Fractals of Change

Amazon Shorts

Update! “The Interpreter’s Tale is now available for download from Amazon Shorts.  A short preview is here.

Today an email came saying that my long story (or short novel) “The Interpreter’s Tale” has been accepted into the Amazon Shorts program. The Shorts are “are never-before-seen short works from a wide variety of well-known authors, available only on Amazon.com.”  They are only distributed electronically although you are welcome to print them.  And they all sell for $.49.

Since I self-published my first novel, hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble, it drew neither acceptance (nor rejection) letters. An acceptance letter turns out to be more gratifying than I would have thought, quite possibly because I’m the son of two oft-published writers and the spirits of our house ebbed and flowed with acceptance and rejection letters not to mention that we ate (or didn’t) based on royalties.

Authors get a whopping 40% royalty for Shorts; much more than the standard 6% my parents got.  But, of course, their books sold for a lot more than $.49. This is most likely not a road to riches but it is two different experiments for me.

The author experiment is the open-ended question: what can fiction look like if we don’t worry about the printed media called books and magazines?  Can we find new, interesting ways to tell a story?  This is a continuation of  the experiment that started with publishing hackoff.com as a blook.

In the old days of non-electronic distribution, there was usually a clear line between short stories, which had to fit in magazines, and novels, which had to fill the form factor of a book.  A very well-know author could stretch this some with a novella or a long short story serialized but generally the story had to fit the medium it was distributed in.

I have a story to tell in bits and pieces, a mosaic of little mysteries that may knit into the tapestry of an adventure.  Some pieces are long like hackoff.com; some are much shorter like “The Interpreter’s Tale”.  All are likely to contain links to online pictures, maps, and who knows what else.  I am writing for the electronic editions, not paper, although I know from experience with hackoff.com that many of you will choose to print and read.  One of the things I like about the Amazon Shorts program is that you retain the right to view or download the electronic edition forever.   Even if you read primarily paper, you can go back and click through any links that you want to follow.

As a web guy, I’m interested in distribution and how content creators connect with content consumers.  How do content creators make a living meeting the need of content consumers?  Part of the answer is that prices go down because a lot of middlemen disappear and much of the physical cost of distribution goes down.  But another part of the answer has to be some sort of marketplace or substitute for a marketplace where sellers find their buyers and vice versa.

My experience with hackoff.com was that about ten to twenty thousand readers read all or a substantial part of the blook online or listed to the podcasts (all free).  These readers found the blook mainly by word of blog and a small amount of planned promotion.  However, this online interest did NOT make the eventual hardcover edition a hit by any means.  It still sells; people still read the online version.  But there is no efficient way to promote either of them in isolation and I don’t have a list of other books to sell along with them.  Thanks to traditional Amazon, however, the book isn’t doomed to disappear and become inaccessible.

Amazon Shorts and other forms of electronic distribution like Mobipocket.com, which I’m also experimenting with, may be part of the answer.  They are places where people who like to read go (don’t know how many).  The fact that content costs money through these channels means that the channel has a reason to promote.  I suspect that channel promotion will remain important to authors – even those authors who don’t need to make a direct living from their books.

Speaking of promotion: I’m only going to tell you a tiny bit about “The Interpreter’s Tale” now.  It takes place in Barcelona; Dom Montain, super-hacker from the last novel, is back;  Larry Lazard, who died in the last novel, is not; there are no stock brokers or IPOs in the story.  Mary says I’m not allowed to say more until there is an Amazon Shorts URL for the story to link to; you know, that call to action thing.

Anonymous Cowards and Infamous Scribblers

Tim O’Reilly has proposed a code of conduct for bloggers and suggested they badge their websites according to whether they agree to these civility guidelines or are a free fire zone for content and comments.  Last week Tim blogged: “We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation in ways that were long missing from mainstream media and marketing-dominated corporate websites. But frankness does not have to mean lack of civility. There's no reason why we should tolerate conversations online that we wouldn't tolerate in our living room.”

