Month: July 2011

Harry Potter 7.2 – The End Of An Era

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We went to see the latest and last film installment in the Harry Potter series yesterday, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. The film is pretty good, even if it is pretty much one long action scene. With a story there are normally three acts. There’s a setup, with questions asked and situations created, then there’s some kind of action and usually some extra problems thrown in, and finally there’s resolution. I recently saw something that sums this up beautifully:

vonnegut three acts Harry Potter 7.2 the end of an era
I found this via Chuck Wendig’s Tumblr, and I love it so much I want to punch it in the face.

So, the problem, if you can call it that, with the last Harry Potter film is that it’s all the last cup. It’s all resolution, action-packed climax. But that’s okay. Because seven previous films have done all the work of the first two acts.

Say what you will about J K Rowling and the Harry Potter stories, there’s something truly amazing about the achievement. Sure, the stories may be derivative, distillations of so much fantasy that’s gone before. But everything is informed by something. Sure, Rowling may not be the greatest writer on the planet, but she does spin a yarn that keeps you reading, and what more do we really want than that? These aren’t wanky literary explorations of language and word form. They’re rollicking yarns, aimed mainly at young people. And Rowling does have a dab hand at naming things. She comes up with the best names.

I was a bit of a critic at first, especially of the first couple of books. Poorly written, derivative stories that insult the genre, blah, blah, blah. Yes, I’m blah, blah, blahing myself. It’s true to some extent, but Rowling kept going, she created a remarkable world and truly interesting characters. Well, mostly. Ginny Weasley, for example, was always a bit of a glyph. But Rowling got young people excited about books again, and for that she deserves a knighthood or a statue or something. We can forgive the small things in the face of the big achievement.

And that achievement is seven books that sell better than the Bible. A merchandising empire that makes nation states weep. Rowling is worth an estimated £500 million. That’s pounds sterling. That’s a mental amount of money from writing about a boy wizard. On top of that, we’ve got the films.

Never has a film franchise like this happened before. Sure, there have been film series’, though none with a single story that runs to eight full-length episodes. There have been characters who have cropped up way more than seven times, like James Bond. But each of those is a seperate story, and there have been many actors playing Bond. To have a story like Harry Potter extend over eight films, over ten years, with the same cast literally growing up as their characters is something we may never see again.

It would be fantastic if some other great book series’ received the same kind of treatment, but it’s unlikely. Not often does a prospect like Potter come along. Very few stories will guarantee a return on investment like Harry Potter does. It’s beyond mainstream; it’s ubiquitous. Producers and financers knew they could pretty much spend carte blanche on Harry Potter films and guarantee getting their money back several times over. Nothing is a safe bet like that in this world. Rowling created that – a guaranteed massive return investment. And you thought her magic was all fiction. This last installment shattered box office records worldwide, with US$169.2 million in US and Canadian ticket sales over the opening weekend. The opening weekend! And they’ve yet to truly milk it, with the rest of its cinema run, then DVDs, then special edition DVDs, then 8 film boxed sets. Not to mention all the associated merchandising.

Then there’s Pottermore to keep the whole thing monetised. Then there’s always the possibility of more books. The whole 19 Years Later thing at the end of the story is there as some kind of cap, but there are loads of ways around that if Rowling chooses to write more.

Of course, the real test of Rowling’s skill will be to write something else. Amazing as the Potter success is, she’ll always be measured against it and may not be able to write any other stories. I hope not. I hope she comes up with something all new, completely unrelated to Harry Potter and his world of wizards and witches, though I doubt she will.

So, for now at least, it’s over. It really is the end of an era. Children started reading books with the success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. They grew up alongside their favourite characters while film stars grew up playing those characters. I’m glad to have seen it through. There’s a good sense of closure now and the books and films will stand as one of the greatest storytelling achievements of all time.

I’m still left with one question unanswered. Why does Harry Potter, or any other witch or wizard, wear glasses? They can regrow bones, for goodness sake. Surely they can fix a spot of myopia. Then again, perhaps it’s good to be left with some questions. Well done J K Rowling, and well done Harry, Hermione and Ron. You all did good.

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

As Borders Lies Dying…

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There’s analysis, punditry and post-mortems aplenty where the failure of Borders is concerned.

