Teel – Page 46 – Teel McClanahan

story is the music of books

“If iTunes store decouples “music” from “albums”, what will future publishers decouple from “books”? What’s the “music” equivalent?” – Kathy Sierra, on Twitter

“For tech books, safari already does do some decoupling; I grab just chapters and subsections all the time off of safari” – Matt Bowen, in response

“but that’s my question… the word “chapter” (or section) does imply fine-granularity (like “song”), but what’s the “music”?” – Kathy Sierra

The music is the story, for fiction, and the knowledge, for non-fiction. (Generally.) It is the part of the “book” that remains the same, regardless of format or edition: Whether you read the story in a hardback or a paperback, from an eReader or an iPhone, have it read to you by a professional storyteller or a friend, and for this analogy even when you watch an adaptation for stage or screen or as a video game (or other interactive entertainment), there is a core thing that remains the same. Whether you get your information from a technical manual, a lecture, a powerpoint presentation, an instructional video, or direct mentorship, there is a core of knowledge that remains the same. This is the music, this is the melody, of what books provide.

iTunes is not what decoupled “music” from “albums” – music existed prior to albums, as sheet music and as live performance, at the least. Even after the advent of the album, the concert experience -unless the live playlist strictly matched the album’s- decoupled music from the confines of the album, often mixing, mashing, and altering the music with every event. The single separated out a song or two at a time (sometimes several “singles” released over time for each album), but if singles weren’t doing the sort of decoupling you imply iTunes does, then neither does iTunes. That sounds like more of the job of the device; the record player, the walkman, the iPod, the live performer, which decouples the music from the medium (record, tape, MP3, memory/sheet-music) to deliver it to you.

So now I’m wondering what you meant, rather than pursuing the interesting part of the line of thought, about story: Did you mean how iTunes delivers music electronically, without a physical container (MP3 vs CD), or did you mean how iTunes allows you to buy individual tracks rather than the groups of tracks known as ‘albums’, or did you mean something else I haven’t understood? Hrm. There are plenty of electronic book sales channels out there that deliver the book without need for the physical container, and most of them have stripped away everything but the raw text (current eBook formatting is atrocious), delivering only the story and none of the window dressing (think the big album artwork on a record, and the glossy, embossed dust jacket on a big paperback – it’s not the book, it’s not the album, it’s marketing material).

But then again, there’s this interesting thought about ‘story is to book as music is to album’ that seems very interesting to me… And the other idea -that Matt brought up- of ‘chapter is to book as song is to album’, and how for some types of writing (poetry, technical manuals) it makes sense for people to want/buy individual tracks/chapters apart from the book as a whole, but then there’s most long-form fiction, and linear and narrative non-fiction, where that doesn’t work. Do you want just chapter 24 of the latest techno-thriller? Just the first and the final chapter of a mystery? Or are you here for the story? Some thoughts:

Voice acting & performance is to audio book as page layout & cover design is to paper book.

A concert is to an album as a reading is to a book.

The easy to use, high-capacity MP3 player with custom playlists and ‘shuffle’ changed the way we, as consumers, take in music. I see electronic reading (including blogs & RSS aggregators, dedicated eReaders & smart phones, and Twitter & facebook status updates) driving toward shorter and shorter ‘chunks’ of words; often part of a longer narrative, but easily broken into bite-size pieces. RSS aggregators are like shuffle (and playlists, if you categorize your feeds) for online writing. Twitter mixes all the conversations of everyone you follow together in the same way – narrative & story have not disappeared, they’ve just been chunked and shuffled. People are micro-blogging fiction, writing whole novels on Twitter and on facebook pages (and in Japan, novels via SMS, written and read without ever leaving phones), and have you heard of the growth of ‘flash fiction‘? The alteration of the landscape of story, which is the music a book plays in your mind, has been going on all around you, and it is already decoupled from paper, from ‘book’. Writers are changing the way they write stories, readers are changing the way they consume stories, (and not just stories, but knowledge as well, as evidenced by most of the feeds being non-fiction, and the success of services like Safari (which Matt mentioned) breaking non-fiction into individually-available chapters and sections) it’s been going on for years, and the paper book isn’t going to die because of it – we’re simply beginning to have a richer, broader landscape that comes to mind when we think of ‘book’.

