Last Month (December 2000)

05 January 2001
Arrrrgh! Prepare to Be Boarded!

Sometimes a judge realizes that she made a mistake before it becomes a permanent problem. Once in a while, it's in our favor, too!

Harlan Ellison has filed suit against a number of internet pirates and their facilitators. Thus far, as usual, it has been one long battle against large corporate (dis)interests and their schools of sharks. Given that one of the defendants calls itself the world's biggest ISP, is anyone surprised? In any event, the remaining identified defendants filed motions to dismiss or judgment on the pleadings (one defendant called it a motion for summary judgment, but it's really not).

Today, the judge issued her tentative decision on the motions: denied. There are going to be several unhappy associates and partners at large, nasty law firms over the weekend, trying desperately to find some way to get an interlocutory appeal (28 U.S.C. §§ 1290 et seq. discuss jurisdiction for federal appeals). The judge's opinion points out that certain critical factual assertions the defendants made were denied with basis, and that other legal issues are inherently factual. The motions concern the scope of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions (17 U.S.C. § 512) that are intended to protect ISPs from "pass through" liability for copyright infringement, similar to the way that telephone service is protected under the "common carrier" doctrine.

That's a necessary safe harbor. The problem is that the defendants didn't follow the rules for sailing into it. The infringements were not merely transitory, but remained persistently; when notified, the defendants did not remove the infringements as required; and one of the defendants did not even comply with the designation-of-agent requirement.

So we get to start the discovery process to prove that what we know happened (through some fairly sophisticated electronic sleuthing) did happen. If I start whining about having to take a trip to Reston to interview some corporatchiks whose heads are so far up their asses that they're emerging from their shoulders, remind me that it beats the alternative of losing the case and making some bad law, ok?

11 January 2001
Is It Modern?

My oldest son has taken a great liking to Gilbert & Sullivan. (That means he's probably mine, and not the milkman's.) He's a bit frightening in his quickness, though, and has probably spoiled your day. He very quickly turned "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" into "I am the very model of an element'ry principal," which (unfortunately for you, since you've read this far) led me to this:

A Publisher for Subsidy

I am the very model of a Publisher for Subsidy,
I'll publish every book that any sucker puts in front of me,
I don't know much of printing, and my ignorance historical,
Runs Gutenberg to lithograph, though not quite categorical;
I'm very well acquainted too with checkbooks mathematical,
Rely on advertising, both the simple and the practical,
About the state of publishing I'm teeming with a lot o' news—
With many cheerful smiles about the ways I'll hide the bread you'll lose.
 
I'm very good at sponsoring and printing the ridiculous,
I know so many ways to take advantage of the credulous;
In short, in matters publishing, I've no scrap of integrity,
I am the very model of a Publisher for Subsidy.
 
I know linguistic history from Grisham to the fox in sox,
I publish awful writing, I've an unfilled taste for paradox,
I set in Times New Roman all the poems done by those who ask,
And copyediting (when done) is billed out as a separate task.
I print up unresearched narratives from any of the fifty states,
And know the many ways to con their memoirs from illiterates,
Then I can hum while flying to Grand Caymen with the authors' dough,
And proclaim all the while, "I'm selling books in northern Idaho."
 
Now I can write an author's bill in legalistic cuneiform,
And tell you every detail known of storage charges uniform;
In short, in matters publishing, I'm all some writers want to see,
I am the very model of a Publisher for Subsidy.
 
In fact, when I know what is meant by "colophon" and "royalty",
When I can tell at sight a sell-through ratio from a penalty,
When such affairs as reviews and store buyers I can understand,
And when I know precisely what is meant by "no remainders planned",
When I have learnt what progress has been made in book typography,
When I know more of value than the dollars making up my fee:
In short, when I've a smattering of element'ry literature,
    literature, literature, literature… ah!
You'll say a slicker publisher has never pushed his wares before—
 
For my book-industry knowledge, though I'm charming and indentury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of last century;
And yes, in matters publishing, I don't care what the readers see,
I am the very model of a Publisher for Subsidy.

I should probably lay off the cough syrup for a while. Perhaps, though, it has a deeper cause…

16 January 2001
Waiting for Foucault

Postmodern fiction and literary theory depend a great deal upon self-reference—so much so that the traditional fictional values of plot, character, and rhetoric are submerged below various levels of themes that somehow seem to involve a confrontation with nihilism. Conversely, category fiction—what many inaccurately call "genre fiction," a term that is simultaneously redundant and contradictory—does everything it can to ignore postmodernism, and the readership is even more dismissive. Postmodernism overwhelmingly relies upon one rhetorical strategy to express its themes: self-reference. And thereby hangs not a tale, but an antitale.

