Publishing Contract Horrors

Happy Halloween!

Cory Doctorow on the worsening and non-negotiable clauses in typical publishers' contracts:

Reasonable Agreement

For instance, some demand all existing, hypothetical, and future-conceivable rights, regardless of the unlikelihood of ever using them. As Doctorow mentions, the confidentiality clause is a bit weird. Recent contracts I've signed all include it, but when would I normally receive confidential information from a publisher, and why or to whom would I think of revealing it? No problem agreeing to that clause, since the possibility of violating it is remote.

I've heard of most of these abuses but not suffered many, happily. As for indemnifying publishers against liability, from my limited experience there's no avoiding some version of that clause. Nowadays standard contracts include it, and an author who refuses to sign simply won't get the contract. One can only hope for an agreement that doesn't include the outrageous versions described by Doctorow.

My one experience in having a novel bought by a major publisher was with Harlequin. For a first-time, unagented author, their contract is a non-negotiable boilerplate document. Fortunately, I've had no problems with them or the agreement. By the time I sold them my stand-alone vampire novel EMBRACING DARKNESS (part of my Vanishing Breed universe but not dependent on any other work in it), their former restrictive pen name policies I'd heard about no longer existed.

The small presses and e-publishers who've published my books and stories have been almost always fine to work with. I did once have a narrow escape from a noncompete clause. A startup small press that a friend in an online writers' group connected me with offered to accept the novel I sent them. The offer included a contract with a clause that made me gasp in horrified disbelief. A broad interpretation would have forbidden me in perpetuity to "compete" with the book, which included vampires, by publishing anything else on the same subject. Vampirism -- my specialty. That's enough gall to divide into three parts! I wrote VOID over each page of the contract they'd preemptively signed, filed it in a drawer, and notified the publisher that I refused the offer.

Doctorow's essay condemns noncompete clauses in the strongest terms. In my opinion, an author of nonfiction might reasonably be asked to refrain from writing anything else that might be considered duplicative for, say, a year at most. As for fiction, how would "compete" even be defined? Maybe in terms of allowing one company exclusive rights to a series? Fortunately, I'd already had lots of stories and novels in the Vanishing Breed universe published in multiple venues long before there was any chance that question would arise.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Posthumous Unfinished Writings and Whether Characters Have a Life of Their Own

Last week I read TERRY PRATCHETT: A LIFE WITH FOOTNOTES, by Rob Wilkins, who worked as the Discworld creator's personal assistant for many years, right up to the end. Two points in this biography distressed me, as a reader, writer, and occasional literary critic. (Well, aside from knowing in advance about the sad conclusion, Pratchett's premature death from a rare form of Alzheimer's disease.) I reacted most strongly to the ceremonious crushing of the hard drive from Pratchett's computer, purposely obliterating his unfinished works. Pratchett ordered that his unpublished writings should stay unpublished and that there would be no posthumous Discworld fiction from other authors. Of course, an author has a right to express that wish and have it obeyed by his heirs. But utterly destroying every trace of those uncompleted stories? Very well, as per the author's instructions, don't publish them. However, I shudder at the thought of the loss to SF and fantasy scholarship. A library could have preserved them in an archival collection for academic study of Pratchett's work.

Some readers of Harper Lee's prequel to (or first draft of) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD declared it should not have been published, that it only tarnished the reputation of her classic novel. "That isn't the point," I mentally screamed at the time. The point is the value of that prior work to scholars of her writing. Consider the abundance of posthumous publications and unfinished works by C. S. Lewis available to fans and academics. I would hate to have missed all that. And then there's the case of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose son spent decades compiling, editing, and releasing Tolkien's many surviving stories and fragments. What a loss to scholars and readers the withholding of that material would have been.

In one of my second-tier favorites of Stephen King's novels, LISEY'S STORY, I of course sympathize with the fictional bestselling author's widow, who has been constantly pestered since his death by academics demanding access to his manuscripts and other files. I also feel for those fictional scholars, though. While reading the book for the first time, I did wonder what the heck was taking her so long to get around to the obviously necessary task of releasing his papers for study. Granted, most of the people making those demands were portrayed as pushy, presumptuous, and often downright contemptuous of Lisey herself. I trust Pratchett scholars wouldn't act that way, and I mourn that we'll never know the contents of those destroyed files. If publication had been allowed, I would have paid a considerable sum to read even a fragment of a story about Susan Sto Helit as headmistress of her old school (one example mentioned in the biography).

Second and less important was a casual remark of Pratchett's quoted in passing, which nevertheless I felt like protesting. Once a fan asked him what Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork city Watch was doing in between two particular novels. Pratchett answered, "Nothing. I made him up." If a fictional character becomes vivid enough for readers to imagine he or she has a life outside the printed pages, isn't that a good thing? Pratchett himself certainly must have understood the fanfic-creating impulse, for he admits to perpetrating fanfiction at least once: As a teenager, he composed a PRIDE AND PREJUDICE rewrite set in the world of LORD OF THE RINGS. (It involved orcs.) Not only fanfic but also professional fiction attests to the irresistible desire to expand on the imagined lives of favorite characters.

I know of at least one novel speculating on what Heathcliff did in his years away from Wuthering Heights and how he made his fortune. A recently published book explores the wartime service of the March girls' father during the early chapters of LITTLE WOMEN. So many classic works leave gaps and unanswered questions. What was the full backstory of Bertha, the mad wife in JANE EYRE, and was she actuallly insane before Rochester locked her in an upstairs suite (not, as commonly said, the attic) with only one companion (THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA)? What happened to Ishmael after his rescue at the end of MOBY-DICK. (Jane Yolen recently published a YA novel spun off from that question.) What's the story of Captain Ahab's wife, fleetingly alluded to in Melville's book? There's a novel about her. In A CHRISTMAS CAROL, how do the events look from Marley's viewpoint? Several works have addressed that question. Why did young Ebenezer Scrooge's father detest him? (Ebenezer's mother couldn't have died in giving birth to him, as one classic film states, because his sister Fan is younger; if Scrooge senior was that bitter about his wife's death, he wouldn't have remarried.) Why is Ebenezer too "poor" to marry Belle right away? His father must have been prosperous, since he enrolled Ebenezer in an apparently respectable boarding school and eventually sent a carriage to bring him home; what happened to the family money? What happened to Fan's husband, the never-mentioned father of Scrooge's nephew? What is Tiny Tim's illness, which has to be something chronic but ultimately fatal and yet curable by nineteenth-century medicine? At the time of Scrooge's death in the future scenes, where is his nephew? It's hard to believe Fred, as portrayed in the present-day scenes, would ever give up on Uncle Ebenezer.

These are the kinds of questions deeply involved fans of stories ask. Speculating on the answers is a vital part of the fun of being a reader.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Ascendance of a Bookworm

That's the title of a Japanese novel, manga, and anime series by Miya Kazuki. (I've been reading/viewing all three formats simultaneously, as installments become available, with the result that I sometimes get confused as to the progress of the plot since they've all reached different points in the story.) I've never come across anything quite like this story's intriguing premise: A Japanese college student obsessed with books—even more than I am, if that's possible—ironically gets killed by having a bookshelf fall on her during an earthquake. With her dying breath, she prays to get reincarnated in a world full of books. The gods apparently have a dark sense of humor, for she wakes up in the body of a sickly five-year-old girl named Myne, the younger daughter of a poor, illiterate family in a preindustrial world. (It's implied, though never explicitly confirmed, that the "real" Myne died during her latest attack of illness, leaving her body vacant for the heroine to enter.) Books are rare, hand-copied, expensive, and owned only by the clergy, nobles, and very wealthy commoners. Myne determines that if she can't acquire books any other way, she'll make them herself. Paper and ink, however, are also scarce and expensive, so she has to figure out how to make those products first. Fortunately, she gets a head start from extensive reading about the history of printing, along with her prior-life varied experience dabbling in arts and crafts. Still, as a five-year-old girl prone to collapsing whenever she exerts herself, she has an uphill battle even convincing anybody to take her wishes seriously, much less gathering the materials she needs. In the course of her "ascendance," she not only manages to introduce movable-type printing to her new environment and spread literacy, she also achieves what I think the "gods" might have intended by placing her in this world: As well as continuing to love books, she also learns to value relationships with people. Along the way, readers pick up a lot of incidental knowledge about the manufacture of paper and the process of printing.

