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Fiction and Non-fiction

I finished two books yesterday. (I didn’t start either of them yesterday; the non-fiction title I started a couple months ago, in fact.) The fiction title was Invasion by Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt. It is an alien invasion story, and this one starts with a family in New York trying to get to their bunker near Vail, Colorado. When people learn that some sort of alien spaceships are approaching Earth, society begins to break down and the trip across the country becomes a very dangerous thing indeed.

It, like all of the Realm and Sands guys’ titles, was a fast, decent read. I received the book for free for becoming a member of their mailing list/newsletter. (I have the second to read, also.) There are important themes tossed into the mix, but I never felt that any of them were handled in more than a superficial manner. The characters are interesting but we don’t really learn that much about them, partly because there are five of them (Meyer, Piper, Trevor, Lila and Lila’s boyfriend Raj) traveling from New York, and another (Meyer’s ex-wife Heather) coming from Los Angeles. The point of views shift too often to really get a great feel for any one of them.

I will be reading the second (Contact) sometime relatively soon, but it will have to grab me a bit more than this one did for me to continue reading on in the series.

The second book was called Rosewater, and it is the book that the Jon Stewart film was based upon. It was written by Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-born Canadian journalist for Newsweek who was reporting on the second election of Ahmadinijad (I’m sure I mangled the spelling but you know who I mean) when the Iranian young voters felt that the election was stolen from the rightful winner. Bahari was jailed and this book is the story of his imprisonment and his treatment while in Evin, a well-known political prison in Iran.

The book was a depressing read, even though you know that Bahari survived the ordeal. His despair comes through in the narrative, as does the cruelty and callousness of his jailers and torturers, especially the one that Bahari refers to as Rosewater (because of the scent he wears every day — that is how Bahari recognizes him at first). I kept putting it down, because frankly, I didn’t need more things depressing me than I already had. But I’m relieved to have finished it. It shines a bit of light on the Iranian theocracy and its strong-man tactics to control its populace, and I think it is important that people read it and understand more about the majority of Iranians, and also about Islam as it is believed by the vast majority (in Iran and in other parts of the world as well) and how it is used as a tool for brainwashing and control. I didn’t see the movie, and probably won’t, so I can’t comment if Stewart’s adaptation is faithful to Bahari’s narrative or if he goes his own way (politically or dramatically) in the film.

So I’m going to tackle one from the TBR pile, and start Jeffrey Deaver’s Garden of Beasts today. If it doesn’t depress me too much, I’ll plow through it and move on to something else, maybe Kellerman’s Killer or King’s Revival.

*****

FLASHBACK by Dan Simmons

My first exposure to Dan Simmons’ novels came through the horror genre — Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night were two excellent novels that seemed, to me, to be very original takes on themes found in the genre. I followed those readings with his work in a different genre — science fiction — by reading his works Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. Those reads blew me away, and I kept going, reading more SF, horror and mystery. Everything was enjoyable.

When I saw that Simmons had written a dystopian novel titled Flashback, I had to give it a try. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the blurb told me that the United States is in a state of collapse and that 85% of its population are using a strange drug called Flashback, which allows them to enter a dream-like state where they can relive moments of their lives of their choosing. That sounds like a pretty cool premise to start with. Follow that with a former police officer, Nick Bottom, who lost his job after the death of his wife, and has now lost his son as well because of his addiction to this drug.

Nick is hired by a Japanese businessman who is serving as one of the US Government’s “Advisors” to investigate the murder of his son. It’s a crime that Nick investigated as a police officer, and he knows that nothing much is going to happen, but he figures he can milk it for a good payday, which will assure him of a supply of his drug. But there’s more going on, and Nick actually does make progress; actually is motivated to solve the crime.

The story is about Nick’s investigation and discoveries, as the world around him is revealed to him (with more clarity for him) and to us readers (for the first time). There is a value in considering this potential future as Simmons foresees it. So much politics is there, so much of the rhetoric we are hearing today is extrapolated forward to come up with the pessimistic future that is depicted here. Do I see it happening? Not at all. But I think it’s worth considering so that we can think about the worst case scenarios as depicted by the Tea Party and conservatives every day today.

