Over at Jeremy Keller’s blog he talks about the cold hard numbers behind his costs and profits on Chronica Feudalis (and in passing I find it amusing to note that his game web site is blocked from my work place whereas my own is not — we can draw conclusions later, but it turns out not to be obvious). Diaspora, it turns out, is a lot simpler (and, by some measures, more profitable) because the VSCA team is communal. Not, strictly, godless communist hordes, but the entire production is shared by the authors who also share all the profits. This is part of the VSCA risk strategy: we spend no money until we have money. And so, our total production costs are:

$23.00 CAD (the proof copy)

All labour was provided by  authors or by dependents of authors (same family profits) or for bragging rights and hobby value (our late-coming playtester, JB).

Editing: I edited for house voice, Toph edited for quality, and everyone copy edited.

Art: I drew some drawings. We weren’t going to have any interior art, but then I decided I wanted to pick up the brush again after twenty years away. I did the cover for fun.

Writing: well, obviously the authors did this.

Web site: I have half a dozen pre-existing domains, so I co-opted one and made it VSCA Publishing. When it’s time for renewal, I’ll bill that to VSCA Publishing but that’s in the future. I wrote the page code and maintain it. It’s deliberately simple and a skill set I already have.

ISBN: Free in Canada and…

Company: …is an implied registration of a company in Canada. VSCA is a sole proprietorship which vastly simplifies practically everything unless I make thirty grand on it this year. So far not much chance of that.

Software: I already had all the software we needed from earlier projects that are unrelated. Lucky break, that, but we could have used free software for most things too without a change in quality.

I don’t have a Q3 (and Q3 was only two months long for us) revenue statement from Lulu yet (which was free to set up, paying only for the proof). I will estimate the revenue at $2,500 USD though. So far Q4 has about $1,200 in revenue under its belt. This revenue includes both direct Lulu sales (about $13/unit) and sales to retailers (about $5/unit). Once the money started coming in, we did acquire some new costs:

Comped copies: for review and so forth. About $200.

Promotional material: a huge whack of dice. $100.

R&D: we started investing in future projects at this point. Around $300 but not borne by all the authors — only authors that have a declared interest in a project are on the hook from their share of profits for new expenses.

So our total here (not figuring quarterly, but over almost exactly a three month period) is looking like around $3,000 profit to be shared unequally between authors depending on their investment in future projects.

At zero risk. Well, twenty bucks.

–BMurray

Capitalism works. As Marcuse said, it delivers the goods. That is, while it doesn’t strictly address things like justice, ethics, morality, or even simple fairness, it does put Xboxes in living rooms. And a lot of other things. It’s even arguable that it puts food on the table (though the argument is really that it puts steak on the table instead of rice and beans). Anyway, it delivers what people want. No question.

I had the good fortune to watch a BBC program the other night — a structured debate between four smart people in an auditorium on a controversial topic. There was no music, no computer graphics, and the debaters (all public figures) were passionate, courteous, and smart. They addressed the topic, they did not speak over one another, and they engaged the audience sincerely. It assumed that audience was smart and, by extension, it assumed that smart is a good thing. This is a recipe for complete failure on television — it is certain that a hundred times the audience was watching Canada’s Worst Drivers.

But obviously there is a sense in which it was “good” television. It demonstrated sensible, coherent thought in an engaging manner on a topic that a lot of people care about (the Catholic church in this case). It’s the kind of thing that we (citizens in a democracy) would like to think that others watch and think about solely by virtue of our duties as citizens (like, you know, helping choose and influence the government of the whole country). Perhaps our highest priority goal as citizens would logically be the education and maintenance of education of the citizenry, as that would surely make for good government (recall that governments are not external entities — they are a way to organize people and are composed solely of people — thinking about them as though they were a thing with its own non-human motives is broken and alienating even though there is a way in which it is true).

