Most of my life, I’ve seen a real disconnect between my intellectual peers, my friends, and the average stranger in the store who lives near me.

I had some friends in college who refused to see films unless they were indie, avant garde, or foreign. They tended to agree with my politics and voted like me. When I came home, my local friends refused to watch films that had even a whiff of critical acclaim. They might vote like me, but their politics usually weren’t as progressive as mine. My parents and sibling like genre fiction, but they’re up for watching or reading anything as long as the plot is to their tastes.

Then there’s the average people I run into at the local cinema or bookstore or supermarket (actually, the bookstore isn’t even a representative sampling, because a lot of people around here don’t read books if they can help it). I rarely share the same politics or taste as they do.

All of our tastes are valid (political opinions aside). We all have the right to watch, listen to, and read what we want. It annoys me that others are not as willing to step outside of their comfort zones. I despise anti-intellectualism, but I despise snobbery just as much. Most intellectuals I know are not snobs, I should point out, but some are, and vocally so.

This brings me to Nicholas Carr and his ilk. People like him are bemoaning the incoming slush pile that will inevitably follow the disintermediation of art production. I call B.S. There’s a lot to be said about an otherwise smart man who gets it wrong so often, but I’ll save that for a later date.

One commenter called Nic on a thread at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing lambasted advocates of independent publishing, said that “self publishing is NEVER going to take hold” (I have news for you, Nic: it already has. Have you seen the top hundred list at Amazon’s Kindle Store lately?) and called Joe’s and Zoe Winter’s writing amateurish at best. Never mind that he wasn’t expecting much because “it was a vampire novel” in Zoe’s case. *Eyeroll* He seems to be in complete denial about the fact that people are buying their books whether he liked them or not.

I couldn’t have expressed it better than Thomas Brookside did on J.A. Konrath’s blog:

One reason I think traditional publishing folks are in for a rude awakening is because of the disconnect between what publishers think is a quality product and what the genre public actually wants.

Most Golden Age science fiction couldn’t get published today. “These characters are flat and cliched!” “These situations are unbelievable!” “This is an empty spectacle without serious ideas!”

There is lots of self-published sci-fi in the Kindle store right now that I would never buy. The premises sound silly and derivative, the plots [when you can determine them from the description] sound hyperactive and unbelievable. And these books are selling. You know why they’re selling? Because there is a fanbase that wants that kind of material.

[...]

I think a lot of what you think is “terrible” quality work is actually just pulp. Pulp got driven out of the market for a few decades, but now ebooks will bring it back. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

The material that I would put in the ranks of the truly terrible is instantly identifiable in the descriptions, because the author can’t write a coherent paragraph. It takes virtually no effort to avoid that material.

So if the question is “How will the public avoid books written by crazy people who can’t write basic English?” the answer is “With ease.”

If the question is “How will the public avoid books that creative writing professors at major universities wouldn’t like?” the answer probably is “You know what? A lot of readers don’t want to avoid those books and will actively seek them out and buy them.” (emphasis mine)

I’m not interested in pleasing creative writing professors, not even the ones at my alma mater. You know why? I think they’re snobs. My first creative writing class there was a nightmare. My professor outright forbid genre fiction. She only wanted stories about the present, stuff that would fit into literary fiction or bookclub fiction at the bookstore. I’m sorry, but I don’t do existential mid-life crisis or cancer battles or sad stories about overcoming illnesses or the Meaning of Life.

All of those concepts may come up in my fiction, but they are not the faux center of my literary product. Character-driven stories are only excellent, in my opinion, if they have an equally riveting plot. I don’t want to read most of what passes as literary fiction these days, and I certainly don’t want to write it. Just because Don DeLillo wrote White Noise and Underworld does not mean I liked the sections where he turned paragraphs into laundry lists and tried to pass them off as high art. It was the plot of each book I liked and the plots that made them worthwhile reads; the well-rounded characters were just a bonus.

I am not interested in writing about the secret zen behind the trivialities of everyday, privileged, upper-middle class white Christians in small town America. Not unless they’re being killed off by vampires.

In other words, I do not do Jodi Picoult.

You know what? I think that’s A-o-fucking-kay.

I suck at time management, and for a writer, this is a productivity killer.

I have so much to do in terms of cleaning up the house. The eBay biz won’t run itself if nothing is listed on there, I need to do an actual garage sale, the big camping trip needs massive preparation, and my office is a wreck.

All of these things mean I haven’t been writing, and I’m worried about not staying in the habit of writing every day, not just blogging. Don’t even get me started about exercise.

My crap is everywhere, there’s not enough room to store it all upstairs, and not enough airtight storage or space to store it in the basement, where the spiders and centipedes live. I HATE centipedes.

When I worked in the basement on my old computer years ago, it was almost impossible to tell if I was seeing a centipede crawl across the floor or dreaming it. I had to rub my eyes, stand up and jump back, just in case. Half of the time it was real. We live in front of the woods. Our backyard basically drops into a valley with a stream and a forest on hills. It’s pretty, It also had mounds of dead leaves that we shovel and heave down the hillside every fall, and as any insect expert will tell you, centipedes just LOVE dead leaves and wood.

Did I mention we have stacks of wood near our house?

Yeeeeah.

Honestly, until the rest of the fam becomes as obsessive about organization like me and stores all items in the basement in airtight plastic storage, we will have spiders. This means we will have centipedes. If only cats ate centipedes…

I think if someone likes book trailers, that’s fine. If someone likes making them, that’s fine. I am just annoyed by this creeping attitude that authors somehow “need” a book trailer.

So perhaps I’m reacting against that. If people just saw it as a fun thing to do and a way to get in front of people who also read, but spend a lot of time in youtube, that would be cool.

But it seems like there is an increasing attitude that a book trailer is something you NEED to succeed as an author. And I resent the idea of having to put another thing on my to do list. Especially when it’s absolutely not practical for me. I’m very Type A. I couldn’t make a book trailer that wouldn’t lessen my work and make it look dumb. That’s counterproductive.

I tend to agree with her on all of these points, although I have seen awesome book trailers that made me want to buy the books. Most of them, however, are terrible.

It is NOT sufficient to make a slide show of low-resolution stock photos and set them to public domain music, ESPECIALLY if the accompanying text describes the plot in a trite, hackneyed way. I watched a book trailer just this week that did a brilliant job of displaying exactly why the author in question ended up using a vanity press, and that’s not counting the flaws of the actual video aspects of the preview.

If you’ve taken film classes, if you know you’re good at editing film and can make a live action or animated trailer yourself for little to no cost or  have a bunch of film and production friends, if you can “see” the trailer in your mind and know what to do to catch people’s attention, if you’ve won awards for your film-making skills, if you have better software to edit than Windows Movie Maker, and if you have the time to spend on a big project, then go for it.

That rules out AT LEAST 99 percent of you.

Probably you.

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

You are not a special snowflake. If you want your writing to be treated like a profession, then treat your work professionally.

The post with the download info is here. Allez! Vite, vite!

[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.

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.

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?

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!

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.