Tag: McRapey

The Baen Brigade fires back

Another Baen author responds to John Scalzi’s attack on Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf:

Recently, Toni Weisskopf the publisher at Baen Books wrote a guest post at Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog, a re-post of an essay she posted on Baen’s Bar, a forum that requires registration so Sarah’s repost is the public link. 

This post has had a lot of responses ranging from acclaim to hate. That means that in some sense, it’s important.  IMHO, the most interesting response was by John Scalzi in his blog. It’s that post I want to try to comment on.  I choose to do it here rather than in the comments there because there’s a zillion comments on it already, and I’m writing to my friends, not his readers.

Scalzi summarizes Toni’s post as follows:

 “Once upon a time all the fractious lands of science fiction fandom were joined together, and worshiped at the altar of Heinlein. But in these fallen times, lo do many refuse to worship Heinlein, preferring instead their false idols and evil ways.”

Let me make myself perfectly clear. Of all the styles of argument that you can engage in, this sort of straw man argument pisses me off.  It offends me. It makes me want to stand up and scream. The problem is, John’s failed both at the art of summary and at intellectual honesty.  He’s set up a target that he claims is Toni’s work, and then shoots at it, but if you’re going to try to tear apart a writer’s work, it’s important to actually tear apart what they wrote.  John didn’t do that.  He exclusively comments, at length on his summary, not on what Toni wrote, never citing her words or thoughts. This is unjust and unfair.

This is all very well and good, but I think Mr. Boatright is forgetting something VERY important. You see, Mr. Scalzi possesses a BACHELOR’S DEGREE in PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE from THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. You can’t front on that! In the meantime, another Baen author, Brad Torgersen, explains why he went with Baen instead of certain other publishers who have been in the news of late for not bothering to talk to their authors for periods exceeding one year and whose senior editors are chiefly known for sexually harassing women or describing themselves as racists on LiveJournal.

One of the things I found most unsettling about the novel publishing landscape were the numerous first-person accounts I was getting, from authors not too much further down the tracks from myself, about how it was a feast or famine business. You either hit home runs immediately, or you got dumped. It didn’t seem to matter who you published with, if you couldn’t show a substantial profit for the publisher, and do it very quickly, you were done. Likewise, if you were on the midlist and you weren’t showing bottom-line numbers indicating you were trending towards bestseller status, you were done. And not always explicitly either. Often people knew they were dumped simply because responsiveness from editors dropped to little or nothing, and contracts which had been previously promised, never showed up. There was no door being slammed, rather the dumping was done quietly. Sort of like having your utilities turned off at the street.

There was one publisher, however, who was getting consistently good marks: Baen. Authors — even new authors — were reporting that this publisher didn’t expect immediate grand slams. Instead, this publisher would work with new authors over time to grow and develop an audience. Not having landslide sales your first time out of the gate was not going to ruin you. Likewise, this publisher had a very respectable and healthy midlist, while also having very good brand label loyalty among readers. The latter being rare in an era when almost all readers are either loyal to a specific author, or loyal to a specific series and/or franchise. Thus it would be easier (for me as a new guy) to develop an audience, and I wouldn’t necessarily be doomed if I wasn’t cracking the top ten on the New York Times list with each subsequent book. There was the promise of breathing room!

I certainly hope that in the future Castalia’s authors will have similar cause to speak so well of us. I consider Baen to be a model for success in the new era of publishing. And, do you know, I’m beginning to suspect that the Baen Brigade is not fooled by Mr. Scalzi’s patented two-step where first he punches someone in the mouth, then steps back, smiles, and pretends to be best friends with them. He’s just joshing with his very good pal Miss Weisskopf, just like he and good buddy John Ringo were only kidding around with each other about his Participation Hugo.

Sorry, Johnny, but you picked your side and everyone knows it. Now everyone can see the very angry little lefty underneath the clown makeup.

UPDATE: Larry Correia piles on, which if you know anything about Larry, is saying something:

Basically, I love my publishing house. I know a lot of other writers, and I know somebody with just about
every publishing house out there. Hang out with a bunch of writers long
enough and you’ll get to hear them gripe about their publishers and
their editors. And if they’re not a star or a golden boy with their
publisher, then you’ll really get to hear them bitch and vent.  After
five years of this stuff I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories, yet I’m
unable to commiserate with them because luckily for me, my editors
don’t suck, and I haven’t ever felt like my publisher is trying to screw
me over.

