Have to love the Internet. I open up a web-browser, head to a social networking sight, and got to see the cover for At The Queen’s Command making its way through those interwebtubethingies. This cover is great. I just love it to death. It’s a gorgeous cover and it has that, “Say what?” factor going for it.

I mean, it’s clearly an American historical novel.

And then you spot the dragon.

Even folks who muddled through high school history—barely avoiding being bored to death—will be pretty sure there were no dragons in the American Revolution. (Technically this is the French and Indian War, or Seven Years War, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on.) And, trust me, this version of the French and Indian War won’t bore you to death.

It’s really kind of funny but it takes seeing a cover to make a book real. Earlier today I shipped a copy of the manuscript off to my father. It was just a pile of pages. But seeing the cover means it’s a book—whether you read it in paper or bytes. With a cover wrapped around it, the book can take up shelf space (or megabytes). It becomes something tangible when, prior to that, it was simply mind-movies shared with those who read the script.

This cover really captures the nature of the book, both because of the historical analogs and the themes I get to play with. I could have written a straight alternate history but, as I did with Eyes of Silver, I chose to change place names and significantly alter some historical aspects. This wasn’t because I couldn’t do, or didn’t want to do, the research. My degree is in history, I love the American Colonial period and to make the changes I made, I had to do the research anyway. Kind of like breaking a bone to set it again, I had to break history to rebuild it.

I did this for two reasons. First, I really didn’t want readers going into the book trying to figure out who is whom. While there might be a character who eventually assumes a very George Washington type position, no characters are modeled on George Washington. The fact is, history calls for someone in that position, so that position will be filled. I opted out of using direct analogs and modeling characters on historical figures because in changing the world, I also changed some of the dynamics which made those individuals who they are.

Second, I really wanted to mess around with aspects of history to sharpen the contrast on certain issues. For example, Tharyngia is the France analog (the name taken from Lotharingia, which was once a nation that had a lot of French territory as part of it). I chose to have Tharyngia’s revolution before the American Revolution. I also framed their revolution as a secular and scientific one, overthrowing a king who had ruled by divine right. This establishes a meritocracy governed by the Laureates—not quite a Randian paradise, but definitely an irreligious state.

I’m really happy with the book. It has all the stuff in it that a book should: action, adventure, discovery, politics, romance, humor, suspense, magick, military exploits and glimpses into a world we might, save for the vibration of some string out there, be living in.

Aaron Allston and I will be teaching an expanded track of Inner Circle Writer Workshop Classes at DragonCon over the Labor Day weekend. Last year was our first year. Our program was so successful, they’ve had to move us to a larger venue. (We’ll have enough chairs this year—without raiding other rooms.) You can either purchase the entire 14 hours worth of classes at one bargain price, or pay ala carte. The link above takes you to the convention page which lists all of the classes.

I will also have all of my ebooks on writing for sale on disk, including some special deals. The coolest of these is the big deal this year: all of the how-to-write books (21 Days to a Novel, Plotting, Characterization, The Rules of Writing, Writing Fiction (a short course), Serial Fiction, World Building and the brand new Digital Career Guide) which is a $170 value, for $140. Plus, I have packaged all of these ebooks on a 4 gig flash drive, which is disguised as a pen. It not only writes, but also has a laser pointer. That’s a $25 device (you can actually pay more for the 4 gig flash drive itself) tossed in for free.

Okay, I know it’s totally a geek-gadget, but I saw them when looking for flash drives and they look great.Given that 4 gigs is more memory than my first five computers combined could muster, I just love these pens. Did I mention they have a laser pointer, too? When do you not need a laser pointer?

These pens were popular enough at Gencon that I’ve restocked. You have a choice of two colors this time: Silver or Black. (Limited quantities of each, I apologize if your color choice is gone by the time you buy.)

I also have one seminar on the Skeptic Track: Fiction Writing and Skepticism at 7pm on Friday. I usually have a reading, but I don’t know when that is yet. Ditto a signing. (I’ll have a few copies of I, Jedi to sell, and a few other things, at the signing.) I may have some other panels, but I won’t know until I get there. DragonCon prints my schedule on the back of my tag and it usually goes on forever. (Other guests look at what they have me doing and the blood drains from their faces.)