So what did I really like about this book? Well, it’s a good story. The trouble comes from being too close to events referred to in this book as sorts of “trigger events” and seeing them from a different perspective. The book looks back at Obama’s elections, the federal debt, entitlements, the lack of military response, the way the administration is dealing with Iran, etc etc, and depicts them as the first steps in becoming the society that the book describes. I look at those same things and don’t see things the same. I look at Simmons’ depiction of Islam and Arabs and Iranians (notice I separate the two — Iranians are not Arabs, racially) and see fear primarily informing the story’s (and I’m assuming, HIS) view of them. I look at his depiction of Israelis as victims who have no responsibility for their own fate in this story, and I find myself disagreeing.

In the context of this story, of this world, however, these things all work really well. They set the table for an engrossing tale where the Japanese are looked at as a stable and sensible race with the proper goals — except for maybe it’s not exactly as it looks. I liked the idea of a “g bear” kinetic energy weapon fired from satellites in space. (The weapon’s name is a nod to the SF writer who imagined such a weapon.) I liked the way drones are incorporated into the story. I also thought that some of the video technology was imaginative and plausible.

I”ll point to some reviews of this book that focus more on the politics:

Amazing Stories Review

Science Fiction World Review

Goodreads Reviews

SF Signal Review

Some of them are pretty negative; they cannot seem to separate the politics from the novel. I found that I was able to do that, and I found FLASHBACK to be a pretty good dystopian story. Dan Simmons set out to write a dystopian piece, and he did so from his own perspective. I thought it worked.

*****

Who’s my competition?

Chuck Wendig wrote a blog article called “100 Random Storytelling Thoughts and Tips” in which he lists…you guessed it…one hundred thoughts on how to write a good story, or make the story you are writing better.

One struck me as I read it, not because it had anything to do with writing. Here it is:

35. There’s always something else for the reader to be doing. You are not competing against other writers or other books, but you are competing against the infinity of options open to your audience: games, toys, social media, sex, sex toys, sex games, corn murder, bee wrangling, monkey punching, gambling, sex gambling, exotic drugs created from household cleaners, falcon training, sex falcon training. Treat your reader as exalted. They have given you money and time. Do not punish them for their choice.

Yeah, Chuck’s writing style in his blog is a little…silly at times. Remember, this is written for his audience. Not mine, or not just anyone. But his point seems to be one we forget often. Other books are not our competition. Choices for entertainment other than reading books ARE our competition. All of our competition. If you write, you are in competition with all the things Chuck listed. (Okay, probably not those things. But certainly we’re in competition with Netflix, with Wii and X-box and PS4, with computer games and websites, with someone’s smartphone or iPad, or any number of other things.)

The point is that reading good books is something we writers all want to do (or we wouldn’t be writing) and something we writers want all of our readers doing. If today that good book is by me, great! Better than great! But if today you’re reading something by another writer of horror, or mystery or SF/Fantasy or thrillers, and it’s a good story, that’s great too! (Just not as great as if you were reading that good book by ME!)

When I read a good book, it triggers something in me…I usually want to read MORE good books, MORE good stories, of the sort I just read, maybe, but maybe something else…the important point, and the relevant point, is that it is a good story and I want MORE! So I’m thrilled to tell someone about a great book I’ve read, an interesting and/or thought-provoking story, an inspirational tale. I find those often in SF stories, in thrillers, and even in horror, which I believe focuses so much on the characters and the settings, which are two things I love to see come alive.

No, as a writer, I’m not in competition with other writers. We all have the same self-interested goal of promoting reading in others, and so much the better if it is in readers who love the kinds of stories that we tell.

Why did this hit home with me? Because I’ve been sitting at home reading Flashback by Dan Simmons, and my kids are on YouTube watching videos about games that they play. Meanwhile there are good books just laying there that I thought they wanted to read. But they aren’t. I’d prefer they read, but they’re old enough to take my strong suggestion that they read instead of watching (and my criticism of the stupidity of watching videos about video games) and chuck it out the window. They work very hard during their school year (dare I say harder than I work at my job?) and right now they’re both working hard, with long days, in band camps. So they can ultimately do what they want with their limited leisure time, at least to a degree. But it doesn’t stop me from being dismayed.

