To Boldly Go Where Stupid Greedy People Have Gone Before

The book publishing industry seems intent on following in the footsteps of the music industry.  Back around the turn of the century, the music industry decided it would be a dandy idea to treat their customers like would-be criminals, and to make it expensive and inconvenient to buy and use digital music.  Digital music was bound to your devices.  Not only could you permanently lose access to music you’d paid for, but it wasn’t even “yours” in the traditional way, since unlike a CD, which you could carry around with you and play wherever you wanted, lend to friends, or sell back to the music store, with DRM you were out the same amount of money, but you were stuck.

It wasn’t until Apple came out with iTunes that the music industry was given a sufficiently violent noogie by Steve Jobs, and finally allowed single tracks to be sold for a reasonable price.  And it wasn’t until only a couple of years ago that Amazon and Apple among others forced the music industry to let them sell DRM-free tracks, which (what a shock!) resulted in people buying more of them, for a higher price.

By treating everyone as potential criminals and refusing to let people buy only what they want, the music industry has succeeded in cutting its revenue in half over the past 10 years.  They’re down over 6 billion dollars a year, and it’s not because people stopped listening to music or because everyone’s a crook.  I’ll bet a lot of people did what I did: bought used CDs for half the price of a new one, ripped the tracks to their computer, then stuffed the CDs in a box in the attic.  Most of the time that’s still a lot cheaper than paying $1.29 per track for a download.

But this isn’t about the music industry.  It’s about the publishing industry, which is doing its very best to dive off that same cliff, like lemmings in wingtip loafers.

I bought a Kindle a few years ago, with the promise that over time I’d be able to save lots of money on book prices.  New releases would be $9.99 and I’d help save the environment and have all that convenience and instant gratification to look forward to.

That was “Bait”.

Now we are well into “Switch”.  Most of the books I’m interested in lately have a significantly higher Kindle price than they do a paperback price.  That’s not Amazon doing that, it’s the publishers.  I was a little shocked the first few times I came across that, since it’s so illogical.  They already get higher margins for ebooks from Amazon.  Most of the cost of producing and marketing a book has nothing to do with the physical costs of printing and transportation, but it has to cost them something.  What gives?

I think I know what it is.  They’ve figured out what people are willing to pay for that book, this time.  But you know what?  People aren’t stupid.  Take advantage of them once or twice, and they’re likely to lose any sympathy at all for you.

What publishers have forgotten is that all the same drawbacks exist for a Kindle ebook as existed for the early DRM-protected music, plus one whopper of an extra.  You can’t lend them.  You can’t sell them back to a used book store.  You can’t buy them used, for less money.  And unlike music, which you hope you’ll want to listen to over and over, you probably expect to only read an ebook once.

So by pricing the Kindle book higher than the paperback, they are creating an  incentive for people to buy the paperback, read it, then sell it to a used book store or lend it to someone else or donate it to the library.  Neither the publisher nor the author gets a penny from the resale, and people who buy the used book will not be buying a new one, either ebook or print.

The publishing industry has decided to walk around with a large “kick me” sign taped to their back, and the irony is, they put it there themselves.

Meanwhile, authors are smart, and they’ve figured out that the publishing industry expects them to create their own “platform” these days, in any case.  The days of significant advertising for mid-list authors are long, long gone.  So why should they hope and pray for the publisher to sell a few thousand books and give them a piddling little royalty, leveraging the author’s own hard work getting the word out, when they can publish it themselves and get the whole price (minus distribution fees)?  It’s a trade-off that’s becoming increasingly tilted towards independent publishing.

It’s time for the hard-working editors in the publishing industry to march into the offices of their executives and administer a forceful but potentially industry-saving dope slap.

Calling Things “Bullshit” is Bullshit

I just read Ian Bogost’s entertaining blog entry titled “Gamification is Bullshit.” I recommend reading it–it’s well written and funny.  It got me thinking, though.

To some people, to paraphrase Sturgeon’s Revelation, 90% of everything is bullshit.  It’s easy to take a look at the lack of substance behind some of the superficial boosters of Gamification or Web 2.0 before it, and to call the whole thing hype and bullshit.

Easy, and not terribly useful.  It’s much easier to find fault with things than it is to make new things for other people to find fault with.

