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Cory Doctorow recently spoke on The Coming War on General Computation, which I think will be one of the most important issues of the coming ten years: more important even than the impact of dwindling oil or water, because what’s at stake is corporate control over what we as citizens are able to do and not do, what we are able to make or not make, what we can invent or not invent.

Here is the full text of The Coming War on General Computation speech by Cory Doctorow, transcribed by Joshua Wise.

Here’s a small excerpt from near the end of the speech:

1576.3 And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we’ve spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.
1627.8 As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won’t be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car – a computer I put my body into – with my hearing aid – a computer I put inside my body – I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from audience] Thank you.
1669.4 Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer’s camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.
1705.0 Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

If you care about these issues, please donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

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Willamette Writers 
January 3rd, 2012 Meeting

Christina Katz
author of The Writer’s Workout: 366 Tips, Task & Techniques From Your Writing Career Coach
Five Flabby Habits to Lose & Five Healthy Habits to Keep
  • Pitched at the Willamette Writers Conference. Stood up in front of 50 people. The editor from writer’s digest was there. Gave her pitch. Now has three published books. Big advocate for WWCon.
  • There’s never been a better time to be a writer.
  • In the past, things were much more divided. There was something of a gap. As a self-published author, it was difficult and not fun to feel that gap. Conversely, to land the traditional publishing gigs, authors had to work overtime and keep working overtime to land those gigs.
  • Now, things have turned. Every author is a publisher to some extent. And every writer will have a range of publications from traditional publishing to self-published and in between.
  • The longer you work in a niche, the better you are going to get. The more you will know, the better you understand your readers, and the better the connections you will make. 
  • I would like to see more writers thinking about writing as a lifetime pursuit. Than you can build up traction, and successes start to pile up, even if they are small successes. People start to recognize your name.
  • The Writer’s Workout is about finding your momentum. Not anyone else’s. It’s not about imitating anyone else. It’s about finding your unique style, voice, and projects, and allowing yourself time to go for excellence.
  • Excellence takes time – it doesn’t happen overnight.
  • Five Flabby Habits to Lose
    • Is there were 7 deadly sins for writers, these would be them.
    • The talent to be your own publisher is everywhere. There’s copyeditors and proofreaders and cover designers.
    • Why wouldn’t we be publishers, when it’s wide open right now?
    • You can be self-published and traditionally published at the same time
  • #1: Negative Thinking
    • Like colored lenses that makes everything darker than it really is
    • When it interferes with your optimism, then it blocks you from taking any steps.
    • You can debate all day: but what about X? What about Y? But then you never do anything.
    • Maybe you can write a 50 page ebook and get it out there.
    • It might only make you $50/month. But if it makes $50/month every month for the rest of your life, then you can write more ebooks.
  • #2: Perfectionism
    • If you’re only going to do it if you know it will be perfect, and if it isn’t going to be perfect, then you aren’t going to do it – then you’ve killed it before you started.
    • Excellence is not perfection.
    • Excellence allows mistakes. It’s a process. It’s a first draft followed by a second draft followed by writing feedback followed by more work and more research.
    • Excellence invites mistakes and messiness as part of a process.
    • Perfection does not allow mistakes as part of the process.
    • “I’m going to write a crummy ebook until it’s not crummy anymore.”
    • Perfectionism doesn’t allow you to be present in the process because it’s too focused on the outcome. 
  • #3: Ego
    • When our self-esteem isn’t the highest; maybe because we have high self-esteem elsewhere in our life, and we don’t yet have it in writing. 
    • We want to hear “That’s an amazing sentence.”
    • We want to hear people say good things about it.
    • Those first compliments give you a contact high.
    • But as you go along, you eventually realize that it isn’t someone giving you back superlatives, but someone really getting what you wrote… Giving back the intention behind the work.
    • It’s everything to be able to connect with your audience. 
  • #4: Victimization
    • What’s so great about these times is that we’re leaving the “I’m a victim because no publisher wants me”. 
    • Now everyone makes their own success.
    • This is really how it has always been: publishers have always make their own success, and self-published authors have made their own success. 
    • All authors have always championed their own cause, their own career.
    • Am I a victim or am I the champion of my own career?
  • #5: Envy
    • It’s easy to fall into the belief that someone else has everything locked up. No one person can own an entire genre of writing.
    • Every single writer, even very successful writers, are simply hard working people who are working to build success every day. 
    • You build your own success.
    • Envy is representative of your own inability to execute.
  • #6: Distraction
    • Distraction is a big reason she wrote The Writer’s Workout.
    • You can now spend all day online.
    • Instead of going out there, you want to go inside yourself.
    • If you are going inside yourself, and writing every day, and saying the things you really want to say, then excellence will come, and you will not get distracted. In fact, you’ll be annoyed if you have to go online because you’d rather be writing.
    • So the solution is to go deeper inside yourself.
    • Research has shown that spending more time on the Internet makes your thinking shallower. If you want to get deep thoughts, big things, then you have to go deeper inside yourself
  • #7: Starving Artist
    • The focus on the lack: that writing is a path to poverty. 
    • That everything else is the path to money.
    • This will block you from investing in writing.
    • It’s like hearing your grandmother say “you’re doing what with your time?”
    • The focus must be on inner wealth.
    • That we have things of value inside of us.
    • That we write to share that value.
    • Then people pay us to get that value.
    • You can’t have external wealth unless you have internal wealth.
    • Unless you believe you have some of value to offer, then how will you make money?
    • It takes a lot of effort to keep my daughter’s creative spirit alive. Because there is a lot of pressure for kid’s to grow up. We work hard to keep her imagination games alive, to keep her creating.
    • We have to do that for ourselves: we have to honor our creative spirits and nurture them. 
  • There has never been a better time to be a writer
    • The stigma of self-publishing is finally gone. If not now, then certainly by the end of the year.
  • Discussion (This was both people from the audience speaking as well as Christina Katz)
    • Learn what you can do yourself and what you can’t. I can do an ebook cover, I can’t do a print cover.
    • Know your audience. 
    • When writing fiction, your audience is more nebulous. The best sales technique for fiction is to publish more fiction. Because when people buy one thing you’ve written, then they’ll buy more.
    • The more books an author has, the more sales.
    • When/how much do you write?
      • It’s cyclical.
      • I love the period from 4am to 8am. Everything is quiet. Even the pets aren’t moving.
      • I work full-time on my writing, and it’s more than full-time when I’m writing a book. 

