but little do they know that she’s not through
Posted on | January 25, 2012 | 9 Comments
Writing a novel is hard work in itself. For some reason, I chose to make it harder by writing Too Close to Miss in first person from the viewpoint of a woman.
Okay, not for some arbitrary reason. I wanted to invert certain thriller genre tropes, so a female protagonist was necessary. And I default into first person unless I make a conscious effort not to. The easiest way to find a voice, for me, is to speak in it all the time.
But it certainly had its challenges.
When people read the first page of my novel, the most frequent feedback I got from male readers was that they didn’t think Mara was a woman until a few pages in. The most frequent feedback I got from female readers is, “why does she have her jeans hanging in the closet?” The detail just rang false. Jeans get folded and placed in a dresser. I don’t keep my jeans there, but that’s probably a guy thing: I have more closet space than I have dresser space. I fixed both those details for the final draft.
Just yesterday, a friend of mine tweeted (in a ha-ha-oops way, not a prurient way) that she’d left her house without a bra on. I didn’t think this was something women did. I know that, depending on physique and outfit, there are times a woman can do it and times that they can’t. But there’s a lot of lore and practice surrounding brassieres that, as a male, is just lost to me. Fitting, support, changing sizes due to fluctuations in weight, fashion considerations – all a darkened vale to me. My relationship with bras has fluctuated between bemusement and frustration for the last eleven years; that’s all the knowledge I can bring to bear.
I see this and I think 'Get a bigger clutch.'
My experience with femininity comes from two sources: the women I know and popular culture. Pop culture is a minefield when it comes to depictions of women (particularly independent women), so that’s better left unexplored. That leaves the women I know. While there are bits and pieces of several female friends in Mara Cunningham, I can only take that so far without being derivative. So I struggle to ask the probing but professional questions necessary to honestly depict a female hero.
The biggest shortcut I’ve taken, for the time being, has been to presume that women tend to want the same things men do: validation of their work, good sex, success for their friends, failure for their rivals and for their mothers to quit bugging them to settle down. Hasn’t steered me wrong yet.
But for those of you who’ve read Too Close to Miss, particularly female readers: does Mara Cunningham strike you as feminine? Not feminine enough? Too feminine (or perhaps too fake in her femininity)? Let me know, and be honest.
_________________
* Nothing creeps me out more than older male writers who write young female characters as an excuse to leer. Rupert Holmes’s Where The Truth Lies is a particular offender, with the perky female protagonist taking every opportunity she can to examine her firm body. Thanks for making it clear who this novel’s for, Rupert.
in the shadow of two gunmen
Posted on | January 24, 2012 | No Comments
A few weeks back, I polled the readers of Overthinking It to ask which season of The West Wing I should watch if I were only to watch one. They overwhelmingly voted for S2. Today I kicked off my analysis of the season on Overthinking it, tackling the two-parter “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.”
You should check it out.
I just stand by and watch you fight your secret war
Posted on | January 19, 2012 | No Comments
Before it can take over the world1, indie publishing has to overcome the perception that self-published authors are crap. Self-published authors don’t do a lot to help this notion (I could link to some particular offenders, but that would be cruel). Then again, legacy published authors aren’t always the best shepherds of their image either; consider Q.R. Markham, the lauded new author whose debut Little, Brown & Co. novel, Assassin of Secrets, was found to be heavily plagiarized2. But there’s a burden of proof on a self-published author that doesn’t exist for someone with a penguin on the cover.
Well, we take the world as we find it, not as we wish it. The perception exists. All I can do to counter it is keep producing well-reviewed neo-noir crime thrillers and calling out good indie work when I find it. This post is the latter.
I bought a copy of Fingers Murphy’s “Everything I Tell You is a Lie” when he released it for free (as part of his KDP Select promotion) on Amazon. It’s a slim little novella, but for its word count it doesn’t lack for impact. “Everything …” is a slick, evocative noir fable. Well, I say “noir,” but really it owes more to the existential fiction inspired by noir. Like Camus’s The Stranger, it follows a man recounting the choices and circumstances that led him to prison, where he’s about to be released after serving a sentence for homicide. It engrosses us in a small town story of the cycle of violence, neglect and pent-up rage that can ruin multiple lives.