This Slate piece asserts Borders died primarily of self-inflicted wounds its competitors have avoided. From the article:

Other companies have adapted to the e-reader revolution, and even benefited from it. Other companies have changed to fit the new bookselling paradigm. And other companies are dealing with the drawn-out aftereffects of the recession. The better reason for its demise is that Borders had long lost its competitive edge on many fronts, from corporate strategy to coffee. It died by a thousand—OK, maybe just four or five—self-inflicted paper cuts.

The Wall Street Journal quotes numerous customers of the chain’s "#1 Store" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and while all of those customers are disappointed, none are surprised.

The Atlantic takes a broader view in its article, Books, Borders and Beyond: How Digital Tech Is Changing Retail:

"But if there’s one thing the Internet takes away from stores, it’s foot traffic. The Web is a shopping mall. So who needs the shopping mall? It’s more convenient for buyers — and cheaper for merchants — to play with a virtual storefront and bypass the high fixed costs of real estate.

"All retailing is vulnerable," says Joel Kurtzman, senior fellow at the Milken Institute and former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. "I’ve spoken with executives at many major big box retailers, and they’re all very worried about how the digital world is changing their business."

Forbes wonders, Does a Failed Borders Presage a Doomed Bookstore Business?

“As Borders expires, new enterprises will evolve to take book retailing’s place,” wrote Gene Hoffman, one-time president of The Kroger Co. and former chairman and president of Supervalu. “Those new enterprises won’t be conventional book retailers but companies that are on the leading edge of what current customers are responding to.”

National Public Radio raises a question about other possible consequences of the Borders failure in its article, When Borders Closes, Do Doors Slam Shut In Classical Music?

Borders’ buying patterns also made for fan frustrations, Goiffon asserts. "For years," he notes, "we pushed in vain to get them to target buying geographically: Instead of sending most of their stock to the biggest markets for classical music, such as New York, they’d send four or five copies of each title to every single store they had — so New York would sell out and be stuck, while all those other copies languished in other stores around the country."

So if you were in one of the main U.S. classical music markets, like Manhattan or San Francisco, you might never see a label’s biggest releases as you flipped through the bins. For many classical music listeners, browsing is still an important pathway to musical discovery, one that many online sellers haven’t managed to duplicate. And lots of people still prefer physical CDs to downloads. (And classical music metadata is still the beast to be tamed.) The Borders experience left a lot to be desired, for sure, but you could walk into one of their stores and know that you’d see classical music there.

Finally, and most depressingly, The Detroit News looks at the effects Borders’ failure will have on local and national economies and unemployment rates:

Borders workers will be hurt because retail employment has stalled and it could be difficult to find a new job, says John Challenger, chief executive at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago job outplacement consulting firm.

Borders will lose its 10,700 employees nationwide, which represent just less than 0.1 percent of the country’s roughly 14.5 million retail workers, Challenger said.

"That’s a big loss of jobs," Challenger said. "We haven’t seen five-figure mega-layoffs in a while."

It takes a retail worker three to four months on average to find another job in the sector, he said.

 

Use Autoresponders And Emails To Promote Your Book

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Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, it’s important to have an opt-in form on your website to capture email addresses of visitors, so that you can contact them now and in the future. Keeping in touch through email helps to build relationships, reinforce your expertise, and keep potential customers from forgetting about you.

You can send "broadcast emails" to your list at any time and use "autoresponders" to automatically send out one or more pre-written emails at specified intervals after someone joins the list. Here’s an example of an autoresponder: when you submit an online form to get a free ebook from someone, you might get an email with a link to the ebook immediately, and then get a follow up message seven days later, and another message ten days after that.

Here are just a few of the ways that authors can promote through autoresponders and broadcast emails:

  • Offer a sample chapter, short story, prequel, ebook, report, or instructional video to people who sign up for your mailing list. This free bonus should be designed to promote your book or other products.
  • Send a newsletter to subscribers with educational or entertainment value.
  • Send your list an announcement of new books or products, and new editions and formats of your book.
  • Offer free or paid mini-courses, online training, or teleseminars, and use the autoresponder to deliver information to the registrants on an automated basis.

In my latest newsletter, I published a more in-depth article that explains how autoresponders work, explores ways that fiction and nonfiction authors can use autoresponders to promote books, and offers tips on choosing a service provider. If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up today to get access to the archive of in-depth newsletter articles and get three free ebooks on book marketing.

