HogeTown

Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign - the final countdown

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

The March 13 deadline for Hugo ballot nominations isn’t far away, so it’s time to ramp the campaign back up.

The story so far, for those who’ve missed it: The Hugo Awards are coming to Australia courtesy of Aussiecon 4. Here’s our chance to help some of our best authors get their best work recognised by getting them nominated for an award.

It’s a pretty simple idea - get out there and nominate your favourite Aussie, writers, works, editors and fans.

But the numbers remain stacked against us.

As of January 1, there were 352 Australians registered and eligible to nominate for the Hugos. A healthy number, yes. But a very small one when compared to the 856 Americans eligible to nominate. And breaking those numbers down further says a bit more about why it’s important we get out there and nominate. Of those 856 Americans, 388 are “supporting” members - ie people who are unlikely to attend the convention but have paid a fee to get regular updates and to be eligible to vote in the Hugos. On top of that, add all the members of last year’s Worldcon, held in Montreal, who are also eligible to nominate and vote in the awards this year.

It’s perfectly understandable that US readers have less exposure than locals to great Australian speculative fiction. But if you think local works and authors deserve recognition; if you think it’s possible to make a difference and if you think it’s important to try then check out the Aussiecon 4 website for nomination details. And if you’re Facebook inclined, log in and join the conversation here.

Tags: awards, Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign, Publishing
Posted in Publishing, Reading, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Let’s break the 37-year John W Campbell Award bogey

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

People, it’s time we made the John W Campbell Award into more than just award for new writing talent from North America.

The John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer has been awarded 37 times since it started in 1973. Of those 37 awards, 36 have been awarded to authors from North America. One has gone to an author from the UK - Jeff Noon. Not once has it gone to an Australian, a Kiwi, a South African, a Japanese writer or anyone else. It has only ever been awarded to residents of three countries - the USA, Canada, and England.

Think of the great Australian genre authors starting their careers that we missed out on recognising: Margo Lanagan, Garth Nix, Sean Williams, Greg Egan, Isobelle Carmody and heaps of others.

This is not the fault of the organisers. They run a good award that has drawn attention to some great new talent. It’s our responsibility as a local community.

This photo, from Patick Nielsen Hayden, isn’t a picture of the award. It shows Jay Lake holding a pin Jay is distributing to all previous nominees. At a quick glance it looks like there’s only one (for Kirsten Bishop) of these exquisite creations in Australian hands (or on lapels).

Local writers aren’t even getting nominated. But with Worldcon coming to Melbourne, we’ve got a chance to make amends and focus some attention on some of our best new local writers.

My list of nominations for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer will include:

• Angela Slatter
• Peter M. Ball
• Lezli Robyn
• Jason Fischer

I’ve read a heap of work from each of these writers and I’m very confident they’ll all go a long way.

Nominations close March 13. You can find out more at the Aussiecon 4 website.

Photo by Patrick Nielsen Hayden used under Creative Commons licence.

Tags: authors, awards, Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign
Posted in Publishing | 2 Comments »

Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign spreads wider

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

The marvellous folks over at ASiF! are getting together to do a 2010 update on the Australian Specfic Snapshot first conducted by Ben Peek in 2007. The good news is one focus of the 2010 update will be on this year’s Hugos and the local authors and works people think are worthy of nomination.

Interviews and recommendations will be appearing on these blogs from tomorrow:
http://random-alex.livejournal.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/
http://www.mechanicalcat.net/rachel
http://tansyrr.com/
http://editormum.livejournal.com/

Looking forward to seeing further discussion of what we should be nominating. Don’t forget, nominations close in a month.

Tags: authors, awards, Homegrown Hugo Nomination Campaign
Posted in Publishing | No Comments »

Apple iPad - the e-book shakeup begins

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Well you can’t buy a device, there are no e-books on sale through the app store and it was only announced three days ago but as predicted Apple’s iPad has already shaken up digital publishing.

On Friday Amazon removed all books by publisher Macmillan - physical and digital - in a move industry insiders say is the culmination of an ongoing dispute over the price the retailing giant was charging customers for e-books on the Kindle. Macmillan wanted to set its own price (around $15) for e-books but Amazon had them locked in at a maximum of $9.99. That disagreement means you can’t currently buy any books from one of the world’s biggest publishers directly from Amazon.

