All posts by Paul Raven

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How publishers can exploit “virtual currencies”

Given that publishing economics are pretty topical at the moment, this video embedded in this post from GalleyCat last Thursday seems either alarmingly prescient or laughably silly, depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: those mind-numbingly infuriating and spammy Farmville games your friends play on Facebook are surprisingly good at generating income for their creators, so publishers should take a leaf from the same book to spice up their own online offerings. The theory does come from the president of a company called Orca which specialises in developing virtual currencies for corporations, so a certain bias in favour of the idea is to be expected…

Here’s an excerpt (which I’ve excerpted in turn from GalleyCat’s post – yay, lazyweb!):

“They convert [virtual currencies] at prices that are not easily divided–one dollar gives you 33 credits [for example] … People don’t necessarily think, ‘it cost me 42-cents to send my friend a virtual beer.’ I think when the publishing industry starts thinking about how they chunk up content–whether it be articles or chapters–it shouldn’t be a debate of whether an article is worth one dollar or three dollars. An article should cost 43 credits.”

My immediate instinct is that this idea stinks, though that’s probably due to my kneejerk loathing of Farmville, Mafia Wars et al; maybe there’ll be a way to graft virtual currencies onto the publishing ecosystem without introducing the intrusive “social” aspects (read as “spamming”) and underhand pricing structures that seem to inform such games, which I suspect wouldn’t gel well with the book-buying demographic. But then again, if you get rid of those aspects of the system, you’ll probably never make a dime with it… so it’s back to the drawing board, I guess.

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Amazon vs. Macmillan: ebook armageddon!

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Unless you’ve been sleeping under a large rock that blocks wi-fi and cellphone signals for the last three days, you’re probably already aware of the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing spat that kicked off late last week. We’re hearing a lot about it in the sf-nal blogosphere, what with Tor Books being a Macmillan subsidiary as well as one of the biggest genre fiction publishers around. [image by tvol]

But just to bring you up to speed, here’s a few bits of commentary from the author’s side. First, Cory Doctorow points out that the war between these two businesses will end up harming writers and readers most of all:

If true, Macmillan demanding a $15 pricetag for its ebooks is just plain farcical. Although there are sunk costs in book production, including the considerable cost of talented editors, copy-editors, typesetters, PR people, marketers, and designers, the incremental cost of selling an ebook is zero. And audiences have noticed this. $15 is comparable to the discounted price for a new hardcover in a chain bookstore, and it costs more than zero to sell that book. Demanding parity pricing suggests that paper, logistics, warehousing, printing, returns and inventory control cost nothing. This is untrue on its face, and readers are aware of this fact.

If true, Amazon draping itself in the consumer-rights flag in demanding a fair price is even more farcical. Though Amazon’s physical-goods sales business is the best in the world when it comes to giving buyers a fair shake, this is materially untrue when it comes to electronic book sales, a sector that it dominates. As mentioned above, Amazon’s DRM and license terms on its Kindle (as well as on its Audible audiobooks division, which controls the major share of the world’s audiobook sales) are markedly unfair to readers. Amazon’s ebooks are locked (by contract and by DRM) to the Kindle (this is even true of the “DRM-free” Kindle books, which still have license terms that prohibit moving the books). This is not due to rightsholder-demands, either: as I discovered when I approached Amazon about selling my books without DRM and without a bad license agreement for Kindle and Audible, they will not allow copyright owners to modify their terms, nor to include text in the body of the work releasing readers from those terms.

Next up, a pretty good economic deconstruction of the situation from Charlie Stross:

From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. They do this by buying wholesale and selling retail, taking up to a 70% discount from the publishers and selling for whatever they can get. Their stalking horse for this is the Kindle publishing platform; they’re trying to in-source the publisher by asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher isn’t merely selling them books wholesale, but is sublicencing the works to be republished via the Kindle publishing platform. Publishers sublicensing rights is SOP in the industry, but not normally handled this way — and it allows Amazon to grab another chunk of the supply chain if they get away with it, turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.

The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down.

And here’s Tobias Buckell trying to explain the situation to people who think authors are being greedy by having ebook versions of their books available at high price points (as if they had the choice). It’s a lengthy post that goes into considerable detail about the costs of publishing ebooks, and takes on the perspective of both readers and writers in a down-to-earth way, so do go and read the whole thing.

… price fixing is not the answer to the eBook dilemma. Letting volume grow from the single digit percentages it is, while giving publishers the flexibility to experiment and play is not the end of the world some claim it to be.