I’m really looking forward to this convention. DragonCon is always great fun. Lots of friends to see and things to enjoy. I can’t wait.

I knew it would happen. It had to happen. There is money to be made and whenever there is money to be made, people will rise up to make it. I don’t, in this instance, refer to hardworking authors, but the parasites who are looking to make a fast buck by making low-rent investments in properties they believe they’ll be able to exploit.

To what am I referring?

Digital rights to authors’ backlists. There are a variety of individuals—traditional publishers included—who are buying up the rights to backlists for little or no advances against royalties, with no firm schedule for publication, with no distribution deals in place, and with little or no expertise in how to actually create an ebook. And yet, writers who have complained for eons about how badly they are used and abused by publishers, are turning around and selling off these assets for a pittance.

This is what the landscape looks like right now.

Traditional publishers are offering 25% of the NET on electronic sales, zero for advances, with no pub dates attached. If any publisher made such an offer for a paper publication, they’d be laughed out of the marketplace, pure and simple. While the royalty might sound great, the lack of an advance, and the lack of a publishing window means the publisher has zero investment in getting the product out in a timely manner. They’re snagging the rights so they’ll have something to sell at some point.

By way of example, three of my novels are now available for the iPhone: A Secret Atlas, When Dragons Rage and The Grand Crusade. Random House sublicensed the electronic rights to those books to ScrollMotion, Inc., the creators of the Iceberg reading apps. The App itself has several screen shots to help sell it, the first being a picture of the cover of my book. The next three screen shots show the interface, and provide glimpses of text which I did not write—and would never have written on my worst day on the job. I hope no one mistakes it for text from the book.

The pre-2009 contracts with publishers grant authors 50% of the NET, which is a better deal, but this is still the NET. Let’s look at A Secret Atlas for a breakdown here, shall we? The App costs $6.99. This means that ScrollMotion, Inc. is paid $4.89 per copy sold (70% of retail price). I don’t know exactly what ScrollMotion, Inc. is making on the deal, but let’s assume 10%. They send $4.40 on to Random House. And then Random House sends half of that, or $2.20, on to me. (Under the new 25% royalty deals, I’d only be getting $1.10.)

In three to nine months after the sale.

Conversely, selling the same book for $5 myself off my website, I’d make $4.55 per copy. Immediately. Selling it myself via the Kindle, I’d make $3.50 in sixty days. Selling through the iBookstore directly I’d make the same as the Kindle deal, and selling through third parties, I’d pull at least $2.50. So, by controlling the rights myself, I’m going to make out better than the best deal anyone else is offering me.

Authors are now being faced with choices that are not easy, but they need to ask one question whenever offered a backlist deal: “If it is that valuable to them, how valuable is it to me?” By way of example, last month alone, ebook sales for Talion: Revenant via the Kindle, earned me over $400. That may not seem like much, but if someone is offering a token amount of money, like $1K, to snap up the rights to books, and yet one can turn around and make almost half that in a single month, you have to be crazy not to think about doing this stuff yourself.

If your reply to the above is, “But I don’t know enough about computers to be able to make an ebook,” stop and think about it this way. Making ebooks isn’t rocket science. It’s easier than dealing with copyedits on a novel, and you’ve done that. And this is a job that will pay you back. Instead of being happy someone is giving you a fish, this is your chance to learn to fish; and who’s going to be more motivated than you to let your fans know your books are available again?

If, on the other hand, your reply is, “I don’t want to learn how to make ebooks,” well, fine. Just don’t turn around and complain about how your being handled in the ebook realm.

Realistically, here are the things to demand in any ebook contract:

1) A cash advance equal to an estimate of the first two years royalties. (If this amount cannot be calculated because “this is a new market,” then don’t go for the deal. This person is speculating. Let them do that with someone else’s work.)

2) A 6 month window for publication of each book under contract. (Estimated time to prepare a book as an ebook is 20 hours from scan to publication. If they do not have the staff or equipment for this, don’t go for the deal. It’s a hobby for them, not a business.)

3) A sunset clause on the contract, preferably two years, after which the contract will be renegotiated at the author’s option. (The technology is changing too fast for you to be locked into a long-term contract without hope of renegotiation.) It is a seller’s market and will continue to be so as new formats and platforms develop, so royalties to authors will increase, not decrease. Do not get locked into a longterm contract for peanuts.

