Reading the Entrails

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon.

It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. So I’d get into some pretty silly calculations involving Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, prices, shipping, and exchange rates.

Then I bought a Kindle. The relationship deepened. I stopped buying printed books from Amazon. In fact, I stopped buying printed books altogether. Now I only get ebooks from the Kindle Store. Unless they’re cheaper elsewhere, of course – which they easily can be, because Amazon charges a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’ on every book bought by people who have the temerity to live outside the USA. (Don’t ask me why. Something to do with Amazon wanting all the money in the world, I think.) This means there is no such thing as a free book on Amazon. All Amazon books start at US$2. So I tend to look around. If I can get a PDF of the book somewhere else and cheaper, or a Mobipocket version, I will. As for free books, on sites like Project Gutenberg, they’re rather better value than the US$2 Amazon equivalents. (What’s worse than the ‘foreigner tax’, I’ve discovered that many Kindle editions of English classics have been ‘Americanized’. God knows why but someone has gone to the trouble of changing the spelling in old Wilkie Collins and Jane Austen novels! Are American readers really that dumb that they need a ‘translation’ from English spelling before they can read a classic English novel?)

When my novel, TimeSplash, went on sale in the Kindle Store, my relationship with Amazon plumbed new depths. At first my biggest concern was with the huge slice of the sale price Amazon charges for the privilege of selling my book. They take a 65% cut of what you pay! Then, not only do they arbitrarily discount it from US$5.50 – the publisher’s sale price – to US$4.40, they also add a US$2 ‘foreigner tax’, making it US$6.40 for foreign buyers, making the book more expensive for the 95% of us who do not live in the USA. (And you only get a DRMed, .PRC file for that – which is why I recommend to anybody wanting to buy my book, for the Kindle or any other eReader, that they buy it from the publisher’s own bookstore. Even for American buyers, I think the bundle of non-DRM formats you get from the publisher is a far more attractive deal than the slightly lower Kindle Store price.)

But that’s not the worst of it. I’ve started noticing all the twiddly bits on te book page in the Kindle Store. Things like the star rating and the tags. As a buyer of the book, you get to rate it and to tag it (either just ticking tags you agree with, or adding your own). It turns out the ratings and, especially the tags are crucial for sales. They determine whether the book turns up in Amazon searches (if it’s not tagged, it probably doesn’t show) and how high up the results list it appears. (So, for God’s sake, if you love me and you bought TimeSplash, rate it and tag it, or you might be my last customer on this site!) Then there’s the customer review. I don’t know how many people have bought the book so far – from the kind things people are saying on Twitter, there are a few of you – but, so far, only one person has written a review. Just one!

But the most insidious and terrible piece of data on the Kindle Store page for TimeSplash is the Kindle Store ranking. It’s something to do with how many books are being sold, but I don’t know what. It’s never the same from one minute to the next and it fluctuates wildly – and I mean wildly, within a range of 70,000 so far. And it means nothing, or, perhaps it means everything! Since it is a rank, and I know Amazon has about 400,000 books in the Kindle Store, it’s easy to see that, if the book is ranked better than 80,000, it is in the top 20% of sales. If it is ranked 20,000 or less, it’s in the top 5% of sales. But what does that mean? Does Amazon sell a thousand ebooks books a day, or a dozen? Who knows? And since 90% of the “best-sellers” in the Kindle Store are free books anyway, what on Earth does that do to the sales distribution? If they’re giving away books by the shovelful (in the US presumably, since they’re not free anywhere else) at one end of the ‘sales’ scale, are there 200,000 titles at the other end that are not selling at all?

I’ve had to stop looking at my book page on Amazon because this kind of thing is driving me nuts. I only make about 60¢ on an Amazon sale anyway so it’s hardly worth worrying about. I’d need to sell tens of thousands before I saw any serious money, and that’s not going to happen. So why torture myself?

Well, because, regardless of the money, I’d like to see people buying the book – and reading it!

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great reading device. I love the e-ink screen (especially because it means I can read in the garden) I love the physical size, weight, and ergonomics, the battery life (it goes for weeks!)  the 3G wireless connection, and the dead easy Amazon shopping experience.

