Monthly Archives: July 2011

Passive Guy has a hard time keeping up with all the reports of all the changes in the publishing biz.

He will give two good posts less of a treatment than their content deserves.

The first, from Dean Wesley Smith with his latest take on Indie/Traditional:

The Problem

Right now the problem is that a former stable industry is changing at light speed. Faster, actually, which makes everything looks so warped and confused. (Sorry, science fiction joke.) No one knows how this change in publishing will settle out in two or three years.

—No one knows which publishers, which imprints will still be around, and which new imprints and publishers will grow into the challenges.

— No one knows what the agent aspect of this business will look like in three or four years. Or if agents will even be a part of publishing.

— No one knows which writers will make it through. (I actually think the bestsellers are in the worst danger.)

It is that crazy.

My answer to this craziness:

Take everything you can take into your own control and hold on.

What does that mean exactly?

Write like crazy.

Then with what you have finished, spend the next two years indie publishing your own stuff, learning all the tricks of being an indie publisher, and getting your own trade paper books into bookstores.

Then when things settle down in traditional publishing, you will be ready and practiced and have some work to present to traditional publishers.

. . . .

Traditional Book Publishers

My Advice: Put on hold unless approached. Or unless you already have a contract.

Stop mailing to them, stop giving your agent anything to sell. Just hold. Don’t pull books or do anything stupid like that. Just hold and finish your contracts.

And do not burn bridges with editors. They may be one of the editors who still have jobs and that you want to work with in two or three years. Just hold.

In publishing, two years is a blink in time. Even if you sold a traditional publisher a book this fall, it would take a year or more to even get out to whatever bookshelves will be left at that time.

The big downside? Having one of your books be an asset in a publisher bankruptcy can be a nightmare at best. You want to avoid that at all costs.

In two or three years, this publishing world will be finding a new place to settle. We will all know which imprints and publishers have survived.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

And from Heather Massey of the SciFi Romance Brigade:

Yes, it’s a lovely dream, with its promise of a nice advance and mainstream exposure, but I think it’s a dream tied to the publishing industry of the past. In other words, it’s tied into the myth that every book has bestseller potential, along with the idea of celebrity authors. Unfortunately, reality has painted an entirely different picture.

. . . .

So why should authors writing a niche subgenre like SFR view traditional publishers as the only brass ring in town? In the time it would take to submit and hear back from 50 agents (if even that many will look at SFR submissions), an author could conceivably have written three four, five, six, or even seven shorts/novellas and sold them to epubs/small press publishers. And have made money from them within a year’s time!

Can we ignore that kind of math?

Here’s some math that will shed more light on the situation from Everything You Wanted to Know About Digital Publishing But Were Afraid To Ask: A Q&A With Maya Banks:

It is absolutely true that last year I made more in digital publishing than I did with Harlequin, Berkley and Ballantine combined. (and the year before too) I think I nudged out thethree publishers by about 20k. I grossed about 600k so you can do the math there.

How does a 30k advance from a traditional print publisher stack up against 600k in ebook sales? 600k wipes the floor with 30k, that’s how. That’s also the type of “top” worth an author’s blood, sweat, and tears. I doubt Ms. Banks made any kind of advance on her first ebook, but it seems to me her risk (and hard work) paid off.

Here’s some more math (of the anecdotal kind): I have more sci-fi romance to read than ever before—with no thanks to Big 6 publishers. 99.9% of my  new release TBR pile is SFR ebooks. In fact, I recently learned about three ebook sales within the same week—and that’s just what came to my inbox. Digital publishers have a much faster turnaround time than traditional print ones.

The latest from Michael Stackpole:

Earlier this week I mentioned that books were being marketed more like magazines and less like novels. For those who are too young to understand what magazines are and why this is significant, it boils down to this. Magazines have no backlist sales: once the new issue comes out, the old one is gone and largely forgotten (except in dentists’ offices, where they all go to die). Because of shrinking shelf space in stores, novels are getting less time to be on sale—they’re being treated like magazines in that regard, with backlist sales moving to ebooks.