4) Clearly define which formats are to be used. At this time there are three: Epub, Kindle/Mobi and PDF which should be provided. All other formats, including smart phone apps and gaming console applications, should be treated differently and negotiated for in good faith. (Think of formats as foreign languages and this all becomes very clear.)

5) Copies of all files, including source files, are to be delivered to the author for his use beyond the life of the contract. Copies of the books should be DRM free, and the author has the option to make “review” copies of said books available for the purpose of publicity.

6) Electronic rights to the books are limited to one language only (i. e. English). Translations and electronic publication of translations are to be negotiated separately.

7) Where there are multiple books in a series, the negotiations should include royalties on a per volume basis and on an omnibus basis, with the publication of an omnibus edition being mandated.

8 ) Royalties should be calculated and paid every 60 days (within the Amazon and Apple pay windows).

9) The files will be made available to the author to sell from his own webstore, with him paying the publisher the equivalent rate as Amazon, with accounting every 60 days. (Because electronic sales are inherently immune to audit, only by selling work directly can an author have any idea of a) true sales figures and b) failure-to-deliver rates which might address why bandwidth-per-file figures do not match sales perfectly.)

I’m sure I’ve missed out on a couple of provisions that should be included. I know many of these will be considered dealbreakers by publishers. So be it. If they want to sell ebooks, they have to have ebooks. I know they can get them from someone else, but if they want mine, they’ll find I’m not giving them away.

And, quite frankly, no other author with enough neurons to form a synapse, should either.

I’ll be at Gencon in Indianapolis next week, teaching my writing classes, doing a reading, and some autographing sessions, just hanging out and having a bunch of fun with friends and colleagues. My schedule looks like this:

Thursday 8/5:

10-12 Noon Signing (At the Catalyst Game Labs booth)
4 PM The Rules of Writing
5 PM Writing Success in the Post-Paper Era

Friday 8/6:

10 AM Signing (Author’s Alley)
4 PM 21 Days to a Novel
5 PM Writing a Successful Series (*New* seminar this year.)
6 PM: Reading (Not sure yet what I will read. Could be the story Covenant, from the anthology Stalking the Wild Hare, which will be on sale at the convention. It’s a collection of stories by the authors involved in the Writers’ Symposium, which Jean Rabe wrangles together. It’s a limited edition, and Gencon is going to be the place where you can get it signed by all the authors.)

Saturday 8/7:

2:15-2:45 PM Signing (At the Catalyst Game Labs booth, prior to their big 3-5 PM BattleTech Blowout signing.)
3 PM Characterization
4 PM Plotting
5 PM 21 Ways to Kill Your Novel(*New* seminar this year.)

Sunday 8/8:

10 AM Signing (Author’s Alley)

I know I have at least one more signing at the Catalyst Game Labs booth (I’m trying to confirm the time). I’ll edit this post as the schedule firms up. [Note: signing added to Thursday 10-12 noon and another, Saturday 2:15-2:45 PM prior to the 3-5 PM mass BattleTech signing.]

I believe all of the seminars will be taking place at the Marriott, which is where they usually are. You’ll want to check the program book to make sure. The seminars all cost $8, payable in tickets, generics, and cash.

I will also have all of my ebooks on writing for sale on disk, including some special deals. The coolest of these is the big deal this year: all of the how-to-write books (21 Days to a Novel, Plotting, Characterization, The Rules of Writing, Writing Fiction (a short course), Serial Fiction, World Building and the brand new Digital Career Guide) which is a $170 value, for $140. Plus, I have packaged all of these ebooks on a 4 gig flash drive, which is disguised as a pen. It not only writes, but also has a laser pointer. That’s a $25 device (you can actually pay more for the 4 gig flash drive itself) tossed in for free.

Okay, I know it’s totally a geek-gadget, but I saw them when looking for flash drives and they look great. (I might have a few left at Dragoncon.) Given that 4 gigs is more memory than my first five computers combined could muster, I just love these pens. Did I mention they have a laser pointer, too? When do you not need a laser pointer?

I’m really looking forward to Gencon and the classes. I always have a lot of fun with them. As I saw when teaching in Austin this week with Aaron Allston, it’s great to watch folks’ eyes brighten as a problem with their writing evaporates. I really enjoy training writers who will turn out the sorts of stories that will challenge and entertain readers. Means I’ll have plenty of good stuff to read when they put me out of business.