Murphy writes with a mature, considered style, filling the story with true-to-life details that make it seem like a real narrative about real people in a real place. It’s a pleasure to read. There’s a slight tendency for the narrator to indulge in abstract introspection, but, since the frame story is about a man in therapy on the eve of his release from prison for murder, that’s almost to be expected.
My sincere wish is that Murphy turns this same stylistic laser on bigger and bolder subjects. Fortunately he’s got a few other titles to his name (if that is his name3) that promise to be meatier tales about desperate men in bad scenes. That’s the sort of story I go for, as anyone who’s read Too Close to Miss can tell you, so I’ll be checking his other stuff out.
_______________
1. It won’t. If it took over the world, it wouldn’t be “indie,” now would it? Not that there’s a particular virtue to independence, but the niche exists because it works.
2. By bloggers, natch.
3. I’ve been assured it isn’t.
the clock’s ticking, I just count the hours
Posted on | January 18, 2012 | 1 Comment
I’m happy my corner of the Internet has risen in unison to protest SOPA. I really am. I’m happy people seem to recognize, today, finally, that putting powerful weapons in the hands of the powerful only serves the interests of the powerful. I’m glad people are doing whatever they can, even if it’s within a rather narrow band (writing their Congresspersons, rewriting their .htaccess files), to check the effects of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money.
My only hope is that today makes an impact. Not on Congress, but on everyone else.
My sincere, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-this-time hope is that people investigate the process that led to SOPA being written in the first place and realize that it’s not an accident. Nothing this big is an accident. SOPA emerged from a deliberate confluence of factions conspiring to protect their power. Congress isn’t endorsing a bill that expands the already draconian provisions of the DMCA because no other option appears available to them to stop piracy. They’re not idiots. Congress is endorsing this bill because people with millions of dollars, such as the MPAA (and their chief lobbyist, former Senator Chris Dodd), want it to happen. And the MPAA wants it to happen because they want to turn third-party filesharing into a revenue stream through a constant barrage of torts.
Does your average member of Congress care about lobbyists and campaign contributions more than they care about their constituency? Obviously Perhaps not. But they know that you’re going to vote for them anyway. Most people are. Your Congressional representative knows that he has an eighty percent chance of keeping his job whatever he does, slightly less if he’s a Senator. You aren’t going to turn your back on him over one trivial bill. But the MPAA might. And when the MPAA takes a member of Congress off their list, that’s a thousand-dollar haircut. More if he has a valuable committee seat.
One of the ways that people get confused about evolution – even the people who defend evolution against creationists – is that they think it’s “accidental.” It’s not. There’s a difference between undesigned and accidental. Evolution produces speciation through the forces of natural and sexual selection, with a healthy dose of mutation thrown in at random intervals. While there is no divine intelligence behind it, that doesn’t mean the process is a complete roll of the dice. Humans (and other animals) fit so well on the planet Earth because an animal that didn’t fit well wouldn’t have survived here. Evolution is a product of forces. It’s no more accidental than a waterfall.
Similarly, the convergence of money and power in the form of destructive regulation is not accidental. It’s not like Lamar Smith woke up one morning, found a monstrous censoring blade on his desk and decided to start swinging it before reason overtook him. It’s not as if Eric Cantor hates Google and wants it destroyed. Rather, you have many unrelated actors – filesharing sites, search engines, content aggregators, members of Congress, the MPAA – and a vast institution that notionally connects them – the law. The law is not a bulwark against the powerful. It’s a giant, flashing beacon. It tells the powerful, “If you want your voice to be heard, make your checks out to this address and no other.”
