5 Oct 2010

On the perils of tweaking your workflow

With the announcement of Scrivener 2.0, I've started thinking about the tools I use for writing Quiet Babylon.

Scrivener is great, I've been using it for two years, but it's really not designed for people like me. Scrivener wants you to work with rich text formatting and I want to work in plain text with light HTML syntax. I am constantly fighting with Scrivener to strip formatting out of text that I paste in. On top of that, I've started using the iPad to write, so I'd love to not have to transfer text back and forth between apps. Scrivener promises Dropbox Syncing, but it seems weird and clunky compared to the "just works" syncing of apps like Notational Velocity/Simplenote.

Where I love Scrivener is in the document tree that allows me to easily move posts between folders to help me organize them. I have folders for early drafts, folders for active works in progress, folders for different writing projects, folders for completed posts. I would like to maintain the ability to easily order and search through hundreds of snippets.

I have a pretty good idea of what I want in a writing app. The problem is finding one that does this. Here's my wantlist:
  • Plain text native: I want it to strip out formatting when I paste in text, I want to only be working in plain text.
  • HTML syntax highlighting: for easier editing.
  • Project drawer/folder: some way of having metadata that lets me track the status of many drafts and snippets.
  • Works with files on the disk: When I move a file from folder to folder in the project drawer, I want that change reflected on the disk. I want to be able to have all of this in Dropbox and then to be able to use a dropbox-compatible iPad editor to read and edit the files. 
  • Allows me to re-order files in the project drawer: If I have a list of files, I should be able to change the order they appear in that list to suit my needs
  • Spellcheck.
  • Find/replace.
  • Works on a Mac
I spent several hours last night looking for something that matched this list, downloading reading documentation and messing around. No luck.

Scrivener wants you to work in RTF and uses a package format for the files, so no easy remote editing (there is a Dropbox sync feature coming, but it looks clunky and besides: the RTF thing). Ulysses uses plain text, but also hides everything in a package and doesn't highlight syntax. Textmate gives syntax highlighting, plain text and when you drag files between folders they move on the disk, but it doesn't allow you to change the order of files in the drawer list. BBedit gives the same stuff as Textmate, and it does let you drag and reorder files in the project drawer. However, those changes are virtual and when you drag files between folders, they aren't moved on the disk which results in weird duplications and confusion, which means it won't play well with the iPad, which is the whole point. MarsEdit offers great native blogging and previews of the post, but it doesn't play well with massive numbers of drafts as far as I can tell, let alone playing well with Dropbox etc.

So after many hours, all I've succeeded in doing it driving myself crazy. At this point unless there is something about BBedit that I am misunderstanding, it seems like Textmate is my best bet, except that I'll have to resort to adding numbers to the start of filenames to control the order which feels like something out of 1992.

Help?
30 Jun 2010

Not an anarchist, still upset about the G20 and Bill Blair

Below is the core text of the email I sent to the police, the mayor and my councillor. I don't expect everyone to have the same opinion as I do about what went down in Toronto, but the police chief's pat dismissal of the idea that there could be any legitimate criticism of the action by police this past weekend is stunningly offensive and infuriating.
 
I've put links on how to contact your representatives at the bottom of this post.

=-=-=-
Hi there.
 
I am writing in response to the interview with the chief of police as published on the Globe and Mail's website. You can read it here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/news/police-chief-offers-no-apologies-for-g20-tactics/article1621788/
 
In particular, I am writing about the chief's comment that ends the article. Here's the exchange for your reference:
 
Q: Do you feel there's been some trust lost between the public and the police this weekend?
 
A: No. I have to tell you I've been overwhelmed with e-mails, letters and phone calls of support … certainly, advocates for the anarchists are offended. I can live with their offence.
 
 
I am not an anarchist, nor am I an advocate for the block bloc tactics on display on Saturday. I'm not even an activist. 
 
I am writing to counteract the chief's mistaken understanding that the only people upset about how the police behaved Saturday night and Sunday are anarchist advocates.
 
Frankly, I'm incredibly upset that the chief seems to be so blind to public opinion - and the possibility that his guys could have made any mistakes - that he willfully dismisses all criticism as being from the lawless. 
 
