Readercon and E-Books (Part 1)

First of all, let me say that Readercon was great this year—which I measure primarily by the enjoyable and interesting people I talked to. A partial list would include Jim Kelly, Rob Sawyer, Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Geary Gravel, Rosemary Kirstein, Tom Easton and his wife Kate Savage (who let me hold an Amazon Kindle in my hands for the first time, and even put some of my books on it!), Michaela Roessner, Terry McGarry, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jim Freund, Judith Berman, Victoria McManus, Dan Kimmel, and—neither last nor least—a bunch of members of the writing workshops I’ve led with Craig Gardner. In that latter group, Chris Howard was positively glowing. His first novel, Seaborn, is just out. It looks terrific. (Two short sections of it went through critique in our workshop.) And Chris figured he’d made it—because his book was already pirated and up on someone’s BitTorrent site. And probably was before the print version was even available.

Whatever you think about that last, good or bad—congratulations, Chris!

On the subject of e-books and piracy, I participated in a lively panel on the subject of e-piracy versus the rising trend of folks making their work available for free online. Our panel moderator was James Patrick Kelly, who has been in the forefront of putting his work up in audio format, initially as free podcasts, which eventually led to a paid appearance on audible.com. We batted around a lot of ideas on the subject—which I promise I will talk about tomorrow. It’s late now. Time to get some sleep.

“I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn’t, I would die.” —Isaac Asimov

Readercon: July 17 – 20

Readercon happens this coming weekend, just outside Boston. It’s one of my convention-going highlights of the year, being full of people who truly love reading and love science fiction! I’ll be on a few panels, and doing a reading. The full text of the Program Guide is online as a PDF. But here’s my schedule:

Friday 4:00 PM, Salon F:
If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What’s Piracy?Jeffrey A. Carver, James Patrick Kelly (L), Cat Rambo, Graham Sleight, Gordon Van Gelder

“Webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free . . . [are helping convert] the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.”–Howard V. Hendrix, former Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). In a recent issue of _Locus_, Cory Doctorow summarized the evidence that giving away free electronic versions of books actually helps rather than hinders sales of the printed versions… What are the differences between giving away a text electronically yourself, and letting others disseminate it without your knowledge and/or permission? …If “piracy” is actually good for all except the best-selling authors, how do writers reconcile this reality with long-standing and deep-rooted feelings about intellectual property rights and getting paid for work?

Friday 7:00 PM, Salon F:
Waking Up Sober Next to a Story Idea — Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeffrey A. Carver (L), David Anthony Durham, Kay Kenyon, Barry B. Longyear, Jennifer Pelland

Really, it seemed absolutely beautiful once upon a time. Now that you’ve had intimate knowledge of it (say, midway through the novel), you can see all the less-than-flattering sides. You may even wonder, What the hell was I thinking? How do you recover enthusiasm for the work? Now that you see the flaws, how do you begin the process of fixing them?

Saturday 12:00 Noon, Vinyard: Kaffeeklatsch (meet the author)
Jeffrey A. Carver; David Anthony Durham

Saturday 2:00 PM, RI: Workshop
Writing Jujitsu: Turning Writer’s Block into Stories. — Barry B. Longyear with participation by Jeffrey A. Carver, Barbara Krasnoff, Sandra McDonald, et al.

You can’t sell it until it’s on paper and you can’t get it on paper if things keep eating up your time, nag at you, bully you, or you’re filled to the brim with illnesses, insecurities, or crushing doubts. Longyear presents a how-to workshop for beginning writers and those who have been there on how to turn what’s blocking your muse into stories.

Sunday 1:30 PM, VT: Reading (30 min.) — Jeffrey A. Carver reads from his forthcoming novel Sunborn.

If you’re going to be at Readercon, I hope you’ll come say hello. (I won’t have a designated autographing time. They had too many authors, and since I don’t currently have anything new out, they triaged me. But I’ll be around. Grab me after a panel, or come to the Kaffeeklatch.)

“First you’re an unknown, then you write a book and you move up to obscurity.” —Martin Myers

Unusual Book Signing Planned

This weekend, I was at my usual early-Saturday-evening haunt, which is the free and very friendly wine tastings at my local beer and wine emporium, Menotomy Beer and Wine in Arlington, Massachusetts. I was looking around, and had a sudden inspiration: why not a combination wine tasting /book signing? A natural, no? (Could be a beer tasting, too; they do those on Friday evenings.)

