Category: Uncategorized

Tears of the major publishers

Amazon is cracking down on the ability of major publishers to rip off authors:

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing.

Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict: “We are determined to protect the value of
our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and
marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president.
“We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are
sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

What is hilarious is the authors and publishers crying about how Amazon is “raising the prices” of their books. It’s an absolutely ridiculous charge. What Amazon is actually doing is refusing to continue its extreme discounting on the artificially high retail price of books.

Castalia House has no issue with Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t discount its prices on our ebooks much because they are already in the price range that Amazon expects: 2.99 to 4.99. But publishers that price their ebooks at $15.99 are in trouble, because no one wants to pay actual retail price for them on Amazon. Compare the price of two John C. Wright books. We sell AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND for a digital list price of $4.99. Tor sells JUDGE OF AGES for a digital list price of $26.99. Tor is counting on Amazon being willing to offer the customer a 45 percent discount, thus allowing Tor to collect $12.15 (assuming the standard 55 percent distribution discount) on an ebook compared to the $3.50 that Castalia receives. But Amazon only makes one dollar more from the 5x more expensive Tor book than it does from the Castalia book, which means a 17 percent operating margin instead of a 30 percent margin.

And Amazon sells more copies of the lower-priced books. At $4.99 AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is #18,816 on Kindle. At $27.99 reduced to $12.99, JUDGE OF AGES is #41,075. Ebook prices are elastic, so if Amazon can sell 2 low-price ebooks for every 1 high price ebook, it not only makes a) about twice the margin, but also b) about fifty cents more.

No wonder Amazon is unwilling to continue the conventional arrangement. Amazon can only successfully sell its books up to a certain price, depending upon the format and length. Due to the distribution discount system, a higher retail price means a higher distribution price, so Amazon makes half the margin on the more expensive, more steeply discounted books from the major publishers. Amazon is not only perfectly within its rights, but logically needs to stop discounting the book from what is, after all, the publisher’s suggested retail price; Hatchette’s complaint is rooted in the fact that Amazon is now selling its books for the price that Hatchette itself suggests!

By the way, this showdown between Amazon and the major publishers is a development that I predicted would be taking place soon during my campaign for SFWA President. The possibility was pooh-poohed by the business geniuses there, including the eventual winner. Nevertheless, the outcome will likely have a huge effect on authors with major publishers because the reason the publishers are fighting this uphill battle is their inability to support their current overhead structure without the additional revenue they receive from their inflated retail prices on ebooks. If either Amazon or the author were to receive a more equitable share, no major publisher could survive in its current form.

What the publishers should do – what they should have done a long time ago – is to set up a joint online store and then stop distributing books through Amazon. But they didn’t have either the nerve or the foresight, so now they’re faced with trying to develop some sort of alternative as Amazon begins to dip its toes into its own publishing line. Their best bet, in my opinion, would be to buy the Nook Store from Barnes&Noble, embrace a truly open standard, and go into competition.

However, they won’t embrace the open standard, and in doing so, they are giving up one of their two advantages over Amazon.

No water for oil

An article from Oilprice is interesting in light of what looks like a serious revision to the prospects for shale gas production in California:

The California Shale Bubble Just Burst

The great hype surrounding the advent of a shale gas bonanza in California may turn out to be just that: hype. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) – the statistical arm of the Department of Energy – has downgraded its estimate of the total amount of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale by a whopping 96 percent. Its previous estimate pegged the recoverable resource in California’s shale formation at 13.7 billion barrels but it now only thinks that there are 600 million barrels available.

The estimate is expected to be made public in June.

The sharply downgraded numbers come amid a heated debate in California over whether or not the state should permit oil and gas companies to use hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) – the process in which a combination of water, chemicals and sand are injected underground at high pressure in order to break apart shale rock and access trapped natural gas.

Fracking involves enormous quantities of water; an average of 127,127 gallons of water were required to frack a single California well in 2013, according to the Western States Petroleum Association. That’s equivalent to 87 percent of the water a family of four uses in an entire year.

California is home to an enormous agricultural industry, and with the Monterey Shale located beneath the fertile Central Valley, fracking is going to compete with agriculture, ranching and other commercial and residential users for water use. With 100 percent of California now in a state of “severe” drought, critics of fracking have gained traction in the debate over the extent to which the government should allow oil and gas companies to move in.

Fracking makes sense in some scenarios and makes no sense in others. In light of California’s chronic water shortages, I can’t see that fracking is a good idea there even if the revision is wrong (or fraudulently concocted for political reasons) and the original estimates of recoverable oil turn out to be correct. More energy doesn’t do much good if you can’t grow crops or transport your sewage.