Is he serious? More than 900 people arrested over the course of the weekend, many released without being charged? Indeed, according to the chief himself, less than 400 of those will be charged with anything. He thinks that's acceptable?
 
Countless reports of inhumane detention conditions, slurs directed at detainees, no access to a phone call or legal representation, video of the police charging a crowd after they sing the national anthem, a complete failure to protect Yonge Street, the wrong people's homes being raided, a law passed in secret whose public announcement will not come until the 3rd of July after it has expired, a $1 billion dollar price tag for the whole thing, and he thinks that the only people upset about this are 'advocates for anarchists'? And he can "live with our offence".
 
Get real.
 
There's plenty of reports about what happened in our city to upset everyone who lives here. He thinks that there's no trust lost between the public and the police? He's wrong. 
 
I have written the chief, but I don't expect any response. It's clear from the chief's comments that he's not particularly interested in hearing criticism of any kind. I hope that you will pass this on to him anyway. And I hope that you will all seriously reconsider this beligerent attitude to the suggestion that anything that happened this weekend was wrong, unfair, or could have been handled much better than it was.
 
Since I wrote the chief, we have learned that he intentionally misled the public about our rights when being stopped by the police during the weekend and that the cache of weapons that he paraded in front of the media contained things seized from an unrelated incident and fantasy roleplaying equipment seized from a man who was not involved in the protest. This kind of contempt for the press and the public is completely unacceptable.
 
This was an unprecedented event. The largest mass arrests in Canadian history, the first use of tear gas in Toronto, rubber bullets fired, a billion dollar price tag. More than just pointing us to the regular channels and hoping that we move on is needed.
 
We need some sunlight on these events with a full and frank accounting of what happened.
 
What are you going to do to fix this?
 
 
900 arrested, less than 400 to be charged
 
Police charge crowd singing O Canada
 
Police fail to protect Yonge Street
 
Police detain many bystanders and journalists
 
Police raid the wrong home
 
Secretly passed law (see below, this turned out to be false)
 
Police use rubber bullets on non-violent crowd
 
Chief of police misled public about expanded security around the fence
 
Some of the "seized G20 weaponry" on display was from an unrelated incident. Some of it was fantasy roleplaying gear.
 
=-=-=-
1 Jun 2010

Oh Slate...

Screen_shot_2010-06-01_at_11

You know I love you very much but why are you whoring out your ad space to people that are clearly trying to blur the boundaries between editorial and advertising?

23 May 2010

Abusing the Facebook "like" button.

If you go to this page and click on the "like" button, then you will see on your profile page (and all your friends will see on their news pages) something that that starts like this...

Screen_shot_2010-05-23_at_6
...and ends like this (note the position of the scroll bar)...

0screen_shot_2010-05-23_at_6

23 May 2010

Virginia Heffernan and the exaggerated death of the open web

Hi Jay,
 
I don't get why people think Virginia Heffernan's "open web" essay is refuted by the fact that the iPad sports a browser. Can anyone assist?
 
Heffernan's argument is that the iPad, iPhone etc only "come to life" when you download apps from the App Store. This makes users of those devices more remote from and "inevitably antagonistic" to the web. Heffernan approvingly quotes Steven Johnson saying "the App Store must rank among the most carefully policed software platforms in history." Heffernan thinks that Apple "rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store."
 
As I read Heffernan's column, I kept thinking, "Did she ever use mobile devices to get online before the iPhone? Does she remember what it was like?" The iPhone and later Android and Palm are the first mobile devices to actually GIVE you access to the open web.
 
Before the iPhone it was all walled gardens, WAP sites, and badly rendered broken pages. Carriers desperately wanted to keep customers in house and so they attempted to be little Aol 2.0s, offering complete services, apps, movies etc. within their little domains. When the iPhone shipped in 2007, it was a sea change. Suddenly, we could access the actual Internet. To put that in context: dominant smartphone maker RIM finally previewed an actually good Blackberry browser in February 2010, three years after the iPhone came out.
 