The further I delve into this series, the more Myne's plight seems to resonate with some real-world analogs. While she knows herself as an educated adult on the inside, at first everybody else sees her as a lower-class, perpetually sick, fairly useless child. In this quandary, she brings to mind people suffering from disabilities that make communication painfully difficult even though their minds are as sharp as anybody's. Or transgender people whose outward appearances conflict with their core gender identity.

On a more personal level, I can identify with Myne from childhood and teen years as a bookish academic overachiever who got no respect from her parents aside from a few minutes once every six weeks during the school term, when report cards were distributed. Now, in old age, I realize the adults knew many important things to which I, as a child and teenager, was oblivious. Yet, in retrospect, I remain aware that I wasn't totally wrong to think I did know some things my parents didn't.

This heroine also reminds me of my early experiences as an avid reader of horror, fantasy, and science fiction—all that "crazy stuff." Nowadays that field of interest is probably considered less "weird" than in the 1950s and 60s. Nevertheless, I believe most lovers of speculative fiction share the feeling of not fitting into the mundane world around us, of being aliens whose true home is elsewhere. Maybe that's why we started to read fantasy and SF to begin with.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Where Are the Editors?

It's discouraging that, while reading books from major publishers, I run into "Where was the editor?" moments all too often. As a reader, I've always been picky about details, and working for over twenty years as a legislative editor exacerbated that tendency. I can't NOT see errors in printed publications. (Spotting them in my own writing, of course, is less reliable; like many if not most writers, I tend to see what I thought I wrote rather than what appears on the screen.) I grind my teeth and mentally scream, "Where was the editor?!"

Some examples from novels I've read lately: "Putting on the breaks" instead of "brakes." Putting someone "through the ringer" instead of the "wringer." That hardy perennial "it's" (it is) for "its" (possessive). And not exactly an error, but a little odd—"damnit" instead of the more usual "dammit." (Many years ago, I read a book review containing the remark that "damnit" sounded as if the curse were directed solely at immature lice.)

In a particular book co-written by one of my favorite authors, the text constantly substitutes "snuck" for "sneaked" and "anyways" for "anyway." Granted, the younger generations habitually use those words, so they're appropriate in the dialogue of teenagers and young adults. However, this novel also has those errors committed by a middle-aged bookstore owner and an immortal elf, as well as the third-person narrative voice. In the latter case, it might be argued that the narrator is echoing the mental processes of the tight-third-person viewpoint character (if that happens to be a teenager in a given scene), but I maintain that this usage makes it sound as if the authors themselves don't know better.

And then there are factual errors, which I don't spot so often. (After all, noticing them depends on whether the problem relates to a subject I know about.) A 2019 contemporary fantasy I enjoyed very much makes it clear—repeatedly, not in what might be an isolated lapse—that the authors think Long Beach, California, is in San Diego. They're in two different counties!

Maybe some readers don't notice or cringe at typos and errors. As both an English major and a former proofreader, I find such things distracting, although seldom enough to spoil my pleasure in a book. If the lapses are so frequent they cast doubt on the author's command of language, of course, that's a different matter. What bug and baffle me are obvious mistakes in otherwise good books by bestselling authors from major publishers. Have standards and/or staff budgets fallen in recent decades? Or am I falsely remembering a nonexistent golden age when novels were more thoroughly edited? Nowadays, it's a refreshing pleasure to read through an entire book without once muttering, "Where was the editor?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World Part 22 - Making a Profit At Writing In A Capitalist World

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World

Part 22

Making a Profit At Writing In A Capitalist World

Previous Parts of Marketing Fiction In A Changing World are indexed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

"Profit" is a term considered anathema in some circles - with fairly good reason.  The term "profit" has come to signify getting something you didn't earn, something actually earned by the sweat of others.

Those who oppose Capitalism could not destroy Capitalism because it is so good at racking up Profit.  Everyone wants "profit" when it is defined as "something for nothing."

But "something for nothing" is not the definition of profit nor has it anything to do with Capitalism.  Capitalism is about personal, individual ownership, which makes copyrights a form of capital.

-------------quote from a quick Google search------------

cap·i·tal·ism
ˈkapədlˌizəm/
noun
an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
synonyms: free enterprise, private enterprise, the free market; enterprise culture
"the capitalism of emerging nations"
-----------end quote---------------

Google's definition of Capitalism calls it a "system" -- a political and economic system.

Capitalism is not a system and has nothing to do with politics or society.  Capitalism is "not a bug in the social system; it's a feature of Reality."

I saw this item on Quora back in June 2016 and admired the precision of this definition.

-------------quote-------------
https://www.quora.com/Why-would-a-working-class-person-prefer-capitalism-to-communism

First please understand that you can't really compare the two since they are different things. Communism is a socioeconomic concept while capitalism is a solely economic concept. Therefore there are no social policies which can be definitely associated with capitalism, which means the comparison needs to be exclusively economic or based on specific cases (e.g. USA vs. USSR). Also, no country on earth practices or has practiced true communism; by definition communism supersedes the concept of the state with small, self-organized communities, therefore neither the USSR nor China were "true" communist systems.

Now, why would a working class person prefer capitalism? I'd say because they would not enjoy living in a communist society.

-----------end quote---------- 

I could write this entire blog entry about the concept "working class" and how it can not possibly be applied to the USA.  The US Constitution can only function well if the populace understands there is not now nor never has been any such thing as "class" in the human species.  

SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE WRITERS NOTE: all bets are off if you are depicting Aliens. Create a species where "class" is a biological imperative, then launch your Love At First Sight story and see what happens next.

But where only humans are involved, the USA Declaration of Independence and the Constitution nailed it perfectly.  These founding documents are based on "All Men Are Created Equal" and we've fought out the battle over the idea of "all men" (which now includes males of different colors) and the idea that "men" includes women, too.  In other words, our social history has been directed along the lines of enhancing Individualism by turning individuals loose to craft their own destinies in their own pursuit of happiness ever after. 

These ancient words mean that in the USA, there is no such thing as class, working or otherwise.  There is no such thing as "the" 1% -- the ultra rich are "a 1%" not "the 1%."  

Social systems that divide humans into classes are called Aristocracies.  The USA views Aristocracy as resoundingly repudiated by thousands of years of utter failure.

Without a "working class" you can not have an Aristocracy.  

So in the USA, there are people who make a living by working, but they are not a "class" -- at any time, any given individual, can become independently wealthy, self-employed, employ others to work for him/her/whatever, go back to school on a scholarship, or get injured (perhaps in war action) and go on the dole or a well earned pension. Humans do not come in "classes."  Humans are resilient and adaptable - ever changing.  We all work.  There is no such thing as "working class."   

Writers work, but do not form a "class" in any sense.  We have nothing in common with one another, which is the exact trait we have in common -- unique individuality. 

That is the precise condition under which Capitalism thrives, flourishes, and produces far more than is invested.  Capitalism is an "undocumented feature" of the Reality Matrix that writers are uniquely suited to exploit.  

The term Capitalism has been co-opted by politicians and redefined.  Academics subsequently wrote a lot of books for Economics courses (often required for various majors in college) because of their Publish Or Perish business model.

To understand Capitalism, think about raw, basic survival, say on Mars or some other harsh planet among the stars. To understand what a Main Character or Hero is and does that is so admired, the writer must understand the reality of Capitalism with all the mis-directions and academics stripped away.