Editing complaints are the best. I don’t know how many times I’ve
heard stories, especially from the mid listers at one of the big houses
about how they’ve turned in a book and waited 6 months, 9 months, or a
YEAR to get any editorial feedback. Hell, at that point I’ve already
written another novel and have forgotten the prior one. Then when the
feedback comes back it is “Hey, throw away this half of the book and
write something entirely different, oh, and I need that by Thursday.”
Sorry. Can’t commiserate with you, buddy….
Let me give you an example of what doing business with Baen is like. When I first started out I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as far as business, and like I said, no agent to guide me (got rejected by pretty much all of them, which is funny because I’m betting they’d love to be getting 15% of this action now!) so when I signed my first contract, I gave over things like dramatic rights (movies and TV), audiobooks, and foreign rights to Baen. At that point in my career, I was just happy that anybody was reading my stuff at all, and I couldn’t imagine that people would want to listen to it or read it in other languages.

So then I got approached by my first movie producer. Wow. Didn’t see that coming. Uh oh, my contract turned all that over to my publishing house… The contract doesn’t specify percentage details for that kind of thing. Now, at this point many publishers would have just screwed me over. Nope. One phone call to Toni, she sticks Baen’s Hollywood agent onto it, we talk, and boom, no problem. I’m then getting an extremely large percent of any of that sort of thing. For the last three years I’ve been collecting option money.

Mailvox: of division and hypocrisy

One of Baen’s many authors had this to say about John Scalzi’s attack on what he claimed was Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf’s divisiveness:

John Scalzi is annoying, yes.  But his straw-manning of Toni really, really set me off.  I’ve been trying to figure out why. Tonight I think I’ve figured it out. Scalzi attacked Toni (falsely) for being a “divider” in the field for one of the very rare times when Toni politely and eloquently editorialized.  Toni does this so seldom, it’s remarkable that anyone could have an issue with it.  Especially when Toni worked hard to be non-combative, non-confrontational in tone and word choice.

Scalzi’s editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden has been a rather routine and divisive voice on his Making Light blog for many years now.  Often combative, often confrontational.  Both he and his wife.  How much division have the Nielsen-Hayden duo sown?  How much has their invective and their involvement in various controversies helped to put up walls in fandom?  Has Scalzi ever once called either of them out for it?

Of course he hasn’t.  And he never will.  Because Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is Scalzi’s lifeline at TOR. I mean, I get it, it’s a smart business move, but it’s incredibly dickish on his part to ignore PNH/TNH then go after Toni like Toni is some kind of pest spreading discord.  That’s fucking hypocritical and untrue.

Of course, this also makes me think of Larry Correia’s rule for arguing with libs:

LIB: ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK!
CON: respond.
LIB: HOW RUDE!

The demonstrable fact is that the Nielsen-Haydens have been rudely and divisively attacking people in the genre since at least 2005. The first I’d ever heard of either of them was when they were attacking me on Making Light for a political op/ed column I’d written for WND and Universal Press Syndicate. I wrote a serious piece which observed in passing that women who were capable of writing hard science fiction did not do so because they were observably disinclined to put in the necessary time and effort required, which led to Patrick Nielsen-Hayden declaring me to be an anti-Semite and his semiaquatic life partner asserting that I could not get laid. Naturally.

John Scalzi not only didn’t take them to task for being divisive and confrontational, he did his best to pile on in his own lightweight, bachelors-degree-in-philosophy manner. Furthermore, it should be noted that John Scalzi and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden were the two individuals most responsible for creating the precedent that SFWA could purge members at any reason at any time. They put direct pressure on the current SFWA Board by threatening to not renew their memberships if I was not expelled.

From the SFWA report: Most prominently, an outgoing Board Member indicated that he intended to let his membership lapse until Beale was no longer a member: “My membership is due and I can’t in good conscience renew it until SFWA finds the means or moral backbone or whatever’s ultimately required to expel someone as hateful and wilfully destructive as Beale—not just from the organisation but from the culture present within it.”

