If Only I Had Known!

I may have mentioned once or twice previously that I have been writing fiction, off and on, since at least 1980 – and possibly before, depending on your point of view – with a grand total of zero professional sales to date. This isn’t actually all that unusual for amateur writers, as it happens. Even as the quality of instruction in writing has plummeted in recent decades, the value placed on writing has also declined, to the point where everyone who has never tried it seems to believe that writing a books is as simple as arranging 100,000 or so words into something vaguely coherent. At the same time, the decline of magazines, newspapers and books in favor of free content on the Internet has reduced the number of opportunities available to writers, until only the extremely fortunate or unreasonably well-connected (and those ghost writing for celebrities of various kinds) have any realistic hope of becoming published. But apparently, once you do actually achieve publication becoming a best-selling author may be as easy as writing a check…

You can check out the Wall Street Journal article online here if you want to, but the basic idea is that a number of services have appeared over the last decade or so that will artificially increase your initial sales for your new book by placing thousands of pre-orders in advance of your release date. Then when your book finally hits the stores it outsells all other new releases for that week, gets on various bestseller lists, and makes you a “Bestselling Author” – resulting in instant street cred, prestige, a much higher hourly or day rate for your consulting services, or whatever other befits you might be able to gain from being the author of a bestselling book in your field (whatever that might be). And the best part is that this method will work even if what you have written is complete twaddle, without any redeeming features…

Of course, the following week, when the artificially inflated sales dry up the book will drop to the level of sales it would have achieved on its own – possibly with a small increase for having been on any major Best Sellers list for a week, or at least until actual reviews of the book start to appear. In some cases, if the books has some utility or interest it may achieve modest sales following the jump-start, but these are unlikely to justify the enormous cost of using the tactic in the first place (up to $200,000 in some cases), and the Journal notes some examples where the books promoted in this fashion are actually experiencing negative sales (more people return copies each week than purchase new ones) once their debut week is over and they have to survive on their own merits…

Now, obviously this won’t affect writers of fiction as much as it will those authors trying to publish professional books, how-to and self-help books, business strategy books and so on, if only because the rewards available to a successful author of fiction are much smaller. Somebody whose novel appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List for a single week is unlikely to draw a lot of six-figure consulting or speaking engagements, and their ability to leverage such a “success” into a new opportunity will be much smaller – especially because a novel can’t have any utility; it’s either a good read or it isn’t. Most publishers are going to require more than just one good week of sales before they will order more copies printed, and if they ever find out about how you’ve gamed the system your chances are effectively shot. But I still can’t help wishing I had known about this strategy years ago…

I’d probably still be a scruffy blogger nobody ever reads. But I’d be a scruffy Bestselling Author who writes a blog that nobody reads…

The Ethics of Textbooks

Back when I was in college there was one class that began with our instructor apologizing for assigning us the textbook he had written. He seemed genuinely embarrassed by this, but he explained that his really was the standard text for this subject; it was then (back in 1984) already in its ninth edition, and you would have read the same textbook if you had taken the same class at UCLA – or Harvard, for that matter. But assigning your students a book you wrote is considered unethical in some circumstances (you’re making money off of a captive audience, you see) and our teacher – who was a good teacher – made a point of assuring us that if there was a better text available he’d use it…

Today, with the rise of self-publishing, e-publishing and a variety of specialty press businesses that would have been called “vanity publishing” just a decade or so ago, anyone who teaches at college level could conceivably author a textbook for his or her class, and many colleges and universities would allow an instructor to assign his or her book to the class without any further review. But while the industry and the technology have changed, the basic question has not: is it ethically acceptable to assign one’s own students a text book one has written and from which one is (at least in theory) receiving royalties? I thought we should take a closer look…