So there’s the conflict: people want simple enjoyable television and there is huge money in providing it. People need (and know they need — we’re not stupid and we know something’s missing) an ongoing civic education — they need to engage issues realistically (as opposed to internet yelling, which is the light entertainment we use to make us think we are still functioning political animals). Oh yeah, there’s a missing piece: we have somehow come to the conclusion that government organs (like the CBC) should be profitable, which is absurd. Why would you want a profitable government organ? If profit is the objective then we should cut it loose and let it be private. If it has government objectives like education and communication, then it should not have a profit motive — it should have a quality motive.

Similarly, profit as an over-arching goal also undermines art. The artist with her eye on profit is looking for inspiration in the desires of her audience. This is why the most profitable art form on the planet today is the porn film. It is impossible to imagine any other art form that could get away with such incredible volume without any diversity and with astounding profit margins except possibly children’s cartoons. This doesn’t make anyone who disdains profit an artist, though, and doesn’t make any artist who makes money (or even wants to make money) a whore. It just points down the road that profit as primary motive travels.

Now people today use the word “artist” very carefully. You don’t want to sound pretentious. You don’t want others to claim you are an artist because that would be leverage against your work. It has a buried implication that your work is navel-gazing; that it has not value other than novelty for novelty’s sake.

Okay, fuck that. Artists are people who create based on their vision and with profit as a secondary motive. Let’s start there. I am an artist. A lot of you are artists. Practically everyone in the tabletop role-playing game design field is, whether they like it or not, an artist. The numbers simply do not bear out any assertion that we are primarily anything but passionate thinkers and creators in a field that is certainly not all that profitable. We have to stop asserting that we are not because there is simply no other explanation for us.

So, as artists, we are unshackled from the needs of the lowest common denominator consumer. We do not need to care what sells a million copies because we are not under the impression that we are about to sell a million copies. For the most part we get pretty excited over selling a thousand copies, something that almost certainly doesn’t pay our actual costs. We are happy when the costs that are not “hobby activity” are covered. We are perfectly satisfied to have sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars of labour-hours into a product that makes ten thousand dollars. And in targeting sales in the thousands, we are obviously catering to a specialised market. People who think like us. People who like what we like. That little niche that gets it.

There are also a lot of us. Each little game might only reach a few hundred people, but there are thousands of these games. That’s still not a mass market, but it’s enough that we can claim to, in aggregate, reach a lot of people who are interested in thinking along non-mass-market lines. And I suspect that this is actually everybody — that every single person out there is starving for a little something highly specialised that could be fulfilled by an artist interested in catering to that tiny unprofitable market. That is, that there is great coverage possible without great success. This is where the artist traditionally resides — speaking to her small audience outside the scope of standardised communications.

Automation is what lets us get to this point — it has enabled more and more people to be artists and therefore to engage an audience in ways that profit-centric media never can. It does not replace big media and never can, but it can subvert it. It can change how fractional demographics behave and it can affect how they consume profit-centric product. The artist has an audience, however small, that is listening. It behooves us to say something. To do so we have to shrug off the idea that “artist” and “intellectual” are somehow denigrating labels. When we deny ourselves a noble label, we deny the nobility. We enter a market in which we cannot compete. A game that refuses its role as art is competing with Canada’s Worst Drivers and it will fail by that measure.

So I would choose a different measure.

–BMurray

Over at I Fly by Night, a blog written by Clash Bowley of Flying Mice Games and all-round cool guy, Clash has some great notes about adapting a Diaspora-like system to his StarCluster game and getting some nifty results out of it. I love this kind of hybridization, obviously, and as evidence I present Diaspora itself which has clear roots in at least two games. So I just wanted to flag this for everyone’s attention because Clash and I don’t travel in similar circles electronically. Or at least until now I wouldn’t have guessed it was so. Now I’m wondering if he has a Wave account because there’s some Diaspora action there that he might be keen on….

