View 757 Tuesday, January 08, 2013

I have been working on getting the California Reader into print, and also on fiction, so I have been a bit slow with commentary here, and also I have let the mail pile up. I’ll try to do some of the mail tonight. As usual it’s all very interesting: this site gets some of the best mail on the Internet. Alas, sometimes the sender has to be anonymous even to the point of my not being able to quote directly, but mostly it’s good arguments. Not all in agreement with me, which is fine.

For many years I have paid dues to AFTRA. I don’t do much in the way of paid radio or television commentary or performances, but once in a while I do and AFTRA collects for me. Overall I think I am ahead in that I get paid for some guest appearances that otherwise would be gratis; I suppose I have missed some opportunities too. For the most part I haven’t paid much attention; AFTRA hasn’t been as activist as some Hollywood unions. Last year AFTRA merged with the Screen Actors Guild, and I got a union card that says ONE UNION SAG-AFTRA.

Now I have a card that lets me vote in the Oscars, and I have been getting DVD’s of Oscar nominated films. They have dire warnings against sharing them or letting them out of my custody, with the implication that the FBI will put twenty agents on the case if I do. I’m sort of against piracy to begin with so that’s no burden.

I have a moral problem here. I will not have time to watch all the movies that ought to be considered for the Oscars; is it fair to vote for ones I like when there are others that might be a lot better? Of course I will vote. I don’t read all the science fiction novels written each year, or even all those nominated, but I vote when I think there’s a work worthy of SFWA’s Nebula, and I’ll employ the same criterion here.

One of the movies we got was ARGO, and we watched it the other night. The opening propaganda about Mossadegh and the Shah is standard hogwash. I suspect that if Iran could have a fair election now, the Pahlavi dynasty would probably be returned to power; the Shah’s government was certainly authoritarian but it was also a great deal more tolerant than what replaced it. But if you ignore the introductory political massaging, it’s a good movie, and not all that far from the way things actually went down. They manage to build tension well even though everyone watching has to know that eventually they’ll get away with it. If you like caper movies you’ll probably like this one.

I’ve spent the day working on the California Sixth Grade Reader – this is the reader that was standard in California public schools when California arguably had the best public school system in the world – which I will put up with commentary shortly. I’m adding a few items to it: in those days California built it’s textbooks largely out of public domain, and some important works that would have been in it if they hadn’t been expensive can be included now. Also, there are some poems that readers would have encountered in fourth and fifth grades in those days, and some of them should be in here as part of preparation for works that are included.

It’s not all that much work, but it is a bit time absorbing. I’ve let this slide for years, and that’s not fair. Given the state of our public schools we need some decent reading materials out there. There’s a lot of Western Civilization that ought not be lost, but which is fading from our collective consciousness. This is one book that will help connect the next generation to those that came before. At some point the education system collapse can’t continue – if something can’t go on forever it will stop – but recovering from the rot that our public education system has become will not be easy.

It won’t be all that easy. In 1914 when this reader was standard in California, something like half the people of this country were involved in agriculture, farming, food processing, food distribution, and other occupations related to food production and distribution. Now that’s a much smaller number because the productivity of our agriculture and food processing system has so greatly increased.

People then moved from agriculture into manufacturing; but manufacturing productivity grows yearly – Moore’s Law directly affects electronics and computers, but that affects productivity of everything else – and fewer and fewer people are needed to do that.

Western Civilization once inspired people. Something needs to do that for the future. Perhaps that will be something new, but it seems important that we don’t throw away all our cultural heritage while we try to figure out what it is.

And it’s dinner time.

View 748 Thursday, November 01, 2012

We have this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michaellevin/publishers-weakly-what-th_b_2024074.html

Which ran with a puff for Levin

New York Times best selling author and Shark Tank survivor Michael Levin runs www.BusinessGhost.com, and is a nationally acknowledged thought leader on the future of book publishing.

Levin is commenting on the Random Penguins merger. Among other things he says:

Here’s what happens next: The remaining major publishers will find it harder to compete, because the resulting publisher (Penguin House?) will be able to produce books more cheaply. So they’ll fire people, merge, fire more people, and eventually roll over and die.
All because publishers never figured out how to deal with the Internet and how to sell books in a wired world.
All because publishers considered themselves "special" and thought they could get away with selling products they didn’t market.
All because publishers are English majors wearing Daddy’s work clothes and pretending to be business people, running their businesses on whim and gut feeling instead of figuring out what people want and giving it to them, the way smart businesses work.
I have no pity for the fallen publishers. In Wall Street terms, there isn’t enough lipstick in the world to make these pigs kissable. They had the responsibility to shape society by providing it with books worth reading, to create a cultural legacy for our generation and generations to come. And instead, what did they give us?

