Brian Keene on piracy

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

Who are you? I wouldn't pay $50 for a signed anything unless it was from Douglas Adams and it was a posthumous signature.

Limited editions don't benefit the author, they benefit eBay. And everyone else loses, and your audience gets to feel like you don't care about them unless they're the 1% of people who can drop $50 on a single book on a whim. Bah.

I don't know anything about Mr. Keene other than that he's won -- twice -- an award for which I was merely nominated. That and his publishing history suggest he's gone from mass-marketed books to the slow marginalization that has afflicted most mainstream sf and horror writers in the twilight of what Virginia Woolf called (with admiration and respect) the common reader.

Faced with not being published at all in hardcover, many once-sought genre writers have agreed to exclusive limited editions before striking humbler deals for paperbacks and, lately, ebooks.

These editions are sometimes lavish and costly to produce. They are not self-published and usually offer incentives to the actual publisher, such as jacked prices and a fan-base willing to splurge. In other words, the pretentious pricing isn't usually the author's idea. It is the drawback of getting to do a beautiful-looking book with a niche publisher who only does that one thing. And the author's percentage isn't generally as high as the book's price would suggest.

Often, the writer isn't trying to make a vast disproportionate profit by doing this. They just want the satisfaction of seeing their book as a handsome physical object. They like being able to point to and sign it during book tours. They toil in dinky rooms for lifetimes in semi-isolation amid exploding marriages and want some sense of tangible validation -- however delayed -- for the effort.

Let's say you're a relic who grew up being published the old way. You might find yourself longing for the pleasures you remember. Here's one of the things you might miss most: the feeling of owning fancy editions of your own words to put on your own shelf and pick up whenever you needed to be reminded your work was real in the truest and most tactile sense.

Limited editions often benefit the author, but not always monetarily.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Let's say you're a relic who grew up being published the old way. You might find yourself longing for the pleasures you remember. Here's one of the things you might miss most: the feeling of owning fancy editions of your own words to put on your own shelf and pick up whenever you needed to be reminded your work was real in the truest and most tactile sense.

Limited editions often benefit the author, but not always monetarily.

(I'm not sure how to respond to this precisely; I hope I can clarify that my snark and disdain is directed at the author and not you.)

I hope that when I'm a famous author, I don't throw my poorer fans under the bus in exchange for a sexy hardcover with my name on it. I'd like to think that I care more about my readers than about running my fingers over the limited edition baby seal skin version or whatever they're making the hardcover from that it costs $50.

ETA: Also, if the "screw my readers, I want a pretty bookend!" is really what's going on here, then why the screaming and bawling over STOP SHARING THE FILE, GUYS, PAY YOUR FIFTY BUCKS. I doubt his "dang, that limited edition thing hurts but I really want the bookend" contract requires him to throw a fit at his readers. Either it's a free publicity tantrum, or he wants to wring his readers for every penny they're worth, or both. Either way, I reiterate that I can and will continue to think him a whelk.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Let me clarify:

Hardcover editions are no longer a given in a world in which even paperback editions are dwindling. They are to moderately successful published writers what houses are to the shrinking middle class: a wistful recollection. In many cases, the choice is to go with the fancy expensive edition or not be published in hardcover at all. This has been going on since at least the 80s.

The choice appears less ruthless to me than it does to you. If other fans will get the book a bit later, and if the wait makes them hungrier without neglecting their appetites, then I don't really see the harm.

Not every writer spews novel after novel of makeshift prose. Some invest huge amounts of time in what they do and labor to make their books perfect, keeping hours like any nine-to-fiver and sucking up the overtime. For them, writing isn't an avocation. Their goal is to produce a thing of lasting quality as well as make a living, which means that writing is their calling as well as their full-time job.

The person who lives that way might be thinking about money when they sign the deal for the edition that will sell. But they might view the limited hardcover differently: I made sacrifices to write this book and a few of you might feel the same way about owning it.

§§§§§§§§§§

Here's where we agree:

Mr. Keene has complained extensively about the pirating of an ebook he himself offered as an incentive for purchasing the official release. He has taken on a role no traditional author wants, which is to be seller, advertiser, marketer and advocate of his own work.

When writers do this, they establish new relationships with the public and are recast as merchants; as bloggers, they become personalities. Unless they are extremely careful, they can shift to being perceived as money-coveting vendors and obnoxious narcissists instead of magnanimous imaginers.

