Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

So.

Apparently, something is wrong with the contact form, in that somewhere along the line (between it and my PA and me), some email is getting eaten. We don't know how, we don't know why, and most importantly, we don't know how much. We only know this is happening at all because I was able to confirm two instances of "I tried to contact you and it didn't go through." (One was resolved by resending with a different return email address. The other, we're not sure.)

Chris is working on a way to make sure this doesn't happen anymore. For right now, giveaways are going to have to be handled in a two-step authentication process, for which I am sorry: specifically, rather than saying "email me," I'm going to be saying "comment here and then email me immediately, so I can tell you if your email is not received." Inconvenient? Yes. Annoying? Yes. The only way I can continue to do giveaways until this problem is resolved? Sadly, yes.

I am deeply sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, especially if you were someone who didn't get a prize because your email was eaten. (Please do not contact me saying "this happened to me a year ago, give me a book." I will believe you. I just don't have the books, or the postage budget, to do anything about it.)

Whee.

There's a trend I've been noticing lately: everything is suddenly everywhere. I think this may have something to do with the emails I receive daily that are literally checklists of every social media site in existence, complete with a handy "be sure to like this here! Be sure to tweet about this here! Be sure to make a witty Tumblr post complete with reaction .gif here! Be sure to..." and I don't know what comes after that, because I have already deleted the email and gone off to interact with something less exhausting. I have enough trouble remembering to promote myself; I can't take on the responsibility of promoting everything I come into contact with.

It feels like the signal to noise ratio is getting skewed; everything is a sea of signal boosts and endorsements and link-backs and that's lovely, if they're things that you support and believe in. I try to post and tweet and yes, Facebook and the rest about things that I care about. But I don't care about everything in the universe. That would be exhausting.

I wonder if we're just all drowning, and thus all afraid of being overlooked. Whatever it is, I admit I'm getting a little tired of being told how to use my social media. "People will be more likely to notice this if you tweet it!" Well...yes. But then they're less likely to notice my awesome Pokemon.

Everything's a trade-off.

1. So I have been forced, by the technical limitations inherent to LJ, to change my Friending policy. Specifically, I am now at MAXIMUM FRIENDOCITY, and adding any more Friends will cause me to be instantly sucked into a horrifying shadow dimension where demons will feast on my delicious bones. Read also, "LJ won't let me Friend any more people." So while I am still a Friend/Unfriend amnesty zone, I will no longer be automatically Friending back. Also, I have now typed the word "Friend" so many times that it has lost all meeting. I shall have to Foe some people.

2. You know it's summer when the Maine Coons felt their bellies by sleeping in their water dish, and you have to take them back to the groomer to be shaved. Again. In other news, guess who gets to take forty pounds of cranky kitty to the groomer? Good guess.

3. I've been scarce recently because a) I've been trying to catch up on some things, and b) I have 600+ comments to answer and it scares me. I will endeavor to post more, if y'all will be understanding about it taking me a while to answer you. S'good? S'good.

4. Disneyland was awesome, except for the part where I twisted my ankle and spent Sunday in a wheelchair. It turns out that I'm still surprisingly good at navigating myself when I need to, and Vixy pushed me when we weren't in spaces that required fine cornering and control. Neither of us died, but wow, was that not an experience that I am in a hurry to repeat.

5. I will, however, say this: if you see a girl pushing a manual wheelchair down a hill, maybe stepping right in front of that wheelchair is not the world's best plan. Especially if that wheelchair contains a person larger than the girl doing the pushing. Because you know what neither of us was able to do in that situation? Stop. In other news, I ran over some idiot-ankles, and I am not sorry.

6. The Hugo Voter Packet has been updated, and now contains the files for Best Related Work. That means that, for the first time ever, a full length filk CD is included in the Hugo packet. So. Cool. It's not too late to register and get your voting rights into the bag! Check out https://chicon.org/membership.php for details.

7. The new season of So You Think You Can Dance has started, and that means that my urge to write InCryptid is returning to normal. This show is totally restorative, in the best, weirdest way possible. I am a happy bunny.

8. Other things that make me happy: the San Diego Comic-Con exclusives have been announced for this year, and they include a new Monster High doll (Scarah Screams) and a new My Little Pony (Derpy Hooves/Bubblecup). I am a sucker for toys.

9. Other things I am a sucker for: Australia. My Mira Grant Q&A on Saturday was the most marsupial-centric Q&A I've ever been a part of. It was sort of impressive, in a "why are we talking about this again?" sort of a way. It may have had something to do with the fact that I had a plush Perry the Platypus on the podium...

