Posted by Persephone Green on Feb 25, 2010 in
Free Stuff Moriah Jovan is giving away FREE copies of her two ebooks, The Proviso and Stay. They are available until Friday, February 26, 2010, at 3:08 p.m. CST. Seriously, you should grab these now. I’m only a little ways into The Proviso, but I love it, and I’m very, very picky about contemporary novels.
The post with the download info is here. Allez! Vite, vite!
You can’t throw a virtual stone in the digital world without hitting a post that talks about pirates. No, not the swashbuckling kind. The kind that infringe on people’s copyrights. Nearly every single post I have read by authors on the publishing industry and ebooks has some discussion of piracy in it. The fact is that many authors either don’t understand the basics of copyright law, don’t understand the spirit in which copyright law was originally written, or don’t respect anyone’s copyright outside of their circle of influence.
[ETA: The person below now understands what she did was wrong. However, I am leaving this intact as an educational post to prove my point.]
Take this person, for instance. This author rants about the scourge of ebook piracy and then proceeds to lift an entire article off of CNN and reposts it, without permission, in her blog, IN THE VERY SAME POST. Really, people? Really?
I’ve saved a screencap of the post and my response to her in a screencap. (No, it is not further copyright infringement for me to repost her blog post, by the way, because I am doing so for the edification of the public and for the purposes of critique.) The author in question did not critique Matt Frisch’s article or quote from it; she COPIED it, WORD-FOR-WORD, and PASTED it into her entry. The fact that she attributed it to the author changes nothing. CNN and Mr. Frisch aren’t making a dime off of her blog post. She is now a pirate. She is now a “thief.”
I put the word “thief” in Scare Quotes because some authors bandy it about whenever they talk about piracy — of print books, of ebooks, of films, of music, of software. The problem with this conflation of copyright infringement with theft is that we’re using a moral judgment to talk about a legal concept in the same discussion and failing to differentiate between a loss of profit due to non-profit infringement and a loss of profit due to a loss of physical property, not to mention a loss of profit due to for-profit/commercial piracy ventures.
By its very definition, theft describes a loss in physical property by an owner. Physical property and intellectual property are not the same. Period. It astounds me how many times people have to point this out before blogging authors ‘get it.’
It is so difficult for me to respect fellow authors when they don’t know the difference between a format for software, counter-culture, creative license alternatives to copyright, and copyright infringement, like Alexie Sherman. I’m sad now, because I cannot support one of the few Native American writers of literature. How can I give this man my money when he thinks the Internet is a harbinger of doom?
The man could take a few pointers from Paul Coelho, for one. As well as a heavy dose of reality.
This is kind of the way I feel about Shiloh Walker (only she’s not representing any oppressed group that I’m not already a part of obviously). I enjoy the genres in which she writes. I think writers who look to the future and believe in actively engaging with their readers are to be lauded. However, I can NOT, in good conscience, give my money to someone who thinks that cutting off someone’s lifeline (the Internet) is a proportional response to copyright infringement. I’ll buy her books used or rent them from a library or not read them.
The logic of the “three strikes” law is absurd. Given the amount of activities in our daily lives that rely on the internet for everything from telephone directories to maps to movie times to reviews to sources of income to cheap methods of communication, I would argue that having an Internet connection is more important than having a car in many cases, especially if you live in a metropolitan area. I know I rely on the web for my livelihood, as does Mrs. Walker for at least part of hers. I use it to order my medicines, check the weather, blog, write, communicate, and coordinate travel plans. Such is our burden: the limiting factor of our existence becomes an indispensable one.
Some thoughts to consider:
· We don’t take shoplifters’ driver’s licenses away when they steal comic books. Or TVs (such is the common comparison, despite the innacurate comparison of physical theft to IP infringement).
· Most people share an ISP and an IP address with other family members or roommates. Punishing innocent people, including the disabled, the mobility-impaired, and the innocent along with the guilty is not the best way to win supporters for your cause.
· Wi-fi signals that consumers set up can leave them open to roving attacks and parasitic activity by neighbors and crackers (the hackers without ethics kind, not the back-country white people kind).