eBook experiment ending

As you may or may not remember, back near the beginning of June I started an experiment re: eBook pricing. From then until now, all my eBooks have been priced under $2 each. The reduced pricing ends after today (so if you haven’t grabbed your copy of any of my eBooks, today is the last day to take advantage of these reduced prices)…

There are a couple of reasons for this; the main one being what I’d discussed at the outset of the experiment: I wanted to see whether volume of sales would increase with reduced prices. I’d even decided that overall sales volume is more important than overall profit, such that if enough copies were selling at the reduced prices to equal (or improve upon) the amount I was earning before the experiment, I’d keep the lower prices. Sadly, the rate of sales remained about the same at reduced prices as it was at my original pricing.

There’s another important reason, and it relates to some recent news from Smashwords. Starting soon, all eligible eBooks available through Smashwords (all of mine should be eligible) will also be distributed through Barnes & Noble’s eBook channels (including fictionwise &c.). This is great news, puts my books in front of even more potential readers, but it does come with an important caveat: sales through the B&N channels will be subject to the normal retail price cut that booksellers demand, so while Smashwords still pays authors 85% of revenue, for sales through the new channels, that’s probably 85% of 50% of list price. Getting close to the kindle cut there, actually.

Finally, and this isn’t something I’ve already got the answers to, I’m thinking more and more lately about the idea of the value of a book. Regardless of format & delivery method, whether it’s hardback, paperback, audio CDs, an MP3 CD, a PDF, or a .txt file – the thing in common between all of them is the book itself, the IP. So, what’s the value of that IP? What is the value of the book? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure how a proper conception of the value of the book will alter the pricing landscape of the various editions and formats it’s made available in, but for right now I’m leaning in the direction of a “maintaining the value of the IP” position & I want people to know that the value of the book, the IP at the core of whichever format they’re buying, is more than $2.

So tomorrow I’m going to raise the prices of all my eBooks, on Smashwords and for the kindle, back to their full (1/2 paperback) original prices. And soon I’m going to put together a video clarifying why I’ll always offer my books for free.

Ignorance of professional writing

“Love it when I run face-first into my own ignorance. Will work on another blog post, soon, about something new I just learned I didn’t know.” – me, on Twitter

So, as I sometimes do, I followed someone’s intriguing link to the ISBW site a little while ago. I haven’t yet been intrigued enough by what I saw there to want to actually listen to the thing. (I basically stopped listening to podcasts 18 months ago, when I switched from working a boring day job that gave me 40+ hours/week that didn’t engage my mind or give me anything else to listen to … to being a full-time creative. I can’t listen to podcasts while I work on my podcasts, or while I’m reading (books, blogs, news, et cetera), or while I’m writing, or while my wife is home (because I’d rather not be ignoring her during the few hours we have together, awake, most weekdays), and that doesn’t leave any regular (ie: available every week) time for listening.)

Anyway, scrolling back through the ISBW posts (half of which … I don’t get, because I never listened to Mur’s book, I guess) there was one that included the following:

The fabulous tool Story Tracker is now available for your iPhone/touch. I used this tool a lot when I was actively working on short stories for many markets, and it’s invaluable. It takes a lot of work on the front end (listing your stories, the details, sales, rejections, income made, trunked status, etc, not to mention all the details for the markets you submit to) but once you have all the information it’s so very useful. Highly recommended. (Thanks to Tobias Buckell for blogging about it and alerting me to its existence. You’re reading Toby’s blog, right? RIGHT?)

Immediately my awareness of my ignorance was expanded. That paragraph is like a list of things I didn’t know. First: There’s software specifically for authors’ tracking of their short story submissions? How many authors need such a software for it to constitute enough a market that people are making iPhone apps for them? I followed the links to the software’s site and the blog in question and in the comments on the blog post discovered two more software products and two additional web services that perform the same function. Seriously? How many authors have so complex a situation re: short story submissions that there are (at least) 3 different softwares and 2 different web services to address that need? A couple other things here I don’t know: What is “trunked status”? Who is Tobias Buckell?

