Tag: books

In which the OC brings to our attention another milestone in the long descent of the publishing industry into the dustbin of history.

n June 20, 2002, the United States Supreme Court decreed, in the case of Atkins v. Virginia, that the mildly mentally retarded were categorically exempt from capital punishment, reasoning that fully functional adults of diminished mental capacity were as a matter of law not as culpable for their acts. Writing eloquently in dissent, Justice Scalia drew a sharp distinction between the severely mentally retarded (who are truly not responsible for their actions), and the merely stupid (the category into which Mr. Atkins undoubtedly fell). Scalia argued forcefully that, with respect to the merely stupid, at least sometimes they deserve to be punished for their antisocial and destructive behavior.

This article, of course, is not about capital punishment. It is a book review of Dirty, Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain. However, the above discussion is relevant because I initially had reservations about writing this book review at all. After all, it is clear to everyone who has read Meghan McCain’s twitter feed, her “articles” on The Daily Beast, or her ill-fated campaign blog that Meghan is not a paragon of clear reasoning, exemplar of familiarity with facts, nor a model of English language expertise. And after subjecting myself to 194 continuous pages of her “writing,” it became clear that none of the above-described works truly plumbed the depths of mental vacuity in which Ms. McCain aimlessly and cluelessly drifts.

Even as an AWCA, I find myself lost in admiration at such a vituperative work of art. Especially since it is so well-merited.

The Original Cyberpunk contemplates anthologizing himself:

Which brings us to the last question: what makes for a good single-author anthology, anyway? What do you like to see? Just the hit singles? Something you haven’t seen before? As many stories as can possibly be fit into a book? Stories focusing on just one particular style or theme, or a good cross-section from the writer’s entire career? And what about the writer’s voice: do you like it when the writer includes a little something about the story? Do you prefer a big something; e.g., longer comments about what the writer thought he was trying to do when he wrote it and what it took to make the story publishable? Or are you happiest when the writer just shuts up and stays the heck out of the way of the stories?

First, I think the idea of an anthology of Mr. Bethke’s work is a great one. And in my opinion, the name is obvious: The Original Cyberpunk. Considering the word is his singular contribution to the English language, it would be a travesty of both marketing and justice were the central collection of his best short fiction not pay homage to it in some way.

As for the actual question posed, I prefer to see a Best Of collection. Unless one is a Major Writer or prolific short story writer who publishes multiple anthologies, the book is likely to become the definitive view of the author’s work for many readers. And I very much enjoy an introductory page preceding each story providing the reader with additional information, either about the idea for the story, the process of writing the story, or deeper aspects of the story that may not be apparent to the average reader.

Small bloggers rejoice! If the New York Times can be believed, one’s literary ambitions are best served by keeping one’s daily readership under 1k per day.

Forget ebooks and technology. The main reason you have to be stupid – not just misguided, ill-informed, or stubborn, but downright stupid – in order to pursue writing as a primary career is a structural market reality explained by a man whose career as a writer is nearing an end:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called “order to net.”

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

And there’s a further wrinkle to it because what significant independent bookstores that still survive and the non-speciality outlets like WalMart subscribe to BookScan and have access to the Death Spiral numbers too and act accordingly. If there’s a book to order at all, because in many cases if the chains’ order to net equation zeros out and they don’t order at all, the book in question doesn’t get published. Back in the day, I knew of novels that were commissioned, accepted, and paid for but never published because the chains didn’t order. Today BookScan prevents such expensive mistakes from happening by aborting them at the acquisition stage.

Voila, the Death Spiral. And I too am in it.

One should never start writing with the idea that it will be one’s primary career. Ironically, I think the quality of books being published is going to improve with the end of the professional writing career. I am deeply and increasingly unimpressed with what the publisher-as-gatekeeper model produces these days. As the success of JK Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Dan Brown, and Katie Price have demonstrated, the best way to sell a lot of books is to produce cliched literary trash that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, and furthermore, it is entirely possible to do it as a sideline. So there’s no rational reason to attempt to pursue writing as a primary career unless one finds the idea of literary penury to be romantic. But if you are foolish enough to decide to play the Writer’s Lottery anyway, keep in mind that you’re going to be increasingly competing with people like me who write for pleasure, don’t expect to make money off it, and price their books accordingly.

RGD, for example, usually bounces between a rank as Amazon’s 2,000 and 5,000 best-selling paid Kindle book when priced at one-fifth the normal Kindle rate, but between its 50,000 and 100,000 best-selling book at the normal hardcover price. It’s exactly the same text, so that tells us that the price elasticity of books will permit free and low-priced books to increasingly dominate the market as the market continues to move towards easily produced electronic books and the power of the gatekeepers is increasingly diminished.

Requiem for a Writer

Many years ago, when I was in junior high, I read a science fiction novel that had what I still consider to be one of the greatest endings in science fiction literature. It was compelling enough that I didn’t learn until years later that I had read the last book in the original trilogy and what ultimately turned out to be the third in a series of five. That book was Giant’s Star and it offered what then appeared to me to be a unique and highly original concept of human origins. The author was James P. Hogan and the books of the Giants series are very well worth reading today as they hold up surprisingly well considering the changes in technology that have taken place between now and 1977.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

The third novel in Charles Stross’s Laundry series, The Fuller Memorandum, is out.

“Like the majority of ordinary British citizens, I used to be a good old-fashioned atheist, secure in my conviction that folks who believed—in angels and demons, supernatural manifestations and demiurges, snake-fondling and babbling in tongues and the world being only a few thousand years old—were all superstitious idiots. It was a conviction encouraged by every crazy news item from the Middle East, every ludicrous White House prayer breakfast on the TV. But then I was recruited by the Laundry, and learned better.

I wish I could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism; it’s so much less unpleasant than the One True Religion….

I’m a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth.

Because the truth is that my God is coming back.

When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

Oh yeah, I’m definitely going to get into this one as soon as I finish Mattingly’s Armada. I’ll post a review when I finish it. In my opinion, Stross is BY FAR at his best when he delves deeply into the squamous, the rugose, and the darkly divine.

While I quite like the potential of the Amazon Kindle – the Kindle version of RGD is still doing very well as an economics bestseller – I really do not like Amazon’s attitude about its ownership of the Kindle network.

There have already been plenty of questions over who “owns” the ebooks you’ve bought, with stories of remotely deactivated books and remotely deactivated features — neither of which happens when you have a real physical book. But there are also other concerns opened up by newly activated features. Apparently one new feature — sent in by a few concerned readers — is that Amazon will now remotely upload and store the user notes and highlights you take on your Kindle, which it then compiles into “popular highlights.”

At the very least, Amazon needs to do this as an opt-in option. I don’t think any amount of ease of use is worth granting both the power and the legal permission to sift through your data to a third party.