Web 2.0 has its roots in something of real value–interactivity–which improves the user experience of people using the internet.  Gamification, done right, has a lot of promise for improving user experience as well.  It can help build community, and help people get more out of their use of on-line resources.

But both of those have had legions of people pointing out the obvious–that the majority of the hype around them is unfounded.  And mostly, the people making noise about them are not necessarily the ones who started the wave of interest in them in the first place.

In Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian,” someone asks “But what have the Romans ever done for us anyway?” and then later they ask “But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Calling anything bullshit is making a statement rather than asking a question.  It’s an attempt to take the whole issue off the table.  If people accept the premise of the statement, you’ll never find out about the good parts that the question would possibly have revealed.

I’m an optimist.  I don’t think 90% of everything is bullshit.  I think 90% of everything is bath water.  There’s probably a baby in there somewhere, or nobody would have got interested in it in the first place.

Agile Writing

You hear a lot about writer’s block.  Almost every book on writing I have contains some words of advice on how to make progress–how to get past the dreaded blank sheet of paper (or these days, blank screen).  There’s a lot of good advice out there, like this list from 43 Folders, that can help you get going when you’re stuck.  I’m willing to bet that some of those tricks also help with other creative things–like writing software.

These days, the “agile” development methodology is king in software development.  It wasn’t long ago (from my perspective) that agile development was viewed with hostility and suspicion by most corporations, but it appears to be following the path described by Arthur Schopenhauer:

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Agile software development breaks down the development of large pieces of functionality into very small pieces, and doesn’t use much long-term planning.  If you know the user is going to have to log in to your web page, you can figure out how to do that in isolation–without knowing whether they are logging into a nuclear reaction flash game, or an actual nuclear reactor control interface.

Well, that’s the theory.  As you may guess from my example, I think it’s easy to oversimplify requirements if you don’t spend at least some time thinking about the big picture.

Writing fiction has the same kind of issues as writing software–and I think each camp can (and should) learn a few lessons from the other.

Sitting down and writing stuff with no outline at all is something many writers do, but they often admit they end up writing way more than they might otherwise as they arrive at one dead end after another.  In software, this kind of approach is often referred to as “cowboy coding“–you throw out all process on the theory that a sufficiently experienced programmer will just do the right thing without all that pesky overhead.  That works OK for your short-story-length software project, but falls down on the big tasks.

Writers do something called timed writing, which is a really cool thing–and which shouldn’t be confused with writing without an outline.  Timed writing is an attempt to get yourself unstuck–to get words and ideas out in the open, without worrying about every little detail.  It’s a method of sticking duct tape over the mouth of your internal critic, so you can actually get something written.  The theory is, once you’ve got yourself going you can switch over to writing your real story and make progress.  It’s mental inertia–what starts at rest tends to stay that way, and what’s in motion tends to stay in motion.  It actually works.

I think software people would benefit from the same thing.  Spend ten minutes writing code as fast as you possibly can, and then throw it all away.  I haven’t tried this yet, but I think I’ll give it a shot.

The thing that agile developers do that I think would help a lot of writers is to focus on a small piece.  A chapter becomes your world for the week, and a scene becomes your world for the day.  Yes, you’ll have your overall outline and character bios and your synopsis and your premise–the same as in software you have some marketing requirements or “user stories”  (yes, they actually are called stories, in software development).  But the overwhelming mountain of the task in front of you will shrink to the comparative molehill of your focus.  Fix this paragraph.  Flesh out the setting for the scene.  Write the dialog for a scene.

Writing is mental, whether it’s fiction or software.  Sometimes you have to trick yourself.

Sometimes after we have a dinner party, I feel overwhelmed by the task of cleaning up all the dishes and tidying everything up.  It’s usually late, I’m tired, and there is a lot more than usual to do.  My mental trick is to pretend to myself that a small part of the job is the whole thing.  We’ll wash and dry the pots and pans, for example, and I’ll put them away, and I’ll pretend we’re just getting started–I’ll think to myself “Hey, this isn’t as bad as I thought!”  Or I’ll clean up the living room and then go check my email, then come back and pretend that I’m just starting.