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Borders Liquidation

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It’s official: Borders is liquidating all of its remaining inventory and equipment and closing its doors. What follows is a reprint of Borders’ press release, dated 7/18/11.

Borders Group to Submit Hilco and Gordon Brothers Proposal to Court for Approval

Hilco and Gordon Brothers to purchase store assets of the business and administer liquidation process
Borders extends gratitude to dedicated employees and loyal customers

ANN ARBOR, Mich., July 18, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ —

Borders Group reported today that, in accordance with the terms of its financing agreement, the Company will submit to the Court for approval the previously-announced proposal from Hilco and Gordon Brothers to purchase the store assets of the business and administer the liquidation process. Borders said that, in the absence of a formal proposal from a going concern bidder, it did not require an auction prior to presenting the proposal to the Court at a scheduled hearing on Thursday, July 21, 2011.

"Following the best efforts of all parties, we are saddened by this development," said Borders Group President Mike Edwards. "We were all working hard towards a different outcome, but the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution, and turbulent economy, have brought us to where we are now," he added.

"For decades, Borders stores have been destinations within our communities, places where people have sought knowledge, entertainment, and enlightenment and connected with others who share their passion. Everyone at Borders has helped millions of people discover new books, music, and movies, and we all take pride in the role Borders has played in our customers’ lives," Edwards continued, "I extend a heartfelt thanks to all of our dedicated employees and our loyal customers."

Borders currently operates 399 stores and employs approximately 10,700 employees. Subject to the Court’s approval, under the proposal, liquidation is expected to commence for some stores and facilities as soon as Friday, July 22, with a phased rollout of the program which is expected to conclude by the end of September. Borders intends to liquidate under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code and, as a result, Borders expects to be able to pay vendors in the ordinary course for all expenses incurred during the bankruptcy cases.

About Borders Group, Inc.

Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Mich., Borders Group, Inc. is a leading specialty retailer of books as well as other educational and entertainment items. Online shopping is offered through borders.com. Find author interviews and vibrant discussions of the products we and our customers are passionate about online at facebook.com/borders, twitter.com/borders and youtube.com/bordersmedia. For more information about the Company, visit borders.com/media.
 
 

Playing Jazz With Words

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This post, by JD Sawyer, originally appeared on his Literary Abominations site on 7/15/11.

You hear a lot of talk of “discovery writers” and “outliners” in the writing world. The “pantsers” and the “plotters,” respectively. It’s true that there are a lot of people that fall into both categories–including many of my friends–and human nature loves dichotomies, but I’ve never fit comfortably either, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.

But first, the reasons why the two popular methods don’t work for me.

Pulling Down My Pants

“Pantsers” are folks that write by the seat of their pants. They trust their subconscious and just fly on from word one, muddling through as they go–and often, they’re brilliant. Many of my favorite short story writers (including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Dean Wesley Smith) write like this, and they are quite often bloody brilliant.

I’ve done this with short stories–sometimes, I’ve done it really well. But for every short story I’ve finished with this method, I have five that started, sputtered, and stopped. Some I’ve gone back and done in a way more suited to my workflow–others I’ve abandoned and think of fondly, like childhood friends I’m unlikely ever to see again.

Why do they sputter? Frankly, it’s because I often write from a milieu, and only infrequently is a milieu sufficient to sustain a whole story. My process often relies on the collision of two dissimilar ideas in my own head, and without those two ideas, the story won’t spin.

With novels, it’s the same problem, only worse. Unless the story itself is a discovery process with a very constrained point of view, there isn’t a lot I can get a foothold on. Even then, I only get so far before I have to resort to other methods.

Which brings us to outlining.

Sketchy Thinking


Read the rest of the post on JD Sawyer‘s Literary Abominations.

TOP TEN: The Divide Between the Published and the Self-Published

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This post, by Robert Chazz Chute, originally appeared on his Chazz Writes site on 7/16/11.

At a recent writers’ conference, I was in grand company. I met a lot of cool people. Almost all of them were traditionally published authors. I watched them ask questions of panels of publishers, agents and editors.

Here’s what I noticed:

1. They don’t want to change along with the rest of the publishing landscape. Inertia is powerful, even in broken systems. And why should they want to change? Things haven’t actually been good, but they didn’t have to worry about things they have to worry about now with the DIY route. It used to be that they were expected to write, mostly to the exclusion of all else. That was job #1 and everything else was supposed to be, in theory, someone else’s job. However, many authors have already felt this pressure change because more and more book promotion and publicity duties have been unloaded on them by publishers.