In my essay, I predicted that one result of this marketing shift would be publishers narrowing the window between hardcover publication and the publication of subsequent editions, like mass market paperbacks. The New York Times confirmed this is exactly what publishers are starting to do. The reasons for this are simple. The vast majority of books sell in the first four months, and then taper off. Since they won’t be on the shelf much longer than that—if that long—there’s no reason to delay the paperback edition, which provides another, similar sales spike.

What is all this going to mean to authors with traditional publishing deals, or anticipating getting same?

1) Lower advances. Publishers have less time to move your product through the stores, have less opportunities to see sales there, and have no idea what they’re doing on ebook marketing. Their only choice is to cut your advances and face the prospect of owing you more money some time down the line.

. . . .

3) Physical sales of series books will take a serious hit. Right now, with the year lag-time between books, we see a 30-60% drop in sales between books in a series. Now without the previous book in the series on the shelves to help drive interest to the new book, sales will tank. (And, face it, the sum and total of advertising most series books get is the printing of a preview chapter in the previous book in the set.) The only way to combat further erosion, is to speed up the publishing cycle . . . .

. . . .

6) Physical books will go out of print faster, but the retention and publication of electronic books means it will be a good long time before you ever get the rights back to your books. Authors are going to have to take good, long looks at their contracts to see what other rights they can exploit to make a living off their work.

Link to the rest at Stormwolf.com

Given all the recent uproar about agents getting into the publishing business plus the constant drumbeat about successful indie authors being solicited by agents for representation, it’s time to look at an Agency Contract.

Before diving into the details of this contract, let’s review some basic legal principles that govern the relationship of a principal – the author in this case – and an agent. These principles are old and universally applied in the United States and probably in the UK. Search for “duties of an agent” in Google and you’ll see a million different versions of the following items. PG will generally use “author” instead of “principal” for clarity.

The three pillars of agency law are Obedience, the obligation of the agent to use Reasonable Care, Skill and Diligence and the requirement that the agent act in the Best Interests of the Author.

1. Obedience. The agent is retained by the author to perform particular duties – find a publisher – and the agent is obligated to carry out the author’s reasonable instructions in doing so.

• Some of the author’s instructions will be implied – the agent should use her skill, knowledge and experience in the publishing industry to locate a willing publisher and help negotiate a publishing contract. This is expected and assumed on both sides.

• Other instructions from the author are likely a combination of what is written in the Agency Agreement and verbal instructions – “Let’s accept the $50,000 advance.”

• To be clear, a principal/agent agreement isn’t master/slave or master/servant relationship. Obedience is just a way of saying the author is in charge and the agent is obligated to help the author accomplish the author’s objectives, not the agent’s.

2. Use Reasonable Care, Skill and Diligence. As the agent carries out his responsibilities to the author, he is obligated to do a high quality job. The agent isn’t required to be superman, but he’s supposed to perform his duties at the skill level expected of professional agents. For example, if one of the express or implied duties of the agent is to check royalty statements for accuracy, the agent is obligated to be diligent and careful in doing so.

3. Act in the Best Interests of the Author. The agent is acting in a trusted capacity to assist the author and is not permitted to do anything that will harm the interests of the author. The agent can and will use her business judgment in representing an author, but she must do so in a way that protects the author and is for the author’s short term and long-term benefit.

• After the agent has had a detailed and honest consultation with the author, if the author makes a decision against the advice of the agent, the agent won’t be violating her obligation to act in the author’s best interests if she acts to carry out the author’s decision. In fact, she is honoring her obligation of Obedience.

• An agent must not have any personal interests that conflict with the author’s best interests. For example, if an author were considering contract proposals from two publishers, and one of those publishers offered the agent a separate payment if she was successful in persuading the author to accept that publisher’s proposal, the agent would have a conflict of interest. The agent’s own financial interest might conflict with the author’s best interests. The bribe might influence how the agent advised the author respecting the two competing proposals.

I’ve described root principles. They split, branch and rebranch into more complex areas. As described in the short Best Interests vs. Obedience discussion, obligations can conflict with one another. Agency is worth a couple of classes in law school that teach enough so you can be a baby lawyer supervised by an experienced attorney and learn more.