By stripping away that co-opted idea-grab that Capitalism is a system (thus created by humans), a writer creating fictional worlds peopled by Aliens or driven by Romance can use the core concept Capitalism to
a) create alien worlds that are truly alien but comprehensible and
b) to run their own writing business.

The basic idea of Capitalism goes like this:
A) Person One has a resource they can't use
B) Person Two has an ability to use that resource but does not have the resource
C) Person One LOANS that resource to Person Two
D) Person Two uses that resource
E) Person Two gives that resource back to Person One with some extra from what using the resource produced (amount determined by prior contract)
F) Person Two keeps all the rest produced by using that resource as personal property.
G) Person Two now has the resource and the ability to use it to create more resources
H) Person One now has the resource and more but still no ability to use it

That resource is CAPITAL, and the process of loaning it and collecting the return OF Capital and ON Capital is Capitalism.

And the story of where that Capital goes repeats the cycle as Person One finds something else to invest the resource into and Person Two keeps on producing more and more, reinvesting excess resource to grow the business and employ more people.

In the Publishing Business, the writer is Person One who has a Resource (unpublished manuscript) they can't use, and the Publisher is Person Two who has ability to use that resource but does not have the resource.

Writers LICENSE their copyright (not SELL, license, a kind of loan) to the publisher, thus loaning the publisher the resource under terms set by contract.

The Publisher uses the manuscript, turns it into a book and gets people to buy it.

After the set term of the contract, the license the publisher holds expires, and all the licensed rights revert to the author (capital is returned) plus all the royalties paid in between.

Today, in this new world, Person One now puts the book up on Kindle or other e-book format and the reputation for that byline or title created by Person Two (the publisher) continues to sell the book, fewer copies but at a greater profit to the writer per copy. Thus the writer "capitalizes" on the Publisher's hard and expert work creating reputation.

Publishing is a perfect example of Capitalism in action and has nothing at all to do with governmental forms or academic economic theories of "society."

Capitalism has to do with combining talents of individual people whose individual talents would not earn them a living -- but when "packaged" by an organizer (like a publisher or producer) those individuals' resources can be transformed into potatoes and oranges bought at the supermarket.

The problem for working writers is that what they get paid, net-net after decades in the business, about averages out to potatoes and oranges.  A good, widely published, widely reviewed writer can cover a modest lifestyle of room, board, clothing, transportation, -- today, maybe not medical care.

SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America) carries a healthcare policy for members that is very expensive but better than nothing.  Few can afford it, yet all need it.  Writing is way too sedentary a profession to maintain health well. The future of Obamacare is not certain, and switching policies can elevate the cost.

Nobody I know works harder, longer hours for less profit than fiction writers.

When all the time is accounted for, time mastering craft skills, time learning, time researching, time dreaming, time writing, time re-writing, time in copy-editing, time formatting, time repairing computers used to write, time marketing, time interacting with readers, time studying markets, -- already the writer of fiction makes less than minimum wage (even if they don't raise that dollar amount of minimum wage soon!)

In my experience, the most creative, sharpest minds contributing to gross domestic product get paid the least per hour worked (over say, 25 years average annual income) if they are working writers. There will be years topping $100,000 income, but then the IRS takes a chunk of that calculated on the idea that this income level will be sustained year after year.

Long ago, the tax code allowed writers to "income average" over 5 years, smoothing out the spikes and valleys of tax owed, taking into account the irregularity and unpredictability of writing income.

So to the TIME spent creating and writing and marketing (even with an Agent, it's a lot of time spent marketing), add the time spent on bookkeeping and accounting and tax preparation -- or the expense of out-sourcing that work.

You aren't "making a profit" at writing until you have paid all those bills, plus your own salary, rent for your home-office and business machines and their supplies (yes, ink for your printer is a business expense paid before declaring a profit).

And that does not even begin to account for capital invested before a career can take off, money for classes, lessons, travel to and from such schooling, computers, phones, tablets of various types constantly upgraded and the professional-level software necessary to produce copy that can be submitted in the proper formats.

See?  There's that word, capital.

Running a business is all about capital investment vs. return on investment (called ROI).

The point of Capitalism is to invest a resource, then turn the crank of the business model, and return that invested Capital, keeping what's left over (after all expenses) as Profit which is then REINVESTED into that business or another business.  Capital is recycled Profit.  They are the same thing. Capital is not MONEY -- Capital is a resource, like a copyright or a house you buy with a mortgage and then rent at more than it costs you.

Money is to be spent on expenses.  Capital is to be invested and recovered plus a profit.

https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle-ebook/dp/B0175P82RA/

If your house's roof starts to spring leaks, it can cost less to patch it if you only consider the money you will spend this month. But then another leak will happen, and another patch.  You also have to consider your time as money -- to go get the materials and climb up there and patch the roof yourself is time spent not-writing, and money just spent.

Your time and your money regarded as capital would lead you to a different approach to solving the problem of a leaky roof.  Call the best roofer in town, replace the entire roof this month with a top professional job and materials (not Home Depot).  You do it that way, you have made a "Capital Investment."  Your capital (time and money) will now "work for you" and pay back in "royalties" (a little each year the roof does not cost you anything).

If you plan to charge the cost on a credit card, and pay it back slowly, the interest the card charges you is NOT a capital investment by you.  It is money spent. Calculated carefully, it can turn out that getting a whole new roof will not "pay for itself" (return your Capital) because "revolving credit" is way too expensive.

A roof can cost the entirety of a book advance plus a royalty payment or two.

Your copyright is your capital.

You invest it into a Publisher, trusting them to use it to make a profit.

You can invest the "interest" you get from loaning your capital (advance+royalties) in a roof. Your house is capital.  You've taken your "profit" (advance+royalties) and reinvested that capital in a capital investment which itself pays dividends. And you still own your copyright.

Your copyright is your capital.

Capitalism, the definition specifies, is a system that assumes you own your copyrights and can rent them out, or sub-license them how you choose.

Is Capitalism a "system" -- or is it a simple fact of surviving in the real world where no individual has all the skills and resources necessary to survive?

Capitalism is the system of contract law that allows a person with a resource to loan that resource to someone who has the ability to use that resource.

The ability to write songs is a resource, the songs written are capital -- but it takes an orchestra and maybe several singers to make a profitable YouTube Video of that song and get millions of hits and launch careers.  The song writer still owns the copyright on the song.

His or her heirs can inherit that copyright.

Copyright law specifies a number of years before it goes into public domain -- i.e. is taken from the rightful owners, the heirs -- but there is no statute of limitation on owning a house or a farm property. There is no difference between a copyright and a farm.

Art, paintings or photographs, fabric patterns, animations, all kinds of art we create become our capital which we license but still own.

Whether creating such works of art is profitable depends on the size of the market that will pay for it - i.e. depends on popularity.

Commercial Art is a different field from Fine Art.  Both create capital. Usually Commercial Art is the only kind that turn that capital into capital+profit.

In the sharing economy, the open source economy, you are free to give away your copyright, and get paid in enhanced reputation - name recognition, publicity, or just spiritual gratitude.

To some extent, people using your open-source resource will toss some money into your PayPal account from time to time, but the "open source' movement is thriving without money.  It runs on pure capital alone, or maybe some bitcoin here and there.

Fan Fiction is that kind of sharing-economy, open source resource, where the writer gets paid in name-recognition, reputation, and writes things for other people to pick up and write about.

So there is a profit to be made off the capital investment of time/skill etc., but that profit is not convertible to money.

Capital and profit are not money.

In Capitalism, capital and profit can be converted to money, and money can be converted to capital and profit.  If your unusable resource is money, you can loan that money at bank-interest+risk, and if the gamble does not fail, you get your money back, plus inflation, plus a profit.