I have to stress that SOPA and PIPA are a natural outcome of the regulatory process, not some accidental aberration. I have to stress it because every law is like that. All of them. Even the ones you like. Especially the ones you like. Every bill whose passage you’ve ever cheered has been the result of either a multi-million dollar lobbying effort or, rarely, a massive coordinated push by an obstreperous faction that decided results were more important than tact.
If you object to SOPA, you object to the system that created it. If you don’t object to the system that created it, you don’t really object to SOPA. And don’t tell me that you understand the potential for corruption, but you hope that by electing “more and better” Ruling Party members that you can get good results, etc, because you can’t. It doesn’t work. You want a super-intelligent shark that’s not going to eat Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I’m sorry, but the super-intelligent shark will always eat Samuel L. Jackson.
shooting from the hip, yeah boy, I shoot to kill
Posted on | January 17, 2012 | 1 Comment
I saw Mission Impossible 4: Spooky Operating Procedure with Sylvia over the holiday weekend. A slam-bang action flick, to use the Variety term, but a little breathless in the writing. And I use that in both the laudatory and pejorative senses: the action never lets up, but the speech gets a little nasally as a result.
Nonetheless it’s probably not my favorite M:I film. Every successive entry in the franchise makes me miss what I liked about the previous entry. I liked Brian de Palma’s velvety style; I liked John Woo’s balletic action; I liked J.J. Abrams’ efficient storytelling. Bird is more efficient at building tension without making it seem as ridiculous as Abrams does, and he can frame a fight scene without it becoming a clash of jumpy visual images. But he needed a better writer.
At first blush, writing a neo-noir crime thriller (like the sequel to Too Close to Miss) is nothing like writing a high-budget action flick. But the same principles of tension, danger and pacing apply, albeit on different scales. I was taking mental notes on things the writers might have done better; perhaps we can compare.
Three Things Ghost Protocol Got Wrong That It’s Not Hard to Get Right
1. Where’s Poochie?
Homer: One, Poochie needs to be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine. Two, whenever Poochie’s not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Poochie”? Three…
Myers: Great, great. Just leave them right there on the floor on your way out.
- The Simpsons, “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show“
Tom Cruise’s character of Ethan Hunt has always been the star of the franchise. But somehow that’s never felt quite as staged as it did in this installment, where nobody can shut up about how awesome Hunt is and how tragic his circumstances are. Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) literally can’t shut up about how awesome it is to be working with Ethan Hunt. Agent Carter (Paula Patton) doesn’t have the same dialogue, but she favors Hunt with a lot of hurt stares, wondering at how he can deal with all that pain.
But it’s particularly galling with newcomer William Brandt (Jeremy Renner). Brandt is set up to be at least as interesting as Hunt: athletic, good sense of humor, driven, photographic memory. And it turns out (in a twist that the trailer reveals, so I don’t feel bad about spoiling it) that Brandt may secretly be a competent field agent as well. But after we discover the extent of Brandt’s talents, he spends the entire next scene … talking about Ethan Hunt.
How to Fix: Show, don’t tell. Ethan Hunt doesn’t do anything particularly impressive for the first twenty minutes of the movie, aside from one artfully choreographed fight scene. Demonstrate the man’s competence and make him admirable, rather than having characters stand around and admire him.
2. Make Your Villains Interesting
Who was the villain of MI4GP? A former Swiss something who was a Russian somebody who wanted to blow up the world. Why? His motives get revealed in a speech, which we watch on video, delivered to the most boring looking government body ever. He’s literally talking about nuking the planet and no one in his audience even blinks.
Compare that to MI2, where our introduction to the villain is through his wicked Tom Cruise impersonation (“that was the hardest part about having to portray you, grinning like an idiot every fifteen minutes”). Or to MI3; Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t look very engaged with the role, but at least he gets the best dialogue (“You can tell a lot about a person’s character by how they treat people they don’t have to treat well”). Compare that to Dr. No, or Die Hard, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or The Dark Knight or any of the classic thrillers.
