Archive for the 'Publishing' Category
December 1st, 2011 by jdsawyer
I’ve been waiting for this day 
a long time. When I first wrote Down From Ten as a screenplay, a production company in Canada was going to be handling rights clearances for the Alan Jay Lerner music incorporated into one of the scenes. When I did the podcast, ASCAP was very helpful. But as a print book, I had to wade into a rights clearance arena I’d never worked with before.
It was worth it. And the folks at the company that manages the Lerner estate were very helpful. Because of their kind work, I can now proudly present you with the ebook version of Down From Ten, a novel uniquely close to my heart.
In early January, a group of friends gather for an annual retreat: eight artists, scientists, and authors cloistered together in a mansion in California’s high country for ten days of games, conversation, exhibition, and hedonism while isolated from the outside world.
The biggest Sierra snowstorm in over twenty years, however, is not part of their plans.
When the house is buried in an avalanche, leaving our heroes with no way to hike out, they must somehow survive and stay sane while waiting for rescue—which becomes difficult when they all start having the same dream.
“Down From Ten is a brilliant, sometimes creepy take on a bohemian cozy with surreal underpinnings and an irrepressibly touching ending.” –Gail Carriger, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Parasol Protectorate series
For the first time in text, read the story that View from Valhalla calls “Unique, lavish, and challenging…amazing in its scope and its detail…with THE most surprising ending I’ve EVER experienced.”
Get it now for your Kindle, Nook, or any other reader.
Or, read the first three chapters here.
Enjoy!
October 5th, 2011 by jdsawyer
We all know that adventurous types like Joe Konrath, and established types like Kris Rusch, and insanely successful types like J.K. Rowling have been having a ball publishing ebooks on their own–and we know that weirdos like me are going to do it because we’re maverick by nature and like tickling the envelope in ways that could get you arrested for molesting post office property, but what about other authors? What’s in it for them?
Why on earth would a youngish author (less than 20 years publishing) with ongoing publishing contracts ever even think about cheating on their publisher with Amazon, Smashwords, PubIt, et. al.? After all, isn’t it a lot of work? Who’s going to do the marketing? And if he’s getting checks from the big boys, why bother with the small-potatoes in ebookland? Why not just leave that stuff to the old guys with a backlist, and the newbies who aren’t good enough to land a New York Deal?
Continue reading ‘But I Already Have a Publisher…’
September 13th, 2011 by jdsawyer
So, the latest-and-greatest panic rumor is that Amazon is going to create a “Netflix for books,” where any Amazon Prime member can download (presumably) any ebook they want for nothing more than the cost of their Prime membership.
People on the net–particularly paranoid authors and lugubrious tech writers–have been speculating about something like this for a while now, and now, according to an article in Wired, Amazon’s actually putting out feelers to see if they can make it work.
Authors, needless to say, are in a lather, because they see the potential that a) their miniscule royalty share from publishers decreasing as more people effectively use the Amazon equivalent of a library instead of paying for books, and b) Amazon might use the sea change as an opportunity to give their e-publishers a big royalty cut (which has been the paranoid topic du jour ever since they bumped it from 35 to 70 percent).
Me? I think it’s bullshit, for several reasons:
Continue reading ‘Netflix for Books? Riiiiiight.’
August 30th, 2011 by jdsawyer
I’m going way out on a limb here. I’m only a lay enthusiast in the field of economics, not an expert in the field, but I’ve got a middling amount of business experience in a variety of different fields, and a strange notion has been growing on my mind lately:
What if the ebook revolution isn’t about ebooks? What if, instead, it’s a symptom of a fundamental restructuring of most of the nature of market economies?
Continue reading ‘The Ebook Revolution Isn’t about Ebooks’
July 11th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Apologies to those who are already tired of this–it’s threatening to become a hobby horse. Looks like with Google+, Google is going where every stupid lawyer has gone before: claiming “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
Ugh. I can tell you where my photo gallery WON’T be moving. I’m beginning to think that the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” is one of the more inventive demonstrations of the elastic nature of the English language.
Photofocus has full coverage. Check it out (because I’m frankly too annoyed to go through this all again). For those interested in my extended thoughts on the matter, read this post on the Dropbox mess, this post on how the economics of free online services actually work, and this post on perpetual licenses.
Meanwhile, I’m beginning to think we need a real test case for this kind of bullshit to either rule it out of order and illegal once and for all (in which case we can ignore these kinds of licensing terms), or make it clear that such clauses are enforceable (and under what circumstances) so that we know exactly what to avoid.