One thing writers must understand about making a profit is that bank interest is not profit.  The tax law treats it as profit and taxes interest, but banks deliberately calculate and set the rate of interest on CD's and savings accounts to cover all their expenses (accountants, tellers, Cloud Megs, hacker intrusions, etc) and give you just exactly enough more dollars to keep your purchasing power going down.  Yes, you lose purchasing power by putting money in a CD and reinvesting the interest.  The interest rate is calculated to be less than inflation, but in such a way that you don't see it.  You look at your numbers and think you have more, but you actually have less.  That is what retail banks do for a living, and they are good at it.

Writers and other artists, being in one of the lowest paid professions, must understand this quirk of tax law - retail bank interest is return of capital, not a payment of a profit, so when you pay taxes on interest, you are actually giving the government some of your capital, reducing your ability to earn in your old age.  The only way out is to get out of the retail level of finance.  Deal wholesale.

To deal wholesale in capital and money you need a lot of capital -- a lot -- so your capital can be invested and earn money you can spend without reducing your capital.  In fact, well invested (Mutual Funds are a good start, but their fees reduce earnings potential), your capital can grow at or above the rate of inflation while yielding a good living.

The trick of it all is to get your mind around the truth about Capitalism.  It is not a social "system" -- it is a fact of reality: humans are interdependent; no man is an island.

Money can be used as capital, but it is not capital.  When used as capital, money becomes a commodity.  It can be traded as a commodity on the international currency exchanges. Money can be a thing in itself, unrelated to potatoes and oranges. In math, this is called Units Conversion.

So the operational, everyday-useful definition of Capitalism is the contract-structure that allows using other people's resources in a way that benefits them most, and yourself second.

As a writer, who owns copyrights, that means you are the one who is benefited most.

You start out with nothing, create something, loan it out, get it back plus a profit, and can loan it again and get paid again, and you still own it.

The cost of creating that something, the overhead expenses you invest in your business, have to be less than what your copyrights bring in for you to declare a profit -- and that means your business has to pay you a living wage before you can declare a profit.

It is very rare for a writer or any creative artist to make an actual profit from their work.  Only during the (usually few) years when the work is reaching its broadest audience is the income more than the cost of doing business as a creative artist or a performing artist.

A reason for that hides within the structure of the big businesses that own publishing or production.

Yes, movie and TV studios and the independent producers who sell them shows are also owned by other types of businesses.  In the case of films or stage productions, the real owners are often "Investors" (individuals with extra millions to invest on the chance they will get their money back and much more).  Many times "Investors" put up the money for a stage play or other production more for the prestige than profit, and are happy to break even.

In this "Changing World" impacted by electronic distribution, Kindle to Netflix to promoting books on blogs, the vast and significant change in the Fiction Writer's business model is also now impacting non-fiction.

The biggest casualty in 2016 is the NEWS BUSINESS.

Here is an article from FORBES about Snapchat and its impact on the News business

http://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2016/06/19/what-snapchat-tells-us-about-the-future-of-news-and-information-gathering/#440c2d41480d

 -- by appealing to the youngest people, Snapchat is setting the stage for adult behavior 20 years hence.  And in this infrastructure shift to electronic media and personal connectivity, which is so deep and so basic (more so than maybe the Printing Press), 20 years is the blink of an eye.  Do you remember cell phones from 20 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

That Wikipedia article shows the evolution of from 1947.  Scan down the article and look at what changes in 20 years. Realize a writing career can be 40 or 50 years because writers don't usually "retire" with a pension.

Facebook is buying these communications start-ups that appeal to specific demographics (target audiences) for a reason, but I doubt that Facebook's execs think of themselves as running a News Service (like AP or Reuters) designed to gather facts and sift out rumors and opinion.

Here is a quote from the Forbes article on Snapchat, tailor made for writers looking to make a Profit off their writing skills in a Capitalist World.

---------quote----------

Most adults, if they have even heard of Snapchat, know it as the place where messages disappear after a few seconds. But the company is adding more and more options, and it is now the network on which young people not only use different kinds of messages, and no, not all messages self-destruct in three seconds, some stay in the in-tray for up to 24 hours, and others can be kept for as long as the sender likes. What’s more, young people even read the company’s online magazine, as well as using other channels it has set up, including one to send money.

So while most of us grownups don’t even know what Snapchat is, Evan Spiegel, now elevated to the status of visionary, and his team have created a company valued already at some $20 billion—so far he’s turned down a $3 billion offer, and then reportedly another for $4 billion—and that is now the new television for young people unable to disconnect from their smartphones, and that 23 media partners are now using to reach a younger generation of readers, attaining millions of hits each month, and that other brands are using to advertise their wares during the Super Bowl. This is highly profitable advertising, as well as non-intrusive, unlike the trash that we have to put up with on other networks and publications unless we install an ad-blocker.

--------end quote---------

This business model based on advertising is one that novelists have never needed to tackle, but TV Series writers must internalize to get the climaxes (cliff hangers) just before the formulaic commercial breaks.  News (televised or internet) packages are structured the exact same way for the same reason.  A Package is that little bit of actual news sandwiched between commercial breaks.

We'll explore more of that Forbes article in Part 23 of Marketing Fiction In A Changing World, looking at the future of our business model.

Fiction publishing and news publishing (such as newspapers on paper and magazines printed on paper, even Radio and TV News or the old fashioned News Reel at the movies) were never "profitable."

Historically, book and Magazine Publishers were owned by other bigger businesses or investors specifically for the "tax write-off" and the Prestige, entree to "the right" cocktail parties and social networks.

In non-fiction, the News business also grew up as a hybrid "public service" or charitable way of paying society back for profits made on other products.  From the 1700's and "movable type" the local town newspaper was a low-margin business at the very best.

News (whether you view it as fiction or non-fiction!) is a capital intensive business.

To gather the product (information), individual people have to go out where the events are occurring, observe, gather and check facts, then cast all that data into the format of "information" by writing the article.  The article has to be transported back to the editing office,  edited, shaped to fit the newspaper's available space, laid out, compiled into print, printed on paper (which has to be trucked in from a manufacturer -- likewise ink -- never cheap), then the paper has to be hauled off to be offered to reluctant buyers.

All those people have to be paid, and all that stuff has to be bought, and all that transportation costs.  This is also true of online newspaper distribution operations such as Huffington Post.

Print papers combined the advertising model with the pay or subscribe model and survived right up until now.  They are still trying to find a way to make money online.

So historically, print and broadcast news operations are labor intensive, capital intensive operations that were owned by larger businesses, mostly for tax write-off, a public service, and prestige (in the case of "news" of course, power over political processes is another form of profit).  Even with advertising and subscriptions, even at their most profitable, news operations have never been stand-alone operations that made a profit.

Publishing and News are two kinds of business that have traditionally been designed specifically to lose money.  So they paid writers and journalists as little as possible to keep them providing material.  These businesses weren't cheating.  They simply could not afford to pay wriers and journalists more and still break even.

Today, in this changing world, Publishing has been moved from being a prestige-crown-jewel to a profit making operation.  That is one reason the price of paper books and e-books are so high, relative to what those prices were in terms of a loaf of bread a hundred years ago.

With razor thin margins, publishers had to 'consolidate' (buy each other until there are only a handful of publishers left who cover the whole world).  So they don't publish books that "ought to be published" or "deserve to be published" any more. They publish books the computer algorythms predict will sell very broadly and very quickly.  Likewise "News" publishes what will captivate the most eyes.

Even though writers are paid a percentage of the cover price for a book, and thus have a built-in wage hike for inflation, that percentage has not gone up, but agent's fees have gone from 10% to 15%, taxes (state, federal and local) have gone up.  Writers' margins have narrowed while publishers are just barely making it unless they have a few blockbusters in a year.

News, likewise, is now making a transition to a stand-alone for-profit business, and therefore needs a much wider audience for commercials and subscriptions.  The only strategy available to get that broad an audience is to make the News more Entertaining (fictionalize it, jazz it up, create a "narrative" that will keep people glued to their screens).