So Amazon has the right to pull the list. It’s part of the negotiating game. They did this to Hachette UK earlier this year in the same manner to force Hachette to play the game according to Amazon’s rules, as it set them up when Amazon first started selling Kindle books. Hachette folded, Amazon views this as a way to get publishers to do what they want.

The reason Macmillan is asking for a change in the way things are done, is because Apple has released an new program, and it offers publishers a program more in line with what they think will work: including some flexibility in early release prices. This now means Kindle is not the big kid anymore, as many are assuming Apple will pull a repeat iTunes store.

Whether or not that happens, I don’t know. But Amazon seems to find the nuclear option okay, and after years of working to send them a lot of business, this is a reverse blow. Because of my online presence, over half of all my print and eBooks are sold via them. Just as they have the right to do this, I have the right to be pretty friggin’ pissed that they think this is the way to negotiate, or build good will in any way.

And here’s some high-snark disparagement from John Scalzi, who points out that – regardless of economics, fairness or anything else – Amazon’s poor handling of the whole fracas is a public relations SNAFU of massive proportions that may well end up doing exactly what they didn’t want it to:

Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.

[…]

And all of this is why a final, ironic bit of Amazon fail will come to pass:

7. Because Of the Idiotic Events of This Weekend, People Will Just Want an iPad Even More.

Again, Amazon: Well played. Well played indeed.

I’ve no idea how soon this matter will be settled, but the economics behind the situation aren’t going to go away, and ripples from this particular rock-in-the-lake will be washing ashore for some time to come. Personally, I want a fair deal for the authors first and foremost… and as much as I’ve long been an advocate of the free-to-read and freemium business models for publishing, I find myself worrying for the first time as to whether or not there’s enough expendable money in the system to support the literary ecosystem as it exists today. Here’s hoping.

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Econopocalypse scenario #3654: the Fat-finger Collapse

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Ars Technica has an interesting article about a couple of recent stock-market glitches caused by high-frequency trading algorithms run amok. Long story short: a screw-up at Credit Suisse was caused by “a trader who accidentally double-clicked an icon in a trading program’s interface, when he should’ve single-clicked“.Yipes.

OK, so it’s not quite the same as a tired technician leaning on the nuclear launch button by accident, but given the utter dependence we have on the instruments of high-speed high finance, similar mistakes could cause global catastrophes. [image by Coffee Maker]

The problem is connected to so-called “day-traders”, computer-assisted stock deals that occur in the blink of an eye, often without much human interaction, and minor errors are amplified at the speed of light (or at least the speed of data in optical fibers) by the networks, causing fluxes that folk like you and I never notice, but which cost bankers and investors thousands of dollars in losses and fines…

Of course, the fact that such computer-driven volatility hurts day traders matters little to long-term investors. But the fear is that these glitches are fleeting indications that the system as a whole is vulnerable and unstable, and that the right combination of circumstances could cause what happend to RMBS to happen on a wider scale. This is especially true as even more of the trading activity, even among individual traders, shifts to automated platforms.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom; the last few years have seen a sharp increase in small trading firms of the two-guys-and-a-fast-computer type, small independent operators using the same techniques as the big banks to trade automatically through the blind of commercially-available trading software.

The Obama administration’s efforts to rein in high-frequency trading by eliminating flash orders and banning proprietary trading (much of which is HFT-based) from large banks will probably have the effect of leveling the playing field a bit for these smaller algo shops. As Matthew Goldstein at points out in his Reuters article on the topic, the prop desks may disappear, but the software and expertise will not. Instead of being concentrated at a few large banks, algo trading will just spread, as the talent behind it either jumps to new funds or goes solo.

Once again, the network corrodes hegemony… but whether a world where anyone and his dog can engage in automated high-frequency wheeler-dealing will be a safer, better and richer one remains to be seen.

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A fistful of writing tips and tools

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brainstormingIt seems like ages since I last relinked any good writing advice here, so let’s take a look at a few items that got tangled up in my intertube trawler-nets this week. First of all Luke Reid points us toward the blog of the pseudonymous Doctor Grasshopper, a medical student and sf/f author who aims to provide useful tips for other writers who want to include realistic diseases and injuries in their plots:

… what I’d really like to do is provide a bit of groundwork for starting from a desired symptom and working your way to figuring out how to make it happen in a marginally medically plausible way.  Some posts will be symptom-based, and will discuss different ways to produce the symptom.  Some posts will be about broad categories of diseases, and how they work.  Some posts will be organ-system-based, and will basically be me geeking out about how cool the human body is.  And of course, I reserve the right to post miscellany as I see fit.