How to Fix: as I said, give your villain the best dialogue. Give him at least one scene to gloat, even if it’s a little unrealistic. Or give him some humanizing or admirable touch, even if it’s just thumbing his nose at social conventions (which we all want to do, deep down).
3. They’re Called Plot Twists, Not Plot Roundabouts
I’m going to spoil a bit of the Act 2 setpiece here, but hopefully most of you have seen the movie already. If not, you’ll still enjoy it even if you know the following.
In act 2, our heroes are stationed at the Burj Khalifa, Dubai, the tallest building in the world. They have to intercept a set of Russian nuclear launch codes before they pass from an assassin to one of the villain’s henchmen. Their plan is to send both the assassin and the henchman to the wrong rooms, with members of the team posing as each, to fake both the handoff and the payoff.
BUT, things get complicated when both the assassin and the henchman show up early. THEN, things get more complicated when Benji can’t hack the hotel’s servers, requiring Ethan to scale the outside of the hotel to break into the server room. AND THEN things get even more complicated when the mask-making machine breaks down, forcing the team to take the chance that the assassin and the henchman have never met each other. BUT THEN things get still more complicated when it turns out that the henchman is bringing a nuclear launch security expert with him, who can verify the codes onsite, preventing Hunt from handing off phony codes to the henchman. AND THEN …
All this in the space of ten minutes. Before the audience can even get a handle on what’s going on, the direction changes. The plot isn’t twisting at this point; it’s turning in a steady spiral. The result is dizziness, not breathlessness.
How to Fix: tension is a function of uncertainty and stakes. Uncertainty requires a baseline of certainty to spring off of: the audience has to think they know what’s likely before you can start changing likelihoods. Get them comfortable before you start tugging on the rug. The M:I series should be ripe for this. There’s lots of opportunity for teams to play with gadgets, monitor surveillance and form plans, developing a scenario to its natural conclusion. Then, just before the end, throw in a plot twist.
By calling out these three points, I don’t mean to imply that the writers of Mission Impossible 4: Haunted Three-Ring Binder are morons or that I’m some master auteur. I’m still learning. But part of the learning process means being an informed audience member and taking notes.
Anyone else seen MI4GP yet? What were your thoughts?
he makes love to the duke, he swordfights the queen
Posted on | January 4, 2012 | 3 Comments
On Monday, I reported on my sales numbers for Too Close to Miss‘s first month: 755 copies in total. Of those 755, 583 came from Barnes & Noble.
It’s tough to find exact figures on how much bigger Amazon is than Barnes & Noble, especially in the burgeoning ebook space. The best estimates I’ve found peg Amazon’s market share at over sixty percent. That remaining forty percent is being fought over by Barnes & Noble, Sony, iTunes and other platforms as well, so it’s not as if there are close second placers. And yet in spite of that, I’ve sold three times the number of copies on B&N that I have on Amazon.
The best I can do is guess. But my guesses are as good as anyone else’s in this crazy business, so here goes:
The recent launching of Kindle Direct Publishing Select resulted in a flurry of volume among the top authors on Amazon. I would wager that a big chunk of Kindle title sales in December were actually loans of KDP Select titles, which count as sales for the purposes of ranking. So anyone who wasn’t in KDP might have lost some sales as a result.
B&N’s self-publishing platform, PubIt!, lets you classify a book in five categories, compared to KDP’s two. It’s possible that Too Close to Miss is ranking better in Women Sleuths than it is in Thrillers, or doing better in Mysteries > Hard-Boiled than in Suspense. I can’t tell (hey, PubIt! – good data for the next platform release!). But it makes sense that being visible in more places would result in better sales.
Related to the above, it’s possible my title reached some tipping point by being associated with some best-seller. Thriller readers and $0.99 readers tend to read compulsively, downloading and buzzing through titles at high speed. If a few people bought Too Close to Miss as well as some hot title, then my book might have started showing up on more “Readers Who Bought This Also Bought …” lists.