From Twitter less than two hours after I announced the Board’s action:

John Scalzi @scalzi
I just renewed my @sfwa membership!
2:18 PM – 14 Aug 2013

P Nielsen Hayden ‏@pnh Aug 14
@scalzi So did I! What a coincidence! @sfwa

So, John Scalzi’s inept attack on Toni Weisskopf is not only hypocritical, but is indicative of the very divisiveness that he feigns to be criticizing. It is no more credible than his false claim to have 50,000 daily readers. The fact is that the SF/F Left has been divisive and confrontational ever since Damon Knight began publicly denigrating AE van Vogt for ideological reasons. The difference now is that the Left’s attacks have grown louder and more frequent while the SF/F Right no longer needs to placate and put up with their antics. They don’t want us and we most certainly don’t need them.

Scalzi and the safe space

Brad Torgersen has a theory about why the Chief Rabbit of Whatever will not leave the safety of his warren:

I no longer directly engage Scalzi — on anything. I used to engage him routinely. But an argument is only an argument if both parties take each other seriously enough to argue. In late 2012, I reached the point where I couldn’t take Scalzi seriously anymore. Mostly because I realized that Whatever is primarily his marketing tool, and that by partaking in his comments (and engaging him in argument there), I was merely playing along with the marketing. Marketing which was helping Scalzi financially as well as emotionally, and all I was getting for my trouble was an ever-increasing sense of frustration.

Now I observe Scalzi from afar. And if he occasionally makes me think he could use a good boot to the head, his denizens, (and the sort of person easily attracted to his blog, and therefore Scalzi’s very effective cult of personality he maintains via that blog), make me think this even more so.

You cannot argue with that sort of group inside the walls of its own house. The house and the landlord both reflect back to the group precisely what they each need to hear and see, in order to remain convinced that they — and they alone — have all the right ideas.

And so I remain disengaged. Because (to paraphrase the W.O.P.R.) the only winning move (with Scalzi and Whatever) is not to play.

It might be different if Scalzi ever stepped beyond his “safe space” in order to defend himself and his invective in an environment where he isn’t lord of the manor. But because Scalzi has created a “safe space” in which he never has to be made to feel demonstrably wrong for any length of time longer than it takes him to ban/deride a critic, he is not what I’d call an honest participant in the larger cultural, political, and philosophical debate. He needs his “safe space” too much.

Which is probably why most people (on Scalzi’s side of this) make such a noise about “safe spaces”, in all kinds of different arenas. They have concluded that any forum for interactivity that does not immediately affirm them — and all of their many smelly little orthodoxies and prejudices — is not “safe”, and therefore they will go to great lengths to whine about, pester, or attack, anyone who does not enable them in their need to be “safe.”

Mr. Torgersen is correct about the insidious and pernicious nature of rabbit warrens. They are intellectually enervating; Mr. Scalzi’s inflated opinion of his argumentative skills have always been illustrative of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but after years of neither permitting substantive discourse on Whatever nor engaging in it outside that safe space, they will have deteriorated from even that low standard.

That is why I encourage SUBSTANTIVE intellectual disputation here. That does not mean that I tolerate the trivial and superficial stuff; there is nothing to be gained in the dialectical contemplation of whether X is or is not a poopyhead. And it is why I accept debate challenges whether they are hosted here or elsewhere and why I accept invitations to a black man’s blog when he wishes to discuss imputations of raciss.

I make no pretense of always being right and that is why I have no fear of taking the risk of being shown to be wrong. But for those who have built up a vast and illusory web of deceit, exaggeration, and spin, the risk of being exposed for who and what they truly are is simply too great. And so they are left posturing to their retarded rabbit choir.

I have to disagree with Mr. Torgesen, however, when he declares that the only winning move with McRapey is not to play. I think the fact that McRapey has stopped his previous practice of divulging his site traffic and his sales numbers, and hidden his previously available blog statistics at Quantcast, is sufficient evidence that shining a light on his web of deceit is also an effective strategy. Here were the last three months of Whatever traffic that were available to the public prior to him shutting it down; contrast them with the year before, when I began exposing his various deceits and con games:

Nov 2013: 407,363 (Nov 2012: 768,725,  down 47 percent)
Dec 2013: 475,543 (Dec 2012: 861,912, down 45 percent)
Jan 2014: 542,192 (Jan 2013: 840,874, down 36 percent)

My own monthly traffic went up 36 percent, from 786,956 to 1,076,538, during that same time period. That monthly average is more than Scalzi’s all-time peak of 1,027,644 in May 2012, which marked the only time Whatever exceeded one million pageviews.

