Alexandra Erin

Via a comment on my e-publishing article:

Anglo-Irish author Richard Herley has taken his novels and published them online using something approaching a shareware model: free to download, with the request that readers who enjoy the work pay a small fee of around 1 to 2 pounds, depending upon the length of the work.

(The pound is going for just under two of our earth dollars, last I checked.)

He seems fairly pleased with the results he’s achieved in the first ten days or so of his experiment. The books on his site so far include four previously published works, consisting of a stone age-set Pagans Trilogy, and The Penal Colony, the novel which formed the basis for the film No Escape. This movie’s probably the closest many people have ever come to being aware of his body of work, so it’s very exciting to see him posting it online where the world can see.

He’s also published at least one one completely new novel in this method, and has a couple of others listed as “coming attractions,” as it were. He notes on his page that he’s the first mainstream author he’s aware of to take this route. I hope he’s far from the last. Even if an author chooses to stick with conventional publication, they should be aware that their out-of-print books could be shared with the public in a way that will continue to generate income for them indefinitely.

I wish him the best of luck in his endeavo(u)r.

Last year, pop “artist” Todd Goldman exhibited paintings and related merchandise that were a blatant rip-off of a panel from an online comic. Evidence suggests he does this a lot, either taking another artist’s work or using artist-unidentified clip art from the web. Of course, a lot of times the reason the artist is unidentified is because of the lax attitude to attribution which permeates the internet, but that’s another story.

Anyway, it’s happened again, this time with a t-shirt design company which provides t-shirts for Hot Topic. Said designer took a popular (and much-copied) image of an anthropomorphic bar of soap saying “Rub Me On Your Butt!”, created by an indy t-shirt designer, and slightly altered it for a t-shirt which is now available at Hot Topic.

When pressed by the original artist for comment, the design company (Newbreed Girl) responded that they get ideas from freelancers and can’t vet the blah blah blah blah pass the buck. Hot Topic has yet to respond.

The fact is that legal options may be limited, if only because of disparaties in finances. If Hot Topic were selling the original soap bar shirts and an indy created a shirt showing what was blatantly the same character in a slightly different pose with a slightly different punchline, Hot Topic could sue them into the stone age. Even the threat of a protracted legal battle would probably be enough. On the other hand, how does David take on Goliath?

(The essential facts about the matter here.)

It may be that the only option here is bad press, lost sales, and general public ill will. Yeah, I know a lot of people don’t shop at Hot Topic, anyway… but if you do, consider searching the web for truly indepedent creative sites which embody the spirit of individuality that Hot Topic tries to manufacture.

Let Hot Topic know. Bitch about Hot Topic (more so than you do already) and Newbreed girl on your blog. Be bold. Use headlines like “Hot Topic Hates Independent Artists” or even “Hot Topic Shits On Individuality.” No, these aren’t meant to be real newsflashes. The idea is to have them be the sorts of things that come up when you do blog searches/web searches for Hot Topic. Companies track that sort of thing.

I’ll confess that I occasionally shop at Hot Topic for *ahem* Tinkerbell memorabilia. Now, though, that’s off the table. I’m not setting foot in their stores again unless this gets resolved and they put a policy in place to guard against this sort of thing. In other words, I’m probably not going to shop there again… and of course, that goes for their sister store, Torrid, which I’ll probably miss a bit more. Oh, well. I guess I have to stop being a mallrat sometime.

There’s also a banner that’s been produced to highlight the issue. I personally think it could go a little bit slower and do more to introduce the facts of the matter… as it stands, it’s not much more than preaching to the choir, but I’m posting it here anyway, behind a cut because it may intrude on the sidebar:

(more…)

So, while waiting for Dreamhost to work their way through the “couple weeks” waiting list (I’ve been told way-off-the-record that I’m “getting near the top”, yay), I have been checking out other hosting companies. One of the problems I’m finding, though, is that none of them are able to match Dreamhost’s most attractive feature: terms of use that basically boil down to “Don’t put up anything illegal, okay?”

If I went exclusively with another hosting company, I’d have to face the prospect that somebody else might judge Tales of MU or Void Dogs to be pornographic or obscene. I could move my less “edgy” works to another hosting account… and be saving money compared to the Dreamhost upgrade… but by an astonishing sort of statistical fluke, you could pretty much produce a list of my stories in order of popularity simply by sorting them from most lurid to least.