Category fiction, and particularly speculative fiction, normally maintains an almost strident silence about the arts. This peculiar denial of a particular variety of self-reference could result from one or more of several factors.

• Fear of being taken as pretentious. This is certainly a valid concern. Much of postmodern literature—and particularly the darlings of the not-quite-successful literary artiste community—is pretentious. However, this merely trades one kind of pretention for another: instead of acknowledging the arts, speculative fiction writers often bombard the reader with an excrutiating authenticity. In horror, this may take the form of almost clinical descriptions (using very nonclinical adjectives) of exactly what body parts are being shredded by the Monster of the Week; in science fiction, it may show up as "wiring diagram" fiction, a thinly disguised attempt to demonstrate the author's engineering prowess; in fantasy, it may show up as appallingly detailed herbal remedies, demonstrating that the author really did do his/her research on preindustrial medicine.
• Fear of bogging the story down in infodumps. Of course, putting in an infodump to describe the crafting and use of musical instruments (unless that is, for some reason, important to the story itself) is inappropriate. But then, speculative fiction is not exactly free of other infodumps.
• Fear of seeming ignorant. As anyone who studies the arts knows, there is as much technical study required as there is for most scientific fields. Unlike scientific fields, though, it's much harder to just make up terminology in the arts, which share the concept of a "special language" with the law.

In the end, the general failure to acknowledge the arts leaves a silence in speculative fiction that can draw the reader away from the characters. How often, for example, does a starship captain have something other than a self-portrait or display of medal citations in his cabin? Doesn't the engineering crew keep a boom-box or other music system going during routine maintenance (I've almost never walked into an active aircraft maintenance facility not working under NBC conditions without finding music going)? Perhaps a groundpounding "military adviser" is a shutterbug or painter…

Ironically, though, most efforts to include the arts in speculative fiction fail as one type of art becomes an obsession, to the detriment of the work. Consider, for example, Modesitt's abysmal spellsong books or M'Caffrey's less-than-one-dimensional Harperhall books in fantasy, all of those awful "writer as protagonist" books in horror which never seem to involve much in the way of actual writing, and Clarke and Lee's pathetic Rama sequels. The arts seem to work best, at least at novel length, when they're diversified: Waitman's The Merro Tree, to some extent; Le Guin's careful integration of the arts into the various societies portrayed in The Dispossessed; the counterpoint of decorative arts and music in Russell's The Sparrow and Orwell's 1984; the interplay among music, painting, and writing in De Lint's Memory and Dream.

Rather like characters.

The major flaw in most subcategorial fiction, such as "military SF," is absence of diversity in the characters. Too often, all of the good guys are minor variations on the same theme, and the bad guys don't even manage that much. Even the masters are not immune; consider, for example, Tolkien's Uruk-hai, which differ from each other only in their names. (This is partially on purpose, as the Uruk-Hai are created creatures, but it goes too far.)

The irony in all this is that including the arts in a work of art (however crass it may be) is self-referential in an "unacceptable" (or at least "unpopular") way—which leads back to the beginning of this essay, but not in quite the same way as we started. That difference is, itself, a rejection of the most extreme aspects of postmodernism: nihilism. Most of what speculative fiction writers know as self-referential fiction—which is an awfully tiny field, given the ghetto walls—merely validates Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Too much of the crap is popular because certain publishers and critics pushed it to further their personal agendas (this should sound much like the cyberpunk movement…).

More critically, speculative fiction writers, as a group, make the same mistake concerning postmodern fiction as do mundanes who criticize speculative fiction as mere escapism: they impose their opinions of a few "popular" works on the value of the entire subcategory. Too often, we let one, or a few, editors (or, in the contemporary publishing scene, marketing dorks) determine what is good and what is not, forgetting that the very best work is likely to have some surface flaws and come from less-known sources. Some history of speculative fiction magazines in the 1950s and 1960s should give us pause: for all the apparent dominance of Astounding, the younger magazines were on whole more vital, as reflected in the greater proportion of memorable work published in F&SF, Galaxy, and If before about 1967.

And so it goes. Because the point is that some self-reference does matter, and some self-awareness is part of the ultimate meaning and structure of a piece. These techniques cannot be rejected as inappropriate any more than one can honestly believe that, say, no sculpture cast in concrete could even theoretically be worthwhile. Technique can be limiting, particularly when it hardens to sterotype or expectation, but it is not determinative.