So, disengagement and retreat is certainly an option, but it is a tactic that ensures intellectual stagnation and eventual irrelevance. More to the point, McRapey used to benefit from his appeal to the political moderates and right-wingers who did not realize that he was their self-appointed enemy; like Marko Kloos and David Weber, he had the rare advantage of being able to successfully sell to both sides of the political aisle.

But no longer. Now that he has been unmasked as a particularly deranged leader of the SF/F Left, I suspect there are more than a few of his former fans, perhaps as many as four in ten based on the site traffic, who are no longer willing to support him or his work. The ideological division of SF/F has observably begun and I strongly suspect that the authors and publishers of the SF/F Right will do to the mainstream SF/F publishers precisely what Fox News has done to the mainstream media.

Portrait of a badass

“The picture does amuse me because based on that picture, many people imagine me as a 6-foot-4 ex-Marine badass, rather than the 5-foot-8 goofball I am in real life.”
– John Scalzi

I find that to be a hilarious quote, not so much because it is hard to believe that anyone has ever imagined McRapey to be an ex-Marine, (and of course, if he knew anything about the Corps he would know there is no such thing as an ex-Marine), but because it is hard to believe anyone would buy the notion that Mr. Scalzi is 5’8″.

Crushing the insects

As he learned from his Mommy, Johnny thinks that if you pretend to embrace an insult, you are totally showing the big meanie that he can’t hurt you. Because if you put on a big enough production, no one will notice that you’re crying yourself to sleep at night.

“The problem is that the ‘vocal minority’ of insects who make up the new generation of writers don’t scramble for the shadows when outside lights shines on them—they bare their pincers and go for the jugular. Maybe it is a good thing that SFWA keeps them locked up. The newer members who Scalzi et al. brought in are an embarrassment to the genre.”
— (name withheld) on SFF.net, during the recent unpleasantness.

Heh heh heh. I realize, of course, that the person who wrote the comment above meant “insect” as an insult. But what do we know about insects? They are numerous, adaptable, highly successful as a class, and, when they put their mind to it, absolutely unstoppable. No wonder this person seems terrified.

As it happens, I have for a long time said that there are three types of writers: dinosaurs, mammals and cockroaches. Dinosaurs are the writers who are tied into an old model of the writing and publishing life, and when that specific model dies, so does the writer’s career. Mammals are the ones who ride the wave of a new writing/publishing model into success and prominence — but if they tie their fortunes to that one model, they’ll find themselves transformed into dinosaurs soon enough. Cockroaches, on the other hand, learn and adapt and thrive in every circumstance, in part because they know that things change. If you’re a writer, being a cockroach is the way to go.

And so, oh! The irony! Of calling writers the thing that (metaphorically) it is awesome to be, careerwise.

For the record (and because it is referring to my time in office, which I can speak about): I am immensely proud to have, along with Mary Robinette Kowal (my VP for two thirds of my administration) and the rest of the board and volunteers, through our efforts on behalf of our membership, helped to bring so many of the writers this person so dismissively refers to as “insects” into SFWA. These writers are talented, opinionated, smart and adaptable, and not coincidentally write some really great things, and were already in my time doing good for the organization. If this person wants to put me at the head of this insect army, I’m delighted to accept the commission (as is Mary! I asked her! She said yes!).

Mary and I are no longer officers of SFWA, but I think our commissions at the head of the Insect Army are still in effect: After all, not every “insect” is in SFWA (yet). And so I say to you: Join John and Mary’s Insect Army! You must write! You must be fearless! You must stand your ground in the face of deeply silly insults, clacking your pincers derisively at them! And, if you believe that every person — writer, “insect” and otherwise — should be treated with the same dignity and honor that you would accord yourself, so much the better. Together we can swarm to make science fiction and fantasy awesome!

Insect is an apt term for them. They are nobodies and no-talents led by mediocrities who have careers by virtue of smoke, mirrors, and being chosen by other mediocrities due to their ideological affiliations. We’re not talking about China Mieville here. We’re not talking about Charles Stross or the late Iain M. Banks, left-wing writers of genuine talent. We’re talking about the nattering nothings. Scalzi is lying when he says: “These writers are talented, opinionated, smart and adaptable, and not coincidentally write some really great things.”

They’re not talented. They’re not smart. Most of them are barely even published. They’re not adaptable, they’re intolerant, and most of them don’t even write as well as the definitively mediocre Scalzi, who produced this award-winning dialogue:


“Man, I owe you a blowjob,” Duvall said.
“What?” Dahl said.
“What?” Hester said.
“Sorry,” Duvall said. “In ground forces, when someone does you a
favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it’s a little thing, it’s
a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of
habit. It’s just an expression.”