–BMurray

In Diaspora we talk a little bit about what changes when technology advances or falls. In a nutshell, we propose that any given technology goes from impossible to government use to corporate use to private use. For our game our interest here is space travel — to begin with it is impossible to get people into space. One day it becomes possible, but the resources require cooperation on the scale of a government project (including the resource of mandating behaviour). Eventually it becomes profitable and the scale changes again and now a corporation can get into space (and this is where we are or are heading here and now). Finally, it becomes something that a single person or family can afford to do. It moves from profitable to leisure in some sense.

This progression happens because of the empowering function of automation.

As technology advances, from the ground you and I see gadgetry first. I can hold my entire record collection from 1984 on a single tiny device (with room to spare — lots of room to spare) and play it to myself for longer than I can actually tolerate before the batteries run down (not to necessarily imply that I am getting great battery life from my player). But gadgetry doesn’t actually create a huge amount of change — the big change in music is that I can click a button and get more music whereas in 1984 I had to catch a bus to a record store and back, carrying a fragile artifact home. Carrying more music than I actually care to listen to is a remote second for social impact.

Automation increases individual empowerment. Empowering individuals through automation causes the capability of the individual to encroach on the capability of last year’s corporation (by which I only mean a large scale organization of humans with a directed purpose — this is not an anti-capitalist screed by any reading). Obviously this touches on my recent experiences with publishing and with publishers: the individual is now fully capable of doing almost everything that last year’s publishers were necessary to do. I can write, buy art, create art, lay out, print, cut, make books, present for sale, and fulfill all from my desk. I even do all my marketing from my desk, now, but that’s not as effective as these other things are. That’s an important hole, though, and I’ll come back to it. So anyway, with respect to publishing, an individual is now potentially as empowered to produce as a corporation once was.

Technically the publishing example is one of a more important effect: the aggregation of automated individuals. My personal capability with respect to publishing is actually because my communication with a small number of other people is managed in an automatic fashion, and the bulk of their work is also automated. I do my work, press a button to submit to an Entity. They get my data, store it, and present it for sale. When an interested party clicks BUY they handle the money, submit the data to a fulfillment Entity automatically, and keep track of things so they can pay me my share. The fulfillment Entity takes the data, turns it into a high-quality books, and hands it to a shipping Entity. They get it to the customer’s door. Each Entity could be a single person except where automation has not quite caught up (like shipping, though it’s getting very good these days too). Some Entities don’t need to be people at all any more.

So let’s say that automation increases my individual power by a factor of two. This means that when n people so empowered choose to interact, their effective output is 2ⁿ. The potential of aggregated individual effort is an exponential function of the effect of automation on each. That’s why automation changes everything, and that’s why there are technological leaps in Diaspora that have the character they do — what humans do doesn’t change all that much except insofar as they do less of what they dislike (generally), but how much they can do does change. And the output of their aggregation is greater.

We could talk now about the costs of communication — how every indirection of communication results in a loss of data between humans because all communication between humans is a form of translation and all human translation is lossy. Then we could see that communication between automatic entities does not necessarily suffer from this, and then see instantly why some efficiencies in automation exist. Then we would also see that organizations beyond a certain size must have some indirect communication (chain of command and cross-discipline communication, for example). So if we now see that automation decreases the size of an organization for the same output, we also see that this output is magnified in quality and quantity when the decrease in size similarly decreases the amount of indirect communication. There are max-min equations to be done here, but there is a moving target that changes with specific industry and degree of automation, that pays off in millions when you hit it: the optimal organization size. This trick never works, though, because organizations acquire meta-interests that include growth, which is broken. See also: dinosaurs.

Regarding publishing, this means that publishers already embody substantial functionality that is being automated to the individual level. As I look around, it seems they know this though most are still steering big-ship-slow and not necessarily in the right direction. Many concentrate on the gadget (we should ePublish!) which is treating symptoms. Treating symptoms offers some relief, but you will probably still die of the disease. Some resist the automation (laughing at self-publishers as though there were a relation to vanity-presses, which have a justifiably evil reputation). The ones that will be present in thirty years are the ones that recognize what isn’t automated and what isn’t likely automatable soon, and selling that service hard. That will put authors in the driver’s seat, though, and neither party seems all that used to that yet. Yet.

