2012 March | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Mar

turn prisons into prisms of the self

Posted by Perich at 7:05 am

I talked about The Hunger Games (the movie) with the rest of the Overthinkers on this week’s podcast; check it out. But the podcast is (or tries to be) more of an objective analysis, less of a subjective review. So, for my own thoughts:

Several friends of mine have complained recently about the injustice of Bully, a documentary about actual problems with actual teenagers, being rated R, while The Hunger Games, a fictional movie about teenagers murdering each other, is rated PG-13. The argument is that children need to see movies like Bully in order to put a face on a problem that they might otherwise ignore.

While I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of The Bully Project, it is just as important that every teenager in America sees The Hunger Games on the big screen. They need to see a world where people accept income inequality as the just outcome of wrongdoing two hundred years ago. They need to see a world where young adults are marched off to death with no objection. They need to see a world where the voices and faces of media are tools of social control. They need to see a world where it’s the villains who call ritual slaughter a “sacrifice” that needs to be “honored,” not the heroes.

But, of course, it’s fantasy. It’s a world where children are told that they need to conform to recognizable roles as early as they can or they’ll be picked off at the fringes of the herd. It’s a world where kissing the boy that society approves of gets you rewards. It’s a world from which there’s no escape – from which the idea of running away, living off the land and ignoring the arbitrary annual bloodletting, is laughed off. It’s bizarro science-fiction; look at the haircuts.

Yes, the setup is brutal, and depressing, and pointless. But what are you going to do when they start pulling names out of slips? Not send a tribute to the Capital?

Mar

folding paper

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Two important book announcements!

First, my friend Gina Damico’s macabre YA fantasy novel Croak is now available at Amazon or other fine retailers. If you don’t want your kids reading about emo vampires, give them this fun little page-turner. I’ve tried about three times to write a good description for it, and I can’t come up with one as good as the back cover copy, so:

Fed up with her wild behavior, sixteen-year-old Lex’s parents ship her off to upstate New York to live with her Uncle Mort for the summer, hoping that a few months of dirty farm work will whip her back into shape. But Uncle Mort’s true occupation is
much dirtier than shoveling manure.

He’s a Grim Reaper. And he’s going to teach Lex the family business.

It’s dark, it’s goofy and nobody falls in love with a hundred-year-old. Why haven’t you bought it already?

In more personal news: for those of you who haven’t caught up with my 80-year-old great aunts yet and bought a Kindle, you can now get Too Close to Miss on paperback through Amazon. Same great content as the well-received ebook, but now on stylish plant matter. Enjoy!

If you own an e-reader and want to pick up Too Close to Miss now, you can download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you already enjoyed Too Close to Miss in electronic form, recommend the paperback version to a friend via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Mar

it’s lethal but it’s living proof

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Hey! Look what came in the mail on Friday:

After designing an awesome cover for my ebook version, Ryan Sawyer took a stab at formatting the image for a paperback binding. This proved maddening for several reasons:

1) Createspace has an automated review process that checks out any PDF you send them for a cover design. Ryan’s kept failing because the block caps of the title were too close to the bleed (that is, the edge of the printable image). That’s what we wanted, of course: we wanted to preserve the claustrophobic effect. But when Createspace flags your cover as failing, there’s no “override and print this anyway” option. So Ryan squeezed the title a bit and we pressed on.

2) Print layout is a science as much as an art. When you read a paperback novel, you’re accustomed to a serifed font of about 10-pt, with between 50-60 characters per line of text. Bigger than that and it looks odd; smaller than that and the eye tires out. Getting it exactly right took several tries, each of which meant printing, ordering and shipping another galley proof.

3) And every time I changed the font, I changed the page count, which meant I had changed the width of the spine, which meant Ryan had to do another cover.

4) Add to this the fact that Createspace didn’t always recognize the fonts I used in Word for Mac, meaning I had to save the file as a PDF, see how it rendered, make any changes, re-save as a PDF and re-upload, etc.

Maybe I’m spoiled, starting out in the era of ebooks, but page layout is a pain in the ass. Deciding what font my book has to be in? Or how many words per line? Why can’t I let the reader decide that? They paid for the book; it’s theirs to play with. And on Kindle or Nook, those options are available to you. In print, I have to govern the experience page by page. What century is this?

Having done the print layout myself (with a bit of help from Sylvia), I can see the value of paying for a professional. Not that I think I’ll need to next time: I have a template now that I can re-use for the next book in the series. But maybe a huge industry grew up around this process for a reason!

If you own an e-reader and want to pick up Too Close to Miss now, you can download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you have friends who don’t own e-readers, but would like this book once it’s available in paperback form, please tell them what you thought of Too Close to Miss via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Mar

you can’t choose what stays and what fades away

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Everyone else in the industry has seen this already, but here’s the WSJ last week with some bad news for legacy publishers:

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

[...]

The five publishers facing a potential suit are CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc.; Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group; Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

Hey, what’d I tell you?

When I first heard of this model, it sounded oddly familiar. Not because Apple had put it into practice already (for ebooks on iTunes). It sounded like minimum advertised pricing (MAP), a stunt that had cost music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars.

[...]

Telling retailers that you’d like them to advertise your products at a minimum price is not illegal in itself. However, the 43 states (and the FTC, in a parallel lawsuit) alleged that MAP was a tactic used to fix a de facto price floor.

I need to stress that I’m not loving this outcome. I had hoped that the Big 6 would recognize the danger they were in and back down from agency pricing without the threat of a lawsuit. The law is a blunt instrument, treating cancer with a claw hammer instead of a laser. Fortunately, per the WSJ article, it looks like the publishers and the Justice Department are agreeing on a settlement so that no one has to go to court.

What might the end of agency pricing mean for readers? Cheaper ebooks across all platforms. No more Kindle books at $14.99.

What might the end of agency pricing mean for authors? Mike Shatzkin speculated that this could be bad for indie authors, as keeping the $0.99 to $2.99 window free of legacy publishers gave indie authors room to stand out. I don’t know that I buy this. In the app market, for instance, both the small companies and the big ones compete in the $0.99 space. Angry Birds wasn’t locked out by the SimCity app. Consumer demand has a way of forcing cream to the top.

(I recognize that I may be committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, picking a successful indie game to prove that an indie game can succeed. But all we have is backward-looking data and experiments in the future)

What does this mean for the craft? For the moment, nothing. Keep writing, keep building a fan base, and keep your options open. The publishing industry has changed overnight in the past. We might have at least one more change coming.