“Got it,” Dahl said.


“No actual blowjob forthcoming,” Duvall said. “To be clear”
“It’s the thought that counts,” Dahl said, and turned to Hester. “What about you? You want to owe me a blowjob, too?”
“I’m thinking about it ,” Hester said. 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it now takes to win A PARTICIPATION HUGO!

After taking over the SFWA with their bureaucratic swarming thanks to the McCaffrey rule, the insects made the same mistake that all the indebted college students are making today. They think the credentials and the awards matter and they don’t understand that those things were only ever significant because of what they symbolized: SF excellence. A Nebula once meant something. A Hugo once meant something. Now, they’re the reward for meaningless swarmings. The insects mistake the awards for the literary accomplishment.

That’s why the Old Guard’s petition, the Old Guard’s disgust, was so hurtful to them. Because it is an undeniable reminder that the insects cannot live on the stolen glory of their elders and betters.

And now that the gatekeepers don’t matter any longer, now that everyone has equal access to the SF/F readers, we will crush them beneath our iron-shod feet.

As for Mary Puppinette Kowal, the reason she’s a complete nobody is because nobody actually gives a damn what she writes. Nobody reads her except her fellow insects. For all her awards and bureaucratic involvement and being pushed by the biggest genre publisher, her most recent book is ranked #268,486 on Kindle. She’s a nasty little nothing and never-will-be who doesn’t even write SF/F, she writes miscategorized Regency Romance.

Mailvox: compare and contrast

  1. Josh observed: “It looks to me like the prestige of being published by a traditional
    publisher is a commodity paid for by allowing them to rape you on the
    royalties.”
  2. McRapey defended Tor: “I actually like my publishers, and they add value to my work and don’t rip me off in the process. Please don’t consider them evil (at least in their involvement with me), or try to cut them out of the pay loop. Thank you.”
  3. Jerry Pournelle cited history: “As to conceding 30% to Amazon, I’m damned happy to do it, since publishers take 90%, and back in the bad old days hardbound publishers got 50% of the 5% we got from paperbacks as well. And tried to grab half the movie rights.”

I suggest a look at the facts are in order. Here are the specific terms from a Big Five publisher on a one-book contract offer with a $40,000 advance. Except for the retension of multimedia rights and the unusually high ebook royalties I negotiated, the terms are very similar to contracts with both larger and smaller advances from fellow Big Five publishers.

  • full term of copyright
  • Hardcover: 10 percent of catalog retail price on first 10,000 copies, 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent on 15,000+ copies.
  • Trade Paperback: 6 percent of catalog retail price on the first 20,000 copies and 7.5 percent on 20,000+ copies.
  • Mass Market Paperback: 9 percent on first 150,000 copies and 10 percent on 150,000+.
  • Ebook: 50 percent of revenues received.(1)
  • Foreign language: 25 percent of proceeds from foreign publisher. Which, if similar to these terms, means 2.5 percent on hardcover and 6.25 percent on ebook.
  • All multimedia rights to games, films, and so forth were retained by the author.(2)

Now, keep in mind that this was considerably better than the boilerplate (see points 1 and 2 below). And there are certainly some authors who are able to command better terms than that, Hugh Howey being the prime example of an ideal model to follow. But before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about or blithely accepts bad contracts, how many authors do you know receive bigger advances than 8x the median SF first novel advance in 2005, (and I’ve heard they’re down to around $3,000 now, in which case 13.3x), while not giving up any film or game rights and receiving twice the standard ebook royalty?

Keep in mind that Jerry and I are not the horror stories. We’re simply pointing out how bad traditional publishing contracts have been even though we are both relative success stories! Bruce Bethke, on the other hand, wasn’t so fortunate. Consider the fate of Cyberpunk: “Initially written as a series of short stories in 1980, the novel was purchased by a publisher via an exclusive contract which
forbade Bethke to sell the novel to any other publisher. The publisher
decided not to release the novel, causing several years of legal battles
over the rights to the book.”