I suggested it to the management (“I have a crazy idea…”), and they loved it. Turns out they’ve been *trying* to get local artists in there to display their work for free, just to liven things up even more. I believe their exact words were: “You’re here. It’s a done deal.”

So if you’re in the Boston area, mark that on your mental calendar for sometime in November, when Sunborn is published. I’ll post more later.

More On Free E-Books

There’s been a lot of interesting stuff written in just the last few days, fortuitously (some of which was brought to my attention by Charlza in his comment to my last post). Simon Owens has a long article about the Tor free e-book program on his blog, bloggasm. He notes several authors’ impressions that book giveaways have helped sales, and quotes extensively from Tobias Buckell, a newer writer who seems to be doing very nicely. There are some provocative comments from readers, on both sides of the question.

Rob Sawyer responds on his own blog with a much more analytical approach to the question. Pointing out that there’s really no hard data for us to base judgments on, he does a nice job of extrapolating some likely ranges for increased sales (and earnings) for writers. In his view, the benefits are probably far more modest than suggested by anecdotal reports. A key point in his argument is that Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, who have reported such apparent good results, are not necessarily typical cases. Both of these writers have huge online presences, and probably got way more downloads than the average writer would. (Certainly they have far more active blogs and web sites than I do.)

So where does this leave me? I learned from reader Pascal that a fair number of my earlier novels are already up on Bit Torrent networks in pirated PDF editions. He got copies to me so that I could look at them, and I see that they range from barely readable hack jobs to thoroughly professional-looking work. I must say it was a shock to see how many novels by how many SF writers are floating around in pirated editions. I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, it’s clear copyright infringement, and to a significant degree badly done infringement. On the other hand, it’s free publicity.

One of my workshop students suggested, why not find the pirate scanners who did the good job and see if I can get them to scan in the first three Chaos books for me. Then I could put at the top of the PDFs:

“This electronic edition, and no other, has been distributed with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will download it, and no other.”

(If you don’t recognize the source, it’s from Tolkien’s note in the Ballantine Books edition of The Lord of the Rings, following the Ace pirated edition, many decades ago.)

So am I any closer to a decision on whether to post Sunborn for free when it’s published? Not really. But leaning now towards putting the first three up to introduce new readers to the series, then letting the book carry it from there.

But we’ll see.

“Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.” —E. B. White

Speaking of Free Books

I’ve been considering the possibility of making Sunborn available for free download, perhaps in installments leading up to the actual pub date (end of October). A number of writers, including Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, have offered their books for free download and discovered that it seemed to increase their audience and interest in the novels, and thus sales of their books. While there are no doubt some readers who will read only the free version and skip the hardcopy, it seems that many more decide they’d like to own the actual book once they’ve read the electronic version. At least, that’s what these writers have reported. Past experience is no guarantee of future performance, though, as the mutual funds tell us.

I’d be interested in knowing what you folks think. This is new territory for all of us in the fiction world, and I’m feeling my way in the dark just like everyone else.

(I’ve already used this quote, but it just seems to fit, so here’s an encore…)

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

BSG Novel—Free at Tor.com!

The e-book version, that is. This week only, you can download my novelization of Battlestar Galactica (the miniseries that began the new BSG) for free from Tor Books. And by the way, if you like e-books, Tor offers a weekly free book. If you sign up for their email newsletter, you’ll get a reminder notice each week when a new title becomes available. You have to act fast, though, because when a new one comes, the old one goes away. (Sort of like woot.com, but without the price and the funny descriptions.)

Speaking of e-books, here’s a reminder that many of my novels are available as e-books in various formats. Go to e-reads.com for a complete listing. And, of course, you can also order new, bound-paper codices (books) directly from me.

“The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” —John Steinbeck

Sunborn Galleys Done, and Other Updates

It’s been a busy month. I got my name landed on Mars, and I’ve put my characters deep into the Orion Nebula. In other words, I just finished correcting the galleys (page proofs to check the typesetting) for the hardcover edition of Sunborn. That’s pretty much the end of my work on the book. I’d promised my editor, Jim Frenkel, that I’d have them in the mail by end of day on Friday—and I got to the post office literally about thirty seconds before they were going to close the windows. Package sent, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I like this book, but I may have read it as many times as I need to, for a while.