I look forward to seeing you there.

The publisher backlash against the Wylie Agency creation of Odyssey Editions and the exclusive, two-year ebook deal with Amazon is neither surprising in its vehemence nor its lack of understanding of the ebook market. Random House immediately went for the throat. They suspended contract negotiations with the Wylie Agency and have told Amazon that they’re disputing the validity of the deal, since it involves titles “subject to active Random House publishing agreements.”

Mind you, every time publishers have made this claim in court to preserve rights that were not specified in a contract, they have lost.

John Sargent, the US head of Macmillan, posted to his blog a statement that, when read coldly, is so weak, so full of fear, and so full of misinformation, it’s achingly funny. He notes:

But it is an extraordinarily bad deal for writers, illustrators, publishers, other booksellers, and for anyone who believes that books should be as widely available as possible.

As I noted yesterday, this deal is anything but bad for writers. At the very least, it will encourage publishers to offer writers a larger royalty on ebooks. But more important than being a good deal for writers, its a great deal for consumers. Mr. Sargent has apparently missed the fact that if a device has a screen, there is a Kindle app that will run on it. This deal won’t make these books harder to find. Anyone who has a smart phone, iPod Touch, iPad, computer or Android powered device will have access to these books. And because early reports indicate the books will be priced at the $9.99 price point, readers will be saving a lot of money.

And Sargent goes furthers:

This move further empowers the dominant player in the market to the detriment of their competitors and creates an unbalanced retail marketplace.
In short, the exclusive-to-Kindle aspect of this deal has no strategic value at all for authors and publishers. Given the advantage for Amazon, I’m sure the deal has been financially attractive for Andrew Wylie’s new venture. In the long run, though, making literature exclusively available digitally to a single retailer will be damaging to the whole book community: authors, agents, publishers, and readers.

Again, he lumps authors with publishers, but this deal is all about the fact that authors and publishers are not in the same boat. Author and publisher interests have long since diverged in the digital market. How anyone can consider a deal that makes authors more money and gets it to them faster, while making their work available worldwide, is beyond comprehension.

He’s crying crocodile tears. If Macmillan came up with a technology that would allow them to dominate the market to the detriment to everyone else, would Mr. Sargent refuse to deploy it? Of course not. That’s capitalism. That’s what he’s required to do if he is going to be responsible to his stockholders. Here he’s just saying that Macmillan missed the boat, so he’ll just sit on the dock and weep.

I hope that works for him. Traditional publishing, it must be remembered, has had several bites at this digital apple. Apple’s Newton device, back in the late 1980s, was designed, in part, as an ebook reader. The Rocket e-book device came on shortly thereafter, and locked up publishing deals with most major publishers. At the same time, Palm’s devices had ebook reading software available. Publishing again flirted with digital marketplaces when Amazon rose up, launching their websites, trying to emulate what Amazon was doing without alienating their retailers. They took half-steps in both situations, and failed to progress. No surprise. Then they sat on the sidelines while the digital revolution savaged the record and video components of their entertainment conglomerates. They again hesitated to act, and now they are paying the price.

Here’s the wake-up call: If agents are going to become publishers and collude with retailers, why don’t the publishers go ahead and become ebook retailers and cut certain retailers off? Why don’t they beef up their ability to sell books electronically? And why don’t they actually use technology to sell books in whichever format they want.

Macmillan, for example, sells a lot of anthologies. I have stories in many of them. And yet, if you go to their website and do a search on my name, you’ll only find a couple of them. Why? Because whoever puts together the webpage doesn’t actually list—either in copy or metatags—all of the authors in the book. All they do is cut and past text from a print catalogue and don’t bother to expand “and others” into a complete list. By being lazy, they obviate one of the great benefits of the net: the ability of folks to use search functions to find things they want to buy.

As I’ve noted recently, I think traditional publishing has a month, perhaps two, to get its act together to salvage anything out of the ruins of their business. What they need to do, in short order, is this:

1) Immediately install a system for converting books into ebooks, for creating omnibus editions and for retailing same directly from their websites, capturing the majority of the profit from sales.