Having access to a browser that fully renders all websites (I'm willfully ignoring Flash support here) is the prerequisite for any kind of open web. The iPhone, iPad, etc. ship with that functionality. Moreover, they allow you to install links to web apps on your home screen right alongside App Store apps. Remember, the App Store only came out in 2008. Before that, Apple was encouraging developers to develop applications using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. From the ground up, the iPhone and iPad are web-natives. 
 
I'm really not sure why Heffernan thinks that the availability of apps means antagonism to the web. To the same extent as the iPad, my PC only comes to life when I install applications. This is true of all computers, yet we have managed to see the web grow and thrive.
 
The second part of her argument is around the policing of the App Store. There is no question that Apple's approval process has resulted in far too many baffling and problematic rejections. However, to go from there to arguing that the energy of the web does not meet "the refined standards" of the App Store is to willfully ignore the apps that are actually available.
 
Want a sense? Here are some terms to put into the iTunes search bar: "Poop", "pick-up", "sexy", "gun", "hot dog".
 
It's a riot in there. There are tonnes of terribly designed, tastelessly conceived, joke, toy, and just plain weird apps. Poke through the free and $0.99 apps; you will be quickly disabused of the notion that the App Store is a refined gated community. If you look at the top paid and top grossing apps you will find that most of them are games. Many more are ToDo, IM, camera, GPS, and things that require the platform to work. There are few of the 'a website but nicer designed and pricy' apps that Heffernan fears (in fact as I write this, there are none in the Canadian store's top 50 lists).
 
As for the policing itself, it's worth again remembering what came before. I used to develop games for cellphones. Before the App Store, getting an application for sale was a complete nightmare. If you were a small developer, you had close to no chance of appearing on the deck at all. Publishers were required middlemen because they had relationships with all of the carriers. They took far, far more than 30%.
 
Each carrier had its own set of rules and priorities. Your product would get rejected for all sorts of reasons ranging from content to the carrier simply deciding that it already had 'enough' apps in the category. At one point, we had to refactor a version of a game based on Scarface so that it contained no blood, swearing, or references to drugs.
 
I'm not making cellphone games anymore, but I imagine this is still happening to all the companies working to get apps on platforms that don't have native stores like iPhone and Android.
 
Apple is on the HTML5 standards committee. Their WebKit layout engine powers almost every browser that runs on a mobile device. Their keynotes introducing the iPhone and iPad both emphasized the web experience (in fact it's the first thing Jobs does in the iPad demo). This is not a company that's web hostile. Nor are its products.
22 May 2010

Martin Gardner RIP

I don't remember where I found the copy of Knotted Doughnuts by Martin Gardner. A yard sale I suppose, or a second hand book store. I don't even remember when. Maybe junior high, maybe high school. I have no idea why I picked it up. The cover is so ugly, and I was never especially into mathematical puzzles.
 
But at some point I acquired the book, took it home and read it. I have no recollection of first reading it. I've read it many, many times since.
 
It's a collection of columns that he wrote for Scientific American called Mathematical Games. It's the 11th collection in the series. Despite being a column about mathematical diversions, it opens with an eye-opening review of the power of coincidence. Its closing essays are a scathing debunking of the I-Ching and other divination systems and then a scathing attack on the Laffer Curve, pulled into this volume out of sequence so that it would appear in book form in 1986 when the arguments about that sort of thing were raging. In between there's topoplogy, a graph paper racing game, an extensive debunking of the idea that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare as part of a longer essay about cryptography, and an astounding graphical investigation of fractal-like programmable worm paths.
 
I pulled all of those topics straight from memory.
 
The essays about coincidence, Shakespearean authorship theory, and the Laffer curve all had an especially powerful impact on me. They drove me to rethink how I looked at proof and evidence. They made me a more critically aware person, and I hope that I have stayed true to the spirit of healthy skepticism that they engendered. I still have my copy Knotted Doughnuts.
 
Martin Gardner died today and the world is poorer for his passing.
17 May 2010

People have already started to play with OpenBook

Screen_shot_2010-05-17_at_2

2 Apr 2010

An Open Letter to Cory Doctorow in Defence of My Mom

Hi Cory,

I saw your post on Boing Boing about why you aren't getting an iPad and how this is a moral choice that the rest of us would do well to follow. I'm writing because while I have no problem with your decision that the device isn't for you, it seems utterly strange to me that you think that your circumstances and reasoning should apply to everyone else. In particular, I wanted to spend a little time defending the honour of my mother.