Sales were trucking along on B&N until the 20th, when they spiked to 89 in one day. Some popular blogger recommending it? Some private email list? It seems odd that the boost on that day would all accrue to B&N and nothing to Amazon. Then again, B&N’s PubIt! gives me sales by day if I want them; Amazon’s KDP does not (or if they do, I haven’t found out how). So I might be missing something. In any case, since that spike, B&N sales have been averaging between 20 and 30 a day.
Ultimately, my surge in B&N volume may not have one root cause. But it’s a good thing I didn’t enroll in KDP Select when it was offered, as I would have had to take my title off of B&N. That would have cost me a few hundred dollars, and I can’t pretend I would have made that up in KDP Select lending.
Obviously, the same results might not be true for everybody. If your book is dragging its binding in the dust on B&N, you stand a chance to make more money in KDP Select. But make sure you look at the numbers before deciding. I did, and I got a very pleasant surprise.
saving his pennies for Sunday
Posted on | January 2, 2012 | 3 Comments
It’s been a hell of a first month, hasn’t it?1
I don’t want this to turn into an indie writing blog focused solely on the numbers. I see a lot of those. While big sales are good, there are more important considerations, like growing the craft, developing a network of supportive readers and fellow authors, establishing benchmarks for quality, and so forth.
But: I’m new to the indie publishing process. I’m learning. And I invited all of you to learn with me. This means ripping open the numbers and letting strangers peck at them.
In the first month, I have 755 sales attributed to Too Close to Miss. This is across Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the various Smashwords platforms. It doesn’t include iTunes sales figures, which I only get to see quarterly, so for all I know I’ve sold more. But 755 is what I know I’ve done.
Some observations:
To the best of my knowledge, 755 units is a phenomenal month for an independent, debut, no-name author. I’m very proud of it. I’d be more proud if it felt real; this is still some sort of crazy dream.
Of those, 148 came in the first full week (Dec 2nd through 10th), 126 in the second week (Dec 11th through 17th), 333 in the third week (Dec 18th through 24th) (more on that odd surge tomorrow) and 169 in the final week (Dec 25th through 31st). So it seems like 100 / week is a good minimum to hope for.
This was at a price of $0.99 across all platforms. Yesterday, as threatened, I raised the price to $3.992. My seat-of-the-pants guess is that multiplying the price by 4X will reduce sales volume by 4X. Of course, the royalty structure on Amazon and B&N means I’ll still be making more money, even if this is the case. And maybe demand is more inelastic than I suspect: maybe I’ll only lose half my sales. Or maybe they’ll shrink to 10 books a week. A spectrum of possibilities awaits!
________________
1. Life tip: the trick to making time last longer is to fill your days with new and exciting things. Since December had a book launch, a cycle of marketing and promotion, Christmas and New Year’s Eve in it, it feels like I’ve packed ten weeks into the last four. At this rate, I will live forever, or at least feel that way.
2. However, since iTunes takes longer to update its prices and since Amazon guarantees a price match on its ebooks, it’s still available (as of this writing) for $0.99 on both those platforms. Object lesson: plan your price changes carefully and stagger the execution.
2011: the year in review
Posted on | December 30, 2011 | 2 Comments
The astronomer raised his head from the eyepiece of his giant telescope and rubbed his eyes. He had checked all his figures and couldn’t escape the obvious conclusion.
“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth,” he said.
Picking up the phone, he called 911. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.
“Out of our jurisdiction,” said the dispatcher. “Please stay on the line.”
He called FEMA. After several hours of transfers, he got a voice mail. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said. Then he hung up.
He called his representative in Congress. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.
“Your Congressman shares your concern,” said a junior staffer. “He’s working with the other members of the Ruling Party to keep America strong. He’s grateful for your support in the next election.”
I need to think bigger, the astronomer thought (bigly), dialing the metro desk of his local newspaper. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.
“Okay,” came the reply. “Let me schedule an interview for you next month. Also: do you know any people we can quote for opposing viewpoints? Just for a sense of balance.”