This shift in the non-fiction writer's business model has caused less capital (time, effort, energy) to be expended on fact-checking, thoroughness, meticulousness.  Non-fiction (News) that is fact-rich is a very expensive to create, and the truth is the market is too small.

Very few people will pay (by watching commercials or subscribing) to get a listing of un-exciting, dry, boring fact after fact.  A few will tune in for a "story."

The cure is, of course, to make fact-gathering much cheaper (Go-Pro cameras in drones?), so that news can be published in fact-rich but boring summaries to that tiny audience that prefers it.

Sometime soon, a Science Fiction Romance writer will write a book set in a world built around a new business model for publishing -- both fact and fiction publishing.

The technology is being implemented rapidly.  Something obvious is staring us all in the face that we are just missing.  The writer who sees it will write the classic everyone refers to for the next hundred years (like 1984, or The Cold Equations).

It may be as simple as what some indie bloggers, and web-radio and YouTube personalities are already doing, gathering and presenting the facts that contradict the "narrative" adopted by the bigger news operations, broadcast network or cable news.

News and Book Publishing may become, once again, not-for-profit operations that just break even in a good year and are tax write-offs in other years.

Where would your career fit into that future?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World Part 11: Terminology in Romance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World
Part 11
Terminology in Romance
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Last week we looked again at Marketing Fiction, and at what sells besides Sex & Violence.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

So today we're going to discuss the part terminology plays in marketing and propose a new term to replace the term "fanfic."  We need to replace the term "fanfic" because of the Changing World in the title of this series of blog posts.

Fanfic has been the driving force behind much of the change, but fanfic itself came from something and has now leaped up to something that makes it require a new label.  That label will open vistas of potential only some of you have seen coming. 

So publishing terminology has its roots inside the fiction that's being marketed, which in turn is rooted in the writer's subconscious, in choice of objectives, in motivation for writing at all.

That's very abstract stuff, but language itself tries to make it concrete.

The classic question, "Why do you write?" is based on the assumption that there is A reason (not a plethora, not a whole personality profile).

Marketing fiction is all about finding fiction that is "aimed at" a specific "audience."  That assumes that a whole bunch of people all share ONE motive for reading (i.e. buying) fiction.

That assumption of a writer and reader sharing just one motivation is the reason that the question, "Why do you writer?" stymies writers. 

There is a why in there somewhere -- but it is not composed of anything you can articulate in a single word or sentence.

Yet all fiction is about that why.

You write a story that is about something (even if you don't consciously know what at the time).  The point of the exercise is not the "something" that the story is "about" -- but rather the "about" itself.  Being ABOUT is what Art is.

As I've discussed in these blog posts on writing craft, stories are Art.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/theme-plot-integration-part-9-use-of-co.html

Art depicts reality - it is not reality, itself.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

And marketing Art shifts and changes, more rapidly now than ever.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-important-book-what-makes-novel.html

Now consider that language, any language, also "depicts" -- the map is not the territory.  Language itself is symbolism.

We've discussed symbolism at some length:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

The essential ingredient in fiction is conflict.  Therefore, the writer must depict both sides of a philosophical argument (a thematic statement) in order for the fiction to be 'about.'  The two sides of an argument must conflict, and ultimately resolve (even if there are issues left over for a sequel.)

The "both sides" structure of a story conflict is artificial.  That division into just two sides is symbolism, not reality.

Sifting two clear, opposing points of view out of the pea-soup morass of human experience so that each side can be clearly depicted is Art.

The process of sifting and defining the two sides is the same as the process of paining a picture.  The graphic artist "selects" certain lines, composition, arrangement, colors, sharp/fuzzy focus, perspective, to "lead the eye" just as a story-writer "leads the mind" via composition.

Having laid out a clean, clear, two-sided conflict, the writer must aim the narrative (a narrative is a beginning, middle, end set of points that are given connection by the writer's composition of the picture extracted from reality).

The narrative must be structured to aim at a particular audience.

If that audience is large enough, the economics of "publishing" (traditional publishing) takes over.  The widely-aimed story becomes commercially viable at a certain break point.  That break point is constantly changing.  It used to be the volume of cardboard consumed by China dictated that break point by dictating the price of newsprint paper used to print paperbacks.

China at that time was just beginning to become a manufacturing powerhouse, and needed boxes made from cardboard to ship finished product.

So trade treaties with China (politically controversial because of China's Communism) governed the subject matter and narrative structure, the composition, of mass market paperbacks, and thus of hardcovers that could be re-published as paperbacks reaching a larger readership.

Then came our "changing world" that I've been writing about here since 2007.


With the advent of usable e-reading screens, the e-book market which had grown via PDF download, dedicated reading devices of dubious worth, html websites posting fanfic, just plain exploded.

It pretty much caught traditional publishers by surprise.

They hadn't followed the growth of hits on fanfic websites. 

And for various reasons, traditional publishers had always been way out of touch with what "readers want" -- and more in touch with what a reader will buy based on a cover, or cover-blurb, or based on what books are placed in a bookstore window or "dump" carton in an aisle. 

Book sales are all that matter to a publisher.  And book sales don't matter at all to a reader, as long as the reader gets satisfaction, or can find the next book in a series they're following.

Book sales matter to a writer only insofar as their income stream is satisfactory.  When income is satisfactory, the matter of sales fades from the writer's consciousness.  The writer is concerned only with ABOUT, with the urge to DEPICT the world in a revealing light that makes sense out of chaos.

To a writer, only the story matters, only the narrative matters. 

That's why writers are so hurt and bewildered when a traditional publisher turns down the next book in a series.  The writer is about finishing the story.  The reader is about finding out the ending of the story.  The publisher is about efficient use of resources to make a profit. 

So with the advent of usable reading screens, the readers who wanted to finish reading the story, and the writers who wanted to finish publishing the story, and some entrepreneurs who saw that connection, founded small publishing via e-books.

The first commercial level explosion of e-book sales for such small publishers was in the Vampire Romance.

Traditional Publishing started this trend -- some might say, Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire started the trend, but I think it appeared first in YA novels about a Vampire who turns up in a High School, either as a student, a teacher, or on the periphery.  13 year old readers become adult readers in about 5 years.

And it was about 5 years after the popularity of YA vampires that we saw the Vampire Romance emerge onto bookstore shelves, buried inside the Romance genre paperbacks.

A  couple years later, Vampire Romance got a label on the spine, different labels from different publishers.

Sales peaked, then started to fall off as other sorts of Paranormal Romance appeared sporadically.  How do I know sales peaked and fell?  Because I was marketing my own material via an agent at that time, and Manhattan lunches gleaned proprietary stats and reports on how the purchasing editors were thinking.

I found that by the time I wanted into that Vampire Romance market, the publishers were saying they were over-bought on Vampire Romance, had more than a year's worth in stock or under contract, and would not even consider another submission.

They ran out of Vampire Romances, and by then other sub-genres were selling better. 

There's a perverse logic in the publishing business model, rooted in the disconnect between the objectives of a writer and the objectives of a publisher.

So when Vampire Romance readers suddenly could not find any more paperbacks to suit them, they quickly learned on the grapevine that Vampire Romance was alive and well, thriving and growing in the e-book market.

That demand for Vampire Romance, in part, drove the demand for readers that drove the technological improvements in screens.  Improved screens increased demand for e-books, and other varieties of novels, and now even non-fiction, are all e-book.

And of course, you've all heard of the contretemps between Amazon and Hatchet and other publishers over the price of e-books.  Readers have been saying for a long time that e-book prices are about double what they should be.

Small publishers are consolidating (buying each other), and refining the business model.  Many, many publishers that started up in the nascent e-book market have closed.  And now the traditional publishers used their marketing strength (and Amazon & B&N) to yank the e-book market away from small publishers. 

http://www.booksandsuch.com/blog/amazon-hachette-battle-matters/

So writers who wanted to reach their own readers self-published.