Let me be clear: I have had people plagiarize my work. I have had people infringe on my copyrights by taking my work without permission. I have had people take my work and try to make money off of it (commercial piracy). Guess which one of the three pissed me off the least?
When I was plagiarized, it hurt like hell. When someone pirated my work to make a few cents, I was steamed. The person who just downloaded my stuff without paying for it? Who says they would have paid for it in the first place?
That’s not where I want to focus my time and energy. The people who resell books on eBay make me steamed. I want them fined and kicked out. Those are the true ebook “pirates.”
Illegal file-sharing is not the same as commercial piracy. THIS is commercial piracy. They are not the same. Just saying. Shame on eBay for letting sellers continue to break the law with impunity.
Tags: commerical piracy, copyright, creative property, ebook infringement, Ebooks, file sharing, intellectual property, piracy, theft, theft vs. infringement
Posted by Persephone Green on Jan 17, 2009 in
Calls to Action,
Charity Villagers in the Native American fishing village of Emmonak are in need of help: they need food and money for heating oil to make it through the winter after an especially bad fishing season. It makes me want to cry.
The good news is that some donations may already be on the way. The bad news is that everyone may think that Emmonak has received all of the help it needs, when there are around 800 people in this village who are used to taking care of themselves and are unused to turning to the state for aid.
Complicating this issue is that Governor Sarah Palin (whom we all just KNOW cares SO MUCH about the Native populations and the environment /sarcasm) has no rural advisor at this time and was probably unaware of the problem, since the last rural advisor resigned some time in October.
There’s more local coverage of the crisis from an Alaskan-oriented blog here, and if you want to make a contribution of funds or food, here are the contact addresses:
Emmonak Tribal Council
P.O. Box 126
Emmanok, AK 99581
(907) 949-1720
or
City of Emmonak, (907) 949-1227/1249 (They will take donations by credit card.
Please specify the donation is for heating oil!)
It’s always good to remember that just when you think you’ve hit hard times, you can still be grateful that things aren’t even worse.
Unfortunately, that usually means they are worse somewhere else, which is where your moral conscience comes into play. Please donate if you can afford to, even just a tiny amount will help. Thank you.
Tags: AK, Alaska, Call to Action, Emmonak, Inuit People, Native Americans, People in Crisis
So, to summarize:
1. Borders may be involved in the practice of “book churning,” or ordering more books than it knows it needs, tearing the covers off the mass-market paperbacks, and sening them back to the publishers for credit, even though they aren’t spending a dime. These orders go through Ingrams and cause the stores to receive credit on their accounts with the publishers. For more information and a really helpful explanatory post on this practice and how it’s affecting the small and large presses, check out “Smacked in the Face by the Long Tail: Business Churn” by LiveJournal blogger Kaigou. This article is well worth the read, as it has a breakdown on the mathematics involved and the profitability issues associated with the practice. It’s worth the read.
2. Ellora’s Cave overspent by buying its own presses and warehousing its own books, and while the profitability of its ebooks remains steady, its print division is suffering because no one wants to work with the company anymore.
3. EC’s executives are suing Borders for screwing EC over, but Borders has only about $40 million in assets, %435 million in debts, and even if EC wins its suit, it will be at the back of the line if Borders liquidates.
4. Allegedly, EC has let its relationships with several authors, both popular and less known, suffer over the last three years because of various unsound, unexplained, or seemingly arbitrary decisions. Some anonymous (and a few not-so-anonymous) authors have aired their complaints in the comments section of the Dear Author thread concerning the lawsuit announcement.
5. Jaid Black and her V.P. have reponded unprofessionally on the thread, and a shitstorm ensued.
…Wow. I am so, so glad I decided not to submit to EC. Not only do these hysterics remind me of past public relations issues that people have had with Ellora’s in the past, but it looks as if the company might end up running itself into the ground from bad business decisions. Why didn’t EC use Ingrams? What gives? And does it really help to issue veiled threats against authors who act as ‘whistleblowers?’ Wouldn’t it have been wiser to simply not respond and let people read the legal summaries?