EFF? ACLU? Are you listening?
July 8th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Dropbox keeps trying. They’ve changed their TOS again–if you’re watching and waiting for them to get their act in order, check the link and see where they’re at now.
Meanwhile, Gigacom has posted an interesting analysis about what the public reaction to Dropbox might mean for the future of online privacy.
Finally, a reader wrote in privately to recommend the iTwin as a potential alternative to Dropbox. From my once-over, it looks to me like i’ll be very useful for a limited subsection of Dropbox users, and fairly idiot-proof, and it certainly does get around the disadvantages of the cloud services. It’s relatively inexpensive, so if you’re looking for an alternative it’s worth checking out.
July 6th, 2011 by jdsawyer
ECtimes posts an excellent analysis of why Dropbox’s TOS situation continues to be a problem for its users–and compares the current (revised several times since Friday) wording to the wording of some other, similar services. Worth a gander.
—addendum—
There are more updates on the Dropbox situation at my new blog post here.
July 3rd, 2011 by jdsawyer
Dropbox has posted a public explanation for their rapid TOS changes today. As suspected, the email they’ve gotten from concerned users hasn’t gone unnoticed–that’s a good thing.
Am I now recommending them? Hell no. Assuming the best of intentions, I think they are in error about the kind of license they need to run a data archive service. And, again, assuming the best of intentions, the sorts of rights they’re claiming to run their service are very easily abused–and the folks that run Dropbox today, no matter how honorable they are, will not be running the place forever. Young companies frequently have rapid changes of administration, and in my opinion it’s foolish to put that kind of trust in the goodwill of even the most ethical of service providers. For a more lengthy explanation why, see my post on The Third Cousins Rule.
There is also the underlying problem with free cloud-based data services, which I mentioned briefly in one of the comments on the previous post, but which I should do a full blog post on. Think I’ll schedule that one for next week.
— —
By the way, for the benefit of those who have privately posted flames on the earlier comment thread (which didn’t make it through moderation due to using false email addresses) asking whether I’ve read a TOS, I recommend you check out this thread on Reddit, in which TOS from similar services by Microsoft Skydrive and SpiderOak are quoted–and they’re FAR more reasonable and intelligent than today’s Dropbox drivel:
The Reddit discussion
And I gotta say, as a company, if Microsoft has less intrusive TOS than you do, you’re doing something wrong. Kudos also to SpiderOak for blind-encrypting their stuff, so they can’t even get to it if they wanted to. There are a couple examples of how cloud-based data services should be done. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but kudos to Microsoft!
Thanks everyone for spreading the word to those affected by all this!
—-Addendum—-
I’ve posted a follow-up with recommendations on how to decide if, and what, back up service will suit your needs, and how to protect yourself from getting screwed by one. You can find that post here.
—Second Addendum—
There are more updates on the Dropbox situation at my new blog post here.
June 13th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Most people why buy a book or pick it up from the library just want to read it–that’s an excellent thing! Sometimes, though, us authors get email from fans who, for whatever reason, what to know what extra they can do. If you’re in that camp, this is for you. If that doesn’t describe you, you’re gonna be bored or annoyed by much of what follows 
Let’s say you’ve found an author you love with a series you adore (and, let’s face it, who hasn’t?). If you’ve been a reader long enough, you’ve experienced the frustration of an orphaned series–where the publisher just drops things mid story, and the next book is never written. You might even have gotten very annoyed with the author for it, and confronted them at a convention or a signing, only to be told it’s out of their hands.
Unfortunate though it might be, the truth is that the success of a series lies in your hands. You may be just one of thousands of readers, but it only takes a handful out of every thousand readers to make a huge difference in how a book does on the open market.
Seanan McGuire a.k.a. Mira Grant and Gail Carriger have both recently chimed in recently on how you can help an author out, and it caused a bit of a shitstorm on twitter–I suspect that storm is a by-product of the interesting times we live in in publishing.
Continue reading ‘Fans Making A Difference’
June 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
A funny thing happens during times of great industrial upheaval: Everyone wants a piece of the new deal, but nobody wants to take what they perceive to be a risk. Most established players retrench, hold on to what’s familiar, and try to shout down anyone with a contravening opinion. It’s human nature to get defensive when one perceives a threat to one’s view of the universe.
In the midst of the upheaval in the publishing industry, I’m seeing this a lot. As agents are conning their clients into unethical business arrangements (and kudos to Peter Cox and Kristen Nelson for going on record about the danger this represents to writers), editors with excellent reputations are getting kicked off writing forums for providing data on the change, publishers are defrauding their authors and engaging in massive rights grabs, breaking the rules can earn you some pretty serious grief from other writers who are following the rules and hoping they’ll get reputation points for it.
