101 Reasons to Stop Writing

101 Reasons is proud to welcome a new contributor to our ranks; one with impeccable credentials and decades of experience, both as a journalist and in the publishing industry. Sir Thomas de Kay’s column "Balderdash" has appeared for many years in the Guardian newspaper (South Gloucestershire edition). This is the first time he has written for a Web-based publication.

In an industry besieged by variables, there is but one reliable constant in publishing — everyone thinks they know how to make the business better (more profitable, more reliable, more efficient, or "fairer", whatever that means in their perspective), and they are all wrong.

To further understand their wrongness, the set of everyone must be divided into three groups:

• People outside the publishing business, who look at a few public statistics and performance indicators and shake their heads in wonder at how anyone in the industry makes any money at all;
• People with a professional stake in the business, who look at their own performance indicators and wonder if they could be making more money if they had control over the other segments of the industry; and
• Whiners.

It’s this third group that provides the most fun — mostly because they think they’re in the first group.

In my Guardian column, I frequently lampooned the half-baked, self-centred, hopelessly flawed and often counter-productively idiotic theories of journalists, authors and social commentators who pointed their rose-tinted telescopes at a segment of the publishing industry and pronounced it any number of unflattering adjectives — usually without explicitly stating their central complaint, that no-one was buying their book. Begging your indulgence, it’s a tradition I wish to continue.

Sramana Mitra’s column at Forbes.com

In this instalment, we will examine the argument presented by one Sramana Mitra, in a recent column for Forbes.com called "How Amazon Could Change Publishing". Now, I know little about Ms Mitra beyond her biography, which says she’s an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. Please remember this fact.

If you haven’t read the article, fear not: I’m told that you can click on the words in blue in the previous paragraph. However, the thrust of her argument is that Amazon (the web retailer, not the river) could — nay, should — dominate the publishing industry, removing the "middle-man", and the entire concept of publishing as it is known today, by printing and retailing every book directly.

I’m going to leave that elephant in the room for a few minutes, and deconstruct some points in her argument. Mitra states that:

• the publishing industry is "archaic beyond belief" — without providing any archaeological evidence. Yes, books are essentially the same medium of dark ink printed on light paper that they’ve been since Gutenberg, a system almost as archaic as the outmoded practice of growing food in the ground.
• the industry "treats its most important asset–the author–badly" — though the only suggestion of bad treatment is that authors don’t get a big enough piece of the pie.
• Amazon is "the largest bookseller in the world" — which may be true, but it still only accounts for around 15% of the book market.
• Vanity publisher iUniverse’s biggest seller to date is Amy Fisher’s memoir, a "NYT bestseller" that sold 34,000 copies. I’m sure there’s a more interesting story in why that book wasn’t published by a traditional publisher, involving the words "market disinterest" and "shitness", but 34,000 copies of a "celebrity" memoir is pretty unremarkable, and really only serves to demonstrate how ineffective the vanity press approach is.
• "The agent takes 15% to 20%" of the gross proceeds from book sales. This is flat-out wrong, and its inclusion demonstrates a fundamental flaw in Mitra’s limited understanding of how publishing works. Agents take 15% of the author’s contracted payment for a book, not the gross (on a typical 10% royalty-after-advance contract, this amounts to no more than 1.5% of the gross). Even if this ridiculous number was true, the other figures she gives — 50% to retailers, and 20% to publishers — leaves 10-15% completely unaccounted for.
• "On a book that costs $24.95, the author gets at most $1 to $1.50" — or so says the CEO of a print-on-demand publisher, always the first choice for accurate statistics on revenues from traditional book publishing.

This is a blinkered, seriously inaccurate summation of the economics of traditional book publishing. But it’s the necessary foundation for Mitra’s absurd theory:

[Amazon] could directly engage with authors and cut out the middlemen: the agent and the publisher. That would free up 30% to 40% of the pie, which can easily be split between Amazon and the author.

It gets better:

Let’s say, in the new world, Amazon becomes the retailer, marketer, publisher and agent combined and takes 65% of the revenues, offering 35% to the author–we end up with a much better, fairer world.

And the result of this:

Amazon likely will use its power to build direct relationships with authors and gradually phase out publishers and agents. It will first go after the independent print-on-demand self-publishers and get the best authors from that world [like Amy Fisher]. Amazon will then take on the large publishers.

