publishing is cray

Spring and a Hot Revision

I’m getting an avalanche of emails and messages from folks wanting me to talk about small and indie presses, more about self-pub, if it’s really so bad in trad, how to get a reputable agent, etc., etc., onward, amen. It’s awful rough out there right now and there is no safe path; there is no magic dingus which will make one a successful author. The idea that there’s a sooper-sekrit handshake or a quick algorithm trick to achieve fame, fortune, and babes on the path of publishing is a poverty tax akin to the lottery–it makes desperate people easier to fleece by holding out a hope that would not be nearly so enticing if our entire society wasn’t straining under the massive, world-eating greed of a few sociopaths. Everything wrong in publishing is a symptom of deeper problems.

The good news is, sunshine and articulation makes solutions a lot more possible; one cannot solve a quandary without knowing its dimensions. The bad news is, it’ll take a lot of collective action to solve a tangle this intractable, and I don’t hold out a lot of hope it’ll happen in any systematic fashion.

I am not pessimistic about publishing, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. (I did Bsky / Mastodon thread on that fact yesterday.) At the same time I mourn for what we’re losing, what we will lose as all this shakes out–whenever that happens. In the end, all I can do is keep working.

Staggering out with Boxnoggin for his first backyard break of the day, I was surprised by the softness of the air. We’re well past the tipping point, it’s abso-tively poso-lutely spring. Maybe the eclipse shook some things loose? We only got twenty percent at totality, and the shadows had funny weight. The birds were going somewhat mad–they knew something was up–and Boxnoggin only settled after the moon had moved to go about its business. The neighborhood cats seemed to be aware of the event as well, quite a few of them prowling in unaccustomed places at unaccustomed hours until ‘it ’twas past.

I can see why ancient folk thought eclipses were celestial anger and anyone who could predict them utterly magical.

Today is probably for cutting an epub of The Highlands War‘s first half for subscribers, as a treat. There’s also a tonne of business correspondence to catch up on and I think I have my rhythm back for the serial. There needs to be another couple dream sequences and then the next battle; soon I’ll be able to move on from this “hot” revision–the type that happens when a book is unfinished but won’t be for long, getting everything in place for the push to the end. Very soon I’ll have another zero draft to my name.

I’m looking forward to it. Of course that will touch off a round of other revisions, since Chained Knight and Gamble were both put on back burners while Doom of the Elder‘s zero got itself settled. And there’s the anthologies to get stuffed through the pipeline as well…

The hell of all this is, I love my job. I was made and born to tell stories, it’s what the gods intended me for. I wish the greed of a few rich folk didn’t make it so bloody difficult. This could be so much easier for everyone–and imagine the explosion of wonderful art we’d have in every direction and format, if that greed were defanged! It would be lovely, wouldn’t it.

In the meantime, I just keep going. There really doesn’t seem much other option, and in any case Boxnoggin wants walkies again so it’s time to grab some toast and get my earbuds.

I’ve got writing to get to.

Barriers in Self-Pub

Well, I ranted so hard yesterday my site temporarily crashed and my mentions are a mess. I regret nothing; it had to be said and I said it.

Someone took minor exception to me remarking that the barriers to entry in self-pub can be prohibitive (though not nearly so much as trad), so I thought I’d start Monday with a few remarks in that direction. Now, that person also made an excellent point that barriers to success are not the same as barriers to entry, and though I think that’s a bit of hair-splitting it’s also undeniably correct. The fact remains that even self-publishing requires tools and know-how, and those tools and know-how are neither common nor universal. Let’s jump right in.

An internet connection. This is so simple it’s often overlooked, but as I have been saying since the early naughts: The internet is not ubiquitous, it just feels like that way when you’re on it. Sure, you can get on wi-fi in coffee shops and libraries if you don’t have home connection, there’s still swathes of the country using dial-up, or you could do everything over mobile data. But uploading a manuscript (or a corrected manuscript) to your distribution platform of choice can get a bit dodgy with dial-up or mobile data, and the time investment of traveling to wherever you can find wi-fi is time that could be spent writing if one had access at home.