Orson Scott Card, David Price, and and dozens, no, hundreds, of authors are in competition with YouTube for their leisure time. They’re not in competition with me as an indie author, or with each other as traditional published authors.

We all need to do what we can to promote reading, and we shouldn’t worry about whether we’re in competition with each other. Because we’re not. No way.

*****

Two SF Novels: MORE THAN HUMAN and TIME HOLE

I read two hard SF novels back-to-back, which is something I haven’t done in a while. (Read two hard SF novels in a row, that is…) The first was TIME HOLE by Mit Sandru. (I received this book as a gift!) The second was MORE THAN HUMAN: THE MENSA CONTAGION by Steven M. Moore. (I received this book as a gift as well!) The books have similarities, although they tell very different stories in terms of subject matter and scope.

TIME HOLE tells the story of an odd discovery on the Moon, where international teams are working at mining and exploratory operations. A piece of equipment breaks down and a pair of generalists, DeeDee and Arno, are sent to drive the new equipment to the outpost. On their way they encounter a large crater…but this crater isn’t made by a meteor impact, and it had not been noted before along this road.

When Arno falls in, DeeDee uses the truck’s winch to pull both of them back to safety, and they make a startling discovery. They aren’t on the same moon that they were on a few minutes ago. Or, perhaps it’s the same moon, but where in time are they? Things are much different.

This short novella (47 pages, according to Amazon**) read a little longer than this. It told a lot of story in those pages, and I came to really care about the two main characters as they tried to get back to their own reality, then find themselves “out of phase” and basically invisible as they return to their base and solve a mystery of what caused the huge time hole on the Moon.

(** ETA: The author pointed out that it is 119 pages, not 47, and now Amazon reflects this length. I thought that it seemed a lot longer than 47 pages and was wondering why Amazon said it, but I took them at their word when I looked…)

This is smart science fiction, that requires the reader to think as he reads, and that works around some more advanced scientific concepts. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and if I have a criticism, it is that the first chapter seemed a little dry, too expository perhaps. Once the characters are introduced, the story kicks into a higher gear and it became a very good read. The writing is very good, and it was a clean ebook, few errors in terms of things to be caught by a proofreader. (I don’t really remember seeing any.) I liked the cover, too. Intriguing image.

The second book, MORE THAN HUMAN: THE MENSA CONTAGION, promised to be really good and right in my wheelhouse in terms of describing an apocalyptic-type event (disease, one of the standard cataclysms that affect humanity in that sort of book). But It became a lot more than that. It became a far-reaching “history” ala Dr. Asimov and his FOUNDATION/EMPIRE future history.

In this story, a meteroid strikes Earth in South Africa, and it carries something with it: a virus. It is quickly determined that the virus is a.) bioengineered, and b.) deliberately aimed at Earth. The story starts with an airline cleaning crew finding a dead body with green sludge oozing from his orifices. The CDC and the government quickly act to lock down the passengers and crew and anyone associated with the plane, but of course, it’s not enough and the virus gets out. Others die before the virus mutates — again and again — into something more benign and even beneficial, perhaps.

The virus wakes up the world to the possibility that there is something more out there — and the second part of the book deals with man’s colonization of Mars as a response to a perceived threat by aliens who would target the planet with a virus, even if the virus is meant as a gift. The third part of the book deals with the discovery of the aliens’ ship found in the vicinity of Saturn, and the resulting recurrent xenophobia brought on by humanity’s first contact with life from somewhere other than Earth.

A lot of packed into the 231 pages of Moore’s novel, which begins to read like a series of short vignettes rather than a continuous story; this style is made necessary by the many jumps in time between significant events. I was reminded of Heinlein stories as far as the flow and pacing of this story. With its cast of hundreds (it seemed; I really didn’t count them), this was a novel with an incredibly broad scope and a quite optimistic, if realistic, take on the future of humanity.