Here's what you said:
...there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for "my mom" (it's amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers).

Frankly, Cory, I'm a little offended that you think that just because I know that my mother has better things to do with her life than puzzle out the difference between sleep, hibernate, and shutdown that I have a low opinion of her.

Your writing about the iPad has this eerie Maker's Myopia to it. You seem to think, "I want machines that are easy to take apart and hard to use, so everyone must." While I get that there are benefits to giving kids and other people a chance to mess around in the guts of things and find out what puts them together, I don't think this is the best of all possible states of human affairs at all possible times.

Let me share with you a recent email exchange with my mother. Mom doesn't own a computer these days, so she uses public library machines several times a week to stay in touch, research things, and generally surf the net.

From: My Mom
To: Me, My Brother
Subject: ??
Message:
Computer advice.
I am using the computer at the library and I am not sure how you are meant to do
"control-alt-delete" 
Do you push all at once or one after the other? I do get it to work but sometimes have to do a bunch of fiddling!
Thanks for your advice!
love Mom

From: Me
To: My Mom
Subject: Re: ??
Message:
Hold down CTRL and ALT. While they are held down, hit DELETE. Note also that DELETE is not the same as BACKSPACE :)

My mother is not a stupid person, Cory. She was vice president of a national charity before she retired and has done tremendous work improving the lives of women and children all around the world. And yet, over a decade into her having an email address, she still runs afoul if the vaious ways that the current generation of computers are confusing, badly documented, and generally user unfriendly. Note that we are talking here about the procedure to initiate a login. This is a struggle to work out how to even START. But at least she can tinker, right?


Make no mistake, the option to tinker with a device does not come free. Devices that get tinkered with require extra care and feeding. They break down in all kinds of interesting ways which can be a great learning experience, if you want to learn about the device. Or devices in general. But if you are at a point where you have something to do that the device is enabling, say reading textbooks to study for an exam, maybe now's not the time to tinker.

Here's the thing about people: we have different interests, we specialize. To trot out the old car analogy: I'm totally thrilled that there are specialist shops that allow enthusiasts to customize their cars down to the spark-plug timing, but that doesn't mean I want to have to know how to fix a car in order to be able to drive it.

This goes in all kinds of directions. The breadth and depth of human knowledge is vast an unfathomable. For the areas where we want to learn, we should demand machines that let us tinker and dig around. But for the areas where we don't, there's no harm in a well-made, maintenance-free, easy-to-use solution. In fact, there's a massive benefit.

I have no idea how to take apart the stove in my kitchen though I am very glad that there are people who do. I know enough to cook on it and greatly enjoy tinkering at the recipe level but I'm not above buying pre-made pasta, and I have no interest in learning to make wine. A friend of mine is getting into brewing so he has an elaborate system of tubs and tubes that he'll wrangle into ales. I look forward to trying the results of his work, but also enjoy being able to pop down to the Beer Store on a hot afternoon.

When people talk about making a computer that their mom can use it's because for a long time NO ONE HAS. My mom doesn't want to tinker with her computer (neither does my dad), she wants to use that time to send emails and photos and maintain the complex network of relationships that is the focus of her time online. She wants to tinker with family while I want to tinker with web pages. For her, the iPad might be perfect.
15 Feb 2010

Crowdfunding & Micropatronage Part 2

Hi!

How was your Valentines? I spent the first part of mine arguing about the right and wrong way for writers to get paid.

Background
It starts with this post by Deanna Zandt. She's gotten a book deal with no advance and wants to fund writing the book full-time over the summer. She's asking for support from her community of readers, colleagues, and friends. The general idea is: send her a donation, and if she can get enough, she'll work on the book full time. $100 or more gets you a copy of the book with a personal thank-you. Everyone else gets positive karma.