Infamous Scribblers by Eric Burns is about the first newspapers in the United States.  Many of the infamous scribblers were also founding fathers including Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and both John and Sam Adams.  They were extraordinarily uncivil; they almost never used their real names when posting… uh writing articles.. “The more pseudonyms an author used, the more likely it was that readers would think of him as several authors, a company of them, an army…”  Sock puppets ran rampant in the press of the new nation.  Alexander Hamilton’s death in a duel was related to and perhaps caused by what he and Aaron Burr had previously written and caused to be written about each other.

I enjoy civil conversation.  Much of what appears on blogs or in chat groups or in other online forums is uninformed repetitious uninformed drivel… and boring besides.  There is something about being anonymous – either in colonial times or now – that encourages people to say things they’d never dare say to each other in person.  Any CEO of a public company  –  which I was - knows what it’s like to be pilloried personally by pseudonymous posters. Tim is absolutely right that we bloggers are 100% responsible for everything which appears on our blogs sites including comments. But Fractals of Change isn’t going to subscribe to the proposed code.

Part of my objection is to specifics:

The suggested code bans anonymous comments.  I pay less attention to anonymous sources in blogs and on network news than I do to those whose credibility I can vet myself.  Nevertheless, leakers – even leakers with less than idealistic motivation – are needed to keep the powerful in check.  Sometimes comments from “anonymous coward” have useful information – you just have to consider the source.

The code says “If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why.”  I often delete spam comments from this blog and block spurious links; rarely, I find a comment which is so patently offensive or libelous (in my view) that I feel a need to delete it.  It neither case does the poster deserve any explanation or further publicity.

The code appears to say that, if you disagree with something in someone else’s blog, you should enter into private discussion rather than just replying in your own blog.  I don’t think so.  The original blogger didn’t consult me before posting the original post; I don’t need to consult him or her before replying.  For example, Tim has sparked an interesting discussion with his original post: should each of us have first attempted a private discussion with him before replying?  To be fair, I’m not sure this is what the code means even though it’s what it appears to say.

To his credit, Tim has established a wiki for editing the proposed code. Anyone who does intend to badge her or his blog should go work on the wiki.  I’m not going to because I think of this blog as an idiosyncratic expression of what I think and readers comments on that thought.  I’m responsible both for what I say and what they say although I allow them pretty wide latitude.  Other reasonable people will draw the lines between acceptable and unacceptable expression somewhere else.  Readers who don’t like what they find here will not come back or will cancel their subscriptions.  They are, and should be, the ultimate censors of what they read.

BTW, a code of conduct does make perfect sense for some organized groups of blogs since the group identity stands for something more (or at least different) than the individual identities of the bloggers.  Tim’s proposed code starts with (but goes beyond) the very common-sensible BlogHer Community Guidelines.

Back to Infamous Scribblers: “If somehow the men and women who settled the New World could rise from their graves and return to us today… and pick up our newspapers and magazine, if they were to watch our television newscasts and listen to the verbal butcheries on our opinion programs on all-news cable and talk radio, even the loudest of them, even the coarsest, the most mean-spirited – if under some marvelous set of circumstances, the citizens of the eighteenth century could find a way to make themselves media-savvy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they would be startled by, and perhaps not altogether approving of, the extent to which we have tamed the wildly inglorious impulses of their journalism.”

On the other hand, they might feel better if they read a few blogs.

Book Tour – South Burlington, VT and Hanover, NH

Two weeks from tomorrow on Saturday, February 10, I’ll be at the Borders Express (formerly Waldenbooks) in University Mall, 55 Dorset Street, South Burlington, VT from noon to two.

On Saturday, March 24, I’ll be at the Dartmouth Bookstore, 33 South Main Street, Hanover, NH at 7PM.

At both places I’ll be reading from hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble, signing copies, and glad to talk about the book, my blog Fractals of Change, or anything else you like.  Hope to see you at one of these places if you live here or are visiting for the now great skiing.

Collapse – Will We or Won’t We?

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, follows up with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The purpose of the book is to give us a few hints on how and how not to deal with the multiple environmental and economic catastrophes which Diamond believes are looming.

Despite that mission statement, it’s not a pompous book.  Diamond tells stories well, thinks well, chooses his examples well, and, although tremendously worried about human civilization in the next fifty years, considers himself a “cautious optimist”.  I’d much rather be lectured about the environment by Jared Diamond than Al Gore any day.