So, Diaspora, yeah. Automation changes everything. When you wonder what a T3 culture looks like, realise first that individuals here could have (that is, barring social repression or poverty or other obstacles to ownership) access to automation that gives them the power of T2 corporations or T1 governments because of automation. That means that it doesn’t make sense that a T3 gun can kill a nation. It does mean that a T3 individual might credibly have the resources to divert asteroids into planets through use of automatic manufacture of automatic spacecraft that navigate automatically to places that have been surveyed automatically and station-keep automatically around asteroids identified automatically so that their orbit is altered catastrophically.

Automation is the key and not gadgetry.

–BMurray

Recently read this article on what to do if your book doesn’t sell by a smallish publisher (by which I mean nowhere near as small as me, but also someone who is not sending you on a whirlwind tour of all the countries whose native language you’ve been translated into) and I was sort of surprised to find a lack of instruction about, well, what to do when your book doesn’t sell. So let me try.

Figure out why your book didn’t sell. At least wonder. Take it seriously. Be honest. This will point to solutions.

Could your book suck? It might. You have to consider the possibility. Did it suck back when it was being shopped to publishers? Maybe? Okay then: this is why a publisher with a good track record for picking only winners (as opposed to picking enough winners that you don’t notice all the losers) is better for you even when they reject you. Maybe your book sucks. Don’t publish a book that sucks so bad that you can’t make your money back. Did your advance cover you and make it worth your while? Yes? Hey you did okay — who cares if your book is selling. Take your money and get on with the next book.

Didn’t suck, huh? I though that might be the case. Was your excellent book inadequately marketed? If so, did you meet your obligations? If you failed to understand and meet your obligations, you might have been the problem. You can still correct this — start meeting them. A sales surge a year late is still a sales surge. Is your publisher meeting their obligations? What evidence do you have? Ask for it. You want to know what they are doing and how much they are spending doing it. This will tell you not only how they are promoting your book but also will give you some clues about whether or not they think it actually sucks. If they are not spending anything on you and your sales are bad, then they are probably not sending good money after bad. You should revisit the first question. You should reconsider your choice of publisher.

Are you dissatisfied because your expenses were too high? If “bad sales” just means you haven’t covered your expenses so you’re basically out of pocket, then “bad sales” might also mean that you had unrealistic expectations or just plain managed your money badly. You can’t save this now, but you can change your behaviour for the future — you can streamline your process to reduce your costs or you can participate more aggressively in marketing to increase sales or you can write better books. Or you can change your standards when selecting a publisher, and reject advances that fail to cover your risk. Also, your book might suck. Consider it carefully.

Is it just the wrong time for your book? The Zeitgeist wasn’t with you — it was a month too late or too early? This is actually just another way for your book to suck. If it suddenly doesn’t suck, jump-start the marketing. If it’s too late (the time is right but you’ve been remaindered), sell that to your publisher. They may agree and may have books still sitting around unpulped. If your work is this time sensitive, though, consider the possibilities of demand printing/sales — your book is never remaindered and you can re-market at any time with no start-up cost and no risk. Some titles at Lulu sell in the tens of thousands, and make at least $5 per unit. How bad were your bad sales? At least if you self-publish you can only blame yourself.

Actually that’s a crappy feature in a lot of ways. Helps with the realism though.