Funnily enough Macmillan is one of the big publishers signing up to the Apple e-book store right from the start. And what’s the price Apple is letting Macmillan charge for an e-book? The magical $15.

While the New York Times rightly says there may be some anti-trust issues if Macmillan’s books went on sale through one of the stores and not the other, there’s still a bit over a month before Apple’s e-book store opens for business. My guess is that it’s Macmillan flexing its muscle now there’s another giant player in the market. Plenty of time for further negotiations.

I’m even more convinced now that the iPad as an e-book reader is a fifth order issue when it comes to digital publishing. All the uber-geeks are complaining because it doesn’t do this or it doesn’t do that. But this device is not designed to replace your laptop. It’s a device to let you consume digital media easily. And it does that well. I’m sure it will make a very good e-book reader but we’ve got plenty of them already.

While it could be months (or years) before Australians will be able to buy e-books from Apple, the impact across the digital publishing industry is likely to be felt much sooner.

Tags: Apple, e-books, iPad
Posted in Publishing, e-books | 8 Comments »

What the Apple iPad means for e-books - a first take

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

The good news is that the newly announced Apple iPad is a much more exciting device in terms of what it brings to the e-book game than it is an an overall computing device. In general terms it’s just an over-sized iPhone that has a few new peripherals (like a keyboard - hooray). But it still doesn’t support Flash and Apple has decided wanting a device that is capable of multi-tasking is just too 1980s.

But the interesting news is what it means for the e-book market.

The iPad introduces a new app called iBooks which links with a dedicated e-bookstore called iBookstore (enough with the “i”s already). It supports ePub as its native format! Apple adopting an industry standard is almost unheard of and it will be interesting to see if Apple allows access to ePub books bought for Stanza (or someone adds this functionality through a hack). They already have in place agreements with major publishers such as Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette.

But the device is not the issue - Apple entering the e-book trade is. These developments - support for e-Pub and Apple having a dedicated e-bookstore will mean a lot for the business. If only we could convince them to open the store up to non-Apple devices. 

What it will mean for the Kindle, who knows at this stage. But it’s 2.5 times heavier, thicker and larger, has a shorter battery life and there’s still that backlit LCD screen. I don’t think it’s a Kindle-killer. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a big leap for e-publishing.

Tags: Apple, e-books, iPad
Posted in Publishing, e-books | 4 Comments »

Why does the Productivity Commission hate Sean Williams?

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

There’s a lot more in the Australian Productivity Commission’s report into parallel book imports than just their economic argument about cheaper books.

There’s been some good analysis of what implementing the recommendations could mean for Australian authors, booksellers and publishers. And there’ll be plenty more to come, which I might do a wrap up of next week. I don’t want to revisit those arguments now because, frankly, others have done it in more depth.

My interest today is Appendix F.

Appendix F is titled: “Design of financial support for book producers”. It analyses grants and literary prizes for authors and publishers. They don’t offer much of an explicit opinion on the Public and Education Lending Right schemes, which compensate authors for books borrowed from public and educational libraries. Except they make the point that most authors receiving payments under PLR and ELR get small amounts; only a few get the big bucks, which seems code for saying it’s not much use when it comes to author incomes. Many authors will tell you different.

Stick with me, I’m getting to the Sean Williams hatred real soon.

The Productivity Commission suggests, that instead of inefficient grants to individual authors and various organisations:

Subsidies to book producers ideally should be delivered only for books that yield material cultural and educational externalities that would not otherwise be generated. The externality value of books, and the likelihood that it would be generated without a dedicated subsidy, is likely to vary between classes or genres of books, as well as within them, and so ideally subsidies should vary to reflect these differences.

And which class of books do they say are likely to offer more value?

Among the diversity of the adult trade sector, Australian stories, histories and biographies are examples of books which are more likely to generate cultural externalities than generic fiction or some non-fictional material such as Australian-authored computer manuals.

There’s the hatred. Sean Williams - a great Australian storyteller - writes some of that dreaded generic fiction. No PLR or ELR for him. The Productivity Commission says instead subsidies could be dished out by a panel of assessors who - as they suggest - should probably give the science fiction section a big miss.

