Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my post-election ennui. Now I'm doing something about it.

Today is #GivingTuesday, and regardless of how you feel about the proliferation of Thanksgiving holiday adjuncts (Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc.), there are many opportunities to amplify your donations today and this week due to other people and organizations matching funds.

And sure, those folks could just give their money freely instead of digging a hole in the ground, but it's their money. Anyway, the point of matching funds is to spread awareness and encourage others to give as well.

I'm taking the advice of many wiser people and setting up monthly donations to support causes I believe in. I can spare $100 a month—that's $10 to each group, in case you're counting—and here's where it's going:

1. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) - not tax deductible, FYI.
2. Planned Parenthood (PPFA) - tax deductible "to the fullest extent allowable," because laws matter, goddammit.
3. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - "fully tax deductible as allowed by law, less the fair market value of any substantial gifts received."
4. Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) - now based in Portland, Oregon!
5. Black Lives Matter - "IDEX provides services such as fiduciary oversight, financial management, and other administrative services to Black Lives Matter. IDEX is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization for both federal and state purposes. Our federal tax identification number is 77-0071852."
6. Native American Rights Fund - not just because their acronym is NARF.
7. National Immigration Law Center - because immigrants, we get the job done.
8. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - "a not-for-profit organization recognized as tax-exempt under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3)."
9. Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - "a 501(c)(3) under federal tax guidelines. TAX ID: 77-0646756"
10. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) - the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights organization in the United States.

So. Tell me. What are you doing to fuck shit up?

I Have Rendered Unto Caesar

And this year, my wife and I--both of us being essentially freelancers--will be filing quarterly estimated taxes. It's the first year we've really needed to do it, now that we're (A) no longer full-time employees and (B) actually making enough annual income that it matters (i.e., no longer just living off our savings--which, BTW, is a weird loophole in pretty much all US finance regulation, but that's another story).

Chances are you've never cared about estimated taxes, because you're a W-2 wage earner whose paycheck includes automatic withholdings for various taxes (Social Security, Medicare, etc.). Well, when you're a freelancer, those things don't get automatically withheld when clients or customers pay you, but the IRS wants their money all the same. And, as Scalzi says in his excellent "Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money" blog post, "the government quite sensibly doesn't trust freelancers to pay their taxes in one lump sum."

So how does it work? Well, I'm sure not qualified to explain it to you, so I'll let my friend Nicole tell you in her well-researched "Surefire Tax Estimating Process for Freelancers" article on The Billfold. And after you absorb all that great information, follow up with The Billfold's other articles on estimated taxes.

It's not actually that much more work, especially since the system is designed to make it easy for you to plan for the coming year when you file your previous year's tax returns; though it's "quarterly," the first deadline of the year is actually April 15th, the same as your federal and state returns. So you can do all the math in one fell swoop, which is what my wife and I did this week. (It helps that she actually enjoys doing taxes, and we live in Washington state, which doesn't collect state income tax.)

Finally, the Treasury Department offers an Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS) which lets you pay your taxes online without going through a fee-charging third-party payment service. And for more info on estimated taxes from the horse's mouth, see the IRS's Estimated Tax FAQs and Publication 505: Tax Withholding and Estimated Tax.

I Have Trouble Asking for Help

I was going to rant and rave today about how badly The Newsroom crashed and burned in its last season, but honestly, that ship has sailed. Do go read Abigail Nussbaum's breakdown, though; she's much more articulate about the situation than I would ever be. (I also started this Facebook thread, which has some good insights by other folks.)

Instead, I'm going to fill this week's column-inches (OH GOD I'M OLD) by juxtaposing two TED talks by amazing women:

Amanda Palmer: The art of asking

http://youtu.be/xMj_P_6H69g

Brene Brown: The power of vulnerability

http://youtu.be/iCvmsMzlF7o

I'm a writer, and many of my friends are writers or creative artists of some kind. (Yes, that includes puzzles.) And we all struggle to figure out how to make money doing what we love.