These principles apply to all sorts of agents – attorneys, real estate agents, stockbrokers, etc. Special rules may govern particular types of agents, but such rules typically expand upon the basic duties of an agent or prescribe how the agent is to deal with specific situations unique to a particular profession. I can’t think of any that violate the core principles of agency described above.

Against this backdrop of duties, we overlay the law of contracts. Generally speaking, two competent adults are free to arrange their business affairs in any legal manner and memorialize those arrangements in a written contract.

If a contract specifically and directly contradicts some aspect of an agent’s general duties summarized above, the contract will probably govern that aspect of the agent/author relationship. However, in interpreting the contract as a whole, a judge will work to fit such non-conforming provisions within the general legal principles of agent duties to an author. If one person is acting on behalf of another, it will be hard to persuade a judge that agency law does not apply.

Some types of contractual terms will not be enforced. For example, if an attorney only represents a client after the client signs a contract that says the attorney will not be liable for legal malpractice under any circumstances, that portion of the contract will not be enforced regardless of how well-drafted. Courts and legislatures have decided such contract terms are unconscionable and/or a violation of public policy.

Why has PG spent time discussing these basic legal principles?

Many observers of the current publishing and indie publishing scene use wild west and frontier metaphors to describe the chaos caused by rapidly-changing technology and its impact on markets, sales channels, pricing and profitability.

One of Passive Guy’s purposes for discussing basic principles of agency law is to make clear that the wild west does not operate in this sphere. Agents may be living in a wild west business climate, but their fundamental obligations to authors have not changed between 1975 and today. Indeed, their obligations have not changed between 1875 and today.

Some parts of some of the literary agency agreements Passive Guy has read turn basic tenets of principal/agent relationships upside down.

In particular, the obligation of a literary agent to follow reasonable instructions of the author is substantially undercut to the point where, in some cases, the agency contract purportedly allows an agent to act contrary to the author’s instructions, violating the fundamental principle of Obedience.

Some agreements between author and agent make it possible, even likely, that the agent will act in ways that will harm the best interests of the author to the agent’s profit instead of protecting the best interests of the author.

During settlement negotiations between another attorney (who was also a friend) and PG several years ago, after PG cited some recent changes the state legislature had made in statutes governing our case, his friend said, “I always work under the philosophy that the old laws are the best laws.”

While PG can find reasons to dislike many old laws, in the case of author/agent relationships, the old laws are the best laws and the old laws are still in force.

The next installment of this series will begin an examination of some clauses in a particularly egregious agency contract.

Penguin reported financial results for the first half of its fiscal year:

Penguin reported lower sales and profits in the first half of 2011 as it adjusted to the “unprecedented challenges” afflicting the publishing sector including the loss of high street booksellers in the US and Australia and the shift to digital.

. . . .

In the company statement, Penguin is reported to have “made a strong and competitive start to 2011 in spite of significant retail disruption in its major markets”. The “significant industry changes” in the period included “a rapid shift towards digital sales channels and digital books and intense pressure on physical book retailers”.

. . . .

In a separate statement, Penguin c.e.o. and chairman John Makinson said: “The past six months have represented a watershed for book publishers and book retailers alike. The rapid penetration of digital devices and content, coupled with the severe pressure on physical booksellers, have presented the whole industry with unprecedented challenges.” He said Penguin had “been able to maintain its sales and further strengthen its margins during these turbulent times”.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Passive Guy missed a great essay from Kristine Kathryn Rusch a couple of days ago.

The topic? Negotiating a publishing contract, something close to PG’s heart.

Excerpts:

First, the rules of negotiation:

1. Know What You Want.

2. Ask.

3. Be Prepared to Walk Away.

4. Stay Calm.

5. Never Reveal Your Entire Hand.

6. Don’t Flip-Flop.

. . . .

Second, the rules of contract negotiation:

1. Expect to Negotiate A Contract.

2. Imagine How the Terms of the Contract Will Impact You Over the Lifetime of the Contract.

3. Focus on What You Want.

4. Make Sure You Have An Equitable Way to Terminate The Contract.

5. Make Sure You Know How You’ll Get Paid or How You Will Make Payments.

6. Control As Much of the Contract As Possible.

7. Once You Both Sign, Negotiation Is Over.

. . . .