2) Offer authors a realistic split of money. Roll percentages back to the pre-2009 50% of electronic revenue.

3) Invest in POD technology and storefronts so publishers will have a presence after the collapse of the big-box stores.

I don’t expect that to happen. I do expect to see more author coalitions and agents following the Wylie lead. And while it will pain me to see big bookstores go away, and I’ll remember fondly the halcyon days of big publishing, I’ll console myself by counting my money and figuring out as many ways as possible to profit in the digital age.

A number of very nice people have asked if I will be attending the Star Wars Celebration V (August 12-15 in Orlando). In the past I’ve heard rumors that I’ve been spotted at other Celebrations, or that I was going to be the guest of honor at some group or other’s party. Having attended conventions I know exactly how those sorts of rumors get started. While I’m confident they are quite innocent, what starts as a “wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversation between a couple of folks becomes a fact overheard by others, and a disappointment in the minds of yet others. That sort of disappointment, when translated to blogs, turns into, “And then there was the author who was too full of himself to actually show up at this party where he’d promised to be…”

In short, I won’t be at Celebration V.

There are a number of reason for this.

1) I’ve never been invited to any of the Celebrations. I don’t say this in any sort of snit or fit of pique. The Celebrations—wonderful events by all accounts—are a business venture. Lucasfilm brings in their guests, publishers bring in their guests, others bring in their guests. While I’d love to attend, it’s kind of silly for anyone to bring me into the show when I don’t have any new Star Wars related projects in the works.

2) It’s been suggested that I could go “just as a fan.” While I’m certainly a fan of Star Wars, I really couldn’t go to the Celebration as just a fan because I’m not just a fan. I’m sure I’d have a great time, but I’m also sure that some well-meaning bloggers would protest, on my behalf, about how it wasn’t right that I was being treated as “just a fan” by the Celebration. That would embarrass me, Lucasfilm and likely create some hard feelings where none need to be created.

3) My travel schedule has already been set for a while, and is very intensive during the summer. (I live in Phoenix, so getting out of town during the hot, muggy monsoon season is not a virtue, it’s a survival strategy.) I’ll be at Gencon the week before Celebration V, and at DragonCon over Labor Day. Squeezing another convention in there would guarantee I got no work done in August. On top of that, I’d be out of pocket at least $1K to attend and my boss (me) doesn’t let me accrue vacation days. The conventions I attend are not vacations, they are work, and by teaching writing classes at them, I actually make money—or, at least, break even.

4) I am likewise certain I’d see lots of friends at Celebration V, but I see most of them at a variety of other conventions. Anyone who was hoping I’d be at Celebration V so they could get a book signed, you have two options. First, you can find me at local shows (I do a lot of conventions each year) or hit this link and learn how to send me a book/card/comic to get it signed.

One point I want to be very clear about: I’m not asking, hinting, suggesting, scheming or otherwise angling to get an invite to Celebration VI or such down the road. The folks who run the show know how to reach me if they feel having me attend would serve their purposes. I fully understand, as I said above, business considerations are how the decisions are made. Heck, if I were running the show, I’d not be asking me to attend. Looking at it in terms of profit and loss, my being there makes no sense at all.

I know everyone who attends will have a wonderful time. That’s very cool. But, when you’re there, if you hear rumors of me being spotted, understand them for what they are: wishful thinking; and have fun without me.

A number of people pointed me to the New York Times article in which Amazon reports that Kindle sales of titles have outstripped hardcover sales. Many folks have jumped on this report as the canary in the coal mine. It’s the death knell of publishing as we know it. It’s the vindication of a lot of what I’ve been saying—both here in this blog, and in my Digital Career Guide.

Or is it?

If you read the article, there are a couple of things that become very clear. First off, they’re selling 148 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers, and most recently that’s jumped to 180 to 100. That’s almost 2 for 1. And while the Amazon ebook numbers reportedly do not include free ebooks, they most certainly include things selling for anywhere from .99 cents to $9.99 for the most part.

My point being this: would we at all be surprised if there’d been a headline like “Amazon Says Paperback Sales Outstrip Hardbacks?” No. The story does not say, very specifically, that ebook sales are outstripping sales of the same titles in hardback. Had that been happening across the board—and Amazon did report when ebook preorders of Dan Brown’s latest exceeded those of the hardcover orders—the press release certainly would have touted that fact. (That’s a report we’ll get 23 months or less from now.)