It grows with this twitter conversation. Many questions and concerns get raised, around both the model and around Deanna's implementation. During that discussion, two other examples of crowdfunding come up. Matt Novak's Paleo-Future Magazine which is currently accepting funds, and Robin Sloan's Kickstarter project which has been successfully funded, and published.

Both Matt and Robin chose a range of rewards for donors. Matt's goes from $3 for a thank-you in the magazine, to $15 for a copy, to $2,000 for a 2-page ad. Robin's went from $1 for a PDF copy, to $11 for a physical copy, to $59 for 4 copies of the book shipped internationally along with your name printed as a backer.

Matt and Deanna's system charges you immediately upon donation, Robin used Kickstarter which only charges backers if the minimum funding goal is reached.

Which is all just to say that there are many potential implementations of the crowdfunding model.

Unexpected Objections
During the past three years, I've had a lot of discussions with a lot of creatives, all centred around the same problem: How can we fund our work? This isn't new, it's been going on since the first priests worked out a tithing system to cover the cost of chicken entrails and ziggurats. It feels new, because the Internet has thrown a lot of the conventional ways into disarray and occasionally offered glimpses of a way of doing things that might be better than convention.

A lot is on the table: Holding down an unrelated job, commercial funding, government funding, publisher advances, working-for-hire, inheritance, an academic career, freelancing, theft and graft, patronage, marrying someone rich, winning a lottery, merchandising, royalties, homelessness. To this quiver of arrows, Kickstarter, Indie Gogo, Spot.us and others add micropatronage.

Yesterday's discussion opened my eyes. In my experience, the question has always been about whether it could word. Yesterday was the first time I heard from people who weren't even sure that it should.

Two Threads
It seems like there were two main threads of objection. One was to Deanna's approach in particular, the other was to the very idea of crowdfunding a writing project.

The price of creativity
The main objection to Deanna's implementation was that donors weren't getting much for their money. $100 for a book seems steep and there was no promise of payout for "investors" (a term which Deanna regrets using - she hadn't intended to evoke venture funding). On the face of it, I agree with these complaints. $100 for a signed book seems like a bad deal to me.

But here's the thing: I don't know. None of us do.

The correct price of goods is very, very hard to determine. It is constrained on one end by the cost of making the good, but on the other end, it's constrained only by the willingness of the customer to pay. It's why Radiohead can release an album and charge $0 to $80. It's why Starbucks can offer drinks for $1.40 to $5.00 despite the difference in ingredients being only pennies. It's why Apple can charge a design premium (or is it a stupid-tax?).

Creative work is notoriously difficult to price. Creative work in the age of digital reproduction even more so. There's no lower limit to the cost of providing another copy of a digital good. It's all guesswork at this point and I welcome as many datapoints and experiments as possible. Who knows? Maybe we've all been woefully underpricing ourselves.

Holding ideas hostage
The second objection was to the very idea of asking for money before the project started. People wondered why creators couldn't fund their work themselves through other projects, jobs etc. Here, the attitude toward cultural production became so alien to me that I don't feel like I can paraphrase it fairly. So I'm just going to quote some tweets verbatim:

Sounds like a potential legal minefield. She should get a job & write it in her spare time...

The idea doesn't look that appealing to me. If she has a job, can't she use her spare time, like the rest of us?

Writers should write before they know there's a paycheck coming at the end. Otherwise shows lack of conviction and passion.

We're talking about from the artist's standpoint. I doubt that guy's idea can have been good at all. If he thought it was he would have just bloody written it. It's what writers do.
Pair of tweets starting here:

Books and movies require materials and manpower to produce, a return on investment in these things is acceptable. I can understand needing finance to publish the book, but this should come after the creation of the work. People are paying for a story that doesn't exist yet, and will only come to fruition if a pledge target is met. As an artist, it makes no sense to me. You create for the sake of creating and sharing, money comes later.
 Series of tweets starting here: 

I'm nervous about grouping these together, because while they sound related to my ears, I'm not sure if the posters would agree (I welcome corrections). Leaving aside the details of each case (Deanna is funding the future writing of a book, Robin was raising funds while writing and self-publishing a book) this attitude toward writing seems to me to be completely insane.