2. Some of them are excited to self-publish. Either they had bad experiences with agents and traditional publishers or they simply want more control of their books. Their out-of-print books and their unpublished books may have new life as self-published works. The digital revolution, to these authors, is an opportunity. (Also, some DIY authors see self-publishing as their way into legacy publishing.)

3. Some are still wringing their hands, aggressively…as if that will turn back time. Like the music industry, Blockbuster, milk men, buggy whips and enjoyable air travel, there was a lot of nostalgia in that room. But nostalgia isn’t an argument against the proliferation of ebooks. It’s sadness at loss and change. They mourn the loss of some of the perks. Though many authors complained about the six city book tour and hanging out in bookstores ignored and unnoticed, admit it: all those bookstore signings had cachet. Book signings were part of the dream of being published and it was nice to rely on the publisher to pay for the trip.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 7 more observations about mainstream-published authors’ take on self-publishing, on Robert Chazz Chute‘s Chazz Writes.

Who is going to Capture the Various Library Worlds?

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This post, by Martyn Daniels, originally appeared on his Brave New World blog on 6/20/11.

The library digital world is starting to undergo some serious consolidation and establish interesting partnerships. The market itself is quite diverse with public, institutional, academic, corporate and educational libraries supporting different usage and content needs and straggling not just books but learned journals, journals, reference works and information resources.

Overdrive announced a partnership arrangement with Amazon to offer the giant’s digital content through their increasingly dominant public library offer. This coupled with Amazon’s new and limited loan service begs many questions as to the exclusivity of the partnership, the long term ambitions of Amazon and their intent to move in this direction. The public library arena could become crowded with many digital supply offers and we still have Ingram in the US and many localised offers emerging around the world.

Google appears to be stuck with their settlement offer and intent to cloud cover the library world but their intent to be the information index of the world and their continuation to scan libraries and now grow their bookstore clearly indicates that they aren’t going away. However they have just announced and arrangement with The British Library to access a huge volume of out-of-copyright works for free for the first time on the internet and mirrors deals Google already has in place with more than 40 libraries around the world. The British Library deal covers some 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century. Google covers the cost of digitisation, producing one copy for its own use, an one copy for the library.

Smiths News bought Dawson Holding earlier this month.


Read the rest of the post on Martyn Daniels‘ Brave New World.

Do you create a Facebook Profile or a Facebook Fan Page?

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This post, by Bill Walker, originally appeared on his site on 7/7/11 and was originally entitled "Businesses: Do you create a Facebook Profile or a Facebook Fan Page?" While the piece is targeted to small businesses, it contains information equally valuable to authors who use Facebook so we’re including it here.

Do you own a business and want to have a presence on Facebook? Everywhere I go I hear people talking about the importance of Facebook for businesses.  In fact, I am one of those people telling business owners that it is important to have a presence on Facebook.

When a business sends me a friend request, I applaud that business for wanting to create a presence on Facebook. However, I feel the creator(s) of that profile don’t really understand what they are doing or they wouldn’t have used a Personal Profile for their business.  At least that’s what I’m hoping, because I can’t imagine why anyone would knowingly use a Personal Profile as their business page as part of the internet strategy.

I’ll get off my soapbox so we can continue…

So, how does one promote a business on Facebook?  The first thing to do is to create a Personal Profile on Facebook. Once that is done then you as a person can create a Fan Page for your business.

There seems to be much confusion about this so let’s begin by going over the differences between a personal profile and a fan page:

Personal Profile vs. Fan Page 

First off there are some very important differences between a Personal Profile and a Fan Page.

The biggest difference is that Personal Profiles are for people.  Real people that put their face (i.e. personal photo) in the section for profile photo. Even if the primary reason you are joining Facebook is to gain visibility for your company, it is very important to keep your Personal Profile current. This allows you to build and maintain relationships with family, friends and potential clients.

Fan Pages are for businesses, organizations, places, brands or products, musicians, authors, speakers, public figures, etc. Facebook set up this ability to create a Fan Page for the express purpose of promoting your business, brand or product.

In fact, it is actually against Facebook terms and conditions to use a Personal Profile for a business. If Facebook finds your Personal Profile set up as a Business Profile, it’s possible that they may delete your profile. Any friends gathered, status updates, photos, events, games (i.e. farmville) will be lost.  All that hard work will have been wasted.