There is, I think, an essential tension between confidence and vulnerability here: an artist needs to have the confidence to believe that people will find value in her art, and to put herself out there to connect with people (some of whom may be jerks--you never know); but an artist must also retain a sincere vulnerability (especially online, but also in person) to make her supporters feel good about supporting her work and helping her out, either financially or by donating their time (assisting with promotion, sharing food, providing couch-surfing space, etc.).

I've seen this dynamic played out in many a failed project on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and any number of other crowdfunding sites. Because those are the places where the intersection of an artist/maker's confidence and vulnerability are laid bare. You have to self-promote your project, but you can't seem like a jerk when you do it. And that can be a very fine line to walk. (#PROTIP: when in doubt, be humble, be grateful, and be nice. In all things, really.)

It's ridiculously easy for things to go wrong online, especially when you're compressing your deep thoughts into 140 characters or fewer. Even if you think you're saying the right thing, other people might interpret it differently. I'm fairly paranoid about this, so I always re-read my tweets and e-mails (and blog posts!) before sending them into the ether. I'm painfully aware that I will be judged harshly for any perceived breach of etiquette because reasons.

There's another reason I've always had trouble asking for help. Whether it was computer programming or fiction writing or even just cooking dinner, I always felt that I was "stupid" if I didn't know something and couldn't figure it out on my own; and if I had to go to someone else for help, that made me a failure, and that was shameful. Maybe that's a common neurosis, but in my case, I always suspected it was a conceptual hybrid of Chinese academic pressure and American cowboy independence. I'm finally getting over that now, in my forties, but it's worth saying out loud. Everyone needs help sometimes. Learning to recognize that, and knowing how to ask for help, is a big part of being a grown-up. (Writing: cheaper than therapy, folks.)

Back to the main point. I don't know if (or when) I'll get into a situation which many other artists have encountered, where they're facing financial ruin due to some health or other personal issue and decide to turn to their friends and fans for help. I don't know how I would handle that, because--other than asking for a raise at my first job--I've never been in a situation where I had to ask someone for money. Again, cultural taboos, blah blah blah. But I hope I'll have figured it out by the time that becomes an issue.

I Don't Worry Too Much about Piracy and Here's Why

TL;DR: oh, just go read Cecilia Tan's blog post instead.

This summer, my friend Katrina Archer self-published her YA fantasy novel Untalented (previously a 2009 ABNA quarterfinalist):

This week, she discovered that the eBook version had been pirated:

If I think that a file on a "paid" download site is my work being illegally downloaded, how do I verify w/o joining site and paying fee?

— Katrina Archer (@katrinaarcher) September 8, 2014

And that started a long Facebook discussion (not shown here) of how much authors should worry about online piracy. I threw in my two cents, but we haven't had computers and the Internet long enough to see how all this shakes out long-term, so everybody's arguing from ideology more than evidence.

With that in mind, here's my "mix tape" argument for not spending your time worrying about how to prevent or fight piracy. I'm focusing my own efforts on making cool stuff, finding an audience, and being nice to paying customers.

By the way, have I mentioned that my own book,
THURSDAY'S CHILDREN: Flash Fiction from 512 Words or Fewer,
is available as a free download (PDF or TXT)?
:)



(And now back to our program.)

NOTA BENE: the excerpts below are totally cherry-picked, heavily edited, and completely biased. YMMV.

I'll begin with Tim O'Reilly's seminal "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution" (11 Dec 2002), from which I often quote:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Cory Doctorow elaborates on this in "Liability vs. leverage: How writers lose when 'piracy' gets harder" (14 Jan 2013):

[A]lthough it’s hard to turn fame into money in the arts, it’s impossible to turn obscurity into money in the arts. It doesn’t matter how you plan on making your money — selling books or downloads, selling ads, getting sponsorship, getting crowdfunded, getting commissions, licensing to someone else who’s figured out how to make money — you won’t get the chance unless people have heard of your stuff.

