Tag: John Scalzi

Why money should not flow to the writer

Yog’s law states that money should flow to the writer. It’s an old aphorism in the publishing industry, from a time when self-publishing was synonymous with vanity publishing. According to this 2003 post by Theresa Nielsen-Hayden:

For years now, we’ve been dinning Yog’s Law into young writers’ heads: Money always flows toward the writer. Alternate version: The only place an author should sign a check is on the back, when they endorse it.

Scalzi, who is also one of the more outspoken proponents of Yog’s Law, added a corrolary in 2014 in response to the argument that the rise of indie publishing renders it invalid:

I disagree, however, that it means Yog’s Law no longer generally holds. I think it does, but with a corollary for self-publishers:

Yog’s Law: Money flows toward the writer.

Self-Pub Corollary to Yog’s Law: While in the process of self-publishing, money and rights are controlled by the writer.

…

So, Yog’s Law: Still not just a law, but a good idea. The self-publishing corollary to Yog’s Law: Also, I think, a good idea.

Here’s the thing, though: there’s a difference between money that flows to the writer like a meandering stream from the mountains to the ocean, and money that goes to the indie writer first and from there flows outward to the writer’s various publishing projects.

In the last couple of weeks, a massive scandal hit the publishing world when it was revealed that an accountant working at Donadio & Olson, a major New York literay agency, had embezzled millions of dollars over the course of decades from major bestselling authors, including Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club. According to Kristine Katherine Rusch, this is not an anomaly:

Unfortunately, as I have been telling you all for years now, embezzlement and financial negligence is rampant at big name agencies. Almost none have systems set up to prevent it. Of the four agencies I worked with over the decades, two actively embezzled from me.

…

The last time I threatened one of those agencies with a forensic accountant they threw me out of the agency overnight. By the time I got up in the morning, they had severed my relationship with them and informed all of my publishers that the payments should go directly to me. Just the threat of an audit did that. This is one of the biggest agencies with some of the biggest names in the world. Ask yourself why they were afraid of a standard business practice. You know the answer.

…

Sorry, folks. I’m not crazy. I didn’t have a bad break-up. This type of financial mismanagement, the kind that led to the embezzlement, is common in these agencies. It’s becoming visible now, because traditional book sales have declined, and so it’s harder for an agency to pay one complaining client with another (non-complaining) client’s advance.

But here’s what I want you to see. I want you to look again at Palahniuk’s apology.

I apologize for cursing my publishers.  And I apologize for any rants about piracy.  My publishers had paid the royalties.  Piracy, when it existed, was small scale.

Now, I want you to think about how many big-name writers you’ve seen railing against piracy and how it’s cutting into their book sales. I want you to think about how many big-name writers blame Amazon (!) for ruining the book business and causing book sales to decline.

I want you to think about how many big-name writers who have said there’s no money in writing, not like there used to be.

All of those writers have agents. All of them.

Money should not flow to the writer. It shouldn’t “flow” at all. It should go to the writer directly, passing through as few hands as practically possible. When it does have to pass through someone else’s hands, the writer should be able to track it at all times.

The problem with Yog’s Law is that it treats a writer’s cashflow like a bunch of tributary streams, meandering lazily from the mountains until they combine into a mighty river. Only after the river flows into the ocean does the writer see any of that money. How much of it was diverted along the way? Siphoned off by unscrupulous agents or publishers? Lost to things outside of the writer’s control?

Cashflow is the lifeblood of any business, and writing is a business. Writers should know exactly where their money is at all times. A system that allows money to “flow” in such a way that the writer cannot track all of it is a fundamentally broken system, even if it follows Yog’s Law.

Trope Tuesday: Settling the (Final) Frontier

I love stories about colonization, especially when they’re set in space.  There’s just something about a small group of rugged pioneers striking out into the harsh, unforgiving wilderness to make a new life for themselves.  Maybe it’s just something about my American heritage, or all those 4x games I played as a kid, but I doubt it.  Ever since the dawn of time, we humans have been on the move, looking for new and better places to call home.  Small wonder, then, that so many of our stories, both ancient and modern, are about settling the frontier.

Since space is the final frontier, this trope is very common in science fiction.  Heinlein was a huge fan of it, but he wasn’t the only one to play with it–not by a long shot.  John Scalzi (The Last Colony), Nancy Kress (Crossfire), C.J. Cherryh (40,000 in Gehenna), Anne McCaffrey (Freedom’s Landing), and Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) are just a few of the many science fiction writers who have explored this trope in their works.  In recent years, several sci fi miniseries (Battlestar Galactica, Terra Nova) have used it as a major premise as well.  And of course, you have all the classic 4x games like Masters of Orion and Alpha Centauri.