It’s possible that clever use of resources would support twice the world’s current population of humans, Diamond says, but continues by calculating that we will be using twelve times as much resources as we are now if people in third world countries achieve their aspiration of first world life styles – even if there is no population growth at all.  Whoops.  Can’t do that.

I’ve blogged that there isn’t enough energy for cars for everyone, single family homes etc. etc. but never knew how many other scarce resources there are nor the pernicious downward spirals in some of these resources AND negative interaction between them.

Early example in the book:  Diamond’s assertion that deforestation was the disaster that did in the Easter Islanders – the ones who made the big heads.  Problem may have been that they needed logs to make a grid to drag the statues over.  There’s good evidence that there was a keeping-up-with-the-Jones thing going on between the chiefs of the clans which divided the island.  Each chief needed to have a bigger statue made than the last guy; there go a lot more trees.

But (here’s the interaction part), cut down the trees and the poor soil of the island erodes away.  The island doesn’t have any recent volcanoes of its own and it’s not downwind from any refreshing dust plumes.  So the soil just doesn’t come back.  Now agriculture of all kinds suffers.  Moreover, small game and birds that depended on the trees are gone.  To make matters much worse, without trees you can’t make boats and most of the fish and shellfish accessible from the shore were already depleted and not coming back.  The documented result was a population crash accompanied and accelerated by cannibalism.

Having to meet the needs of an elite can put a civilization on the road to collapse.  Success story of overcoming that problem is the island of Tikopia, 1.8 square miles, too far from anywhere for trade, population of around 1200 people, and they’ve been there for 3000 years.  They have many excellent agricultural practices they’ve developed over the years, all sustainable obviously and capable of being reestablished after one of the area’s very frequent cyclones goes through.  Turns out, though, that they had a pig problem.  Nasty things root up gardens and are an inefficient way to make food – 10 pounds of edible veggies go into making a pound of bacon.  But the chiefs did like their pork.  Nevertheless, in a more-or-less consensus driven society, a decision was made around 1600 to kill every pig on the island.  Done.  Food supply stabilized.  Can we make decisions like that?  Diamond doesn’t hesitate to draw the high-on-the-hog parallel with CEO salaries.

When the amount of arable land per person goes down, the temptation is to skimp on practices like letting fields lie fallow or irrigating with caution. Of course the problem now gets worse instead of better as the soil yields less and less or, in some cases, becomes depleted and can’t come back at all.  That’s happening through much of the world.  Sounds a lot like focusing on quarterly results and letting the company go to hell (my observation and not Diamond’s). 

Of course you can fertilize.  But it takes energy to make fertilizer.  And fertilizer runoff causes algae blooms which wipe out the fish that you’d like to eat in place of the crops that aren’t growing.

No societies avoid problems.  If they last long enough they encounter some kind of climate change. When there’s beneficial climate change, the population grows.  Then the cycle swings the other way; some cope; some don’t.  Will we? Diamond asks.

Done right and in the right places, agriculture and hunting are both sustainable.  Done wrong or in the wrong place and crops and animals become a resource that don’t replenish any more than coal, iron, or oil do.  One of Diamond’s examples is the former forests of Australia.  First Europeans who got there saw some huge trees in thick stands.  They cut a lot of them down and shipped them off in trade.  Big mistake.  Turns out that those lush tree stands grew on very infertile soil.  Most of the nutrition of the forest is tied up in the standing trees.  If you haul out trees, there’s no nutrition for the next “crop” even if you’ve been very careful not to clear cut, carefully reseed etc. This is not true everywhere.  Forestry and other forms of agriculture can be sustainable if done right AND in the right places.  Otherwise you’re living off the capital and not the interest.

Globalization puts us all on the same island, says Diamond.  He’s not railing against globalization, just citing a fact.  But he’s mildly optimistic that we can make the right decisions for two basic reasons: some other civilizations have been able to AND we have very good history of what bad decisions were and how/why they were made.  His book’s a great addition to that information.

Please Join Me in Stowe

I'll be doing a reading from hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble, signing books, and answering questions at the Stowe Free Library starting at 7:30 tomorrow night.