So, what’s really being said here is that, given a choice between a cheap ebook and a pricier hardback, readers who already have made the hardware investment in an ebook reader are buying ebooks. This is news?

The buried lede in this story is one that you have to ferret out from between the lines. The fact that the New York Times felt this story was newsworthy means that the “ebook reader” meme has gained a serious foothold. As I’ve mentioned before, when folks talk to me about ebooks, they’re discussing the merits of the readers—not asking what the heck one of the devices is. Half the folks asking me about the iPad want to know how well it serves as a book-reader. The fact that that particular question is on their list shows how much traction the idea of ebooks has gotten in the mind of the public. Ebooks and their utility are accepted in society, and folks are now concerned about how best to make them part of their lives.

Another news and speculation trend I’ve been seeing is authors wondering/lamenting what ebooks and their proliferation will do to the art of writing. I talk a very great deal about that in the Digital Career Guide. In short, the digital marketplace will force writers to get better. We have to please our audiences, not an editor who is going to acquire our books. Writers are suddenly working without a net as we dance on the high-wire. We don’t have an editor insulating us from the public—though that’s an illusion that vanished when the first book commentary blog hit the net. As of yesterday, we’d better be turning out good work that our readers want to read, or we’ll be slinging fries at McDonalds.

The business changes are also huge. The whole experiment I’m trying with the Talion: Revenant 10,000 ebook challenge will turn the entire system of financing novels on its head. Instead of mortgaging the future for whatever a publisher thinks they’ll be able to sell 2-6 years down the line, I can have readers vote with their dollars for what I should be doing. I can write for my audience, and if a publisher later comes along and wants to turn out a physical copy of the book, that’s great. They’ll be doing it on my terms, however, because they’ll need me more than I’ll need them.

The New York Times article isn’t the canary in the coal mine. It’s the look on the faces of the miners when they realize the canary’s dead. The revolution is already in full swing. It’s racing forward, and this article is just an after-the-action report on a battle that’s long since over. If traditional publishing hopes to make a stand, they’ve got a month, maybe two, to make it. If not, well, I’m sure the Buggy-whip Manufacturers’ Hall of Fame still has some empty space. They’ll fit right in.

Monday and Tuesday (July 26-27) Aaron Allston and I will be at Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy in Austin, TX to hold two days of writing seminars. Dragon’s Lair has posted the full schedule of events for your edification. We’re putting on ten hours of seminars, including my 21 Days to a Novel and Aaron’s brilliant Plot Analysis seminars. A cursory glance at the schedule makes very apparent the fact that these seminars will cover everything you want to know about writing. You’ll develop and strengthen your skills set, as well as learn about the business.

Aaron and I have taught seminars together in the past, most notably at DragonCon and Origins. We’ll do so again at DragonCon this year, expanding the above program to include four more hours of new content not available in last year’s seminar sessions. When I sit in on Aaron’s seminars, I am very impressed by not only the depth and wisdom of his analysis, but the very effective methods he’s developed for teaching others.

This has always been my problem with writing seminars in the past: Great writers aren’t always great teachers. It doesn’t matter how good a writer is if he can’t communicate to others what he actually does. There are a number of reasons for this lack. First off, it could be that the writer isn’t analytical enough about his own process to actually know what it is he does. You’d be surprised how many authors fly on auto-pilot and never identify the tricks of the trade that make them so effective. Aaron and I have done that, and are willing to provide our students with that information.

Second, some writers know what they do, but don’t want to share for fear of training up the competition. Speaking for myself on that point, I’m not worried about competition. First off, if any student gets better than I am, it’s because I’ve gotten lazy. In that case, I deserve to be shoved out of the market. Second off, I’m not training competition for me, I’m training the writers who will end the careers of lazy writers who are taking up my shelf-space in stores. Third, and perhaps most important in the shifting world of publishing today, there is going to be less and less competition for shelf-space, since virtual shelves accommodate everyone. So, in offering these seminars, Aaron and I get to train up a generation of writers who will turn out the sorts of stories that we like to read.

