One Harlequin Author @60:
"The Billionaire Beancounter's Bargain of Shame."
I just wanted to admire that again.
It strikes me as if the 'selling services to authors' (aka vanity publishing) is nowhere near as potentially successful as the 'sell books to the public' model. The pool of potential clients is much smaller, the pool of potential clients who are willing and able to pay you a substantial fee even smaller. From looking at catalogues, I would say that the number of repeat customers is likely to be 5% or less, which means that you need to continue to market yourself at new customers - and if your service is expensive and does not live up to the promises you have been made (agents hate having bound copies dropped on their desks, nobody the author knows had $publisher calling, they only sold half of your 100 author copies, plus their friends and family want to be _given_ a book instead of paying for it) then, in short, your current clients aren't going to reccommend your services.
Compare to the pool of readers with an established reading habit, who tend to be more than willing to buy another book *and* to reccommend them to their friends. Sure, there's more risk in this... but it's also a long-term proposition.
The problem with the vanity model is that it cuts into the traditional revenue stream in so many ways. It might be a short-term profit (but then, setting it up also cost money, and ASI will want a substantial cut, so the money doesn't go to Harlequin.
From a business point of view, it really makes no sense at all. Which shows that even a company that's profitable with 60 years experience can get it completely, utterly, totally _wrong_.
Adding my best wishes to the list.
Patrick & Teresa, glad you're ok. This is, indeed, a missable experience. (I was in SF a week before the quake in 1989. On that bridge. I still shudder.)
Glen @44: Even Australia had its share of earthquakes (that nobody talks about).
Wishing you all the best. And that's a plural 'you' -Teresa for the obvious reasons, and everybody else who worries because you can never have too much support.
Caroline @ 124/ Lorax @125:
I could have been any flavour of sexual orientation and have any kind of preference - *nobody cared* and *nobody in Japan knows*. They didn't ask, and I didn't tell.
I admit I didn't think what travel would be like with a (same-sexed) partner, because I was simply recounting my experience - I did not hang out a sign that said 'I am x' and there was neither a need for an explanation nor even an opportunity for it.
Personally, I don't think that walking hand in hand with anyone would have been a problem for me - it might have caused reactions, but so what - I was a traveller, I did not *care* what anyone thought of me, I would be gone the next day, and as I said, being western you stand out a mile anyway. Can't talk about sharing rooms, but folks who went to Worldcon might report on that - I'm certain people were sharing, as they do at all cons - m/f (unmarried), m/m, f/f, large robot/furry, whatever.
I don't think being gay would give you a different reaction from simply being western and not fitting in.
That is, unless you do the provocative kind of act that Hard Gay is showing on the video; which I found unnecessary and extremely offputting; but that would be *exactly the same* if he were het.
Xopher @113
Mostly what I've experienced was disinterest. Being tall and white I would always stand out in any crowd, and while some people appeared genuinely interested, most were simply going about their daily lives. Unless you are openly trying to demonstrate your gayness, I can't see how your reception would be much different.
I don't eat fish - emphatically not - which was one of my difficulties in finding food; but I think that learning a spot of Japanese and - yes - looking for restaurants that have seen a vegetarian before should make up for it. Again, praise be to Lonely Planet and its listing of restaurants...
(Temples. Volcanoes. Japanese gardens. Dragonflies. Wild eagles. Have we tempted you yet?)
Xopher @65:
I went to Japan for Worldcon and although I wasn't particularly keen beforehand, I'm hoping to go again. It's a fascinating country, an easy travelling country, and even without any Japanese I mostly managed to find things to eat. (A little knowledge of written Japanese and I could have sounded things out and done better, but I was too stressed beforehand to really make the effort.)
It's different, yes, but in a good way. Oh, and Lonely Planet rules.
Simon @ 921:
This getting-ghostwritten thing sounds like harder work than writing...
Going the reviewer road sounds plausible, although I don't think it is failsafe, particularly if Lanaia does not think of herself as a genre writer - I don't think a mainstream reviewer would be familiar with Dark Prince.
Which completely ignores the fact that Lanaia was so blinded that not only was she happy to pay money to a known fraudster, she does not appear to have questioned the deviations from her own ideas.
I do idly wonder how Hill came up with the idea. Did he agree to ghostwrite because he'd noticed just the right novel to rip off? Or did he suggest the ghostwriting? We shall never know, but we can speculate...
Bruce @895
I used to have a high rate of good photos to not-so-wonderful ones with my film camera. Then I went digital and started to be daring. What's a wasted shot of fifty if all you have to do is erase it from your hard disk? (They *do* take time, so it's not entirely costless.) I'm much more daring. I go for shots I didn't think would work, I try a different angle or perspective and I take another just because. I am getting a lot more pictures that are bad, as in 'delete immediately', and a lot more that didn't work after all - but I also get more pictures that are great, as opposed to merely good.
I think there's a lesson for me as a writer, too. Be daring. Dare to fail. Go and practice until the difficult thing is _right_ rather than going for the safe option.
Frustrating? Yes. Wasteful? Often. Rewarding? You bet.
Serge @825:
It's all about a sense of entitlement. Victims often have it in spades - they believe they are entitled to the rewards because they've worked hard, or because they've got talent, or because people who are not as morally upright as them get more rewards, or...
Reasons vary, but in their minds, the world owes them, so they're merely helping the world along a little.