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A few days ago, Jason Glaspey, a prominent member of Portland’s tech and startup community, and the man behind PaleoPlan,  approached me and said he would be doing a review of Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears on Silicon Florist.

Avogadro Corp is my first novel. It’s a techno-thriller about the accidental creation of an artificial intelligence at the world’s largest Internet company and the subsequent race to contain it, as it starts to manipulate people, transfer funds, and arm itself.

It’s set almost entirely in Portland, Oregon. Readers have enjoyed the references to Portland’s coffee scene, imaging a 10,000 employee tech company in downtown Portland, and the realistic portrayal of AI emergence. Some early feedback includes:

  • “jaw-dropping tale about how something as innocuous as email can subvert an entire organization”
  • “a terrific, and stunningly believable, account of how the first sentient artificial intelligence might accidentally arise”
  • “HAL, the self aware CPU from 2001 a Space Odyssey is a kitten compared to ELOPe”
  • “a startling, feasible examination of the emergence of artificial intelligence”

It’s available in paperback, for the kindle, and inepub format for a variety of other e-readers. And so far it’s doing great – averaging 5 star reviews on Amazon.

Jason knew I had been offering a Kindle Fire and some Amazon gift certificates in exchange for help promoting Avogadro Corp. He asked if I would keep it running a little longer until his review came out. That didn’t seem quite fair to people who had already done so much to help get the word out.

So instead I’m going to give away a second Kindle Fire.

Here’s the deal:

  1. Spread the word in the next week! Send people to this blog post or the Avogadro Corp page on Amazon. Here are some ideas: Facebook “like”, Facebook sharing, retweets, Twitter, e-mail, e-mail signature, blog posts, or a review if you’ve already read it. You can sing about it from street corners too, but this may get you funny looks. (Please stick to appropriate sharing to audiences who will appreciate learning about a good book. I don’t want to encourage spammy behavior.)
  2. By 9am PST on Dec. 31 (ya know, the last day of the year), leave a comment on this blog post telling me what you did. If possible, quantify the impact (clicks, page views, etc.).