I think “agile” methods have something in common with that.  Small problems aren’t just easier to do, they’re easier to imagine doing.  The journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but it’s still a hell of a long fucking walk.  But a journey of a thousand meters?  Stand back, everyone!  I can do this!

Fiction and Software, Premise and Promise

Have you ever noticed that sometimes it’s easier to learn about the thing that’s right under your nose if you try to learn something new?

I remember learning French in ninth grade, and suddenly realizing that there was a structure to language that was different in different languages.   All that nonsense about outlining sentences that we did in English class suddenly made a lot more sense to me.  Of course, English is screwed up enough that it’s nice to have comparatively structured languages like French to help make sense of things.  Except for adjectives.  The French have screwy adjectives.  Adjectives screwy?  You put the adjective before the noun with some kinds of adjectives, or after the noun with others, or on either side depending on if you’re being figurative or literal — “un grand homme” versus “un homme grand”.  You see?

Anyway, I’ve been learning more about writing lately, about all sorts of things.  A couple of weeks ago I thought it would be funny to exclaim “fucking gerunds!”, but realized that nobody around would get the pun — they’d probably just edge away from me nervously.  But bad puns aren’t the only thing I’ve been thinking of lately — another is that what makes great fiction and what makes great software are very similar.

The email list for my critique group had some discussion about “premise” lately, which was really interesting.  We read a blog entry by Alexandra Sokoloff about answering the question “what’s your book about?”, and an article by Christopher Lockhart about constructing a logline (a premise in Hollywood-ese).  Since then I’ve been reading Donald Maass’s “Writing the Breakout Novel”, and came across his section on premise.

Maass’s Premise list — what he looks for in a breakout novel — is:

1. plausibility
2. inherent conflict
3. originality
4. gut emotional appeal

I’d already been thinking about the way novels are created compared to the way software is created.  This sounded very similar to my theory about the necessary ingredients in creating killer software:

1. plausibility (can be done by the current development team in a reasonable amount of time)
2. solves a real problem (for people who can pay you real money)
3. originality (why is your solution better?)
4. people want it (and they want it bad)

Let’s call that the promise — the software you commit to deliver.  If you ask a writer “what’s your book about?” and they say “it’s a bit complicated to explain,” you probably aren’t going to see it on the shelf anytime real soon.

The same thing is true of software.  If you ask the team “what’s in this next release?” and they say “Oh, a bunch of stuff,” you might not have that big sales uptick you’ve been hoping for.

But if they say “We’re coming out with features X, Y, and Z, which will solve huge problems for customers and get all sorts of new business!” that’s better.

And if they say “We will crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and hear the lamentation of their women,” well, perhaps you’re focused a little too much on beating the competition.  But don’t worry–developers like that eventually grow out of it, and go on to become the governor of California.

Starting Over

Ten months ago, I started putting first draft content from my novel in progress (Fractal Magic) here.  Thank you to all my friends for the feedback and encouragement, and for spending the time to read my stuff!  It was typical first-draft stuff.  It was rough and clumsy, and contained great swaths of boring dreck–but I had fun writing it then, and I’m still having fun with it now.

That was back before I knew much of anything about writing other than how to string words together.  I’d always written–stories and half-completed novels, for the most part.  I’d even written a lot of stuff I’d been paid for: things like fake news stories and humorous horoscopes–but I’d never known anything about the business of writing and getting published.

Since then, I’ve taken a few writing classes and workshops, which have been remarkably different than the creative writing classes I took back in college or from the local community college.  Most notable of these were a workshop with Ellen Klages at the Potlatch Science Fiction and Fantasy convention, and two 10-week classes from The Attic with Marc Acito: Story Structure, and The First Fifty Pages.  I can’t begin to say enough good things about those.

I also went to the Willamette Writer’s Conference last month, where I learned an incredible amount in three days, and talked to a few agents and editors and a lot of writers.

This writing stuff is fun!

I’ve also been reading too many books on writing–just like I read too many books on software development.  I’ll probably be reviewing some of those here.

My novel is coming along–there are still a few gaping holes, and a lot of things I want to rethink, and most of it is still at first-draft status–but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.  It’ll never be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, but I have some hope that staggering will be involved in some way.

The greatest and most surprising thing to me is that I’ve met so many new friends and fascinating people along the way, so far.