If you have been reading Salon Futura #8 you will have noticed that we are publishing two books by Ben Jeapes very shortly. Ben talks about the books here. He is altogether too kind about me, but he’s right about Andy’s cover.
Salon Futura
Salon Futura #8
We have a new issue online (probably the penultimate one, unless some sort of miracle like a lottery win happens, because of this).
It is, of course, full of good stuff. Gary Westfahl celebrates a major anniversary in the history of science fiction. Raz Greenberg looks at the new Jane Jensen video game. Alvaro goes in search of the literary essay. And Jonathan looks at the career of Yukinobu Hoshino.
In The Salon I talk about YA science fiction with David D. Levine, Imogen Russell Williams and Ben Jeapes. Our interview subjects are Nick Harkaway and R.F. Long. And there’s news of two new books from Wizard’s Tower.
And there’s a marvelous cover by Duncan Long, which has has written about on his blog.
You can find all of that lot here.
Life Happens
Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that I was less than happy with life last week. Part of that was family stuff that I can’t talk about publicly, but the rest of it is very relevant and I’ve only avoided talking about it until now because there were people who needed to be told first so they wouldn’t worry.
Basically the situation is that the global economic crisis has finally caught up with my day job, and as a result I am facing a 40% reduction in my income. This is not a total disaster. I should still have enough money to pay the rent, taxes, utility bills and still have something left over for food. But unless I can find other paid work to fill the gap I’m not going to have any money for things like books, conventions and the like.
At this point you may well be thinking it is a good job I have this second business to fall back on. However, like most businesses, Wizard’s Tower did not burst fully-profitable from my brow. New businesses need nurturing and investment, and right now most of what Wizard’s Tower does loses money.
Dark Spires is close to earning out, which is a great relief to Colin and myself, and I actually have a couple of (ebook only) books coming out very soon. However, the ebook sales are very low and I don’t expect to make more than a few dollars off then. (Most of the money goes to the authors and retailers.)
The bookstore is making sales, but it needs professional online shopping software to provide the sort of service that publishers and customers expect, and that costs money. At the moment sales are not covering costs, let alone making an income for me. It is possible that now I’m going to have more time on my hands I will be able to ramp sales up by doing more PR, so Kevin and I will keep the store going for a few months to see what happens. We’ll see how that goes.
The big drain on my finances is Salon Futura. That costs me several hundred dollars a month, and the income is practically zero. I simply can’t afford that any more, so it will probably have to go. I have sufficient funds to cover all of the material I had promised to buy, and I’m going to stretch that into two slightly thinner issues rather than one fat one to give me a bit of time to look at alternatives, but I’m not hopeful.
One thing I am not going to do is run a “save Salon Futura” appeal. Given the level of readership I doubt that would generate more than enough for one more issue, and then we’d be back where we started. What the magazine needs is a regular source of income. As it is pretty clear that substantially more than 99% of its readers do not think it is worth paying for, the message has to be that it isn’t worth doing. I’m very grateful to the small number of people who have donated money or bought ebook copies, and personally I think the sort of material that Karen, Jonathan, Sam and the other contributors have produced is worth paying for. I just can’t afford to do that myself any more.
In the long term this may turn out to be something of a blessing as it gives me both the time and the incentive to try to diversify my income. However, given the current economic climate, the next few months may prove rather depressing. I shall try not to inflict this on you.
What this does mean, however, is that there is no chance of my being able to get back to the USA in the foreseeable future. It also means that I will be cutting back drastically on conventions. I have existing commitments to Eastercon, Eurocon and Finncon. They are also all part-paid for, and the air travel can probably be done on points. I’ll also do BristolCon as that only requires a fairly cheap train ticket. But everything else is currently on hold, and priority will be given to events where I think I may be able to find work.
Introducing Ibis Reader
One thing that is abundantly clear from yesterday’s discussion of ebooks is that many people are still very unclear about the technology. To start with I would like to make a few things clear. When you buy an ebook from me:
- It is yours — you own it, and I can’t take it back
- You can lend it to your friends
- You can sell or give it to someone else
- Just like a paper book
- You can buy it anywhere in the world
- And you don’t need to buy a special device to read it on
Really, no special device? No, you don’t. The About Ebooks page at the store has a list of different free programs that you can buy to read an epub file on an ordinary computer, but today I’d like to tell you about another reading system that I’ve found since I wrote that page, and which I have come to think is the best option.