So education isn’t the answer?

Interesting that the economic performance of the USA appears to have slowed down dramatically in the last 40 years despite the much more educated state of the workforce:

Eight percent of the population now holds Master’s degrees, the same percentage that held bachelor’s degrees (or higher) in the 1960s, reports Vox. Master’s degrees in education were by far the most popular, holding at around a third to a quarter of all such degrees from 1971 to 2012, though MBAs had taken the top spot by 2010. In fact, the increase in the number of MBA degrees is astonishing: Only 11.2 percent of master’s degrees were in business in 1971, but in 2012, they were a whopping 25.4 percent.

The rise of the master’s degree is likely a product of credential inflation. As more and more people acquire bachelor’s degrees, those who wish to make themselves stand out go on to get the MA. And as Vox points out, while a Master’s degree does have a positive impact on earnings, the overall debt of people with undergraduate and Master’s degrees has grown markedly in the past decade. In fact, as we recently noted, graduate student debt is in large part driving the student loan crisis.

I was always dubious about the idea that formal education did most people any good. I mean, how many of your fellow students in high school and college would you say appeared to learn anything at all from the experience?

Pink projection and passive-aggression

More nonsensical posturing out of the pinkshirted brigade, as an aspiring SF writer tries his hand at amateur psychiatry. Delusion ensues.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
 Reading VDs blog now is like watching a schizophrenic muttering persecution delusions in a cell smeared with their own faeces.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Holy crap. Vox Day seems to be entering the catastrophic break phase of his psychotic meltdown after the Nebula awards. Sad to observe.

Joyce Chng (JDamask) ‏@jolantru
@damiengwalter Ewww.

SFReviews.net/SFF180 ‏@SFReviewsnet
@damiengwalter Let me guess. He’s lost what’s left of his mind because all the fiction winners were women?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@SFReviewsnet Yep. And keeps whinging about how “amusing” it is and how he isn’t at all obsessed with the issue.

SFReviews.net/SFF180 ‏@SFReviewsnet
@damiengwalter Very odd defense mechanism. “Your ongoing success and professional esteem *amuses* me. My lack of same = superiority.” Okaay.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@SFReviewsnet VD is a borderline personality. They hook on to people / communities for attention because of deep rooted fear issues.

Now, keep in mind that these claims of obsession are coming from people who write about me on a regular basis, and who openly fantasize about wanting to harm me. Just to give one example:

Den Patrick @Den_Patrick
Weird night of discussions, mainly how I want to hurt politicians and Vox Day. Booze may have been involved. Offering no apologies. 

I didn’t create these people. I didn’t invent them. I have done nothing more than respond to their repeated attacks by describing them accurately and that was sufficient to set them off. It is readily observable that most of them are uninteresting writers with nothing to say that anyone outside their weird little cocoon wants to read, and one need not see their pictures to confirm that they are lonely social failures rejected by the sane and the attractive. They hate me beyond all others, I think, because they know I see them for what they are. Note that the claims of “borderline personality”, “deep rooted fear issues”, and “psychotic meltdown” are being made by an individual who described himself in the following manner:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a
lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many
losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a
desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere….  I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery
I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse
where I had, at long last, collapsed.

Just as the darkness cannot comprehend the light, the mentally diseased and dysfunctional cannot understand the healthy and fully functional. They interpret every action, every statement, through their own cracked and crippled perspective.  John C. Wright described them well in his final essay in TRANSHUMAN OR SUBHUMAN, “Restless Heart of Darkness”:

Despair is the key. It explains nearly everything that is so puzzling about the madness of modern life, the pack of self-contradictory dogmas that make up the default assumptions of the Dark Ages in which we live.

They have nothing else. No wonder they are bitter. No wonder they are irrational. No wonder they lie like dogs. No wonder they boast. No wonder they are full of envy and malice. No wonder they kill babies in the womb and fete socialist dictators and mass murderers. No wonder they love death. No wonder they admire, protect and love Islamic terrorists. No wonder they admire, protect, and love sexual perversion.

It is because they have nothing else. They live in a world of darkness, without hope, with nothing but their seven great friends to sustain them: pride, which they call self-esteem; envy, which they call social justice; wrath, which they call activism and protest; sloth, which they call enlightenment; gluttony, which they call health food and legalization of recreational drugs; greed, which they call fairness in taxation; lust, which they call sexual liberation.

The modern age is suffering from spiritual and philosophical starvation in the midst of what should be the greatest feast of mind and spirit imaginable. Someone has told them offal was food and food was poison, and so they gnaw on foul things which cannot satisfy them, which make their hungers grow. They are dying of thirst, and someone offers them seawater to drink.