Tags: Bad Business Decisions, Borders, EC, Ellora's Cave, Jaid Black, Lawsuits, Mismanagement, Publishing Industry, Publishing Industry Controversies, Shooting One's Self in the Foot
Posted by Persephone Green on Jan 9, 2009 in
Blogging The one about blogging every day on this blog, anyway. Oh, well. ou should only write if you have something worth saying.
The problem is, I *do* have something worth saying. Every day, there are new conversations about the future of publishing, genre fiction, the digital epoch, etc. So why is it so hard to commit to not just drafting, but PUBLISHING a post every twenty-four hours?
For me, it has something to do with permanence and privacy. If I say something I don’t believe or won’t believe forever, I’m stuck with it. Someone, somewhere will have an archive, and the words will stay with me forever.
I really want to know: what makes *you* hesitate before hitting the “Publish” button? Even if you find this most months or years from now, I’ll still want to know, so please leave a comment. Thanks!
Tags: Blogging
Posted by Persephone Green on Dec 31, 2008 in
Temet Cognosce Two hours and twenty-two minutes to go, give or take an extra second!
Now, for resolutions. I resolve to:
1. Lose weight. (Don’t we all?)
2. Blog every day. (Yeah, right. We’ll see how long THAT one lasts. I’m gessing until January 3rd. Taking bets now.)
3. Comment more and link more to other people. This goes hand-in-hand with Number Two.
4. Not engage in discussions with stupid, ignorant, and/or bigoted people. I will instead mock them here or on a different blog with other sane and sage people.
5. Encourage the rise of e-books.
6. Publish something significant that is fiction. (I’ve published lots of non-fiction pieces under a different name, but not much fictional.)
Happy New Year, everyone! May you make progress and exact change from those in power when the need is great.
Tags: 2008, 2009, 2009 Resolutions, Happy New Year, New Year's Resolutions
There ARE sub-genres, however, and they are not ‘low standards’ by which to judge fiction simply because they may not encompass literary fiction.
Yes, Virginia — excuse me, Lorraine Adams — historical romance IS a successful section of the bookstore, just like any other sub-genre. It is not the equivalent of Paris Hilton when comparing acting careers. You are not allowed to act like it is the Playboy section of the magazine racks.
This is basically what Ms. Adams did when criticizing The Jewel of Medina in the New York Times’s Sunday Book Review:
Spellberg’s characterization of “The Jewel of Medina” as soft porn doesn’t hold up, since the language describing A’isha and Muhammad’s conjugal relations is always euphemistic and most often juvenile. The novel is, in fact, an example of that subspecies of genre fiction, “historical romance.” Yet even judged by that standard, Jones’s prose is lamentable.
‘By that standard?’ By that standard? By what standard, exactly? A bestselling, award-winning standard? A sub-genre that includes Karen Marie Moning, Lisa Jackson, Julia Quinn, Julie Garwood, Brenda Joyce, Christina Dodd, Jude Deveraux and Robin Carr? Oh, wait, that’s right! They’re not ‘real authors’ because they write romance. *FISTBANG OF RAGE*
Ms. Adams? The ways you are an uninformed twit — LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.
Actually, I don’t have time. SBTB pretty much wrote what I would’ve said.
Note: Thanks to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for the scoop on Lorraine Adam’s lack of education in the genre side of publishing.
Tags: Historical Romance, Idiocy, Lorraine Adams, NYTBR, Reviews, Romance Sub-Genres, Someone Is Wrong on the Internet, Sub-Genres, Subgenres, The Jewel of Medina
Posted by Persephone Green on Dec 19, 2008 in
Publishing & the Economy,
Publishing Industry Literary Agent Colleen Lindsay noted that editor Mark Tavani, senior editor at Ballantine Books, had sage words of advice about the current economic crisis and how the publishing industry’s problems started long before the September 13th* economic collapse. In Books, Going Forward, he said this:
Anyway, maybe we contract. Maybe fewer books get published. Maybe some publishing folks have to look elsewhere for a paycheck. I don’t say those things lightly, because I love those books, and I’m one of those publishing folks, and I have a lot of friends in the industry. But on the bright side, maybe fewer books will mean better books. Maybe, over time, books will regain an elite status that I sense they once had. Maybe, in the end, books won’t qualify precisely as mass entertainment, but entertainment for a sizable if select audience.