So, while Tor may not be ripping off McRapey, who happily accepts making less money per unit in return for primary author status at the largest SF publisher, they are most certainly taking advantage of their lesser auhors. Compare who the names of the writers they published 10-15 years ago to the names being published now. What you will see, and what you will see if you look at any major publisher’s list of authors published over time is a regular new author churn, with low-cost authors providing 1-3 new books before being dropped and replaced when they fail to achieve sufficient sales velocity. It’s a constant churning process, and sometimes the publisher gets it wrong, such as when Pocket Books dropped Dan Brown prior to him writing The Da Vinci Code, which is a sequel to the Pocket-published Angels and Demons.

As one of the people involved in that decision once told me: “Nobody knows what they’re doing in this industry. We act like we do, but we really don’t.”

For the most part, publishers don’t really care who makes it and who doesn’t, because there are always new replacement writers to pour into the publishing mill. And there is nothing wrong with this process at face value, after all, publishers can’t afford to keep publishing authors who don’t sell in sufficient numbers. The problem is that the winners and losers are, to a large part, predetermined by the gatekeepers within the publishing house due to print runs and decisions to reprint books that have sold through their print runs or not. In my experience, these decisions are seldom based in ideology or malice, but are mostly rooted in happenstance and bureaucratic inertia.

Also, I should correct a previous statement. John Scalzi did not denigrate “self-publishers” when he went on his anti-Random House rampage in his swan song as SFWA president. He explicitly denigrated independent publishers operating on the no-advances model.

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

There is nothing stupid or malicious about a shared risk/shared reward model. Only a rabbit who is afraid of risk could possibly suggest that there is. I leave it to the reader to compare the royalty terms of the traditional publishers shown above to the 25 to 65 percent royalties on revenues received offered by independent publishers utilizing the “no advances” shared-risk model, and to decide whose business model is disadvantageous to the author and which sort of contracts are therefore best avoided.

(1) With the Big Five these are now a standard 25 percent.
(2) I have a copy of the contract with the boilerplate struck out. They actually tried to grab 100 percent of the net proceeds from British Commonwealth rights, foreign language translation rights, motion picture and television rights, and commercial merchandising rights.

Of Amazon and author earnings

You may recall that last year, I pointed out that John Scalzi was not only doing authors a serious disservice by denigrating self-publishing, attacking publishers who mitigate their risk by not paying advances, and throwing a public hissy fit over Random House moving into the 21st Century with its Hydra imprint, he was actually doing himself a disservice by throwing away more than half his revenues for the privilege of being able to say he is approved by the gatekeepers at Tor. Scalzi, of course, pretended that I had no idea what I was talking about, because he is a special snowflake who has a totally unique publishing contract that bears no similarity to any other publishing deal in the industry or something like that.

After all, who are you going to trust on such matters, the economics writer who correctly predicted both the bull market in gold and the 2008 financial crisis or the Bernie Madoff of science fiction with his “50,000 DAILY READERS”?

I mention this because Hugh Howey, the massively successful SF self-publisher, just released a fascinating report on the current economics of publishing and what he learned pretty much confirmed everything that I’ve been saying on the subject for the last two years. It also very clearly demonstrates that the current and past leadership of the SFWA consist of individuals who did not, and who do not, understand the electronic train coming down the tracks that is already in the process of crushing the traditional publishers.

Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today: Looks good for the Big Five, doesn’t it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon’s platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.

 Let’s now look at revenue from the author’s perspective: It’s a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why: Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.

But here is the money bit:

You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%. Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon’s publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They’re just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops.

In other words, any statistics you read concerning the publishing industry are even less credible than the fiction produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That being said, I believe Howey is right. I believe “the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead” and part of that is going to be the result of the destruction of the gatekeepers who have been methodically destroying science fiction and fantasy for the last 30 years. The gatekeepers cannot sustain their inflated prices, they cannot foist their favored authors on unsuspecting readers, and they can no longer pretend their books sell any better or are of any higher quality than those being produced by the myriad of other active publishers for much longer.

“It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the
overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the
dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100
best-selling books in these genres are e-books!”

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In 13 months, ebooks have comprised 94 percent of the sales of A Throne of Bones. And keep in mind that Howey’s statistics probably don’t include the distribution of free ebooks. My free/sold ratio is 5/1. This is why Castalia House is only producing print books in hardcover for the hard-core fans who enjoy collecting as well as reading; if it’s not electronic, it’s no longer really relevant.