Ibis Reader is a web-based epub reading solution. You upload the books to the site, and can then read them anywhere using a web browser. That means you can read them on a PC, a Mac or a Unix machine; you can read them on an iPad, or on any other tablet or smartphone that has a web browser. The software works fine on all these platforms, though for the very small screens of smartphones there is an app alternative as well.
Although Ibis is a cloud-based solution, that doesn’t mean your books are trapped there. You own them and can download them at any time. It is more like an offline backup than a streaming service.
There’s no charge for using Ibis. All you need to do is sign up for a free account so that you have a login that will take you your library. Obviously it is an online service, so for people still on dial-up it is not a good option, but if you have a broadband account it will be fine. And again with the smartphones you can use the app and store books locally.
Ibis works with epub files, which are as close as we have right now to a standard. It does require that the files conform to the epub standard (yes, some publishers don’t bother to check) and are DRM free. All of the books I publish should be fine, and I’ll try to check all of the books in the store, though that will take time. Those of you who are comfortable with software can make epubs from other formats using Calibre.
The biggest obstacle I have found to getting people to buy from places other than Amazon is convenience. There’s that one-click option. But there is an interface for Ibis too. If you have an account, try this:
Add Salon Futura #1 to Ibis Reader
See, easy isn’t it. 🙂
What I need to do is to work out how to add that functionality to the store so that once you have bought a book you are presented with a link to load it into Ibis. As it is commercial store software I may not be able to do it myself, but I’ll work on it.
Time is Money
I’d been planning to post today about ebook pricing because I’d be grateful if you could take a look at this poll which Neil Clarke is running on his LiveJournal. The more information we get the easier it is to provide people with what they are willing to buy.
Had it been me doing the poll I would have asked a supplementary question to the people who said they would buy from big stores but not direct from Neil or myself. It must be pretty obvious that we get more money if you buy direct, so what is the attraction of big stores? Is it the convenience of Amazon’s one-click purchase? Is it the payment method? (Taking credit cards costs money, so you need a high turnover to justify it.) Is it concerns about security or reliability? This is, I think, a major issue in the online marketplace.
While I was thinking about this, however, a light bulb went off. A week or so ago, during the debate on $0.99 ebooks, Cat Valente asked why people are prepared to pay $6 or so for a latte, but not $3 for a book (the exact amounts are probably wrong, but the idea is there). I think I might know the answer.
When you buy a latte (or a movie ticket, or a CD, or whatever) you expect to get the enjoyment out of it almost immediately. There is no major investment on your part. When you buy a book, however, you only get the enjoyment out of it if you spend the many hours necessary to read it. We all live very busy lives these days, and our time is valuable. Many people I know (including myself) already own more books than they can hope to read in the rest of their lifetime. So when you buy a book you are not asking yourself “can I afford $3?” (or however much it costs), you are asking yourself “can I afford 10 hours?” (or however long you estimate it will take you to read it). If you are going to read it, the cost is much less of an issue, and you may well be prepared to pay a lot more given the amount of time it will amuse you for.
Does this make sense to people? Because if so it suggests that the only effect of cutting the price of books is to try to encourage people to buy books that they won’t read.
[I note that the same does not apply to Clarkesworld and Salon Futura. What is happening there is that we are trying to find the price people will pay for the convenience of having an ebook edition of something they can get for free online.]
An Editor’s Lament
No, not mine. But I do have similar problems.
There has been a fair amount of talk around the blogosphere of late about the fact that, despite women buying and reading more books than men, reviews in mainstream newspapers are mostly by men, about books by men. Today Katy Guest, Literary Editor of The Independent, entered the fray, mildly blowing her newspaper’s trumpet, but also lamenting how hard it is to get women to submit material to be published.
I feel her pain. I have managed to buy some articles by women for Clarkesworld, but by no means 50%. I am trying to make a conscious effort to seek out more women writers, but they do seem to need to be encouraged, and men don’t. Despite my making a conscious effort to get women involved in Salon Futura, all of the guest articles I have published to date (as opposed to articles by columnists) have been by men. Hopefully that will change soon.