Travani has a lot of salient points, and I agree with him in part here: consumers are having to drag the publishing industry kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, and it shouldn’t be that way. If fewer imprints means that editors will stop giving multi-million dollar advances to anyone, let alone illiterate celebrities, if publishers will look at newer technology like Print-On-Demand with interest instead of scorn, if corporate lawyers will give up on the idea of DRM because it alienates consumers and actually increases piracy, then yes, I will be the first out there to champion reorganization. The Millenial Generation is coming of age, and we do not look at traditional institutions he way our parents did.
For instance, I don’t look at the internet model of instant gratification and see it as a temporal phase that will wax and wane as blogs overpopulate the digital enivironment. The first (and last) problem with that way of thinking is that environments, unlike the Internet, have limits.
There is one sector of book reading that has not declined over the past few years, and that is ebooks. Granted, many of these books are in two genres, erotica and romance, but the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres are making headway with publishers like Baen and one-stop shps like Fictionwise. Meanwhile, Amazon wants to dominate and overtake the publishing industry as the seller of all proprietary creativity, just as Google wants to be the organizer of all proprietary creativity. Someone needs to move in front of the train before there is no more room left on the tracks for anyone else to ride.
I also look at traditional models of mass media as just what they are: models of what has worked in the past, what holds up in the present, and what may or may not survive into the future. Lest someone interpret this point of view as a writ of doom on the current vetting system, however, literary agents are the part of the publishing industry most likely to survive and thrive. Our society is built to delude unskilled, mediocre creators into thinking that they are unique, special snowflakes and to reward incompetence as long as the person embodying it sells it efficiently and with enough self-confidence. As long as there are abject failures lacking in artistic merit who believe they deserve to be published, there will always be a need for the gatekeepers. This does not preclude other authors who simply choose to work outside the model from being good authors – although the vast majority of them will be terrible authors — because there are some who want complete editorial control, some who aren’t in it for the money at all, and some who have built-in platforms that do not require the services that a literary agent can provide in order to succeed financially. None of these trends above are new, only the modus operandi has changed.
There’s nothing wrong with publishing fewer books — if the books we’re cutting are coffee table books, celebrity biographies, compendiums of useless facts and self-help ripoffs like The Secret. If we’re talking about publishing fwere vampire stories, then maybe we should talk about publishing fewer BAD vampire stories. There are different taste levels, and then there’s just straight-up bad writing. Bad writing should not find an agency, much less a publisher. Trends should not preclude sales of sub-genres.
I know that the average non-writer does not see a difference in quality betwen Tom Clancy and Stephen King, only genre and taste. Writers should see a difference. One of those two men can write damn good prose; the other just makes a lot of money. But I still think that both of them have a place on our bookshelves.
Why? Because as a whole, the literacy rate should be increasing, not decreasing. If airport novels are what it takes to keep the average consumer literate, then so be it. It’s bad enough that national news anchors have forgotten what adverbs are. There is no need to send the populace into a grammatical tailspin by serving up only The Kite Runner or the lastest book by Thomas Pynchon.
For the record, I feel no personal animosity towards authors or readers of literary fiction. I read it, I’ve written it (or at least tried to, in my not-so-humble opinion, under a different name), and I’ve enjoyed it. The deciding factor for me is usually the plot, and genre fiction tends to have plots that are more appealing to me on the whole. As someone who dreams of supporting herself one day by her words alone, I can look at the bestellers lists right now and tell you that the road I want to travel will be a hell of a lot easier if I write genre fiction. History has given us many, many decades of literary elitism and maybe three decades of commercial elitism. Why would the pendulum swinging too far in either direction appeal to any of us? Can’t we strive for artistic merit without falling prey to the pseudo-intellectual hype about Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduates and New Yorker pieces? Can’t we read beautiful prose that appeals to a broad audience?