In the blog post, by way of explaining why the iPhone app wouldn’t work very well for him, Buckell said “I have an excel spreadsheet with 650+ submission entries on it, tracking 130+ short stories or so, I don’t see sitting in place and keying these in by hand into it.” — What stood out to me first about this sentence was my inability to think of anything near enough places that even publish short stories to accommodate that quantity of submissions. I had no idea. On the Duotrope site they “list 2580 current markets, plus 1246 closed/dead/removed/DNQ markets” – where by ‘markets’ they mean … places that publish short stories (or poetry), I assume. The list of current markets for fiction includes 2121 listings, right now. I had no idea.

In addition to which … 130+ short stories? I’ve written 2 or 3 dozen short stories in my life. Of course, that might have to do with the fact that I didn’t know there were thousands of potential publishers for short fiction, which implies even more readers – someone must be buying what those publishers are putting out, right? I had no idea. I’m aware of maybe a handful of places (read: publications) I might go to if I wanted to read short stories, myself. Not dozens, not hundreds, certainly not thousands. As far as I knew, from my personal experience as a reader, short stories were vastly in the minority -both in terms of number of stories and in volume of writing overall- compared to other available fiction, perhaps a fraction of a percent. Since I didn’t read much short fiction, and wasn’t aware of much short fiction, I’ve never spent much time thinking about writing short fiction.

(Of course, until I started reading through industry reports (ie: after I started my own publishing company, in 2007) I had no idea that fiction was only a small fraction of the overall book market. Fiction gets all the visibility, most of the press, and most of the big advances… I just hadn’t thought about it. I’ve never been very interested in writing non-fiction, so I just didn’t look into it beyond by interests as a reader.)

I just … I guess it comes down to approaching writing not as a profession, but as a calling. Instead of ever bothering to look into what other writers do to make a living, what markets exist to sell the written word into and what they’re looking for and will pay for, I just wrote what I wanted to write. I wrote the stories that I had to tell, in the way they wanted to be told. I wasn’t trying to write to make money, to build a career, or even just to follow in the footsteps of other writers. So many other people who label themselves as writers are on such a different path from me. They want such different things. They write all the time, they write with specific markets in mind, they are aware of and follow genre conventions, they collaborate with each other, they build their “platforms”… I noticed recently that there is a further distinction being made, automatically by people classifying themselves as such – that people who are writing blogs, writing journalism, writing short fiction for specific markets, writing non-fiction, working on most any commercial writing… they say they are a “writer” (or that they are an aspiring writer). I am an author. I’m not in this to write. Writing isn’t the point. It’s all about the stories, the ideas.

Also, my perspective on publishing itself is a bit skewed, since I know I can put together a collection of short stories and publish it as soon as I’m happy with it. I can publish even an individual short story as an “eBook” to the kindle and via Smashwords (which is apparently about to start selling through to B&N and its subsidiaries) as soon as any individual story is done, and not wait until I have enough for a book. I could even put together chapbooks and sell them by hand & through my site, if I had the urge to sell physical copies of short works – individually or as collections not large enough to warrant becoming a paperback. I hadn’t thought much about submitting short stories to other publishers, since publishing them myself is so straightforward. I don’t even really know how much money people are able to make from writing and selling short stories to those thousands of “markets” … and I think I’m only wondering it in the context of “how many copies do I have to personally fail to sell for selling to someone else to make sense,” since I’m not really motivated by money – just curious how the different models compare. Maybe I’ll look into it, now that I know that the short-fiction-publishing world is so much larger and more complex than I’d suspected. Perhaps I’ll even start writing (and/or reading) more short fiction. But I have trouble holding back finished writing because it’s the industry standard way to do things, so … I doubt I’ll ever have use for the sort of softwares discussed above.

Thinking (personally) about money

I do a lot of thinking about economics; about value, money, trade, debt, earning, business, equality, fairness, and on and on and on. That is not (exactly) what I’m writing about today – that’s mostly big-picture stuff. Today I’m thinking about how I think about my own money. I am aware (though I don’t really understand why it is the case) that it is considered a faux pas to discuss personal finances, and that doing so makes some people uncomfortable. If that’s you, hey, don’t read on. Whatever.