Of course there may be other reasons too. Currently Ms. Guest’s article has just two comments. Both of them are from men making snide “jokes”. It is an inevitable truth of today’s “have your say” culture that articles by women, especially intelligent articles by women, are liable to attract the attention of male trolls. Then there will be the mansplainers, who feel the need to explain to the poor girly, in words of one syllable or less, the truth of the matter that she is so hopelessly seeking to understand. Often they will parrot your points back at you, apparently unable to conceive that you could have make them yourself. Obviously you’ll get intelligent, helpful comments from male readers as well, but the trolls and mansplainers are pretty much inevitable.
Some of my male friends seem to relish troll comments and take them as a challenge. I suspect that far too many women look at comments feeds, shake their heads, and wonder why why anyone would both to put themselves in the stocks to have insults thrown at them.
But, to shift metaphors a little, if we are not prepared to stick our necks out a little, then there will always be more articles by men than by women, and we will always live in a culture in which is seems that men are the source of intellectual authority. So please, ladies, could I have some submissions to Clarkesworld and Salon Futura?
Salon Futura #7
Right, that’s another one out of the door. 🙂
Issue #7 features a lovely cover by Dean “Conzpiracy” Samed which may or may not explain why Fluff Cthulhu favored Wales over Ireland in the rugby at the weekend. (Sorry Jen.)
We have two guest articles. The very wonderful Ken MacLeod has a report on one of the strangest academic conferences ever to feature science fiction. I know that China has a degree in International Relations, but I had no idea that people working in that discipline wrote books about SF.
The second guest article is from frequent Guardian columnist, David Barnett, and it looks at one for the hottest novels from last year, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.
There’s something of an emphasis on crime in this issue. The podcast features three SF/F/H writers who have use the crime novel structure in their work: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Aliette de Bodard and Mike Carey. My own article covers crime-related works by Seanan McGuire, Ben Aaronovitch, J.M. McDermott, Bryan Talbot and Thomas Blackthorne (a.k.a. John Meaney).
Jonathan’s article is all about Shotaro Ishinomori. If that name means nothing to you, well he’s the guy who, among many other things, created the Power Rangers. Do check out the “Starfish Hitler” video, it is awesomely silly.
Sam has gone for a walk in the Hindu Kush. He has good reasons for it, honest.
Our interviews this month were shot at P-Con in Dublin so we have two Ireland-based writers: C.E. Murphy and Ian McDonald. If you want to know what Ian is working on next, go listen.
Plus we have our usual features about what new books you can buy from us, and from other people. And there’s a new subscription offer you can take advantage of.
The epub of #7 is available in store now. Kindle versions are on their way, as soon as Kevin has had a chance to test them (unless anyone else wants to volunteer).
Screaming Dreams Sale
I’ve been getting some very positive feedback about the latest Salon Futura cover. The artist, Steve Upham, also runs a small press, and right now he is having a sale. The books on offer are mainly horror but also include titles by Rhys Hughes and John Grant.
While you are at Steve’s site, check out his art portfolio. There are many other wonderful images where I found that cover.
Salon Futura #6
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! And because I love you all lots, I have a new issue of Salon Futura for you.
To mark the release day, Jonathan Clements has a very romantic story from Japan.
Our guest contributor this month is Raz Greenberg from Israel who tells us all about a wonderful French animator.
Sam, meanwhile, gets all surreal with the help of Robert Irwin’s novel, Exquisite Corpse.
My own contribution started out all snowy and ended up as a meditation on suspension of disbelief.
Karen is back with some thoughts about the Last Man on Earth.
This month’s Salon is all about Running a Small Press and my guests are L. Timmel Duchamp (Aqueduct Press), Alisa Krasnostein (Twelfth Planet Press) and Sean Wallace (Prime Books).
Our interview guests for February are Gary K. Wolfe and Ann VanderMeer.
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro has taken over running the Pipeline column and is doing a great job.
Two new small presses have joined our bookstore. A warm welcome please for Bull Spec, and for Papaveria Press who have their first two ebooks, The Winter Triptych by Nicole Kornher-Stace and Jack o’ the Hills by C.S.E. Cooney, launching today.
And we have a magnificent cover by Steve Upham.