Read the rest of the post on Bill Walker‘s site.

On Finding The Right Writer’s Group For You

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Writer’s groups can be quite difficult because sometimes there is more talking than writing. Maybe that’s what you want, but I have been struggling to find a place to write for a while now. When I talked to Dan Sawyer a while back on prolific writing, he mentioned his writing partner Gail, and I felt the need to find something similar. Last week I found the perfect writer’s group and I talk about it below.

The writing group I went to has rules: No talking, just writing, for 2 hours. Then you’re free to socialize. I arrived at the Battersea pub at 6.30pm after work, ready to write, but also jaded from a full day’s work. I was knackered and if I had gone home, it would have been dinner, reading and bed. But there were 4 other writers there and they were diligently at it, so I opened my netbook and started to write. Two hours later I had 2000 words and a new scene for Prophecy, my next novel. Brilliant!I will be going back next week, ready to write again. The positive peer pressure was just what I needed.

So to find the right writer’s group for you – decide what you want to get out of it, and what you are willing to put in. I don’t want to talk at the moment, I want to write. I’m sure I will need a critique group for the next phase of the edits, but right now, it’s first draft which means writing.

Are you in a writer’s group? What does it provide for you?
What do you recommend for others?

PS. This is the first video from my garden in London. It’s under a flight path so it is a little noisy – and I got the camera angle wrong – I do have a body! Let me know what you think. Do you like my videos?

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

7 Distraction-Free Writing Environments for Authors

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As someone who writes and publishes constantly, the tools that I use are pretty important to me. I’ve written before about how the distraction-free writing enviroments that are embodied in some recent writing software really help me to focus and get a lot done in the time I have available.

So far, my favorite is iAWriter for the iPad, a program I use just about every day for the bulk of all my drafts. On the Mac I’ve been using Omm Writer Dana, another brilliant implementation of this idea.

informationArchitects just came out with their version of iAWriter for the Mac, and it’s a brilliant app. They have re-thought what they did on the iPad, and made this application just as good for the Mac.

I thought this was a great time to have a look at other programs that also try to solve the problem of too much distraction to get any writing done. Here are 7 solutions, many free, that you can try whether you’re on Windows or Mac.

Click through and check these programs out. Some offer amazing levels of customization, others are bare-bones and fixed in their format. Some try to mimic monospaced character-mode screens, others provide backgrounds and ambient music. It’s only by trying them out that you can tell whether one will work for you.

If you’ve got others to add, let me know in the comments.

Windows

Darkroom
Free from They.mislead.us
“Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text. Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application.”

Darkroom for self-publishers

Q10
Free from Baara
Available in English, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish
“Q10 is a simple but powerful text editor designed and built with writers in mind. Q10 is freeware. That’s right, you can download and use it at no cost.
Q10 is small, fast and keeps out of your way. Q10 will clean your kitchen, walk your dog and make excellent coffee. Well, not really. But it’s really good as a full-screen text editor.”

Q10 for writing

Writemonkey
Free from Iztok Stržinar in Slovenia
“Writemonkey is a Windows zenware* writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood, it helps you write better. Editing is for another day … ”

Writemonkey

Creawriter
Free and Donation versions from SPL
“CreaWriter is a Windows program designed to boost your productivity and creativity. Its full screen, minimalistic interface provides a distraction-free environment. Indulge yourself in a relaxed and calm atmosphere and achieve a whole new level of concentration! Inspired by OmmWriter, a Mac OS X only application, CreaWriter allows you to customize both background image and ambient sound.”

Creawriter

Macintosh OS X

iAWriter
$17.99 from Information Architects
“iA Writer for Mac is a digital writing tool that makes sure that all your thoughts go into the text instead of the program. iA Writer has no preferences. It is how it is. It works like it works. Love it or hate it. It’s unique FocusMode allows me to think, spell and write at one sentence at a time. iA Writer is fast; it works without mouse. It automatically formats semantical entities such as headlines, lists, bold, strong, block quotes written in markdown.”

iAWriter for Macintosh

Writeroom
$24.99 from Hog Bay Software
30-day free trial
“WriteRoom’s full screen writing environment gets your computer out of the way so that you can focus on your work. The result is a subtle clearing of the mind that I think helps you write better.”