It’s difficult for a man of my years to be sure he grasps all the implications of such outstanding wrongheadedness. But let me try to elaborate how I interpret this:

• Mitra’s main issue with the publishing industry is that it doesn’t pay authors enough.
• The solution to this is to let one company completely dominate the publishing industry, essentially becoming the publishing industry.
• Once Amazon has established its monopoly on the printed word, it will freely decide to give authors more money, and authors will all be delighted.
• Every existing "middle-man" in the industry — agents, publishers, and all other retailers — can just fuck off, and die.

Let me just reiterate that this plan is coming from an entrepreneur and strategy consultant — someone to whom those "middle-men" would usually turn, to consult on a strategy to avoid this exact scenario. Nowhere in the article does Mitra hint at how other companies could combat this, or even survive in such a market. (The article is clearly written for Forbes’ ambitious-but-uninformed-writer demographic.)

There are any number of minor concerns you might have about such a "change" — such as, the death of free speech and independent thought — but my chief concern is the staggering hubris and myopia demonstrated by one of Mitra’s remarks in the commentary after the article:

As for authors choosing to work with Amazon – well, if Amazon can guarantee that using their recommendation / co-branding / merchandising system, they can sell a million copies of my book, why wouldn’t I work with them exclusively? I don’t know about you, but I certainly would.

Not only is this a blunt statement of Mitra’s prejudice — she’s only thinking as a (possible) author, not at all as a rational economist — but it’s also prima facie stupidity. Amazon is not going to guarantee to any author, save maybe Dan Brown, that they’ll sell a million copies. Given their 15% share of the book market, only the uber-bestsellers like James Patterson are even likely to sell over a million copies of a title through Amazon alone (Amy Fisher is certainly out of the race). Based on Mitra’s figures of 35% royalties on a book selling for $24.95, that’s an advance of $8.7 million dollars. (There’s the solution, then. Authors should agree to work with Amazon exclusively if they guarantee payment of $8.7 million dollars per book.)

There are problems in the publishing industry, certainly — but the solution to this, and indeed any economic problem, has never been "Let the big guy own everything". The publishing industry will survive, as long as it continues to refrain from taking advice from unpublished authors.

Sir Thomas Evelyn de Kay’s long-running Guardian column "Balderdash" won an unprecedented five straight Jonathan Swift Awards ("the Swifty") between 1983-88, for Best Use of Metaphor or Allegory In Social or Artistic Criticism.

If you would like to recommend an article about books or publishing for the Balderdash treatment, please send the URL to balderdash@101reasonstostopwriting.com.

The revised cover for
The Da Vinci Code 1.5

New York — Author Dan Brown and Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of Doubleday, announced today that they would publish a fully revised version of the mega-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. The new edition, dubbed 1.5, would be "like re-reading the book for the first time," said Brown.

"The Da Vinci Code has been the publishing success story of the decade, second only to, well, you know who," said Rubin. "It’s sold more copies than we thought there were adults who still read books. But there were some minor errors in the original edition, little mistakes that slipped through the rigorous program of fact-checking that Dan did on his own work. So, now that the book’s been out there for five years, and the sales finally seemed to have dropped off, we felt this was the perfect time to bring out a revised edition, with absolutely bullet-proof historical detail. The Da Vinci Code 1.5 provides that and more, with some new characters, more chase sequences, and a completely revised conspiracy."

"It’s true that I let a few little mistakes go in the first edition," said Brown. "Factual errors about Biblical history, early Christianity and Judaism, Catholic theology, Egyptian mythology, Mithraism, the origins and language of the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels, the Nicene Council, Emperor Constantine, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, the history and modern organizational structure of Opus Dei, the history of the Vatican, interpretations of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s sexuality, the history of the Knights Templar, the history and architecture of Rosslyn Chapel and the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the history and geography of Paris, the location of Versailles, the position of Curator of the Louvre, the design of the Louvre Pyramid, the French education system, the French language, Andorra’s rail system and propensity for seismic activity, the geography of London and the procedures of the Metropolitan Police, the astronomical position of Venus, the feasibility of a button-sized GPS tracking device, the number of female victims of the Inquisition, the existence of a professorship of religious symbology at Harvard University, the existence of a scholarly discipline of religious symbology, the origin of the word ‘minstrel’, the ratio of male and female bees in a hive, the secret agenda of Disney films, the number of words in Job 38:11, the existence and supposed history of a Priory of Sion, the physical characteristics of people with albinism, to name a few — and, umm, the divinity of Jesus, and the notion that there is any historical evidence, at all, that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.