Let us now and forever eschew anger and indignation at these creatures. They are blind kittens who cling and claw and scratch at the hand that come to feed and comfort. No man should be angered at a blind scratch.

Neither should we do them the honor of assuming theirs is a philosophy, political or otherwise, or a coherent worldview, or anything that can be discussed or debated. It is a dream, a delirium, a vision, a nightmare.

There is no point in correcting their ludicrous lies or attempting to show them the obvious illogic in their statements. They are lost to madness and until they abandon their prideful despair of their own accord, there is literally nothing that anyone, least of all me, can do for them. They cannot imagine my amusement at their abysmal creations and their impotent rage because they cannot imagine either sanity or a sense of humor that is not based on a fleeting sense of superiority.

So much for inevitability

Some of the EU’s greatest champions are openly discussing paring it down in order to try saving it. Former French President Sarkozy calls for the suspension of Schengen:

With the far-Right Front National polled to pip Mr Sarkozy’s crisis-wracked UMP to the post in Sunday’s EU elections in France, the ex-president said: “Schengen I must be immediately suspended and be replaced by a Schengen II of which member countries can only be a part if they previously agree to the same immigration policy.”

Europe migration policy has failed and the need to replace Schengen I has become obvious, he added, as the current system allows immigrants who enter it to “choose the (European) country with the most generous welfare system. Europe is not meant to organise social and migratory dumping, almost systematically at the expense of France,” he warned.

Without mentioning by name his Socialist French presidential successor, François Hollande, Mr Sarkozy nevertheless decried an “absence of leadership (that) is placing Europe in danger, as it is without vision, direction or priorities”.

He also called for half of the competences of Brussels to be returned to national governments. The European Commission, meanwhile, should be stripped of all legislative powers – the sole preserve of the EU parliament.

However, he warned against the rise of populist anti-EU sentiment, saying the bloc protects its citizens from the “ideological veering off course of governments and majority parties.

“If the European Union broke up centuries-old hatred and conflicts of interest would resurface more violently.”

“We must correct its excesses but as a project it must be preserved.”

At this point, even its leaders understand that the EU is a complete failure. If it is conserved at all, it will be as some sort of Franco-German free market. But the Euro is a disaster and the grand scheme of the United States of Europe is already dead.

And with UKIP doing much better than expected with the local councils – it’s already confirmed to have taken 89 council seats, 9 better than the 80 projected, and could end up with as many as 230 – it shouldn’t be too many years before Great Britain is out of the monstrosity, with or without Scotland.

The Pink Nebulas

Kate Paulk contemplates the 2014 Nebula Awards:

The big news of the last week or so is that this years Nebula Award winners (with the exception of the Grandmaster Award) are all women. Naturally this should be taken as sincere recognition of an excellent field, the most impressive of whom just happened to be female, right?

Right…

Let’s hear from some of those who discussed the winners:

  “Yes!. All the fiction winners are women. The white male patriarchy takes one right in the balls. “

Keep this in mind if you’re considering voting for a woman in the future. A vote for her isn’t a vote for her, it’s a vote against white male patriarchy. And apparently, every time a man wins, the pinkshirts take one right in the glittery hoo-hah.

“2014 Nebulas & all the fiction winners are women – The idea that
women don’t belong in scifi has another nail in its coffin”

Actually, if you read the winners, you’ll find conclusive evidence that women not only don’t belong in science fiction, but these particular women belong in mental institutions.

“Another dinosaur complaining about the Nebulas. Wish they’d just leave sff and be hush for good.”

Well, based on the sales numbers, the readers are certainly leaving SF/F. At least, they are leaving what is being fraudulently passed off as SF/F by these charlatans. The pinkshirts are chasing off the larger part of SF/F’s historical readership, then wondering why advances are plummeting and the midlist is dying. It’s such a mystery!

“as great as it is that so many women won #nebulas, now i’m wondering what form the inevitable backlash will take.”

It will be fun, won’t it! I suspect that within 15 years, assuming they are still being given out, a Nebula won’t be as well regarded as an empty toilet paper roll. Consider how far its prestige has fallen since the joke that was the Quantum Rose award. These days, a middle volume from a mediocre romance series in space would look downright Clarkean by comparison.

“Pretty healthy podium line-up in the Nebulas this year; I imagine the Hugo ballot-stuffers are suitably furious.”

One can only assume that “healthy” here is a euphemism for “well-fed”. It would be interesting to know how the fiction winners stacked up against the average NCAA defensive line. I’m not sure they could mount much of a pass rush, but with a run-stopper like Swirsky in the middle, you’re not going to run on them. And as for ballot-stuffers, I wouldn’t know. I never stuffed any ballots.