Writeroom

Multiple Platforms

FocusWriter
Free from Gott Code
“FocusWriter is a simple, distraction-free writing environment. It utilizes a hide-away interface that you access by moving your mouse to the edges of the screen, allowing the program to have a familiar look and feel to it while still getting out of the way so that you can immerse yourself in your work. It’s available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and has been translated into many different languages.”

Focuswriter

If you’ve never tried this approach to boosting your writing productivity,

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer.

The Tsunami of Crap

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This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 7/5/11.

Some people believe the ease of self-publishing means that millions of wannabe writers will flood the market with their crummy ebooks, and the good authors will get lost in the morass, and then family values will go unprotected and the economy will collapse and the world will crash into the sun and puppies and kittens by the truckload will die horrible, screaming deaths.

Or something like that.

This is bullshit, of course. A myth. A fabrication. One rooted in envy and fear.

Readers aren’t the ones worried about the scores of new ebooks being released. They have no need to be worried. There are already billions of books in the world. A few more million won’t make a difference.

Readers are able to find what they want, quite easily. They can go into a bookstore and come out with a purchase, even though that store stocks 150,000 titles. They can go into a library, and ten minutes later walk out with a handful of books that interest them.

There are millions of websites, and YouTube videos, and things to buy on Amazon.com. There are thousands of choices on cable TV and Netflix and Hulu. Yet we’re always able to find gems.

No, the readers don’t care if some moron uploads his ten-years-in-the-making opus "Me and My Boogers: A Love Story." They’ll be able to avoid it just by looking at the crummy cover art, the poor description, and the handful of one star reviews.

 

Read the rest of the post on J.A. Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

The Fear Factor

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In which L.J. Sellers explains why letting bits of your personal life spill into your pages may not be a bad thing.

In my personal life I try to be optimistic, but in my fiction I write about my fears. It’s been true since I sat down to write my first novel. At the time, Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news and my greatest fear was that a sexual predator would kidnap and kill one of my three young boys. So I wrote a story about a woman who tracks down her son’s killer. The experience was cathartic, and I continued the practice in future novels, because as it turns out, many readers share the same fears.

Being kidnapped and held against my will is another dominant fear for me and millions of other women as well—because it happens!—so the theme occurs often in crime fiction novels, including two of mine (The Baby Thief, Secrets to Die For).

Most of my stories though have elements of fears that are very personal to me. For example, when I wrote The Sex Club, the first book in the Detective Jackson series, my son was in Iraq and I worried constantly that he would die. My sister had just succumbed to cancer and I grieved for her and worried for other members of my family. So Kera, my main female protagonist, was dealing with those elements. Right or wrong, I couldn’t separate those emotions from my writing and they ended up on the page.

Soon after that, my husband was diagnosed with retroperitoneal fibrosis, which triggered all kinds of fears for me. He faced a life of pain, multiple surgeries, and likely an early death. Without being consciously aware that I was doing it at first, my Jackson character started having pain and health issues. Eventually, he was diagnosed with RF, and in Thrilled to Death, he underwent a surgery, very similar to the one my husband experienced. Readers tell me they enjoy my characters, who are realistic, yet unique, so incorporating true-to-life, frightening details adds richness to my stories while helping me work through emotional challenges.

In late 2009 when I was writing Passions of the Dead, I was dealing with unemployment: mine, my husband’s, my brother’s, and dozens of other people I knew. I witnessed the devastating effect it can have on families. That fearful theme became dominant when I outlined the story. My Jackson novels of course are always about crime, murder in particular, and my main goal is tell a great story. But every fictitious crime needs a unique, complex, and compelling motive, and I look for those motives in the fear I’m experiencing.

Some of my fears are more social and universal. I fear that as a society we have wrongfully imprisoned hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people. Dozens of news stories about the release of prisoners wrongfully convicted continue to feed this fear, so that issue, which is often the result of coercion or intimidation, is part of the plot in Dying for Justice, the fifth Detective Jackson novel.

Right now I fear for the future of our county if the economy doesn’t improve. I also fear for our comfort and safety if the extreme weather patterns continue and grow worse. So I’m writing a futuristic thriller in which those fears come into play. Guilt and redemption are also prominent themes in The Arranger, which will release in early September. (If you’re a book reviewer and would like a copy, please email me.)