In other words, moving Tribe and The 3 Seas to another account wouldn’t really change much.

The main thing I was thinking was setting up Star Harbor Nights on a different account to “test drive” the service, since it has an established (and anxious) fan base and since I wouldn’t be moving a big archive over all at once. Actual sex crops up pretty infrequently in SHN, and it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice to avoid it in the future… but more than a few hosting companies actually have a provision against “foul language”, a term which actually has no legal meaning whatsoever. I’m guessing they’re taking the stance that each and every site hosted with them is an advertisement for their services and they’re thinking Respectable Businesses aren’t going to want to be hosted by the same company that hosts Peter Potty Mouth’s Daily Rant.

Well, I’m sure there are Respectable Businesses that think that way, but it’s pretty stupid all the same… what customers go through the trouble of finding out which other sites are hosted by the hosting company which a business they might prospectively patronize?

Mostly, I wouldn’t be happy about paying money to a company to serve content if they place greater restrictions on that content than the applicable laws. If Dreamhost takes a whole lot longer to get down to me, I’ll have to figure out something… even if it comes down to taking a hard look at my ISP’s terms of service and seeing about hosting for myself. I’d really rather not mess with that.

If anybody reading this knows a good hosting service with a liberal TOS/AUP, feel free to let me know… and if you’ve got a referral code or something, don’t be shy about sharing it.

I’ve been getting scattered reports of internal server errors when people try to access Tales of MU all day, so I’m not going to update anything else tonight. I’ll be keeping an eye on the stats that I can watch, and contacting my host to see if I can get a more realistic estimate of the server waiting list time, because the couple/few weeks I was initially told are long since past.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Well, somehow the caching plugin for Tales of MU was turned off (probably when I upgraded to the latest Wordpress version on Sunday?) on the same day that Pages Unbound got the big link from User Friendly, so there’s been a few recurrences of The Evil Error Message of Doom and I spent some time trying to chase down what, apart from the extra traffic was going on.

In between frustrations, I made some nice blog posts (below) and changed the upper area of my blog around a bit. If you look closely, you’ll notice I’ve enshrined “kitten snuff porn” up at the top of the page. The more legitimate claims to fame I rack up, the more tightly I cling to the bizarre and trivial ones…

Speaking of bizarre and trivial, since I’m awake at 2:00 in the morning with nothing to update, I decided to check up on fellow Nebraskan Lazette Gifford. Looking at the December 2007 newsletter, I notice her imprint, Dragontooth Fantasy, is having a little bit of trouble:

We obviously faced problems in the production end during 2007. Most of this was due to the loss of copyeditors. Copyeditors are essential to any serious publisher. I am not qualified to do the work, and finding people who are — and holding on to them — is very difficult in a position that only pays on percentage of book sales. It’s not a way to make a lot of money, but it is a way to get experience and (as in the case of one of the DTF editors) move on to ‘real world’ editing.

I’m actually going to restrain myself and not make a crack about copyeditors here. I will point out (though not to her, unless she happens to stumble across this in an ego trawl or something) that if she’d move to a model that’s independent of a bigger publisher like Double Dragon, there’d be more pieces of the pie available.

I mean, let’s grant that copyeditors are Absolutely Essential To The Process… that leaves us with the author, the copyeditor, cover artist, and her, who brings everything together and facilitates the whole thing. Who else do they need? I’m not looking for an employee roster from DD. I mean, who do they actually need?

Her suspicion of Lulu is based around her perception of low quality, but if she’s bringing in a professionally edited manuscript in the first place, that shouldn’t be an issue. Lulu’s print copies aren’t cheap, but as Double Dragon is an e-publisher there’s not really any comparison. It really seems like she could (barring contractual obligations) take her future books to Lulu and her and her authors could clean up, compared to how they’re doing.

From my outsider’s perspective, I initially assumed that Double Dragon must be providing the editors for Dragontooth, but apparently that’s not the case. This leaves us once again with the classic question of what they’re doing that Zette and Dragontooth couldn’t do for themselves… and have more money left over with which to lure in experienced copyeditors.

In past flameversations on this topic, her contention has been that Doubledragon’s listings in multiple digital storefronts bring in sales, but I’m not convinced that a bunch of authors nobody’s heard of are going to see that much business buried on the seventeenth page of a listing, behind well-known and nationally famous authors. The independent market belongs to people who drive their own sales, not those who meekly sit in the back row waiting for somebody to look past Terry Pratchett and Anne McCaffery.