Would be very happy to have you there if you're in the neighborhood to talk about either the book or this blog.

Interview on Net Neutrality

Recently Phil Leigh interviewed me on net neutrality at Inside Digital Media.  His questions are good and my answers are OK.  He was particularly good at getting me to respond to the most cogent arguments made by opponents of a neutral Internet.

He was also kind enough to ask some questions about hackoff.com.

You can listen to or download it from  http://www.insidedigitalmedia.com/downloads/evslin2.mp3.

Please Join Me in Philly

Mary and I'll be at Robin's bookstore in Philadelphia tonight (Wednesday) at 7:00PM.  I'll read from hackoff.com: and historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble, sign books, and talk about anything you'd like to talk about.

The store is at 108 South 13th Street in Philly.

Hope to meet Fractals of Change readers as well as book readers.

Book Tour in Philadelphia

I will be reading from hackoff.com and signing copies at Robin's Bookstore, 108 South 13th Street in Philadephia at 7PM on September 20th.  Robin's is Philadelphia's oldest independent bookstore and well worth a visit in its own right.  If you are anywhere near, please come join us.

Readers of Fractals of Change who'd like to talk about the blog instead of the book are very welcome as well.

My father, Bernard Evslin,  is from Philadelphia and his plays were first put on at the Hedgerow Theater nearby.  I'm looking forward to seeing family as well as meeting readers.

Life on The Long Tail – Introduction

The good news is that there is more life on the long tail of anything than ever before.  The bad news is that life on the long tail is worse than ever before (but better than death).  This has implications for entrepreneurs, new bloggers, and would-be novelists.

The subtitle of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail is “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. As almost everybody knows by now, Chris postulates and gives evidence for the theory that the Internet has changed things so that a greater percentage of sales are of non-hit products than in the days of brick and mortar retailing.  His oft-quoted example is that Amazon has an infinite bookshelf and can therefore carry more titles than even a Barnes & Noble Superstore.  None of the books on the far end of Amazon’s shelf individually sell many copies; but, as a group, they can represent significant sales.

Spill over benefits are wider choice for consumers and less need for a book to be an instant hit or disappear.  Same for music.  Same for almost anything else.

Chris doesn’t mean that hits will disappear.  The Long Tail itself is a hit.  Chris believes that the natural distribution of sales follows the democratic but very un-egalitarian power law.  According to the simplest form of the power law, the value of being #1 in a category is twice the value of being #2, three times the value of being #3 four times the value of being #4  etc. and dismal etc. as you get further and further out on the curve.

So, if a best selling book in a category sells 10 million copies per year, book #1,000 in the category can expect to sell 10,000 copies/year (still a hit); but book #10,000 will sell 1,000 copies per year.  That’s three copies per day worldwide, not many per individual book store.  Obviously, #10,000 isn’t going occupy physical shelf space very long.

Looked at another way, if there were one million separate titles in a  category, one-third of sales would come from the top 100 (they’ll be in the airport book racks), another third of sales come from books 101 through 10,000 (they’re in the book stores), and the remaining one-third of value is contributed by books 10,001 through 1,000,000.  That last third is value that Amazon can harvest because it can afford to carry these books and the physical books stores which would have to actually stock them can’t.

Note for nerds: The sum of the power law formula is that, if there are N distinct items for sale, the top M items (where M can’t equal 1) account for the percentage of sales calculated by log(M)/log(N).

Actually, though, before Amazon (oversimplifying) books 10,001 through 1,000,000 might as well not have existed.  If there were only 10,000 books, then the top 100 would account for 40% of all sales and books 101 through 10,000 would account for the remaining 60%.

So is this good news?  Yes if you’re Amazon.  Yes if you’re the author of book 10,001 and would rather be live on the long tail then out of circulation.  No if you’re the author of any of the first ten thousand books! You are going to lose sales to the newly extended long tail.

Clay Shirky posted brilliantly in 2003: “We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.

“A second counter-intuitive aspect of power laws is that most elements in a power law system are below average, because the curve is so heavily weighted towards the top performers.”