With the iPad, 3G is an ‘optional’ extra, so the base model starts at $629 (2.5 times the Kindle price!) plus, you have to pay a monthly fee for it, which (currently, in the US) starts at $15/mo – so another $180 per year (about 3/4 of a new Kindle each year!) That the Kindle bundles the price of a 3G ISP connection into the price of its books is, in my view, one of the best things about it. Say you buy 20 books a year from the Kindle Store or on the iPad’s new iBook store. The Kindle’s books will cost you just the cover price. The iPad books will cost you the cover rice plus a twentieth of $180 (i.e. $9 !!) each. For identical $10 books, that means you’re paying $10 on the Kindle and $19 on the iPad! Where is the sense in that?

The iPad is very pretty, it has colour and a touch screen and so on, but try taking it outside to read a book during your lunch break and you’ll soon see the benefits of e-ink, and the Kindle’s small size and light weight. What’s more, because the Kindle is designed for ebook reading, you can easily hold it in one hand and turn the page with the same hand – the buttons are just where they should be – so you can eat a sandwich with the other hand. Try doing that with an iPad.

You may argue that it’s not a fair comparison, the Kindle is a dedicated ebook reader, the iPad is, essentially, a PDA on which you can also read books. I say, so what? I don’t want a PDA. (And, if I did, I’d buy one with a proper, non-modal operating system, not a souped-up iPhone OS.) I’ve already got a smartphone that does useful things that the iPad doesn’t (like taking pictures and making phone calls) along with useful things that the iPad does, like displaying maps, managing a diary, and so on. If I had an iPad, I would still need a phone (with a camera). I would also still need a good ebook reader – because a bulky, LCD-screened, expensive, heavy iPad just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve got to say, Apple, I feel pretty disappointed.

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

I suppose the title sums up my overall reaction to my new Kindle ebook reader but there are all kinds of details of the experience that I should probably add.

I was reluctant to get a Kindle. It’s not the best e-book reader in the world and e-ink is not my favourite screen technology. The ‘international’ version (why don’t they just say ‘the one for foreigners’?) doesn’t have a proper charger (just USB – which is SLOW) has no SD card slot, and, even at the current exchange rate, I still think it’s overpriced.  However, it is the best – certainly the best value – that is currently available in Australia, I really, really wanted an ereader, and it’s wireless connectivity trumps most other technical features.

When I took it out of the box, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The screen was smaller than I had expected and the device weighed more. The e-ink page is not as high contrast as I remembered (much less than the LCD screen I’m typing into at the moment) and the slow refresh rate makes the user interface feel slow and clunky. When I uploaded a few MobiPocket files from my PC (a piece of cake, by the way) and started to read, I found the slow page turning and the flickering through black as the page turns a bit of a worry. (Please note that most of these drawbacks would be common to all e-ink ebook readers.)

Then I started to read. Within a couple of minutes the page turning and the rest didn’t bother me at all. I got used to it and the whole device just melted into the background. In fact, now that I’ve spent a few hours using the Kindle, I found going back to a real book quite a surprise. Have they always been so big and heavy and cumbersome as that? How did I cope with such a ridiculously cumbersome technology for all those years?

Someone put a lot of thought into the Kindle hardware. The ergonomics of the physical device are excellent. The controls are just where they need to be. Most things do just what you’d expect them to without having to check the manual. It’s easy to hold, well balanced and feels natural to operate. The only part of the machine I don’t like is the on/off switch at the top. It’s hard to find (when you’re holding the machine in a reading position) and fiddly to use. But then, you don’t use it all that often.

The software user interface design isn’t quite so good, but it’s acceptable. The menus are OK, screen layouts for books and so on are adequate. The book cover images are too small to make much sense of and being black and white and fairly low resolution doesn’t help. But the designers made some good choices about menu contents and about defaults. The first time I went back to a magazine I had been reading and found that it opened just where I had left off, I wanted to shake the designer’s hand. My (long-sighted) wife particularly likes the fact you can easily switch to a larger font size.

Registration was easy (essentially there is none – unless you received the Kindle as a gift) and the shopping experience really shows the years of bookselling expertise that Amazon brings to bear.

So far I have a handful of sci-fi magazines on the device, and a bundle of 50-odd books by Wilkie Collins that I bought from Amazon for about $7. (Yes, I know they’d have been free from Project Gutenberg but, for a few dollars, the convenience of having 50-odd books delivered direct to the reader is irresistable.) I’ve yet to see how the Kindle handles collections of hundreds of books and other documents. The way it seems at the moment (books easy and cheap to acquire, reading simple and pleasurable) I can only see one reason I would ever buy another print book: availability.