But it’s not just Williams. The productivity hates any number of great Aussie speculative fiction authors like Karen Miller and Marianne de Pierres. They probably don’t hate Margo Lanagan quite so much but only because she writes lots of those great youth-oriented page-turning cultural externalities yarns.

Though having a panel to assess subsidy eligibility is probably a bit inefficient. Here’s what they suggest could streamline the process:

An alternative approach to aligning subsidies with potential differences in cultural externalities of books, that may be more suitable for a broad book subsidy scheme, would be to distinguish book content according to generally accepted bibliographic classification systems.

Why bother with a pesky assessment panel - they may let a few genre books through - when you can just wall off the entire science fiction and fantasy section and forget about it? It’s kinda like saying you can go for a jog along any street you want but you’ll only get fit if your route goes through the rich suburbs.

So what type of books are likely to be Productivity Commission pre-approved:

Most obviously, the core ideas that were embodied in books such as The New Testament, The Wealth of Nations, Mein Kampf and The Female Eunuch have had major impacts on how societies operate. Truly ‘iconic’ works are rare, but some books have similar, though smaller, external effects through their influence on people’s views and attitudes.

But watch out for those negative externality generators

For example, some people would see Professor Ian Plimer’s recent book Heaven and Earth — which purports to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change — as generating external costs, to the extent that it weakens community support for measures to reduce greenhouse emissions. Most clearly, books that have the effect of promoting intolerance between groups can diminish certain forms of social capital and generate external costs.

Mein Kampf’s okay but don’t challenge climate change, okay? (And before anyone throws Godwin’s law back at me, just remember - the Productivity Commission started it). 

And here’s the biggest problem for me. The Productivity Commission started off making an economic argument. And there’s probably an important discussion to have around some of these things. It would be good to pay less for books. But why isn’t the Productivity Commission saying we should drop the GST on books, or force Amazon and other online retailer to pay the 10% tax and reduce their government-regulated competitive advantage. Lets discuss them.

Instead we get this nonsense - essentially an argument over what has literary merit. Stories matter to me, not externalities.

But clearly it’s important to them. So just in case they didn’t check - a note for the Productivity Commission: Cheapest I could find Mein Kampf on Amazon was US$1.46 (without shipping). But if that’s a bit much you can probably get it cheaper if everyone puts in and you buy the order in bulk.

Tags: Productivity Commission, Publishing
Posted in Publishing, Uncategorized, politics | 2 Comments »

To market to market with a hit like Twilight

Monday, April 20th, 2009

I took this photo a week or so ago at the Brisbane Borders store. It got me thinking about the future of bookstores (as distinct from the book business) becoming more and more analogous to cinemas.

There are around 220 copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books here - and that’s on top of the display on the ground floor, the display in the science fiction and fantasy section, the display in the YA section and the posters promoting the upcoming release of the DVD. It’s no surprise there are reports that the Meyer books accounted for 16% of all tracked book sales in the US in the first quarter.

Many chain bookstores are already stocking fewer titles but the oncoming ebook swarm is about to make that even more profound. I suspect we’re going to see chain bookstores either devote more space to making it easier to buy ebooks instore (in the interim) and then move to stocking substantially fewer “hit” titles. The cinema analogy comes into play when you look at choosing a movie online or from the rental store, or going to see one of eight or 10 movies on the big screen.

Question is how fast it will happen and what it will mean for the book biz in the meantime.

Posted in Publishing, e-books | 3 Comments »

Aloud allowed - the Kindle 2, authors and readers

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

The burgeoning brouhaha over the new Kindle’s ability to read text aloud opens up some cool questions and reveals some interesting underlying misconceptions from various parties.

The story so far for those who missed it: Amazon this week re-Kindled its ebook reader and announced some new features including more storage capacity, better screen contrast, round keys and a text-to-speech feature.

It’s this last ‘new’ feature that’s causing all the grief (mind you - round keys! Seriously? That’s outrageous)

Some small publishers are concerned about how it impacts on rights issues and what that may mean for author payments. But the biggest noise is being made by the Authors Guild, which is insisting the text-to-speech functions not just infringes audio rights but is essentially the same thing.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken  said: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

Text-to-speech is a transient form - not a recording. It’s no more a breach of an author’s copyright than reading a work aloud to yourself is. It is not derivative unless someone broadcasts the audio or records it (I’ll save format shifting arguments for another time).

