Giant Superintelligent Triassic Squid - Please Come Back

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This Giant Superintelligent Triassic Squid article raises some interesting possibilities.

I don't think that the new scientific work out there on the unexpectedly high intelligence of squid has been sufficiently exploited by genre authors.

Personally, I hope this big guy is still lurking down there in the deeps somewhere. Forget Cloverfield, I want this guy to show up on some waterfront some day.

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The Literature of Deflation

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The New York Times has a frightening little piece up outlining the likely consequences of a Greek departure from the Euro - an event that, to me at least, seems extraordinarily likely.

If Europe truly ends up this bad - if people are fleeing Portugal and Italy with suitcases full of Euros, hoping to hell that Germany doesn't go up in flames too - I have to imagine America's current fascination with apocalypse porn will end pretty quickly. (Sorry, fellow zombie authors.) How fun can that kind of fantasy be, when the reality starts to hit you in the face?

If socialist realism in literature makes a comeback, I for one am going to be really pissed.

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A Quick Thought on Steve Jobs

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I won't try to cover all the big-picture stuff about the legacy of Steve Jobs, because the entire commentariat is trying to do that right now.

I just want to stop and thank the guy for one thing:

Fonts.

They say that Jobs was personally responsible for insisting that the early Mac word processing programs had to include multiple font choices - an innovation that Microsoft rapidly copied.

That one decision was critical in giving birth to desktop publishing.

In a very real sense, a lot of the "creative" side of the computer revolution is descended in one way or another from desktop publishing. That was the moment when computers stopped being an appliance or a computational tool and became a canvas, too.

Thanks, Steve.

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Back to the Blog Thing - Work in Progress

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After a lengthy layoff during which my time was dominated by non-writing projects, I'm back at work on a new series.

I'll be posting updates to this space as I proceed - and I'll also be doing some more standard blogging here as well.

What's the new series about? Well, the short answer is that it revolves around this map:



More to follow.

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Shylock of Venice Now Available in Paperback.

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It took a couple of CreateSpace proofs to get it done, but The Most Extreme Crueltie and Revenge of Shylock of Venice is now available in paperback for $9.95.

Right now it's only up at Amazon. Barnes and Noble and 3rd party booksellers should have it in a few more weeks, when the CreateSpace Expanded Distribution clicks in.

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The Most Extreme Crueltie and Revenge of Shylock of Venice

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…BECAUSE SHAKESPEARE GOT THE ENDING WRONG THE FIRST TIME.

Stripped of his fortune, his daughter, his religion, and even his name, Shylock of Venice (now baptized “Christoforo”, under duress) broods over his injuries alone. A mysterious traveler, dressed in black, offers him the chance to avenge himself upon those who have wronged him, and to seize back all that they have taken. When Shylock agrees, they embark on a journey that takes them across Renaissance Italy and through the history of post-Humanist philosophy – and what they find is not what either of them expects.

As some of you may have seen by now, my latest release has gone live at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

It's ebook-only for the moment; the paperback should be available in a few days.

Warning: this is a play in five acts, written in early modern English. In other words, I totally committed to the conceit that I was creating a sequel to Shakespeare's play. If you hate EME or the play form, this might not be up your alley.

In a piece for the New York Times, Kevin Kelly of Wired fame wrote of the future of ebooks:

...In the universal library, no book will be an island. Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

I was pretty heavily influenced by this somewhat heady vision. It reminded me a great deal of the fictional "glass bead game" in Hesse's Magister Ludi. It's also reflective of the way I think in general. Those of you who read De Bello Lemures can probably see how this vision would appeal to me.

Shylock of Venice was written with this concept of the future ebook in mind. I don't get there, by any stretch of the imagination, but I take a few baby steps. The text is largely composed of repurposed text from other sources [along with original text that is itself heavy with allusion], and the selection process is itself supposed to contain information that informs the primary story. If that sounds really annoying and pretentious, I apologize. I found it fun, and I hope readers will find it fun too.

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Is "Indie" Publishing Destructive to Literature in General?

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Zoe Winters has a blog post up today about indie publishing where she writes:

Some readers see indie authors as immature writers who are going through a “rebellious phase”. Some have even called us “lazy narcissists.” If you can’t look at a book cover and a short sample of a work before judging it, perhaps it isn’t the indie author who is lazy.

I find this very interesting because it’s a problem inherent only in publishing. Entrepreneurs who start businesses in other industries, even other creative industries, are not thought of as acting out in rebellion. They are simply choosing to be captain of their own ship by starting a business.