Many self-publishing writers are New York Times Bestselling writers, taking back the rights to their NYT best sellers, re-publishing them by themselves or through small e-book publishers, and then finishing their series.  Sometimes they bring out new books in new series.

Meanwhile, a lot of writers who could not sell to traditional publishing went with self-publishing.

Some of these had honed their craft on fanfic websites, getting feedback from readers, learning to use beta-readers, and grow into a skill set that works to produce good novels that hit their readers nerves squarely.

Other self-publishing writers learned as they went. 

There's an organization for e-book publishers and writers something like SFWA or RWA, complete with genre book awards and cover art awards which I joined years ago when I had my first e-book out, Molt Brother.  Now it's in paper, e-book, and also audiobook, along with the sequel, City of a Million Legends.



http://www.epicorg.com/  is the website of the e-book professionals organization and it also has an active forum where people exchange a lot of information, writers find publishers, and so on.

These are the people generating the change in the world of publishing.

So we are seeing an increasing level of quality in self-published books.

Historically, Science Fiction Fandom invented fanfic -- fiction written by fans for fans.  For the most part, science fiction fanzines never published fiction, but rather discussed conventions and novels.  But fan fiction thrived in smaller circulation, often on carbon paper, though usually not using established characters of a professional writer. 

With the advent of Spockanalia and T-Negative, Star Trek fans discovered the joys of fanfic written to expand and expound on the TV characters.  And gradually, fan writers created original characters to interact with the established characters, revealing new depths to the shallow TV depictions.

That evolution of fan fiction is the main subject of my Bantam Paperback STAR TREK LIVES!



STAR TREK was the first TV Series to engage the fertile imagination of organized science fiction fandom.  Yes, organized.  There were (and are) clubs with constitutions, slates of officers, and annual elections, plus dues and publications.  The World Science Fiction Society holds the annual World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) and awards the Hugo, as well as other Awards.

Science Fiction fandom was (and is) organized and connected.  Today it's connected via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  Then it was snailmail and telephone.

From STAR TREK LIVES! and the New York Star Trek Conventions, the media picked up on the term fanfic (especially slash), and popularized the term FAN, fanzine, fan fiction, and eventually the term FANFIC. 

In that term, FANFIC, may lie the barricade between self-published Romance novels and the prestige they deserve.  It may also give us a clue as to where the resistance against Romance comes from in the general population, even though they flock to films with a tear-jerking Romance, and give awards to the RomCom (the romantic comedy) -- yet shy from Romance per se.

Terminology is key to changing people's assumptions, or prejudices.  We changed from the term "nigger" to the term Black to indicate elevating the prestige, the potential value of a person. 

The terms Liberal and Progressive, Communist and Socialist, Independent, etc etc are continuously redefined, and then changed. 

So let's examine the origin of the term "fan" to see what it is telling the world about us.

The media, and now dictionaries and major sources, keep insisting on a misconception about the origin and meaning of the term "fan."

They insist that the science fiction fan is a FANATIC (i.e. not sane but obsessed.)

That is the label that was slapped on science fiction fandom way back before it was organized, and even afterward for decades.

A fanatic is a person who is not in their "right mind."  And usually, being a mild conditiion, the fanatic "out-grows it" or "gets over it."

Can you imagine out-growing or getting over Romance?  Come on! 

But they are saying that science fiction is a "phase" that some teens go through and therefore it is negligible, and can safely be tolerated and disregarded.  There is nothing in it (they said in the 1930's) that has any bearing on reality or the future.

30 years later, that generation sent men to the Moon. 

The next generation of science fiction fanatics invented the internet and the web.

The next twenty years saw the advent of the cell phone, then the smartphone.

Fanaticism is a mental disorder suffered by teens, like measles was considered a childhood disease you just had to suffer through. 

Fanaticism is a disease.

Today they say of the same age-group that Videogaming is "addictive."  That's it's unhealthy for teens to communicate with each other via social media.

In the 1940's they said the same thing of that generation's teens who were communicating with each other via telephone.  The picture of the teen monopolizing the ONLY phone-line in a household, holding long conversations with fellow teens (often of opposite gender) was a feature of life in the 1950's, tolerated and scorned by adults.

If you're a writer intending to grab a market-share for your work, watch what teens are doing now.  It takes about 5 years to write a novel, from Idea to published, and in 5 years today's teens will be at peak entertainment consumer years. 

But they may pick up the scorn associated with terminology used when talking about Romance Genre novels, and never explore the rich, complex, and satisfying worlds Romance writers build.

Or, if they do browse mass market paperbacks, they may never discover the worlds being created by writers using small publishers or self-publishing in e-books.

I get a couple of newsletters pitching free and 0.99cent e-books, Romance genre, Mysteries, etc. 

https://www.bookbub.com/home/

I often see books pitched as having many hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

The star-review has become the self-publisher's marketing tool, and yes, there is some fraud associated with this statistic, even though Amazon tries to prevent that. 

Still, read some of those reviews.  Even if you would scorn the book because of typos or need for editing out inconsistencies and filling plot-holes, look at the comments by readers who focus entirely on the payload, the way the STORY made them feel, not the technical flaws in the writing craft.

Those 5-star reviews are typical of fanzine reader responses to fanfic based on a TV-show. 

Get that free newsletter, click through to Amazon on a title with lots of 5-star reviews and read carefully.  And while reading, think about this.

Self-publishing is hard (writing the novel is easy by comparison).  The odds are against you selling a single copy to anyone you don't know personally. 

But there are associations of self-publishing writers who can teach you how to connect with cheap promotional strategies that might work. 

There is very likely an audience hungry for what you want to sell them.  You finding them, them finding you, or "going viral" is a long-shot.  Finding and serving a market is what publishers do -- their business model is suited to that process.  Writing uses a different business model.

But because of the adequate e-reader screens now available fairly cheap, there is a readership starving for what you write.  They just won't recognize it when starting right at it. 

What do we need to get that instant recognition?

We need a label, a symbol, a TERM which describes what this kind of fiction is, where it comes from, why it deserves their attention, and most important what it actually delivers.

The term self-published has gathered scorn because of the missing editorial steps people have become used to.

The term fanfic has gathered scorn because of the old (and inaccurate) term fanatic. 

What other artform besides writing has, historically, been a source of pure satisfaction and meaningful entertainment (and information)?

Think about the music industry.

Commercially available music has its origins in the Bards taking news, information, and historical Events and gossip from town to town, presenting it all as song. 

Isolated towns had their own youngsters who sang and played music.

Think about the old West.  Whoever in town could saw on a fiddle played for the square dancing. 

Along with all this, came one of the oldest artforms, which became known as Folk Music. 

Here's a wikipedia article on 1940's folk music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_folk_music_revival

In the 1960's, people like Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, Woodie Guthrie, Johnny Cash, and people you've never heard of because they only played and sang at weddings and birthday parties.  Yesteryear's Garage Bands.

You can get this old music on Amazon, iTunes, and other websites. 

http://www.last.fm/music/Peter,+Paul+&+Mary/+similar

http://tropicalglen.com/Jukebox/Genre/FolkMusic/NewChannel.html

Yes, politics grabbed the folk song and ran with it.  Theodore Bikel's concert records have patter that reveals all that. 

But folk music reflects the life and times of those who perform and those who foster it.  It's folk, not professional.

In the 1960's it became big time professional, and highly respected -- because it made money for the music industry in records and concerts (and movies).

Country Music is the professional development of old, folk music by people who farmed and lived too far away from cities to associate with city folks.  Country was isolated because transit was slow, and internet didn't exist.  Today, many places only have satellite service if that. 

A lot of money has been made from Country Music -- and don't forget Elvis Presley came from that venue.

Today the term folk music doesn't carry the opprobrium that fanfic does.