“There aren’t any opposing viewpoints,” the astronomer said. “The asteroid is actually going to hit. And is it my job to get these people?”
“I’m not really sure. I’m an intern. We’ve laid off, like, a lot of writers.”
Realizing that traditional means wouldn’t work, the astronomer set off to make a spectacle. He made the biggest sign he could comfortably carry and a thousand pamphlets and headed downtown to City Hall. Once there, after negotiating for space between the LaRouchies and the homeless guys, he hoisted his sign in the air.
“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said.
An asteroid is going to hit the Earth.
“An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” they said.
By now, the astronomer and his friends were a big enough crowd to draw hecklers. “If there’s a real asteroid, why isn’t NASA doing anything about it?” someone yelled.
“I don’t know,” the astronomer replied. “I’m trying to make sure NASA hears about it!”
“Then why don’t you go to Houston, or wherever the hell NASA lives?”
“I can’t afford to! Could you go?” But the heckler had wandered off.
A few people believed the astronomer, but got offended at what he was saying. “So what if an asteroid is going to ‘hit the Earth’?” said one. “Screaming about it in the streets isn’t going to do anything. This country survived the Revolutionary War, the Great Depression and Bud Selig as commissioner of baseball. It can survive an asteroid.”
“An asteroid’s nothing like the Great Depression,” said the astronomer. “It’s an asteroid. And it affects the whole Earth. And I’m not screaming.”
Worse than the hecklers, though, were the well-intentioned critics. “It’s important that you’re bringing this to people’s attention,” said one science blogger. “But by protesting like some crazy hippie …”
“I’m not protesting,” said the astronomer.
“… you discredit the whole scientific community. You make us look irrational. What you need to do is publish your list of grievances as a letter in a reputable journal …”
“I don’t have grievances!”
“… and then submit a study for peer review.”
“Anyone can look at my data,” said the astronomer. “It’s on the web at anasteroidisgoingtohittheearth.tumblr.com. I’m not doing this because I want publication; I’m doing this because I fear for the future of life on this planet.”
As more people reviewed and corroborated the astronomer’s data, the crowd outside City Hall grew. Frowning, the mayor put in a call to the Police Commissioner, who deployed a SWAT team.
“We respect your right to criticize the government,” said the Commissioner.
“I’m not criticizing!”
“… but local statutes forbid interest groups from occupying this privately-owned plaza immediately in front of City Hall without a permit.”
“I’m not an interest group,” the astronomer said. “Unless the entire human race is an interest group, because the entire human race might be in danger from this asteroid that is going to hit the Earth!”
The SWAT team drew their Tasers.
The violent crackdown on the astronomer and his two dozen followers got some media attention. “Scientists are taking to the streets,” said an Opposition Party candidate, “holding the Mayor accountable. And it’s about time. Our nation has lagged behind China, India and other shoe-producing countries in science education for far too long. Unless we make our children a priority, the 21st century is going to hit America like an asteroid!”
“The asteroid isn’t a metaphor,” the astronomer said. “It’s an actual asteroid that will hit the actual Earth.” But he wasn’t on camera, so nobody heard him.
Members of the Ruling Party were harsher. “In this time of economic crisis,” said a prominent Senator, “it’s irresponsible for anyone to suggest spending taxpayer dollars on some anti-meteor laser or giant force field. These are the sorts of boneheaded ideas that ivory tower academics produce all the time. The moral depravity of America’s universities continues to sicken me.”
“Who said anything about a laser?” the astronomer said. “Or a force field?” But a quick search uncovered similar protests in other cities, protests with very specific lists of demands. “Who are these guys?” he wondered.
As the circle of “Kum-Ba-Yah”-chanting protesters linked arms to prevent the SWAT team from dispersing the camp with non-lethal shotguns, a FEMA coordinator struggled through the crowd. He had played the astronomer’s voice mail from a week earlier and had finally caught up with him.
“I believe you,” he told the astronomer. “I checked the data with NORAD and it all makes sense. So now what?”