I’ll consider the first 20 submissions, if I get that many, and from the 3 that I think did the best job (subjective, I know), I’ll pick one to receive the Kindle Fire. The 2 runner ups will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Void where prohibited, robots and artificial intelligences under 21 not allowed, no prize awarded if the AI apocalypse occurs before the contest ends, etc., etc. Recipients will be announced within a few days after the 31st. (If you don’t want the Kindle Fire, you can donate it to a school or non-profit.)

Most of all, I hope you enjoy Avogadro Corp.

Thanks,
Will

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For those of you that haven’t heard, after a two year journey, my novel Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears is published!

Avogadro Corp is a techno-thriller about the accidental creation of an artificial intelligence at the world’s largest Internet company, and the subsequent race to contain it, as it starts to manipulate people, transfer funds, and arm itself.

It’s available in paperback, for the kindle, and in epub format for a variety of other e-readers. 

If you’ve already bought a copy – THANK YOU! It means so much to me. 

If not, I hope you’ll buy a copy and enjoy it, or consider giving it as a gift to someone who loves techno-thrillers or science fiction.

The Next Step

Writing Avogadro Corp was incredibly fun, and the path to publication was a great learning experience. But now that it’s published, the next challenge I face is to help it rise above the noise of thousands of other books. 

Here’s just a few of the things that help a book get noticed: sharing it on Facebook or twitter, buying it or giving it as a gift, providing a review on Amazon, blog posts that link to it, emails to friends about it.

Anything you can do to help support my book would be tremendous!

Bonus: A Free Kindle Fire

If you don’t yet have a Kindle Fire and would like one for free, I’m giving one away. This is a thank you for all the feedback and help I received over the last six months. (As usual, I was inspired by Tim Ferriss to do this, and in fact won the Kindle Fire from Tim in his own book promotion contest.)
Here’s the deal:
  1. Spread the word in the next 7 days! Send people to this blog post or the Avogadro Corp page on Amazon. Here are some ideas: Facebook “like”, Facebook sharing, retweets, Twitter, e-mail, e-mail signature, blog posts, or a review if you’ve already read it. You can sing about it from street corners too, but this may get you funny looks.
  2. By 9am PST on Dec. 18 (next Sunday), leave a comment on this blog post telling me what you did. If possible, quantify the impact (clicks, page views, etc.).
I’ll consider the first 50 submissions, if I get that many, and from the 5 that I think did the best job (subjective, I know), I’ll pick one to receive the Kindle Fire. The 4 runner ups will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. Void where prohibited, robots and artificial intelligences under 21 not allowed, no prize awarded if the AI apocalypse occurs before the contest ends, etc., etc. Winners will be announced next week.

Again, even if you don’t want the Kindle Fire, anything you can do to help promote Avogadro Corp is still awesome!

Resources

If you take this on, here’s a few links that might help:
Happy holidays!

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By now you must know I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss. His lifestyle design book The 4-Hour Workweek and his fat loss, muscle building health book the 4-Hour Body were both ground-breaking, best-selling books.

His third book is called the 4-Hour Chef. And it’s like no cookbook you’ve ever read. Using cooking as an example, he actually teaching the skills and tools to learn and become an expert at anything. It’s up for pre-order now on Amazon at a greatly reduced price. I’ve already ordered my copy. 🙂

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The Singularity Institute has posted a comprehensive list of all Singularity Summit talks with videos of each talk. A few that I’m particularly interested in:

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I attended OryCon 33, a regional science fiction / fantasy con in Portland, Oregon. This is my second time attending OryCon. As a writer, it’s a great opportunity to get questions answered about professional writing and the publishing industry, learn writing craft, and to meet authors, editors, and fans.

Like most conferences I go to, I take a lot of notes. Here’s what I took during OryCon. The links take you to a full post on my line by line notes from the panel.