10. Jean Gray is still dead.

All right: here's the thing. Discount Armageddon is officially released March 6th. That's the date we've been talking about for months, that's the date you should be able to obtain the book, that's the date when sales begin counting against my first week numbers. Any books which escape into the wild before then count against my overall sales, but do not count for that all-important first week. Also, because I am number-based OCD, any books which escape into the wild before then make me feel sick, cry hysterically, and basically become non-functional with stress. It's THE BEST THING.

As of midnight Monday/the very beginning of Tuesday, Amazon has been shipping copies of Discount Armageddon. Consequentially, Barnes & Noble is doing the same thing. I haven't been saying anything because DAW is trying frantically to fix it, and I didn't want to drive sales to the sites which have chosen to release my book early. (I don't blame B&N for reacting when they saw that the book was on sale; they're a business, after all. But it's not helping my stress level any.) Please, please, do not buy my book early. I know it's hard. I know that the urge to have the shiny thing now is strong within us. I've ordered dolls from Japan and Australia, and DVD sets from Canada and the UK, for just this reason. But those things were legitimately released in the regions where I was ordering them, and Discount Armageddon has not been legitimately released anywhere at all. Please wait until March 6th. Don't punish independent bookstores, and local brick and mortar stores, for some computer's hard-to-fix mistake. Please. I am literally begging you here.

It doesn't help that so much of a book's success is measured by their first week. I've basically thrown up every time I thought about my week one numbers (including just now), because these early sales could mean the difference between a series and an accidental duology. It's unlikely—DAW is very loyal, and they stand by me—but it could happen, and I am very much worst-case-scenario girl when I'm this flipped out. So please. Do not buy early. Wait until March 6th.

And then there are the ebooks.

Both Amazon and B&N have put the physical edition of Discount Armageddon on sale, but are still holding the electronic edition for the actual release date. People who receive their physical books early are reaping the benefits of a fortuitous, author-breaking error. People who have to wait for their electronic books are not being denied anything; they're doing what was supposed to happen in the first place. This has not stopped the exciting emails from rolling in. They mostly stopped after the first day, but on that first day, I was called...

( A lot of bad things are behind this cut. If you don't want to see, just go with 'I was called a lot of bad things.' )

See, apparently, the ebooks are being withheld because I, personally, am trying to force everyone to buy my preferred format (physical). So sexual threats and relentless abuse are totally acceptable, because it just shows me the error of my ways.

I have nothing to do with the books being available early. I wish they weren't.

I have no control over whether the electronic editions are available early. I'm glad they're not, but it's not because I'm a greedy bitch; it's because I don't want any editions available early.

I am literally sick with stress, and this is not in any way helping. Please, don't buy my books before their actual release date. Please, don't place an order with a site which is offering my books before their actual release date. Please, don't call me horrible names because you can't have what you want the second that you want it.

Please.

(Because it must be said...comment amnesty. I'm already crying hard enough.)

So as I get ready to leave, I begin addressing the administrative funtimes that are my inbox. Which leads us to today's exciting question:

"Why hasn't my _____________ been mailed?"

This question comes in three flavors: books, shirts, and ARCs. If you are currently expecting a book from me, it has been mailed. If you don't have it, it's either in transit, or the post office has eaten it. I sadly don't control the post office, and I can't afford to pay for confirmation on every package I send, so unless you sent me money for postage that included tracking, I don't have a way of knowing where it wound up. I'm sorry.

If you are currently expecting a shirt from me, we just received the last box from the printer. It's a small shirt shop, and they were as overwhelmed as I was by the size of the response. We're still packaging and mailing, and will finally be able to start packing and mailing out those shirts that previously didn't exist. Thank you very much for your patience. I can look up individual people on the list, but I ask that you email Deborah at the merchandise account, not me directly; Deborah has the files, and time spent digging through the list of shipped shirts for your name is time I'm not spending putting shirts in envelopes.

If you are currently expecting an ARC from me...here's where things get fun. See, my email? Is apparently broken. As in, "no longer accepting mail from my website contact form." So the addresses of the winners of our last contest never reached me. If you're reading this, please try sending your address again, via LJ messenger this time; my webmaster, Chris, is trying to isolate and repair the problem, but I have no idea how long that's going to take. For the moment, assume that if you've emailed me, I didn't get it.

Because administrative chaos right before a week in Florida is so totally what I needed this year. Happy holidays!

So people have been asking a lot lately "Why can't people outside the US buy the e-book edition of X?" (In this case, X = any given work that is unavailable in a specific region. Most often "Countdown," since it lacks a physical edition, but almost everything has fallen into this category at one point or another.)