But let's talk about books specifically. Since books are made of text, and plain text is pretty much the easiest form of data to copy and share over the Internet (by design), online piracy is an obvious concern for professional writers. However, John Scalzi makes a very logical argument in "The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy" (13 May 2005):

Let's ask: Who are pirates? They are people who won't pay for things (i.e., dickheads), or they're people who can't pay for things (i.e., cash-strapped college students and others). The dickheads have ever been with us; they wouldn't pay even if they had the money. I don't worry about them, I just hope they fall down an abandoned well...

I don't know anyone who can pay for a book or a CD or a DVD or whatever who doesn't... I don't see the people who can't pay as pirates. I see them as people who will pay, once they can. Until then, I think of it as I'm floating them a loan. Nor is it an entirely selfless act. I'm cultivating a reader -- someone who thinks of books as a legitimate form of entertainment -- and since I want to be a writer until I croak, that's a good investment for me...

Yes, there's an investment risk... [but] I believe that fundamentally, most people aren't thieving dickheads; they're people who if they like your writing will want to support your career... Treat readers like they can't be trusted and there's no reason for them not to live down to your expectations. Make it clear to them that they're integral to your continued success, and they will help you succeed. Treat them like human beings, for God's sake.

This is not a new sentiment. In fact, Eric Flint said pretty much the same thing in "Introducing the Baen Free Library" (11 Oct 2000):

[Publisher] Jim Baen is fond of pointing out: most people would rather be honest than dishonest.

He's absolutely right about that. One of the things about the online debate over e-piracy that particularly galled me was the blithe assumption by some of my opponents that the human race is a pack of slavering would-be thieves held (barely) in check by the fear of prison sentences...

[T]he truth is that most people are no more tempted to steal a few dollars than they are to spend their lunch hour panhandling for money on the streets. Partly because they don't need to, but mostly because it's beneath their dignity and self-respect.

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the "gap" between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

Of course, none of this philosophizing assuages the gut feeling of "OMG they're stealing my stuff!" Cecilia Tan breaks it down for us in "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ebook Piracy" (23 May 2011):

[A]uthors who see 100,000 downloads of their book as equivalent to 100,000 lost sales are deluding themselves. Please trust me when I say that 100,000 downloads is not the equivalent of 100,000 copies shoplifted. It’s actually the equivalent of 100,000 people thumbing through the book while standing in the bookstore or library, deciding whether to invest the time in reading it...

Of those 100,000 who downloaded your book, most of them aren’t reading it anyway. 90,000 probably never open the file. Of the 10,000 who do, you just got the equivalent of them opening a copy of the book on the shelf at a bookstore to see if they like it. Most traditional authors would have KILLED to have such great placement in the bookstores as to attract 10,000 browsers to pick up the book and look in it. Out of those 10K, say 3 out of 4 decide the book is not their cup of tea. So now we’re down to 2500 who are genuinely interested. In the brick and mortar world, retail rule of thumb says 500 of them would have a good chance of buying it...

Giving stuff away helps. Having it for easy sale also helps. In fact, despite all our “new media” chatter about publicity in the digital age, about blog tours and Twitter contests and Facebook pages, these two things seem to be the only two things that actually make a measurable impact on sales. Give stuff away to increase your customer base, and then have it for easy sale to sift money out of those who are eager to pay. That’s it.

There's more great stuff in Tan's post, including a link to Jeff Vogel's highly entertaining "might as well have just made a big pile of money and set it on fire" cautionary tales. If any of these issues interest you, I encourage you to spend a few minutes reading through her full article.

Back to Untalented. Since the pirate site in question appears to be behind a paywall, and Kat's already filed a successful DMCA takedown notice against them, I'm not too concerned for her—why would any reasonable person pay to access a shady download site instead of just buying the eBook from Amazon?