  • Author Influences: Who most influenced the panelists? Answers ranged from Ray Bradbury to Kelly Link. I’ve already bought a dozen books based on what I heard here. 
  • Self-Publishing: The New Vanity Press? This controversial sounding panel actually turned into a great discussion about how an author can be professionally successful self-publishing. Annie Bellet is great, and even surprised the other panelists with the success she’s had, and the counter-intuitive discoveries (such as finding that author platform had no impact on sales).
  • Getting Your First Professional Sale: Tips, tricks, and personal experiences from five published panelists including E.E. Knight and Mary Robinette Kowal. 
  • How To Promote Yourself as a Writer Without Being Obnoxious: This panel discussion promoting the writer vs. the book, how to use social media, and when to push back against the publisher. 
  • Self-Publish Write Note: Hands on panel by Robert Plamondon on the mechanics of self-publishing, including print books.
  • Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: This panel included Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson. The discussion including our ethical responsibility towards A.I. (is it OK to kill them?), our responsibility to ensure that A.I. behave ethically (how do we keep them from killing us?), lovebots, and robot nursing aides.
  • Using Social Media to Get Published: The use of social media, author platform, and self publishing to help achieve getting traditionally published.
  • Writing Formidable Women: By the end of this panel I learned how to spell formidable. Great discussion about what makes women formidable. Victoria Blake (editor, Underland Press) said “wanting to do something other than please someone else.” Also discussed how a formidable woman is inherently more complex than a formidable man because of social, physical limitations. There’s a broader palette of tools for a woman to be formidable.
  • Structure of Writing: A writing craft discussion of structure as a tool.
  • Playing God: Apocalyptic Storytelling: Another panel where I learned how to spell a word through repetition. 
  • Gender and Writing: Discussion about male and female characters, different styles of problem-solving, and how the Buffy effect (kick-ass female characters) causes a lack of other, more feminine stylings of addressing conflict.
  • Internal and External Change in Writing: The important and effect of internal character change in additional to external (action) change. It’s not a story unless a character learns something or changes in some way.
  • Use of Description in Writing: self-description, adverbs, the view paragraph – what works and what doesn’t. 
  • Ken Scholes Evolution of a Writing Career: Published author Ken Scholes gave an overview of his twenty year career in writing, and how what appears to be sudden success is actually the outcome of many years of practice and networking. Then he addressed audience questions about writing and publishing.  

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A touch of Farmer, a pinch of LeGuin
OryCon 33
My apologies for any misspellings or butcherings of names.
  • Ann Wilkes: Writes science fiction and fantasy, mostly short stories, one novel, compared to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys. 
  • Amy Thomson: Author of Virtual Girl
  • Andrew Fuller: Short fiction, scifi, fantasy, and horror. Also edit online magazine 3lodedeye.
  • Rat Vukcevich: Last novel is Boarding Instructions. Writes around the edge of scifi and fantasy. 
  • Claude Lalumière: writer, editor. 
  • Influences?
  • Claude: As bookseller back in the 90s, I was amazed by certain authors. “How did they do that?” So I would read and reread these authors to figure out what they did. Primarily their short fiction. J.G. Ballard. Bob Silverberg. R.A. Lafferty. Also Unquenchable Fire