My feeling is if you find a way to get paid for your work full-time: TAKE IT, TAKE IT, TAKE IT.

An aside about videogames
Before I started writing about cyborgs & architects, I co-founded Capybara Games. When we started, we were unproven, so we worked on two games in our spare time for free. Once they were done, we shopped them around. One was eventually released. The other never saw the light of day. Together, they were good enough to get us the attention of Disney, who paid us to make a cellphone game based on Pixar's Cars.

Once we started full-time game making, it was a constant balancing act between work-for-hire, speculative development, original IP prototyping, and original IP production. Funding these projects was a combination of sweat equity, development fees, tax credits, royalties from other projects, loans, grants, and unpaid overtime. When you run a studio, you've got mouths to feed and bills to pay. This adds up to a monthly burn rate. Keeping the studio running means ensuring that every month you have cash to cover the salaries of your people. At some level, the source of that cash becomes irrelevant.

Here's the thing about money: it's fungible. If I give you $25 and you buy a $25 steak, we can't say for sure that I bought you a steak. The only thing we can say is that I gave you $25 more than you would have had otherwise. If you give me $200,000 to make a video game, all you can say for sure is that at the end of the day a game got made to your satisfaction (or not) and I got $200,000. Maybe the money came from you, maybe some of your money funded another project. Maybe money from another project funded yours. Maybe we took out a loan, hoping that future income would cover the costs of current work.

Here's the thing about writing: when you are a writer, you become a studio of one. You have a monthly burn rate and some sort of source(s) of cashflow. For your work to be sustainable, cash-flow needs to meet or exceed your income. That's it.

The strength of my convictions
I can't speak for Robin, Matt, or Deanna, but I have far more projects and ideas in the early stages than I have time to execute.
At Capybara, whenever it came time start a new project, we always came up with far more ideas than we could afford to make. We made choices. We picked the ones we liked best, the ones that seemed most do-able, and the ones that seemed most likely to do well. Did we make the most whorish sell-out games we could imagine? No, because that would have been awful. But we didn't ignore commercial considerations either. We wanted to make games that we could be proud of but that other people might like because we wanted the studio to survive.

I don't think there's a moral dimension to this question. I don't think that asking for feedback or money before the work gets started (whether it's from your publisher, your family, strangers on the Internet, or your own bank account) displays a lack of conviction. One way or another, the work has to get funded. Everyone's got a monthly burn rate and cashflow.

Tim's attitude that his decision to arrange his professional life in one way somehow shows more conviction than Robin's alternative arrangement makes no sense to me. Both writers found backers to fund their work. The fact that Tim's backers are unwitting doesn't make a whit of difference.

Writing is work
Andy's argument - that books and movies require manpower to produce, while writing doesn't - makes even less sense to me. (I really, really don't understand this attitude). Writing takes skill, practice, and time. It's inherently speculative work, having more in common with RnD efforts than with the linear payoff of running a print shop or flipping burgers.

When you sit down to produce a work, they only thing we can say for sure is that the quality of the final product will be distantly related to the time and effort put in and that commercial success will be only distantly related to the quality. This is very much like RnD with the many dead ends, scrapped projects, unexpected breakthroughs, and successful (or failed) commercialization attempts.

It's a risky business all around. The nice thing about writing is that it's a relatively cheap risk. One strategy is to bear that risk yourself. This is what Tim and Andy want to do by writing a book to completion before attempting to commercialize it. Another strategy is to share the risk with a corporation. This is the function of publishing houses that provide an advance or production support. The crowdfunding approach chooses a third path: spreading the risk onto willing backers.

When Andy calls asking for funding to cover the writing of a work "holding your ideas hostage", but sees no problem with locking those same ideas behind a ticket or cover price it boggles my mind. Robin got enough funding to cover the cost of his project and then he gave his ideas away! One way or another, the cost of the project gets covered. It's just business models! We all hold our ideas hostage at one point or another.

The morality of income
I keep coming close to saying that there is no moral dimension to this discussion at all, but I don't quite think that's true. For instance, I'm generally anti-heroin-sales-to-fund-cultural-production.