The answer, sadly, is simple, and not something that's easy to fix. Basically, when I sign a contract with a publisher, they acquire certain territorial rights. DAW owns the US distribution rights for Toby and InCryptid. Orbit owns the US and UK distribution rights for Newsflesh. Other publishers own my distribution rights in other regions. The pieces I have sold to the Orbit Short Fiction Program ("Apocalypse Scenario #683" and "Countdown") were sold under a contract which, at present, covers only US territorial rights. Meaning that my publisher can't make those properties available outside the United States. They aren't allowed. And buying the rights for every possible market, in every possible region, would make the work fiscally unsustainable for them.

Part of this is tied to the intrinsic value of a property. Say, for example, that we want to sell the InCryptid books to a UK publisher, for a UK edition. This would make the physical books cheaper for UK customers, since they wouldn't need to pay import costs. This would mean I got paid (foreign rights sales are a good chunk of my income in a given year, since it's a way to keep a book that's already been sold paying my electric bill). But if we tell a UK publisher "oh, and by the way, we sold the ebook rights to that series to someone else," that publisher isn't going to buy the series. There's too much tied up in ebooks right now for that to be fiscally wise of a publisher.

Orbit is working on making the short fiction pieces available outside the US; if you check the Short Fiction landing page, they note the problem exists, and that they're looking for a solution. But the solution is never going to be "sell global ebook rights to the US publisher," because if authors did that, the foreign rights market would collapse. Books would remain import-expensive, non-English readers would lose a lot of diversity, and my cats would get very hungry.

It sucks that it works this way, just like it sucks when I can't get the British or Australian TV shows I want on the right region format immediately. It may change someday. But for right now, this is why things are the way they are.

Okay, so. A few things...

1. I am still assembling the T-shirt spreadsheet. I had intended to finish last night, but then my home internet decided to emulate the mighty banana slug and travel at a speed of approximately three miles per hour, making navigating LJ borderline impossible. So if you haven't heard back from me, you do not yet need to worry. I will post one more time when the spreadsheet is done, saying "if you haven't heard back from me, worry." But if you followed the instructions (name, size, color, email address on the original post) or contacted me and asked politely for an exception, you should be fine.

2. I just found out that apparently, my drummer on Wicked Girls was never paid. I thought he'd been paid out of the money I gave my producer, but no, that all went to mixing. Given the math of albums, this is totally believable, but marginally, you know, inconvenient. So if you don't yet have a copy of Wicked Girls, or wanted to get one for a friend, now would be an awesome time to do so, as I now have an unexpected recording-related bill to pay.

3. I have a convention this weekend, and word counts to make, and I'm trying to post a piece of Newsflesh-related short fiction every day during the countdown to Deadline. So in the interests of maintaining my own sanity, I'm declaring amnesty from my normal "answer all comments" blog policy where those posts are concerned. I'll try to answer direct questions and the like, but I won't answer every expression of "yay, more story." I'll read and appreciate them all, I just need to use my time in other ways right this second. :)

4. My phone is dead. Not just a little dead; dead-dead, the great death from which there is no returning. So I'm a little grumpy, and only accessible via electronic channels right now. Some of which don't work from home, where the internet is toast. Did I mention that this was the best week ever?

5. There is no number five. I just didn't want to end the list on an even number.

Hello, world! It's the Thursday before Wondercon, and I'm trying to take care of all the little rags and tags of reality that build up over the course of a week like cat hair on velvet pants. So anyway...

1. The fight is still raging in the BSC Review tournament! This round closes Sunday morning, at which point, eight books will be reduced to four, and those four will duke it out for the right to do to the bracket semi-finals. Cat and I both still have horses in this race, so please, help keep Toby swinging!

2. Speaking of Cat, her new book, Deathless, came out this week. Hooray for book release! There's a lot of neat free stuff to have and enjoy and be amazed by; my darling talkstowolves has made a big post collecting it all into one place. I even drew a Pretty Little Dead Ghoul for the occasion. Feel the love!

3. My new phone is lovely, and allows me to do exciting things like "take pictures of my cats" and "access Twitter from the train." It also allows me to answer email when I'm not at home, which is going to be a huge, huge relief as time goes on. It's already taken some of the weight off, since I've been able to respond to things while in transit.

4. Thomas and Alice have started working against me. Thomas jumped onto the back of my knees at four o'clock this morning, jarring me INSTANTLY AWAKE, at which point Alice began pushing their ceramic food dishes back and forth in the feeding tray. Scrape. Scrape. Scraaaaaape. So yes, I got up, and I fed the cats. I am so doomed.