Europe and the black-white game

An African-American discovers to her surprise that, unlike Americans, Europeans aren’t afraid of blacks:

I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let’s jump the line. These white people, they’re going to be scared of us. We’ll just go and jump the line. We’ll get to the front of the line. So, of course, you know, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I’m black. That usually works in New York.

These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn’t believe it. And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there. You can’t just walk to the front of the line. They were, like, ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I’m like, these are white people, and they’re not scared of us?

That’s when I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. I mean, of course, it was kind of humiliating, because you know, we’re supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these French bitches in high heels were threatening us. And they were in our faces. And it made me realize that the whole black-white game just doesn’t work outside of the United States.

Because white people aren’t afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don’t hate you, because that sort of goes together. So I’ll take it. I’ll wait on line. Now I don’t dare jump lines. So that opened my eyes.

It’s true, Europeans, especially Continentals, are much less inclined to kowtow to Africans than Americans are. This may be helpful in understanding an aspect of the divergence of my position from that of the white progressive non-athletes. It’s not that I hate blacks, it’s more that I’m not afraid of them and therefore don’t treat them like ticking time bombs. It’s not just that I’m a continental European myself these days either, because I’ve been burning black guy’s asses, talking smack with them, and forcing them back down since I was an 11th grade 100-meter sprinter competing in the city district against sprinters from Minneapolis North, Minneapolis South, Washburn, Edison, and Southwest.

If you know anything about men’s athletics, you’ll know that sprinters are the arrogant prima donnas of the sports world. Once you’ve faced down a big old branded Omega or a strutting member of the Disciples who is trying to intimidate everybody during warmups, calling out an overweight, overrated black woman with a big mouth is not exactly a challenge. The greater part of the black intimidation routine is nothing more than a front to mask deep insecurity. The whole performance, the eye-rolling, the neck-bobbing, the implied threats of violence, and the posturing, tends to fall completely apart when met with a sneer and a sarcastic word.

At one meet my senior year, there was a particularly unpleasant fellow who was getting in my face in the area behind the blocks while we were waiting for the race because I was the only non-black sprinter in the finals. He was going on about “white boy” this and “faggot” that and so forth. I didn’t say anything, I just reached into my bag and handed him a banana. (We always kept a few around to fight leg cramps). He looked at me in total disbelief, at which point I said: “You’ve been pounding your chest so much, I figured you’d probably want one of these.”

The other six guys just about sprained something laughing.

Paper Americans

Charles Blow laments that the resident aliens aren’t exercising their political muscle yet:

“In 1990, the U.S. had 19.8 million immigrants. That number rose to a record 40.7 million immigrants in 2012, among them 11.7 million unauthorized. Over this period, the number of immigrants in the U.S. increased more than five times as much as the U.S.-born population (106.1 percent versus 19.3 percent), according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.”

It continues: “Today there are four states in which about one-in-five or more people are foreign born — California, New York, New Jersey and Florida. By contrast, in 1990, California was the only state to have more than a fifth of its population born outside the U.S.”

According to a September report from the Immigration Policy Center:

“In the 2014 elections, there will be approximately 9.3 million newly eligible voters. These include both people who were 16 or 17 years old at the time of the 2012 elections, as well as immigrants who become naturalized U.S. citizens between 2012 and 2014. Of these 9.3 million newly eligible voters, 1.8 million will be Asian or Latino. Another 1.4 million will be new U.S. citizens through naturalization. Together, these 3.2 million people will comprise 34 percent of the new electorate.”

And that is to say nothing of the surge in African-born immigrants. According to a 2011 article in the United Nations Dispatch:

“Over the last 30 years, the African born population has grown from just 200,000 people to 1.5 million. And while Africans still make up just 3.9 percent of the total foreign-born population, that share is growing fast. In 2010, for example, nearly 10 percent of new green card recipients were born in Africa.”

These immigrants aren’t Americans. And, thanks to the size of the influx and the century-long erosion of the American population, neither they nor their descendants ever will be. The previous waves of European immigration didn’t fully grasp the English Common Law or the vital concept of limited government even when both were still more or less in effect. These new groups of economic vultures are only arriving in time to fight for the less choice pickings from the corpse.

I find it telling that the same people who still consider me to be an American in some capacity simultaneously insist that these paper Americans are no longer Mexicans or Nigerians or Chinese, but through the magic of geographic relocation, have been transformed into something indistinguishable from your average White Anglo-Saxon Protestant circa 1950.

A nation of immigrants is not a nation at all.