I first saw the Levin essay in an author association – Science Fiction Writers of America – discussion, and replied off the top of my head. Some fellow members of SFWA have suggested it might be appreciated by a wider readership.

I am reminded of the Old Timer in the late Fibber McGee series, who would listen to a long rant and say "Pretty good, Sonny, but it ain’t the way I heard it."

I have had my criticisms of the publishing world, but I don’t think things are as bad as all that. Indeed, the big problem with publishing seems to be that the bean counters come in and decide that there ought to be much higher returns on investment than publishing generally makes, and try to apply what they think thy know from the business community to publishing. The result is usually a disaster.

Publishing has its ups and downs, but the ups don’t go all that high: traditionally the return on investment in publishing is much smaller than the average in the business world, and the efficiencies are awful– but attempts to streamline and make things more efficient have generally made things worse. At least that’s the way I heard it and what I have seen since I got into this racket in the late 1960’s.

It’s certainly the case that new technologies have changed publishing at its core and no one is quite sure how to adjust to that. Worse, the collapse of the distribution system in which all the smart business people tried to eat each other with hostile takeovers left traditional publishing with real dilemmas. When you go from 200 distributors to about three and a half, and some of the takeovers were so hostile that the losers ‘lost’ their customer lists and accounts retrievable files on their way out the door, you are going to get some real dilemmas. More, the consolidated distribution companies, hugely in debt, thought they could now put bigger squeezes on the publishers just as technology made enormous changes in the very nature of distributing.

Alas, authors and their associations were taken in surprise as much as anyone else.

More, looking at the new generation of computers, laptops, netbooks, readers, etc., and new print technologies and print on demand system, the revolution isn’t anywhere near over. This means that publishers are going to have to scrap a lot of what they "know" and learn the new world.
Authors have to be aware of all this, but authors aren’t publishers, and most authors who thought they could be publishers have regretted trying that. The whole point of the publishing business was to take a lot of decisions out of the hands of authors — indeed, SFWA uses the publishers as its Membership Committee, and the collapse of publishing is making us wonder if we need to come up with our own means for choosing members.
Publishers have taken most of the business and marketing work out of the system leaving authors to write, not manage. Publishers give out advances and publish and market books. They try to choose books that will sell while at the same time playing for the favor of certain public intellectuals in the hopes of being well thought of, not just panders. What most publishers wanted was to do ‘important’ books that made money. That didn’t always work. "I publish Mickey Spillane so that I can publish award winning books…"

After the huge flop of Day of the Locust (it sold about 400 copies total) Bennett Cerf famously said "If I ever publish another Hollywood novel it will be My Fifty Ways of Making Love by Hedy Lamar". Of course that’s now considered one of the great American novels and Random House is quite proud of having published it.

Publishers have ceased to be the gatekeepers in the sense that anyone can now ‘publish’ a book. On the other hand, there is still the need for advances, editing, marketing including soliciting puffs and blurbs and reviews — every reviewer I know of is now bombarded with requests for reviews from people they don’t know, and every author receives requests for puffs from people who swear they have been readers and fans for many years, and no matter what good intentions we may have there is no way we can read all that. Someone has to become the equivalent of the publishers reader and the slush pile editor. Someone has to select what book ideas should have an advance, and there has to be a way to get a return on that risky investment. I will still read soon to be published books sent to me by my editors and publishers, but I can’t possibly read everything sent me by readers seeking a puff. Nor can anyone else.

I’m not sure that the rant that began this topic is terribly useful in finding answers to these questions.

= = = = =

I can add this:

In the past year one effect of the publisher revolution has been that eBook rights have become more valuable than print rights. Lucifer’s Hammer and Mote in God’s Eye are now selling quite well as eBooks even though they are decades old. Oath of Fealty isn’t doing too badly. Backlists are valuable again – and publishers haven’t done anything to market those books. Amazon has with its clever “People who bought this book also enjoyed” advertisements, which spreads the popularity of Mote and Hammer to many other works.

Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a great deal for publishers to do. There are still the difficult tasks of editing – both line editing and copy-editing and the specialized copy editing required for eBooks which have to be examined in several publishing formats.

There is still the fact that publishers serve as the Membership Committee for the Author’s Guild, Mystery Writers of American, Science Fiction Writers of America, etc.: That is many author associations only allow membership to published authors, and ‘published’ specifically excludes self-published. This is now challenged by ‘self-published’ eBooks making more in a year than they would have got as advances for first novels. Author associations don’t know how to deal with this.