For those of you who like such things, the epub version is available from the bookstore.
Me: In Hebrew
Today I have ding production on Salon Futura #6 and watching rugby. The former you’ll see on Monday, I hope. The latter, well laughing at the Scottish rugby team isn’t really fair. But I did want to pop in briefly to say how pleased I am that some kind people in Israel have translated one of my articles from Salon Futura #5 into Hebrew. You can find it here. Thanks Ehud!
February Conventions
After a couple of quiet months it is time to start convention travel again. This coming weekend I be doing production on Salon Futura #6, which should provide a nice Valentine’s present for you all on Monday. Jonathan Clements has a very appropriate article. The rest of us are rather less romantic.
The following weekend (19th) I shall be in London for Picocon. Juliet McKenna is one of their Guests of Honour, so someone from BristolCon has to be there to show support. It will be great to catch up with Juliet and their other GoHs, Kari Sperring and Paul McAuley. I’ll be in London on the Friday night, but I have to be on a train home on Saturday evening.
And the weekend after that I shall be in Cardiff on the Saturday for their inaugural comic expo. Paul Cornell will be there, as will some of the BristolCon artists. I’m looking forward to meeting Steve Upham as he has provided the cover for Salon Futura #6. I’m dragging John Meaney along to see what all this comic stuff is all about. And my pal Barry Nugent of Geek Syndicate will be launching his first graphic novel, which should be cause for celebration.
I will, of course, have copies of Dark Spires available at both these events, should you wish to avail yourself of the special convention discount rate.
Language and Identity, SF-Style
On this week’s Coode Street podcast Jonathan Strahan surprised me rather by saying that he hates the term “specifc” (and also variants such as “speculative fiction”). Given that I use it quite a lot, I was interested to understand why.
In context, Jonathan explained that he encounters the term most often as a whitewash phrase used by people who don’t want to admit that they are having anything to do with science fiction. So, for example, a university English department might offer courses in “speculative fiction” in order to avoid the opprobrium that would be heaped upon them for teaching “science fiction”.
Jonathan and Gary also discussed the term “sci-fi”, which was roundly hated amongst fandom until very recently for similar but opposite reasons. The theory was that anyone who used “sci-fi” rather than “science fiction” was a froth-at-the-mouth fanboy who was only interested in films and television, and was probably unable to actually read books. People who used the term “sci-fi” gave respectable science fiction fans a bad name, and “sci-fi” was used as a term of abuse by the media, just as “queer” was used to insult homosexuals.
However, language changes and evolves. The term “queer” has been largely reclaimed, though there are still people in the LGBT community who regard it as offensive. And “sci-fi” is in such common usage now that younger fans see no problem in adopting it.
Jonathan wondered whether “specfic” was another generational issue given that his friends from the Galactic Suburbia podcast use it a lot. But I’m older than Jonathan, so I have no excuse on those grounds.
You may be wondering whether, because Salon Futura is aimed at broad minded mainstream readers as well as the science fiction community, I might be using “specfic” for precisely the reasons that Jonathan suggests — in order to avoid people having to confront the awful truth that they actually read science fiction. Actually, however, my reasons are rather different. I like “specfic” because it is a useful umbrella term.
To start with it is a lot shorter than having to write “science fiction, fantasy, horror and related literatures”. Of course you could rightly point out that the term “science fiction” is often used in exactly that sort of umbrella fashion. However, I have got very tired over the years of people who insist that whenever “science fiction” is used it can only ever mean “science fiction”, not anything that they do not accept as falling under that term. I’m talking about the sort of people who insist that, because the Hugo Awards are given out by the World Science Fiction Society at the World Science Fiction Convention then they must only be for science fiction, not fantasy or indeed anything that Hugo Gernsback would not have recognized as properly scientific, despite the fact that is says clearly in the WSFS constitution that works of fantasy are eligible.
I am also very wary of the practice of using the name of a majority or most active subgroup in a community as an umbrella term for that community. For example, you should not use “English” to mean “British”. I also wince when I see people use “transgender” as an umbrella word for the trans community, particularly if I think they are using it to imply that transsexuals are deluded and politically unacceptable. So I try to use umbrella terms that are more neutral. Of course no word is perfect, and the fact that “specfic” abbreviates to SF is bound to annoy fantasy fans. I could use Clute’s term, “Fantasktika”, But unlike many Clute neologisms that one hasn’t really caught on, and would upset science fiction fans. Specfic has a certain pedigree, and has the cachet of having been coined by Heinlein.
