Tablesaw!

A while ago, I finally broke down and got a Facebook account. I try to make it as one-way as possible—there's no information of my own on the site, I just use it to keep in touch with other folks who use it as their major form of communication. It doesn't even have a picture on it, so if you'd like to befriend me, you'll probably need to contact me in e-mail and prod me to add you.

But I was thinking about other social-networking things too, especially since I finally added Steam to my computer. There's social networking on everything now, it seems. So here are some places I am:

XBOX Live: LaSierraDeMesa
Wii Friend: 3313-9279-5908-0771
Steam: Tablesaw
Hulu: Tablesaw

Still resisting Tumblr and Twitter for now.

When a friend of mine sent a picture of her cat to me and some other coworkers, extolling the virtues in the cat's taste in literature.

Naturally, this had to happen:

( The cat macro was a bit larger )

My friend's response was:

So, 1 question: Why does [the cat] have a French accent?

Keep in mind that my friend is not unsaavy when it comes to the internets or the fandom. And yet, no knowledge of lolcats.

I . . . I didn't know that could be possible.

Dear Authors:

I'd like to talk to you about making money now that traditional publishing is dead. First, here's John Scalzi on the subject:

Book publishing is a sinking ship. The former passengers on the ship have given in to their feral instincts and are dismantling the ship board by board. The remaining crew are being wedged further and further back into what little of the ship remains above the waterline. Eventually the whole ship will disappear beneath the waves and all the crew will drown. The thought of possibly jumping off the ship apparently doesn’t occur to the crew; rather, their ambition is simply to be the last person to drown.

Screw ‘em. Let them drown. . . . .

Listen to me now: Writers are not in the publishing industry. The publishing industry exists to handle the output of writers and distribute it in an effective and hopefully profitable way; however it does not necessarily follow that writer’s only option is the publishing industry, especially not now. Congruent to this: Books aren’t the only option. I write books, but you know what? I’m not a book writer, any more than a musician is an LP musician or an MP3 musician. The book is the container. It’s not destiny.

Wait a second. That's Scalzi writing five years ago about Writing in the Age of Piracy.

And, okay, I'll confess, that first paragraph is out of context. The article only supposes the total annihilation of traditional publishing (via piracy, not e-books) as a way to talk about alternate revenue steams. Specifically, he talks about how Penny Arcade has built a media empire by creating things that they gave away totally for free. The big takeaway is:

Multiple revenue streams are a writer’s friend.

That's what's getting to me about the whole Amazon/MacMillan/e-book/print/online/offline mishigoss. Print may not be dead, but there are a lot of other rings, and there's no reason to tie all your hopes onto just one.

Authors, let me tell you, when I buy a traditionally published book, I do not feel like I am supporting you as the author. I am supporting the publisher, and I am supporting the bookseller, but I am not supporting you. There's just too much in between. So when Scalzi calls for readers to support authors, I'm constantly surprised when he suggests that we find a book published and distributed elsewhere. I mean, if you want to support Macmillan, then, yeah buy Macmillan's books. But, I want to support you, not the corporation who licensed your work with a cash consideration and then rebranded it and distributed it nationally.

I think it's even worse when it's badness. When Bloomsbury whitewashed a cover again, there were very appropriate calls for a boycott. Bloomsbury thinks that they can portray non-white characters in their novels as white characters on their covers as a way to increase sales. A boycott will divorce them of this belief.

But authors balked because of the damage it would do to the author. To pull support from the publisher is to pull support from the author, and so we shouldn't boycott.

Authors, are you really that close to your publisher? Perhaps you are, or perhaps you aren't. But why can't I support you, the author, the one I'm a fan of, when I disagree with the company that paid to license your work?

What's more, I don't have a very large budget for buying stories anyway. My reading pace is slower, and I've got bookcases and second-hand shops and libraries all around me. So I've stopped myself from buying most books to keep my finances under control. So if I spring for a new book, it's probably only because I have a gift card. But I do still read. And I read stories online. I read author blogs online. And I listen to Escape Artists podcasts at work. I have a number of authors of whom I am fans.

Authors, I am your fan, but I am not buying books, print or otherwise. How do I give you money outside of using your Amazon link to buy the book that somebody else published?

The traditional publishing model is what it is, and it's clear from that it's still really, really good at taking a novel and sending out to a wide audience. And really, that an end of itself. Those novels get you fans. But you might not have gotten money from the person who read the novel and became a fan. You may never get that money by publishing novels (on your own, or through a corporate publisher). But we're still here, and we still want to support you. Whether we have the money or not, we feel that tug, and how able we are to resist that pull varies with what you're using to tempt us.

Honestly, I think I spend more money on T-shirts than new books now, because the LA library does not allow me to borrow T-shirts. And a number of those shirts refer to movies, TV shows, and videogames. And I don't have a lot of wiggle room in my budget for Paypal tipjars, but I still contribute more to them than to my out-of-pocket print fiction budget.

Authors, why can't I buy a shirt, a shirt with a jaunty quote of your devising?

Publishing may be in trouble. It's not just that there are all those middlepeople, but those middlepeople may also be turn out to be idiots, and then your link to the Amazon page of your book isn't going to be a great option. You don't have to switch everything. You don't need too many Girl Who Navigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Makings, because you'll always have that one there, waiting for fans.

Authors, listen to time-delay Scalzi. You are not in the publishing industry. You can escape the not really sinking ship and also still probably leave all your stuff on the ship, 'cause it's not really sinking, and then you've got like a resort vacation on the island without having to move all your stuff and still getting access to the nice galley (which may now have fresher fruit from the shore anyway). There's no reason to only stay on the ship. There are other places to meet your fans (and get our money into your pocket). Use all of them.