Hardware. Believe it or not, some people are too poor for desktops or even secondhand laptops. There are smartphones, of course, and where there’s a will there’s a way–but just think about the brute work of typing 50-60k words for a novel into a smartphone, and let’s not even talk about revisions. You could write longhand and just type the final draft in, I suppose, but again…let’s not even talk about revisions.

Software. Sure, you can use an open-source rich text editor for your drafting and let KDP or D2D format an exported Word doc for you, then slap an MS Paint cover on it. That’s absolutely one way to do it, yep, and the thought of trying it that way is…daunting, to say the least. Yes, there’s Scrivener and it’ll output an epub for you, but doing it that way presupposes you have access to Scrivener as a tool and also the understanding/knowledge of how to get it to compile in that format, then there’s getting an open-source program to proof the result in (say, reading the epub in Calibre and making correction notes in longhand, then updating the Scrivener file and recompiling) and that brings us to another barrier. Right now I use Scrivener for writing and revising, MSWord and Goodnotes for CEs/proofing, Vellum for formatting–and each of those programs required an initial investment of moolah plus an ongoing investment in skill, labor, and updates. Free does not necessarily mean good or labor-saving.

Knowledge. This is a HUGE one. I came to self-publishing already knowing certain basics–editing best practices, proofreader strategies, word processing software shortcuts and formatting foibles, a bit about distribution, big scams to avoid, and most importantly, where to look for other information. This last bit is a skill so basic to certain levels of privilege it can be almost invisible to those who possess it. It’s not about knowing what to do, it’s about knowing where to find a reputable bit of advice that will tell one what to do. By the time I started seriously getting into self-pub I had industry peers I could tap when I had questions as well as access to proven sources of good internet information. (And that was decades ago, so it was uncontaminated by “AI”.) Knowing, for example, that a certain distributor uses Ingram Spark instead of Lightning Source for their back-end POD is useful and necessary, but figuring out that’s something you need to know takes effort and experience.

Time. If you’re working two or three jobs to just barely make rent on a place shared with extended family (born or chosen), time to write, revise, edit, copyedit, proof, find cover art, figure out distribution and pricing, schedule releases, and market is at a premium, or perhaps impossible to find. Even time to research what the latest scams are so you don’t fall prey to grifters is an investment that might not be feasible. This leads into discussion of another barrier…

Energy. Ideally, publishers are supposed to do two things: Provide necessary quality control services (editing, copyediting, proofing, cover art) at economy of scale; and handle distribution/marketing with both economy of scale and pooled resources. Paying a publisher to deal with that stuff frees up time and energy for a writer to do the most important thing–no, not BookTok, for God’s sake, but write. If you already have a dayjob, childcare, and housing instability (or any combination of the above), or if your daily spoons are eaten by microaggressions or disability, a publisher leasing rights to your work could be the thing that allows you to produce any work at all. In self-publishing, you are responsible for not just the writing but the quality control, cover, distribution, marketing–the whole enchilada. Sure, you can skimp on quality control, and that feeds into barrier to success instead of entry, but if the name of the game is to get your work in front of people, well, you kind of want it to look good enough for them to actually read it and come back for more, right? Right?

Now, you might be saying these are barriers to entry in any artistic field or even any industry as a matter of course, and you’d be right. Someone with greater privilege will be able to surmount some of these speed bumps without even noticing they’re there–if one is already on the internet all the damn time, that presumes hardware and a connection, so you’re already two to the good. The barriers to entry in trad publishing are a lot higher, yes, and as I said yesterday, self-pub isn’t quite so difficult but there are still major speedbumps for marginalized folks. While one may start with janky tools and slowly accrete knowledge, skill, and money to invest in better tools while one’s craft and skill also grow, that still requires time and energy one might not possess.

Yes, self-publishing is democratizing to a certain extent. It’s still not a panacea, and not the only answer–though it is a really good one for a whole lotta folks! The barriers in self-pub are lower, not nonexistent. If we threw out the whole tottering, moribund edifice of trad tomorrow, in ten years we’d have it again (albeit maybe not as rot-laced) because pooling resources and economy of scale are both natural human endeavours (part of our heritage as a cooperative species) and a way of surviving under capitalism. A thriving publishing ecosystem would have many big trad houses (not just those counted on one hand), plenty of indie presses, lots of small publishers, and a vibrant section of the industry providing self-pub services at reasonable costs; within all that there would be a multiplicity of ways for marginalized folks to get their stories out without some of the speedbumps above forcing them to give up in exhaustion and despair. Bonus if said thriving pub ecosystem didn’t have to deal with Amazon greedily strangling everything it can while flooding the zone with toxic crap, too.

