Summer in Three Places: Different ways of getting wet.

Melbourne

Sunfire over rippling sheen,

and the slow rock of low waves.

Boats bobbing on water, quiet and ignored.

The heat dreams between creaking trees,

and the imaginable cold and clean grasp

of bay water.

So you shine, and this whole slow-motion world of days

vanishes into you.

You're laughing at the seagulls.

You're dropping twigs onto the water.

You're breathing quietly in your cup

of air – the frame of your ribs

embraces your physical heart. An insect

traces arcs across still water near the pier

and the heat keeps pressing.

Sydney

madness. Unbuckled streets engine their own noise.

Familiar muscular roads bulge with cars

but not faces.

The freshly radiant leaf-world reaches and splashes

green between houses, flats. Water you can feel flowing, pushing

thickly through the air itself,

and just over the ridge of orange rooves, your strung wires

looping and lazy in the teary haze, and nearby somewhere:

The ocean massing her shoreline.

Near Byrneside

Fragrant life has muddy fingers, and when he jumps

he tucks his knees up under his chin. Splashing in

the cool brown channel, a scatter cloud of insects whooshes away.

You can smell the freshness of horseshit, and you silent on the bank,

rest into long, faun grass. He appears again,

shaking the water from his head, serious about climbing out

to jump in again. He is practicing for the Olympics, just in case

Channel diving ever gets put in, you never know.

Tech Convergence and Vertical Integration in Publishing

Once you have released yourself from any delusions about being published by a commercial publisher, and from the idiotic idea of making real money from your writing, and flown up on the freedom that realisation gives you, you may want to (sigh) self publish.

I am completely cool with the idea that no publisher in OZ will touch my book. Probably that's a result of my completely giving up on the idea of writing for a clientele of regular human-type book buyers. In this way me and the publishers of Australia have a pretty solid understanding. Of course that didn't stop me sending it to them. They are a powerful network and their endorsement is respected and they still largely control which novels get to stick their heads up above the ever-rolling media ocean and at least get heard about by the public. So you'd be mad not to give it a go. A series of polite rejection letters followed with glacial regularity.

So now I am considering getting a few copies done for friends and family. Last time I looked at this the costs were just completely ridiculous. This time I am pleasantly surprised. But let me be absolutely clear – this is not a commercial operation. This is the whoopsie-bang version of stapling a poetry chapbook together and trading it for smokes in the university bar. In this case the copies will be given away, though of course if anyone decides they want to give cash that proposition will not be rejected.

My specs were 400 pages with a two colour cover in standard novel format. I wanted quotes for 1, 10, 25 and 100.

Quotes from four PoDs in Australia:

Quote 1: AUD11.08 per book if you get a minimum 100 printed

Quote 2: AUD11.08 per book with a minimum 10 printed

Quote 3: AUD14.25 per book for 25 copies, or AUD12.96 per book for 30

Quote 4: AUD35.60 per book for 10, or AUD16.41 per book for 100

[I can't put the actual names of the companies here alongside the quote because their individual emails have those confidentiality phrases at the bottom, and the quotes may vary according to location or something I don't know about. But if you would like to know the names of the companies I approached send me a direct email jkspencer_200@yahoo.com ]

Now combine that realisation with an understanding of these companies:

www.completelynovel.com, will do PoD and delivery in UK/US for ridiculously low prices.

www.smashwords.com, will manage your listing in all e-book spaces.

These are just two examples, there are other similar outfits around, though I think completelynovel.com is the first to offer the whole lot.

One starts to wonder why bother with Publishers anyway? There is no reason to think that going with a traditional publisher is going to get your book wider distribution among your intended audience (particularly if your target audience is about 25 people), nor to think publishers are going to get you more money for the effort. If you accept you are never going to be able to give up your day job, why not seek to maximise control and ROI?

On the other hand, what if you are a really well known writer like say John Birmingham or Margaret Atwood, both of whom are active users of e-networks? (I chose these two to illustrate the variety of writers now engaging with the Interverse). Wouldn't these costs also present an opportunity to an established writer? Here's the rub. If you are not JB or Margaret Atwood, ie you're not going to sell thousands of books: why go with a publisher who's hardly going to support you anyway, and you get only like 10% of the cover price? Get your own 100 copies printed and take 50% of the cover price. In other words, for every 5 books a publisher sells you can make the same amount of money selling 1. This of course assumes you don't use booksellers or any other ticket-clippers as a distribution channel.