Late edit: let’s say your publisher likes your stuff and signs a contract with you that gives you $4,000 in advance against royalties. Let’s also say that you get $2 per book in royalties. What this means is that your publisher is expecting to sell at least 2,000 copies of your book. They are basically saying that to your face here. So, if that didn’t happen, you have to wonder why not. Certainly one possibility is that you (not your book) didn’t live up to their expectations. This should be factored into their calculation when they gave you 2,000 sales’ worth of advance, though. They assessed your book and you and based on that (detailed, time-proven, professionsal) assessment, bet on a minimum of 2,000 sales plus or minus some margin of error. It’s possible that you just got unlucky and wound up on the inside of their error margin — you only sold 1,870 books maybe. But you should find out. Because if you only sold 200 books, then their assessment process is broken, and both you and they should care about that — no one can survive on analyses with 90% error bars on them. That’s basically the “flipping a coin” business model, and you do not want these people managing your PR and sales. You want to take your advance and run laughing to another publisher with another book. So when you see that contract, maybe ask how the advance sum was arrived at. If it’s just “common practice” then you want to be pretty sure that selling up to that advance is also “common practice” for them.

Just realised that the short version of this whole post is: you are shopping for a publisher as much as they are shopping for you. As technology advances and more and more of the business of publishing is automated away, the publisher needs to meet your needs more and more aggressively, because their utility is being eroded. As an author, you should expect them to back up their claims with numbers and analysis and fact. They should be what they imply they are. If it’s just a guy in a suit guessing based on last week’s guess, well, you can do that.

Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, just posted a lovely little piece about Cassini’s flyby of the moon Enceladus. This is amazing not just because the pictures are beautiful (and there is a special place in my heart for the fact that our earliest close-up pics of this area of space are in black and white) but because they were snapped at a range of only a hundred kilometers. Now really, look at the distance from here to Saturn. Proportionally, 100km is basically nothing. We can put a robot in space and place it where we want to within, what, 50km?

Holy shit we are awesome.

Enceladus seen from the Cassini probe at 100km.

Now in Diaspora this is slightly better than the median technology level. Maybe the same as. Maybe a little less. That means that in a cluster with higher-than-average technology (say T2 but certainly T3), this could easily be a manned vehicle, and not a bank-breakingly expensive one. You get the picture: this kind of amazing thing is in reach of the private citizen in Diaspora. Private citizens go to Enceladus. Not for laughs, mind you, but not part of a government or even corporate project, either.

They go chasing a little profit. And they look out the window and see this. Every day for a month maybe. Man my job sure sucks by comparison.

–BMurray

I’ve had the good fortune to write a great many words collaboratively in several different (very different) contexts. In my profession as a technology researcher in safety-critical applications, I am often required to write technical documentation, white papers, proposals, and requirements, and all have collaborative elements. In my real life as an enthusiastic hobbyist, I write and analyze games with variously-sized groups of similarly enthusiastic hobbyist. And so I have some experience with managing collaboration. I have not, however, been forced to examine the techniques that make it work until very recently.

Recently, you see, I got an invitation to Google Wave.

Wave is a tool whereby you can begin writing a document of arbitrary purpose and invite others to join in. Each participant may:

• edit the primary document directly
• add commentary to the document, possibly in the form of a complete revision of the document
• comment on commentary, recursively

There are other things you can do but they are detail rather than substance (attach robots to do automatic revisions, such as replacing code with computed values; insert pictures, audio, or video; and so on).

My first impulse was to do exactly what I do when getting ready to collaborate through the wiki — write a document and invite my cabal to comment and extend. I know my cabal. They are exactly five other people who I know in face-to-face interaction and trust within my home. So my first hurdle with Wave is that no one I trust in this fashion also has access to Wave.

So I began another exercise. Well, rather I chose to participate in someone elses more open exercise. The Wave model is such that the originator has no special ownership over the content except insofar as she invites participants. Each participant, however, has equal power to extend and edit and invite further participants. This last is both a power and a weakness.