On the one hand, there is no doubt that not all textbooks are created equal. In most fields there appears to be a one book, or at most a small group, that find wide acceptance and become the standard texts for that subject. However, just because a book has become the standard in the field that does not mean that it is necessarily the best explanation of that subject, or that a given instructor somewhere might not have a better understanding of the subject (and a better grasp of how to present it) than the authors do. If an instructor can provide better information to his or her students than they can get from the standard text it could be argued that he or she has a duty to his or her students to write up that information and publish it for them…

On the other hand, publishing textbooks is often seen as a lucrative sideline. Unlike popular fiction, where margins are often small enough to preclude any large royalties to anyone, the markup on textbooks is so outrageous that even a relatively small run can add up for the publisher (500 books at $200 each is $100,000, and 500 students isn’t a particularly large class in some universities). There’s no real question that this system is prone to abuses, and even if the authors are receiving a relatively small percentage of the profits there would be a very strong appeal to writing and assigning your own text. Certainly there are some texts that will be published and assigned despite being absolute twaddle…

So that leads me to the question: Does a publishing company have an ethical responsibility not to publish textbooks that contain no useful information and could actually be harmful to a student due to the mass of misinformation they contain? Does the company have a responsibility to its stockholders, employees, and other stakeholders to sell whatever products will result in the highest profits, regardless of the effect on the student, the discipline, or Education in general? No one is suggesting that a textbook on medicine or chemistry that contains faulty information, and could result in a danger to the general public, should ever be countenanced. But do we, as businesspeople, have the right to decide that a given text should not be produced based solely on the fact that the instructor who is going to assign it is also the author?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Ethics of Enabling

As noted in this week’s discussion on people using the Amazon self-publishing system (and presumably the Barnes and Noble equivalent) to knock-off products or divert sales with misleading designs and descriptions of similar products, there is no doubt that the company can shut down such operations if it becomes aware of them, or that they will take such action if complaints are filed. What struck me about the situation was the inherent conflict of interest involved: Amazon gets a piece of every self-publishing sale, knock-off or not, which gives them little incentive to police the system; even if a bilked customer demands a refund, the company still gets the interest from holding their money for a day or more – and if the customer just buys a second book (the one they originally wanted) without demanding a refund, the company makes two sales. It appears that there are several ethics questions we could ask about this situation – as well as some completely practical ones…

First of all, if any company knows that one of its products or services is being used in an unethical (but not technically illegal) manner, does that company have any responsibility to prevent such usage? In this case, Amazon’s own e-publishing service is making the unethical practice possible, and could easily enable people to steal and republish material outright, but one can also use Western Union wire transfer services to secure the money from phishing scams, or use perfectly innocent optical read/write drives to pirate DVD movies or CDs. Any company has a responsibility to protect its customers from outright fraud, at least to the extent that it can, but does the company have an ethical responsibility to protect customers from acts that aren’t illegal so much as generally unpleasant?

On the other hand, suppose a company does take drastic actions to safeguard its customers. Amazon could use a variety of semi-autonomous software packages to scan and monitor its e-book library looking for obvious scams; they would also need qualified readers to examine works flagged as knock-offs (or outright copyright infringement) to determine if civil or criminal trials with be forthcoming, and a more complex accounting system to make sure that no one who deserves to be paid has their revenue delayed by a malicious false claim, and no one who doesn’t deserve to be paid benefits from his or her ill-gotten gains. But while none of this is difficult, or even that complicated, any such action will incur costs, which will detract from the bottom line, resulting in lower profits, lower dividends, and ultimately lower pay for the employees as well. If the expenses are severe enough the result could be higher pricing overall, which would also harm customers who aren’t even buying e-books in the first place…

In every business there is going to be some aspect of the operation where the trade-off between optimizing safety and optimizing profitability come into direct opposition – and it generally won’t be possible to maximize both without also bankrupting the company. In this specific case, Amazon could essentially eradicate all knock-offs from their e-book selection, but only at a greatly increased cost that might do in the entire e-book marketplace, or even the company as a whole. It would also be possible for the company to just say “let the buyer beware” and attempt to maximize profit at the cost of every other consideration. And while neither of these extremes is likely to be viable in this case (or in most business models, in fact), the question still remains: at what point does a company’s responsibility to its stockholders, employees and other stakeholders outweigh its responsibility to its customers? Does that answer change if the customers are merely being annoyed or inconvenienced, not defrauded? And on what would you base such a decision, if it was yours to make?