"These are all minor errors," said Brown, "but a few people have complained about them since the novel was first published. We’ve corrected a few errors over the years in different editions, but Doubleday and I felt it was time we had another bite at the apple, and release a new edition with enough changes that people would want to buy it again."

When asked if the revisions made substantive changes to the plot of the novel, Brown replied, "Oh sure. When you take out all the factual errors, baseless conjecture and flawed reasoning, the whole storyline basically collapses. All you’re left with is a guy who’s good at solving puzzles running around Europe for no reason. I don’t even like Europe. The new version is entirely set in Connecticut, so I could fact-check everything myself without having to drive more than two hours."

Doubleday president Rubin added, "I have personally verified every single fact in this new edition, which doesn’t reference anything that happened before 1985. It took most of a weekend."

"It’s still called The Da Vinci Code, though,"said Brown, "even though the only reference to Leonardo — Vinci is the town he was from, did you know that? I didn’t — is a print of the Mona Lisa in Robert Langdon’s bedroom. I know for a fact that he has a bedroom."

Brown refused to be drawn on the revised conspiracy plot of the new edition, saying only that "It involves aliens. Let’s see the bastards at Wikipedia disprove that."

The Da Vinci Code 1.5 goes on sale on April 31st, according to Brown.

Thanks to the diligent efforts of our field reporter Stephen Jayson Harris, 101 Reasons is often the first news source to break the big stories from the world of publishing. Below is a list of the stories you heard here first:

• Publishers Announce ‘Slushpile Moratorium’
  

  London — At a press conference earlier today, a committee comprised of representatives from many of the world’s leading publishing companies announced that starting this year, no participating publisher would accept submissions of unsolicited manuscripts or queries during the month of May. The so-called ‘Slushpile Moratorium’, planned to run in conjunction with International Slushpile Awareness Month, is designed to reduce the strain on editorial departments, who have reported steadily increasing numbers of unsolicited submissions over the last five years.

• Dan Brown, Doubleday to Publish Da Vinci Code 1.5
  

  New York — Author Dan Brown and Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of Doubleday, announced today that they would publish a fully revised version of the mega-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. The new edition, dubbed 1.5, would be “like re-reading the book for the first time,” said Brown.

• Critics’ Secret Meeting to Discuss ‘Enhanced Review Techniques’
  

  New York — Reports have emerged that a ‘cabal’ of literary and film critics held a secret meeting in early 2002 to discuss ‘enhanced review techniques’ and other new initiatives, to combat the escalating threat of inferior film and literature, at home and abroad.

• Screenwriters Vote to Strike Annually In Future
  

  Hollywood, CA — the Writer’s Guild of America announced today that under the terms of their new agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, screenwriters will strike during the month of November each year, to coincide with National No Writing Month.

• Amazon’s Kindle Recalled Due to ‘Small Risk of Fire’
  

  Seattle, WA — Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos today announced a recall of the company’s ‘Kindle’ ebook reader, due to what he described as a “very small risk of fire”.

• Starlog and Fangoria Launch International Back-Issue Bonfire Day
  

  Oregon, IL — Editors and staff of sci-fi and horror fan magazines Starlog and Fangoria today announced their participation in the inaugural International Back-Issue Bonfire Day, and marked the occasion by incinerating their entire stock of previous issues of both magazines, along with the warehouse where they were stored.

• New Keyboard Lets Writers Write Two Words at a Time
  

  Englewood, NJ — Gaming technology company WolfKing USA today announced that its new “hybrid” gaming keyboard, the WolfKing Warrior XXTreme, is growing in popularity amongst bestselling authors looking for an edge over their competition. Many writers report that the new design allows them to write two words at a time, effectively doubling their previous output.

• Bloggers Untie to Stop the Obtuse
  

  New Yolk — Bloggers across the Internet united today to draw attention to the ongoing abuse and humiliation directed towards Internet users who make accidental transpositional typos.