Freedom is the one thing nearly every human being will seek in one way or another. Whether it’s freedom of religion, freedom from oppressive governments, or freedom from working as a wage slave in someone else’s cubicle. Why should writing be any different?

I’ve wondered about this same question. I’m going to put on my devil’s advocate hat and try, for a change, to put a good face on the anti-indie argument out there.

Most people are familiar with the concept of a "network effect" from the world of computers. There are many technology examples of products or services where a part of the value to the consumer is the fact that everyone else is using that product or service. The Windows operating system, for example, is valuable precisely because it is ubiquitous. When you buy Windows and learn how to use it, you gain access to all the products that work with that operating system. Facebook is another good example. Facebook is valuable because everyone is on it. If you were the only user of Facebook, it wouldn’t matter if it was the best product ever.

So one question we have to ask ourselves is: Are there "network effects" in literature?

Is a book a product where the only transaction is between the author and the reader? If so, then all that matters is if the individual reader enjoys the individual book that they buy. Or are there other transactions going on whenever a reader buys and reads a book?

It may be that part of the value in some literary works is the fact that everyone else has read them. There can never be another Shakespeare, for example, because even if someone came along with the same verbal and dramatic talent, Shakespeare’s works have a four hundred year head start on getting integrated into our cultural landscape. A "new Shakespeare" would not have all of his plots recycled in a million other stories and movies. He would not have the vast academic infrastructure devoted to the study of every layer of meaning in his works. You would not be able to go to his birthplace and take part in dozens of tourist attractions based on his name. Shakespeare is just more useful to us, because we’ve all read him, than he would be if he was a niche interest known only to a few specialists.

This pretty straightforward fact makes it at least possible that something will be lost if the mass-interest world of publishing is demolished and replaced with long-tail independent niche publishing. We might all still be able to find individual authors whose work we enjoy, but might not be able to participate in large-scale communities of shared literary experience, for the simple reason that those no longer exist.

Maybe the problem won’t be that indie publishers suck – but that they don’t. If indie work is all garbage, it will just be filtered out and people will still construct communities around Authors Who Matter. But if indie work is good, then the entire concept of a literary community will disintegrate, because there will be no quality mechanism by which to select Authors Who Matter. Maybe the artificial limits placed on the "supply of authors" by traditional publishing was actually beneficial, because that limit made it possible for Authors Who Matter to exist in the first place.

I’m not saying I believe this. I’m offering it, as I said, as the devil’s advocate in Zoe’s discussion. As I’ve said elsewhere, I’d keep publishing even if I was, in fact, going to be responsible for the Death of Literature. But I’m interested in the discussion anyway.

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On the Slush Pile Apocalypse and Other Myths of Self-Publishing - Part 2

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Yesterday we talked about how the dire warnings of a tsunami of self-published slush washing over the product pages of the Amazon Kindle Store have not come to pass. How can we explain the eerie absence of the millions of slush manuscripts we were told to expect and to fear?

Has there been some sort of unpublished author Rapture? Doubtful.

So what’s up?

I think four things are possible.

1. Slush pile authors only want to be "published".

I will admit that just like every other observer, I assumed that when an easy path to free or nearly free self-publication with wide distribution became available, a significant percentage of slush pile authors would jump on it. Why wouldn’t they? Well, if you aren’t looking at writing as a business or your manuscripts as assets ["I have a product and I want to sell it to people"], but are instead looking at writing as a vehicle for achieving a dream or fantasy vision of yourself, then self-publication isn’t really a substitute for traditional publication.

Some people are writing for the moment when they can walk to their mailbox and open a letter telling them that They Are Somebody. Those people aren’t getting out of line no matter what royalty rate Amazon sets.

2. The slush pile was never really that big to begin with.

The slush pile is a legend of the literary world, and the thing about legends is that they grow in the telling.

Typewritten manuscripts take up a lot of space. Print out 500 novel-length manuscripts, put them in padded mailers, and put them in a pile. It will be a big pile.

But you can add 500 books to Amazon’s database and you won’t be able to tell the difference.

The slush pile will look larger to people who have to physically live with it than it will look to anyone else.

3. The slush pile was as big as everyone says, but it doesn’t represent as many authors as we thought.

"Oh no!" agents and publishers said as they read #2. "You’re completely wrong! The slush pile really is as big as we say! It’s not a perception issue. I get 500 emails a day!"

That may be true – but it’s always possible that this never represented that many authors. Although they’re not supposed to make multiple submissions, I’m sure that unpublished authors violate that rule more than they obey it. And each unpublished author may have multiple manuscripts. If a bunch of busy-beaver unpublished authors are out there sending out ten different manuscripts to every agent and publisher in the Writer’s Guide once a year or every time they tweak their query or opening chapter, that adds up to a lot of unread manuscripts. It can also create the impression that there are orders of magnitude more unpublished authors chomping at the bit than there actually are.