“I don’t know,” said the astronomer.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Aren’t you the leader of this movement? What’s your agenda? What’s your platform? Where are your bullet points?”
“It’s not a movement,” the astronomer said. “I don’t have an agenda.”
“Then what are you even doing here?”
Having delivered this speech several times over the last week, the astronomer was able to control his patience. “Look,” he said, “I’m an astronomer. I’m not an engineer or a civil defense coordinator or a paramedic. Those are the people who need to know about this asteroid that’s going to hit the Earth. But I can’t make them act.”
“I don’t think a paramedic will know how to deal with an asteroid hitting the Earth.”
“Probably not. But someone out there will, and if I keep saying this loud enough and for long enough, that person will hear this and think about it. And then they’ll come up with a solution. Failing that, if everybody accepts the fact that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth – because it is – then maybe people will start doing what they need to do to minimize the damage, instead of passing it off or pretending that traditional institutions are capable of dealing with it. I can’t make anyone do anything. All I can do is tell people what I know: that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth.”
“Makes sense,” the FEMA coordinator said. “Have you called your Congressperson?”
The astronomer started crying.
Meanwhile, the SWAT team had just received the order to move in. “It’s too bad,” said one officer, checking the non-lethal rounds in his non-lethal shotgun. “I sympathize with these guys, I really do. I mean, who wants to get hit by an asteroid?”
“I’m with you,” said his sergeant. “But we live in a society of laws. If you want someone to do something about an asteroid, you line up and vote like the rest of us.”
“Amen to that. Me and Sully are grabbing some beers after; you want in?”
“Nah, I’m gonna head home,” the sergeant said, looking up at the sky. “It got dark awful early today.”
Tags: allegory > an evening with the professor > democracy > giant asteroid > institutions > occupy wall street > rule of law > silly
you’ve been so kind and generous; I don’t know how you keep on giving
Posted on | December 28, 2011 | No Comments
Three bullets:
First, the number of people who downloaded Too Close to Miss as their first purchase for their Kindle or Nook is overwhelming. Thank you all. The near-total market penetration amongst my friends tells me I need to get my marketing game together, because I’m running out of friends with e-readers.
More on this later, but a quick observation: as of today, my sales on Barnes & Noble have tripled my sales on Amazon. This is so far outside my expectations of how the various ebook platforms would work that I’m treating it as I would a hundred-dollar bill found on the bottom of my closet. I’ll have a lengthier post examining how and why this might have happened come the new year, but for now: thank you Nook users!
The people who bother to read this blog every day (and thank you!) are the closest thing to a mailing list I have right now, so you get to hear it first: I’m jacking up the price of Too Close to Miss on January 1st. I don’t know to what yet, but at least to the magical $2.99 price point, if not higher. I think I’ve plumbed the network of supportive friends and curious strangers about as deep as I can, which is what the $0.99 come-on was meant to do. But to achieve my dream of being a self-supporting writer, I need to (someday) earn a decent amount of revenue per sale. I don’t expect to start earning that total next month, or even next year. But I need to see how much sales will drop – if at all – as the price goes up. I need data more than I need units moving off the virtual shelf.
So if you’ve bought Too Close to Miss already and enjoyed it, please let your friends know that they can only get it this cheap for 4 more days. Send them to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or iTunes. You’ll position yourself as a distinguished connoisseur, that savvy critic who can point out ebook gems in the crowded turf. “I bought his first one at just under a dollar,” you’ll say, gesturing for the waiter to refill your Chateau d’Yquem, “and it’s held its value remarkably well.”
Consume it? Don't be absurd. It's an investment!
screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it
Posted on | December 23, 2011 | 4 Comments
In light of the pending passage of SOPA, several friends have circulated a VICE article titled, “Dear Congress: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How the Internet Works“. I was about to work up a good head of steam and post a counter-rant, but Marie C. linked me to a great response: “Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works” that says about 75% of what I would have said:
What you have to understand is that Congress is saying that they don’t understand the Internet isn’t a failure of Congress. You may think these guys in Washington are foolish — even too stupid to really understand the “mysteries of the Internet.” but look at how our members of Congress talk about the biopharmaceutical industry: I haven’t used the word “biosimilar” once in my life, but Congress used it 70+ times in a single month.