The Kindle Booksstore has about 300,000 titles but it is nowhere near enough. The first three books I looked for using the device (‘Anathem’ by Neal Stephenson, ‘Dead America’ by Luke Keioskie, and ‘Old Man’s War’ by John Scalzi) were not there. Stephenson and Scazi would definitely have made sales if they had been. (I’ve already got ‘Dead America’.) Fortunately, there are plenty pf other ebook shops and ebook editions of everything will be the norm soon enough.

I’m pretty sure my Kindle (for foreigners) will be thoroughly outdated in a couple of years’ time (hell, it’s starting to slide even now) but between now and then, I expect it to be my constant companion. People who don’t think electronic publishing is the future, probably haven’t tried using an ebook reader yet. I’ve only had mine 24 hours and the advantages of presenting books electronically over presenting them on paper seem overwhelming. Yes, the technology is not yet perfect, but it is already good enough that I don’t want to go back to the old days (yesterday morning) before my ereader arrived.

Life is short. If you only read 20 or 30 novels a year, as I do, you’ve only got time to read about 1500 of them between being old enough to start and being too gaga to remember where the library is. Maybe 2,000 if you start young and keep a close watch on your marbles.

Of the novels I’ve read so far, the great majority were so-so, a few dozen were unelievably awful, and maybe as many as a hundred were really, really good. I don’t suppose novelists are getting any better with time, so I guess the chances of any new novel I pick up being really, really good are what they always were – rather less than 1 in ten.

For me, most of my reading years are behind me and I would very much like the ones still left to be full of excellent novels, nothing so-so, and certainly no more dross. To achieve this, I believe I have three main strategies.

1. Hook into a review service that delivers great books I know I will like. This is a good idea in theory but, in practice, I have never found one. Perhaps my taste is peculiar, but even in the wide world of the Web, where all tastes are catered for, I can’t seem to find anyone who recommends the kind of thing I enjoy. Even among my friends and acquaintances, I don’t know anybody who likes just what I like. And as for exciting new technologies, I haven’t met a recommendation engine yet that wasn’t brain dead (“People who bought ‘Vermilion Sands’ also bought ‘Secrets Revealed: How to Make a Squillion from Your Blog’ and ‘Gloaming: Teenager-Loving Vampires in A Glasgow High-School”.)

2. Re-read those wonderful books I loved the first time round. To be honest I’ve been leaning towards this strategy for a while now. I recently re-read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and just now I’m working my way through the Foundation trilogy (having found it in a second-hand bookshop a couple of weeks ago.) Essentially this is just tapping into another kind of review service – using my own memory of what was good as a recommendation – along with the hope that I’ve forgotten the details enough so I can enjoy rediscovering the text. (I have my top 50-ish list of sci-fi books on Amazon if you’re curious.)

3. Read the ‘classics’. Again, a sort of review service, this time a crowd-sourced recommendation that spans generations of readers. It’s not a bad strategy, actually. Almost all the ‘classics’ I’ve read have been great books. Sadly, I’ve already read a lot of the ones I know about (although I’d gladly re-read all of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy, and so on.) Which puts me in uncharted waters again. Some of the classics have been disappointing. Henry James, for example, sends me to sleep, and Dostoyevsky drives me up the wall. Even Dickens is a bit patchy (although I haven’t met a novel by his mate Wilkie Collins that I haven’t liked.) So even the wisdom of crowds when it has stood the test of time, can sometimes let you down.

In terms of success, strategy 2 wins hands down, followed by strategy 3. And that’s a problem. Being an author, I don’t want to recommend to people that they only read old stuff – much of it for free from Project Gutenberg or available only from second-hand shops. New authors don’t make any money that way. What’s more, no-one would ever discover today’s Ursula K. le Guin or J.G. Ballard – whoever they may be (if you happen to know, do tell.)

So I must recommend strategy 1 to everybody. Find yourself a great reviewer who is perfectly in tune with your personal taste and rely on them to identify all the great new releases as they come out. It doesn’t work for me but that’s only because my tase is more refined exquisite special exceptional … Oh you know what I mean.

Can you hear its siren call?