It’s worth thinking about…

Hard-Copy Knock-Offs

Most people have encountered “knock-off” versions of some familiar product over the years; the designer clothing and accessories that are copied on the cheap and then sold as the original (frequently off the back of a truck or at a stand by the side of the road) tend to get the most ink, since the practice is now illegal in most of the states, but you can find imitation versions of almost anything if you look in the right place. Anytime there’s a highly successful movie or television show, somebody will throw together a lookalike cover and some leftover footage from the back of their archives and put it on the shelf next to the real thing, hoping that people in a hurry will grab the wrong product by mistake; you see the same scams with software and books. Sometimes you will even see a retailer design a package for their in-house generic product that makes it difficult to tell the knock-off from the name brand. But the current controversy at Amazon still constitutes a new level of fraud, as far as I’m concerned…

You can read more about it on the CNN/Fortune site, but the basic idea is that people are using the Amazon self-publishing system, called CreateSpace to generate titles that sound (and in some cases look) enough like best-selling books to confuse the casual shopper; in some cases going so far as to copy or paraphrase marketing slogans and jacket quotes. Technically, creating these products isn’t illegal, at least so long as they don’t actually use any copyrighted material without permission, but you would have a hard time telling someone who was looking for “Twilight: New Moon” and actually purchased “Twilight New Moon” by mistake that he or she wasn’t ripped off. But whether or not you consider this a deceptive business practice – people could check author names, publisher names, ISBN numbers and so on, since they’re already online if they’re buying things from Amazon – what makes this case unique is that the whole practice wouldn’t be possible without the CreateSpace system…

Up until a few years ago, knocking off a book was a significant undertaking. You could steal text from online sources and claim it as your own if you wanted to – and a lot of websites still do – but making money off of Internet content is notoriously difficult unless you’re selling porn. Ripping off the same text – or just designing a book with different content but a similar title and cover design – has always been possible, but printing up copies of a book is expensive, and getting them into actual bookstores takes time and effort. This is why most self-publishing efforts were ineffectual before Amazon and Barnes & Noble introduced their online self-publishing systems, and suddenly made it possible for anyone knock off a best seller in a matter of days. But even worse, in my opinion, it’s now possible to do this anonymously…

Any real-world author has to have a publisher, a distributor, or at least contact information if he or she wants to get paid. An electronic publishing “author” just needs an Amazon account and a Pay-Pal account, and while both companies can delete accounts for abusing the system, they have little motivation to do so, and even less reason to patrol the tens of thousands of self-published e-books that pop onto their virtual shelves every day looking for such violations. Until such time as somebody succeeds in prosecuting one system or the other (or both) under Deceptive Business Practice laws, the only recourse the book-buying public has is “Let the buyer beware!”

Of course, for authors this raises a whole crop of additional issues – but that’s a discussion for another day…

The Ethics of Phone Books

I noticed an article on S.F. Gate online about an initiative by the City of San Francisco to ban the delivery of hard-copy yellow pages phone books within the City limits. It’s a follow-up to their move to ban plastic shopping bags a few years ago, and appears to be based on the fact that most people these days use electronic yellow pages online instead of the physical version, the fact that unused physical phone books waste a lot of energy, the fact that un-recycled versions take up a lot of landfill space, and the fact that no one on the San Francisco City Council appears to have any ownership interest in a company that prints yellow pages. Naturally, the people who publish yellow pages are protesting this measure on First Amendment grounds, saying that such a ban interferes with their rights to freedom of the press – which brings up a number of interesting ethics questions…