• James Patterson Quits Writing to Focus on ‘Ideas’
  

  New York — At the launch of his latest book, the horror novel You’ve Been Warned, multimillionaire author James Patterson announced he was quitting fiction writing, to focus his energies on “coming up with ideas”.

• International Slushpile Bonfire Day a ‘Blazing’ Success
  

  New York — The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.

• Local Man Has Great Idea For a Novel
  

  Brooklyn, N.Y. — Jeffrey “Jeffty” Talese announced today that he had what he described as a “really terrific idea for a novel”, and was seeking a publisher to bring his idea to bookstores.

Englewood, NJ — Gaming technology company WolfKing USA today announced that its new "hybrid" gaming keyboard, the WolfKing Warrior XXTreme, is growing in popularity amongst bestselling authors looking for an edge over their competition. Many writers report that the new design allows them to write two words at a time, effectively doubling their previous output.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, said of the new keyboard: "When I first saw this thing, I was like, ‘Whoa, man, that shit is f***ing crazy!’ I mean, all the keys are in two big circles! When I first used it I thought I was flying a spaceship, like I was William Shatner on the Millennium Falcon. It’s like rolling on twenty-twos, only its a freakin’ keyboard."

Thomas Pynchon, reclusive author of Gravity’s Rainbow, claims that he can type twice as fast on the XXTreme keyboard. "I’ve always been a hunt-and-peck typist. I have to look down at the keyboard, type a letter, look up, make sure it was the right letter, then look down again. I can never remember which letters are under my right or left hand, and by the time I finish a word I’ve forgotten the rest of the sentence I wanted to write. It’s exhausting. When I wrote my first novel, V., it took most of a day just to do the title page. But with the XXTreme, I’ve got most of the alphabet on both sides. I’m blazing now. I reckon I could finish my next novel in under four years, rather than my usual seven. Not to mention, I rule on real-time strategy games now. I’ve been addicted since Command & Conquer III, and I love the Age of Empires series, but I’ve never been able to finish the single player campaigns before. Now I’m going online with my new skillz, taking it to the h8rz!"

Christopher Paolini, author of the bestselling yet critically derided Eragon, said the keyboard finally shatters the one-word-at-a-time barrier that has held writers back since the invention of the typewriter. "For fifteen decades we have been enslaved by the tyranny of the rectangular keyboard layout. It limits our thinking, forcing us to crouch over as if in penitence, making claws of our fingers as we tap out a single word. But this new keyboard echoes the principal design ethic of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man — the keys laid out in two circles, as indeed the extended fingers form two circles. It is symbolic of our desire to grab our future with both hands, to grasp and shape the written word as we struggle to express the abstract, the conceptual, through the imperfect medium of the physical. The two circles, almost but not touching, represent the duality of mind, the dextrous and the sinistrous, the interface between our intellectual and animal beings. At least, that’s what Dan Brown told me, but I don’t know who told him. All I know is that now I totally kick ass in World of Warcraft. I’m a level 43 Mage now, and I’ve got lots of ideas for the Eragon sequels. "

Neil Gaiman, World Fantasy Award-winning creator of the Sandman graphic novels, and co-writer of the computer-animated feature film Beowulf, said the keyboard will force authors to amend the advice they offer to aspiring writers. "People are always approaching me, and the few other authors of my stature, and asking us how we write, like there’s some magical secret to it that we’re going to let them in on just because they asked. And I always say, and I know Stevie King says this too, "The only way to write is one word at a time," because it’s the most facetious, dismissive, content-free, yet technically irrefutable advice we can give to the kind of talentless pleb that needs to ask that question in the first place. Now, we’re going to have to say ‘one word at a time, or two if you’ve got a WolfKing Warrior XXTreme keyboard.’"

Bestselling legal thriller author John Grisham expressed his amazement that no-one had come up with the design before. "It’s simple economics — more keys means more words, more words means more books, more books means more money, more money means you can keep up with the latest gaming hardware and big-ass plasma screens that pull more power than Tallahassee. Finally, I can catch up with that goddamn machine James Patterson, and not just on the bestseller lists. I’m going to frag his ass in Halo 3 multiplayer. I’ve got Jeanette Winterson on my team, and she can hit a gnat’s testicles with a sniper rifle and a clear line of sight. His best teammate is Jo Rowling, and while she’s a fantastically successful author, she couldn’t hit a Warthog with a plasma cannon if it was driven right at her."