(While I’m dreaming, I’d love a flock of goats I didn’t have to clean up after. That sounds like fun.)

So, while the person taking exception had a point–especially about the difference between a barrier to success and a barrier to entry–I think a lot of discussion about self-pub falls prey to the bootstrapping myth in both subtle and overt ways, and outright overlooks quite a few things. That being said, I don’t think either that commenter or I are wrong, precisely, we’re just talking at different ends of the problem.

There were other comments I could write blog posts about–I’ve still only scratched the surface of this subject, as someone will make me dismally aware as soon as I press “publish”–but this one’s already long enough and Boxnoggin wants walkies. (Talk about a time investment.)

See you around.

We Gotta Talk About (Trad) Publishing

No, seriously, guys. We really, really need to talk about some of this.

A fellow author forwarded this article to me this morning, and my head nearly exploded–not because of the writer or really any of the information within, because the former is perfectly lovely and the latter a hundred percent accurate. What’s bothering me are implications, to the point that I had to take some time to calm down before attempting to talk about it here.

The TL;DR of the above-linked article is that there’s a mushrooming crop of literary agents jostling into the industry, plus trad editors are so overwhelmed they’re taking 6-12mos to even respond to submissions (when they don’t ghost), so now even reputable agents are asking writers–both new and established–to do all sorts of escalating bullshit (like moodboards, what the ever-loving hell) in order to catch the attention of said overwhelmed editors. The article takes a view along the axes of marginalization keeping a lot of writers out of trad’s pool of accreted resources, which is reasonable, just, and absolutely should be talked about.

But that’s not my lane, since I’m operating from a place of relative privilege. So I’m sticking to other lanes; and boy howdy, there’s no shortage of those.

Publishing has always been an awfully exploitative business. For a long while the level of fuckery in trad pub was low enough for plenty of writers to make a reasonable gamble by submitting by the rules and building a career, but this is no longer the case. Which is not solely or even mostly a function of the pandemic, mind you–the problems were already there well before 2020 rolled around, but conditions since ~2016 have absolutely poured jet fuel on the fire and now we’ve got a multiple-alarm blaze. (You could even trace the problems to Amazon’s strong-arming, or further back to Reagonomics, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.)

The Big Five/Four have already offloaded the brute work of marketing onto individual authors, hollowing out their own marketing departments in order to line C-suite pockets. Now the crunch has reached editorial departments, where even salaried folk traditionally protected from a lot of industry bullshit are being ruthlessly overworked, underpaid, and just generally mistreated. (No, this is not a “pity the poor editors” screed, just a fact.) Consequently a lot of folk are leaving, and those who remain–or the shiny new ones coming in, thinking they’re going to score a good job–find it impossible to pick up the slack. The article linked above is absolutely correct that editors at the big houses are now being used as draft-horse project managers, which does not work with novels or nonfiction books. It just…doesn’t.

The article is also absolutely correct that there is a glut of “literary agents” right now, though I’m not certain it’s as a result of the pandemic giving people “time to write”. The further fact that literary agents are wholly unregulated remains as well. A whole lot of “agents” hanging out their shingle might not know the industry or have usable reputation or connections–that’s a charitable way of putting it–and as in any unregulated field there’s a whole lotta grifters out there too. This compounds the problem of exploitation and also makes the burden on editors that much heavier.

Here’s the thing: Trad publishing is not only expecting authors to write the damn book and wait to find a reputable agent (one should do one’s due diligence in that area as a matter of course), but also expecting a writer to wait half a year to a whole year for an editor to even look at the work, and then expecting us to do all the marketing as well?

What precisely are we paying trad publishers a percentage for, then? Cover art, when multibillion-dollar trad houses are using plagiarism machines to make the covers for even hotly anticipated titles? Marketing, which we’re supposed to do ourselves? Editorial services and support, from editors so overworked it takes them a year to answer emails? Really?