First off, does advertising classify as protected speech? I’ll leave the second-guessing of what the Founding Fathers would have intended to the Strict Constructionist types on the far right, although it’s hard to imagine that anyone living in 1787 could have imagined telephones, let alone telemarketers or spam emails. But whether the Founders intended it or not, the real question for us is whether advertising SHOULD be protected under the Constitution. The right to advertise isn’t guaranteed under the First Amendment, but the right to publish is – and in a very real sense, most print media exists only to sell ads; the content is just a way of getting people to pick up the material and read it. If the city is allowed to ban distribution of yellow pages, there’s no reason the same law couldn’t be used to restrict distribution of newspapers and magazines…

On the other hand, the city does have the right to regulate what gets collected by its garbage trucks, what gets disposed of in its landfills, and what gets processed in its recycling plants. Even if San Francisco can’t prevent the books from being distributed, it can probably make it a crime to throw them away – or make it a requirement for the publisher to collect the old ones. Neither of these actions will endear the City Council to the people of San Francisco, nor will it go over well if the publishers start charging more to advertise in the yellow pages in order to cover the cost of collection and recycling. But while we could argue that people have a right to smaller landfills – and more environmentally friendly living conditions in general – it would be harder to argue that people have a right to physical yellow pages…

Unless we consider that some people do not have Internet connections, can’t afford to have computers, and might still need to find telephone numbers. In which case, the lack of telephone books would inconvenience those people and cut off anyone advertising in the books from a huge (if admittedly not very lucrative) market segment. So I think we have to ask a few questions about this situation: Does the right of the city to exclude tons of waste from the landfill and even more tons of particulate from the air supersede the right of published to publish phone books, or companies to advertise in them? Does the right of people who can’t afford a computer to look things up supersede the right of everyone else to a cleaner city environment? Should the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech apply to all advertising? And if not, how do we draw the line between publications that sell advertising space around their content, and publications that squeeze content in between masses of copy?

And, perhaps more important of all, should a single municipal government be able to make that decision unilaterally, without input from the Supreme Court, Congress, the People of the United States, or even the residents of the city they nominally govern?

It’s worth thinking about…

Self-Publishing and You

Since e-books first started appearing in mainstream sources, I’ve been wondering when we’d see vanity publishing – or legitimate self-publishing – versions of these products arriving on the market. Vanity publishing seemed unlikely, since in most cases the whole point is to have a book you can show people, give people to read, and so on; a vanity-published e-book wouldn’t confer any more status than any other computer file. Self-publishing is another matter, though – in a world where more and more of the publishing industry seems to be devoted to sensationalist crap and ghostwritten autobiographies, an increasing number of serious authors have been arranging to have their own work printed and distributed for sale as the only means of ever getting it published. For that purpose, self-publication in electronic format would probably make sense, especially if there was some established on-line retailer who would handle the nuts and bolts for you – and especially if you had some prospect of actually getting paid for doing so…

I got an email about it this morning, but you can pick up the news story from the Gizmodo website if you want the details. Basically, if you had anything you think people might want to download and buy, you can post it as an e-book on the Barnes and Noble site, and they’ll split the proceeds with you (you get 65% of the sale price for anything under $10 and 40% of anything higher than that). It costs Barnes and Noble almost nothing to create a product page for you – since there’s no publisher information, Library of Congress information, trade journal notes, book reviews or cover art to post – and the only potential downside is having to process credit cards (and prosecute fraudulent ones). And it certainly could be used for vanity publishing, if you’re the sort of tech nerd who thinks having your own e-book is cool, and if there’s anyone who would pay for a copy of it. But I think the real potential here is probably for authors with small but real communities of readers…