On the other hand, if you are JB or Margaret Atwood, why go with a publisher when you could so easily set up your own website and supply chain and sell directly through your own distribution channel to your already established readers? And again, you'd get like $10 per book instead of $2 per book from your publisher. Even if you only sell half as many books you're still two and a half times better off financially. And believe me, if JB or Margaret Atwood announced they were going to drop their publishers and sell only through their website that in itself would generate publicity and drive sales further.

This is the inevitable squeeze the Publishers have to deal with. In business terms it's nothing new, it's just the convergence of technology creating easier paths to vertical integration. This has been happening since the birth of capitalism. Some might even say it is one of the driving forces of capitalism. It's just that it is happening faster now, and as I have been in Corporate Land for a while I didn't notice the speed at which it is occurring in publishing.

The publishers used to control a valve through which production flowed. The tightness of that valve was the barrier to entry of being able to afford to publish a book with a printer who required a minimum print run of a few thousand. But that's gone daddy-o. The other valve was access to exclusive distribution channels to the public through bookstores. That one has also gone.

The point is emphatically not that now suddenly you will be able make money out of writing because these barriers have gone. If you're a weirdo like me there's probably only a market of a few dozen people who would buy your book anyway, regardless of the production methods and distribution channels used. But even if you are a writer who can command a large following, you also have no need to accept the losses incurred when you go through the old barriers / valves. And that is what is terrifyingly beautiful. Be as cynical or as wondrous as you want, but I truly believe this convergence is going to have as radical an impact as the Gutenberg Press. And the impact will not just be in the number of books printed and read, but in the exponential expansion of the ideas that get out into the world.

Because importantly, the Gutenberg Press not only increased the production of normally approved texts, it also provided the opportunity for texts that previously would never have been published to come out. Then, the removal of a layer of control (the Church) allowed texts that would not have been approved to get printed, so long as you had enough money. The publishers are / were essentially just groups of people with enough money and access to networks to engage printers at a price that made it economically reasonable for the printers to print. They controlled production and access, they were the entities who gave permission for something to get out into world or vanish. But they won't be for much longer. And THAT is what is going to change the world.

Of course this is not going to happen by next Wednesday. In the meantime those publishers that survive will evolve. Just as when this kind of convergence occurs in any other industry the survivors will be those who can specialise, capture new valves, or provide a new value proposition. My hunch is that specialist publishers of high quality lit will survive, more as marketing services providers and editorial selectors for their own readership. Publishers like Sleepers in Melbourne are probably on to a fairly good thing in that they have built a brand that has value in terms of their ability to select kick-ass books. If they publish something I want to read it because their opinion on what is worth my reading has been proven. I follow Sleepers per se, just as much as any of their writers. Whereas you take someone like HarperCollins, well, I don't really believe their spin, their publishing activity is so wide that they are too far removed from my own interest for me to believe them.

You can see there is a parallel here, in that what publishers like Sleepers are doing is getting closer to the consumer, in essence following the shrinking chain and building trust (which is 'brand') and thus creating a value proposition.

Alternatively publishers can do what completelynovel.com is seeking to do and position themselves as a convenient tool for writers/readers to communicate. This is not exactly the same as a valve as the barrier to entry is so low in this model that there needs to be some other kind of proposition to keep customers buying. We'll see.

Update: Here's a fantastic video about all this by Richard Nash.

On Success and Failure

This is going to twist around a bit.

One of the great lies this society propagates is about determination and success. It goes something like this:

If you really believe in what you want to do, and you work really hard at it, eventually you will succeed.

Even on brief reflection this is arrant nonsense, for what makes those who succeed so remarkable is that they have done so while many others have failed. Even people who have worked harder, with more determination, and for longer.

Our efforts towards achievement occur within a network of so many interconnected contingencies and just plain happenstances that to claim that the cause of anyone's 'success' can be solely ascribed to their personal effort is just ridiculous. Of course, nothing would occur without effort (except for within the ranks of the uber rich), but effort alone (assuming you are not uber rich) will not make you 'successful'.