You signed the contract.  Your agent didn’t sign it.  You did.  Your agent might have given you advice, but you took that advice. You took that deal, finalized that negotiation, worked with that company. If you got screwed, then that’s your responsibility to make sure it never happens again.  If you had incredible success, then congratulations. That success came from your actions as well.

. . . .

But we are in a brave new world and agents have a serious handicap in modern negotiation: Most agents do not have law degrees.  In the past, we could get away with having a non-lawyer do our negotiating for us. Publishing contracts fell into certain types, and it was pretty easy to know what contract terms meant.  It was also easy to know what to ask for to improve those contract terms.

It is no longer easy, and it takes a legal mind to surf these rough waters.  Your publisher has a lawyer on their team.  You now need a lawyer on yours–even if you have an agent.

. . . .

[L]et’s discuss the places in a publishing contract where you should hold the line.

Those places are:

1. The Rights You Plan To License.

2. The Amount You Will Get Paid For That License.

3. The Number of Books You License in This Contract

4. Future Projects With That Publishing House.

5. The Sunset Clause.

. . . .

2. The Amount You Will Get Paid For That License.

This one’s a tricky proposition. Because advances are going down significantly while the demand for rights has gone up. Most established writers can make more money with self-publishing over the next two years than they can through their publisher.

The difference is that the publisher pays up front, and self-publishing does not.

There are a variety of ways to look at payment. The best way to examine what you’re getting for the rights you license is the value you’ll receive.

Note that I didn’t say the money you will receive. Unless you’re a Times bestseller, you’re probably not going to be paid up front what you are worth, certainly not in these times.

So you need to examine the value of what the publisher offers.

1. Do you need the up front money to continue with your writing career? Can you live on that advance? If so, try to get the publisher to pay you on signing and acceptance of the finished manuscript. (Limit your rewrites in your contract to no more than two.)

2. Can your publisher get your book into markets that you cannot? Are those markets worth going into? A year ago, publishers could easily get your books into brick-and-mortar stores. Now, lots of brick-and-mortar stores are gone or cutting back on their titles. Is it worth losing a large chunk of your income for the opportunity to get into reduced brick-and-mortar market?

3. Does your publisher do quality e-books? I can name three traditional publishers who do not do high quality e-books, trying to drive readers to hardcovers instead. If your publisher does a crappy e-book product and the market is moving to e-book, realize that your readers will blame you for the bad product, not your publisher.

4. Does your publisher do a timely e-book? Right now, one of my traditional publishers is delaying the e-book of my latest release to the consternation of me and my fans. We’re losing sales weekly because the publisher believes that the delay will increase sales of the trade paper. Instead, in this madcap busy world, readers who want the book now will forget that the book exists when the e-edition finally appears six months from now. Each day my traditional publisher delays causes significant lost revenues—and subjects me to confused and angry e-mails.

5. Will your publisher promote your book? I don’t necessarily mean whether or not your publisher will have an ad budget for your book. But is your publisher sending out galleys? Contacting the sales forces of local bookstores? Make sure the book bloggers know about the title? If your publisher isn’t doing any of those things, then you’re not getting value for your dollar.

Here’s how I look at a book advance. If the publisher wants a lot of rights, the publisher must pay for them. With advances declining, it’s less and less likely that a midlist writer can receive a good advance in exchange for the rights she’s licensing.

Link to the rest at Kristine Katherine Rusch

This is a must read.

Passive Guy will add that having a third party negotiate for you or assist in negotiations can make a big difference. That’s one reason why lawyers are involved in so many big business contracts.

The entire preliminary process of reaching the point where two parties, two businesses, etc., want to complete a transaction involves pitching, selling, promoting, conceding, bluffing and a million other techniques. Every deal picks up momentum as it progresses toward a close and people directly involved in generating that momentum become very caught up in getting it done. It’s not easy to move from selling mode to negotiating mode and there’s a serious tendency to concede contract points to sell the deal to conclusion.