I should mention that another serious problem for the traditional publishers I predicted during my campaign for SFWA president has already surfaced, and it has done so even sooner than I said it would. Dreamworks Interactive recently announced that it will no longer be licensing the publishing rights to its works, but will publish its own ebooks. This means that the very lucrative media tie-in model that is keeping many of the larger genre publishers afloat is about to disappear. That means no more paying sizable advances to award-winning authors of terrible romances in space on the basis of Halo tie-in sales. It will be interesting to see which of the major genre publishers goes down first.

A statue for Scalzi?

This is getting absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I realize that John Scalzi is the doyenne of Pink SF with ~50 kazillion readers and he has won a Participation Hugo and all, but a statue? Seriously?

The sculptor did get the whole shambling thing right, though. And he did a nice job of capturing the whole sexyrapey gamma male vibe. All it needs is that notorious quote.

“I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on
women without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.”
– John Scalzi

Desperation is an ugly color

John Scalzi moves the goalposts in trying to hide the decline:

What’s this? It’s the traffic graph for all the parts of Scalzi.com that are not part of the current iteration of Whatever, i.e., archives and other bits and pieces that continue to be linked into from around the Web and Internet. The part of the site you’re reading now (the current iteration of Whatever), has statistics information provided by WordPress and Google Analytics. Everything else has its stat information recorded by the 1&1 Site Analytics. There’s surprisingly little overlap in recording between the two stats packages. Last year the WordPress stats package recorded 7.57 million visits; the 1&1 stats package recorded 6.13 million. The former set of stats are mirrored inexactly by Google Analytics; the latter, not at all.

I note this because occasionally I see someone who is not me purport to speak with authority about how many visits the site gets. However, as the total universe of visits the site gets is not publicly accessible, if someone who is not me is making that claim, they literally do not know what they are talking about. Not because they are obtuse or dishonest (or at least not just), but simply because they don’t have all the information about the traffic coming into the site — the entire site.

(If I am making the claim, mind you, I generally note all sorts of caveats about the numbers. If several years of looking at stats has shown me anything, it’s that the numbers are fairly fungible, shall we say.)

The moral of the story: Beware people who are not me! At least, as far as the stats to this site are concerned.

Let’s see here. Little Johnny bragged about his 8 MILLION VIEWS in 2012.  He wrote: “Just passed the number. Thanks to Hacker News for the assist; someone
there linked to “A Self-Made Man Looks at How He Made It,” sending a
flood of programmers over to read it. You can follow their own
discussion of the article here. I’ll note again that this is just the
views recorded by WordPress’ software; the actual number of views is
higher. I’ll have a full report early in 2013.  But still: 8 million
views. It doesn’t suck.  Thank you.”

Keep in mind that these were the numbers he previously reported for Whatever:

2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000

Now notice that he’s openly admitting that he had 7.57 million WordPress visits for Whatever in 2013. Where have we seen that number before? Ah, yes, in the chart I posted on January 1, 2014. And notice, too, that I specifically labeled those 7.57 million views as Whatever visits; in Google Analytics terms they were closer to 7.52 million. In any case, Johnny is trying to obscure the fact that the numbers I reported for Whatever were precisely accurate. Instead of calling my account into question, all he’s managed to do is to confirm my veracity. Not only do I know what I am talking about, (which was never anything but Whatever, the Very Important Blog that was supposed to be ever so vastly popular), but my numbers were dead-on accurate.

Now Johnny is belatedly bringing in non-Whatever traffic after five years of ignoring it to attempt to obscure the fact that my blogs have surpassed his blog, and he’s doing so in a characteristically deceptive manner. There may well be “surprisingly little overlap”, but of course, Johnny doesn’t say if that overlap is 10 percent or 40 percent. As usual, he’s hiding information and frantically spinning the information he can’t hide in order to try to make himself look better. It’s all rather desperate.

And it’s pointless anyhow. Even if there were no overlap at all, even if we accept his moving of the goalposts, and even if we ignore the fact that WordPress visits are slightly exaggerated in comparison with Google Analytics pageviews, at 13.7 million for Maximum McRapey to 13.1 million for VP and AG alone in 2013, the fact is that I’ve already passed him up in 2014.  That’s because in January, he was down 30 percent year-on-year from 2013, while my two blogs were up 24 percent. He’s on an annual rate towards 5.3M Whatever / 9.6M Max Total while I’m on an annual rate towards 16.2M VP+AG combined.