It's Mr. Keene's regrettable emphasis on piracy, pricing, successive editions and being cheated that makes the cost of those limited hardcovers seem so irksome. Many genre writers before him have published the same way and been content to leave the machinery obscured by the tarp. In my opinion, that's where the machinery should remain.

We've seen this happen before to music, film and television. We've seen what grousing about it did to the popularity of the artists and celebrities who held anti-piracy press conferences. Writers have the advantage of being the third successive group to suffer the economic effects. I understand Keene's feelings of betrayal and frustration, but I'm mystified by his obliviousness to history.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I hope that when I'm a famous author, I don't throw my poorer fans under the bus in exchange for a sexy hardcover with my name on it. I'd like to think that I care more about my readers than about running my fingers over the limited edition baby seal skin version or whatever they're making the hardcover from that it costs $50.

$50 is just the pre-order price, unless the readers are lucky enough to get their order in before all the hordes of dealers descend on it you can at least double that figure for the reader's price.

If the aim is to have something pretty to put on shelves, it doesn't need to be a limited edition in such a small quantity to do that. Since it's all sold through pre-orders anyway, they could use the number of orders to determine the print run (and then a 10% run-on for latecomers). Doing that would also bring down the unit price, which could either increase profit or reduce the cost for readers.

[Prestidigitweeze]

The real question is whether those details are up to Mr. Keene or his publisher. Moderate past successes don't necessarily put him in a negotiating position of strength.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Mr. Keene has complained extensively about the pirating of an ebook he himself offered as an incentive for purchasing the official release. He has taken on a role no traditional author wants, which is to be seller, advertiser, marketer and advocate of his own work.

According to whom? I'm not trying to be touchy at you, but I'm a little bored of the meme that before ebooks, all the TAs sat in darkened rooms cordoned off from their readership, but then the ebooks came along and forced them out in the sunlight where they are reacting in a manner usually reserved for vampires.

Maybe it's because I'm coming from a sf/f perspective but "be engaged with your readership" and "don't be a dick" have always been basic rules for TAs. And sell/advertise/market/advocate has pretty much always been true -- unless convention appearances and book signings have been figments of my imagination all this time in which case I wish you guys had told me that earlier.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Being bored with the truism (not meme) that traditional authors were cut off from their readership doesn't make it less apt. Speaking to the public under controlled and predictable circumstances is not the same as sharing a room with them on the internet 24-7.

Things are changing and your perception of authors is an updated one, which is to say non-traditional. This isn't a criticism. By traditional, I don't mean greater legitimacy or a more professional mindset. I simply mean past professional practice.

Traditional as in old-school, not better.

I grew up knowing a lot of writers published by big houses and academic presses. The first advice they gave me was never to be my own agent or promoter. This was because book stores, magazine editors, readers and so on considered it crass and unprofessional.

Never talk to store owners about carrying your books, they warned. It doesn't come off well. Have someone else do that for you.

(This is not a value judgment from me because I think things were better that way. It's simply the way things had worked and continued to work while I was still a mangy prodigy.)

One of the first people to go against that idea was Terry McMillan who, as a young woman (in those days) of color, found publishers unresponsive to a target audience she absolutely knew to be important. So far as I know (and I mean that anecdotally), she was one of the first successful writers in the past forty years to book her own tours, be her own agent and generally self-negotiate her way to the major audience she was certain she could reach. William T. Vollman was another.

But those are the exceptions. Those people managed the feat despite the limitations of conventional channels because they thought out their strategies carefully and were really good at interacting at the more hands-on levels they chose.

Your having "come from an SF/F perspective" makes absolutely no difference here because you're describing me as well (at least until age sixteen or seventeen). Ninety percent of the first writers I knew personally worked with SF and horror almost exclusively, and I've continued to read occasional SF and horror books for most of my life. Some critics have even categorized me as a horror writer.

But back to my old friends: None of them ever wanted a public forum in which to pontificate; the most skillful socially stayed completely clear of controversies, quarrels and bickering unless the effort was orchestrated (cf. cyberpunk) or the target was Harlan Ellison.

Conventions are an entirely different phenomenon than internet self-promotion. Those writers were far more shielded than any blogger.

Clearly, you and I have seen writers at conventions from different angles. I only ever went to any convention with my writer friends, which means I saw things from their vantage. I saw the us-vs.-them side they carefully hid from their fans.