5. The full-length trailer for the new season of Doctor Who has been released, and is so intensely awesome as to cause me to sit, weak-kneed and gaping at my monitor, for several minutes before hitting "play" again. I remain overjoyed and giggly over the fact that this show, my show, is back.

6. Also, there's a new My Little Pony cartoon that doesn't suck. I clearly control the universe. You can place your requests with Kate, who will only allow me to fulfill the ones that don't involve diseases or amphibians.

7. I'm getting ready to do a massive post office run, so I am once again taking orders for "Wicked Girls" posters. According to my files, if it's been paid for, it's been sent out; please email me if you don't have yours. Comment either here or on the original post if you'd like to request a poster, and we'll coordinate.

8. I will be mostly offline this weekend, as I will be attending Wondercon. I'll have my awesome new phone with me, but let's face it, when given a choice between answering email and staring raptly at James Gunn, James Gunn wins without a contest. I'll definitely Tweet my location at various points throughout the weekend, and if you find me, you could win a prize. Or not. I may be out of prizes.

9. Zombies are still love.

10. I get to see Amy this weekend (Mebberson, not McNally)! And Kaja! And Phil! And there will be cupcakes, and hugging, and artwork, and Mom will probably wear her chicken hat, and I'm so excited!!!!!

What's new and awesome in the world of you?

So far this morning, I have deleted seven spam comments, and blocked the commenters from posting in my journal again. I have also deleted five spam emails submitted through my website contact form (which proves, I think, that we're training spambots to pass Turing Tests, since you have to prove humanity before my website lets you email me).

I read a web comic called Skin Horse, and pretty much daily, the comment section is kudzu'd by spammers, until one of the admins comes along and deletes the offers of cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money from a bank in a country that doesn't exist. So far as I know, none of the readers of Skin Horse really want any of these things.

My message boards are in a continual state of "behind" when it comes to approving users, because we have to work so hard to not approve spammers.

And through it all...I don't know anyone who has ever purchased something from a spammer. Most people are so anti-spam that they reject perfectly legitimate purchases, because they've decided that they're "spammy." (This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.) All spam seems to do is waste our time and make us paranoid about clicking things. It's like the TSA of shit you encounter on the Internet.

I do not want .jpgs and spam. I do not want them, Sam I Am.

I am about to preach to the choir, because I have no idea what else to do, and frankly, I am at a loss for other options.

I am a professional author. I have worked a very long time to reach a place in my life where I could make that statement and not feel like a fake. I have written books; publishers have judged them commercially viable and worthy of publication; my books can thus be purchased from bookstores and online retailers everywhere. Please note the word "purchased." My books, which cost me time and sanity, and cost my publisher time and money, can be purchased from bookstores and online retailers everywhere.

Or, if you'd prefer, they can be illegally downloaded from the Internet. Mind you, this will eventually lead to my being unable to justify the time it takes me to write them, since an author who cannot make a living through writing must make a living through other means. My cats don't understand "Mommy can't feed you because people don't believe she should be compensated for her work." They also don't understand "People say they like the things I write, but they'd rather steal them than make sure I can keep writing."

To be honest, I don't understand it either.

"See! Piracy is a serious problem." —Penny Arcade.

When I first started publishing, I had no real clue how big the book piracy problem was becoming (and it's continued to grow since then; the number of available torrents increases every day). I was honestly stunned when I got the first Google alert notifying me of an illegal download of Rosemary and Rue. Now, it's a rare day—and for "rare" read "non-existent," now that I have four books in print—that doesn't come with at least one torrent notification. Normally, it's more like four or five, and sometimes more, when some new site discovers my work and gets excited about the possibility of stealing it. Yes, stealing it.

Look: when you calculate the average author's royalties on a mass-market paperback, it comes to approximately fifty cents per copy. Let's assume I got paid $5,000 for Rosemary and Rue. I didn't just pull that figure out of my ass—that's the standard first advance for a genre novel, although very few people will get that exact number. Still, it's nice and round. Now, part of the standard publishing model says that I won't get any additional money for the book until it has managed to earn back the advance, which is done solely from the percentage of the cover price that "belongs" to me. So an author with a $5,000 advance must sell ten thousand copies of their book before they "earn out" and start making additional money. Authors who regularly fail to "earn out" will find themselves with decreasing advances, until the day that the number hits zero, and the party is over.

"Internet piracy isn't that big a deal," people say. "It can't hurt your sales that badly." Oh, really? Well, if I get one notification of an illegal torrent per day...let's assume that each torrent is downloaded three times at most. Okay? One torrent per day is 365 torrents per year, or 1,095 illegal downloads per book per year. This is a conservative estimate of downloads; most torrents will be downloaded more like ten times each. Gosh, I feel popular now! Or maybe violated, it's hard to say.