One of the Waves I joined was Fred Hicks‘ attempt to use the Diaspora cluster generation system to create Dungeons & Dragons 4e environments within their “points of light” model, where small outposts of organized good (light) exist within a vast and hostile wilderness that varies from uncaring to flat-out evil. At first blush this is a natural for the cluster system. And as we began it was indeed progressing nicely, albeit perhaps towards a very different third game which does not yet exist (which, as a designer, is sort of the point even when we don’t know it).

As more people join in, however, we find that the discussion bifurcates repeatedly, exploring different possibilities in the detail to which each participant is interested. Someone very enthusiastic about what someone else feels is an uninteresting avenue of exploration will nonetheless contribute proportional to their interest. This is not necessarily a problem — but it does run contrary to the idea of collaborating on the production of a document — it’s not just wasted effort but it is also complicating the intended target.

So, within a wiki, we would have one document that acquires and loses internal commentary, gradually converging on a shared vision of the final product, an then we would go to the Last Stage.

Within the wave, we have a huge brainstorming document that retains all commentary, and that by nature diverges rather than converges. We can still, however, go to the Last Stage, but there is more work in it — but possibly with more value.

The Last Stage is the gatekeeping. At some point in the life cycle of any document that is expected to be coherent, one person must take control of it and ensure that all of the content is consistent with an overall vision and voice. There are many ways to gatekeep — you can simply take control of the source media (a word-processing document perhaps) and allow only a single person to directly edit it. Now you increase the time it takes for others to affect the document (perhaps by printing, marking up, and delivering to the gatekeeper for inclusion or rejection) but this is part of the desired effect: at some point the process must become cumbersome for all but the gatekeeper in order to reduce frivolous or (worse) cyclic changes. Gatekeeping is necessary if the document is ever to be finished.

With the wiki this is fairly straight-forward because a single document is already present that represents the agreement of all collaborators. With the Wave, however, this is not the case. Gatekeeping now has a precursor stage: actually writing the document. The gatekeeper must first lock down the wave (which is not actually possible to enforce, but she can at least announce that no further commentary will be considered — but can you actually adhere to that?) Next she must extract the content from the commentary — there will be several threads of discussion and many will be about different documents than her intended target. She will need to distill ideas from side-channels where they are useful and ignore others. At this point it may or may not be valuable to bring this new document to a new Wave and iterate over it. But perhaps not. In any case, there are a lot more ideas in a much less controlled context to distill into the gated document. This is liable to produce very different results from a more closed collaboration.

Another aspect of open collaboration like this is attribution. With our closed system at VSCA I know who the authors are and that means I know who’s getting a cheque when we publish and as we sell. Who is a full-member in a Google Wave when any contributor can invite any other? Who owns this intellectual property? When a VSCA project reaches a certain shape we ask explicitly of all members, “who here thinks they are an author of this document deserving of an equal share in both profits and expenses?” We can trust the answers because we can trust the people. But when the team has been extended by second and third (and more) order invitations, how can there reasonably be this level of trust?

Does the Wave perhaps require, realistically, that the end results (assuming it ever creates any end-products) be some form of free? It’s hard to see any other way to work with the resultant intellectual property.

–BMurray

Okay, so what if a Big Publisher looked really seriously at the new technologies and thought to themselves, “Hmm, I know how to get things printed. I know about printers, about paper, all that good stuff. I know about fulfillment and I have tons of contacts. But I don’t want to print crappy or even marginal books. I want to hand out fat advances that I can expect appropriate returns on. I want everyone to be happy.” And now what if they didn’t think, “And so I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and pretend the small press isn’t relevant to us.”

What if a Big Publisher re-thought its resources and, in addition to doing what it already does well, offered a print-on-demand service like Lulu with good automated (and “automated” is the secret word folks — big changes come from automation and not gadgetry; your iPhone is cool but the printing press didn’t have to fit in your pocket to change things) upload and content management. I mean Lulu is really a hot model for this kind of thing. You take all your back end capabilities and make them available through a slick, friendly, front end. Now you are offering self-publishing at least in part by leveraging your existing assets.

If you stop there, you’re an idiot.