“Trust me” said the liar

No wonder nothing the Tories and Labour have said ends up harming UKIP’s electoral appeal. All of the accusations are coming out of the mouths of confirmed liars:

David Cameron has appealed to “frustrated” voters not to back Ukip on Thursday, promising to salvage Britain’s relationship with the European Union just as he said he has overhauled the UK economy.

As Britain votes in European elections, the Prime Minister made a last-ditch attempt to stop voters deserting his Conservatives for Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party.

The Conservatives face finishing third in the European elections when results are declared late on Sunday. Mr Farage said on Wednesday that his party would win the poll to elect MEPs.

The narrative, coming from the same people who said UKIP would never amount to anything, will be that this is merely a “tantrum”, an electoral ephemera that will disappear by the time the real elections roll around. I suspect the truth is precisely the opposite; I have long felt that UKIP is the coming force in UK politics and even told a friend who was recruited as a UKIP candidate last year as much.

Sadly, he didn’t heed my advice and accept the recruitment offer, otherwise he would be one of UKIP’s Members of the European Parliament later today. I very much wish he had.

Here is to hoping that UKIP finishes a strong first in the European elections today and is able to translate that electoral momentum into the next Parliamentary elections. Because the single biggest priority in Europe is the extrication of the English people from the third coming of the Franco-German Empire.

If you live in the UK, vote UKIP today. I know the European elections are nonsense, but that’s not the point. UKIP is the way out. Take it while you can.

SF/F Thought Police strike again

Or, why Uncle Timmy was disinvited from Archon:

I’m going to tell you a little story about a good man who has been slandered and libeled by one individual who is hiding behind the anonymity of the Internets. That good man? Tim “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo.

You see, a pathetic troll whose name I’m not going to bother typing (because it’s a nickname that the individual hides behind because they’re afraid of owning up to their actions) has, after taking random snippets of conversations and tacky jokes that Uncle Timmy publishes on something called “The Revenge”, managed to get Uncle Timmy uninvited from Archon this year. Archon, apparently, is “listening to the fans” (the one who has slandered and committed libel, but we won’t get into that at the moment) and decided that it was in their best interest to not have Uncle Timmy as their Fan Guest of Honor this year.

Let’s ignore, for the moment, the forty years that Uncle Timmy has dedicated to fandom in the South and Midwest. Let’s forget that he started and ran Libertycon for 25 years, which is one of the more popular “small cons” around. Let’s ignore the fact that the man is extremely smart and is an engineer who has a sterling reputation (except when he’s playing spades. He’s a jerk when he plays spades). Heck, let’s even ignore the fact that Uncle Timmy is an old, fat white dude who started a scholarship for a fan and friend (a black man) after he died tragically while trying to help someone.

Oh, wait. No. Not only no, but hell no. All these facts are pertinent to the lie being spread that Uncle Timmy is one big old Southern racist redneck who hates science.

I told you none of this was about me, none of it ever had much to do with me. But now you know why I have never backed down to the petty pinkshirted grotesqueries. SFWA, Archon, Rutgers, Smith, Brandeis, Haverford, it’s all the same. It’s all about control of the narrative, control of the organization, and control of the lines of communication.

That’s why toleration is not an option. That’s why preening oneself on refusing to take a stand is moral cowardice. Those are merely slow forms of surrender and submission. Sad Puppies was the first time the pinkshirts have been punched in the mouth in decades and they reacted like a vampire to Holy Water. But it was a mere splash, when what is needed is an inexhaustible firehose.

On a related subject, Sarah Hoyt addresses the triumphant vaginalism of the SFWA, which celebrates the fact that its membership did not vote an award to a single white male this year.

UPDATE: Apparently I am wrong and the Nebulas were all about me.

It’s so heartening and amazing that so many women authors won! I know
there has been a lot of drama about sexism and racism in science fiction
circles lately and I feel like all of these women winning such a high
prize is just awesome. The Vox Days of the world are going to be nearly
apoplectic with anger but they can go fuck themselves. Women in sci-fi
for the win!
– trynewideas, ULauren Davis Monday 12:11pm

Apoplectic? Quite the contrary, I am VASTLY amused. I hope they are successful in setting up the multicultural Matriarchy of their absurd fantasies. I love the fact they actually gave an award to Swirsky’s ridiculous dino-porn revenge fantasy and I wish they’d gone one step deeper into self-marginalization and only given awards to gay black women writers. They are actively killing off the market for pink science fiction and they don’t even realize they are doing it. These women are in sci-fi the same way a cancer cell is in the human body. The only victory they will find is self-extinction. They can hand themselves hundreds of awards, thousands, but they will never receive the respect they so desperately crave.

Because the map is not the territory.