Speakeasy

Returning to the questions raised by the JK Rowling lawsuit thing, another argument that I may have overlooked seems to be whether free material, in the form of free chapters and extracts, e-book downloads, fan paraphernalia, or anything else you find on the internet, impinges on the official sales of an author’s text, or boosts them.

One of the concerns Rowling apparently had about Van Ander’s unofficial encyclopaedia was that it would cannibalise the sales of the official encyclopaedia she intended to release (she was going to donate proceeds to charity). But will it? Or will fans go on to buy her official edition anyway? How popular could an unauthorised lexicon ever have been, especially in competition with her official version? (Link)

It’s almost as if the book industry is finally getting in on the piracy debate. Now that e-books and online texts are more and more available, will we have to deal with pirated books? And are they a bad thing, anyway? This article, which is actually about the circulation of early episodes of Battlestar Galactica, says that a ‘try-before-you-buy’ approach can really work. A lot of publishers have already embraced this, in the form of free sample chapters, and in Neil Gaiman’s case, free e-books. A recent post on Booksquare also asks a few pertinant questions.

Neil maintains an excellent blog, by the way, with a whole thread on copyright issues as he encounters them. And he has several interesting posts on the Rowling case, including one from a lawyer who outlines a few interesting copyright points (apparently, the ‘Fair Use’ clause RDR is attempting to apply to Van Ander’s lexicon only applies to ‘transformative’ works, where the contested product is significantly different to the original).

A lovely article in the LA Times by Michael Chabon, on the nature of entertainment and why it shouldn’t be a dirty word.

The Telegraph’s done a Best Cult Books list. A contentious proposition, the list includes the classics like Slaughterhouse 5, Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow, plus slightly unexpected entries like Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care, and Naomi Wolfe’s Beauty Myth. And of course, the comments on the page are full of ‘But you missed…’ and ‘That’s not a cult book!’

What is a cult book, anyway? The Telegraph puts it as an intangible difference, that just makes them stand apart from the usual bestsellers. They’re often those books that sell by word-of-mouth, or the books that change the way people think, and tap into key characteristics of a generation or subculture. Or maybe they’re just the books you took very seriously when you were 17.

Join Peter Bishop, Creative Director of Varuna: The Writers’ House, and Camilla Noli, author of Still Water and participant in Varuna’s manuscript development programs, on the AWM Forum on at 1pm on Tuesday, 29 April to talk about manuscript development. Ask about the stages a writer goes through, and what organisations like Varuna can offer. Find out exactly how much work goes into bringing a manuscript up to publishing standard.

The son of Vladimir Nabokov has finally announced his decision not to burn the manuscript of his father’s final, unfinished novel.

You might have heard about the controversy late last year. The dying Nabokov asked his son to burn the manuscript, as he didn’t want to publish a work that was not up to the standard of his earlier novels. The son, Dmitri, agreed, but has held off for the past few years, unable to decide between honouring his father’s wishes and giving the world what he says is "the most concentrated distillation of his father’s creativity". Nabokov fans all over the world have been on tenterhooks ever since, waiting to find out whether or not The Original of Laura, currently existing as 50 index cards in a Swiss bank vault, would meet a fiery end, or whether they’d get to read the final work of one of the 20th century’s greatest novelists.

Turns out they get to read it; according to the Guardian, Dmitri had a dream about his father and has decided the role of ‘literary arsonist’ is not for him.

It may have come to your attention that JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, etc, has gotten into some kind of legal stew with a fan. I’ve only been following it peripherally, myself, and I’ve been unable to decide who’s side to come down on, partly because, from the reportage, I haven’t been able to work out exactly what’s going on.

Now, though, I’ve had a bit of a look at the whole thing. The situation as it stands seems to be that a fan, Steven Van Anders, who’s been running an online Harry Potter resource, has hooked up with a publisher called RDR and published a hardcopy lexicon trading on the success of the website. And Rowling and Warner Brothers have taken them to court.

From what I can tell, the major issues in the case are copyright related. Rowling and WB’s lawyers have claimed Van Anders’ book copies Rowling’s work directly, to a degree of up to 90%. In return, RDR’s lawyers are trying for a Fair Usage claim, which allows limited use of copyright material without permission from the copyright holders.

The major issue according to fans and interested members of the public, however, is the question of whether Rowling, as one of the richest women in Britain and clearly in the position of power when it comes to publishing rights, has done herself any favours by suing a small press, and by extension, one of her own fans. On the one hand, she’s well within her rights to litigate against someone who infringes on her copyright. On the other, she comes off looking a wee bit controlling, maybe even tight-fisted.

But the whole situation has generated quite a bit of ill-will and anxiety, with fans wondering whether this lawsuit will open the floodgates for paranoid authors to sue online fansites or fanfiction authors, and what kind of future fandoms will have. There’s a strong argument that the proliferation of fan material, which by definition is often in breach of copyright, can only enhance and strengthen an author’s fanbase, thus boosting the economic value of the work. Rowling is famous for (and because of) her rabid fans, and, let’s face it, she’s been ignoring or even endorsing the massive network of fans, fanfiction, web resources and online artworks that obsessively catalogue and reinvent what is essentially her intellectual property. Perhaps that’s why there’s been a mini-backlash now that she’s finally put her foot down.