Niven and Benford have just been on an author’s death march – book signing tour – for their new collaboration, Bowl of Heaven, which managed to hit the best seller list. There is still money in book publishing of the old fashioned variety.

Publishing has been through many crises and will go through more. Publishers and authors have many mutual interests; the problem is usually the bean counters who come into publishing not understanding that to be a successful publisher you need to know something about authors – not only getting along with established authors who can make money for you, but in recognizing and encouraging and developing newcomers whose first efforts probably won’t make any money, but who can become the best sellers you will need in ten years and more.

At least that’s the way I heard it.

View 699 Thursday, November 03, 2011

Don’t know when you’ll see this. Time Warner Cable Internet service has been unreliable for the past couple of weeks, with intermittent periods of no service. It’s been out for over an hour now. Ah. Now it’s back. We’ll see for how long. Time Warner has been doing this to us recently. Hah. It was back for less than a minute. Now the cable modem is blinking again. I sure wish I had a reliable alternative to Time Warner Cable Internet service, but I don’t think I do.

It came back on at 1400 and seems to be working again. When it works it works well, but I have had a several minute failure every couple of days for the past week. It’s more annoying than anything else, of course. I expect you can just call this griping. I’d have been happy for this much service a decade ago.

What with the Time Warner Internet connection being out again it’s probably as well that I don’t do breaking news. (Now it’s back, but I still don’t do breaking news. And now it’s gone again.)

The reason I don’t do breaking news is that although the media give you the impression that they know what’s going on, they don’t, but they have a great interest in making you think they do.

There are now many new versions of the Herman Cain story, none with much in the way of facts. What’s clear is that he’s fair game for anyone who can come up with something to say, and even fairly conservative outfits are eager to get in on the game, with announcements that turn out to say little to nothing that can be confirmed, and some of which has already been withdrawn.

I understand the blood lust of the liberals against Cain. I am not sure why outfits that call themselves conservative are joining that hunt given the ambiguity of the charges. Yes, it proves that Cain can be flustered. So have a number of presidents. I am not at all certain that stability under media fire is at the top of the list of qualifications to be president in what is the biggest crisis since – well, certainly since the end of the Cold War. Being cool is a virtue, but the President is not often called before an Inquisition without advisors and staff. President Obama seems to have that skill; has it served the nation well? Presenting a good front to journalists is not actually the ultimate achievement for a president.

The journalism game has changed a lot since I got into the racket. Of course I was and am a columnist rather than a reporter, and while I have done factual reporting – I was science correspondent for National Catholic Press for a number of years and did a lot of straight reports – it wasn’t my strongest point. Mostly I deal in what I choose to call informed opinion and rational argument. But I have noticed that over the years journalists have become more frantic, a lot more like paparazzi.

I wonder if that is caused by the Internet and blogging? Now everyone has access to the public. Everyone is a publisher. Having a Press Card counts essentially for nothing. Anyone is a reporter. In my day journalists were more concerned with getting it right than getting it first – the old Hearst days of getting it out there as an Extra to sell more papers were over and taught as bad examples. Of course being right rather than first could be taken too far; I recall some of us ribbing Eric Burgess, the highly respected science correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, and incidentally the man who thought of “The Plaque” that went out with Pioneer – Niven and I were with him when he thought of it and saw him dash off to talk to Sagan about it. At a National Association of Science Writers meeting once Burgess, in a public discussion, said “Everything in the Monitor is true!” At which point several of his colleagues said “Yes, Eric, and it has been for a long, long time…”  But in general we were all agreed that it was better to get the facts right before breaking the story.

But the myth of the scoop continued even then and seems potent now. After all, you might have that golden story, the one that goes viral and gets you a million readers, and you can turn that into your own web site. You can be the Daily Koz or rival Huffington, all you have to do is hit it right. That still doesn’t explain how supposedly conservative and well established web sites rush into the Pound Cain and Pound Him Now contest.

As for me, I can wait for the facts on his personal story. I like most of what Cain proposes. I particularly like a national excise tax. Taxing consumption has the great merit of being inescapable. Everyone has to pay some of it. The worst thing about democracy is that it gives the power to tax to those who aren’t paying that tax. The very principle of a ‘progressive’ tax is that it’s a tax on someone else, but if it’s actually progressive then there’s some hope that even the poorest must pay something, and thus have an incentive to think about what that something is spent on.

It’s really easy to vote for a tax you won’t pay that is targeted for something that either benefits you directly, or makes you feel generous and charitable, a bit like Robin Hood. It’s not charity when you rob the rich to give to the poor, and it’s not really all that moral when you slaughter the King’s Men in ambush in order to rob the tax collector . You may also learn that you have made mortal enemies of the King’s Men, and that they may be better at their job than you are, but that’s another story. But I ramble. My point is that Cain proposes taxes that everyone will pay, which gives everyone a powerful incentive to keep those taxes low.