Trouble is, this isn’t first grade. There are no gold stars for following the rules. And a lot of people are breaking the rules.
And they’re winning.
Continue reading ‘Who’s an Outlier, Again?’
May 31st, 2011 by jdsawyer
— — — —
Previous chapter: Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (Or Should)
— — — —
Implicit in the early installments in this series was the assumption that when you do a business deal, both parties have something to gain and something to lose. It follows then, that all other things being equal, when you approach the negotiating table, you’re negotiating with an equal. Unfortunately, things are most often unequal.
There are a lot of things that go into the power dynamics of a negotiation. The most obvious is need: whichever one of you needs the deal more has less power to dictate terms. That’s important, and we’ll deal with it in this installment, but it’s not the whole picture.
Why not? For two reasons:
First, people live in societies, and those societies have laws that govern how contracts are made and limit what terms can be legally agreed to, and under what conditions. It is not, for example, legal to sell oneself into slavery in the West, or to sell another into slavery. Snicker all you want, this was not always the case–in fact, by some looser definitions of the term “slavery,” this has only become illegal in the United States in the last two generations. I kid you not.
What constraints the law imposes on your bargaining ability varies from industry to industry, but in general the terms are governed by three areas of law: Contract law, Tax law, and domain-specific regulations (copyright laws, labor laws, real estate laws, environmental laws, etc.). Some of these laws vary radically from state-to-state, and Federal law can trump State law or defer to State law, or it can specify which State’s laws have jurisdiction in an interstate deal–all depending on the circumstances. As the party to a contract, it’s your responsibility to get familiar with the laws in the domains you’re dealing in. If you’re working in a heavily regulated industry, or an industry with a lot of caselaw (ex: anything involving employees or intellectual property), you’d be well advised to run things by a lawyer.
Second, everybody’s human, and as such are susceptible to losing sight of the deal because their focus shifts to the contest. This is the stock-in-trade of every salesperson on the planet: to convince you to buy what they’re selling by distracting you from the deal when you display reluctance. These distractions can take the form of compliments, social bonding gestures (getting you a cup of coffee, talking to you about movies), by threats and insults (“only a fool would pass this up,” “I can only give you this deal today”), incentives (“Act now and get a free dairy cow”), plays for sympathy (“how can I feed my children with a profit margin that slim?”) and affected offense (“I can’t believe you’d think I’d cheat you!”). These tricks come in all guises, and played well, they bear the stamp of legitimacy, but using the trump card I get to later you can strip away a lot of the pretense.
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: Embrace Your Inner 2 Year-Old’
May 26th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Preface: I mentioned this in the first post in this series, but because I’m going to be talking about some specific points of law in this post, I need to reiterate: I am not a lawyer, am not qualified to dispense legal advice, and none of what follows should be considered as legal advice. All of what follows is opinion based on experience and on layperson’s research, and you should always consult a lawyer of an appropriate specialty when negotiating an IP-related contract (especially when dealing with a company that can afford bigger lawyers than you can).
— — — —
Previous chapter: Market Awareness
— — — —
If God had a lounge singer in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, I’d lay you even odds that it would have been Peggy Lee. Along with Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Rosemary Clooney, she had a glorious, smoky, rich alto that wrapped naturally around horns and clarinets to make sounds that were the aural equivalent of chocolate.
Peggy Lee had a good friend named Walter, and Walter need a singer/songwriter for his new project. Walter did good work, and he was a good friend, so Peggy gave him a good rate, and in 1955 the result of that project hit the country like Christmas. It was a little movie called Lady and the Tramp.
It was a great collaboration, and they had a good contract for the time (Peggy and her cowriter retained rights to “transcriptions” such as record albums and sheet music–a smart move). Everything might have been peachy for life, if Sony hadn’t screwed up the world with home video.
Videotapes have been around pretty much since the Big Bang (or at least since 1951) in broadcast, but nobody really expected that it would wind up being something people used at home any more than the early computer manufacturers thought that your phone would contain twice the computing power that sent men to the moon (which some of them now do). Even if it were technically possible, why would anyone want home video when they had, you know, lives? And television? A professional toy like video tape wouldn’t appeal to a mass market–or such was the thinking. Sony, by the 1970s the world leader in miniaturization, disagreed. In 1975 they introduced Betamax, the first home video format.