Really?

An agent gets a percentage of work sold, so it’s in their interests to find a way through the tangle. But is that way forcing the author to do up fucking moodboards or audio, or other labor-intensive gewgaws? Seriously, what the hell is this nonsense? We’re supposed to do the agent’s job as well as the editor’s and the marketing department’s, in return for…what, exactly?

This isn’t really to knock agents; the reputable ones are just as baffled as their authors. One could make the case that they honestly mean well when telling authors to add these bells and whistles in order to attempt enticing some overworked editor (who might hit burnout and leave next month, orphaning an entire slew of works both debut and midlist) to shuffle a submission to the top of the inbox. And it’s not even to really knock plenty of editors, who get into the job because they love literature and want to make a difference.

But if an editor is so overworked they literally can’t answer subs from even well-known, reputable agents with proven authors in their stable, how in God’s name are they supposed to be providing the editorial care and in-house advocacy required by the books they do end up buying?

The answer is simple: They can’t. Trad publishing is literally failing at doing its job. A lot of people, for various reasons both self-serving and otherwise, have accused trad of simply being an entitled gatekeeping mechanism; even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes, and honestly it’s starting to look like the urge for infinite exploitation, Amazon-style, has turned trad pub into the nightmare it was accused, by envious dickwads, of being.

I just keep thinking, what precisely are authors paying for when these companies literally will not or cannot do their fucking jobs?

No, really, what are we supposed to grant rights to big publishing houses for nowadays? Editing, from folks so overwhelmed they can’t even answer their email? Cover art, when they’re making it clear they want fuck over and steal from our visual artist pals even more than from writers? Marketing, when we’re expected to do it ourselves, and then blamed when we don’t have the reach of multibillion-dollar corporations? Industry knowledge, when they’re literally worshipping at the altar of TikTok and Goodreads, neither of which have even a Magic 8-Ball’s accuracy? It certainly can’t be prestige; seriously, is there any of that left?

It’s beginning to look like the barriers to entry in self-pub are a lot easier to surmount for even the most marginalized of writers. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still fairly prohibitive there, in a lot of respects–just a lot less prohibitive than this bloody nonsense.

The Big Five/Four appear to be rotting in tar pits; indie or small presses who have good business hygiene and treat their authors well are positioned beautifully to grab market share when the avalanche of market correction hits. One supposes the cycle will start all over again, then–from an original ground polluted almost past bearing by both Amazon’s predatory practices and the ecology-wrecking plagiarism machines, true, but at least a few of us might get some breathing room.

How many great stories and authors are we going to lose before that happens, though, and when said correction hits? Even more than we’re losing now because the industry is full of grifters calling themselves agents, reputable agents who can’t get overworked editors to look at anything, editors hollowed out by burnout so badly that it takes them half a year (or a full year) to respond to subs if they respond at all, editors so overwhelmed they can’t provide proper editing or in-house support for what books do manage to be sold, a complete lack of marketing support, TikTok and Goodreads being treated as industry oracles, hush-hush meetings where publishing execs are attempting to figure out how to replace pesky human writers who expect to be paid with hallucinating plagiarism machines (oh yeah, those screenshots are something, indeed), cover art made by hallucinating DALL-E and Midjourney, and titles poisoned by SEO delirium?

This is wild. This is bizarre even by publishing standards, and that’s saying something. What, exactly, are the authors–the ones providing the stuff this industry literally cannot run without, mind you, the human beings producing the books and stories even the corporate plagiarism machines cannot function without–paying for here? What services are being rendered, what benefits are authors getting by granting rights and percentages to these companies?

No wonder so many established midlisters are making the move to self-pub; no wonder the number of hybrid authors is at an all-time high. I can only see this trend accelerating, especially since the tools for self-pub have been around for awhile now and there’s a lot of free guides about how to do it–if you can find a search engine that isn’t serving up gobs of “AI” horseshite, that is. (I like DuckDuckGo, myself.)

Moodboards. For Chrissake. I just…I can’t even. Moodboards. What a time to be alive, and in publishing. I just keep coming back to that one simple question, so I’ll repeat it a final time before going to do my chores.