As always, this is a well-written and well constructed SF tale, again with a pretty clean job of copyediting and formatting. Steven M. Moore has something like twenty novels out there, and while I can’t rank this as his best, it’s right up there. (As an aside — when you’ve read a lot by a particular author, you can’t help “grading” them against their own output, or at least I can’t. For example, when I read a Stephen King novel, I often think it’s only a “B” effort, but that’s because I’m judging it against King’s best works and not against “all” books. If that same book had been written by a different, new (to me) author, I might give it an “A”, if that makes sense. I think I’m doing that with Steve Moore’s works now. There have been several that I’ve liked so much that other good stories might suffer a bit in comparison to those.)

In conclusion, I’d say that these are both worthwhile reads for anyone who likes their SF to be of the “hard” variety. I’d grade them both as “A”.

Happy reading!

*****

Why I write – a flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig

I often read Chuck Wendig’s TerribleMinds blog: I find it to be informative and always entertaining, and the comments are often fun as well. So when I saw a “flash fiction” challenge that didn’t involve flash fiction, in his post titled “Today’s Flash Fiction Writing Challenge Is Not About Fiction,” I thought, why not? Let me give it a try!

It’s not really a question I’ve often asked myself. The short answer, I suppose, is that I really enjoy it. Why do I play piano or guitar? Because I enjoy it. I’m good enough on both to play in, like, amateur bands and such, with an occasional appearance on a CD or something, but I’m not massively talented on either one. Plus, I don’t put in the work to take full advantage of the talent I do have. I was, at one point in my life, able to supplement my income by playing music. Not by much, but still…

So I write for the same reason. I like to write. I think I do it well. I’m no Stephen King, but I think I’m as good as a lot of people writing fiction today. I know what I like when I read, and I try to write those same things, in that same style. Why do I think I can do it well enough to publish stories? For the same reason that I was able to take the stage in front of a house full of bar patrons or wedding guests and feel comfortable playing a rip-roaring solo on a rock and roll tune on piano.

There’s a longer answer. When I read some of the other entries to Chuck’s challenge, I noticed that mostly, they had deeper thoughts on this issue. So I thought, there must be a deeper reason for me as well. And I thought about it some more, and came up with some other stuff.

I’ve been writing since I was in grade school. I watched a Disney episode on some wild animal or another, with the folksy narrator who personified the cute little bugger, and I wrote my own story in the same vain, about a bobcat in New York. I read some non-fiction about Native Americans and the trains that traveled through the plains with the passengers shooting cows, er, ah, bison who were meandering on the prairies, minding their own business and munching away. Then I wrote a short story about something like that. I loved baseball as a kid, and made up my own fictional team (The Joliet Argonauts) and wrote three long-ish stories that detailed their championship run. (My teacher told me that I might have a future as a sportscaster or a sports journalist.) My friends and I had a snowball fight and I fictionalized that.

I always wanted to describe the world the way I thought it should be, or maybe the way I wanted it to be. So I wrote. When I read stories by Heinlein, by Asimov, by Clarke, then later by King, Koontz, McCammon and so many others, I saw worlds that inspired me to think about my own worlds…and it seemed natural to write about those worlds. Even more, I saw characters that drew me in, that made me feel like I knew them. And I pictured my own characters, and again, it seemed natural to put them into situations.

These situations are called stories, and I write them for the same reason I read a lot – because I want to see what happens to these characters as they explore these worlds.

That’s my own story, and I’m sticking to it.

*****

What I’ve been reading – Kindle edition

I’ve had some good reads lately. I’ve been reading more and more on my Kindle, just because it’s so darned convenient. I have tons of books by the likes of Stephen King, Jeffrey Deaver, Michael Connelly, CJ Box, Robert Crais and others on my stacks, sitting there unread, but since I’ve been reading when I’m in bed after lights out or in situations where I don’t have great lighting, the Kindle’s been the go-to source of stories.

Anyway, here’s a few things I’ve been reading recently. I’m not going to make too many comments, just say whether I liked them or not.

