A Work in Progress

Panel: Will Frank (M), Paul Herman, Richard Morgan, John Wardale

This was an interesting panel. I went because I knew that there's been quite a bit of uproar about various copyright-related issues. I did learn quite a bit.

My Notes

• Some people think of copyright just as protection
• The biggest goal of copyright is just to promote culture
• The reason there is any protection at all is so that artists can gain income from their works
• Supposed to provide a limit so you can protect your stuff for a period of time, but has become perpetual
• Copyright is really narrow (someone has take the same picture you did)
• Copyright is provided for in the Constitution; a balance—a deal—between the government and the artist
• Patent is for ideas; copyrights are for the actual work
• Copyright is the exclusive rights that can be licensed
• Original copyright was 28 years, now 95; 75 years in most places overseas (life of the artist + 25 years)
• In the U.S., it is only about economic benefit, not moral as in Europe
• Fair Use exception: 4 key points
• Have you harmed the future income potential of the work?
• One key word is "transformative"
• Some groups create an aura around their rights
• Parody is a good example of fair use
• The Internet exists in a weird place in relation to copyright
• Cite your source
• Respect the social norm
• Trademark is a different beast; it's related to a product or a family of products, not content
• Creative Commons licensing
• Open source is about free speech, not free beer
• Most fan work is derivative work
• There are different rules about inheriting copyright than for other items; make sure you plan for that accordingly

The less said about this session, the better.

I had to walk out when someone started a debate over “. . . doesn’t define what a document is”. I mean . . . really?

Next.

Panel: Michelle Sagara, Peggy Hailey, Michael J. Walsh, Gini Koch, Lawrence Person

This was an interesting session and not as "gloom and doom" as you might think.

Other Notes:

• Bookselling is in a period of minor transition (personally, I thought this was a vast understatement)
• Things haven't changed that much
• It's important to hand-sell books customers would actually like
• Booksellers pay, in general, less than everyone else; they work there because they love books
• Struggle with the brick and mortar stores with eBooks
• Suddenly everything was available everywhere all the time
• A great time for book buyers
• For sellers: a lot more competitive, a lot more books, free shipping
• It's nearly impossible to compete with Amazon at the things they do well
• The Internet changed a whole lot
• Amazon is a godsend to small presses to sell internationally
• It's a Golden Age for people buying books
• For more authors, it's more difficult because there's so much out there
• Buy the building
• Your job is to convince your audience that you are worth supporting
• The way to make a small fortune in the book business is to start with a large fortune
• Know your customers; know what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are
• Most bookstore have not failed due to sales, but from rents
• You need to do something that Amazon can't
• Author events
• Offer yourself for events; pass the word
• Keep your word
• Bookstores need authors; authors need bookstores to sell their books
• Word gets around
• Most bookstores are willing to work with you, but make sure you're talking to the right person
• Make sure you tell your friends to show up
• As it becomes easier to get POD books, more bookstores will be willing to handle them
• Many bookstores will sell on consignment
• Tends to be book-dependent
• As an online bookseller, I will tend to carry only stuff I already know
• We shouldn't judge a book by its cover--but we do
• Lead time for events depends on the store: at least a month for large stores
• Ideally, approach them a few months before the book actually becomes available
• The bookstore business is an absolutely insane business
• If you want to get rich, don't be in this business

I wanted to give a shout-out to everyone that Hunt Press has launched a new web site today.

Please check it out. While you’re there, buy a book—or three—from them.

Supporting small presses is what it’s all about. If you’re looking for interesting, leading-edge reading, places like Hunt Press are where you want to look.

Go. Buy. Let me know what you thought.

I’ve been pondering on the subject of eBooks and digital distribution of books—well, any content—and began to wonder if there is an opportunity for writers and publishers to adopt a different model or, actually, give new life to an old one.

It has been a long-standing practice in monthly magazines to serialize chapters from an upcoming novel. One advantage of this is that readers can get their monthly fix without waiting for the entire novel to be published.

One of the unfortunate side effects of the Internet age, with information available instantly at ones fingertips, is the reduction in the amount of time that many people are willing to wait to get what they want: the phenomenon half-jokingly referred to as “short attention-span theater”.

What is wonder is this: Would readers would be willing to “subscribe” to a book if its chapters were published on monthly basis, rather than waiting until the book was completed?

Magazines sell monthly subscriptions. Some software is available on a subscription basis, allowing users to get free upgrades for a specified period of time. Could this same model be applied to other content?

Following a model similar to online gaming, readers could be offered “tiers” of subscription levels: preview content for free, complete content for a basic subscription, additional content for an additional charge, and perhaps access to all of an author’s work (or all editions of a work) for a “lifetime subscription”.

I can see all sorts of details that would need to be worked out, particularly around pricing:

• Would a subscription cost more or less than the final book? (I can see readers willing to pay a little more not to have to wait.)
• Might a subscription price also include a reduced price (or free) edition of the final book?