19 January 2001
The Left Hand of Ignorance

We'll start off with a quotation:

How Scams Work
Publishers: They're called subsidy, or "vanity" publishers. They recruit authors through display ads in writer's magazines, spam sent to online newsgroups[,] or even through unsolicited leters and brochures sent by regular mail. "ATTENTION: WRITERS WANTED[,]" they trumpet. When you respond with a query or manuscript, you receive a letter awash with praise for your writing and chock full of promises of success and exaggerated claims of all the wonderful things the publisher will do for your manuscript, from printing to promotion. Then when the contract comes, you notice the clause that states how much YOU are expected to contribute, usually a significant sum of money. For this you will receive X number of books out of X number printed, your book will be widely distributed and promoted[,] and you will all live happily ever after.
   Don't bet on it. These kinds of publishers make profits from the fees they charge writers, not from sales of the books they produce. The finished books are often of dubious quality, there's actually little or no promotional effort expended by the publisher at all[,] and you'll be hard pressed to find your book in major bookstores (or even small ones). The publisher may not even print as many total books as promised….
   Literary agents and book doctors: Shady agents recruit writers much as subsidy publishers do—through ads, online spam[,] and direct mail….
Here's what to watch out for:….
   Display ads for agents, publishers, contests[,] and anthologies. You're better off resisting these ads entirely. Legitimate, successful agents and publishers don't need to advertise; they're deluged with more writers than they can take on. What's more, these ads are misleading. Study them carefully and you probably won't find any mention of a fee, but you can be sure that requests for money will be introduced once you respond to the ad.

This is a perfect example of the left and right hands keeping each other in the dark. It is taken from a short article by Nancy Breen in 2001 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest, 2000), 101–03. Reread that sentence again. That's right—the single most common source for those ads decried in the article. The problems go deeper than just between publications, though. The book lists 56 agents. I have documentation demonstrating that four of these agents regularly violate at least one aspect of the advice quoted above, and I have received complaints (I am still investigating) concerning two others. That's over 10%, folks. The record for publishers is more difficult to discern, although it appears to be somewhat better—nonetheless, I spotted at least three questionable publishers while skimming the first 25 pages of the publisher listings.

I've always paid a lot more attention to what someone does than what he or she says. All of the commas I inserted to improve the grammar and reduce ambiguity should give a hint on the writing skill apparent at WD. That's not to say that the editors of this particular book should not be applauded for at least partly removing their heads from certain bodily orifices in which WD's collective head has resided for years. But, on the basis of actions…

21 January 2001
Herding Cockroaches

Once in a while, something goes right for authors. A recent report from SFWA's Grievance Committee—the notorious GriefCom—shows that at least one book person seems to care about making sure that authors get paid. Although I'm not a big fan ordinarily of book packagers in general or of Byron Preiss's work in particular, Mr. Preiss has always had a reputation for playing (relatively) fair with authors, despite the inherent conflicts of interest created by the way that book packaging works.

For most purposes, think of book packagers as adding yet another middle-man to the process. Too often, the book packager does the job that editors are supposed to do: solicit manuscripts and materials on particular topics. Editors can seldom do this anymore, given that they must attend all those marketing meetings (at which they'll generally be ignored) and maybe, someday, actually read some manuscripts; occasionally, when feeling guilty, maybe the oddball editor will actually edit. For most products, this actually makes little economic sense for anyone except the packager him- or herself, as the payrates are so bloody low to begin with that it takes an author in desperate need of money, or who really doesn't care about money because he or she believes this will be his or her "big break," to cooperate. On the other hand, that's a good description of about 98% of all authors, so perhaps it's not completely nonsensical. The model does, however, make some sense in creating semicollaborative and multimedia works; this was the primary focus of Preiss's company—before he lost control.

Mr. Preiss acted with honor to pay writers out of his own pocket after the investors who purchased his company stiffed them. Thus, if I were interested in writing that kind of material (and Mr. Preiss opens a new packaging operation), he would jump to the top of the list. As it is, however, I recommend that writers avoid sending material to Byron Preiss Multimedia Company (presuming that it has maintained that name; I have been unable to confirm this) so long as it remains under the control of the British investment firm Vmailer. I cannot, however, invoke the "b" word, because that would be a violation of antitrust law:

boycott.