But, if you examine folk music down to the roots, you will see that folk music and self-published novels (from people who were nerve traditionally published and actively do not want to be traditionally published) share a similar kind of popularity. 

And if you juxtapose real folk music (by folks not getting paid to do it) with professional music (by people who do it for profit), you will see an artistic similarity between folk and professional music that exactly parallels the similarity between fanfic and traditionally published fic.

Trace origins and development, find the driving force behind music, and trace how that force generated the Music Industry, and then do the same for novels.

Go back into the 1800's and study women's Gothic novels, circulating as hand-written copies among housewives.  That was fanfic.

I expect you can do the same study with Art.  There are Great Artists who are "Great" because we've heard of them.  And we've heard of them because they had Patrons and got commissions to decorate famous places (like the Cysteine Chapel, for example).  And there are folk artists whose work is left to us only as fragmentary remains on pottery sherds dug up by archeologists.

There's commercial art -- advertisements, book covers -- and there's fine art shown in galleries.  And then there's folk art, which you find in people's homes, done for the pleasure of their families.  Think about quilting, and going out to "the Country" to buy handmade quilts to hang on the wall as art. Those quilts are folk art, and they are respected.

Today, we also have Fan Art published in fanzines. 

All of these art-forms have a folk version, and a professional version.

Why shouldn't fan fiction and self-published fan fiction be the FOLKFIC of our world?

Self-publishing is so closely parallel, and often related to, fanfic devoted to underlying works and  published on websites for free reading, that the only difference is the homage paid to the underlying work.

Fanfic writers introduce original characters, and re-interpret existing characters, sometimes take them to new worlds, tell parts of a story not treated in the professionally published novels, but it is original writing.

You all know how much fanfic my Sime~Gen Universe novels have generated.  There are millions of words posted on simegen.com alone.

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/

Also, on simegen.com we have posted some classic Trek fanzine material.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

You might note on that /startrek/ index page that we have a new addition, the Scholastic Voice Magazine Star Trek Story Contest Winner from 1980.  It was written by a High School boy,  Thomas Vinciguerra, who went on to become a nationally published journalist, and who wrote many articles about Star Trek.  You can find links and the story at:

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/contestwinner/

Here's a 2014 contest on marketing on the internet.
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-public-library-internet/
-------quote---------
As part of its ongoing Seattle Writes initiative, the library has partnered with self-publishing and distribution platform Smashwords to encourage local writers to package their writing for an audience. The eyeball icing on the finger-typing cake? A contest, open until midnight on October 15, in which up to three entrants who publish via Smashwords will have their eBooks included for circulation in the SPL eBook collection.
The fine print is hardly daunting. Have an SPL library card. Be 18 or older. Publish your eBook (for free) with Smashwords on its website. Enter the contest.
Oh. And write the eBook.
....
-------end quote------


Also a new addition to the simegen.com/fandom/ section is a short novel by a Sime~Gen fanfic writer, Mary Lou Mendum, done in Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire universe, using some of Catherine's characters, and a whole cast of original characters.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/skolianempire/ 

Mary Lou is an example of a writer who specifically does not want to write professionally.  It's a hobby, and she does it to please specific people.  In the case of the Skolian Universe novel, it was done to entertain someone while ill.

She's an example of a folk-writer, writing folk-fic.

Or perhaps it should be called filkfic as akin to Filk Singing.

The term Filk to describe the original lyrics sung to popular tunes done at Science Fiction Conventions dates back to a typo in a con program book.  The term was immediately adopted as a badge of honor, though what they did with music was one of the oldest traditions in folk music (new words to old songs, variations on old tunes to adapt to new lyrics).

Folk Art is the baseline creativity of humanity singing the song of the universe.

Commercial Art (mass market paperbacks) is Folk Art leveled to the lowest common denominator, made accessible to all.

Fanfic and self-publishing are both types of folk art, folk-storytelling.

The material is popular not because an insane person created it, a fanatic, but because perfectly sane people with experiences in common resonate to it, enjoy it, and elevate the performers of it to local celebrity status.

The folk of the town admire and reward the local bard, the story-teller who teaches morality to children, the shaman who teaches history to children in rhyme, and the artist who draws pictures of local events.

Fanfic and Self-published works resemble Folk Music both in content, and appeal and business model. 

But "Folk" carries a much higher prestige than "Fanatic." 

The most powerful force in civilization is the folks, not insanity or teen phases.

You don't tolerate the folks.  You admire them.   Discount the power of the folks at your peril (or so the rulers of France discovered to their tribulation.  England had a problem with those pesky colonists and their Boston Tea Party, too.)

So I propose replacing the term fanfic with the term folkfic or Folk-fic, or some variant so it includes self-published original universe fiction.  Here you find the stories the folk (the largest market there is) really want. 

The More Things Change; The More They Stay The Same.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

The Important Book - What Makes a Novel Respectable by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The Important Book

Part 1
What Makes a Novel Respectable?
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Last week, we heard from a self-publishing Historical writer who has incorporated a ghost into her series on the Gold Rush which she self-publishes.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-ghost-on-horseback-guest-post-by.html

This series on The Important Book will present some perspective on the place of the e-book and self-publishing in the coming world.

At inception, this Tuesday blog series began to answer the question, "Why is Romance, and particularly Science Fiction Romance, not accorded the respect it deserves?" 

The answer started by analyzing the writing craft of the Romance Writers who first broke the "no science fiction" barrier.  And we then went into detail about the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction, and all about commercial Marketing of these genres.

All the while, the e-book revolution has reshaped the field of writing, editing, publishing, and marketing of fiction.  That revolution is still spinning, and I think gaining speed.  There's a long way to go yet, but writers who can extrapolate where the process will be 5-10 years from now will be able to reach world-wide sales in the millions of copies. 

To extrapolate, one generally starts with a deep look into history.

In this case, since the topic is The Important Book, we need to look at how "important" books used to get published, see where they are now, then look up to chart where they may go next.

From the dawn of publishing (think Gutenberg or even hand-copying), creating copies and distributing them was hugely expensive.  Only Barons and the elite could engage in such a useless hobby as buying books, or writing them and getting them copied.

The mechanism of making copies and sending them around the landscape (think The Royal Mail - dirt roads, saddlebags, and books on parchment with leather bindings that weight 10 lbs or more each) can be thought of as "overhead," the expense of business.

The IDEAS inside those books, suggested by the black squiggles on the pages, are the Payload.  The ideas are what is being sold, what is valuable enough to make the cost of a copy worth while to the buyer.

Today's e-book innovation has reduced that overhead to the cost of a computer and word processor (some of which are free), the time invested to write, hiring an editor, a copyeditor, and a publicist to polish the text and prepare the formatting. 

All of that writing time and editing effort was expended on those early books, too, so that's not a change.  The change is only in the expense of making and distributing copies.

While the e-book innovation was just beginning, traditional publishers encountered increasing costs for paper, printing, warehousing, distributors went bankrupt not paying publishers what was owed, and salaries of editors, etc., costs of publicity (ad prices; good ad-writers) skyrocketed due to inflation and international trade agreements (tariffs).

It's that international component that causes me to point your attention at international affairs, politics, and silent tariff wars.  The international climate was a huge factor in destroying the old publishing business model of doing several "Important Books" a year.

When all this caused a huge shift in the business model of publishing that I've written about here several times, what you saw on the shelves changed.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/12/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/harlequin-horizons-rwa-mwa-sfwa-epic.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html

The shift, put simply, is from a Tax-write-off business model to a Profit-making business model.

Up until that shift-point (which had little to do with e-books because there were no screens comfortable to read on), big companies owned publishing companies as a Tax Write-off. 

The publishers were supposed to lose money by publishing Important Books, books that would grab attention, be talked about, referred to, win prestigious prizes, and enhance the reputation of the company that owned the publishing house.