To help decompress, last night I wrote a letter to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, both praising and protesting this month’s cover story, The Sky Is Falling, by Gregg Easterbrook, about the hazard to Earth from wayward asteroids and comets. Seriously, it would take just one good-sized rock from space to kack most of human civilization. So NASA’s gearing up to protect us, right? Ding. Nope. NASA’s head’s in the sand. So far, I’m with the author.

Where we part company is where he dismisses our planned return to the moon as a waste of money detracting from our ability to do other things in space, like defend ourselves from big rocks. In fact, I believe returning to the moon is the next step toward building a permanent infrastructure in space, which among other things will give us the ongoing capability to do such things as capture or divert asteroids before they can divert us (from our future).

If they don’t publish the letter (and the odds certainly are long), I’ll post it in its entirety later.

“Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.” —Flannery O’Connor

Phoenix and Me

The successful landing of Phoenix on the northern polar region of Mars was a sensational event (which live coverage by the Science Channel managed to make dull; how could they do that?), being the first rocket-powered soft landing on Mars since 1976, when the Vikings landed. You’ve all seen pictures from the Mars surface, no doubt–but you might not have seen this picture, the first time any craft has ever been photographed landing on another world:

If you go to the full image at Astronomy Picture of the Day, you’ll see the magnificent crater near which Phoenix landed.

Phoenix is not just a national and international triumph; it’s a personal one, as well. I was reminded by the Planetary Society that my family and I are personally represented on Mars by this craft: it carries a DVD that bears our names, along with those of 250,000 other people who signed up for the mission. It also bears a library of science and science fiction works about Mars, to be recovered and enjoyed by future explorers. Here’s a picture, taken by Phoenix itself, of the DVD on Mars.

Now that’s a good feeling, knowing that a part of me is up there on Mars right now.

Bread Loaf Conference

As I hoped and expected, the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf was a great time, and entirely too short. My daughter Julia attended the workshops led by another fiction writer, while I worked with a talented and extraordinarily open and enthusiastic group of fourteen high school students on their fiction writing. That was just the core of it; there were also readings (from the podium where Robert Frost used to hold forth—I did one myself), additional writing sessions open to all, conversations with writers of all stripes, good food and good company, and—wonder of wonders—sunshine on the mountain. I was sad to leave. But I’ll tell you this: there are some excellent writers coming up in the years ahead! Be warned. Be heartened.

The Sunborn galleys arrived for my inspection and correction just before the conference, and I didn’t have time to so much as glance at them over the weekend. Now I’m working on them, but I’m also getting ready to leave on another trip, this time to meet with another group that wants to pick the brains of SF writers.

I hope you’re all enjoying your spring.

“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” —Peter De Vries

Sunborn Available for Preorder

For years, readers have been sending me emails saying, “When is the next Chaos Chronicles book coming out?” or, “I’m not getting any younger—will there ever be another Chaos Chronicles book?” or even, “Thanks a lot for leaving me hanging, because it’s obvious there’s never going to be another book, you jerk.”

Readers of this blog have known for years that Sunborn, the new Chaos book, was coming—or at least it’s been my word against the doubters. (Sometimes, I’ve been among the doubters.) Well, you no longer have to take my word for it! It’s up on Amazon. And you can even preorder it. Now. Today. Go ahead, click the link! It won’t hurt.

I was surprised it was up this soon (the pub date is October of this year, from Tor Books). In fact, I didn’t even know it was up until a kind reader in Germany sent me a note telling me about it. I quickly discovered that they’d misspelled my first name on the dustjacket, at least as displayed on Amazon, but a note to my editor resulted in that being fixed pretty quickly. (I hope it stays fixed. I’m sure it will. Nothing can go wrongg.)

That’s the news from here. I might not get this written up before I go, so I’ll just mention that next week I’ll be heading up again to the Bread Loaf writing center near Middlebury, Vermont, to teach at the annual New England Young Writers Conference. If you are, or are the parent or teacher of, a young writer of high school age, you really should look into this for next year. It’s a terrific program. I’ll tell all about it, after I get back.

And did I mention? You can preorder Sunborn from Amazon.

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” —Red Smith

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