None of this will last, of course. Language evolves very quickly. In 50 years time those of you still alive then may find everyone using Fantastika, or that distinctions between science fiction and mainstream literature have gone away because everyone writes it. One day back issues of Salon Futura may be re-issued with every occurrence of the hideously offensive world “specfic” altered to “sci-fi”. But for now I shall continue to use specfic. Sorry Jonathan.
Salon Futura #5
Things are more or less back to normal at Libsyn. The podcast still isn’t on iTunes, but that could be Apple’s fault and you can certainly listen to the podcast online.
Anyway, we have a new issue, and it is full of good stuff, starting with what I think is an absolutely awesome cover featuring one of my favorite paintings by Judith Clute.
Sam spends this issue talking about Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Jeanette Winterson and Venice. He also gets to talk with Jon in a bonus interview that happened by accident.
We have a guest article from Colin Harvey taking a close look at the career of one of the hottest properties in science fiction at the moment, Paolo Bacigalupi.
Jonathan’s search for Japanese steampunk led him to write an article about a crime writer who so loved Edgar Allan Poe that he gave himself a Japanese version of Poe’s name as a pen name: Edogawa Ranpo.
I have two article this issue. The main book review is all about 2010’s debut writers, but I also wrote a piece about the nature of “genre” which I hope might move us slightly away from the obsession with categorization (though it probably won’t).
Our interviewees are Paul Cornell (talking about writing comics) and our cover artist, Judith Clute. The Salon is also devoted to comics as Maura McHugh, Joe Gordon and David Monteith discuss potential nominees for the Graphic Story Hugo.
We also have the usual backup features of Pipeline and New In Store. The latter has news of a fundraiser project for Queensland Flood relief.
Production Delay
Well I was going to publish Salon Futura #5 this morning. However, I have now spent 3.5 hours trying to get the podcast to go live at Libsyn.com. All I have got is a pile of lengthy progress messages followed by errors that might mean something to their tech support, if they were answering their email, but are of no help to me whatsoever.
So basically publication is on hold until either Libsyn sort out whatever the problem is with their site, or until I find a new podcast hosting service. Recommendations would be appreciated. Ideally I’d like one that doesn’t use a flash player and can therefore be accessed on iPads, etc.
Not Dead
I’ve just been very busy getting issue #5 of Salon Futura ready for publication. I think it is all ready to go now. Assuming I don’t discover anything horrible it will be online tomorrow morning (UK time).
People and Money
Running Wizard’s Tower is proving interesting and educational in a number of ways. Unsurprisingly, I have discovered that I am not a very good salesperson. Making stuff is no problem. Persuading people to part with money is quite another. Some of that is personal. A Welsh Methodist upbringing drums into you that asking for money for anything except charity is a bad thing to do. And for very obvious reasons of personal history my self esteem is not exactly stellar. However, there are also techniques to be learned, and that’s interesting in a different way.
One observation that I would cautiously advance is that the behavior of human beings en masse is very different from their stated individual behavior on the Internet. No matter how much people may rail against the evils of commercialism, much of it works. I suspect, for example, that it is much easier to sell things if you price them at a ridiculously high mark-up and then offer periodic massive sales than if you were to price them closer to cost, no matter how “evil” such behavior might seem.
The other thing I am learning is that there are all sorts of delicate balancing acts to be negotiated between reminding people to buy and not being irritating. I’m currently erring on the side of caution, I think. Of course it may simply be that what I’m doing is utter rubbish and no one wants to pay for it, but that way lies surrender and I’m not prepared to give up on life just yet.
Here’s an interesting concrete example. I tend to think that it is better to ask for money in return for something than to ask for money for nothing. Hence I’d prefer to have people buy ebook editions of Salon Futura than donate money. But that falls down in a couple of ways. Firstly many of you don’t have ebook readers, and while you can read epubs on a PC, you might as well read the website. Secondly it requires you to actually go to the store and make a purchase. That’s work. It is easier to persuade people to pay money if you make it easier for them to do so.