It took a few years for it to catch on, but (thanks largely to the porn industry) by the 1980s home video was THE thing (and in the years since, this trend has only deepened with more formats being released). Studios started making their bread-and-butter money from video rentals and sales, rather than from theatrical exhibition. The only people who had a problem with this were the artists who weren’t getting paid for the work they’d done for theatrical exhibition–but most of them just grumbled. Not Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee pulled out her lawyers and said “Sic ‘em.”
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (or should)’
May 17th, 2011 by jdsawyer
As I get to the very end of writing Free Will, it’s time to wrench open the Antithesis taps again.
My friend Danny Schade has now soundtracked two and a half books for me over the last couple years. For Predestination, he composed upwards of nine hours of music, and it made such an impression that people started immediately clamoring for versions they could listen to without the story talking over it.
A year ago, Schadey came out to ArtisticWhispers where he and I brought in veteran producer Mary Mason, and the three of us proceeded to rework the music into an album. In that first glorious weekend, we culled those original nine hours down to nineteen emblematic tracks with a running time target of between fifty minutes and an hour. Then, over the year since, in stolen moments, Schadey composed and recorded new material and arrangements at his home base in Colorado, while we here in California re-mixed, produced, sweetened, polished, and sometimes re-orchestrated the original material, blending the old with the new to bring Schadey’s audio vision snapping to the fore. The result is one we now proudly present to you, for the first time anywhere: A one hour instrumental genre-spanning rock opera. Predestination: The Soundtrack.
Available now as a DRM-free MP3 download.
Also, don’t forget that the novel which started it all is now available as an ebook, with all new scenes and other material to deepen the world and set you up for Free Will, which is coming in June. Get it now for Kindle, Nook, and for all other readers on Smashwords. And, of course, if you like the artwork, you can get a signed and numbered limited edition poster print for your private gallery.
And remember…
…It isn’t whether you win or lose. It’s how you rig the game.
April 16th, 2011 by jdsawyer
It’s tax weekend, and if you’re like most 
Americans you’re madly rushing to get your forms (or extensions) filed. Of course, if you’re not American, you’ll have to deal with taxes sooner or later anyway. In either case, chances are you’ll hit the end of your weekend and be forced from the gorgeous spring weather to the inside of an office, or a warehouse, or a truck–and that’s when you’ll really need a bit of a vacation.
As your fantasy travel agent, allow me to offer you a guided tour of the San Francisco Bay Area like you’ve never seen it before: through the eyes of detective Clarke Lantham, sentenced to the hell of the suburbs in his quest to find a missing teenage girl. For the first time in paperback from AWP Mystery comes And Then She Was Gone, the adventure described by Gail Carriger as “full of snappy one-liners I’m dying to quote” and by Seth Harwood as “a mystery so dark and complex that you could lose a molar biting into it.”
Now available from AWP Mystery in paperback, And Then She Was Gone is a tense, funny, action packed adventure that sticks its fingers just under edge in order to flip it over. The handsome new edition rings in at 214 pages contains the full text of the ebook edition, plus a map detailing the geography that plays such an integral role in the story, along with a sample of the second Clarke Lantham novel, A Ghostly Christmas Present.
Now, it’s true that you can buy the novel at Amazon now, and you’ll be able to find it in bookstores this fall, but for you loyal folk that read my blog, it’s available for a special rate. Until May 15, buy your copy by clicking here and using the coupon code Q38WV4AS, and you’ll receive $1.50 off the $9.99 cover price.
Finally, for those of you who run vending booths at conventions (or who work in bookstores) and would like to carry And Then She Was Gone, shoot me an email from the Contact Form and I will send you the AWP Books wholesale pricing schedule.
I’ll see you between the pages!
April 7th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Time for a new short story–this one is called 
Angels Unawares. It first appeared as part of the Sculpting God series, which is currently re-podcasting from this blog. It later appeared as part of The Podthology, last year’s anthology of the best of podcast short fiction (along with Cold Duty, available at right, and The Man In The Rain, which which will release in a few days).
Now, to brighten your e-book reader, I give you one of my favorite bed-time stories, complete with a new afterword that tells the story behind the story.
In 1898, a woman’s body was discovered broken and battered at the bottom of a tall sea bluff in Southern Scotland. and the small town she lived in began locking the doors at night. Only one man saw what happened, but he carried the secret of her death to his death bed. Wounded in the trenches on the Western Front, he gives his last confession…
Get it now, DRM free, from Amazon or Smashwords.
—Story Sample Below the Cut—
Continue reading ‘Released: Angels Unawares’