Let’s suppose that you’re a blogger and you get a few hundred hits everyday, maybe a few thousand on days when your post is particularly funny, well-written, or risqué. Let’s also suppose that you have written a book that might be of interest to your readers, and you put it up on the new Barnes & Noble “Pubit” service, with a cover price of $9.99. If 200 people download it, you’ve netted a cool $130, which is probably a lot more than your getting from letting your web host put banner ads on your page. If your book is successful it will probably draw more interest to your blog; if the blog grows in popularity it could also create additional sales for your book. If the process cycles through enough times, you might even make enough doing this to quit your day job…

Of course, there’s a reason that most of the world’s 100,000,000 bloggers have fewer than two dozen readers each – it’s essentially the same reason that somewhere between 35% and 85% of the world’s 100,000,000 bloggers have given up on the project and stopped updating their blogs more than very occasionally, which is that most of these people have nothing of general interest to say, even on the rare occasions when they actually say it well. Amazon has had a similar service – called the 70/30 program for some time now, and it doesn’t seem to have created any new bestselling authors out of the blogosphere. Producing enough e-book sales to make a living at it is hard enough for established authors, let alone somebody whose total readership could hold their annual convention in my living room. On the other hand, all great changes begin with small ones; all fundamental shifts in a civilization begin with tiny ones. If this really is the trend that begins the information-based society predicted by Heinlein and Clarke – well, remember folks, you heard it here first…

Now where was that novel I was working on?

Bookstore in a Box

With the advent of electronic book readers a few years back, there was a lot of talk that e-books would eventually do to paper books what the iTunes system is doing to physical copies of records and CDs – someday everyone would just have a discrete electronic device that would have access to a huge library of electronic books in the space of a single volume. So far that hasn’t happened, thanks in part to the relatively high cost of both the reader devices and the e-books themselves, and in part to the reliability of actual hard-copy books. In a world where you have to worry about backing up almost everything repeatedly, it’s nice to own books in a format that never needs batteries and ignores magnets…

Now there’s a new device coming out that may give the old-fashioned book a new lease on life. A story featured on the Guardian UK Online site details a new technology called an Espresso Book Machine which is making its London debut this week. Essentially, it’s a high-speed automated printing system that can print, bind and cover a book in just a few minutes, connected up to a database of text files that currently includes about 500,000 books. If the company that makes it is successful in expanding their text library to the 1,000,000-plus books they’re currently talking about, that would give them the equivalent of over 26 MILES of bookshelves, or roughly 50 conventional bookstores worth, in the space needed for a large photocopier…

To me, that isn’t even the most mind-blowing aspect of the technology, however. Instead, let me call to your attention that not only can this device sell you any one of a million or so books, anytime you like, but unless the machine runs out of paper this (effectively) infinitely-large bookstore will NEVER RUN OUT OF A SINGLE TITLE…

Sorry for shouting, but anybody who has ever worked in Retail (or supply) can tell you that this is the single hardest aspect of running any retail outlet, and most other kinds of business, in fact. It’s certainly my single biggest pet peeve with conventional bookstores, which tend to have hundreds or thousands of feet worth of cheesy, ghostwritten celebrity vehicles and romance novels, but generally don’t carry even the classics in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Detective Fiction or any one of a number of other subjects I’d want to purchase – and when they do, are always out of whatever I wanted…

Then there’s the Independent Publisher effect. Until now, the main things preventing self-publishing from becoming a viable industry have been marketing and distribution; a lone author (or even a small publishing company) generally can’t afford to advertise their offerings to enough people to make any difference, and there’s no way for them to convince bookstores to give up the shelf space for their books. But with unlimited shelf space, and the ability to generate buzz over the Internet, this gizmo could do for obscure authors what the Radiohead Gambit did for musical acts…

It remains to be seen if these machines can turn things around for the brick-and-mortar bookstore, of course. As amazing as this device is, it’s still not as convenient as having books delivered right to your door by Amazon, and it’s expensive enough that most small booksellers won’t be able to afford one, which means it’s mainly going to be good for the big retail chains. But for the moment, it looks as if the humble book may be getting a new lease on life…