  • Ray: My influences reflect my discovery of reading. Back in the 50s and 60s. Boy engineer and Boy scientists. Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series. Ray Bradbury — he opens your eyes to what can be done with language. J.G. Ballard – his structure and vision. Precise and elegant. He can take big concepts like in Crash, and little things like Concrete Island. What you can do in a novel – I cannot recommend it too highly.
    • in school, in the 60s, protesting the war. kurt vonnegut turned out to be a major influence. Slaughterhouse Five.
    • R.A. Lafferty. 
    • Daemon Knight’s …
    • Typed in an entire manuscript, just to understand what the author was doing. 
  • Ann Wilkes:
    • when I was a kid, I was watching TV when you guys were reading.
    • Douglas Adams. In the later books, the humor began to run thin. To keep doing the same tongue in cheek in the same voice without changing, it was too much.
    • David Brin: 
      • Practice Effect by David Brin: “How the hell did he do that?” He takes physics and turns it on its head. You take materials and the more you use them, the better they get. [This was one of my favorites too – Will]
      • Uplift Wars
    • Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game. The scope of the cultures
    • Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
    • The Void trilogy by Peter Hamilton. 
  • Andrew Fuller
    • as a kid, it was steven king, lovecraft.
    • I have to thank a teacher who said “stop reading steven king and just read other stuff”
    • Ray Bradbury.
      • the nostalgia, the atmosphere.
    • Collection of short stories called Blow Up. The House Takeover. This family has to keep moving from room to room because there’s something taking over the house. 
    • Forever War
    • Mind Bridge
    • Octavia Butler
    • Wild Seed
    • short fiction by Ursula LeGuin
    • hardboiled: Hammett, Chandler.
  • Amy Thomson
    • I was like a lit match and gasoline: I took off with reading.
    • I read the entire Time Life science series because I could only get six books a day from the library.
    • Hans Christian Andersen. 
    • I would get $10/month to buy books from my mother. Back in 1971, 72, 73 that was a lot of f…ing money.
    • Ray Bradbury
      • where I discover prose style
    • Dunseney
    • Everything in the Ballinetine Fantasy series
    • Anne McCaffrey
    • Wilhelm and Sturgeon.
    • Read ton of Darkover
    • Every female superhero comic
    • After college, Gene Wolfe, Delany, Joanna Rush
    • Got  job as a Locus reader for short fiction. Jeff Reinman, …
    • Octavia Butler
    • Travel books: My Journey to Lhasa
  • Who most influenced us that doesn’t write genre
    • Andrew: Mystery and hardboiled writers.
      • The History of Salt book. Kurlandsky. Cod and salt drive the British Navy and allowed them to colonize the world.
    • Ann Wilkes
      • Madeline Lingal
      • Eugenia Price: Atmosphere. Wrote a book set in islands of south carolina.
      • Spy novels: great for learning pacing. Jack Higgins. Leon Yuris – reluctant spy. 
    • Ray Vukcevich
      • William Burroughs: Junkie and Queer. Naked Lunch. Steamrolls over you with its honesty.
      • Italian: Dino Buzzati – The Falling Girl
        • Sudden Fiction collection. 
      • Ron Carlson
        • Bigfoot stole my wife
        • Can nail the emotional content right into the structure in a fascinating way
      • Truman Capote: his short fiction
    • Claude:
      • Breakfast at Tiffany’s
      • Jack Kerby – unbridled creativity. more ideas per page.
      • Major films of David Lynch – master of storytelling. What to reveal and not to reveal to properly tell a story. Blue Velvet. Mullholland Drive. 
      • LeGuin: 
        • Always Coming Home. Reverse archeology. She digs for a society that doesn’t exist yet.
          • A sense of yearning that is so powerful.
        • story of a fictional european country. very subtle stories. Learn how to leave at the right moment. Don’t overstay your welcome.
  • Influence writers active right now:

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    Self-Publishing: The New Vanity Press?
    Annie Bellet, Jess Hartley, John C. Bunnell
    OryCon 33
    • Jess: 
      • 10 years as a freelance writer, editor, and developer in RPG industry
      • put out several products herself
    • John:
      • Reviewing and writing scifi/fantasy since 1984
      • Book review columns for Dragon magazine, amazing stories, Hugo nominated short fiction team, Publisher’s Weekly. Short fiction published in traditional anthologies and magazine. Two short ebooks with traditional publisher. 
      • Networked with a number of people going with self-publishing
    • Annie
      • Bunch of short stories published traditionally.
      • A lot of experimenting with self-publishing in the last year. One novel up, and four short stories.
      • Toes in both waters to see where I can make money.
    • Everyone has to pay the rent.
    • types of publishing
      • corporate publishing / traditional publishing: a company dedicated to putting out books.
      • indie publishing: a person or couple of people. 
    • John: refers to uncio press as a traditional publisher because its a traditional contract arrangement: he has a contract, they pay him, they do the production.
    • Annie:
      • The way I see it, there is my job as a writer. That’s the same job it has always been. To write good stories that people want to read.
      • Then there is my job as a publisher: to get covers designed, to get books out, to get the word out. And that’s the same job as any publisher.
    • Jess: Panel description is a trap. Vanity press has traditionally been defined as a book that isn’t good enough. A subquality book that is being put out only because the author is willing to push it through. 
    • John: 
      • Vanity press in the traditional world is a gloried printing service, because they never had distribution, so you couldn’t get sales.
      • Print self publishing had been grouped with vanity press because until recently most self-publishers had the same problem that vanity press had: they couldn’t get distribution. Now that’s change, and distribution is available. It’s easier to set yourself to get nominally distributed.
      • With ebooks, distribution (getting on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble) is easier, but that’s only half the battle, because you still have to get noticed.
    • John: The difference is partly in the goal.
      • If your goal is to get a bunch of books on your doorstep, that’s one thing.
      • If your goal is to make money, that’s another thing.
    • Annie: 
      • Publish America’s model is to sell books to the author. 
      • Whereas self-publishing is to sell books to the reader.
    • Jess: There is a difference in the vetting process between traditional publishing and vanity publishing.
    • John: Now there are lots of services springing up to help authors with electronic publishing, and their goal may or may not be to help get a quality product out.
    • Jess: You’re now the project manager for your book, even if you aren’t doing the work to self-publish yourself.
    • John: 
      • If you are a successfully published author, the economics of self-publishing stuff that is out of print can be very good.
      • If you are a new author, it can be much more challenging.
    • Annie:
      • Not that challenging.
      • My Annie Bellet name has been traditionally published. But my other pen names, my mystery and thriller stuff, makes 10 times as much money, even though that name has no traditional publishing clout at all.
    • There’s no “made it” day in this industry. You get an acceptance one day, and a rejection the next.
    • John: You are earning rent paying money off a single novel for which you have built no online presence. 
      • Annie: Yes.
      • Jess: But not just by throwing something up there. You hired a professional editor, you hired a cover designer.
      • Annie: Yes.
    • John: Where are these things selling?
      • Annie: Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Using Createspace. Annie Blum books in Multnomah Village. You can buy through Barnes and Noble and special order it.
        • Kindle by far sells the best. Amazon is a huge data machine designed to sell shit. It has taken time…about a year.
    • Q: What inspired you to take this track?
      • Annie: 
        • I’m poor. 
        • It’s helpful to have a backlist. I have to write a lot of books really fast. If you have twenty novels sitting on the shelf you can put all that out.
    • To get the “also boughts” to show up, it doesn’t start to happen until I get 25-30 sales.
    • Chunks of the market:
      • 43% – romance
      • big – mystery
      • 7% – science fiction 
      • 6% – literary fiction 
    • Q: Are authors perpetuating the notion of self-publishing as a vanity movement?
      • Readers don’t care who is publishing what, they don’t even notice.
      • Writers are all competing with each other, it is a very small world.
    • If you want to make money in this industry, you have to go where the money is.
    • Q: How much does the price of ebooks affect things? My dad doesn’t buy anything expensive, so he probably isn’t buying anything by traditional writers.
      • Annie: I don’t think 99 cents is a good price for anything but a short story. I price my ebooks at $5.99, my print books at $12-14. Just like traditionally published books.
        • You’re selling yourself short if you are not pricing it well.
      • Jess: there’s valid philosophies behind why to do loss leaders and for pricing compared to other quality work, but it is all so new, and the aggregate data is not available. it’s all still so new.
    • John: The revenue share I get from an ebook distributed from Amazon is different that what I get for something purchased direct from the publisher. 
      • Jess: The closer you get to the source, the more financial support the creator is getting.
    • Annie: 
      • The thing that seduced me is that 70% royalty rate – you don’t have to sell very many copies to make money.
      • I also alternate between making the book free and then switching to paid.
      • More works is more money: If you have 15 books put up, then…
        • it’s 15x more times to be discovered
        • it’s crossover revenue from one book to the next
    • Annie: I am still sending work to markets. I would still like money from other people.
    • Annie: Work on the work first. Nobody is going to buy a crappy book. Focus first on creation, not on marketing. More quality work out is itself marketing.
    • If you self publish a short story, no publisher will be interested in it, because they only want first rights.
    • But if you self publish a novel, there can be a chance that a publisher might be interested in it.
    • The scale is entirely different. If you self-publish, and sell 6,000 copies a year at $4/book, that’s great. But for a publisher, that’s not good enough to renew an author’s contract.
    • Annie:
      • For each book, I calculate a breakeven point:
        • I pay myself $25 an hour as a writer.
        • I pay a cover designer and an editor.
        • So I know how many copies I need to sell.
        • At a hundred copies, I’ve paid for the cover designer and editor.
      • For my thriller, I made it free for 9 days, got 18,000 sales.
    • If you select “Premium Distribution” with Createspace, people can buy your book on Barnes and Noble site or special order in a store.