Third, teaching requires an entirely different skills-set than writing. In college I was trained to be a teacher. I’ve been teaching writing seminars since the early 1990s at Gencon. I’ve expanded to other conventions and other venues, including university conferences. Part of being a teacher is understanding that different students learn in different ways. Great teachers shape their lessons and hone their approaches to provide multiple vectors on making a point clear. In short, they figure out the ways to get the message across to you, so that you can make the most of it.

Some folks will think that $10 an hour for writing seminars is kind of pricy, especially in this economic climate. If you’re committed to becoming the best writer you can be, that’s a tiny investment in your career. The first story you sell to a professional market after these seminars would more than pay for the entire course. When else are you going have a chance to learn the craft of writing from a pair of New York Times Bestselling authors at such sensible prices? (And I would note that lots of people have paid a lot more for some of these very seminars in different venues.)

I’m looking forward to meeting folks at Dragon’s Lair. There’s an incomparable joy in seeing eyes brighten and smiles grow as someone hears a solution to a problem that’s been vexing them for a long time. I really love helping others achieve the dream that I’ve been lucky enough to have come true. Hopefully you’ll be one of them.

Talion: Revenant has been on sale electronically for three months now, so it’s time for an update on numbers. When I released the book I said that when I’d sold 10,000 copies, I’d write the sequel: Talion: Nemesis. I’m banking the money as it comes in, and your purchases will become my advance for writing that new novel.

Since the book went on sale we’ve sold 210 copies, which is much higher than I expected at this point. (I don’t have an accounting yet for the copies sold through the Appstore/iBookstore, but I’d guess that would be an added 40 copies or so at best.) So, in three months, we’re 2.5% of the way to the goal. If you want to look at the fact that another 9,750 need to sell before I start working, that could be a bit depressing, but I’m enthused by the results.

One aspect is momentum. Sales have been increasing, and that’s very promising. Through Amazon, the T:R sales have been smoking the sales of A Gathering Evil, which I’ve left at $2. I could draw some conclusions about price sensitivity for ebooks from this. It would appear to me that as long as the price is reasonable, readers are willing to buy. And one should remember, most of the folks who are purchasing the book already owned at least one paperback copy, so these sales are largely a down-payment on getting the sequel.

Digital publication and marketing are a brand new field. I’m feeling my way through it the same as everyone else. I know, for example, this update will spur some more sales. It will prompt folks to blog more about the project, and that will bring more sales. As we move forward, I’ll look at selling some more Talion fiction and tossing that money into the kitty, too. As I hit conventions over the summer, I’ll talk about the book and encourage folks to buy. I will also look at the efficacy of purchasing advertising on the net to see if that spurs things onward.

The power of the Internet can’t be denied. If everyone who already purchased were to convince just two friends to buy a copy, and those folks convinced two friends to buy, and so on; we’d sell that 10,000 copies by December and you’d likely have the new book by summer of 2011. Even if you don’t want to buy a copy, you can talk friends into buying copies, introducing the book to folks who haven’t read it, and you’ll get the sequel that much faster.

What I’m really enthused about is the number of folks who actually get it. This whole challenge isn’t just about getting enough money fto write a sequel. It’s about making a fundamental change in the way publishing is done. Instead of getting paid by publishers for what they guess I might sell in the future, I can work on the basis of being paid for work I’ve already done. The advantage there is incredible because it buys me the freedom to turn out the kind of work that I want to write and which, rather obviously, my patrons (that would be you) want to read. With this cycle ramping up, I’d be in a position to ask you what you want to see next from me, be it more DragonCrown War material, more stories in the Age of Discovery world, long work, short work, new and experimental work. (I will, however, draw the line at writing Fluffy Cat or Sparkly Vampire stories.)

Right now, we’re off to a good start. I’ll do more to keep awareness of the project out there. I appreciate your help in all this by Tweeting and Facebooking and posting reviews on Amazon and linking back to the store. This project really can turn publishing on its head. Thanks for joining me in the revolution.

A WIRED story coming out of Book Expo America once again reveals the gap between reality and what some of the leaders in publishing think.

Susan Petersen Kennedy, president of Penguin Group USA, said publishers will not make the same mistakes as the music industry, which had an epic struggle over electronic distribution and piracy and lost huge market share.

