lot of alpha-readers' eyeballs to find typos, then propagate bug reports back to the writer to fix before typesetting and printing.

The trouble with the last paragraph is that it can be tedious to mark a typo in an ebook and report it back. I think technology can make this a lot easier and it can streamline reporting. Amazon could tweak their Kindle software to do this fairly easily, and if they get the @author thing working, it might be turned to this purpose. However, since Jeff Bezos doesn't take orders from me, I think we should modify an open source reader program--since we have the source. Pick one that runs on any Android device--cell phone, rooted Nook Color, or tablet. Maybe a Kindle Fire if Amazon doesn't get in the way.

To this application a programmer could add code to mark a word or words, where it appears in the text, what the problem is, and who the reporter is, pack it up in a well-formatted message, then transmit the message via the web to the writer. Bonus points for macro commands for the writer's word-processing program that will position the text at the location of the error as indicated by the report. And the reviewer's notes inserted as a comment.


The publisher could circulate advanced review copies to alpha/beta readers who'd use this system as indicated to improve the work's accuracy.

Since I'm a programmer all this seems very feasible to me. But I've learned that if I'm the only one interested in making something happen, progress goes very slowly. Does anybody else think this could be useful?

Leave a comment if you think so. If enough votes are in favor, I'll see about next steps.

Publishing, Ebooks, and Saving Money

The world is changing. Used to be that a few large corporations held unassailable monopolies on what you could read. They decided what got published, and what didn't. Since they were in the business of making money, they reasonably made decisions to maximize profits. Thus some amazing prose from some obscure genius would get tossed out of the slush pile while some porn star's ghost-written memoir would be fast-tracked. I'm not ragging on porn stars, just pointing out that in the traditional model, the corporation had a limited number of opportunities and it chose what maximized profits.

Is this what you want?

If you don't yet own a Kindle or a Nook get one. If you've already got a tablet computer or smartphone it'll cost you nothing to download the Kindle application.

No, go do it now. I'll wait.

OK, now that you've got a Kindle you're going to want to put something on it. And if you don't have a bunch of free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, you're missing out on a huge value.

When you go out looking for free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, you may notice some other ebooks are for sale. Amazon sells lots of them and most of them are about $9.99 (or they were until Apple won the right of traditional publishers to charge more). If you keep looking, you'll see there are tons of books that are free. And others like my story, The Aristotelian, that are $0.99.

There are a LOT of ebooks for $2.99 and under. A whole lot of them. It boggles the mind how many. How come? Because of Kindle Direct Publishing a lot of writers are bypassing traditional publishers and selling directly through Amazon. All the jobs that traditional publishers did are being done by the authors themselves. Or not being done.

Traditional publishers have a name for this kind of thing, vanity press. And since it undermines their profits they've done their best to discourage it. Oh, Mr. Bookseller, you don't want to carry that title, it's self-published. Same for newspaper reviews. Like it has cooties.

And there's a grain of truth in that narrative. A traditional publisher pays for editing, an editor is supposed to go through the text and do proof-reading to flush out any typos. Self-published work can sometimes skip this step, and statistically, you're more likely to find typos. Moreover, an aspiring writer may be so in love with his story, s/he'll disbelieve any report that it's not wonderful. Writers are dreamers who tell lies for a living and before they'll tell you any lies, they tell themselves lies about themselves and the quality of their work. If any writer says otherwise, reread the last sentence. Hence, some self-published works are unworthy.

You can find lots of cheap ebooks, but you won't necessarily want to read all of them. Whereas $0.99 much money, there's time. An ebook must be worth the time it takes to read it. Plus the time it takes to decide to buy it, plus the time it takes to find it.

What to do? The Traditional Publishers have a solution they'd like to push on you. Simply pay them $9.99+ and they'll decide which titles are worthy and which are unworthy, and they'll decide what you will like, too. And they'll tell you to do things their way or you'll drown in an ocean of self-published dreck.

There is another way. I go to flea markets, yard sales, and thrift stores to save money. I also sort through bins of CDs at Dollar Stores. Looking for bargains is like hunting. You take what you find with no guarantee up front what you'll find. You have to enjoy the hunt to sort through nicknacks at an Estate Sale. If you watch American Pickers, Cash & Cari, or Antiques Roadshow on television, you'll understand. I realized just recently that schlepping through a long list of cheap ebooks is just like this.

But there's a difference. When you're at an Estate Sale, and your search turns up some unrecognized treasure, you snap it up for yourself. If there's two, you grab it, too. And you brag to your friends at what a great find you acquired. All they can do is envy you. Conversely, with ebooks there's no limit per customer. You can download it, and your friends can, too. Or your friends can report to you what treasures they've uncovered!

Everybody wins, except traditional publishers who'd rather charge you $9.99+ and tell you what to think.