Edited to Add: As often happens when I write a post from three different locations (go cloud computing), I deleted a chunk and forgot to compensate it. It's created some confusion, so let me just put back in the chunk I forgot to deal with, which is a portion of text from the Scalzi quote:

Because here’s the thing about that “sinking ship:” Even if we grant it is sinking (which we should not), and that the passengers are scurvy pirates (which we ought not), this ship is sinking in about five feet of water and the shore is fifty yards away. And if you haven’t the wit to make it to shore, then by God, you deserve to die.

To see how much I thought I'd addressed that, look at how I referenced it in the last paragraph.

Anyway, what's "dying" about the publishing industry isn't the industry itself, it's the author's ability to make money from it, which has generally been decreasing as the money for buying books has been diverted elsewhere. Hypothetically and hyperbolically, it could get to the point where an author might be able to get a novel prepared for print and distributed, but not be able to make any money from it (which is the point at which we join Scalzi's hypotehtical and hyperbolic essay).

What then? Do you take out the middlepeople and publsh the novel by yourself so that you can get the money that results from selling directly to a smaller audience? Or do you have the publisher prepare, print, and sell the novel; draw a wider audience; and earn money by encouraging the audience to do things other than buying the books?

Most likely, it'll be a combination. But you can still make money licensing novels to be printed traditionally, you can still make additional money right now.

So, again, sell me a T-shirt.

ithiliana suggests that the "unified fabric of human desire" must be some sort of plaid. Which got me thinking about kilts. Which led me to writing this:

I just wrote up a short abstract.
(It's weak but it scored a book contract.)
But the bloggers told me what I lacked:
"Ogi, where's your trousers?"

Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low,
The better for my arse to show.
Fen cry, "Oh, John Ringo, no!
Ogi, where's your trousers!?"

I posted a web survey,
But I took it down right away.
Now I'm afeard of all El Jay
Because I nay have on trousers.

I went down to a comm with kink
To have some fun seeing what they think.
All the ficcers gave me eyes that stink,
Saying, "Ogi, where's your trousers!?"

The backlash hasn't been dismissed,
But they've no reason to be pissed.
You can't put ethics on a scientist,
Saying, "Ogi, where's your trousers!?"

Context

Well, technically not NASA. Defying Gravity is a new show on ABC about a group of astronauts in the near future taking a tour around the solar system. It's . . . meh.

Anyway, in this weeks episode, two crewmembers see a planetary lander being updated from the International Space Organization (the "ISO," not NASA). On the computer screen there's a prominent window that reads "RECEIVING UPDATE FROM MISSION CONTROL." Behind it is a larger window that is scrolling "computery text."

Or at least, I assume it's supposed to look computery. Even before I froze the screen I could tell that it was scrolling through a list of IP addresses for Wikipedia. No wonder they're having so much trouble on that ship; it's the massively complex interplanetary space mission that anyone can edit!

The firm has finally updated our browsing software to from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. It's like I have a real internet. And since my major job function runs in IE, I can actually search correctly and find things when I need to. I can also look at websites everywhere without them looking like crap and yelling at me to update my browser. Hooray!

Especially good, since I'm working overtime today, which is going to suck a bit more than I thought since amythyst is apparently going crazy kidnapping people and eating sushi.

Sister got married. ojouchan and I got our netbooks from Virgin America. We're having fun playing around with them. They are tiny.

I was reading a post about Amzon last night, and it struck me that Occam's Razor seems to be cutting across the issue equally well in multiple ways. I started to feel like the Internet is in the middle of an episode of House.

Scene 1: The patient, Amazon.com, is enjoying a pleasant holiday weekend when it realizes it can't feel its GLBT inventory.

Scene 2: Cuddy gets House to take the case via Twitter.

And now we're in scene 3. Everyone's in the conference room staring at the whiteboard of symptoms presenting a differential diagnosis. "It could be this." "But that doesn't explain this." "That's not relevant because of these." "These are explained by this, which is a result of the that."

Unfortunately, at this point the script stalls. We can't send half of the Internet to take Amazon's code to the MRI of Doom and then send the other half to break into Jeff Bezos's house and rifle through is cabinets. The only thing we can be sure of is House saying, "And in the meantime, get him started on PR. We don't want the patient to lose his brand before my replacement copy of Dead Poets Society ships."

So we all just stare at the whiteboard, remembering that everybody lies.

Now, it is I who have the new gmail account! And lo, it is connected to my livejournal account. E-maileth me, for sooth!

(Delivery of sooth is not guaranteed and void where prohibited.)

Whoever it was who brought the chocolate-covered espresso beans into the office this week. Oh, it was fun before I realized what was happening. It was fun when I was nibbling at work. Not so much when I was at home working at 3 p.m. before crashing to bed and sleeping through my Thursday-night reality programming. Not so much when I wake up early today and can't get back to sleep.

On the other hand, since I was very tired today, I was actually kind of glad they were there. It was a very slow night, and I needed something to get me through.

Of course, I've got some other distractions going, too. johnratite inches its way toward crowning a champion (it's down to two finalists, now). In addition, the attentions of the npl have turned toward the Wikipedia. I've been using it as a helpful tool when looking for trivia, and a new game developed by tmcay brought everyone to the party. I'll leave it to others to describe Seekipedia, but if you feel like playing, drop me an IM on Monday and Wednesday nights and I'll pass you into the chat room.

Anyway, with all the attention, and the drive to put up and refine a page for the NPL has enmeshed me into the Wikipedia proper. Every other link leads to someplace that needs a comma or two. There's so much a copyeditor can do.

I'm also working on a page for the NPL Web site. More on that once I know it's closer to completion.

Now: Donuts, Sleep.

SunNYTX: 18:30. Very nice grid, even beyond the gimmick.