And the technology already exists. Windows will do it for you already with many ebooks and there’s plenty of places on the web that will as well. If you’re keen to hear Mr Aiken’s quote in all its auditory glory, check it out here.

I remember convincing my three-year-old nephew once that there was a little man living in my speakers because he used to talk to him after I typed some text into my computer. That would have been in about 1992. This ain’t nothing new folks.

I’ve often tried to win debates by arguing a more outlandish case and have someone argue me back towards my desired (and more reasonable) point. But The Authors Guild has a long way to go given they first have to be argued from wrong to silly before they can meaningfully engage.

As a reader, I think it’s a great idea. It means I can put my book down for a few minutes and stay with the story the story.

As an author, I think it’s a great idea. it means my readers can put the book down for a few minutes and stay with the story. 

Wouldn’t this be a great tool to add to WordPress or LJ?

One defence many supporters are offering that doesn’t fly with me is that it shouldn’t matter anyway because the quality of the computerised reading voice is so poor it doesn’t come close to replicating the experience of a trained voice actor read an audio book. The quality of the computerised voice is poor. But it won’t be forever. Check out the audio of the Aiken quote that I had the website create for me. It’s not Orson Welles or Morgan Freeman but it’s actually not too bad. And it will get better, much better, over time.

To me though, it’s just another example of why authors should work hard to understand themselves and their work as a platform. It can be confusing stuff but the publishing world is changing and authors need to engage with this stuff any more.

On a final note turns out science fiction author Fred Pohl is on a Guild advisory council. Fred’s a smart guy. Maybe he could knock their heads together a bit.  You out there, Fred?

Tags: ebooks, Kindle, rights
Posted in Publishing, e-books | No Comments »

The Meyer Imperative

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Ever noticed how later books in a wildy popular series rapidly balloon in length? You’re not alone. I’m not the first - far from it - and won’t be the last to comment on the increasing length of books in series such as Twilight and Harry Potter.

But I thought it might be worth putting some rigour - ie numbers - around some of the assumptions. So I wheeled out my trusty version of Excel and decided to put its graphing abilities to good use. I wanted to see how rapid the rise (or fall) in page length was over the course of novel series that became suddenly successful.

The four series I chose to graph were:

• Twilight - Stephenie Meyer
• Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
• the Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson
• Lord of the Rings - J. R. R Tolkien

Here’s what the results look like.

I included the last two as controls (and because, you know, they were close to hand). I considered including Asimov’s Foundation books as another (of which there are seven, not including his expanded Empire and Robot series and novels written by other authors). But for the record, Foundation, first published in 1951 in book form totalled 255 pages. The last in the series was Forward the Foundation, which was published 42 years later and came in at 464 pages.

All comparisons are between consistent editions.

For the record:

• the first Twilight book was 434 pages and the last was 736
• the first Harry Potter book was 223 pages and the last was 607 (book five peaked at 766 pages
• the first Mars book was 519 pages and the last was 609.
• the first Lord of the Rings book was 427 pages and the last 416

But here’s where it gets tricky - and probably why the post is titled the Meyer Imperative rather than the Potter Principle. Rowling pulled back on the length of books six and seven. So to adequatelty compare we need to plot all series as if they went to seven books. Enter Excel.

At seven books apiece the last Harry Potter book was 2.7 times the length of the first one. But if the Twilight series had continued in the same pattern, a seventh book in the series would have come in at whopping 1306 pages. And that length would have made in a smidgen over 3 times the lenth of the first book.  A seventh Mars book (Muave Mars, anyone?) would have only clocked in at 828 pages.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

But what’s it all mean, I hear you ask. Who knows? I suspect that publishers who find they’ve got a massive hit on their hands let writers have a freer hand - not necessarily to keep them happy but more likely I suspect to get the product to market faster.

And it isn’t by definition a comment on quality - and certainly I haven’t read the Twilight books - but it will be interesting to see what happens with the next series from Rowling and Meyer, whether they’re a success or not quite so much. And what that means for lengthas the series progress.

Tags: authors, Meyer Imperative
Posted in Publishing, Reading | 2 Comments »