This very human tendency is why standard practice in every sales organization with which PG has been involved is to give the sales rep a set of well-marked parameters – You can discount the price up to 10% and no more. You can throw in X and Y extras and that’s it. Beyond that point, you need approval from your boss, the CFO or someone else who isn’t directly involved in the pitching and tap-dancing.

Whoever has approval rights looks at the deal with fresh eyes and is more likely to see the big picture because he/she hasn’t been involved in the 50 steps needed to bring a deal to a point where it’s ready to be closed. This person may be able to say, “If we don’t have to paint our gizmos in different colors, we can make money with a 15% discount. Tell the other side we can deliver everything in red at 15% off, but if they want other colors, 12% is as far as we can go.”

Lawyers make excellent bad guys in the negotiating process. While he was practicing, if PG was advising his client without being directly involved in the negotiating, he would sometimes say, “Blame your lawyer for needing to have X in the contract. You’re a reasonable and cooperative person, but your lawyer says you have to put this in.” From a psychological perspective, this allowed my client to maintain the sympathetic relationship she had built up with the other side and I was the remote bad guy.

Attorneys are not always a magic solution to all negotiation issues, however. Lawyers operating a contingency fee (a percentage of the amount received by a client from a settlement or a trial) can have the same issues literary agents do. If the attorney is running below the revenues his law firm expects from each firm partner and year end is approaching, that attorney may be tempted to settle faster by accepting less than he would if his billings for the year were higher.

While Passive Guy would readily agree a certain percentage of lawyers operating on contingency fees shortchange their clients for some of the same reasons a certain percentage of financially desperate literary agents do, the attorney has the option to take the case to trial and force money out of the other side. Unless there’s a little-known agent thing PG is not aware of, hauling a publisher up in front of a jury to obtain a reasonable advance is not one of the things agents can do.

One other difference is all attorneys operate under strict standards prohibiting conflicts of interest and other types of misdeeds. In the states PG is familiar with, a letter from a dissatisfied client can trigger an ethics investigation. Such an investigation can require the attorney to provide documents, testify before a commission or administrative law judge under oath and engage in a lot of other embarrassing and time-consuming activities.

While PG would not claim ethical rules for attorneys always operate in a perfect manner, every lawyer knows they’re hanging over her head. No lawyer wants to deal with an ethics complaint and that threat has a real effect on attorneys who may think about crossing the line.

Why? Ethics enforcement agencies have the power to disbar attorneys. If you’re disbarred, you get to pay off your law school student loans on the money you make running a milkshake machine at McDonalds.

Without implying all or many agents are crooked, etc., Passive Guy observes that agents have no similar ethical standards backed by ethics enforcement procedures. Nobody can disbar an agent.

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

E.L. Doctorow

Passive Guy has played around with some free (his favorite price) web tools for analyzing what’s happening with his Tweets – @passivevoiceblg for those who haven’t followed yet.

Many thanks to those who have already followed and continue help him prosper with ReTweets and mentions.

Here are the analytic packages PG has found so far.

Twitter Counter

This has cool graphics and does some interpolation of various Twitter trends.

This first graph shows the number of people following Passive Guy on Twitter over the last three months.

“What,” you may ask, “happened at the end of June?”

During that period PG talked about Harlequin, royalty shenanigans by some publishers and his Consulting Agent idea (That’s still a real project. He’s waiting on two more things before it happens). He also received some nice mentions from Dean Wesley Smith, Kris Rusch and Barry Eisler.

However, Passive Guy believes the main change was that he became more conscious of the wording of blog post titles. He has a WordPress plugin (WP to Twitter) that grabs the post title and sends a Tweet when the post is published. He thinks more about what the post title will look like in a Tweet than he did in former days.

If PG can just think of a blog post to go with “Headless Body in Topless Bar!” he’ll be a Twitter King. Twitter fame has to happen this way because Passive Guy is too old to form a boy band.

Here’s the bottom of the Twitter Counter screen which shows PG was off his Twitter game yesterday. The First Commandment of Twitter is “Follow and ye shall be followed.” He didn’t follow very well so he didn’t get followed very well. He likes the predictive panel that says he’ll have 8,000 followers in 69 days if current trends continue. You can watch how PG is doing on the almost real-time counter in the right navigation bar of the blog right below the Email Update box.