In any event, her strategy apparently does not appear to produce consistent enough income for her to be able to keep copyeditors around.

Anyway, I have no idea what she considers the qualifications for this post to be, or what channels she’s using to look for her new copyeditors… she makes no mention of that in the newsletter and provides no contact information for queries. Still, from her mention of the valuable experience and the fact that the announcement at the top says they’re closed for submissions until summer of this year or longer, I’d say she’s probably pretty wide open.

If anybody is for some reason looking to get their foot in the door, it’s probably worth a shot.

Also the number one search result for “Neil Fucking Gaiman”.

This was brought to my attention by Mouselord. Neil Fucking Gaiman, in cooperation with his label Harper Fucking Collins (a divison of News Corp), is preparing to offer one of his published novels for free online in celebration of his blog’s seventh blogiversary. He says “initially for a month.”

What happens if this turns out to be a viable strategy, though? What happens if Harper Fucking Collins sees a surge of interest in Neil’s work? Most people I know who are into Neil got into Neil because somebody loaned them one of his books, most of which are admittedly hard to do justice when you’re trying to tell somebody how awesome they are. What if a lot of people read whichever novel gets picked (there’s a vote thingy) and then decide they must buy it and every thing he’s ever written?

Dear goth in heathen, I hope that Harper Fucking Collins is smart enough to put a direct link to buy a hard copy on the free copy… they’ll be missing sales if they overlook that or think “Who’s going to buy when we’re giving it away for free?”

What if Neil sees a surge of interest in Neil’s work and decides to try something new with some of his ideas that aren’t necessarily under contract, like offering it for free from the get-go and accepting reader contributions? I don’t claim to know the man-god, but I gather things like creative control are somewhat important to him. You don’t get more of that than when you are your own publisher.

Neil Fucking Gaiman.

Seriously.

I’m excited by the possibilities here.

(And, just so this post shows up in exact phrase searches: Neil Gaiman.)

So, now I’m corresponding with Shirley Meier, who was nice enough to leave a comment on a previous post about authors going online. She may very well be taking the leap herself. She also contributes another piece of the dismal picture of the industry: authors’ rates as low as 3% and 4% are apparently not uncommon.

I’ll point out once again that that there are e-publishers who go as high as 30%, but since you have to drive the sales yourself, giving up 70% doesn’t seem like a great deal.

Anyway, I got another “made it” sign yesterday, when somebody chose to advertise their online D&D setting on the Tales of MU site with “Banana pudding goes well with a d20.” (For any blog readers who aren’t specifically MU readers, banana pudding is the favorite desert of fan-favorite character Two.) It’s still up at the moment. The advertiser, who is of course a MU reader as well, seems happy with the returns so far.

And while I’m posting, I just thought I’d mention (and preserve) the fact that my blog is still the number one Google result for kitten snuff porn.

And apparently, lesbian spanking scene, too.

Thanks go to my father for pointing that second one out.

One of the longest running webcomics in the whole wide world wide web, User Friendly, posted a link to Pages Unbound as the “link of the day” today.

The other day I got an e-mail from Karen Wehrstein, a professional artist and published author (two solo books from Baen, and involvement with another with S.M. Stirling and Shirley Meier) asking for tips and tricks of the online writing world. It was an interesting exchange. She confirmed a lot of what I’ve been hearing/reading from other sources: 6-8% royalties for mass market paperbacks, shrinking advances, growing cuts for agents, and an increasingly cut-throat world where your first novel must either sell like hotcakes or it might as well be your last novel. It’s totally a buyer’s market.

Anyway, Karen’s no stranger to the computer world and its creative possibilities. She contributes digital artwork to the political blog DailyKos and has seen bloggers “go pro” with their online writing before. What she’s preparing to do with her fiction is offer her existing novels online in serial form, with revised and expanded material… kind of the “digitally remastered special edition director’s cut.” I didn’t ask, but I have to assume this means the rights have reverted to her. I hope she has tremendous success with this, because it could serve as an inspiration to other authors who have the rights to out-of-print books that aren’t doing any good for either themselves or for readers. I think more established authors would be willing to try this than serializing their unpublished work, for the simple reason that there’s less perception of risking future sales.

Once they see that it’s commercially viable and can bring more favorable returns to the author than the traditional path, the resistance to self-publishing original unpublished works may vanish.