Last but not least, until September 30th, US readers have the chance to win a paperback copy of Untalented through this GoodReads giveaway! You have literally nothing to lose. Of course, if you can't wait—or don't want to take your chances—you can also buy the eBook right now. (Full disclosure: yes, that is an affiliate link.)

I Less Than Three Portland

(Today's "The I in MEAT" blog post is brought to you by the perfect texture, The Doubleclicks, and the Twitter.)

Back in 2007, DeeAnn and I went all in on what we called "the writer move." In particular, we decided to stretch our savings by moving out of the San Francisco Bay Area to a more affordable city--meaning we had most of North America to choose from.

Some places we ruled out right away, for various reasons. Seattle was also too expensive (and still is). Canada would require proof of rabies vaccination for our cats, which in itself wasn't a problem, but we didn't want to risk losing them to international quarantine or for some other obscure medical reason. And flying the cats anywhere also seemed like asking for trouble. But that still left forty-eight of the United States to choose from.

To narrow down the wide field of candidates, we created a big spreadsheet and researched data which were important to our lifestyle. Some of those properties included:

• Winter comfort (January windchill and annual snowfall)
• Summer comfort (July heat index and average rainfall)
• Cost of living estimate, averaged from five different sources
• Distance to nearest airport
• Distance to nearest VA hospital
• Number of Trader Joe's stores within 15 miles
• Number of Thai restaurants within 5 miles
• Percentage of population identifying as religious
• Percentage of population identifying as Democratic

Here's a link to the full spreadsheet, if you're curious about the details. Note that we gathered this data seven years ago, and much of it will be out of date now:


http://goo.gl/p3tl1O

We took trips to visit our top two out-of-state candidate cities, shown in black text on that spreadsheet: Cary, North Carolina (in the Research Triangle) and Portland, Oregon. (Our fallback was Sacramento, California, which area we were already familiar with from all our Hogwarts Game scouting in 2006.) Cary had a fantastic farmer's market, but the neighborhoods weren't remotely walkable. And Portland... well, we live here now.

It took us a little while to adjust, but now we couldn't be happier with our home. (And no, I am not saying that ironically.) The move also inspired me to ask for 37 Postcards back in 2010, and that was pretty amazing, too.

If you're thinking about relocating, and you have some latitude in your selection criteria, Internet research is an excellent place to start. We started with information from Sperling's Best Places, then supplemented and corroborated that with data from various other online sources which we judged reliable and relevant. Your mileage may vary.

In Which My Demands Are Not Met

I haven't been able to go out to any movies for a few weeks because of my annoying eye condition. I can still see close up, so I have been able to work on my laptop and catch up on my TV viewing, but I would have preferred to have the option of going out and doing more things--especially this past weekend, when I was in Los Angeles visiting my family.

In particular, there are two movies out now that I'd really like to see (non-English posters from MoviePosterDB.com, for amusement value):

The Social Network and Red will probably still be in second-run venues when my eye gets better in a couple of months (or sooner--knock on wood), but I would be willing to pay to download and watch them on my laptop now. I'd probably even pay a premium for a "rental" option on opening weekend--let's say $20, which is fair-ish assuming you'll have at least two people watching--as long as the terms of use weren't too draconian.

The thing is, the technology already exists. iTunes aside, studios send out thousands of screener DVDs every year after Oscar nominations are announced--often for movies still in wide theatrical release--so Academy members can view the nominated films at their leisure and make an informed voting decision. (Theoretically, anyway--the politics of AMPAS is another post.) But there are all sorts of entrenched business models and traditional arrangements that would be upset by "day-and-date" digital distribution, and nobody wants to risk that kind of major change.

Meanwhile, pirates will always find a way to get you what you want. Not that I'm condoning that sort of activity, but never in human history has criminalizing a behavior eliminated it. And it's stupid to not offer for sale something that people are demonstrably willing to pay for, just because you're paranoid that you won't make enough profit from your media monopoly or too lazy to change anything about your business practices.