DON’T LEAVE ME, James Scott Bell. Liked it a lot. Four to five stars.
SEASICK, Iain Rob Wright. Good horror story, set at sea. 4 to 5 stars.
UNDER THE EMPYREAN SKY, Chuck Wendig. Neat fantasy set in a cool world. A little slow on the uptake. 4 stars.
SLOW BURN 6: BLEED, Bobby Adair. Zombie fiction, pretty good, lots of action. 4 stars
SLOW BURN 7: CITY OF STIN, Bobby Adair. Zombie fiction, sorta slow with not as much happeniing. 3.5 stars
VLAD V: VAMPIRE, Mit Sandru. A relatively short introductory novel, good enough that I want to read more. 4 to 5 stars
COLD MOON, Alexandra Sokoloff. Satisfying third book in a series. Very fun and tense read. 5 stars
HEART OF STONE, H. Lynn Keith. Very good thriller with SF elements and interesting characters. 5 stars.
SPOOKED, Tracy Sharp. Good horror story with great pacing and characters. 4 to 5 stars.
INTRUDERS: THE INVASION, Tracy Sharp. Another zombie story, but this one has aliens as well. Great first book in a series. Looking forward to the rest. 5 stars.

That’s enough for now. Interestingly, all of the above are indie authors. Something there for everyone!!!

On the docket: VLAD V: THE DEATH OF A VAMPIRE RIP by Mit Sandru, I, LAWYER FRAT PARTY by John Ellsworth, MORE THAN HUMAN: THE MENSA CONTAGION by Steven M. Moore, TIME HOLE by Mit Sandru, INVASION and CONTACT by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant.

Have a great day!

*****

ODD MAN OUT Promotion

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision – I decided to give away ODD MAN OUT, a short story pair that featured the title tale (about 1600 words) and a second short story called THE HOUSE AT THE BEND IN THE ROAD (about 1800 words).

Of all my works, I like this cover the best. It looks professionally done, because it was. I have a good friend, Rich Siegle, who did the cover for me (gratis), and he does book covers for small publisher Poison Pen Press in Scottsdale, Arizona. I paired these two stories because, well, they seemed to go together. Originally I had paired SOLE OCCUPANT and ODD MAN OUT because I liked them about the best of all my short stories, but I ended up using this pairing because it kept the word counts between the two ebooks about the same.

ODD MAN OUT is also found in the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. The short story pair costs $0.99 on Amazon, because that is the lowest price Amazon will let you set for something. I lowered the collection to $0.99 also, because I hoped to move some titles.

I decided to give this short story away because I thought if someone liked enough, they might be inspired to buy the collection which contains both of these and twelve other stories (including the aforementioned SOLE OCCUPANT).

I also started to expand this short story into a longer work. Hoping that I can get 20 or 30 thousand words out of it. It struck me as I read it that there was a lot more story to tell. So we’ll see what comes out of that project. I haven’t been putting much time into writing on this story recently; there’s been a LOT going on with my family, but I think things might start to wind down now.

The other reason I haven’t been writing it is because I spent some time finishing up the collaboration between my son Kevin and me. It’s part of a series, and we completed Book 1 and got a fair start on Book 2. Book 1 is about 77000 words, so it’s a full length novel. Believe it or not, it started life as Harry Potter/SwordArt Online crossover fan fiction written by my son. I saw some potential in it and decided to write it with a more original slant.

So, maybe I will get some things written before summer runs out of time. We’ll see.

Oh, yeah. The point of this post was that I did a giveaway with ODD MAN OUT. The giveaway ran three days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). I only announced it on Facebook. I gave away 35 copies of the short story in that time frame. (Well, 36, but one was downloaded by me for free in an attempt to boost the number by one.)

I guess that’s 35 people who never heard of me before, because I doubt I had anyone from my Facebook announcement get it. Okay, perhaps there were four or five downloads because of that announcement. I can’t say for sure. We’ll see if anyone grabs the collection in the next week or so. Even one or two downloads would be great!

So, did it do what I hoped? No…it made it to #10 on a “Ghosts and Haunted Houses” list on Amazon, but it certainly didn’t amount to much in the sense of sheer downloads. But it’s just one of those things.

Have a great week.

*****

Going all-in on KDP Select…

Yesterday I was reading blog entries on The Passive Voice, on Joe Konrath’s blog and some Hugh Howey thoughts, and I thought, “Wow! Why am I not in KDP Select?”

So why wasn’t I?

