Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

Tag archive: new technology

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Railroaded with a New Cover

Railroaded tied for second in the 2005 Great Canadian story contest.  How three judges tied for their second place vote I’m not really sure, but hey, I’ll take it.

Why yellow for the titles?  Well red doesn’t reduce well to an Amazon thumbnail, so reading even the big title was a challenge.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I bet you’ll find that titles and author names in future books are going to get bigger and fatter as designers are ordered to create titles that look good both as full size and as thumbnails.

The title in red will be available for the Sony soon as e-pub, thanks to the open source software called Calibre.  On my Sony the red looks just fine, but hey, it’s being displayed full screen and gray scale.  I wonder what it looks like on a color Nook?

I promise to get that how-to menu item up there next week.  But for now: enjoy Railroaded.

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Burning Moose

I’ve gone nuclear on my Microsoft Word document; I’ve loaded Mobipocket creator to the PC side of my MAC, since Mobi doesn’t make a MAC version.  Finally, I photoshopped  the spiffy new cover you see on the left.

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Front Matter, Back Matter, Meta Data?

So I’m working my way through the Smashwords Style Guide, and I’m surprised to discover that they want me to put a long warning about copyright infringement at the beginning of my e-books.

I’m reminded of the FBI warning at the beginning of video movies, the ones I used to fast-forward through before DVDs came along and made that impossible.  I’ve often wondered how many movie pirates read that warning and said, “Oh no!  Better not copy or sell this.  That’s against the law.”

So I put all this extended copyright stuff at the front of my short story, Fire Retardant, and all I’ve accomplished is cluttering up the story preview–you know, the sample the buyer can check out before they take the 99 cent plunge.  Potential purchasers spend more time reading a copyright notice than my brilliant words.  That’s gonna change.

A quick survey of other e-books on my Sony proves that even Random House puts this stuff at the back, but I’m wondering if there’s even a better way: how about in the meta-data?  I’m going to check out the mobi e-pub software and see if I can stick this into the meta data when I generate the stories in Kindle format.  I would still put a copyright date with my name at the beginning, but not a long notice.

I’m guessing that the whole concept of putting copyright at the front began because in print books the first page is on the right anyway, so you might as well stick all that copyright notice stuff on the left side.  But in e-books that makes it the first page, which is probably why most publishers are switching it to the last page.

Makes sense to me.  Hey Smashwords!  You guys getting this?

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Who Would Walk Away From 500 Thousand Dollars?

Apparently Barry Eisler just did.  Why did he walk away from this lucrative book deal with St. Martin’s Press?  Because he believes he will make more self-publishing in the long run, particularly on e-book rights.

Eisler is joining a growing number of authors who are walking away from legacy publishers.  The problem is that the standard industry contract only gives the author  a 25% royalty on e-books, which comes off after Amazon or Smashwords has taken their cut.  Then the agent takes 15% off that 25% and it works out that the author is really only getting 17% of the e-book price.

Why accept that little crumb when an author can sell their novel through Kindle and get a 70% royalty?  No agent or publisher required.  In fact, how can publishers defend such a huge cut when they don’t need a printing press, trucks or a delivery network for e-books?

Up until now they’ve claimed that branding can save their publishing model–that readers will flock to a legacy publisher’s books because there are too many lousy self-published books to sort through.  But the truth is that the internet has its own filters, like the book bloggers who have made Amanda Hocking the new internet writing star.

Publishers are not obsolete, but they need to embrace the future and recognize that things have changed for the better.  E-readers have more people buying books than they have in a decade, and this should be a good thing.  Desperate attempts by legacy publishers to keep e-book prices high in order to stall the e-revolution will fail.  Refusing to give authors a fair cut will cost them content and market share.

Eilser wisely draws a parallel to railroads in the 1950s just as the interstates were under construction.  The railroads thought they were in the railroad business, but actually they were in the transportation business.  Once large trucks became a viable option, many railroads folded.  The smart railroads adapted, combining trucking and rail, adjusting prices and expectations and finding the niches they could still fill.

Because of my film industry background, I’m reminded of Kodak and Fuji film back in the 90s.  Even a camera assistant like me knew that high definition digital video was coming, but Kodak thought they were in the film stock business and tried to fight the change by producing better and better film stocks.  They achieved some amazing things with their 800 ASA film stock, but it couldn’t stop the slide to cheap digital.

Fuji knew they were in the image capture business and went aggressively after the digital video business.  Their CEO got an award a couple of years ago for keeping Fiji successful through this upheaval.

I was in Kodak’s home town–Rochester, NY–in 2006.  It’s the only time that I’ve seen an empty ten-story office building.  I’m talking about a modern glass and steel office building.  Kodak did follow Fuji’s lead into digital and has survived, but it was gut-wrenchingly painful to watch, and a lot of hard working people lost their jobs in the process.

Publishers should be in the business of selling books, not pulped dead trees.  Some publishers will recognize this and adapt to e-books and thrive.  Others will go down.  It doesn’t have to be this painful.

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Don’t Buy My Short Story — Yet

So I’ve been crushed by an old version of Microsoft Word.  I knew I had paragraph formatting issues with my short story, Burning Moose, when I first uploaded it for sale as an Amazon e-book, but I thought I’d solved the problem with the short story Railroaded by saving it as an .rtf and going back to a .doc before uploading.