Every writer is different, so the kind you're talking about could certainly exist and I believe you when you talk about them, but the literally hundreds I've known and/or observed before the popularization of e-books are all people who'd hate to be involved in self-promotion beyond the usual book tours, speaking to crowds and signing books. You're in a box made of gorilla glass when you deal with the public that way. It's a lot easier not to look like a Richard Face if you've got someone to play Richard for you.

The business is changing and the old model isn't sustainable even for most of the old guard. We're at the point at which tradition is ending and most of older writers are being forced to adapt. The point is that some of them can't seem to adapt very well to a post-print world. Some, like Thom Disch, even refuse.

Though Thom's no longer with us, his blog is still up. It's often brilliant, but the tone is increasingly lonely and wistful. Deprived of fiction's artifice, the unsheltered, unprotected Thom is revealed in his final posts to have been, in the words of O'Neill, "a little in love with death." Yes, he was still grieving over Charles Naylor. Yes, he was frostbitten with fear by the likelihood of losing his home. But I believe it hurt him to strip away his masks. Revealing his naked face to the world helped to destroy his pride in not being of it.

You might be surprised at how many writers looked at book tours as the chance to become someone else, the glamorous and witty people they imagined their audience imagined them to be. I've even known writers whose spouses and partners had to agree from the beginning that monogamy was the expectation everywhere but on a book tour.

The eye-widening event for me was watching career arcs before and after The Agent. Writers I knew became unfathomably popular. One went from having a book published by a small literary press to three major houses duking it out for the privilege of publishing a collection of short stories and essays (not even a novel). Shortly after that same book hit the shelves, he appeared on David Letterman.

Originally Posted by anamardoll

According to whom? I'm not trying to be touchy at you, but I'm a little bored of the meme that before ebooks, all the TAs sat in darkened rooms cordoned off from their readership, but then the ebooks came along and forced them out in the sunlight where they are reacting in a manner usually reserved for vampires.

Maybe it's because I'm coming from a sf/f perspective but "be engaged with your readership" and "don't be a dick" have always been basic rules for TAs. And sell/advertise/market/advocate has pretty much always been true -- unless convention appearances and book signings have been figments of my imagination all this time in which case I wish you guys had told me that earlier.

[anamardoll]

Oh, I'm not saying that some authors don't hate their readers -- many obviously do. I'm saying that this has always been the way of things and this idea that the writers who hate their readers NOW have to be given some slack because they're not used to the ebooks-internet-iphone-technology world is bunk. If an author thinks their readership exists only to fan them and peel grapes for them, I reserve the right to think they're a jerk and I will spend my money elsewhere. I'm not going to give them a cookie because "not openly hating your fans" is HAAAAAAARRRRRD.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Wow, I must not be making myself clear. The idea wasn't that writers hated their fans (though I've known some who did). It was that everything would go horribly wrong if an author interacted with fans and bookstore owners directly instead of having someone else set it up. Same with pitching a novel to publishers. All of it was supposed to be done by Others. A lot of writers still say it's easier to get a book deal than a shark (a beneficially pushy agent), the idea being that the deal might be bad and book might die, but a hungry agent will ensure you a better deal and greater recognition.

For all I know, these ideas might have originated with agents who wanted writers to be disproportionately docile, grateful and dependent.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Wow, I must not be making myself clear. The idea wasn't that writers hated their fans (though I've known some who did). It was that everything would go horribly wrong if an author interacted with fans and bookstore owners directly instead of having someone else set it up.

I still get that impression now, especially when spending time on online sites (like this one). I am continually reminded that no one really wants to hear my views on a given subject, especially if it contradicts their own; I, the author, am expected to be a smiling Ken doll, waving blandly and repeating, "That guy is so right! Thanks for all you do! God bless you all!"

But when I try to actually promote myself, I get the "crappy indie author" treatment... I've seen friendlier attitudes to bums on the street.

Of course, one of the reasons authors spend time on websites is specifically to get others to do your promotion for you; having others spread the word through conversation, social media and emails that "This guy is great! You should check out his books!" But if you're spending your time avoiding anything that'll give you the "crappy indie author" treatment, it's kind of hard to distinguish yourself enough to encourage others to promote you.

[Prestidigitweeze]

It's a given that the best self-promoters aren't always the best writers and vice versa. ("Are you vice-versatile, Mildred Piercings?") But I've noticed that the golden ones -- the writers everyone likes as people and, by extension, as talents -- are the ones who seem to listen and be supportive to strangers and are at least competent stylists and have distinctive voices. I've got friends like that and it turns out they're not putting on an act. They really are that fun to be around. Sometimes they even wish they weren't, imagining their agreeability and pleasantness to be some kind of blandness.