She’s inviting specific questions from the audience, too, so go subscribe to the RSS feed; expertise is an invaluable resource, after all, and free is the best price.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife blog (an online supplement to the book of the same title) is spooling out a bunch of interesting guest posts at the moment, including this little gem from Jeremy L C Jones; if you’ve heard the writerly aphorism “show, don’t tell” but never quite understood what it means, this post should shed some light on the subject.

… I am often surprised at how many of my students haven’t heard “Show, Don’t Tell” or who have heard it but don’t get it.  There comes a time in each semester when I have to explain the difference between showing and telling.

Usually, this can be taken care of with a simple demonstration.

“I am happy,” I say.  ”That is telling.”

Then I jump up and down, hooting and pumping my fists in the air.  “And that is showing.”

They all smile and nod.  They get it!  I am a proud teacher.

Click through for examples and exercises; excessive exposition and blunt telling are the most frequent problems I encounter in manuscripts sent to me for critique, and slush readers of my acquaintance bump into it a great deal, too. Jones’ post should help you grasp the root of the problem, and show you some routes to solving it.

Shifting gear to a somewhat more meta level, John Ginsberg-Stevens pops in to the Apex Book Company blog to look at one of the less-discussed cogs in the genre writer’s gearbox: the annihilation of history.

… I think this is a vital engine in the creative mechanism of SF.  Whether there’s been a zombiepocalypse, an alien invasion, or a high adventure 10,000 years in the future, the genre thrives on messing with history, taking it apart, or brazenly dismissing it to focus on something else.  This applies to genre history as much as it does to actual history, as later generations absorb or break the past to fuel their own creations. From Heinlein’s classic Future History to recent works like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree, history is subjected to an act of destruction that may alter it into something new or unrecognizable, recombine it, or entirely eliminate it. This could be an Asimovian reformulation of the grand sweep of history, or the intimate breakdown and evocation of local history and folklore into something very different.

This act of destruction can produce a lot of creative energy, and can also focus the audience’s attention on what is important in a narrative.

Some good ideas for critics, reviewers and regular readers in there, too.

Last but not least, it’s back to Luc Reid for one of his own posts, which discusses how to turn a neat idea into a viable story – one of the bits I always struggle with! Reid identifies four basic approaches:

A) Create a beginning situation and let the story take its own course
B) Build an outline
C) Develop an excellent scene
D) Write a first sentence as a jumping-off point

Here’s a snippet from the first approach:

Once you have a character who wants something different from what’s going on, the story has a chance to take off. Whatever you do, don’t give the character what she or he wants–at least not right away. Preferably, make that thing more important and more difficult the deeper we get into the story. If you’re writing off the cuff, it pays to throw every new problem you can think of at your character and let your character try to find their own way out. Of course, they have to continue to have a desire or need they’re following to plot their course, at least in most cases.

Good stuff, clearly explained… Reid’s a good writer to follow if you want useful advice on developing your fictional chops. [image by Marco Arment]

Have you got any recommendations for good writerly advice online? Or a tip or hack of your own to share?

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UK police to deploy military UAV drones, snoop more effectively

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US Air Force UAV droneFuturismic readers resident outside the UK may wonder why exactly it is that I keep battering on about the omnipresent surveillance systems that are saturating this silly little island. After all, if I’m not doing anything wrong, I should have nothing to fear, right?

Well, if believing that helps you sleep at night, then you carry on. In the meantime, I hope you’ll not object to me becoming steadily more nervous about such systems being put into the hands of a clueless, corrupt bureaucracy of a government. Am I overstating the case here? I don’t know – but how would you feel if you heard your police force were investing in the same sort of UAV surveillance drones that have proven so popular with the “peacekeeping” forces currently stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Better yet, wait until you hear exactly what they want them for:

… for the ­”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

I suppose we should at least be grateful that the ubiquitous yet hollow catch-all of “terrorism” doesn’t turn up in that list. But there’s more:

… the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.

The Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates UK airspace, has been told by BAE and Kent police that civilian UAVs would “greatly extend” the government’s surveillance capacity and “revolutionise policing”. The CAA is currently reluctant to license UAVs in normal airspace because of the risk of collisions with other aircraft, but adequate “sense and avoid” systems for drones are only a few years away.

I try very hard to keep Futurismic free of my soap-boxing these days, and I hope you’ll accept my apologies if this post has bored, baffled or offended you. But Futurismic‘s also the biggest soap-box I have access to, and I honestly believe this sort of creeping totalitarianism must be called out in public at every available opportunity. Governments that profess to be democracies should remember that respect is a two-way street. [image by ebrkut]