It turns out that did nothing.  Railroaded was MS from 2004, the others–well, I think I wrote Burning Moose on a MAC SE that I bought used from CPused, a great store that has since gone under.  You get the idea.  Very old technology.

Luckily Smashwords has a 73 page manual on how to format your MS word document so that it will upload nicely as an e-book.   So here I go again.  I’ve uploaded a new version of Fire Retardant but it’ll take 24 hours to publish.  I’ll check it out when it’s up to make sure it’s good and then I’ll relaunch.

I’m pretty sure this is going to get easier to do as new programs are written to solve these little formatting issues.  In the meantime: at least I learned a lot about MS word today.

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Fire Retardant Launch

Cover for Fire Retardant–a Sioux Rock Falls Short Story

Forest fires regularly sweep through Northern Ontario during the summer months, and if a town is in the way it has no chance.  In 1979 the town of Cobalt, Ontario near Lake Tamiskaming lost a good chunk, with only the church, a few homes and a decaying strip plaza spared.

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Kindle vs Sony: Pricing Divergence

I note this morning that Amanda Hocking’s Switched (see post below) is for sale on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents, but on the Sony Reader Store’s front page it’s $3.99.  While that’s not a horrible price, it’s four times out of line.

I like my Sony e-reader, but I’m getting the Kindle app for my i-phone, and the e-reader will idle for yet another novel.

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Rebecca Senese Seizes the Day

Rebecca Senese and I shared a strange place in the history of Storyteller Magazine before we even met. I’d finally snagged the cover of Storyteller in the winter 2006 edition after many attempts, so my mother proudly purchased a subscription for every member of the family, including my aunt.

Unfortunately, I had decided that for my story White Metal I’d let construction workers speak like construction workers.  The F-bomb fell more than a few times, and Storyteller chose to stick it right in one of the teaser lines.  My aunt, horrified by the profanity, refused to even read her nephew’s story and instead carried on to read the next story in the issue, Brother’s Under the Skin by Rebecca Senese.

It was like pouring gasoline on fire.  My aunt, the very committed Catholic anti-abortion activist, read a story about parents who clone their murdered son and try to relive his childhood through the clone.  Boom!

Terry Tyo, the owner of Storyteller, got a nasty phone call demanding that he cancel my aunt’s subscription and never send her a copy of his sick magazine again.  Terry was gun shy of controversial stories for months.  Between us, Rebecca and I had rocked Storyteller’s world.

Now Rebecca is out to rock your world.  She read my first post about planning to e-publish all my out of print short stories, but she ran where I walked.  I’m still trying to pull together the other stories, get them up with Smashwords for the Sony and Nook, and put together my anthology.  But in the last two months, while I was off in another world, Rebecca’s done it.

I’d better hurry.  A year ago I was in the middle of the e-book revolution, now I’m playing catch up.  So watch here for more announcements and e-publishing.  First my Storyteller stories, then my contest winners, then my novel and then…write till I die.  I finally have a market, however humble.  It’s there for the bold.

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Snow Helps E-books

Lots of people got Kindles and Nooks and e-readers over Christmas this year.  These lucky people also apparently decided it was too snowy to go out shopping between Christmas and New Year’s, because instead they stayed home and purchased record numbers of e-books.

According to USA Today, the top 6 bestsellers sold more e-books than print books, and 19 of the top 50 also sold more e-books.  After more than a decade of hype and failure, it looks like e-books have finally got off the ground, and this time it’s not just better readers but more and cheaper content that has made the difference.

It’s time for traditional publishers to wake up and remember that they’re publishers, not printers.  Stop fighting to keep to the old delivery system and just move on with the new one.

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I Saw the Future — Yesterday

I chose physics as my major in university because it was my best subject in high school thanks to an excellent teacher, it seemed like an interesting field of study and I wanted to be a science fiction author and I thought it would help.

But by the time I graduated with a specialist in geophysics, I had stopped reading SF and was more interested in geo-politics than geophysics.

I think what turned me off SF was that as the moon launches faded and the baby boomers realized that they weren’t going to go to space, SF went distant, very distant.  Novels like Dune took us eons into the future and our planet had nothing to do with it anymore.  I loved Dune, but I missed the immediacy of Heinlein and the sense that this was all going to happen and very soon.

So I watched with fascination yesterday as history imitated fiction.  Elon Musk is the real life version of Heinlein’s D.D. Harriman, the fictional entrepreneur who started a rocket program to get people cheaply into orbit, not just to make money, but because he believed it was humanity’s destiny to go forth from this planet and explore.

Yesterday Musk’s company, SpaceX, became the first private company to launch a space capsule into orbit and return it safely to Earth, a feat previously accomplished only by countries, not companies.  Better yet, SpaceX intends to human rate their Dragon capsule.  Musk’s stated intention is to provide cheap access to space for anyone.

He’s the absolute opposite of the evil Hollywood capitalist.  He took the billion he made from Paypal to start a company to build electric cars and sunk everything else into SpaceX.  He wants to do things to make life better for humans, and he wants to make money doing it.  What a great combination!

So maybe I will write some sci-fi again one day, but my characters will be riding to space on SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, and they won’t be traveling through worm holes, or black holes.  I suspect I’ll be accused of having little imagination, but what I really see is the future.  I saw it yesterday.