I can see some advantages:

• For readers: As previously mentioned, readers would not need to wait months (or years!) to follow the adventures of their favorite characters. In addition, they would receive only the content that they want. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve purchased magazines just for the chance to read a single article or story. While I’m sure that the publishers loved that, it did irk me.)
• For writers: It could provide a steady stream of revenue for writers and publishers, knowing that they have a committed audience for the length of their subscription to the work. It would also make it much easier for them to keep in contact with their audience, giving them a direct connection to provide their readers with information about upcoming work and appearances.

What do you think? Would you be willing to subscribe to a book?

"A goal without a plan is just a wish."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It seems to me that when creative individuals are confronted by structure and organization, they immediately revert into a passive-aggressive mode of operation.

Maybe this is why so many artists miss deadlines? I know creativity does run answer to a timeclock, but really? Having a goal is rarely a bad thing. It gives you something to aim for—a target to shoot at.

The Cylons had a Plan. The Bene Gesserit had a Plan. Hari Seldon had a Plan.

Now, we’ll ignore that most of those plans lasted decades and centuries. But how do you know how you’re going to get from Starting Point A to Finish Line B without having a Plan? How do you accomplish something like, say, writing a book without having a Plan?

Or, as a friend of mine put it oh-so-succinctly, “Focus, Steven! What's your PLAN????”

Well . . . umm . . .

I really have no excuse. Trained in project management, I can’t find direction on my own personal endeavors. Bad form. Worse yet, bad example!

So, I spent my Sunday morning putting one together: setting a SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goal, specific objectives, and a list of scheduled milestones. I won’t bore you with its details there. Suffice to say, it exists.

Now we’ll see how well I do in sticking to it.

I got the impression that nearly everyone on the panel felt that social media interaction was a necessary evil, yet also a valuable means to interact and hear from ones audience. Beware, however, of it becoming a distraction from the real work of writing.

Twitter seems to be the preferred method of communication, with feeds to other avenues such as Facebook.

They use Facebook as a "hub" to collect their content from other avenues (Twitter, blogs, etc.) and find that most of their feedback comes through Facebook and not through the original source.

Privacy was a concern regarding some of the social networking platforms, particularly Facebook and Google+. In general, Facebook and Google+ both got pretty negative feedback from the panel.

There was a general consensus to use social media to recommend, not to sell.

Cory Doctorow's advice was to use the ones that you find satisfying.

I've been following this discussion for the past week or so: The Publishing Death Spiral.

I'll leave it to you to make your own judgment on the opinions espoused within, but I do find Part Three pretty much dead on. My questions are:

• How long will it take before the inevitable evolution wins out?
• And what happens to authors in the meantime until it does?

(I know there's a lot more questions to be asked, but I thought I'd start with just two...)

I find myself at one of those crossroads again.

This is not one of the great age-related milestones. Nor is it even all that large in scale in terms of Big Life Decisions. But it does reflect what I’ve discovered has been a recurring theme in my life.

Pretty much everyone is familiar with these lines from Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

It’s so often easier, particularly in these confused and perilous economic times, to make the “safe” choice. You know the one: the one that ensures that the mortgage keeps getting paid. (I do wonder these days—a lot—just how “safe” that choice really is.)

Yes, it can be argued that it’s possible to do both, pay the bills and feed the muse. But there is the reality that there are only so many waking hours in the day, hours that get eaten up by working, commuting, choring, and so on.

What brings this all on you might ask?

I just finished completing an online course in Flash animation. It’s something I also wanted to learn, but never took the time because it really wasn’t all that pertinent to my job and there were always other things to be done. (If you’re at all curious, here is one of my class projects. It was the one I had the most fun with!)

Having done that, I am seriously considering enrolling in the Advanced course. Then, that annoying little voice spoke up and reminded me that I really should complete my PMI enrollment and take the PMP exam so I can be a certified Project Management Professional. <cue appropriate impressive-sounding bass tones here> (Yes, that is probably every bit as boring as it sounds, but could be potentially useful in any future job search.) I could so both, but that’s a whole lot of work on top of a full-time job.

The point of this was not to whine or otherwise bemoan taking on a potentially heavy workload. I know that there are plenty of others who have done—and are doing—far more just to survive. It was just that even giving voice to that possible decision re-raised the long-standing issue for me.

Which will I choose? I don’t know yet. Maybe one. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

People leave managers, not companies.

Prior to moving to my current place of employment, I was a people manager for more than seven years. During that period, outside of layoffs and other such actions, I had a 0% voluntary attrition rate. That's right. During that period, which spanned both the dot-com boom and collapse, no one voluntarily left my team.

Several times since then, I have been asked if I would be interested in managing people again. Each time, I have declined. Not because I didn't enjoy it. Not because I don't believe that I wasn't good at it. The basic reason is this: Most organizations have made it almost impossible to manage people effectively.