At the end of Mr. Barnes's summary for GriefCom, he asks a very important question:

So aside from the standard advice to look as much as you can before leaping, another issue arises for SFWA: Do we need to think of alternate approaches and strategies to get our members off the bottom of the pay list, when the people making the decisions have no lasting connection to writing or publishing? If so, any ideas?

Well, I do have an idea, but nobody is going to like it, and nobody is going to do it. There is one writer's organization that seems to have its completely dishonorable customers at least paying on time: Writer's Guild of America (West). WGA(W)'s structure enables them to engage in boycotts without running afoul of antitrust law. But that requires introducing the "u" word to the conversation:

union.

WGA(W) can do this for two reasons. WGA is not subdivided into bitchy, catfighting subsets based on filmmaking categories that end up harming their members more than anything else, like so much of the writing community is (I'm thinking not of SFWA, but of the longrunning animosity between the National Writer's Union, and the Author's Guild, and for that matter just about everyone else dealing with print publications). Instead, different divisions within WGA deal with different forms of screenwriting—primarily film, television, and advertising—and, most crucially, coordinate with allied unions involved in production of audiovideo materials—the Screen Actors' Guild, the Directors' Guild, etc. Most importantly, though, a significant percentage of the people who actually make decisions, or at least determine what will be presented for approval to the decisionmakers, are current and/or former members of WGA(W) or one of the allied groups. By parallel, this would mean that editors at publishing companies must be former and/or current writers, and that the rest of the production staffs must also be unionized and honor the agreements.

Unfortunately, it will never work. Unlike Hollywood, there are just too many different business models for successful publishers in print. In Hollywood, one is either a semispecialist independent or captive to a humongous media conglomerate. In print, many publishers put out only one or a few publications, which may range from small-press quarterlies to mass-market weeklies, from four literary fiction or professional/academic nonfiction titles to hundreds of mass-market books a year, from… Further, the financial barriers to becoming a successful publisher, although higher than most wishful publishers and editors would like to believe, are several orders of magnitude lower than those for entering audiovisual creation and distribution. Even absent these business models, though, it's a lot easier to herd cats than herd authors. Screenwriters inherently understand the concept of "team player"—even the difficult ones. Authors don't. Three authors together can't even agree on what time to have lunch, let alone standards for publication.

There is, however, one final barrier. The real one. The objections in the previous paragraph applied equally to pre-unionized manufacturing at the end of the nineteenth century, but they were overcome. There is one additional layer of people in publishing, however, and there is a crucial difference between that layer in Hollywood and that layer in print publishing. This is not going to make very many people happy, but here it is:

• Screenwriters' agents are regulated by the government.
• Literary agents are completely unregulated, even by themselves.

So, Mr. Barnes, after all of this abstraction, my suggestion is simple: Get agents regulated by law. Whatever path is taken thereafter, this will provide a single point of contact on which to focus efforts. Absent this fundamental change, you won't be herding cats; you'll be herding cockroaches, who run away whenever any light is shined on their activities. (At least not all agents carry diseases, though.)

24 January 2001
Dilletantes

Just a few notes on professionalism and writing. These notes are tied together only by their subject; shuffle them as you see fit.

• A professional writer does everything in his or her power to improve his or her writing. Contrary to what some "gurus"—often creative writing instructors who have sold little or nothing of their own work—say, that means reading voraciously. Read the good, read the bad, read everything. And learn from it. A writer who cannot diagnose good or bad writing in another's work will be completely unable to self-edit. A writer who cannot self-edit is nothing more than a dilletante.

• A professional writer never does less than a professional job. "Good enough to sell" is not, in the long run, good enough. There is a point of diminishing returns beyond which further editing does not actually make a work enough (if any) better, but that point is all too seldom reached—even in published work.

• A professional fiction writer never loses respect for his or her readers. That requires a fine balance between failing to adequately explain the milieu and treating the readers like idiots with excessive infodumps. Remember: Those explanations are almost always about the environment. Except in very rare instances, such as true utopian (these days, meaning dystopian) literature, the environment must remain secondary to character, plot, and theme, or the work isn't fiction—it's only allegory.

• A professional nonfiction writer never loses respect for his or her readers. That requires rhetorical choices as intricate as, and often more intricate than, required for fiction. George Orwell's essays for Time and Tide are outstanding examples. There is a difference between pontificating and either informing or persuading. Learn it.

• A professional dramatist, whether for stage or for screen, maintains respect for both the audience and the actors by writing a clear, deliverable script. Cacophony has its place, but drama is not it. It's not just the actors' egos on the line when the script is muddled; it's their livelihoods.