Because now you have two new tools if you’re paying attention. First, you have a way to generate profits off rejections. A manuscript comes in and it’s okay but you know you can’t offer a decent advance. It’s risky and times are tight. Normally you just say, “no”. Now, however, you’re in a position to say (and try total honesty here because people are not stupid), “You know, we don’t think we can turn a buck on this given our operating costs, but what we can do is give you a place to publish yourself and publicize and sell your content. You get our high-quality binding and all that good stuff, but you lay it out and manage all the marketing and organizing getting books to stores if you want that. Or you can send clients to an address and they can click click buy your book. We’ll print it, package it, ship it, and pay you a piece.”

Sweet! And publishers do other things too, any of which can be farmed out as a cut-rate consulting service. You already have a thousand layout templates, so add to this letter (which happily no longer needs to be a rejection letter — more of a re-alignment letter perhaps) another note. “For a small fee we’ll even lay out your book elegantly or help design your cover from a rich library of proven ideas.” How much is your editor’s time worth? Offer that too, again with a little profit on top.

You just turned a rejection slip into a revenue-generating customer that’s also generating their own revenue on a book you would have rejected and forgotten.

Now suppose you blew it. That marginal risk turned out to be an opportunity missed. The book has sold 10,000 units out of your POD facility. Sure, you’re actually doing okay — you took five bucks clear off of each already — and if you had no POD backup they’d either be dental hygienists or publishing with someone smarter (or less risk aversive) than you. But what you actually have now is a stable full of people writing and a concrete metric by which to sieve out the good ones. Want only authors that are selling four figures out of your POD shop? That’s in your weekly reports. Peruse the summaries in your weekly strat meeting and make a call — maybe it’s worth bringing that one guy back up. “You know, we were wrong about your book. You’re making great sales numbers and good money with it. We’d like to give it a little editing work, a new cover, a cooler layout, a marketing package, and distribute the hell out of it. Oh and here’s ten grand because we think it’ll make that back in a week. Oh and we want first refusal on your next book. There is a next book isn’t there?”

With enough writers selling their stuff on their own time, some are going to pay off. And these are second order finds — you already rejected them, found a way to make a buck off them anyway, and then re-acquired them as pre-made stars. You can afford to manage the press on these ones. You can set out to make them happy — they are proven quantities and you have numbers rather than intuition to demonstrate it.

And godammit Lulu needs some professional competition. Get in here and make everyone happy.

–BMurray

Over at Berrett-Koehler Publishers there’s a great list entitled “The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing“, which Fred Hicks pointed me at this morning. Go read that and come back.

Okay nifty, huh? Now what surprises me most about that is not really the declining numbers and the increasing market specialisation. What’s interesting to me is that a publishing company wrote that. Who was their audience? My guess is that the audience is prospective writers — this document is an exercise in expectations management for the clients of the publishing company. It’s a way to make sure that they see the realities of the business and are ready to take on the burden of being an author, which has increased substantially from the Good Old Days.

It used to be the case that you could expect to sell an interesting number of books if a publisher picked you up because the publishers were pretty picky. They were picky because they shouldered not only the burden of risk associated with publishing but also because they shouldered the marketing of the book. The handled pre-contract research to determine whether the book was worth investing in and they handled post-contract press events to get the word out. Now, apparently, that’s not a given. If the mean sales are down and gross sales peaked and specialisation is increasing, this tells me that a lot of books are crap in a broad context however interesting in a narrow one. And that tells me that publishers aren’t doing their first step in the process: weeding out the crap. This means they have gone from rejecting most authors to accepting many but managing down their expectations.

This also tells me that they (the publishers) are not reading this document carefully. Because this means that the publisher is steadily winnowing down his responsibility in the process and there is nowhere left to winnow.