* (JYFI, I say September 13th and not the first actual date of the stock market plunge because that was the day that at noon EST, everyone was pretty sure Bank of America or Barclays would buy Lehman Brothers. By 6 p.m. EST, Those potential deals had fallen through, it was pretty clear Lehman Brothers would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the credit options for buying cars had frozen. I know this because my family bought a new car at appoximately 3 p.m. EST, and we received a great finance rate on our loan. We were probably one of the last families in the country to purchase a vehicle before dealers received panicked calls and the banks stop issuing loans. Then, on Monday, the stock market crashed.)
Tags: Publishing & the Economy, Publishing Industry
Posted by Persephone Green on Nov 25, 2008 in
Publishing & the Economy,
Publishing Industry More Terrible Economic News from Dear Author. Oh, dear. -.- Harcourt has even halted acquisitions of manuscripts entirely.
I…don’t think that has ever happened before. Ever.
Just wait until Paulson and Bernanke announce that (Neener, neener! We love banks and screw you little guys!) they’re not going to give money to automakers and will let GM go bankrupt, and the hundreds of industries dependent on cars all fall like dominoes. I’m fairly certain that Pennsylvania and Ohio will actually lose about a third of their tax revenue. Hell, the only place employing people around here are HMOs, chain stores, discount stores, gas stations, car dealers, and car manufacturing industries. Everything else, and I mean everything, is in the crapper, and they’re ready to pull the flush handle. How will people buy books when they have no jobs, no internet, no car?
Tags: economic meltdown, financial crisis, Publishing Industry
Posted by Persephone Green on Oct 14, 2008 in
Temet Cognosce Hmm, where to start? Well, I’m a freelance writer at the moment, trying to scrape by until I can repay my parents in full for their generosity in helping me with my medical bills. I’m trying to go back to school, but I hope to work as a writer full-time as soon as is feasibly possible, even if it means going without cable. Probably.
What else? Hmm. I want an ereader, but as I read ebooks on my computer anyway, it’s only a necessity for those darn DRMed books. I generally don’t like cheese unless it’s on pizza, and I hate parmesan, along with any other really stinky, foul-smelling flavorings, including but not limited to liquid garlic (I don’t eat garlic bread), that fake orange cheese dust on Cheetos, Cheese Puffs and Doritos that slimes your fingers, nacho dip, about 50 percet of vegetable dips, most ranch dressings, sour cream, cream in general, and General Cinemas popcorn butter. (I’m allergic to it, Just that brand. I know, I’m weird.) The rest of my weird tastes in food are too extensive to list, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my intense dislike for crunchy and/or slimy chunks of anything in otherwise homogenous mixtures. That means no crunchy peanut butter, raisins in my cookies, cereal or bagels, nuts in pastries or brownies, or fruit pieces that aren’t completely blended in my yogurt. Granola in yogurt and chocolate chips in nearly anything starchy or creamy ary two big exceptions, as they are yummy. Yumminess is good. Maximize the yumminess!
Where was I? Oh, right. The blog. So, there’s this blog sitting here. I’m not sure what to do with it, because there are so many things I COULD do with it. Oh, the possibilities! Mwahahahahaaaa.
Anyway, nice to see you! Stop by frequently, see what’s up (what’s bothering me or, alternately, why I am Blissfully Transcendentally Happy) and leave a comment to say hi, or tell me what a mean jerk I am, or worship at my digital feet. All feedback is welcome.*
* Note that I specifically didn’t say all feedback is equal. Flames will be engaged with flamethrowers. If I’m bored, possibly the local fire brigade.
That’s all, folks! Have a nice day! Until next time. 
[...Although I'll be damned if I know why that smiley face is so freaking happy. God knows I didn't provide much incentive for people to come back. But hey, I like optimists. He can be on MY dodgeball team now.]
Tags: food allergies, foods I hate, philosophy