It’s hard to know what Van Anders’ intent was (malicious moneymaker, or just a dope?), but what happens in the apparently unlikely event that RDR wins? Will authors who don’t make as much money as Rowling, and who don’t have the weight of the Warner Brothers conglomerate behind them, have to take steps to protect against copyright infringement? Will this then arbitrarily prevent fans from harmlessly copying and reinventing material, thus stunting the author’s potential fanbase?

Booksquare has weighed in on the debate, discussing the merits of suing your readers, and the kind of ill-will and future suppression of fandoms that could potentially come out of it. In the comments on the post, debate continues, with some very interesting points for and against, by readers who have been following the case much closer than me.

Reeeeeeeally interesting interview with Benjamin LeRoy, founder of Bleak House Books, a US publisher of crime and dark literary fiction. Not only does Mr LeRoy talk about books in a way that makes you think he really loves them, he offers a no-holds-barred analysis of what he expects from an author. For example:

As soon as I see awkward prose on page one, I reject a book. You wouldn’t trust a clumsy surgeon with a scalpel. I don’t trust authors who aren’t in complete control of their environment. Sloppy work is sloppy work. Doesn’t matter the profession, I don’t want it.

When I read this, I thought, wow, he’s a hardass. But with the glut of badly-written fiction around, and believe me, there is so much out there, isn’t it refreshing to know there’s someone out there not publishing any old trash? And when I thought about it some more, I wondered why on earth a writer would expect to send ’sloppy work’ to a publisher and expect to get anywhere with it.

If you’re thinking, but writing can be edited, right? I think you need to step back and ask yourself exactly what you’re doing. If you’re sending your stuff out there with the expectation that it’ll be polished up by someone else, think again. Never, ever send out a manuscript you haven’t pored over with a fine tooth comb. You might as well send out your first draft. (And please tell me you haven’t been doing that. NEVER submit a first draft anywhere. First drafts are always awful.)

How do you tell the difference? How do you know if your work is ’sloppy’ and ‘awkward’? Compare and contrast. Read read READ! Read authors you admire, authors other poeple admire. Try to pick apart what’s so good about their writing, but it’s amazing how much you’ll pick up by osmosis. And, worst case scenario, take a refresher course in grammar and punctuation, to make sure your comma usage and sentece structures are being all they can be.

You see, writing is a job. It’s something you have to work at. To excel at it, like in any other job, you have to commit to it, and take professional development courses, and study what’s going on in your field. Sure, it pays a hell of a lot less, and you’ll probably have to work hard, but that’s what it takes.

Well, we’ve finally done it. The data for the tenth edition of The Australian Writer’s Marketplace has just gone to the printers. And not a moment too soon; if there had been one more listing we had to update, we probably would have given up and cried into our Weet-bix. Or beer, depending on the time of day.

It’s a tough job, really. Well, no, not tough. But it’s a little odd phoning up Animals Australia Australian Sporting Shooter one after the other. Or calling Australian Parenting, and then Australian Penthouse. And of course, your boss always looks over just as you’ve Googled Australian Hustler, trying to find their phone number…

But we’re done. Now it all goes to the typesetter, then we get copies to proof and send back again. There’s indexing, layout changes, inserting the advertising. Once, at the eleventh hour, we realised a listing had somehow been duplicated; deleting it meant every page after it changed. I think our poor typesetter nearly had a nervous breakdown that day. Finally, everything goes to the printers, gets bound up in a sexy cover, the AWM staff have a celebratory beer, and it’s all over for another couple of years.

We haven’t made too many changes to this edition, other than the usual updates to somewhere between 50-70% of listings. The cover’s a little different, and we’re mixing the New Zealand/International listings in with everything else (don’t worry, they’ll be indexed). Good news; there seem to be more paying magazine markets than ever. And our sexy new cover certainly is sexy. You saw it here first!

The Telegraph’s 110 Best Books is interesting for the blurbs alone. For example:

Heroine meets hero and hates him. Is charmed by a cad. A family crisis – caused by the cad – is resolved by the hero. The heroine sees him for what he really is and realises (after visiting his enormous house) that she loves him. The plot has been endlessly borrowed, but few authors have written anything as witty or profound as Pride and Prejudice.

Or:

Scarlett O’Hara manipulates her way through the American civil war. This selfish, but gutsy heroine idealises the unattainable Ashley before realising her love for her third husband, Rhett, who dismisses her with, ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn.’ (That’s Gone With The Wind, by the way).

Aside from the descriptions, the list is neatly divided into categories like Classics, Children’s books (Harry Potter, Narnia, His Dark Materials), Science Fiction (Neuromancer, Frankenstein, Brave New World), Crime, Literary Fiction, Romantic Fiction, etc. The ‘Books That Changed The World’ section was interesting as well, featuring influential tomes like Das Kapital and Machiavelli’s The Prince. The Lives section, essentially auto/biography but also Lives of the Artists and Eminent Victorians.

Here. Approaching them, talking to them, exactly what they actually do….