What, precisely, are we paying these companies for?

Win Or Sledgehammer

The dog started the day by demanding many a bellyrub and cuddle before he would deign to leave a warm bed–which, honestly, fair play and I did not mind. However, he followed it up by attempting to stamp on every hyacinth and daffodil in the backyard, forcing us to trudge around in circles while he sought the perfect place to pee as the temperature hovers near freezing.

I don’t even know. Then there was the Coffee Grinder Incident and I began to despair of ever getting some goddamn caffeine. Fortunately the Moka pot didn’t make me wait too long and now I am safely in my office, shivering with the aftereffects of Boxnoggin’s frigid bathroom break but grateful for the cup of java I’m finally managing to get down my poor sleepy gullet.

I have Flo Rida’s My House running through my head; it’s a supremely danceable tune. Yesterday it was fighting for supremacy with DNCE’s Cake By the Ocean, which starts out sounding like Uptown Funk to a degree which makes it mash with several other tracks on my skull radio. However, it is also supremely danceable, so I didn’t mind. Still, I’m glad to have just one song plaguing me at the moment–when I get three or four going, it’s usually a sign I need more work to keep the ol’ thinkmeat from consuming itself.

Yesterday was all administrivia and video meetings. Honestly I don’t know why anyone talks to me–I mean, sure, I’m hilarious, but I’m also A Lot and a crotchety misanthropist to boot. I got into publishing because it was a job I could handle from home while caring for toddlers (childcare costs would have eaten the proceeds from any other) and now I’m so used to setting my own schedule and arranging things to suit myself I’m largely unfit for not only any other career but also interacting with what one thinks of as “normal” people.

I get weird early, I stay weird, and it’s not gonna change.

Anyway, the Ides of March are tomorrow and the second tranche of sales and price drops for the month are coming ’round the bend. Today there is a cake to bake, plus wordcount to catch up on since I got barely 400 yesterday and I suspect they all have to be thrown out. I may have to reserve one day per week for goddamn bureaucratic nonsense so I can protect the rest of my working time. I need this book done and if I’m going indie at the rate I suspect (developments are underway) I also need a few other things in place.

My patience for incremental effort is being severely tested. I need a win or two. Maybe I’ll get one during walkies, or today’s run. If that doesn’t work, there’s a sledgehammer sitting to the right of my desk, and I’m sure I can find a way to use it around the yard for a bit.

…honestly, the prospect sounds more and more enticing the longer I think about it. Thursday got the first few hits in, but I’ve got a plan for the war entire.

Time to get swinging.

The Devil Does Promo

The interval after one gets the first sip of coffee down but before the initial blessed intimation of caffeine in the bloodstream is a liminal space. Thresholds are funny things, and this one’s no different. Technically caffeine’s one of the few substances capable of going straight across the stomach lining (along with aspirin, very simple sugar, and a proportion of alcohol) and by the gods am I ever grateful for that. It’s not so much that my brain needs jump-starting–the collection of squirrels inside my skull is always coked up and singing, thank you–but coffee seems to impose some order on the damn chorus and bring the body into sync as well.

Whew. Anyway, over the weekend I did an experimental promo thing with Moon’s Knight, offering it for $3.99US in ebook. (It’s still going; today’s the last scheduled day for the price drop even though the official promo is done.) I’m testing a certain marketing platform, and I also highlighted the sale on social media. I can’t tell which proportion of sales is which yet; those analytics should be interesting.

Of course, it was sort of a gimme, since this is the book that garnered one of my favourite Amazon reviews, in which a pearl-clutching “Avid Reader” took exception to the protagonist thinking, “fuck God” at the funeral of her best friend. Normally I don’t glance at such things, but the stars aligned in this particular case and I had to laugh. I mean, you can’t buy promo like that, it’s bloody priceless. I’ll probably find that the bulk of the sales are people who saw that on my Mastodon or Bsky feeds and said, “that sounds like a good time”.

The fact that the book almost wasn’t published at all–only the intervention and insistence of my beta readers convinced me to do so–only makes it funnier.