4. The slush apocalypse already came, and those authors slunk away to hide.

Everybody knows that the slush pile represents a certain amount of delusion. In #1 we talked about how some unpublished authors are motivated by a fantasy vision of themselves. I think there’s a second common unpublished author daydream out there – the fantasy of Unrecognized Genius and the related fantasy of Instant Success.

If you’re a slush pile author who subscribes to these two fantasies, you firmly believe that as soon as you get published the world will acknowledge your brilliance and you will sell a million copies and go on Oprah and hang out with Nicholas Sparks and John Grisham and Tom Clancy while the Smithsonian looks into acquiring your childhood photos and mementoes. If you’re that author, the entire time you’re formatting your first Kindle upload, you’re daydreaming about the 1000 sales you will have in the first 72 hours after your upload goes live. You’re daydreaming about how Stephen King will email you about how he bought your book and wishes he had written it. And then your book goes live, and these things don’t happen.

A large number of those authors won’t upload another manuscript. They’re done. They’ll bail.

The funny thing about the traditional publishing slush pile is that anyone in it can still hold on to the dream, or the delusion. For as long as you’re still in the pile, you can still be an Unrecognized Genius. So in a real sense the existence of the pile is itself a factor in increasing the size of the pile – because for as long as it’s there, people aren’t clearing the decks of their dreams.

Consider a nonworking actor who also believes himself to be an Unrecognized Genius. He goes to auditions for years, convinced that he will succeed if someone will give him a chance. For as long as that’s the case, he’s increasing the size of the line at auditions.

And then one day someone gives him a chance. Opening night, the curtain goes up, and he steps out on stage – and the crowd boos. The show closes. The actor finally quits, and the line at auditions goes down by one person.

It’s at least possible that a large number of slush pile authors have experimented with the Kindle platform, and finally "gotten their chance" – and since they didn’t instantly succeed, they quit in disgust. It’s a maddening thing, checking the DTP report system waiting for sales to show up. If your expectations aren’t set properly, it would probably be an embittering thing.

By giving authors a chance to finally fail for real, instead of leaving them to bide their time in the slush pile line, the Kindle boom may finally be clearing the backlog in the slush pile line. It may be leading at least some people to quit who would otherwise have continued to toss manuscripts into the pile.

I don’t know if what’s going on is a function of just one of these possibilities, or if all five are in play. But it’s got to be something.

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On the Slush Pile Apocalypse and Other Myths of Self-Publishing – Part 1

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A persistent meme about self-publishing is that the ability of writers to independently publish to the Kindle for free and to POD platforms like CreateSpace at minimal cost will inevitably lead to irresponsible and talentless hacks burying the reading public in a mountain of slush.

In a Salon article that attracted a lot of attention, Laura Miller wrote:

Will readers have to flounder in an ocean of slush before the new gatekeepers appear to rescue them? And if so, how long before they contract slush fatigue? A few days of reading bad manuscript after bad manuscript has a tendency to make you never want to pick up another manuscript again, but when finding new talent is your job and your vocation, you keep at it until you're successful enough to hire someone else to do it for you. If, on the other hand, you're a civilian, and reading is something you turn to, seeking fun or transcendence, during your precious hours of free time, how long will you persist when book after book has exactly the opposite effect, crushing your spirit instead of refreshing it? How long before you decide to just give up?

Currently there are a couple of threads over at Kindleboards lamenting this as well.

So the question, to me, becomes: Where is the mountain of slush we were promised, and told to fear? The Kindle has been out for three years. Shouldn’t we be drowning in the slush by now?

Bowker reports that in 2009 traditional publishing produced 288,355 new titles and new editions.

That was down slightly in a recession year, but not to a degree material to our concerns here. 2008 and 2007 showed similar numbers, and we can assume 2010 will as well.

By the time the Kindle’s 3rd anniversary runs around in November, there will probably be around 690,000 titles available in the Kindle Store. That means that Kindle Store title growth is averaging around 230,000 titles a year. In other words, the ebook platform that we’re told will be a fire hose spraying all readers everywhere with slush is currently adding fewer titles a year than the traditional publishing world is adding the old-fashioned way.

