I really don’t go in for talking about current events on the blog. The main reason for this is the fact that I am profoundly out of touch with the outside world. I don’t have cable and I don’t watch the news. On the rare occasion I miss the news and feel the need to absorb some fearmongering bullshit, I just drop a tab of acid and read a Lovecraft story. There’s less pretense that way.
I generally assume that if something really interesting happens, one of my friends will tell me, or it will show up in some of the webcomics I read. In a pinch, I assume I’ll simply absorb the knowledge through the aether, have it beamed into my mind with alien space rays, or apprehend it directly through examination of my Socratic soul using the dialectic.
I’m well aware that this isn’t the most efficient or comprehensive way to aggregate information. But it still beats the hell out of watching Fox News.
The other reason I don’t talk much about the issues on here is that when things are big enough to be interesting, they also tend to be so big that it’s hard for me to form easily encapsulated opinions about them.
For example, when there was the big kerfuffle about Google digitizing a shitload of books and thereby egregiously violating international copyright law, I was interested. Anything dealing with intellectual property rights effects me personally and professionally. So I read a bunch of stuff about it, thought some thoughts, and had a few really good conversations with a few of my librarian friends.
The upshot of my research? It’s a really complicated issue, and I have mixed feelings about it. Is Google being a bit of a dick and doing morally questionable stuff? Absolutely. But…. Well…. It’s more complicated than that.
See? Any blog I wrote on the issue would be nothing more than a long-winded shrug. Not terribly fun to write, and not particularly entertaining to read.
That’s my recent take on the current Amazon dealio.
For those of you who haven’t heard. Amazon (the bookseller) recently got into a bit of an argument with Macmillan (a book publisher) about e-book pricing. As a result, Amazon pulled all of Macmillan’s books off their website. Not just the e-books. All the books.
I’ve done some research and talked to some people and my conclusion is that.
1. This is a big deal.
2. Amazon is being a bit of a dick, and attempting to bully folks in order to get more of the publishing pie than is really fair.
This feels weird for me to say, because honestly, Amazon has been good to me over the years. They gave me good reviews and really helped promote my book early on. It was really nice.
But it really doesn’t matter how good they’ve been to me in the past. If you’re nice to me, then beat up my neighbor for his lunch money, you’re still a bully. I’m afraid there’s just no way around it.
3. This whole thing is pretty complicated, and I’m not well informed enough make any real intelligent assessment of the overall situation or what it might mean for publishing, DRM, or the future of e-books.
If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you might want to check out this blog written by the lovely and talented Charles Stross. He understands the landscape of publishing WAY better than me and does a great job of summing things up.
Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight.
Here’s also a blog from Tobias Buckell that has more technical details. He does some of the math for you and explains what all this really means in a delightfully low-bullshit way.
Here’s the public statement from Macmillan too.
I’m bringing this to your attention because if you’re like me, you sometimes miss things like this unless someone points them out. Also, I’m guessing most of you kinda like books.
I like books too, and while two companies having a corporate slapfight might seem far removed from the book you pick up, read, and enjoy, the truth is that these corporate manoeuvrings have very real effects on which books get published in the future, their quality, and how well authors get treated in the process.
If anyone else has relevant links they’d like to post in the comments below, please feel free to do so. I’m way too tired to dig up more stuff right now. I’ve got to go to bed.
We’re living in interesting times, folks….
pat
I said I’d tell you when I knew….
So my editor has finished reading the great beastly draft of The Wise Man’s Fear I sent her a while back.
It’s the third draft she’s read, but it’s the first one I’ve really had any confidence in. The first one was pure crap. The second one was mostly complete but still pretty shaky in parts.
This draft was good. I’m verging on being proud of it. It still has a few problems, but they’re manageable problems. They’re problems I can percieve and get my head around, and that means they’re problems I can solve.
So Betsy got back to me with her feedback on the manuscript: a list of 27 things she felt needed attention in the book, arranged in nicely worded bullet points. (The formatting was at my request. I’m fond of bullet points.)
Some of her 27 points are small things. Some are bigger issues. We agree about most of them. Two or three will require a bit of negotiation.
It’s really not a long list, especially when you consider that my own list of things-that-need-fixing-in-book-two currently stands at about 50 or 60 items.
Every time I sit down to work on the book, I try to resolve a few of those issues. Sometimes I fix something and cross it off the list. Other times, a beta reader will bring something to my attention and I add it to the list. As I work, sometimes new problems occur to me, and I add those to the list as well. Sometimes I fix something, and that causes a new problem. So I cross something off and add something at the same time.
It’s kinda like trying to iron all the wrinkles out of a shirt. A huge, living, n-dimentional shirt.
As an example: tonight I worked on the book for about 9 hours. I crossed off four things on my list and added six things. But most of those six things are small, while two of the things I fixed were moderately big and complicated. So it was a good day’s work. (Unfortunately, because one problem tangled me up for four hours, I didn’t get home until 1:30 AM, which means I didn’t get to say goodnight to Oot, which sucks.)
Anyway, earlier today I talked on the phone with my editor about the book. We talked about her 27 points.
My editor asked me if I could have the book done by September.
I thought about it. I thought about her 27 points and my ever-changing 50-60 points. I thought about who I can still use as beta readers, and how many drafts I’ll be able go through in four months. I thought about how many times I will personally be able to read the book in four months.
I said I was sure I could finish it by September.
She asked me if I was sure. Really sure.
I thought about it. Back in 2007, I was sure I’d have the book done by 2008. But I was hugely ignorant and optimistic back then. So I was dead fucking wrong. That caused a lot of grief.
I told her I was really sure I could have it finished by September.
Come hell or high water? She asked me.
Come hell or high water, I said.
So we agreed that I’d have the book finished by September. It was nice. It made us both happy.
So that’s part of the news, that I’ll be finished writing The Wise Man’s Fear by September.
But here’s the rest of the news: that means that the book can’t come out until March of 2011.
Why? Well, for a bunch of reasons. Mostly because there are a lot of things that have to happen before a mass of text becomes a printed book on a shelf. It needs to be copyedited. The edits need to be confirmed. It needs to be proofed, checked for consistency, fiddled with. Fonts need to be chosen. It needs to go through layout. Then it needs to be proofed again. Marketing needs to happen. It needs to be sent to reviewers, and the reviewers need to have time to read it before they write the reviews. It needs to be put into catalogs of to-be-published-books so people who run bookstores can learn about it and order copies for their stores. It needs to be printed, boxed, warehoused, shipped. We need to sacrifice a black she-goat and pray to strange and terrible gods. Then we need to proofread again.
A lot of these steps are going to take longer than normal because my book is 2-3 times longer than most ordinary novels. Other things are going to take longer because this book is kinda important to a lot of people, and we want to make sure everything gets done just right.
The simple truth of the matter is this: that’s just the way it is. I wish it could be sooner, and I’m guessing many of you feel the same. Believe it or not, if the publisher could wave a magic wand and make that happen, they would. (Remember, they don’t make money on the book until they can sell it.)
But there’s no way the book can come out earlier and still have it be the best book possible.
So that’s what happened today: I found out the publication date for The Wise Man’s Fear – March 1st 2011.
Honestly, it would be way easier for me to sit on this information for a while. I could wait until the date was a little closer, thereby avoid some of the great wailing and gnashing of teeth I expect will follow this announcement. That shit brings me no joy. It damages my calm and makes it harder for me to write.
But I promised y’all I would pass along the *real* publication date as soon as I knew it. So that’s what I’m doing.
March 1st 2011.
pat