“It’s always treated as if the publishers are the Luddites,” she told Reuters in an interview. “The devices have not caught up with the content. Contrary to popular opinion, the book is actually so far more flexible.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Take a look at that last pair of sentences. What do they mean? Let’s break that first one down: The devices have not caught up with the content. The two readers I have (Sony Touch and iPad) allow me to read, to adjust the type size, to highlight passages, to make notes and to double-tap a word, immediately bringing up a dictionary to tell me what that word means. In addition, if the device is hooked into the internet, hotlinks become live, so I can immediately go to the net and purchase the next volume, or learn more about the book. So, the way I see it, the devices do everything a print book does, and more.

The second sentence, however, is the one that I find even more puzzling. What does she mean by flexible? Moreover, is flexibility even a quality that makes any difference in this battle? I don’t think so. Print books are heavy and bulky. In the space of a single thin paperback or less (a smart phone or iPod Touch) a reader can carry thousands of books. And, sure, print books won’t run out of power, but battery life is a silly measurement. After all, it’s not how long your battery will last, it’s how long are you going to be between chances to recharge your device? In the last three years of hauling a iPod Touch around, that’s been absolutely never for me.

Right now, the only edge your mass market paperback has over an ebook reader is that you can’t use it between the ground and 10,000 feet on a flight. Might be the longest 20 minutes of your life going up and down, but that’s what the inflight magazines are for.

Jim Lowder pointed me to another article coming out of BEA that illustrates more problems with publishers and the way they address ebooks.

Dominique Raccah, of Sourcebooks, agreed that the new technology was a great way to connect authors with readers. However, she refuted Defiore’s argument that eBooks made life easier for publishers. Through a series of slides, Raccah stressed that making digital books is complicated for publishers because formatting them is so complicated. “We have thirty new steps to format the book to be an eBook and that is before production and meta-data,” she said.

[Emphasis mine.]

Thirty steps? I wish I had seen the slides. When I went from text file to ebook for Talion: Revenant it took exactly seven steps:

1) Get a cover made.
2) Get a spacer illo made
3) Insert Bookmark breaks (insert a line at each chapter head and four other places: a search operation for 30 lines)
4) Insert spacer illo tags (insert a line at each 3 line break: a search operation for two dozen lines)
5) Insert hotlinks (cut and paste from a file)
6) Gather illos and text file into a folder
7) Run Michael Zapp’s Legend Maker software to create the epub and Kindle file.

Total time for those seven steps less than two hours. In a week or so, I’ll be taking my novel Eyes of Silver and prepping it from scan to epub. I’ll track my time and let you know how long it took. The real question is that if I can do things in less time and with fewer steps than traditional publishers, what’s going on in New York? While Susan Petersen Kennedy protests that publishers are not Luddites, their understanding of technology and their use of it really casts that statement in doubt. And the usual retort of “Well, Mike, you understand this stuff and are comfortable with it,” just doesn’t wash. If you and your staff are not comfortable with things, hire someone who is!

And here’s the real dark side of things for traditional publishers. They’re looking at their ebook sales and using their growth to calculate how much time they have to get their ebook business squared away. But they’re not the only folks selling ebooks. In the last two months I’ve sold more copies of Talion: Revenant as an ebook than Bantam has sold of The Grand Crusade as an ebook since 2003. Sure those numbers show the surge of ebook sales that has been growing sharply, and TR sales benefit from it, no doubt at all. But traditional publishers are not tracking data on my sales, or on the sales of any other self-published electronic publication. Traditional publishers numbers are as reliable as the data on tomato sales a farmer gathers when he only counts the sales from his roadside stand. The numbers do not measure supply or demand, so are good only in relation to other numbers he’s gathered.

While my ebook sales may not amount to much in the world of traditional publishing, they’re important for two reasons. First, someone buying a book from me isn’t buying a book from them. Second, since I don’t have their overhead, I can sell for less. This means I am shaping what folks see as a reasonable price for ebooks. This means my sales, and the sales of other authors who are offering books for $5 or less are shaping perceptions that traditional publishers are going to have to deal with.

Ultimately it’s not a question of publishers being Luddites or not. It’s a question of their being in touch with reality. Right now, not looking very good on that front. As far as they’re concerned, it’s not raining where they are, just up in the mountains. So there shouldn’t be a problem pitching a tent in that dry river bed, should there?