Soon I’ll start work on the next Jackson book. I have a list of ideas, many culled from true crime cases found in the news. Regardless of what I decide in the beginning though, you can bet that as the plot develops, whatever fear is most prevalent on my mind will surface in the story.

What fears do you like to read about in fiction? Which fears are too intense for reading pleasure?


This is a cross-posting from The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

AAP President Speaks Out On GSU Case

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In this Publisher’s Weekly Soapbox editorial (subscriber-only access), Tom Allen, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers writes about Georgia State University being on trial for copyright infringement. Note that reprint permission was obtained from Publisher’s Weekly by the Copyright Clearance Center, which now provides this content to Publetariat’s audience.

 

Common Goals: AAP on the GSU e-reserve lawsuit　

Paul Courant’s recent Soapbox op-ed (“Adversary or Enemy?”) doesn’t address what motivated three academic publishers to sue, with great reluctance, Georgia State University for copyright infringement: GSU was, and is, systematically downloading and scanning substantial portions of books and posting them on e-reserve, semester after semester, for tens of thousands of students without paying a cent for royalties to the authors and publishers who created the materials.

Imagine the consequences if universities across the country adopted GSU’s policy of not paying anything for wholesale scanning and distribution of copyrighted materials, simply because the material was posted on e-reserves instead of packaged as a printed coursepack. Courant’s University of Michigan doesn’t follow GSU’s policy, nor do most other American universities.

GSU implemented its policy in a way that invited disregard for basic copyright norms by delegating difficult copyright decisions to faculty without guidance, without meaningful review mechanisms, and without providing any funds to pay for permissions when necessary. The result poses a threat to the creative ecosystem in which copyright protection provides incentives for scholars and publishers to develop and distribute high-quality materials for students of all ages. Academic publishers, faculty, and librarians may have their differences. But they are tightly bound together in a common enterprise: education.

The transition to digital delivery holds great promise for quicker access to a broader range of materials through more channels, with greater flexibility for teaching faculty. And in some cases, lower costs. But the ecosystem is degraded by using digital formats as a rationale for the reproduction and distribution of significant amounts of copyrighted material for “free.”

Misconceptions about the GSU litigation are widespread in part because the fair use exception to copyright is not widely understood. An educational purpose is one factor in determining fair use, but it doesn’t stand alone. If all copying for educational purposes were fair use, the production of high-quality educational content would decline or disappear.

I won’t attempt in this space to explain how the plaintiff publishers’ proposed injunction, if approved by the court and properly administered by GSU officials, could simplify the task of making fair use determinations and obtaining permissions to use copyrighted material in an effective, timely manner.

But I do want to make a couple of important points. First, when academic copying and distribution of material clearly constitute fair use, permission is unnecessary. Second, when permission is needed, the path for any institution, including GSU, is inexpensive and has never been easier.

At trial, Tracey Armstrong, president and CEO of the Copyright Clearance Center, testified that anyone seeking to use copyrighted materials could obtain permissions on a case-by-case basis through CCC’s Web site or subscribe to a “blanket license.” [Editor’s note: CCC is underwriting half of the publishers’ legal costs in this suit.] When a university adopts CCC’s blanket license, called the Annual Academic Copyright License Service, it covers all faculty, students, and others attached to the institution, including distance learners. It provides access to approximately 2.5 million titles, including books and periodicals. Prices are based on the number of students attending the institution and the proportion of those in graduate study. In combination, these two licensing services and parallel efforts by publishers are making the process of obtaining permission quite efficient.

What would be the annual cost to Georgia State University if it subscribed to a blanket Annual Academic Copyright License? The answer is $114,000 in rights-holder royalties per year plus a one-time, first-year-only administrative charge of 20% of that amount.
With an estimated 30,400 students at GSU, $114,000 works out to about $3.75 per student. About the cost of one medium-sized Starbucks drink.

Paying the people who create and develop the materials we use in teaching is the right thing to do. Contrary to Dr. Courant’s claim of “enormous costs to academic performance” or another academic librarian’s alarm about a “nightmare scenario” for higher education, I believe the ecosystem that binds educators, librarians, and publishers is working and will survive this litigation over copyright infringement at one particular institution. I will bet them both a Starbucks on that. 