I noticed something in the last day or so about a line of thinking I’d been mulling over. The thinking went in this direction:

My household is currently running “in the red.” My wife works full time as a teacher and I work full time as an independent author & artist. Her work brings home a regular salary. My work generates a less stable source of additional income. Last year (depending on how you look at the accounting) my business was within about $100 of breaking even… This year, it isn’t so close. The economy is down, summer months are hard, I’m anti-social and averse to marketing; whatever the reason, my end of the income hasn’t been particularly stable or sufficient, lately. So I was running some numbers, trying to more accurately target how far into the red we’re running – how much more I need to earn just to keep groceries in the cupboards. We’re already running pretty close to the bone around here, eating a lot of rice, a lot of spaghetti, going to the library instead of book stores, no new DVDs or CDs or video games (maybe 2-3 (mostly used) so far this year), not eating out… there’s not a lot left to cut out, anymore – though we’re still generally comfortable, pretty content. We’re just running a few hundred dollars short every month in order to stay comfortable & content.

In months I make good sales at the art walk & online we’re less short, but between the cost of doing business (art supplies, space rental at the art walk, publishing costs, screen printing costs, et cetera) and the best month’s sales this year bringing in less revenue than the size of the deficit it’s not quite enough. There’s a large measure of faith in this, of hope in future sales, even of believing that the economy will recover soon. Faith and hope don’t buy groceries, and deficit spending can’t go on forever, so I started thinking about supplementing my income.

Most writers and artists I know, even the so-called-successful ones (the ones with the book deals from major publishers, or prestigious gallery exhibitions), seem to have day jobs. Not only to have day jobs, but to proclaim loud and proud to aspiring creatives looking to them for guidance that they shouldn’t ever expect not to have a day job. If my family ever actually gets to a point where we’re in danger of not being able to pay our bills, I’m certainly willing to give up this experiment in making being creative (and a househusband) my “day job” and look for more traditional work. Depending on how sales go in the next few months, we might be reaching that point pretty soon. And unless sales really start kicking…

So, after putting together a spreadsheet with money in, money out, and working out exactly how much extra income I need to reach break-even, I started calculating how many hours & days of work at minimum wage I’d have to do to get that spreadsheet to reach zero. I started thinking about how many days a month I’d have to give up to day laboring in order to be able to live this life the rest of my days, about what I need to do to be able to work via one of the couple of (legal) day-labor places in the neighborhood. I even twittered about it.

But here is the thing about that thinking that I didn’t notice until a day or two later: Unlike (apparently) normal people, it didn’t occur to me to try to get a proper day job. Or that I might want to aim for more income than just barely enough. – You see (and I keep forgetting that this isn’t “normal”): I’m not motivated by money.

Not by money, not by power, not by fame. As I posted recently, just thinking about|correlating my creative work with the money it may/may-not bring in works counter to my motivation.

I wish the world wasn’t going the other way.

Doctors are selfish bastards, pt. 1

There is a shortage of Primary Care Physicians in the US. It leads to longer waits for patients to see doctors for basic & preventative care, and to PCPs who have less time to spend with each patient. ie: Wait weeks-to-months for a 15 minute appointment with your doctor. (And/or get treated by a nurse instead.)

There is not a shortage of doctors. But given the choice between earning 2 or 3 times the median household income as PCPs and 10+ times the median household income as specialists/surgeons, doctors are choosing earning more money over doing what is best for people’s health, or for society at large.

We pretend that doctors, as a class, want to help. Want to do good. That they selected their profession with noble intentions. Sadly, this is not borne out by the facts. Not any more. Not in how doctors set their courses as a group, and not in how they practice medicine on a day-to-day and patient-by-patient basis.*

They are choosing self over society. They are choosing wealth over health.

*(The latter exemplified in the rising costs of healthcare without corresponding increases in wellness or even accurate diagnosis – doctors don’t bother to do a good job because they get paid better not to. Which is a separate issue I may post about another time; today I am thinking about a dearth of PCPs, not the average PCP’s high likelihood of running a test rather than thinking.)