And to some degree I can emphasize with it, because if you go through life long enough you *will* encounter people who treat you unfairly, and I'm pretty certain that everyone in this thread had that feeling at some point of their lives that it's not fair, they'd deserved to win/pass the test/get picked for a team/job/partnership ...
The problem with Victims is that they see all of life in this light. It's a very unhealthy pattern of thinking that carries its own rewards. In the beginning, it gathers a lot of sympathy: you poor thing, so hard done by, let me sympathize, so the person comes back for another fix. And at some point - see this thread - all they get from their surroundings is 'grow up and deal with this, you're not being unjustly persecuted, you're being _justly_ persecuted, so will you just shut up and apologize' which, of course, leaves them completely puzzled...
Alma @816:
I hear you. Oh, how I hear you, and I am incredibly happy to know that you have not lost any of that passion; too many writers get bogged down.
When I first read about this case, I was puzzled - how can one claim to want to be a writer and pay someone else to write? - but I have come to the conclusion that the world Lanaia inhabits is not the one we live in. Unfortunately, this seems to make her a target for every scammer on the planet, and I am furious for people like Christopher Hill and her current 'agent' to take advantage of that.
When I started writing, I was imensely protective of my words. The idea that someone else should take my words, my ideas, and mess with them was a red flag before a bull.
(Yes, I've grown up since then. I've also learnt to write better, so I _can_ provide alternative wordings or scenes for anything that doesn't work as well as it should.)
But even now, if someone came up to me and said 'I can help you get published... but only if you throw away half of your book and use mine' I would spit in their eye before leaving.
Pyre @806
Sometimes openings or first chapters get quoted, so it wasn't entirely unrealistic to think that google might throw up something, but I think it makes my point: for someone who has a facility with language it might have been easy to guess that Hill's text was not written by him; but unless you knew the book, it was anything but easy to establish where it came from. Even googling for novels dealing with Alexander the Great was not much help: this is a nice and comprehensive listing from 1920 to 2006, and it does include David Gemmel's 'Lion of Macedon' (as well as other genre novels) - but the Dark Prince is not listed. Finding the source was, I would argue, _not_ trivial.
Which doesn't make any of the rest of the hole any less deep and steep-sided, but I felt it was a point worth clearing up. I have no idea how else one would find the source in a case like this.
me @804: when using emphasis tags, check that they're written correctly. Sorry. The first paragraph isn't mine, it's Simon's.
Simon @692: She didn't think to look? Sorry, welcome to the legal concept of 'constructive notice' - you could easily have found out, so the court assumes you did and takes it from there
My google-fu is not strong enough to find David Gemmel's original text. Unless you know the book in question, I do not think there is an easy way of finding it - historical fiction by fantasy authors tends not to be on anyone's radar.
(The only references I could find were to Lanaia's text; there are several of them, and thanks to this exercise I can now admire the golden-haired boy: it's a phrase frequently associated with Alexander.)
Faren @421:
lulu.com is not to blame for any of the kerfuffle.
They are, as far as anyone can make out, completely honest: they let you upload a file and take a reasonable percentage of the price for themselves. They will do print runs of one, they have a website that is geared towards readers as much as writers, and they don't sell you $$$$ services or charge 'setup fees' goinig into hundreds and thousands of dollars, with the quality of service usually much poorer than what you would see from a reputable freelance editor/copy editor/book designer.
In short, they compare extremely favorably with any other vanity publisher. What *is* interesting is that here is a vanity publisher - Royal - who uses another vanity publisher - lulu - to produce the physical book - quite probably because they can't be bothered to find a POD printer willing to deal with them.
Cheryl @ 188 said it all (I've corrected the punctuation)
We were innocent before, guilty now.
The mind, she boggles. 'We're not making enough profit, so we're asking our suppliers to give us some extra money' is something I would not believe if I read it in a work of fiction.
I'm wasting my time reading Making Light instead of working. C'mon everybody, out with the chequebooks. Let's see five dollars from every reader of this forum. I want more money in my life.
Christopher, that's exactly the kind of thing that scares the hell out of your _allies_, and I am fairly confident the US wasn't planning to drop a nuke on Britain. How it looks to the people who might actually live near the proposed targets, I leave to your imagination.
As for the idea that one would consciously choose to kill and maim other human beings, however little one likes them, because one might feel better afterwards: that does not sound like a healthy thought to me.
I had to stop watching the video as I found it incredibly disturbing.
Why does this university employ such a large number of police officers in the first place? What are they afraid off? (I've attended universities in Germany and Britain. They employ security guards to make sure doors are locked and people park their cars in the right places. The idea that there would be armed police on campus as a matter of fact is frightening on its own.)
So a person is quietly sitting in a computer lab and working on the computer there. What threat is he to security? None at all. That someone shouts 'get off me' or triest to twist free when grabbed forcefully is, to me, a perfectly normal reaction, even when the grabber wears a uniform.
That the conduct of the policemen in question is despicable should be without dispute. What I would like to see discussed is why anyone felt it necessary to send more than a maximum of two unarmed security guards to say to this guy 'excuse me, can you please leave now'.
I can comment on the police horses, though. While police horses undergo special training, there is no way anyone in the world can guarantee that a horse that feels threatened will not act in the matter a horse does by nature, that is to kick out. Riding up people sitting on the ground in the manner they did was inviting injury.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 4 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 10 |
| 2006 | 6 |
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