I put my short stories in KDP Select when I wanted to give some of them away several months ago. But I never put my longer collections and my novella into it. My reasoning was that I was going to move to publish the works with other platforms, like B&N, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. I was thinking that maybe Draft2Digital was the way to go, but I wasn’t sure.

I never did any of that. Honestly, I can’t see myself putting in the work to do so at this time. Maybe if I was seeing income worth talking about, I could justify putting in the time. But right now, I can’t.

So, I placed everything into KDP Select. My novella, THE CAVE, costs $0.99 to buy, but can be borrowed in Kindle Unlimited or through Prime. My short story collections, DIE 6, 14 DARK WINDOWS, and THE STRIKER FILES, are all currently priced at $0.99, and all can be borrowed via KU or through Prime. And my four short stories (all of which are found in 14 DARK WINDOWS as well), are also priced at $0.99, and all are part of KU and Prime.

Here’s what one reviewer said about my short story ODD MAN OUT:

A pair of creepy tales, well written if on the short side. Worth a read, especially via Kindle Unlimited. I’ll be checking out the collection that includes these. EC, Amazon review.

Another review about the same says:

The book is two short word pictures of atmospheric horror. They both nicely evoke a feeling of creepy dread, and in the case of the House At the Bend In the Road, mystery. Worth a read! Scott R. Turner, Amazon review.

(ODD MAN OUT is available as a standalone short story or as part of the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS.)

Anyway, there it is. I’m all in on KDP Select for now. Grab ’em or borrow them. They’re not pricey. I think they’re good reads, but of course I would think that, since I wrote them. But a few others think the same. Don’t let others do your thinking for you; check them out yourself…

*****

Subscription services for ebooks – some thoughts

When I started practicing dentistry almost 30 years ago, I became involved in a reimbursement plan called “Capitation.” It was “insurance” where families or individuals paid a set fee every month, then the company took a percentage of that fee and passed the rest on to me. Their advertising to patients stated that they ‘covered’ 100% of every dental procedure known to man.

When I first started with them, I was actually getting checks for a little more than what I would have billed for services on capitation patients that month. But very soon that corrected itself and I was getting less than what I would have billed, by about 20%. Then another provider quit and I got a large influx of new patients. I started making more money, but very soon I was doing way more work than I was getting paid for. It got to the point where I was getting only 40-50% of the work I was doing.

So I quit.

The future of bookselling, says Joe Konrath among others, is in subscription services. No one says that books will not still be purchased, but what Joe says, if I’m understanding him correctly, is that for many readers, especially avid readers, there will be a significant economic incentive to borrow books via a service like Scribd or Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited rather than purchasing the titles.

I can certainly see how he comes up with that view. It’s exactly what happened with my capitation participation. As the subscribers to the plan figured out that they could get an unlimited amount of dentistry done for one set monthly fee, and perhaps just as importantly, that there was a new young dentist out there who would do the dentistry they needed (and do a good job of it), they flocked in to use their “insurance.” Very few of them understood what they were paying for. As far as they knew, they were paying an insurance premium and I was getting paid by the insurance company for work done as I did it. (That IS the situation with fee-for-service insurance, which is capped at one to two thousand dollars per year but pays me for the services I perform on patients.) Capitation was a great plan for the patients – as long as there was a provider willing to do dentistry for the amount of money he was receiving.

So, there are three distinct entities involved in systems like this. One is the reader. She is analogous to the patient in my capitation situation. She wants stories to read, and a subscription service would seem to give them to her. How many stories she reads in a month? It’s limited only by her speed of reading and the time she has available for reading.

The second is the author. She would be analogous to the provider, who, in my case, is the dentist. She produces stories for the reader to read. How many stories can the author provide? Well, again, it depends on the speed of the author (ie, how fast she can write) and the amount of time she has to actually write stories. It’s limited by both of those two things, just as in a dental practice. In my case, I was limited by the number of appointments I had available for everyone, not just the capitation patients. I was also limited by how long I took to perform a specific procedure. Root canals took longer than fillings and cleanings. Dentures took more appointments. I was also limited by my own costs. I suppose an author is limited by the costs of editing, proofreading, cover, formatting, etc etc. In other words, in both situations there would seem to be a floor as to reimbursement. Reimbursement needs to cover the costs of doing business.