I’ve talked about risk and its relationship to profit for small context publishing recently. Basically for zero risk you can get comparable profit if you take on the marketing and use a highly automated POD service. Comparable to being a publisher and doing print runs and risking that investment, I mean. So if I accept a narrow audience, and I accept that mean sales for a book are in the hundreds per year and not hundreds of thousands, and I accept that I need to do my own marketing, then this document is telling me that the publisher has ceased to be relevant. If I absorb what I have to (writing, layout, and marketing) and shuck what I can (risk, dreams of riches) then I can do all this myself.

So, publishers (and I note that I am writing on behalf of a company (composed of me) called VSCA Publishing), you need to knock on my door now. It used to be that authors went cap-in-hand to publishers looking for a deal to get their book into the wild, but this document is telling me that the publisher (well this one at least) is not going to do anything for the author that he can’t do himself. Real automation has snuck up on the business. So the publisher needs to knock on my door now and beat the business I can do myself. And he has to beat it by enough that we can share the profit in such a way that I come out ahead over pressing the button at Lulu. Turns out, according to that document, this is hard.

So is the publisher dead? Well obviously not yet, but there’s a bell tolling somewhere. A publisher is now (or soon to become) someone who needs to knock on the door of the author and make some guarantees about volume and about marketing. Or a return to significant advances, perhaps. They need to tell me they can beat my sales estimates by a factor of ten and they are telling me their estimates are actually lower than my own. They need to show me that their connections guarantee me exposure in places I couldn’t otherwise go and that I want to go there, and they are telling me that the niche market I already know is all there is. They need to show me that they are shouldering risk that actually needs to be shouldered, and back it up with numbers that make me more money for less effort.

Last week I thought it was just the distribution thugs that were in trouble. This document tells me that the technologies are eating much deeper into the industry than that. Again (see also: music, journalism), we are seeing how real automation empowers individuals, and that means that a corporation of individuals thus empowered is a wholly different beast than a current-day corporation of unempowered employees.  Nothing is changing tonight and the corporations will thrash as they change, but this document shows some incredible blindness. They are basically saying that they can only do so much.

And it’s as much as I can do alone at home.

–BMurray

Rob Donoghue has some very nice things to say over at his blog, Some Space to Think, about Diaspora. Specifically, right now he’s jazzed about scope, which we introduce in no more than half a page of material on page six. My response to his observations and to those of his commenters is:

You guys are mowing all over my Soft Horizon lawn. :D A lot of this is ground I’ve covered while analyzing scopes but some of it is new as well, which is exciting. An upcoming project, Soft Horizon, uses scopes as a critical component of character generation and it pays in extraordinary ways.

During character creation, when asked to select an aspect, the player may choose either an aspect or a scope. She gets one scope for free — Myself. Every aspect must be under a scope. Refresh is the number of aspects only.

I’m sure you can already see most of the cool trade-offs being performed here. One that’s less obvious, perhaps, is that the player is making decisions about autonomy: when the ref compels an aspect under the scope “The Royal Family”, it’s the character’s obligations that are pushing. Were the aspect under “Myself” it would be a personal decision. The story of accepting or denying the compel must take the scope into account.

Another feature is the empty scope. What does it do? Well, when someone maneuvers to put an aspect on you (friendly most relevantly but also hostile) they must put it under an existing scope. So empty scopes are places where your friends can make you extra awesome by empowering your relationships (your DEMON SWORD or your CREW OF PIRATES).

Scopes rocks.

Scope is a remarkably powerful concept to introduce to Fate because it adds constraints and the one thing that Fate really needs is constraint. These kinds of constraints are the anchor points in the system (any system) that let us find interesting new mechanisms and interactions between mechanisms. Systems with no constraints have nowhere to get a grip and twist. And look how much you can twist this sucker with just this one constraint!

This is space that needs exploring — in any awesome system in which you can do anything, wonder how you can tie it down and make it beg. Once bound, it will be more obvious how to make it something more interesting.

BDSM metaphors are not typical for me, I promise.

–BMurray