You all know how much I loathe marketing, but if this is the year I’m prepping to go full-feral indie, I need to get more comfortable with it. Intellectually I know that living under late-stage capitalism means we’ve got to use the tools we have, people won’t know about the books unless I tell them, and that it’s necessary and good for an artist to talk about their stuff and make a living. But the brute work of promo does not move me and I have no patience for the douchebags who want to shame artists for having to engage in it, so I’ve been avoiding the whole shebang except when I absolutely cannot.

Needs must when the devil drives, though and Mama’s got rent to pay. I keep hearing that bit in Always Look On the Bright Side of Life where Eric Idle riffs, “Incidentally, this record is available in the foyer…some of us gotta live as well, you know…”

There are far worse earworms upon a Monday morn.

Today is for setting up the next pitched battle in Highlands War and getting a protagonist locked in a dungeon elsewhere. After, of course, Boxnoggin gets his ramble and my own corpse its endorphin-producing shamble. The former will be reasonably pleasant since his leg seems well on the way to full healing, but I’m still keeping him on very easy walkies and discouraging indoor parkour. He is only moderately upset at that last bit since we’re providing canine puzzles and lots of other not-so-leaping fun and encouragement to keep him occupied. (By “puzzles” I mean “very easy Kong toys”, since…well, we love this dog, but he is not a rocket scientist, let’s put it that way.)

The morning has been passing weird, which is to be expected on a Monday. I’m waiting for the Chained Knight edit letter to drop, at which point I’ll shift to revising that book and Gamble. Hopefully this week should see some other things shake loose…but if they don’t I’ve got more than enough to keep me occupied. Rather like Boxnoggin, in fact.

Time to grab some brekkie and stagger forth.

Awards, Co-Opted

Well, release day has come and gone, and I’m still a nervous wreck. That’s to be expected, since this series has had such an awful time being born. Recovery always takes thrice the time I think it will, even when I pad out the schedule to what I consider “reasonable”. This perhaps means I am an unreasonable person who drives herself too hard, or…you know what, I’m just going to drink more coffee.

The big news in my corner of publishing right now is the Sanford & Barkley report on what precisely went down with the 2023 Hugo Awards in Chengdu. Yes, it was censorship. Yes, the call was largely coming from inside the house–censorship and bribery often function indirectly, after all. And yes, this bears out my point that if an award is so easily co-opted by bad actors, perhaps it should not be so very prestigious.

I should, in the interests of clarity, make it explicit that I can say this because I am not and will never be an “awards”-type writer. The reasons are various and sundry, but the reason I mention this boils down to me not having any skin in this game. I am aware my position is relatively privileged in that respect. I would like to think that if this were not the case I would still say the same things, but upon that path lies hubris so it’s best to just be honest.

Look, most (if not all) literary awards are popularity contests. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the approbation of one’s peers and/or co-professionals is in many cases desirable indeed, and in a wider sense popular works are that way because they appeal to a wide number and variety of people. It’s a good thing to have other folks in your industry say openly that you’re fantastic at your job, and popular works that get more people reading and talking about books lift up the rest of publishing/bookdom, a rising tide heaving all boats up a few inches. Nothing is wrong with that AT ALL.

However, there is a dark side to any awards process. Those who are good at bureaucracy or brigading have a natural advantage when it comes to gaming such things, and any work which speaks to a wide number of people also speaks to their fears and collective id. The former is far more insidious than the latter, and will be relentlessly taken advantage of unless the awards process is constructed in such a way as to curb the enthusiasm of ill-meaning bureaucrats and bigots.

Ideally, an awards process constructed to curb those advantages garners prestige. In the real world, prestige is often bought, or a function of combined age and catering to dominant prejudices, and we are faced with one of the most highly sought and well-regarded awards in SFF being co-opted with stunning regularity by bigots and censorious dickwads. Those who have spoken about this problem when it surfaces face relentless harassment and mockery before being proven right every. damn. time. I don’t think this particular incident will end any differently. The inertia of the Hugos, the “it’s too haaaaard to change!”, are heavy indeed. The old-guard vested interests will simply wait for the storm to pass before going back to co-opting and pulling levers, and in another few years we’ll have yet another “omg the Hugos are fucked” moment. Plus ça change…

So yes, this is bad. And yes, I think some version of this fuckery will happen again and again, up to and including “well-regarded” fansites mocking and brigading those who point out problems as they’re developing. It won’t stop until SFF publishing and fandom put a stop to it, but herding those cats–especially if there’s money to be made and egos to be massaged–may well prove impossible.