I’ve been trying to decide lately at what point being published for no fee counts as vanity publishing. A few of my recent publications have been in non-fee-paying magazines. I sent my work to them because I thought it would be an appropriate first step on the ladder to being paid for my work. (You may remember I blogged about this recently.) And I would still recommend this to other writers who are starting out. The editors I’ve dealt with have been intelligent, professional people who put a lot of work into helping me adjust my stories for their needs and, in the process, taught me a lot about writing for magazines and about how to work with editors. In fact, I have noticed no difference in the standards and professionalism of the ‘for-the-love’ editors and the ones who’ve paid me.

However, as I also noted, other writers have a completely different attitude. They target the highest-paying magazines first, then, on rejection, move to lower-paying magazines. Only when all paying markets are exhausted, will they send their work to non-paying magazines. Effectively, the non-paying mags are used as dumping grounds for stories they can’t sell. In which case, you have to ask yourself, why do they send their work to non-paying mags at all? Presumably, because it is better to have your story published, even for free, than to have it sitting forever on your hard drive. In other words, it’s a kind of vanity publishing.

Yet I’m pretty sure these same authors would baulk at the idea of actually paying someone to publish their work. That really would be beyond the pale. And it’s not such an odd reaction. After all, the free magazines do have standards – quite high ones. They do reject work – lots of it. So acceptance by a ‘for-the-love’ magazine is still a validation of the author as a writer. And the free magazines do still have wide circulations. Publication by those magazines still means the author’s work ‘gets out there’. But why is that better than leaving the story unpublished? Why is it that, when all else fails, writers would rather give their stories away to a magazine than to have them go unread?

It can only be vanity.

And here’s another interesting development I’ve noticed. Some authors have begun publishing their work directly as e-books. If you live in the USA, you can very easily self-publish a work as an e-book on Amazon and, for everybody else, you can do the same thing on Lulu. It is rumoured that Sony will introduce a similar service soon. It costs absolutely nothing and, for some, there is money to be made. These companies provide tools to support the author in formatting their books, designing covers,  and so on. The only expenses are getting an ISBN and registering your copyright (in the USA) and even an ISBN isn’t necessary to sell through Lulu.

Of course, there is no editorial selection at all. Anyone can publish anything this way. (Someone – and I forget who, unfortunately – said recently that the way to think of Lulu is as a photocopying service – a service it provides very well and at reasonable prices.) So maybe this is the next step for those authors who can’t sell their stories, and can’t get them accepted by the free magazines, but still want to get them out there. They can publish their work as e-books through these online services. It is still free. They still have not crossed that line and paid to be published.

How many will do it? How many will go there?

We already see the writers advice sites saying there are perfectly good reasons to self-publish (a family memoir, say, or a local history – the kind of books that commercial publishers won’t touch.) This is a distinct softening of the hard line that used to be drawn. Maybe the next softening will be to say it’s OK to self-publish if you have a work that is unpublishable for the reason that it has been rejected by every legitimate outlet. It seems unthinkable, but you never know, after all, commercial publishing is contracting and may well contract a lot farther over the next couple of years. Every month now, a few more magazines go bust, or are put ‘on hiatus’ as they wait for better times. The number of stories not finding a paying or even a non-paying outlet must be rising steadily. Stories that, last year would have been publishable, next year won’t be. What will happen to them all?

Watch this space.

I just can’t stop playing with this blog. The WordPress template I’m using makes everything so easy. Today, I had the bright idea that I’d add a link to an Amazon shop featuring my old, out-of-print books. They’re pretty ancient now but you can still buy them second-hand on Amazon and I hoped people would be curious.

Then I thought maybe that wasn’t really interesting enough. So I hit on the idea of putting up a page of sci-fi books that I thought were the most important, significant and purely wonderful I have ever read – just to let everyone know what my taste is. Unfortunately, once I’d started, I couldn’t stop and I ended up listing over forty of them! (And I still keep thinking of others I should have included.)

Doing it as an Amazon shop makes it so easy to pick books and lay out the pages that it would be idiotic to do it any other way. Plus, it has the added bonus that if anyone does feel like buying one of the books I recommend, I get a small cut of the sale price!

To see the new page on this blog, click “Buy My Books” – the rightmost menu item at the top of this page. Or you could just go straight to the Amazon shop page.