If Congress is complaining that they don’t know about something that you care about, the right answer isn’t to tell them to go get educated. The right answer is to educate them. Congress mentioned the word “biologics” 75 times in a month because a lobbyist spent a long time doing their job: educating members of Congress on the needs of its industry.
Right now, if you want effective legislation around your industry, then you need to pay the right lobbyists, make the right campaign contributions, and write the right legislation at the right time in order to get it out of Washington.
To which I have nothing to add save this:
The complaint, as I understand it, is that legislators in Congress are not experts on the Internet. They are, in fact, extraordinarily ill-informed on the subject and have no desire to get smarter. Now if your message is that “members of Congress are brutish failures living unexamined lives,” I’ll sign your petition and buy you a drink. But among my more outraged friends, I sensed this growing chorus of enraged disappointment. There was a consensus that Congress could, or should, do better.
Guys, Congress is not comprised of experts on any subject. That’s the point. That’s how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. Rather than letting the experts on health care (doctors) determine the cost of health care, or the experts on engineering (engineers) decide where bridges are built, or the experts on logistics (generals) decide where the army gets deployed, the people elect a series of stand-ins to make these decisions instead.
The fear was that if you leave the experts in charge, they will arrange affairs to benefit themselves. And that’s not an unreasonable concern! Quoting James Madison in Federalist #10:
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are the different classes of Legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?
So no, legislators are not experts on the subjects they write laws about. That’s the whole idea. Legislators are separate from the factions they govern, in order to preserve objectivity. What the VICE article is describing is not a bug, it’s not a feature, it was the god-damned selling point.
And lest you think I’m taking silly outdated ideas like “bicameral legislature” out of context, consider the healthcare reboot that rammed its way through Congress in 2010. Back then, the concern was passing the bill before the Opposition Party could bog it down in committee. Nancy Pelosi advocated for “passing the bill so that you can find out what is in it” (her words). Sam Baucus, one of the principal architects, proudly claimed not to have read every page (“it’s statutory language [...] we hire experts”). The Ruling Party urged the passage of a bill known to be imperfect through “prompt, decisive leadership,” and letting adjustments to the law come later. Everywhere the emphasis was on speed, not on results.
In other words, the goal was not to craft an ideal piece of law, but to hurry a bill through the process as quickly as possible.
Well, congratulations! This is what you wanted. This is the process you championed: a process where MPAA lobbyists can bring about the end of unregulated Internet speech by rushing a bill through Congress. This is what happens when a body of legislators is invested with immense power: they might use it to do stupid things. Every law that you think is a good idea is the result of a bunch of uninformed self-promoters taking lobbyist money, trading favors and slapping each other on the back. All of them. The bad ones, too.
The problem is not that power is being used for evil. The problem is not that power is in the wrong people’s hands. The problem is that the power exists at all.
Paying The Bills
Feed
Search This Site
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Andrea Harris on but little do they know that she’s not through
- Perich on but little do they know that she’s not through
- Andrea Harris on but little do they know that she’s not through
- Andrea Harris on but little do they know that she’s not through
- Lindsay on but little do they know that she’s not through
Archives
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
Periscope Depth
TOO CLOSE TO MISS
"... opens with a bang and never relents ..."
"... from chapter one, I couldn't put the damn thing down ..."
"... already looking forward to Perich's next book ..."
Mara Cunningham knew that sleeping with a married man was a bad idea. But when her lover shows up in the hospital after his wife and son are murdered, the rumors about her turn dangerous. Now she's the prime suspect in a double homicide, and the real killers will stop at nothing to silence her ...
Buy the book that readers are calling "a great, suspenseful thriller" at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers.