Johnny is in observable decline and he knows it; despite trying one new stunt after another, he still hasn’t written anything as good as his Heinlein rip-off published seven years ago. It won’t be long before the ever-ravenous left-wing forces he fanned for years will begin devouring him in envy now that he’s finally received his unmerited Participation Hugo. I don’t care about such things, but those shambling shoggoths sure as hell do!

In any event, the fact is that there is overlap between the two components of the 13.7 million and Johnny refused to specify how much overlap there is tells you all you need to know about his long-delayed honesty. Either way, his fraud has been exposed, the numbers that I reported are now confirmed to be very accurate, and if you still take the chubby little neurotic seriously, well, you probably aren’t tall enough for this ride.

John Scalzi has never learned that if you simply tell the truth, you never have to worry about anyone finding out that you are a fraud. He could have ended all of this nonsense by simply putting up a public Sitemeter or Google Analytics counter, but then, doing so would have demolished the myth of popularity that he has so carefully constructed over the years.

Mailvox: Talk Scalzi

Rocean appears to have forgotten that I am far from the only critic of McRapey:

Scazli has a new response to VD up. In essence, he’s smart, he’s honest, and gosh-darn it people like him. Or more accurately, just more adolescent snark and word games.

I checked it out and I don’t believe the post to be a response to anything I wrote. I suspect his cryptic meandering may have been intended as a response to Heartiste, given the references to a “stupidsphere”. I don’t question for a moment that an effete young lad, abandoned by his father and desperately seeking both attention and approval from the women upon whom his path to a better life depends, would genuinely subscribe to the equalitarian claptrap he has espoused in public for years. That doing so would tend to put him in good odor with the gatekeepers and shambling shoggoths of Pink SF/F is mostly a matter of positive happenstance.

UPDATE: Or perhaps he is addressing Ed Trimnell, who recently wrote:

John Scalzi is a pure, coldly calculating opportunist who knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes blogs posts like “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. I suspect that Scalzi believes only a fraction of what he writes. 

Regardless, I found this admission from December 19th to be of more interest:

[T]his year, by blog readership looks like it end up lower than it was last year — about 7.5 million recorded visits for the year, as opposed to 8.1 million in 2012. I attribute this to a couple of month-long “semi-hiatuses,” during which I posted less while I was writing books or on tour, a theory borne out by looking at the monthly numbers (November, which was one of those months, had the lowest visitorship of any month in two years). However, this year I also added 15,000 Twitter followers, most of whom (so far as I can tell) are actual real live people and not Twitter bots, and my Facebook and Google Plus public pages also saw growth. (I should note 7.5 million visits still means 2013 is Whatever’s second best year ever, so I’m not exactly panicking over here in that regard. But again, the fact that my other online presences showed substantial growth works as an offset in any event.) 

Those of you who previously doubted me concerning my observations about Whatever’s declining traffic may recall the following statement, which I made here on December 10th. 

McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.

As before, Scalzi is using “recorded visits” when a more accurate term would be “WordPress pageviews”. Translating the numbers into Google pageviews, he had 7.897 million pageviews in 2012 and he’s anticipating about 7.155 million in 2013. You knew he’d have an excuse for the decline and I was pretty sure “other online presences” would be one of them. But it’s not merely an excuse, it is a legitimate reason as well. Keep in mind that I’ve never once claimed that Mr. Scalzi is not influential in SF/F circles; he was able to arrange my expulsion from SFWA by threatening to quit, after all. My contentions have been limited to pointing out that McRapey is nowhere nearly as “huge” as he would have his fans believe, that Whatever averages less than one-twelfth of the claimed 50,000 DAILY READERS, and that his blog is in fact is considerably less popular than most of us thought until the end of last year.

Those who have mastered division will surely note that 7.155 million divided by 365 is 19,603, which would be considerably short of 50,000 even if Whatever had a 1/1 pageview/reader ratio. Which it obviously doesn’t.

That being said, I’m not surprised that Scalzi has done well on Twitter. Whatever will likely continue to decline in large part because Twitter is a medium much better suited to an approval-seeking narcissist with snarky little thoughts who is more interest in talking than listening, and whose primary interest in dialogue is receiving praise.

Technologies change. And one no longer requires a blog to post pictures of cats and repeatedly be told how awesome one is.

UPDATE: Sometimes, Johnny just can’t wait for the next back-pat and has to do it himself.  “I’m pretty smart”, he declares. Sure, not National Merit smart. Or even Mensa smart. But pretty smart. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Cocoa?