Space Colonies can come in a variety of different flavors:

  • Lost Colony — What happens when the original colonists lose all contact with the outside universe and no one thinks to check up on them for a while.  Can either turn into a story of survival or a clash of cultures, if/when they ever re-establish contact.
  • Cult Colony — Religion is one of the few things that will drive massive numbers of people to leave everything behind and start over in a new world.  Just look at the Pilgrims for a real-world examples.  In space colonies of this type, you can expect to see some extremely radical people, since the isolation of deep space tends to compound their fundamentalist tendencies.  Expect these to be both weird and frightening.
  • Space Amish — Something of a combination of the two, except with much more primitive technology.  Expect to see log cabins, horse- (or giant lizard) drawn carriages, and other tropes closer to the Western genre.  Sometimes, they may be hiding a superweapon.
  • Penal Colony — Australia in space (ahem…IN SPAAACE!!!).  What happens when the empire needs a place to conveniently exile all the troublemakers and rabble rousers.  Not a place for the faint of heart.
  • Wretched Hive — What happens to a penal colony when the prisoners actually run the place.  Like the previous type, except taken up to eleven.  Or not, depending on the history and culture.  Tatooine is the eponymous example.
  • Death World — As the name would suggest, this is not the kind of place you’d want to homestead.  Anyone who does is bound to be a badass.  The Empire and the Federation often recruit most of their soldiers from here.
  • Company World — I couldn’t find this one listed on tvtropes.  Basically, it’s a planet that is owned and governed entirely by a private corporation, which expects to make a tidy profit off of the place.  The colonists are basically indentured servants (since robots simply wouldn’t do) and have almost no property or rights.  Expect the story to be about sticking it to the man.

These are just a few of the many possibilities that you can play with when settling the frontier.  In my opinion, however, the essential elements are as follows:

  • The story is not just about exploring a new world, but establishing some kind of a permanent presence there.
  • By coming to the new world, the colonists must leave everything from their old, familiar lives behind.
  • The colonists must resolve the story conflict through their own self-reliance, not by waiting for an outside force to save them.

I’ve only dabbled with this trope, but it does play a role in many of my stories, most notably in the Star Wanderers series.  Genesis Earth also has elements of it as well, though it’s not the main driver for the plot.  It is a major factor in Heart of the Nebula, though, the (currently) unpublished sequel to Bringing Stella Home.  And in my future books, you can definitely expect to see this trope again.

Why I love Robert Charles Wilson

From Mysterium, which I plan to review here soon:

“Do you ever wonder, Howard, about the questions we can’t ask?
“Can’t answer, you mean?
“No. Can’t ask.”
“I don’t understand.”
Stern leaned back in his deck chair and folded his hands over his gaunt, ascetic frame. His glasses were opaque in the porch light. The crickets seemed suddenly loud.
“Think about a dog,” he said. “Think about your dog–what’s his name?”
“Albert.”
“Yes. Think about Albert. He’s a healthy dog, is he not?”
“Yes.”
“Intelligent?”
“Sure.”
“He functions in every way normally, then, within the parameters of dogness. He’s an exemplar of his species. And he has the ability to learn, yes? He can do tricks? Learn from his experience? And he’s awarer of his surroundings; he can distinguish between you and your mother, for instance? H’es not unconscious or impaired?”
“Right.”
“But despite all that, there’s a limit on his understanding. Obviously so. If we talk about gravitons or Fourier transforms, he can’t follow the conversation. We’re speaking a language he doesn’t know and cannot know. The concepts can’t be translated; his mental universe simply won’t contain them.”
“Granted,” Howard said. “Am I missing the point?”
“We’re sitting here,” Stern said, “asking spectacular questions, you and I. About the universe and how it began. About everything that exists. And if we can ask a question, probably, sooner or later, we can answer it. So we assume there’s no limit to knowledge. But maybe your dog makes the same mistake! He doesn’t know what lies beyond the neighborhood, but if he found himself in a strange place he would approach it with the tools of comprehension available to him, and soon he would understand it–dog-fashion, by sight and smell and so on. There are no limits to his comprehensions, Howard, except the limits he does not and cannot ever experience.
“So how different are we? We’re mammals within the same broad compass of evolution, after all. Our forebrains are bigger, but the difference amounts to a few ounces. We can ask many, many more questions than your dog. And we can answer them. But if there are real limits on our comprehension, they would be as invisible to us as they are to Albert. So: Is there anything in the universe we simply cannot know? Is there a question we can’t ask? And would we ever encounter some hint of it, some intimation of the mystery? Or is it permanently beyond our grasp?”

This is the kind of science fiction that I love: the kind that brings me right up to the limits of human knowledge and makes me feel naked in the face of the unknown. The kind where the aliens truly feel alien, not like an unusually bizarre race of human beings. I want the aliens to surprise me–I want to feel that there’s something about them that is completely beyond my comprehension. Something sublime, something romantic.

In all of his books that I’ve read, Robert Charles Wilson captures this feeling spectacularly. So does Arthur C. Clarke, C. J. Cherryh, and Orson Scott Card. Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, John Scalzi and Alastair Reynolds are excellent writers, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed their books, but their aliens are too…understandable. Too clear cut, too defined. After a while, you don’t feel that there’s anything left to surprise you, anything that is so alien it’s beyond your grasp.

In some ways, I think this boils down to the author’s worldview. Those with a more positivist worldview believe that the world is fundamentally understandable, and that every phenomenon can be modeled and predicted, provided that we have a sophisticated enough understanding of natural law. The interpretivist worldview, on the other hand, posits that while truth may exist, there are limits to our understanding–that some things are inherently unpredictable and impossible to model.

I used to think that I was a positivist. Then I took Poli Sci 310 with Goodliffe, and it turned my world upside down. Genesis Earth is, in some ways, a product of that personal worldview shift. I don’t think I’m anywhere near on par with my aliens as Wilson, Clarke, and Card are with theirs, but I hope I’m on my way.