The rest of us just have to get better at not letting things get to us. The worst thing we can do is to react when some other member of a forum says something negative. We think we're being proactive when all we're really doing is showing the world we take ourselves too seriously.

Things didn't used to be that way. Then again, I couldn't have friended my favorite writers on Facebook back then and eventually had a drink with them either.

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I still get that impression now, especially when spending time on online sites (like this one). I am continually reminded that no one really wants to hear my views on a given subject, especially if it contradicts their own; I, the author, am expected to be a smiling Ken doll, waving blandly and repeating, "That guy is so right! Thanks for all you do! God bless you all!"

But when I try to actually promote myself, I get the "crappy indie author" treatment... I've seen friendlier attitudes to bums on the street.

Of course, one of the reasons authors spend time on websites is specifically to get others to do your promotion for you; having others spread the word through conversation, social media and emails that "This guy is great! You should check out his books!" But if you're spending your time avoiding anything that'll give you the "crappy indie author" treatment, it's kind of hard to distinguish yourself enough to encourage others to promote you.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I still get that impression now, especially when spending time on online sites (like this one). I am continually reminded that no one really wants to hear my views on a given subject, especially if it contradicts their own; I, the author, am expected to be a smiling Ken doll, waving blandly and repeating, "That guy is so right! Thanks for all you do! God bless you all!"

But when I try to actually promote myself, I get the "crappy indie author" treatment... I've seen friendlier attitudes to bums on the street.

Of course, one of the reasons authors spend time on websites is specifically to get others to do your promotion for you; having others spread the word through conversation, social media and emails that "This guy is great! You should check out his books!" But if you're spending your time avoiding anything that'll give you the "crappy indie author" treatment, it's kind of hard to distinguish yourself enough to encourage others to promote you.

Author or not, that seems to be standard treatment to people in general, in my experience. People don't like hearing views that are different from their own, period.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Author or not, that seems to be standard treatment to people in general, in my experience. People don't like hearing views that are different from their own, period.

I think it's more complicated than that.

There's a lot of people on here -- myself included -- who try to avoid finding out too much about authors because eventually the author is going to say something full of Fail (because that's what humans DO) and then it can sort of taint the reader's interaction with the text.

Look at Orson Scott Card. I enjoyed Ender's Game at the time, but now that I know his position on homosexuality, the book reads differently to me. That's just how FedEx arrows work, for better or worse. Or you have the Scott Adams / Dilbert guy writing stuff about how we shouldn't blame men for rape anymore than we should blame lions for eating zebras or whatever because they can't help themselves and it's just... oooookay. Wish you hadn't shared that, to be honest.

If Pick-An-Author at random came out tomorrow saying "I think Hitler was right!!", a lot of people would have a hard time subsidizing their lifestyle and paying for their art which may or may not have been written to include those sentiments.

This is pretty standard fare. It's one of the reasons why a lot of authors use multiple personas -- one for promoting themselves as inoffensively as possible and one for just bopping around on the internet. And it's not excluded to authors -- MOST people would be called out for publicly saying they agree with Hitler. I see no reason to expect everyone to behave differently just because LE ARTISTE!!

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Being bored with the truism (not meme) that traditional authors were cut off from their readership doesn't make it less apt. Speaking to the public under controlled and predictable circumstances is not the same as sharing a room with them on the internet 24-7.

Brian Keene has complained about that aspect of the internet himself, in an interview in one of those book review podcast type things people do. Readers now, they expect to be able to interact with their favourite writers, and they get annoyed if they don't get an immediate reaction from them. The only way around that would be not to have any kind of internet presense under your real (or pen) name.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Brian Keene has complained about that aspect of the internet himself, in an interview in one of those book review podcast type things people do. Readers now, they expect to be able to interact with their favourite writers, and they get annoyed if they don't get an immediate reaction from them. The only way around that would be not to have any kind of internet presense under your real (or pen) name.

I still think this is patently silly. I have a blog where I publish something once a day at 9 am CST. I respond to comments when I have the time and inclination. I respond to personal emails in the same way.

No one has ever complained that I haven't gotten back to them in a timely manner. I'm sure that 1% of fans DO, but that doesn't mean the author should (a) get upset about it or (b) generalize that therefore all fans are like that.

I'm guessing that 99% of Rowling's readers would turn viciously on anyone who complained that she didn't answer their email.

Possibly I just work with really wonderfully reasonable people.