The third is the “Company.” In my case the company was one that provided capitation-style “insurance” to various employers so they could provide reasonably priced dental plans to their employees. In an author’s case, the companies are Scribd and Oyster and Amazon. The company has to balance the amount of money coming in with the amount of money going out in such a way that it covers its cost of administering the plan (in the dental example) or delivering, storing and providing some promotion for the ebooks in the lending service (Scribd, Oyster and Amazon). Oh, and it needs to make a little profit. (Costs would include the salaries of everyone involved in the process of acting as the middleman.)

In the case of Scribd, it seems that they were paying authors for borrows as if the books were purchased. Voracious readers were reading a LOT, apparently, and Scribd was responsible for paying the authors as if those readers were purchasing every book. (Almost sounds like a fee-for-service dental plan.) Authors were paid per unit read, full price for the book. Readers were paying a flat fee (something like $8.99 a month?) to access as many books as they wanted to.

In Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, Amazon collects a flat fee ($9.99 a month) from subscribers, and allows them to borrow ten books simultaneously. It then takes their subscription fees and puts them into a pool (minus whatever costs they feel they need to withhold to cover their operating costs and whatever profit they want to make), and from that pool it reimburses the authors whose books were borrowed. (I think I understand this correctly.) Amazon was paying authors if a reader read 10% of their book, which was great for short stories (my own shorts were in there, but I think I only had one or two Kindle borrows), not quite as good for authors of novels and such. Now they have switched it so that writers will be paid by the actual pages read of their works. I take this to mean that if someone writes a ten page short story and a reader finishes it, that writer is paid the same as an author who writes a 300 page novel and a reader only reads the first ten pages of it. (Seems relatively fair on the face of it.)

So, if everything is golden, why did Scribd remove a bunch of romance novels from their service? Apparently they did this because romance readers are reading them right into the poor house. They’re reimbursing every author full price for the books borrowed. If a reader is paying $8.99 for a month’s subscription, it’s easy math to see that they can read three books priced at $2.99 before the company starts taking it on the chin. Not just no profit, but real financial losses.

I think this is illustrative of the pitfalls of this sort of model. Because when you look at Scribd’s options, you see that there aren’t too many. First, they could raise subscription fees. Mark Coker suggested that perhaps there should be a tiered plan, with a basic level that allows a certain number of borrows per month, and maybe an unlimited plan for more money that allows as many borrows as the reader can read. Any increase in costs up front to the reader will likely lead to less subscribers. For some it would be a good deal at a much higher fee, but for others it would perhaps tip the scales in the other direction.

Second, they could pay authors less. This is sort of what Amazon’s KU does. There is a fixed pool of money, funded (I assume) in large part by subscription fees. The pool is divided by the total number of pages read by subscribers, and the authors are paid by pages read. In general, this model will reimburse authors by some amount that is probably less than the amount they would receive had all the borrowed books been purchased by readers. I can’t say this with 100% certainty, but the math seems to make sense, especially if we’re talking about books that are reimbursed at 70%. (At 35%, the math tips in the other direction. All of my books are currently priced at $0.99, so I don’t make much per purchase.) But they run the risk of having authors pull their books out of the program if they aren’t making enough money for their efforts.

Third, the company could simply take losses and hope that the subscription dollars grow as more people subscribe, and hope that not all of them are voracious readers who consume many more books than they are realistically paying for. They run the risk of losing money and putting themselves right out of business, unless they’re a company like Amazon.

In my capitation case, the company who administered the plan had very little, if any, risk. Their biggest concern was in getting a provider who would adequately care for their subscribers. I know that one of the problems when I was doing it was that when I got that influx of patients due to another provider dropping out of the system, I found that they all needed a bunch of dental work. The other dentist wasn’t doing much of anything. Cleanings, a few fillings, and not much more. He was coasting – sitting back, collecting checks and not doing the work because he wasn’t treatment planning it. Many of them needed crowns and partial dentures, and I was doing them, one after another. I had to ration out the care, because I simply couldn’t afford to do it all in one month. I wasn’t being paid for it. Also, I had to ration out chair time. I couldn’t allow more than a certain number of patients with that plan per week, because I had other, paying patients who I needed to work on in order to keep the business running at that time. The theory was that once I got a patient or a family completed, they would not need much work in the future, and I could collect their capitation fee without providing much value in the way of services. In practice, many of the patients dropped the coverage once they got their crowns and partials, and there was no way to force them to continue to pay for it.

