Monthly Archives: May 2009

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Amateur hour is over – Amazon becomes a publisher

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This year is just burgeoning with disruptive change for the publishing industry, and here’s the latest cat among the pigeons: Amazon have decided that they can do more than just distribute books. They’re going to start republishing them as well.

Even great books can be overlooked. And authors with great potential often struggle to connect with the larger audience they deserve to reach. We’re fortunate at Amazon.com to have customers who know a good book when they read one, so we’ve introduced AmazonEncore to help connect authors and their books with more readers.

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.

How successful this will turn out to be, I have no idea. Knowing how prevalent spurious reviews can be on Amazon – particularly on self-published works of dubious merit – I’m curious to discover what sort of vetting process they’ll go through before actually deciding to push a title out of obscurity and into the spotlight. Perhaps they’ll give Harriet Klausner the editorial hotseat…

[Via George Walkley, marketing and digital strategist for Little, Brown Books here in the UK.]

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PR advice for writers from Jeff VanderMeer

Booklife by Jeff VanderMeerHyperprolific author and anthologist Jeff VanderMeer recently completed and submitted Booklife, a non-fiction book about the writing life that promises to be full of insight, harsh truths, good ideas and (knowing VanderMeer) dark humour.

He’s been posting a few excerpts from it in various places, including a chunk of tips on PR and self-publicity for writers which are well worth reading even if you’re not a writer – they say a lot about the art of publicity in a world where everyone is already their own PR firm (whether they realise it or not).

That advice includes a warning on the dangers of listening to advice from those who aren’t as qualified to give it as they might like to think:

How did some of these people arrive at bad places? Horrible advice. Always keep in mind that advice, especially advice on promoting yourself, is often anecdotal or a Received Idea–received from a time machine from the Distant Past. Sincerely-given but idiotic career advice can be a shiv in the side, an icepick through the eye. Worse, it can result in a slow malarial fever from which you never recover, performing actions you later have no good rationale for doing. The worst career advice attempts to separate you from your work, you a shucked oyster wondering what happened, and why.

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Charles Stross on the future of gaming

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Star Wars MMO game screenshotThe Zeitgeist strikes again – it appears that this week is going to throw up lots of stuff about computer gaming. Here’s a counterpoint to Sven’s dispatch; a transcript of a keynote speech that Charlie Stross gave to the LOGIN 2009 games industry conference yesterday.

In the next five years we can expect semiconductor development to proceed much as it has in the previous five years: there’s at least one more generation of miniaturization to go in chip fabrication, and that’s going to feed our expectations of diminishing power consumption and increasing performance for a few years. There may well be signs of a next-generation console war. And so on. This isn’t news.

One factor that’s going to come into play is the increasing cost of semiconductor fab lines. As the resolution of a lithography process gets finer, the cost of setting up a fab line increases — and it’s not a linear relationship. A 22nm line is going to cost a lot more than a 33nm line, or a 45nm one. It’s the dark shadow of Moore’s Law: the cost per transistor on a chip may be falling exponentially, but the fabs that spit them out are growing pricier by a similar ratio.

Something like this happened, historically, in the development of the aerospace industry. Over the past thirty years, we’ve grown used to thinking of the civil aerospace industry as a mature and predictable field, dominated by two huge multinationals and protected by prohibitive costs of entry. But it wasn’t always so.

Go read the whole thing; Stross swiftly and plausibly draws a line from the present to the future two decades hence, a future where the audience demographics for gaming have shifted to include the vast majority of the population, and the technology platforms that games run on are small, portable and ubiquitous. [image by st3f4n]

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The future of fiction is games

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computer game end-screenWe’ve already heard arguments to the effect that computer games could become the ‘new frontier’ for fiction writing and storytelling, but they’ve usually come from the games or fiction communities themselves. It seems the idea is starting to get some traction beyond the ghettos, though – here’s a reviewer at the Daily Telegraph responding to a new game based on Dante’s Inferno:

Dante’s Inferno may not herald a new era in literary gaming, but connoisseurs of story could do worse than watch the area for developments. A recent survey of American teenagers revealed that 97 per cent of the consumers of the future now play video games.

What’s more, certain independent games are entering a phase – familiar to historians of jazz, comics and indeed 20th-century literature – of vigorous experimentation with techniques of narrative. (An evening with the frightening and baffling The Path, rather like an Angela Carter story siphoned through The Sims, will show you what I mean.) And with book sales falling, it may not be long before prose writers jump ship for a medium that offers some of the most exciting possibilities of the new century.

It’s happened before. Veterans of home computing in the Eighties and Nineties may recall knotting their brows over the game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams himself. Adams also wrote Bureaucracy, a game in which the paper-shuffling protagonist’s most pressing task is to avoid succumbing to a brain haemorrhage from stress. And the veteran sci-fi novelist Harlan Ellison delivered I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a game whose vision of eternal torture remains more shocking than most of its high-resolution descendants.

No surprise to see science fiction writers cropping up in the discussion – though whether that’s because they’re generally a more forward-thinking type of writer or because they’ve always had to struggle to find new markets is a moot point.

And, of course, computer gaming is still a medium in its infancy by comparison to the novel, song or poem – not to mention one that inherently has vast potential to absorb other media into itself. It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to imagine much of the consumer media we enjoy today being reparsed into more interactive forms; my only hope is that is doesn’t shake down to the levels of banality that tend to define television, the previous game-changing media technology. [image by blakespot; story via TomorrowMuseum]