And it’s important to note that these years should be the Kindle Store’s peak title growth years, because there’s a huge backlog of existing print titles being formatted for Kindle and added to the store. Right now, right this very moment, should be the peak slush era also - all the unpublished authors between the ages of 20 and 70 should have a giant trunk full of titles available to add to the Kindle with minimal effort. So even with a huge backlog of "shovel ready" content available, and no barrier to entry, the Kindle Store can’t grow its title base as fast as traditional print publishing is growing its own – let alone increase it at the kind of exponential rate people seem to fear. The titles aren’t appearing the way they should be.

So where are they? They. Just. Aren’t. There.

Why aren’t they there? I have a couple of theories. I’ll talk about them in tomorrow’s blog post.

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Win A Free Kindle

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Scott Nicholson, noted indie horror author, is running a promotion this month where he is giving away free Kindles.

You can view the contest details here.

Check it out!

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Smashwords Listing and Sample Info for The Last Days of Jericho

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The Last Days of Jericho is now also available at Smashwords.com. The multiformat listings at Smashwords mean that a version of the book should now exist for any ereader.

Smashwords also allows the author to set up a free sample of each title. The sample for this book has been set at 50% - so the first half of the book is now free!

View the Smashwords Listing.

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The Last Days of Jericho Now Available At Amazon

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The Last Days of Jericho has gone live at Amazon!

The paperback version is $12.95. The Kindle version is $2.99.

I'd like to thank everyone for all the support I received while writing and publishing this book.

A monster is approaching the Bronze Age city of Yarich.

It cannot be stopped. It cannot be turned aside.

And the monster is…God Himself.

The Canaanite city of Yarich is home to a society that is literate, cosmopolitan – and doomed. Sakal, caravan-master to the Melek or king of the city-state, recounts the tale of the increasingly desperate battle for survival waged by an urban culture against fanatical outsiders – nomads from the desert wielding a terrible supernatural power. Half Deuteronomy, half Gojira, Brookside’s story examines the horror that arises from the knowledge of inexorable fate, and explores the moral ambiguity at the heart of the Old Testament tales that help make up the foundation of western civilization.

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De Bello Lemures Reviewed at UNRV.com

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De Bello Lemures received a very gracious review from the folks over at www.unrv.com today.

UNRV is an in-depth content site for anyone with an interest in Ancient Rome. I'm flattered that they even considered De Bello Lemures for a review, and very gratified by their positive take.

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Free Preview of The Last Days of Jericho Now Available

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A .PDF format preview of the first four chapters of The Last Days of Jericho is now available as a free download.

I will try to have .EPUB and .MOBI versions available later this week.

Check it out, and let me know what you think!

The full version will be released on July 1st!

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Win a Copy of The Last Days of Jericho

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To celebrate the upcoming release of The Last Days of Jericho, I'm going to give away two copies on July 1st.

The winners will have their choice of autographed copies of the paperback or the ebook version.

To enter, reply in the comments section of this post. You'll need to use an ID that gives me a way to contact you, whether at your own site or via email.

Since I intend to promote this to my Facebook friends, there are some rules and disclaimers I have to post:

1. No purchase necessary.
2. You must be 18 or over.
3. You cannot live in Belgium, Norway, Sweden, India, or any country embargoed by the United States.
4. This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. You understand that you are providing your information to the Annotated Horror Blog and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used to notify you if you win the contest.

You can view the book trailer here.

You can download a free preview of the first four chapters here.

Thanks!

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Trailer for The Last Days of Jericho

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The Last Days of Jericho Gets A Facebook Page

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I've created a Facebook page for The Last Days of Jericho.

There's going to be a book giveaway contest in June, and I'll try to lure in some of my FB friends to participate in that over here.

So if you're a FB friend of mine, prepare to get lots of harassing requests to fan the page.

If you're not currently a FB friend of mine, friend me dammit! And fan the page.

Thanks!

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Proof Cover for The Last Days of Jericho

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The Last Days of Jericho Arrives July 1st

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A publication date has been set for The Last Days of Jericho. It will be available at Amazon in paperback and for the Kindle on July 1st.

De Bello Lemures is an Amazon-only publication right now, and due to the difficulty of publishing such a heavily footnoted work as an ebook in anything but Kindle format it will probably remain so in the immediate future. The Last Days of Jericho, however, will ultimately also be available for the iPad, the Nook, the Sony e-reader, and the Kobo. The vagaries of the Smashwords publication system mean that I can't give you a firm date for those formats right now, but I hope it won't be too long after July 1st.

I hope to have a preview version posted shortly.

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Interview at www.TheAuthorsSpeak.com

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Eric Mays of TheAuthorsSpeak was gracious enough to include me in his author interview series.

It's a nice article. Check it out!

BTW, Eric is himself the author of the bizarro-Hamlet novel Naked Metamorphosis. I've read it, and it's great. Check that out too!

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