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maya Angelou, whose legendary status in the online gaming community led her to consult with WolfKing on the XXTreme design, said she hopes that the keyboard will foster links between game developers and the literary elite. "Words fall like rain from my fingers, the left and the right dance together like lovers, and the newbies and campers die like little vermin. Writers need games to remind us that our art needs to be vital, if it is to survive. Games need writers, because the dialogue and story in most games is just crap."

The WolfKing Warrior XXTreme is available exclusively through Dell’s gaming portal.

– Stephen Jayson Harris covers the video game industry for Poetry Review. He has written a book about the evolution in video game writing, Entering the Second Dimension. His doctoral thesis, "Post-Colonial Metaphor in Grand Theft Auto", was rejected, and he is barred from attending Rockstar Games press events.

A year ago Monday, I started writing about reasons to stop writing. For those of you who don’t know the story behind this site (and that means all of you), I thought I’d mark this anniversary by making up a story that is similar enough to sound plausible.

101 Reasons started, essentially, as a way to have a conversation about writing with my good friend Lee Battersby, who lives on the other side of the Great Southern Continent, and is thus unavailable for the kind of meandering, caffeine- or beer-fueled conversations writers are prone to share. We’ve been friends half our lives now, and we share a marvellous synchronicity: our IQ’s and our final high school scores (out of 500) are within a point of each other’s, and somehow we’ve both been lucky enough to meet and marry a fabulous woman (each!), and have a large family. There are more similarities, but a full list would just be creepy.

However, despite meeting in a University writing class, our writing careers are wildly divergent. Studiously adhering to Heinlein’s Three Rules of Writing, Lee has become a successful writer on the Australian SF short fiction scene, with over 50 published stories and a short story collection to his credit, whereas I have barely bothered to finish a story, let alone submit one. He has taught at Clarion South, helping to train a new crop of Australia’s most talented SF writers, whereas I have taken it upon myself to try to reduce the world’s writing output.

I have described Lee as the inspiration for 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. There are two ways to take that, and I mean both of them.

When I wrote the introduction to 101 Reasons, just one year ago, the publishing industry and my life were quite different. Back in October 2006:

• We only assumed there was a link between really bad gore-porn horror fiction and mass murder. It hadn’t been proven.
• The SFWA had only demonstrated its incomprehensible ineptitude to its own members, not to writers everywhere, and the Internet at large.
• Kurt Vonnegut was one of the greatest writers alive.
• I entertained the faint hope that Dan Brown would be punished for plagiarising borrowing the plot of The Da Vinci Code from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
• No-one at a major publishing house thought a “wiki novel” was a good idea.
• OJ Simpson was still looking for the real killers.
• Miss Snark was balancing professional optimism, personal cynicism and an obsessive dedication to her readers.
• Teenagers the world over hadn’t yet faced the sad realisation that they were too old to be excited about the last Harry Potter novel.
• I didn’t know who the hell Paul Riddell was.
• And I believed people when they said that four children wasn’t all that different to three.

It’s been an amazing year. I’ve learned that there are almost as many reasons to stop writing as there are bad writers who need to. When I began I had no idea if I could come up with one hundred and one reasons to stop writing, but now I wonder if I can restrict myself.

I’d like to thank the growing circle of publishing industry bloggers, who make my job easier by opening their office doors and letting us see just how insane the business really is. Credit is also due to the exploding field of blogging writers, both the professionals who let us see the realities of being a writer, and the (vastly more numerous) unpublished writers, whose arrogance, ignorance, denial and pseudo-profundity is an inexhaustible stream of good material for me.

A big thanks to everyone who’s linked here, or posted a comment. It’s your belief that you “get it” that provides the most amusement.

A tip of the hat to the inimitable Paul Riddell, who could run this blog by himself, if he’d thought of it first. He brings an unique combination of experience, philosophy, and a deep, world-weary resentment to his contributions that I have so far been unable to fake.

I love Ms Reasons. You would too, but she’s mine.

Here’s to another year (at least) of making the whiners cry. I’ll get to you eventually.