And yes: I think that even those who live entirely off the public teat, whose entire income is given to them by the government either as a pension or as salary or as Food Stamps or Health Care Benefits or as an “earned income tax” (aka negative income tax, a ‘refund’ of withholding taxes only there were no taxes withheld) – even if your total income is from government payments to you of other people’s tax money, you ought to pay some taxes. There ought to be some consequence to you for voting for tax increases. Or so I believe. And Cain seems to appreciate that.

It may well turn out that Cain has prohibitive personal faults. Or he may not. We can wait to find that out. Meanwhile, conservatives ought to learn something from the enemy: rally round the flag. Support your own people, and don’t be in a big hurry to bash them. Yes, we have principles, and if one of our own has committed the unforgiveable sin we will reject him: but we are certainly not going to look for reasons to pile on just because the rumors are flying. We can expect those rumors about every candidate we ever field. It’s the other side’s stock in trade.

I’ll let someone else break the news. Here we deal in principles.

The Long Beach Police have, as expected, have been cleared of all wrong doing in gunning down without warning a man seated on private property waving about a water hose nozzle that looked something like “a six shooter.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/long-beach-officers-cleared-in-water-nozzle-fatal-shooting-case.html

The police never identified themselves, there was no complaint against the victim other than that it looked like a gun –

I thought Americans had the right to keep and bear arms. That would, I would hope, include the right to keep and bear them on private property making no threats against anyone. It would include the right to keep and bear a toy weapon on your front porch.

I had never heard that it was against the law to sit on a porch and wave a toy gun about. I would have thought that the Long Beach police would be obliged to protect a man who, realizing he was drunk, retreated to a friend’s front porch and sat patiently waiting his return. I would have thought it criminal to sneak up on someone and gun him down without warning, whether you are a policeman or a scared neighbor or a would be robber. But I grew up in a time and place when we thought we were free.

Salve Sclave.

Martinmas approaches.

IT fell about the Martinmas time,

And a gay time it was then,

When our goodwife got puddings to make,

And she’s boild them in the pan.

 

The wind sae cauld blew south and north,

And blew into the floor;

Quoth our goodman to our goodwife,

‘Gae out and bar the door.’

 

My hand is in my hussyfskap,

Goodman, as ye may see;

An it shoud nae be barrd this hundred year,

It’s no be barrd for me.’

 

They made a paction tween them twa,

They made it firm and sure,

That the first word whaeer shoud speak,

Shoud rise and bar the door.

Then by there came two gentlemen,

At twelve o clock at night,

And they could neither see house nor hall,

Nor coal nor candle-light.

‘Now whether is this a rich man’s house,

Or whether is it a poor?’

But neer a word wad ane o them speak,

For barring of the door.

 

And first they ate the white puddings,

And then they ate the black;

Tho muckle thought the goodwife to hersel,

Yet neer a word she spake.

Then said the one unto the other,

‘Here, man, tak ye my knife;

Do ye tak aff the auld man’s beard,

And I’ll kiss the goodwife.’

‘But there’s nae water in the house,

And what shall we do than?’

‘What ails ye at the pudding-broo,

That boils into the pan?’

 

O up then started our goodman,

An angry man was he:

‘Will ye kiss my wife before my een,

And scad me wi pudding-bree?’

Then up and started our goodwife,

Gied three skips on the floor:

‘Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,

Get up and bar the door.’

The Hephaestus ABE Books flap continues: I find that at least one of the POD “collections” of my novels, which lists superbookdeals as the publisher, is in fact not a collection of my works but of some statements about those works. That is not stated comprehensibly by the book description, which tries its best to look as if it is offering the books themselves in a new POD edition. At best, then, this is a deception, and offering it for sale does not make add to ABE Books’ reputation.

I am pretty clear that I am not losing any sales to this, and that I over-reacted to the discovery. Anyone buying one of those ‘collections’ and finding that he has paid for a few pages of commentary is not likely to be more reluctant to buy the books themselves, and in fact may even want the real thing even more. I also doubt that there are many sales of these things. My first thought when I saw this was that it was a matter for an author association committee: this whole matter needs a policy considered by experts, not merely the opinion of one author even if that’s me. I need to remember. I don’t do breaking news. And whatever damage this Hephaestus / superbooksdeal is doing to authors is not so huge as to warrant running about in panic. SFWA used to have a copyrights committee to consider such matters. Perhaps it will start that up again.