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Scalzi’s complaint: Just how much does a novelist owe fans online—e-book-lovers included?
July 20, 2008 | 4:49 am
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By David Rothman
SF novelist John Scalzi isn’t as ferocious in Real Life as this photo would suggest. But maybe almost. He just might sink his teeth into fans complaining about DRM, e-book formats and other things beyond his power to control in a major way.
I empathize. Granted, few dislike DRM more than I do. In fact, it would be wonderful for authors to form an organization that would get them on record as opposing DRM and the Tower of eBabel. Zillions of writers are out there. Publishers need to favor those more realistic about the futility of "protection" in an era of econo-scanners and crowd-sourced typing. I myself am lucky to be publishing The Solomon Scandals through Twilight Times, a small press whose owner, Lida Quillen, agrees with me. But what if my only choice were a DRM-lovin’ publisher? Should I say no? Hardly, after having worked on Scandals on and off for three decades.
Scandals news: Collapsing an IRS/CIA building
Meanwhile a question. Scandals, a D.C. newspaper novel with some SFish elements, includes the collapse of a rickety IRS/CIA building—a bit of a stand-in for putrid government programs. How many TeleBlog readers would be interested in learning about real-life collapses with certain similarities to my fictitious one? Some forensic engineering experts are helping me with the details, and I’m planning for the Scandals site to include Creative Commons-licensed material on such disasters. I’ll also welcome some collapse help from rescue workers and emergency medical techs who know what recovery efforts are like.
Here in the Washington area, memories of the infamous Skyline Towers collapse linger—something for New Yorkers to ponder, too, in the aftermath of crane accidents, which might be only the tip of the iceberg. In China, shoddy building practices may have contributed to the 69,000-death toll from the recent earthquake.
Related: Lost in Blogland, by novelist Jennifer Cody Epstein, appearing in Booksquare. Scalzi is not the only one pondering the issue of book-writing vs. the online variety. Just how much time to devote to each?
(Thanks to Mike Cane, news tipper extraordinaire, for the Scalzi pointer. With hundreds of RSS feeds to track, I miss a lot of items even in the better blogs.)
Technorati Tags: John Scalzi
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Comments:
That Scalzi entry was weird. Someone who would send him an e-mail complaining about DRM really doesn’t get it/hasn’t been paying attention.
OTOH, you have occasionally featured individuals who post their novels/whatever online for free then take them down a bit later and conclude that this is an completely ineffective marketing method. But Scalzi is a good example of how that can be successfully exploited. I can’t be the only one who had never heard of Scalzi until running across a link to Agent to the Stars online, reading it and thinking “where can I buy more like this?”
>>>But what if my only choice were a DRM-lovin’ publisher? Should I say no? Hardly, after having worked on Scandals on and off for three decades.
Well what are you doing LETTING THEM HAVE the e-rights to begin with? Ain’t no frikkin way I am EVER EVER giving up rights again. Once Apple “legits” ebooks, baby, NYC can sink in the ocean and take the putrid print publishing world with it (with NO apologies to print pub contributors to teleread — well, except to that one woman who KEPT her e-rights. Right on!). My stuff will be at the iTunes Store so I can do silly things like pay rent regularly. I’d rather scream at Steve Jobs than those NYC Suits. I’d *get* somewhere with Jobs. Let the print publishers start worrying about THEIR rent!
Hi, Brian. Perhaps the word in the success stories is “can.” They’re still pretty rare and tend to involve established or semi-established writers. Happy you discovered Agent. One of my own faves, for sure.
As for DRM and “not paying attention”—well, that’s indeed all the more reason for Scalzi to feel a little grouchy. He’s not talking about isolated notes here. For latecomers, yes, Scalzi Gets It about “protection.” If I didn’t make that clear enough in the original post, I will now.
Meanwhile, at the more cosmic level, let’s hope that the suits in the publishing business can pay more attention to readers’ persistent hatred of DRM. Just wait until those Kindle owners want to move on to other machines that can’t read Jeff’s special format.
Thanks,
David
Mike writes:
> I’d rather scream at Steve Jobs than those
> NYC Suits. I’d *get* somewhere with Jobs.
*snicker*
It’s clear you’ve never met His Steveness.
I’ve read enough about Steve. He doesn’t scare me. But I do remain in awe of how the hell he gets over again and again with the Suits. But I’m no Suit.
Thanks, David. BTW, if I could add one more comment about Scalzi and another author whom I think the first book I ever read of was either a pirated or legit work (too long ago now to remember which) is Charles Stross. Stross has written about the non-writing commitments that are part and parcel of his novel writing. Having seen both at scifi-related conventions (for lack of a better term) I don’t think people who are not part of that scene realize just how much work these folks put in to promote their books…especially because most it isn’t straightforward promotion. I actually saw Scalzi on a “panel” doing an MST3K-style takedown of the “I, Robot” movie. And it was hilarious and a lot of fun, but clearly doing that for/with a room of say 50 people for 2 hours isn’t exactly going to cause books to fly off the shelf (in fact, I suspect most of the fans of his work like me who showed up already owned copies of his books, so ironically a lot of the marketing effect would be toward future books, but again, I’m already subscribed to his blog, so from a traditional marketing standpoint, I’d imagine this activity had very little value).
Even if he were paid for his appearance (and he may have .. I have no clue/interest on how these things work) it was certainly a hell of a lot of work for whatever payoff there was.
But as I’ve suggested before, I think this is what makes someone like Scalzi or Doctorow, etc be able to pull this off. It’s a multi-pronged strategy that, to some extent, can’t be an explicit strategy or it comes off as fake, because it’s almost like building a following for an author in the same way that you see, say, bands on the college circuit building up an audience.
Personally, I couldn’t do that, and I admire the folks who do. But that’s going to be very hard to replicate, especially in genres where the fan boys and girls aren’t such a big part of the market (for example, I imagine the buyers of a top-selling scifi book are far more homogeneous from book to book than are the buyers for top-selling historical romances).
Something else I’m just throwing out here about authors is the huge fanfic communities. I know people whose fiction reading has gone from several novels a month to almost entirely fanfic, which they’re also writing as part of a community. Again, I’m not so sure how well this can be exploited outside the scifi/fantasy genres, but it’d be interesting to see author start to explicitly market to and accomodate the fanfic-ers as a way to drive sales.
Most companies seem to approach fanfic with benign neglect — we could sue you but we choose not to for now. I could see someone writing, say a scifi trilogy, giving explicit licensing for noncommercial fanfic. One of the things I could imagine doing would be to write story X and leave subplots Y and Z open for fanfic-ers to explore. They still need to buy the real books to get the context, so if it’s popular enough it’s like they’re buying the source material for the fanfic Bible (which people are doing now anyway).
For example, the worst scifi novels are typically written by authors trying to expand loose ends (see Star Wars’ “Clone Wars” and Star Trek’s novelized version of the Genetic Wars…ugh). Much better to not only allow but encourage others to pick up those threads in non-commercial settings whereby they drive sales to the commercial books and avoid the Marketers of Dune phenom.