In other words, all traditional publishers were vanity presses except that the vanity being stoked was of the corporation owning the publisher, not of the writer whose work got published. 

After that shift point, the "bean counters" (accountants) took over and monitored publishing profits.

Publishing companies got bought, sold, traded internationally (corporate control of publishing in the USA no longer resides in the USA), and kicked around like a football all over the globe.  Then consolidation set in, with publishers being combined into larger publishers, with fewer and fewer editors making the decisions on which books to publish.

The editorial decision making process went from being in the hands of a specific individual acquisitions editor to being in the hands of committees composed of some editors, a lot of publicity, promotion, art department, legal department etc etc departments. 

The editors would find a few books to bring to a meeting to "pitch" (30-second description) at the committee, and the committee would vote on which of all the books to publish.

Keep in mind that the decision makers had not read the manuscript they were voting on, just as Senators and Congressmen have not read the bills they vote on.  All they know of the subject is in the pitch, and all they are interested in is whether that pitch will be popular enough to generate profit of some kind.

That publishing committee process took hold because it did seem to enhance profit-making potential, but simultaneously we saw the "death of the mid-list." 

The mid-list book is a book that is not a "lead title" -- does not get any budget for publicity except to be noted in the list of books published each month, does not get review copies sent to newspapers, and does not get a person in the publicity department booking the author into Guest Spots on TV.

Lead titles get all that and more -- a huge number of copies printed, banners and "dumps" in book stores, extra fees paid to book stores to get the book put in the front window and placed at eye level on shelves. (these days they pay Amazon to feature a book)

Mid-list books do not get any of that.  They are buried in the midst of all the other books, right above the list of reprints. 

But while a Lead Title requires a huge overhead investment by the publisher, it is a huge gamble.  Very often Lead Titles don't turn a profit.

Mid-list titles on the other hand could be counted on to break even because the readers of that type of material followed the authors, searched out and bought the books regardless of reviews. 

Mid-list titles were bread and butter for Tax-Write-Off publishers, and paid the rent for Indie publishers (there were a few Indie or Start-up publishers, but they were forced by economics to contract with big houses to get distribution.)

So, prior to this shift, Important books got chosen by a single, well read, widely-read, well educated person (very often a Literature Major, or Art History Major, or English Major, sometimes Theater Major) who had read the manuscript all the way through.  This person knew the world and the market and understood the Ideas presented in the book (e.g. the theme).

This person knew how to find a "theme" inside fiction, and how to judge how relevant that theme might be to the readers buying that publisher's book.

This person was in the editing business because they wanted to publish Important Books -- and very often because Important Books were Respectable Books.

Think Gutenberg again.  It wasn't until the Dime Novel and the Penny Dreadful, the pulp era, that books got published just because people wanted to read them.

With expensive overhead, publishing was, like the Sport of Kings, something only the well educated and innovative thinkers were involved with, decision makers who decisions affected thousands.

Publishing was entirely the realm of the scholar, the person who lived their life in the rarified atmosphere of thought. 

An Important Book to them was a book with a New Idea (Isaac Newton) -- preferably an Idea they could argue against at dinner parties.

Yep. All of publishing was just a big fanfic website!  An in-group. 

The exchange of Ideas has never been shown to turn a big profit.  In fact, the effort required to find, formulate and convey a new Idea is far greater than any possible return.  Idea-exchange is a hobby done for the fun of it.

Until, after Newton's era, after Sir Francis Bacon's era, people noticed that innovative ideas generated innovative technology that turned a profit.

What is a profit?

A profit means you get more OUT of a process than you put INTO the process.

For example, the cotton gin -- a machine that could separate cotton balls from the seeds faster and more efficiently than human hands could.

Keeping slaves to do that work is very expensive.  Hiring ex-slaves to do that work is maybe a bit less expensive, but still a huge expense compared to what you can sell the cotton for.  Running a machine to do that work -- a few maintenance workers, mechanics, handle-crankers, and production volume went up while expense went down.

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/cotton-gin-and-eli-whitney

"Business" is all about profit.  Without profit above about 10%, no business can continue.  That's why the history of human civilization on this planet is stagnant up until Gutenberg, starts to move with Columbus and sea-going vessels improving, but is very slow up until the cotton gin. 

Each era's innovation speed can be traced alongside the penetration of reading skills and book distribution.

Some of the "Important Books" that ushered in change form pivot points.

So in those days, Important Books were Respectable Books -- books with ideas in them that people had to discuss with each other, saying, "How did this guy ever think of that?"

And they'd take that idea and think it for themselves -- resulting in more new ideas, and new ways of doing things. 

So, prior to the shift of publishing from Tax-Loss to Profit Making, Important Books were Respectable Books.

After that shift, Popular Books were Respectable Books because they made a quick, easy profit using the innovative technologies that reduced the cost of production of a book and increased the distribution.  This was not a big change.  It only continued the shift seen with the Dime Novel and the Pulps.   

Romance has always been popular, and sales are predictable.  In other words, most Romance novels like Science Fiction novels and other genres, fall in the "Mid-List Category" -- and got hit hard by this shift to profit making.

Profit became the key to Respectability.

This was not invented by the field of publishing. It reflected a shift in our general cultural values.  Another such shift is in progress now.

As the Important Book - the book about Ideas (remember Science Fiction is known as The Literature of Ideas) - has become unpublishable, the e-book revolution has gained steam.

Why is the Important Book unpublishable?  Think about the percentage of people who buy and read books.  It's usually hovering around 5% to 10%. 

Of those who read, even fewer actually want to find a new idea, an idea that contradicts what they already believe.

Adventure into strange ideas is an acquired taste.

So to people who don't want new ideas, the Important Book is the book everyone they know just read.  Popular is important.

New Ideas are never popular because they are new, so nobody has ever heard of them and when they do hear, they don't understand or see any use for it.

So what is "Respectable" to one reader is not worth the cover price to another.

With their huge overhead expense, Traditional Publishers can no longer afford to publish Important Books.

No Important Book is going to have a broad enough appeal to sell to a wide enough audience to break even, given that huge overhead expense.

Important Books, by their idea-rich nature, have a narrow appeal.  But those few people who absorb those ideas and put them to use can, indeed, change the world.

That's why the books are Important -- they change the course of History.

Most books don't do that. 

Even most Romance Novels don't change the course of all history.  But a Romance Novel read at the right point in life can change the course of an individual person's life, and thus is an Important Book to that individual.

Science Fiction -- as a field -- has now been seen to change the course of history.  Star Trek was a big influence, and it built on Science Fiction writers' ideas (which Gene Roddenberry was aware of).  It hit big in college dorms, and those college kids went on to invent the internet (the Web was invented in Europe), fuel ambitions for N.A.S.A. and today the search for livable exo-planets.

Simultaneously, we have seen a cultural values shift that has popularized the notion that the HEA - the Happily Ever After - ending to a Romance is unrealistic, that such things don't happen in real life.

Here is an idea to mull over. 

The HEA ending to a Romance Novel might be the contribution to changing the course of human history parallel to Science Fiction's contribution of the internet.

If that contribution can be made, Romance might become both Important enough and Profitable enough to become Respectable.

So if you have an Idea for explaining to the scoffers why the HEA is plausible and attainable, you have an Important Book.

Where, in this world of publishing-by-bean-counter can you publish any Important Book?

It's the e-book field, self-publishing and/or very small press publishing.

That's where the Important Books that I've been seeing lately are turning up -- not from the traditional publishers.

So if you've written a good book, but get turned down by all the traditional publishers (via agents), you might consider whether it is an Important Book and has been turned down because it's Important.

Would this book have been published in 1890?  Or rather, would the theme that is the core of this book have been publishable in 1890?  Does the book say something that people need to hear but don't want to hear?  Does it say it in a way that makes readers want to hear what it's saying? 

If so, you may have to consider self-publishing or going with a small press that specializes in e-book.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com