(This, incidentally, is one reason why most people will still buy their Kindle books from Amazon, rather than from independent retailers like me, even though the Amazon ones are DRMed and mine are not. Buying through the Kindle shop is easier, because the book downloads automatically.)
So here’s a question for you. If I were to offer a £1.49 monthly subscription to Salon Futura, via PayPal with automatic billing, would any of you sign up? It is cheap — only £1.49/month — and easy — sign up once and not have to worry again. Of course you wouldn’t have to do it — the magazine will still be available for free online. But it would help pay the bills if enough people do it.
If you don’t want to comment about it here, but would be happy to pay, email me. I want to get a good sense of whether this is worth doing before offering it. Thanks!
Salon Futura #4
I put Salon Futura #4 live earlier today. As usual it is full of good stuff.
Our guest article for this issue is by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and looks at the long history of generation ship stories.
Karen has an international look to her short fiction picks this month. Of the three stories, one is from Clarkesworld, but the other two are from magazines based in Germany and Israel.
Sam heads off to Tasmania via Finland and the Congo to review the new Johanna Sinisalo novel, Birdbrain, and look at other SF books influenced by Joseph Conrad’s classic story, Heart of Darkness.
Jonathan heads off into space with Leiji Matsumoto, the artistic genius behind Space Battleship Yamato.
My own column tries to persuade reluctant males that not all fantasy novels written by women are romance novels in disguise. The authors covered are Cat Valente, Lauren Beukes, N.K. Jemisin, Karen Lord, Ekaterina Sedia and Liz Williams.
This month’s interviews are with Al Reynolds and Juliet McKenna. Both of them were shot at BristolCon, and they both have a lot of interesting things to say.
The Salon is entitled “Steampunk Without Empire”. Karin Lowachee, Lavie Tidhar and Jeff VanderMeer join me to discuss whether steampunk is necessarily imperialist.
Possibly the most exciting news of the month is that the web store is beginning to ramp up at last. I’m delighted to be able to announce that we are now stocking some titles from Lethe Press, including the fabulous Diana Comet by Sandra McDonald.
And we have some lovely cover art from local artist, Simon Breeze.
I’m very relieved to have got to the end of the year with all four planned issues released on schedule. We are now, of course, Hugo eligible for next year, though it would be an amazing achievement to get a nomination on the basis of just four issues. I’m rather more interested in stopping losing quite so much money. I’ll have more to say about that in a couple of days, but in the meantime donations are always appreciated, and if you have an iPad the magazine looks utterly gorgeous on it, and is very cheap.
A Weekend Away
As you may have noticed, I have been not blogging much over the past few days. That’s because I have been in London. I headed out there on Friday afternoon, attended the British Fantasy Society meeting that evening and sold some copies of Dark Spires (yay!).
Many thanks are due to my friends Teddy and Tom who put me up at their place in Wimbledon for a couple of nights. I generally take them something costume-related to say thank you. Hopefully they enjoyed the latest offering.
On Saturday I attended a party at the home of John and Judith Clute in Camden. The official theme of the party was Clute’s 70th birthday, though the actual event took place some weeks ago and the party was scheduled to allow maximum attendance by desired guests. Despite the snow, a great group of people turned up. Gary K. Wolfe flew in from Chicago, and a bunch of famous writers dropped in, including Robert Irwin and Brian Aldiss.
On Sunday I was back in Camden so that Gary, Clute and I could record an episode of the Coode Street Podcast (otherwise known as “Live with Gary K. Wolfe”, but as will become obvious it is by no means live).
I provided the tech at our end. Initially I connected to the Clute home network, because I expected it to be the most stable option. Unfortunately Skype kept cutting out on us. I didn’t have time to diagnose why, but was able to switch to using the MiFi. That did the job just fine.
I’m listening to the podcast now (you can find it here). It sounds like Jonathan wasn’t able to save anything useful from the failed attempts to record a discussion, which is a shame because there was some good stuff in it. I did précis it at the beginning of the recording we have, but I’ll write more about it tomorrow.
Clute and Gary got a bit animated at times, and I found myself wishing that I had the means to do sound effects so that it sounded like they were actually slugging it out. You’ll just have to imagine it.