Some of this has implications for subscription services, some of it is unique to dentistry. The thing with ebooks is that there are tons of providers (authors) and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books out there. It isn’t a single author being forced to write stories for the masses for virtually nothing. But in another sense, that just means that the pot (the subscriber fees) has to be divided in a lot more parts before being distributed to the providers.

There is a delicate balance here that is going to be very difficult for a company to negotiate successfully. Amazon is experimenting with the way they reimburse authors, and they have the size and the ability to spend money in an attempt to figure out a way to do this right, to find that perfect balancing spot.

There’s more to be said on this issue, but this has gone on long enough today. If anyone reads this and has any thoughts, please jot them down in the comments! Thanks!

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What is “Science Fiction?”

I was touring blogs over my lunch hour here at the office, and came across this interesting selection on The Passive Voice, titled Rockets, Robots, and Reckless Imagination. It’s an article about science fiction in Pakistan and how popularizing it as a genre might benefit the country down the road, and why the author believes this to be true. I liked the article, but as is often the case, the comments to the article are very thought provoking.

So I started thinking about what Science Fiction was, to me. Sometimes I think it’s one of those “I know it when I see it” types of things. I read a novel or a short story and I know if its SF or something else.

I believe there are two different things in play. First, there are the trappings of SF. Think Star Wars. Think Buck Rogers. Think Star Trek, even. Put futuristic weapons in a story, set it on a different planet, at some point in the future, and some people will box it up and call it “Science Fiction.” Is it? Hardly, in my view.

Star Wars has a lot of SF trappings in it. There are space ships, robots, laser weapons, interplanetary travel, and aliens in that universe. Another example is a Stephen King short story called “The Jaunt.” Have you read it? It deals with a way to travel between two distant points instantaneously. It’s sort of like warp drive or teleporting in the Star Trek universe. Is it science fiction? I say it’s not. The only point of the wormhole, or whatever it is that allows them to travel between the two points, is to create a real horror story. It uses a science fiction device to tell a frightening tale.

Instead, I believe that it is the second thing that makes something a science fiction story, and that thing is “idea.” Good science fiction explores ideas, extrapolates them into the future and tells a story within the framework of that idea. Can dystopian fiction be science fiction? I believe it can be. Can post-apocalyptic fiction be SF? Again, my answer would be “yes.” But SF can be many things. Sometimes it’s a mystery or a thriller, set in the future and using ideas about the future at its core. (I’m thinking of some of Asimov’s robot stories, and also of the fiction of Steven M. Moore.) Sometimes it is more straightforward, focusing on the effects, near-term or far-flung, of some important scientific discovery that is within the realm of possibility, however improbable.

You can’t just throw out a handful of SF trappings and make something “science fiction.” Those trappings have to be integral to the story. As has been said in many places and many times, Star Wars could have been set in the old West (and in fact, may have been set in imperial Japan?) and the story would be the same. You could replace the lasers with revolvers or swords, you could replace the robots with people, and you could replace the spaceships with horses or trains or whatever, and you’d have essentially the same story.

Take a science fiction story and replace the “trappings” of SF in it, and you won’t have the same story. You likely won’t even have a story.

To me, SF takes an idea, maybe from today, and extrapolates it in some way, shape or form. It may or may not have robots, lasers, and space ships, but it will have an idea that has become integral to the story.

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The comments at TPV talk about religion versus science, and one poster (Antares) points out that for most of us, science has an element of faith in it. We put faith in a scientist or a teacher or a research paper and accept its pronouncements as truth, much the same way that we accept the pronouncements of a church or a religion as true. He mentions that few of us have actually done the work to “see” that DNA is a double helix, but we accept that it is based on the assertions of scientists and observers. I found this interesting. Something about it seems short-sighted, but I can’t figure out exactly what it is. Anyone have any thoughts?

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