Returning to our $5,000 advance, I must sell—actually sell, from actual stores—10,000 books before my publisher realizes a profit and says "Yeah, okay, let's keep buying your stuff." Let's assume, this time optimistically, that all 1,095 people who illegally downloaded my book were originally planning to buy it new, before they found this awesome new way to save money and get the book magically delivered to their computer. So unless my book was guaranteed to appeal to 11,095 people, I may have just dipped below the magical 10,000 person mark. Goodie for me.

"Dear person online begging someone to upload an illegal copy of my book because you LOVE me SO MUCH: you don't love me. You love stealing." —Ally Carter, author of Heist Society.

I made the following statement in a relatively recent post:

"Why do book series end in the middle? Because not enough people bought the books. Sometimes they can live on, as with Tim Pratt's online serialization of his fabulous Marla Mason stories, but for the majority of authors, if the sales aren't there, the story's over. Why do midlist authors disappear? Because their sales weren't good enough to justify their continued publication. Why are TV shows canceled? Because not enough people gave money to their advertisers. All entertainment is profit-driven. We pay to play, and when we stop paying, they stop playing."

Several people promptly told me that I was wrong, and that authors who really want to continue their series can do so whether they have a publisher or not. My addiction to professional editing services and distribution is clearly a personal failing, and I should embrace this brave new world of working forty hours a week to pay for cat food, and then going home and working forty hours a week to Stick It To The Man by continuing my canceled series. Sadly, this isn't going to work. When I'm writing books for money, I go through a rigorous internal editing and proofreading process before anyone sees my work. When not writing books for money, I write for my own pleasure, and if there are a few typos or logical failings, whatever. That doesn't pay my bills.

I love my books. I love my art. If I were only in it for the money, I would be doing something else for a living, like selling my kidneys. But at the end of the day, if a series can't pay, I can't afford the hundreds of hours required to write the average book. It's just not feasible. Note the number of unpublished "first in series" books I have sitting around. Until they sell, I can't afford to write the sequels. No matter how much I want to.

"People will spend fifteen bucks on an ironic shirt." —Penny Arcade.

A paperback book costs ten dollars, retail, and less if bought at a discount or with a coupon. This is about the same as a ticket to the movies. Even if you read fast, it will probably take you a minimum of three hours to finish said paperback, and then it's yours to keep. The movie is over faster, and also not yours at the end of the evening. (This is not to say that people don't pirate movies, and that said piracy isn't a huge concern. They do, and it is. But that isn't my department, as yet. Believe me, I'll start researching film piracy the day that Feed is optioned for the big screen.) People are constantly willing to pay for things that are more transitory than books, yet seem to blank out when asked why stealing books is still theft.

"I'll buy it later." Really? "I just want to see if I like it." Okay, how about you download the free chapters from the author's website, and then go to a bookstore? "I want to see if the author has improved since the last one." See above. "I disagree with the author's moral or ethical stance, so I'm voting with my dollars." Okay. You're also voting through theft. Why not get the book from a library or support your local used bookstore instead? It would be a lot less sketchy.

I know plenty of people who would never dream of walking into my house and stealing a book off my shelf, but have talked themselves around to the point where downloading books illegally is just not the same thing, not the same thing at all. It's the same thing. Don't believe me? Ask Paul Cornell (taken from Twitter):

"Just saw download site with 2356 illegal downloads of Knight and Squire. You have no idea how angry that makes me. Bloody thieves."
"Thanks everyone who's said they're buying it. No thanks to: 'well, if it was legally downloadable...' Like they're forced to steal it."
"Just heard: average number of illegal downloads = four times legal sales. That's why your favorite title got canceled. No margin left."

The margin is what makes it profitable for publishers to keep publishing. The margin keeps their lights on, and keeps the creators receiving royalty checks, and now we're back to feeding my cats, which is a topic I think about a great deal. The cats don't give me a choice.

I leave you with this grim thought. Yesterday, I was sitting around, minding my own business, when a friend of mine (name redacted as it was a private conversation) messaged me with:

"Somebody went to the trouble to photocopy all of [upcoming, not yet released book] and put it up online."

This sort of thing tightens control over ARCs, which reduces their distribution to book bloggers, which makes it harder for you to find well-informed early reviews. It potentially hurts my friend's sales, which may result, long-term, in her being dropped from her publisher, which means no more books for her fans. So who does Internet piracy hurt?

It hurts you.