I did also record an interview with Gary for Salon Futura. That won’t be online until February, but I needed to get it done now because Gary has to go back to the US and I may not see him again for a year or more.
I’m now back home and looking forward to watching the cricket from Australia, where it will be much warmer than it is here.
More on Paying for Non-Fiction
This morning over breakfast I listened to the latest edition (#21) of the Galactic Suburbia podcast. I’m very grateful to the ladies for mentioning my post on paying for non-fiction, but I can’t help feeling that they missed the point a little because they said things like, “why should anyone pay for reviews when so many people are willing to do it for free?”
Well, you know, lots of people put their fiction online for free as well, but we still pay people to write it. Sometimes we pay them quite a lot, because they are good at it.
And possibly my point is that when a magazine doesn’t pay for the reviews it prints then it is saying to its readers that it doesn’t care whether those reviews are any good or not.
But mainly the point is that if you do want to get paid for non-fiction has to be worth reading. If you query me to write something for Salon Futura I won’t just say, “yeah great, the more reviews the merrier,” because I have a budget to stick to. Instead I will ask you questions, like this:
- Why, of all the hundreds of books published recently, should we carry a review of this one?
- What do you have to say about the book that is interesting, exciting, innovative, important?
- Why should other people want to read what you have to say about this book?
And if you can’t answer those questions, or if your answer amounts to, “I read it and I liked it”, then I won’t buy your article.
It comes down to this: there are all sorts of reasons why people write reviews, but if you want someone to pay you to write them then you have to write something that other people are going to want to read.
What’s In Store – The Magazines
Aside from Dark Spires, the only things I have in store at the moment are copies of Clarkesworld and Salon Futura. I don’t expect this state of affairs to last. I’m actively talking to small presses and individual authors about stocking their books. In the meantime, however, let’s talk about the magazines, because I’m sure that there are some people out there who are thinking: “Charging money for something you can find free online? What an outrageous ripoff!”
Well, that’s certainly one way of looking at it. The other way is to say that it is giving you an opportunity to pay for something if you can afford to do so, because if nobody pays then it won’t keep going for long.
It helps to understand the situation better if you also read this post from The Hill, a blog about things to do with Congress, which people were linking to on Twitter today. In it Colleen Doran explains some of the bad things that are happening to comics creators right now, which she sees as a direct result of piracy: people scanning comics and posting them online for free.
There are all sorts of arguments that could be made about this, and I’d prefer it if the comment thread didn’t degenerate into a flame war about piracy. There’s not much new to be said on the issue these days. I would, however, like to make two points.
Firstly, laws are not going to stamp out piracy. Prohibition did not stop people from drinking alcohol; the “war on drugs” hasn’t stopped people smoking dope or snorting cocaine; “just say no” campaigns don’t stop teenagers from having sex. If something is possible, and it looks like fun, people will do it.
Secondly, the proposed new law that Doran is talking about is not targeting individual pirates, but rather piracy as a business. It is one thing to share your ebooks with your mates. It is quite another to make a business of pirating thousands of ebooks and making money off advertising on your web site.
So one way of looking at what is happening with online magazines is to say that we are pirating our own stuff. Given that it is inevitable that anything worth having is going to appear for free somewhere, we might as well get the traffic coming to our own sites, so that we get the ad revenue instead of the pirates.
That’s not the end of the story, however. Because what we really want to do is pay creators — writers and artists — good money for good work. Clearly not everyone can afford to pay. That may be because they are kids, because they are out of work, or because they come from poorer parts of the world where they can barely afford to get online. I’m OK with that. Salon Futura has readers in places like Vietnam, Bosnia and Egypt. I don’t know who those people are, but I’m pleased they are reading my magazine and fairly sure that they would not be doing so if they had to buy it from Amazon.
Some of you, however, can afford to pay. I’ve lived in California. People there think nothing of adding 15% to restaurant bills, or dropping a couple of bucks to a bellhop or maid in a hotel. Is it really too much to ask to pay a few dollars a month to keep the likes of Clarkesworld and Salon Futura going? Possibly it is, but now you have the choice. You don’t have to pay “too much”, but you don’t have to pay “too little” either.
Sorry if I’m banging the drum a bit here, but this is the way the world is going. If we want writers, artists, musicians and so on to continue to entertain us, we have to give them money for what they do.