TweetReach

PG likes this one because it calculates total impressions, which shows how many people saw how many Tweets. These are rolling numbers for the last 50 Tweets. You have to pay if you want to see more than that.

PG admits he was skeptical about Twitter at first, but 73,000 impressions via Twitter, no matter how fleeting most are, is nothing to sneeze at. For comparison, PG is usually welcoming about 1,000-1200 unique visitors to his blog each day.

TweetEffect

This is the analytics package that makes PG paranoid. It correlates how many people follow or unfollow him with the Tweets he sends out.

This first screen is the overview which shows how PG’s last 185 Tweets did as far as gaining or losing followers. Net negative. Not good.

The second TweetEffect screen shows what happened around specific Tweets.

The biggest loser -5, happened when PG got careless and sent out a Tweet announcing a new blog post without a title. This was the terrific second installment of Courtney Milan’s essay about agent/publishers and their conflicts of interest.

What’s strange is when PG sent out a fixed Tweet including title of the blog post, he gained 5 followers. His working hypothesis is that some of the agents who follow PG clicked on the first mysterious link, got ticked off, decided he was trash and unfollowed him. When the second Tweet appeared, 5 enlightened souls decided such insights were lovely and worth a follow.

As mentioned, this analytics package makes PG paranoid. He tries to convince himself that the correlation between Tweets he sends and unfollows is mostly random churn in his Twitter account, but he’s not sure and he really can’t see a bigger pattern in types and categories of Tweets.

Topsy

Topsy tracks the number of times PG’s most mentioned Tweet gets mentioned by others each day.

So this first graph says (if you hover over July 25) that PG’s Tweet about travel adventure memoirist Pamela J. Olson was mentioned in 24 other Tweets on that date.

Topsy’s UI people need a retread, but this table shows which of the posts by other people that PG tweeted about on Tuesday received how many mentions on Twitter. Courtney was #1 with 25.

The other columns with headings you can’t read talk about Influence, Momentum, Velocity and Peak which are very, very important indicators, but PG hasn’t checked to see exactly what they mean yet. He’s certain you will be a much more conscientious Topsyite than he is.

So, here are links to Twitter Counter, TweetReach, TweetEffect and Topsy.

Passive Guy discovered these by stumbling around the web, so if you have recommendations for Twitter analytics packages, please share in the comments.

Passive Guy was late coming to The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. He half-expected it to be corny but found marvelously graceful writing.

Examples:

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

. . . .

His eyes looked directly at her, and she felt something jump inside. The eyes, the voice, the face, the silver hair, the easy way he moved his body, old ways, disturbing ways, ways that draw you in. Ways that whisper to you in the final moment before sleep comes, when the barriers have fallen. Ways that rearrange the molecular space between male and female, regardless of species.

The generations must roll, and the ways whisper only of that single requirement, nothing more. The power is infinite, the design supremely elegant. The ways are unswerving, their goal is clear. The ways are simple; we have made them seem complicated. Francesca sensed this without knowing she was sensing it, sensed it at the level of her cells. And there began the thing that would change her forever.

. . . .

But the slow street tango had begun. Somewhere it played; he could hear it, an old accordion. It was far back, or far ahead, he couldn’t be sure. Yet it moved toward him steadily. And the sound of it blurred his criteria and funneled down his alternatives toward unity. Inexorably, it did that, until there was nowhere left to go, except toward Francesca Johnson.

. . . .

This is why I’m here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.

. . . .

And she heard his voice coming back down the highway. “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.”

. . . .

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.

. . . .

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can’t blame him for never wanting to live without them again.

. . . .

It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

. . . .

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out but I’m glad I had them.

Military journalist and writer Angela Yuriko Smith blogs as Dandilyon Fluff (there’s a complex intro). She introduces us to a place for authors to gather and talk regardless of where they live – in a virtual world.

Excerpts:

The place is called Book Island, and it’s located in the world of Second Life. There is a virtual cafe where authors and hopefuls congregate. There are regular readings, writer chats and informal schmoozing.