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    Getting Your First Professional Sale
    Annie Bellet, (Eric) E.E. Knight, Edward Morris, Jess Hartley, Mary Robinette Kowal
    OryCon 33
    • Annie Bellet: Got first professional sale on August 2010, sold 9 stories so far. Short fiction to magazines.
    • E.E. Knight: novels, 15 or so. First professional sale of fiction was 1991. First time I cashed a check was for non-fiction for bridal magazine. To this day, that was the best money I made per word.
    • Edward Morris: Sold 85 short stories globally, six books in a small press. First professional sale was in 2000 to Interzone. A lucky break: on duotrope.com trying to figure out where to sell my fiction.
    • Jess Hartley: writing for RPG industry for the last 10 years. First sale was a novel for a RPG tie-in.
    • Mary Robinette Kowal: First professional sale to New Horizon in 2006. Just won the Hugo for short story. About 65 short stories published.
    • Bloody Pitfalls
      • Mary: I went to research cover letters. Completely different for non-fiction than for short stories. Made sure you have the right one. 
      • Short stories: cover letter is very minimal.
      • Novels: Just enough to know that it is the type of material they publish.
    • A publishing house that says “We will not take unsolicited manuscripts” will take an unsolicited query letter. It’s exactly the same as a cover letter, with a “May I send you a manuscript?”
      • Lots of times you may get a positive response.
    • Q: I’m working on something that may best be a graphic novel.
      • Morris: Look for graphic novel scripts. Frank Miller’s batman scripts are available out there. That’s the format you want to submit.
    • Q: How long should my cover letter be?
      • Only a single page.
      • Tell them what it is about, not what happens.
      • Think about it as the back cover copy on a book.
    • Eric: Networking is another path to an editor. I know a number of authors who went to World Fantasy and hooked up with editors in the bar, and they chat, and they get invited to send a manuscript to them. 
      • They want to know you’re not crazy. They want to know they could buy 12 manuscripts from you, not just one.
      • Jim Butcher was having trouble selling the Dresdon Files, and met an editor at the bar at World Fantasy, and got the editor to pick it up off the slush pile and read it.
    • Mary: The traditional wisdom is to do short stories and to go to conventions. But Jim Hine did a survey and found that there is no commonality: as many people got their first sale that way as that didn’t.
      • Jess: Did it the way you are most comfortable. If you are an extrovert, so to 
      • Mary: I teach a class called Schmoozing 101. 
        • Have your elevator pitch ready. But DO NOT be the first person to bring up business. Just have a conversation. At some point they will ask what you are working on. Then it’s time for your pitch.
        • Have an exit strategy. 
    • Q: How long to wait before OK to submit elsewhere?
      • Mary: I knew the editor, had just won the Campbell, and had an agent, and it still took a year to hear back on a novel.
      • If it’s been more than their standard period of time, send a query letter. Just three lines: I sent this manuscript. I just want to make sure you have received it. Thank you.
      • You can send queries to lots of people. It’s only when they have the manuscript that you have to wait.
    • Duotrope.com 
    • Ralan.com
    • Submitting to the black hole: http://critters.org/blackholes/index.ht
    • Q: How long before you give up on a short story:
      • Annie: never
      • Mary: never, but…
      • Edward: five years, but then new markets are always opening up
    • Mary: But before you sell anything, you have to be writing something good. 
      • Mary: I just critiqued someone who didn’t know what a contraction was.
    • Q: Are there editors more open to new writers?
      • Mary: All of them. They want to find the next big thing.
      • Knight: You shouldn’t be afraid just because you don’t have publishing credits. Just go to the top.
    • For short fiction sales, if you can write short stories that are around 4,000 words, you are more likely to make a sale. Editors have a fixed word count, and they cannot go over this count. They are more likely to take a chance on a new writer if it is short. Too much shorter than 4,000 words, and it gets harder to craft a enriching story. As soon as you start getting longer, you are taking up words from other stories.
    • Q: How do you keep track of where you’ve submitted?
      • Mary: Duotrope.com
      • Annie: Excel file. The most stories I had out at one time was 37.
      • It’s really important to keep good records of where stuff is out. 
      • WritersPlanner is another good one, just for tracking submissions.
      • It’s important to track not just who has accepted, but who has paid you.
        • If you have 20 stories out, it’s hard to keep track of who has paid.
    • Shop for publishers and agents at the same time.
    • A bad agent is worse than no agent. There is no criteria you have to pass to call yourself a literary agent. There’s no oversight.
      • Take the decision of selecting an agent as seriously as you would getting married.
      • Consider not just the single agent but the agencies: if it is a single agent, and they drop dead…
    • Q: Markets going to electronic submissions vs. paper. How does that affect things?
      • Mary: the only difference is that it’s faster to submit things, so now they get a lot more crap. But for you, as a writer, it’s makes no difference in the process.
    • Q: Are the electronic markets as effective as the paper ones?
      • Mary: More so now, because the electronic markets do not have a shelf life. if I publish in a paper market, it’s but now, but it’s gone in a few months. If it is online, I can always point people to it.