I have watched while, for various reasons the benefits for employees have been whittled down to barely more than a regular paycheck and basic health insurance. My observation is that the companies have removed nearly all of the tools for rewarding employees, leaving managers only with ways for punishing them. Almost entirely gone are raises, bonuses, and forms of compensation beyond the financial. Employees are expected to work longer hours with fewer rewards. As good and compassionate as any manager might be, they need ways of making their employees feel valued without having to dip into their own pockets.

In find it becoming more and more difficult to be a corporate worker bee that contributes little else than to a company's bottom line. There is a scene in Star Trek: Generations where Kirk addresses Picard that often echoes back to me:

Well let me tell you something. Don't! Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you're there... you can make a difference.

I think there are points in our lives, where we want to do more than earn a paycheck, when we want to make a difference. Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but many people I know have expressed such sentiments. Perhaps I simply hang out with a more enlightened crowd. I don't know.

When I did manage a team, I did feel like I made a difference—at least to them. Even as the rewards diminished, I felt as least I gave them what I could in terms of candor and honesty. Yet even that will only go so far.

I do miss having a team of people to manage. In many ways it is much more fulfilling than just project management. I think, though, that will likely be a long time before I'm willing to do it again in the current business environment. I shudder to hear employees referred to as "human assets". I guess I should be grateful that at least we're still referred to as "human".

I learned a long time ago that the business world is neither fair nor just.

Many, many years ago, while in high school, some friends and I decided to take our lunchtime gaming activities to the next level and petition the school to make it an official club. After jumping through all of the proverbial hoops, our application was rejected on the grounds that there was a perception that games such as Dungeons & Dungeons involved witchcraft and other possible dark arts. (It also didn't help that there had just been a heavily publicized case of a student whose disappearance had been reported to have been related to his participation in the game.) Knowing that the decision of the school management was based on misinformation, I decided to petition the students in an attempt to reverse the decision.

At the same time, I was employed by a small, family-owned office supply store. I mentioned the situation to my boss, along with my plans to appeal the school's ruling. I was told, in very clear terms, to drop the matter if I wanted to continue my employment. As the school district was a major customer, it would not be appropriate for someone recognizable as part of that business to challenge the school on such an issue. (It was also far more complex than that, as this was also a highly active Catholic area, but I'll leave the religious angles out of this discussion for some other time.)

Stunned and hurt by the lack of support, I did not further persue the issue. It was my first job; I was saving for a car and college--and it was several steps above dealing with daily grease spatters at one of the neighborhood fast food places. The lesson was well-learned though: fear of losing one's regular paycheck can trump the spirit behind many a just cause.

Flash forward to present day . . .

Last week, I was greeted by this report by CNN. Let me share just a brief excerpt, but please read the rest on your own later:

(CNN) -- Blog fans in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, saw PittGirl as their masked superhero -- a comedian and local commentator who jibed the mayor without reserve and ranted freely about her hatred of pigeons.

But despite her effort to keep her real name secret, people started to figure out who PittGirl was.

Feeling pressure to take control of her identity before someone else outed her, PittGirl on Wednesday posted pictures of herself on her blog and introduced readers to her real-world self: Virginia Montanez, a 35-year-old married mother of two who worked in the nonprofit sector.

On Thursday morning, Montanez was fired from her job because of her online persona, she said.

What I find interesting about this article is that in none of the cases does it state, specifically, the reason why the individuals were fired other than for espousing their opinions online under pseudonyms. It is not stated whether those opinions were at odds with those of the organizations they had been part of, whether their remarks were potentially legally actionable against both the individual or the organization, or whether the actions taken were the collective result of other factors entirely.

Although I might be reading more into it than there is, the message I get from it is this: If you work for any organization, don't go public with your opinions--any opinions. If you do so anonymously, they can and will find out. In fact, there is even a statement in the article that goes as far to say (and I paraphrase on purpose here) that to hide behind an online pseudonym is akin to cowardice.

Now while I definitely agree that people should take care about the opinions they provide on public online forums, particularly if they involve bad-mouthing their employers. That strikes me as just good common sense. However, this feels to me like a serious blurring between an individual's professional and personal lives (and heaven knows that organizations are already trying to claim more than their fair share of one's time).

In this time of constant fear over losing one's employment, I see this as yet one more tool in a company's arsenal of tools for maintaining control (and, I would even daresay, ownership) over its employees. No longer are an inidividual's personal opinions and activities their own, but they can now come--legally--under scrutiny and subject to possible retalitory action by the companies that employ them.

I wish I had something concrete to recommend here other than expressing your outrage (and then possibly putting yourself at the same risk as those mentioned in the article). In a country that prides itself for having Freedom of Speech, I find what this article reports (and what it doesn't say) alarming.

Side Note: I happened to see this article at the same time that I was struggling with the future direction of this blog—and whether there was even going to be one. Part of me was prepared to toss reserve and caution to the proverbial wind and begin putting out my opinions as I had not done before. I'm not saying that I won't still do so, but the coincidence of the appearance of the article was unsettling.