• A professional poet maintains respect for his or her readers by always remembering that it's the poem that matters, not his or her own cleverness. Poetry is particularly prone to artistiteism, because good poetry is more than the clever creation of an image. Poetry, like everything else concerning words, is about communication; the word-images are merely a means to an end, not an end in themselves. This is where the two extremes common in contemporary poetry fail. Sappy love poems (secular or religious) communicate only the shallowness of the poet's obsessions; avant garde poses outside the hands of a true master communicate only the depth of the poet's narcissism.

Lastly, a note on yesterday's (entirely anticipated) shortsighted announcement of the next SFWA Grandmaster. I have only two words for the collective that voted on this:

Grow up.

This was a bad decision. I made my position clear last month. Farmer is not a hack (which puts him several rungs up on a couple of current grandmasters). Neither, however, does the corpus of his work warrant elevation as a Grandmaster over any (let alone every) one of the candidates mentioned. If SFWA wants old, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, and Kate Wilhelm aren't exactly spring chickens; if SFWA wants ill, Harlan Ellison has had that heart attack.

We honor the past when we stop living in it.

27 January 2001
Another Brick in the Wall

Large law firms (and, for that matter, government investigatory agencies) often have a problem with information. Under legal ethics rules, anything that one partner in a law firm knows, all the partners know ("imputed knowledge"). This can create some fairly difficult situations, particularly when a lawyer joins a firm from a government position. There is one exception to the imputed-knowledge rule: complete isolation from a matter. This is known as a "Chinese Wall," because it's intended to keep barbarians out.

In turn, this results in some interesting (and, to the cynical, vastly amusing) little games. Let's say that, as a result of a change in administration, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois—a political appointee—steps down due to a change in the tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This results in not just one, but two interesting situations:

1. The outgoing US Attorney will almost certainly move to a large law firm in Chicago. A high proportion of former US Attorneys end up in white-collar crime defense, and virtually all of them end up doing work in highly regulated areas (ignoring, for the moment, those who go into academia, a negligible percentage, or the bench, a significant percentage). Since the US Attorney controls all investigations done in a given district, this can create a few problems.

2. But the interesting case is the incoming US Attorney. Again, a high proportion come from major law firms. The interesting factor is considering the result of a partner in, say, the antitrust section of a major law firm, becoming the new US Attorney. Everything that all of his partners know will be imputed to him—and there's a high probability that his firm represents at least one individual then being investigated for potential criminal prosecution.

So, if perhaps you're wondering why nothing seems to happen for the first few months after a presidential election, it's because nobody knows anything. Or, at least, they have to pretend not to know anything. It's not just politics and getting a handle on a new job (which do have some effect, but not the typical months-long silence).

29 January 2001
A Research Proposal

The marketing dorks who now control the publishing industry have gotten there by convincing each other that they really do know how to sell ice to the Inuit. Perhaps, though, it's time for some enterprising marketing professor to test the "received wisdom" of book marketing (magazine marketing is, as they say, beyond the scope of this study). There's probably some pretty good grant money in it. But just how would one study "marketing effectiveness" for books?

Let's start with the one marketing device common to all books—the cover. A number of possible variables suggest themselves:

• Color scheme
• Metallic inks and foils
• Framing
• Size
• Sluglines
• Relative prominence of author's name and title
• Spine v. face placement

Designing a study to test these variables, or other similar ones, would be quite simple. One method might be to establish a "bookrack" with carefully selected covers, bring in a significant number of subjects, and see what the subjects reach for. The arrangement of the covers needs to be varied, too, so that placement on the "bookrack" doesn't mask the result with its own noise. This is all fairly routine so far. The key is the next step.

I propose the following null hypothesis:

The bookbuying habits of the customers, both within a given marketing category and in general, do not significantly influence cover effectiveness.

As should be pretty obvious by now, I expect actual results to disprove that null hypothesis. What is interesting about this is an inference that one can then make about the marketing dorks. In my experience, publishing industry marketing dorks are not bookbuyers—or at least not in the categories for which they have marketing responsibility. Yet they impose their own tastes on marketing efforts, well beyond cover selection. <RHETORICALQUESTION>Is this, just perhaps, counterproductive?</RHETORICALQUESTION>

Speculative fiction in particular has a fairly narrow audience. Something like 90% of speculative fiction book purchases are believed to be by readers who purchase at least six speculative fiction books each year. That, itself, is grist for another study… but even this initial study would be of immensely greater intellectual honesty and accuracy than the current "received wisdom."

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