The entire area is dedicated to literature, from Orwell Avenue to Pulitzer Square. For a few dollars a month you can rent a little shop to display your book, all the information about it and links on where to buy it online. You can host readings in your shop whenever you work it out with your fans or have them at The Writer’s Block Cafe & Bar.

 

Link to the rest at Dandilyon Fluff

Angela describes a recent book reading on Second Life:

If a group of geese are a ‘gaggle’ and a bunch of crows are a ‘murder’, than what would you call a bunch of writers hanging out?  A ‘waggle of worders’… or a maybe a  ’scrabble’?

Whatever the official term, that’s what I experienced this morning when I attended a reading by the often hilarious and sometimes spooky Hakeber Haber.  Afterwards we all sat around chatting, and while the subjects ranged from boobs to veteran hippies, they always had a literary undertone.  Seriously, they did.

I can’t remember when I’ve had more fun with a bunch of fellow scribblers.  I’m not a stranger to ‘writer’s associations’ but never have I met such a relaxed and happy group.  Something about sitting in the comfort of my own home and having a good laugh over a cup of my own (better than Starbucks) coffee in my bathrobe made the whole experience deliciously indulgent.

Link to the rest at Dandilyon Fluff

Passive Guy loves stories like this. For those who don’t know about Second Life, it’s a complex online 3D world that’s been around for eight years. Here’s a description from Wikipedia:

 A number of free client programs called Viewers enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another.

According to Wikipedia, Second Life currently has about 20 million user accounts. New York City has a population of 8 million.

When Second Life was first opened, a great many journalists and essayists wrote about what it meant, the replacement of real life (meatspace) with virtual life, virtual economies, virtual relationships, etc. Then the topic dropped below assignment editors’ radar and disappeared from the latest trends section. PG signed up for an account early, explored for an hour or so and hadn’t thought about it for years.

Here’s an explanation from author Alexander M. Zoltai, an early visitor to The Passive Voice, about The Value of a Second Life:

I served a year in a war zone and got a deadly liver virus.

The military gave me a small pension and (hopefully) got rid of the virus.

I live in a studio apartment and have just enough money to pay for food, rent, electric, water, and Internet access.

When I finally got my pension (I had to wait, of course), the back-pay to the date of applying let me buy a computer.

I wrote and published and am promoting a book–total financial outlay, $200.

Part of my promotion is in a virtual world, Second Life. I’ve written about my involvement in a number of posts…

This blog and my time on other blogs and forums cost me nothing extra. Second Life costs me nothing extra.

However, the value I get from my ability to use the Internet is priceless.

There are three discussion sessions I facilitate each week in Second Life–one that explores the issues raised in my book, a writers’ chat, and a readers’ chat.

People from many parts of the World attend these discussions.

I wanted to give you a mere taste of what it can be like talking to folks in a “virtual coffee shop.”

I saved the transcript from a recent session and edited out a section of the conversation. Since folks are typing all these words (they appear over the heads of our virtual bodies), the typos, misspellings, and malformations are really a part of the “verbal” landscape.

I don’t appear in this excerpt because I was participating with my voice and not my keyboard. I’m the facilitator and excluding what I said doesn’t effect the conversation.

Here’s a glimpse into what a pensioned, veteran writer-type guy spends time doing in his apartment…

Link to the conversation at Notes from an Alien

Other than scifi and fantasy authors, many may view this sort of thing as ultimate weirdness.

While PG isn’t contending that everyone needs to sign up for Second Life, he sees Angela and Alexander as storytellers pursuing their craft, connecting with readers and other storytellers.

Instead of talking with people who happen to walk into Barnes & Noble during a book signing or driving to a writers conference, they’re using a venue Cather and Steinbeck could not have imagined to discuss stories and storymaking. Just like a book signing, it’s a mixture of the mundane and interesting.

At the end of the Second World discussion Alexander shares, via their avatars, Bob and Sandy describe the significance of stories:

Bob: We exist in an emotional world. It’s fundamental to being human.

Sandy: My choice…is the strip as much of it away and look at what remains…..I find, time after time, that the opposite occurs in novels…that the one fundamental…is the emotional bone…nothing much further. No matter how you arrange the words….they are there to inject emotion…thas it.