I am Sick Today

But there are three cool things I need to tell you about: first, Puzzled Pint Brooklyn got a very nice write-up in The Wall Street Journal! Second, our friends The Doubleclicks made a very groovy Ghostbusters-inspired music video. Third, there's a fun new game called Valeria: Card Kingdoms which you can back on Kickstarter. That's all, and now I'm going back to bed.

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.)

Six "Gangnam Style" Spoofs You Must See

You* will, of course, have already seen the original music video by Korean pop star PSY:

0. "Gangnam Style"

Find out what he's saying in this annotated slideshow by a Hawaiian design firm. Not that it really matters.




Like all Internet memes, "Gangnam Style" quickly spawned countless imitators. Some are good, some... not so much. After spending way too much time online (WHAT ELSE IS NEW), I've collected some notable specimens below.


1. "Mitt Romney Style"

Let's just get this out of the way. This first video, by the hit-or-miss comedy factory CollegeHumor, is significant for being topical, though it probably won't age well past this election season. I'm not a big fan of the clumsy lyrics, and it's more a case of co-opting the meme to make a partisan political statement rather than paying tribute to the original sentiment, but c'mon. "Hey wealthy ladies?" Gotta love that bit. (WARNING: open captioned NSFW language.)




2. "Deadpool vs Gangnam Style"

Many "Gangnam" tributes feature the original music over new visuals, but few follow in the cheesy dance steps of the original as closely as this one. It features an anonymous cosplayer prancing around what appears to be a shopping mall, and it's completely nonsensical, ridiculous, and charming. There's even a Mobile Suit Gundam sight gag early on, and you should watch all the way to the end for outtakes. (Bonus: check out a live "Gundam Style" performance by some enthusiastic amateurs.)




3. "Klingon Style"

As you know, Bob, I'm a huge Star Trek fan, so my seeing this video was inevitable. The parallel setup works remarkably well—who knew Klingon warriors and K-pop rappers had such similar attitudes? Also, that dancing Vulcan kid is just the first of many well-placed sight gags, mostly from the TNG era. Just wait until the elevator scene at 1:55. (Speaking of which, in another universe: Han always shoots first.)




4. "A cappella Cover by Voiceland"

I'm also an ex-Richter Scale, so I was bound to stumble across at least one pure vocal rendition. This jazzy cover by Bulgarian group Voiceland Ensemble follows the old-school a cappella tradition, re-interpreting the original in a less overbearing style and with evocative words sung in the place of instrumental sounds (as opposed to making imitative noises—long story, ask me later). The stereo effects are a little distracting, but it's a decent live performance.




5. "Gangnam Busters"

My introduction to the world of musical mash-ups was "The Ghost That Feeds," which weaves together Ray Parker, Jr.'s immortal Ghostbusters theme song and Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds." I still haven't heard any other mash-up which matches that one for pure technical quality, but "Gangnam Busters" comes close. The audio transitions are seamless and well-timed, even if it could have used a little more Ray toward the end.




6. "Lo Pan Style"

Finally, this is how you win the Internet.




Have you encountered other "Gangnam"-inspired music videos that tickle your fancy? Please share in the comments!



* Unless you're my wife, who refuses to watch it on principle.

Friday Flash Fiction: "Unanswered Questions"

This week's story was inspired in part by Breakin' It Down with Catherine Reitman and the Occupy Oakland clusterfuck.

You might not think those two things go together, but they are both Halloween-thematic: Ms. Reitman is the daughter of the guy who directed Ghostbusters, and what happened in Oakland is pretty damn scary.

ETA: DeeAnn points out that I may have also been influenced by Cowboy Bebop. She is, as usual, correct.

Read "Unanswered Questions" at 512 Words or Fewer

SnoutCast #43: "Ghost Patrol BANG Debriefing"

This week: a roundtable debriefing with the crew behind Ghost Patrol BANG! Thanks to Brian, David, Greg, Jenn, Jesse, Matt, and Rachel for chatting with me in DeeAnn's absence.


[ Download mp3 - 44 MB ]

00:59 - introductions
02:30 - whence Ghost Patrol BANG?
05:50 - wedding first, Game later
07:53 - Desert Taxi + lowkey = crazy delicious
12:18 - SHaRC vs. OWL
14:40 - application expectation
18:06 - simulcasting
22:40 - the consequences of over-preparation
25:50 - production value enablers
28:57 - "But it's still a paper puzzle...right?"
33:05 - the new kid on the block
35:15 - GC roll call: Greg
35:50 - GC roll call: Jesse
36:29 - GC roll call: Brian
38:07 - GC roll call: Jenn
40:11 - GC roll call: David
41:50 - GC roll call: Matt
43:15 - GC roll call: Rachel
44:19 - what's next?
44:58 - get your own Puzzled Pint franchise!
45:21 - upcoming events: Iron Puzzler (winter)
47:30 - The End

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "Skullcrusher Mountain" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

       

Comic Book Report: Invincible Iron Man Vol. 4: Stark Disassembled

Wow. Matt Fraction must have really liked Dollhouse, because this entire five-issue arc is about (minor spoilers) Tony Stark being trapped in The Attic while his friends and allies restore his mind and memories from a backup wedge.

It's not a bad story, and Salvador Larocca's art continues to be impressive. An extended guest appearance by Doctor Strange and visits from Thor and both Captains America spice up the proceedings, but as with many crossovers, the big guns conveniently disappear just before the actual threat appears, so the titular hero can save the day on his own.

And, of course, they hit the reset button on Pepper Potts. Boo. I guess you still have to go to DC for real female superheroes. Oh yeah, I said it!

The next part of this series is titled "Resilient," and it'll be interesting to see how Fraction handles what should be a long and arduous process of rehabilitation. We all know Tony's going to get back in the suit, but it'll be more satisfying if he actually earns it.

Buy the book: Powell's, Amazon (affiliate links)

Friday Flash Fiction: "Guardians"

I need to work on coming up with more original titles. That is all.

Read "Guardians" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Dickly Departed"

It's in the Urban Dictionary, and that's good enough for me. But, um, just for the record: this usage is the first definition. The FIRST one!

Read "Dickly Departed" at 512 Words or Fewer