This effort to success argument is endlessly repeated by those who have already achieved 'success', and as you will necessarily never hear from those who have not achieved that 'success' in the space in which 'successful' people proselytise to us, the room for any other argument is small. For example, you will never see a failed talk-show host on their own talk-show talking about how it is not just hard work that makes you a successful talk-show host because if you did, they would not be a failed talk-show host. Or, I often read of 'successful' writers claiming that you will succeed if you keep working hard at the writing etc, but of course you will never read in a major publication a failed writer writing about how they worked hard at their writing for fifty years but never succeeded, because again, if you did read it they wouldn't have been a 'failure'. (This blog an exception).

One of the reasons we so often hear this argument is that people who have achieved success often feel a need to justify to themselves and others the disproportionate possession of the world's resources (money) that success has given them. They like to tell themselves and us that it is not as a result of mere chance and luck they have become rich, but as a just reward for serious efforts undertaken by themselves, in the face of great hardship blah blah blah.

One danger in the hard work breeds success argument is that it makes people who work hard and don't succeed feel that perhaps they are not working hard enough, when in reality no amount of hard work is going to result in their success. It makes them anxious that perhaps they have 'failed' through their own fault when this is not the case.

Another danger is of course in the equation of success with riches.

I am wary here of seeming to put out some other trite platitude about the attainment of riches not being a worthy assessment of success, when for society-at-large, the attainment of wealth is seen as the evidence of success. Certainly the attainment of poverty is not often considered a successful outcome to an endeavour. But it is still valid to decouple the attainment of wealth from the attainment of success.

That might sound strange but I strongly believe it is important if you want to be happy. Now, this needs to be seriously tempered with the condition that whatever you do you have a modicum of material wellness. If you are skint you have no choice. But if we can get one step beyond this and assume just for the moment that you do have the ability to feed, house and put clothes on your family, only then can we talk about what personal success might mean beyond the admittedly large and first hurdle of getting a job.

In societal terms I myself have experienced a modicum of failure and success in my own humble measure. I have seen great failure and success in societal terms in others. I do not believe that really hard work has anything to do with it as I have worked just as hard and failed in societal terms as I have and succeeded in those terms. This is where this post is going to twist, for I have come to agree with the great lie mentioned above, so long as it is decoupled from the belief of success necessarily equalling wealth, and so long as we understand that a certain amount of material well-being must be present to satisfy basic needs. That is, you are not homeless.

[Parallel to this is the phenomenon I have seen repeatedly: That many people I have met who have attained wealth have not actuality chased it as an end in itself. The wealth has come as a by-product of chance, hard work and luck as well as, sometimes, bastardry. For we should never mistake, as the wealthy often do, the attainment of wealth with the practice of virtue. This common false attribution itself leads to all sorts of wickedness which I will not go into here.]

Conversely, I have known people who have attained wealth but not success if we equate success with happiness. I suspect this is because happiness needs to grow from a real personal achievement, and when someone becomes wealthy from sources not related to their own achievement; and they can not mislead themselves into believing otherwise, their wealth really does become hollow. I have known seriously sad wealthy people. Before I knew people like this I would have dismissed their sadness as affectation, and railed at their thanklessness to the fates that bestowed them such advantage. But now that I have sat with them, drank with them, heard their stories, I know that it is possible to be wealthy and a complete failure. I really pity them.

Of course I have also known happy rich people. Some are happy because they honestly believe they deserve their wealth. Some are happy because they can just accept and even revel in the sheer good luck they had to acquire wealth. Some are all these kinds in one.

But the truth within the great lie is that so long as you accept that whatever it is you do will probably not result in you being wealthy, if you completely separate being wealthy from being successful and replace it with a definition of success along the lines of the endeavour itself, then hard work and determination can get you great success, which for many is probably the mastery of some trade or activity.

For example, I have come to realise that for me personally the completion of my fourth novel has given me by far a greater feeling of success than the project of my last job. The novel will almost certainly never be commercially published, never make me any money, and has cost me a great deal both financially and in time. But I believe it works. It does what I set out to make it do. Or, I know it is the best that I can do at this time. I will shortly put it aside and start another, but for the rest of my life I shall notch it up as a really great achievement. My last job was no failure, it was a wonderful time and afforded me the ability to have time off to write the novel. But the job will fade in memory. My daughter in twenty years time will probably not even know what that job was, but I feel certain that if she reads the manuscript she will be proud. That, my friends, is success.