The real horror here is that Chinese SFF authors, publishers, and fans had a brief shining moment of hope which was relentlessly stamped out by the arrogance and collusion of people in charge of the Hugos and their ringleader, a breathtakingly egoistic, bigoted, and contemptuous white dude. The damage extends far and wide, and will no doubt be forgotten by Western SFF publishing and fandom by the time the next shiny spaceship awards are handed out.

…plus ce même chose.

I mourn for all the stories and fandom deliciousness we’re missing out on because this shit keeps happening. Things could be so very different, yet they are not. There might indeed be an arc bending towards justice, but damned if I can see it.

Anyway, I need more coffee and Boxnoggin wants his walkies. After that it’s back to writing. I have the great good fortune to continue making my books, at least for the moment, and I’d best use it to the hilt.

Let Thursday begin.

Practice in Patience

A while ago I added user-agent blocking to my site’s firewall in order to discourage “AI” content theft. Since I did so, there have been nearly 3k separate attempts by ChatGPT to steal from my site for their plagiarism machine, and a few hundred on the part of other theft machines. (Last year Neil Clarke put up this wonderfully informative post about protecting one’s website, and I regularly check for new user agents with a DuckDuckGo search.)

Of course, nasty little theft apologist shitheads will sniff that my blog is public, and if I didn’t want the content to be used I shouldn’t have put it here. I’m not even going to dignify that red, goalpost-moving herring with a response.

Anyway. In publishing news (so far as that goes), shifting my self-pub works to distribute at Kobo through Draft2Digital instead of directly has shown an appreciable bump in sales even in the few weeks since the change started. Part of this can be explained by a sharp swift poke making the algorithm notice something it had grown used to ignoring, and another component is D2D automagically rounding territorial prices to .49 and .99, which Kobo prioritises on the down-low but doesn’t give authors the tools to do without spending a lot of time fiddling around. The time investment in keeping track of exchange rates and going back every few months to tweak territorial prices–when I have direct evidence it can be done by a platform itself without fuss–is just too much, especially for an author who has a significant number of titles.

So I’ve been pleased by the results of the change, though I really, really wanted to list directly at Kobo–I am fond of keeping eggs in different baskets, as we all know–and gave them multiple years and chances to shape up. And please remember my experience may not be representative, I know other authors (mostly Canadian) who have wildly different benchmarks and success rates. Publishing is not a one-size-fits-all game.

Most of yesterday was taken up with administrivia like contract stuff, cleanup, formatting, and editor correspondence. It needed to be done and I’d had a couple good working days beforehand, so I’m not too behind the pitch. But I’d rather’ve been writing, as always. The first pitched battle in Highlands War (today’s subscription drop will see the beginning of the second season) needs tying up with the aftermath scene(s), the Sekrit Projekt is going to burn a king’s body, and the novella is airborne but needs another goose or two on the throttle to achieve cruising altitude.

And Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped!

Before all that, though, Boxnoggin is craving toast scraps and walkies. He forgot the Icepocalypse and having to basically stay indoors for a week less than 24hrs after the melt had progressed enough we could make it around the block, but still senses something is Not Quite Right and must do an awful lot of sniffing and christening every. single. bush. and. corner to make up for the enforced vacation. Being still caddywumpus from the entire thing myself, both because of the weather and entirely unrelated stress (I did feel like the world was mirroring my inner state for a while, yes indeedy), I understand…but I still wish he’d get a move on sometimes.

Ah well, it’s good practice in patience. I have never regarded myself as a patient being, though the kids say otherwise; the most I can say is that I have deliberately arranged my life to lengthen my fuse in some areas. While that’s great, it also seems to grant a shorter fuse in others, though at least I tend to disengage with a vengeance before I hit that point.

Small mercies, and now I must embark upon the rest of Thursday. At least it looks like a raw, grey, rainy day outside–my favourite kind. And the amount of work looming will keep me off the streets and out of trouble, just as soon as walkies and a run are dealt with.

Excelsior, and all that…