So, although the producers of hits suffer marginally from the growth of the long tail, the average denizen of the tail is hungrier than ever. A corollary of Chris’ thesis is that the long tail is growing increasingly over-populated.

Debut authors should NOT quit their day jobs too soon.

(Clay and I are ignoring the fact that the existence of more choice somewhat grows the total market.)

The power law also explains why it is bad idea to be the twentieth social networking site or VoIP phone company even if #1 was just purchased for a gazillion dollars.  Let’s assume that a gazillion means a $24 million just to make the math easy.  Power law says that #2 is worth $12,000,000 (still not bad), #3 is worth $8,000,000 (you’d get by even after your VCs’ cut).  But #20 is worth only $1.2 million.  When you check the liquidation preference (see Brad Feld on this) in your financing, you’ll find that you don’t get any of that – it all goes to the investors and they won’t even be happy.

The lengthening tail affects copy-cat entrepreneurs as well as authors.  The ever lower cost of starting and running an Internet business means that #20 will always have to contend with #21 through #50 if it looks like any money is going to made in the category.  Tough to get the investors’ money back.  Actually, since so much of the value is at the head of the curve when talking about network businesses, it is impossible for any but a handful of network business to succeed within a category.

So how do establish a position on or move to the head end and off the long, hungry tail?  If I knew that secret, hackoff.com would be on every best seller list and Fractals of Change would be the most  popular blog in cyberspace (at least among entrepreneurs and nerds).  But that won’t stop me from posting more hints and speculations.

Taking My Own Advice and Finding Porn

Sometimes it takes me a while.  I’m embarrassed to say that in my new career as author, blogger, and whatever I DIDN’T drill down into apparent good news the way I said an entrepreneur should.

“…a successful entrepreneur obsesses over the pulse of his or her business.  Much of that pulse is numbers,” I posted.  In a prescient comment on that post , reader Gary Bourgeault wrote:

“When things are going good, one of the easiest things to do is to stop measuring and paying attention to our metrics.

“Success has that funny way of creating an illusion. Metrics helps us to not be surprised by what is really happening in our businesses.”

Gary’s comment should have made me drill down further than I had into the apparent good news reported by sitemeter below about visits to the website for my novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble.

 

Just a little background.  Readership was very high during the time I initially serialized hackoff.com online as a blook. It was free. The hardcover wasn’t yet available.  Many bloggers were kind with recommendations and links to it.  Not surprisingly, once the initial serialization was done and these readers found out whodunnit, daily readership fell off although new readers can still read free online or subscribe free to text or podcast episodes by RSS or email.

So made sense to me that readership would start to build again as word of the book got around and with the hardcover edition supplementing the online edition. Besides, there’ve been increased visits to my non-fiction blog Fractals of Change lately (see chart immediately below) and a  certain percentage of Fractals readers always go to the hackoff.com site. 

 

I assumed that the increase in visits to Fractals (on which I have drilled down and posted part of the reason for here) was driving the increase in visits to hackoff.com. Look how similar the curves are. Wrong!

Unfortunately hadn’t been paying enough attention to the reader forum which has been pretty quiet since the serialization ended. When I did go there, I found the forum (which did not then require registration) filled with spam. Not just spam but mostly pointers to porno and cheap drug sites! Tens of thousands of messages.  If you typed “nude moms” into Google, hackoff.com forum is where you went.  Don’t ask me why “nude moms”; hackoff.com has sex like any good novel but no nude moms.

Now purchases of the hardcover and subscription to hackoff.com are both up. Close analysis shows that some of the readers who came for porn or cheap drugs, stayed to read the story, subscribed, and/or went to Amazon (can’t tell if they’re the ones who bought or not).  Seems that the spam may have added some value in this case.  Briefly flirted with the idea of leaving it there but couldn’t bear to.  It makes the forum useless to readers who really want to discuss the book, for one thing.  Could also get the site blacklisted.  And it’s so ugly!

So had to clean off all the messages posted recently (including any real ones, unfortunately).  Also now require registration to post in the forum which I didn’t want to do.  And am checking it regularly.

Note that page views have fallen off (sigh) since the porn was removed last week even though the search engines are still driving visits here in memory of porn past.