Curation Nation

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In this new “Beyond the Book” podcast and transcript from Copyright Clearance Center, CCC’s Chris Kenneally discusses the activity of curation with Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation. Rosenbaum explains that "curation is theoretically the cure to what ails us, which is this pounding headache of data that is really… getting worse and there’s no signs of it easing up… There’s nobody that’s set the gold standard for curation. Huffington Post was a pretty good early model, because what Arianna figured out was that if she could aggregate traffic, which she did really well, that people that need content would come to her and that she could become the arbiter of what goes on the home page."

He goes onto clarify that when information is "organized by some kind of robot online, it’s not what you’re expecting, [or] what you want…. We’re all going to make content and so what we’re beginning to see is a Web in which everybody is a publisher and increasingly what I want to do is narrow the number of places that I go to listen to the world. "
 
To give an example of how Rosenbaum is taking curation head on, he previews that his company Magnify is now powering TEDx, the technology conference TED’s local event operation, because TED wanted a "video experience that felt curated." 

The podcast and transcript are available in the respective links blow:
 
http://beyondthebookcast.com/curation-nation/
 
http://beyondthebookcast.com/wp-images/RosenbaumTranscript.pdf  

Can The Subscription Model Work For Trade Publishers?

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I recently read a Slate article about how the film industry is repeating the DRM and business model mistakes of the music industry, and of course saw many parallels with, and implications for, trade publishing in it. But unlike the film and music industries, Big Pub has plenty more market and cultural shifts to contend with these days than just the rising popularity and availability of digital media.

The once-mighty Borders has failed, proving once and for all that brick and mortar is no longer the ace in the hole it once seemed for trade publishers. Authors, established and aspiring alike, are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to partner with trade publishers now that it’s become clear they can get their work to a readership more quickly, keep control of their intellectual property rights, and earn higher royalties to boot by going indie. As if to add insult to injury, Amazon seems poised to eat whatever’s left of Big Publishing’s lunch after everyone else has had a go at the trough. But it occurred to me that there may yet be some unexplored and promising territory for Big Pub, if they’re willing to entertain an unorthodox idea: a subscription model of ebook content delivery.

Much like Gamefly and O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online, major publishers could offer a monthly, flat-fee subscription service for
book-at-a-time access to all their ebook titles in various ereader formats. Note that I said access, not ownership. It would be a rental-type paradigm, and like Gamefly and Netflix could be offered at various pricing tiers according to how many titles the consumer is allowed to have checked out at any given time. Such a plan would enable publishers to maintain steady, ongoing revenue streams in addition to their existing sales channels, and would allow publishers to do an end-run around Amazon, B&N’s Nook store, and Apple’s iBookstore, too.

Perhaps just as importantly, it would allow publishers to gracefully exit the ebook pricing, DRM and staged release debacles of the past, and finally be seen as offering a valuable service to consumers instead of being the big, greedy bad guys.

Gamefly charges the equivalent of the cost of one new game at retail prices for its basic subscription; trade publishers could do the same. At $10 – $15 per month I think plenty of avid ebook readers would be willing to sign up, because they’re probably already buying at least one ebook at retail prices each month.

There are only 5 major players left in trade publishing, so even if you had to ‘subscribe’ to all 5 of them individually (since it’s not likely they’d form some kind of collective service), you’re still only talking approximately the same monthly fee as what plenty of people are already paying for their Gamefly accounts.

While publishers would lose money on accounts signed to voracious readers who currently buy numerous ebooks every month at retail prices, those folks are outliers. Most people I know don’t buy ebooks at that rate, and most people I know don’t read more than one book a month, either. Also, there would surely be a large contingent of people who sign up fully intending to wring their money’s worth out of the subscription fee, but ultimately end up ‘checking out’ a book only every second or third month. Once you know the books are there for the taking any time, there’s no urgency.

If you subscribe to Netflix, Gamefly or even a health club, you’re probably personally acquainted with this phenomenon. I say this while gazing ruefully at the Netflix DVD I’ve had checked out for nearly four months now. Yep, I’ve paid the monthly fee for that movie three times over, and in fact could’ve bought the DVD for less than I’ve paid for this rental by now. But I still have no intention of cancelling my Netflix subscription because it’s a convenience I’m willing to pay for. And maybe someday I really will end up checking out a new movie every few days, like I imagined I’d be doing when I first signed up.

Yes, there are technological hurdles to be overcome. And yes, there will be some considerable startup effort and investment. But those things are true of any new business model trade publishers might try to adopt. And heaven knows, the model they’ve currently got is no longer working so they’re going to have to try something.  

 

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.