Every source of funding carries with it costs and burdens. Artists who accept government funding face one kind of pressure, while artists who accept commercial income face another. Even people with wealthy spouses have to give the occasional back-rub.

Tim's choice to fund his novel through a job means that he's severely limited how many hours a day he can put into writing the novel. He's chosen to cripple his output in order to cover his costs. This isn't a moral choice, it's an investment strategy.

Most creators that I know would gladly give all of their work away for free, if it weren't for the cashflow problem. But there is a cashflow problem and the money comes from somewhere. So they sell copies, or merchandise, or write grant applications, or do work for hire, or take on other jobs. Whatever gets you through the week. In that light, I just can't bring myself to see asking for funding directly from your audience as an especially weak or morally-wanting move.

There are costs and benefits. As Joanne McNeil pointed out, it's not inherently good that author's are being asked to become their own cheerleaders. There are implementation questions and scaling issues. There are problems around quality and access and fairness of any system of funding. But these are practical questions. What surprised me were the moral questions about whether it was even right for writers to ask to be paid for their labour.

The work has value. One way or another, we gotta get paid.

As Harlan Ellison said, "I sell my soul but at the highest rates, the highest rates." Pay the writer (strong language warning).
14 Feb 2010

An argument about crowdfunding

Not sure how valuable this is, but I decided to take the time to collate and preserve the vibrant Twitter argument that erupted this morning as best I could. I ended up removing a lot of @names from the tweets in order to preserve readability and remove format-noise. I also rearranged the threads a little, to keep tweets that felt like they went together in a row, so as to better preserve the sense of conversation and make it less confusing for people coming to the discussion fresh.

It starts with Simon Sellars of Ballardian asking author PD Smith about an example of crowdfunding.

@ballardian What do you think? 'Crowdfunding', to get a book written http://bit.ly/oFs1V | http://bit.ly/13eWVM

@PD_Smith New to me!

@timmaughan (Science fiction author and anime/manga bloggerChrist, it's on social media? The ability of these snake oil peddlers to hook people in never fails to disturb me.

@ballardian What gets me is that she has a contract with a good royalty deal. Will she pay investors back if the book earns?

@PD_Smith Sounds like a potential legal minefield. She should get a job & write it in her spare time...

@WillWiles (senior editor of Icon Magazine and author of Spillway) The idea doesn't look that appealing to me. If she has a job, can't she use her spare time, like the rest of us? Seems like the funders don't stand to gain much out of it also ...

@PD_Smith Yes, the more you think about it, the more of a rip-off it seems.

@WillWiles Tell you what, when my book is published, you can all crowdfund it by buying copies. If you want. Or not.

@PD_Smith Now, that's what I call *real* crowdfunding...


@doingitwrong (That's me!) Not sure why you guys seem so hostile to this. It's just Kickstarter by someone you don't like.

@WillWiles Not hostile, highly sceptical. No ROI? Seems like panhandling.

@doingitwrong I'm indifferent to the content of her book. Can't fault her anymore than I can fault Dan Brown. If the model turns out to work out, that's good news for the rest of us.

Here's the model funding a good project. @robinsloan on Kickstarter http://bit.ly/14N9rO (I'd totally crowdfund any of you guys.)

@timmaughan like I said earlier, they're only getting support because people fall for this SocMedia BS it's a slightly more sophisticated version of Nigerian email scams. People are desperate. I'm not anti the model per se, just the content and motivations. This whole seo/soc media gold rush is like dot com boom again. Crossed with Scientology.

@ballardian 99% of writers don't get advances sufficient to live off during writeup so her entire premise is false

@PD_Smith Good point RT @iGrannie: I have several non-fiction 19th century books which were written & produced via public subscription.

@ballardian Good point, but applicable? The no-advance deal means her royalties are higher. Can't be compared to 19th C patronage.

@PD_Smith Or maybe it suggests she doesn't expect to sell many copies... Impressive chutzpah.


@paleofuture (Writer of the Paleo-Future blog.) I'm experimenting with crowdfunding to sell ads: http://bit.ly/co9tKA

I have no problem with her approach. She's not deceiving anyone, even if it's Panhandling 2.0

@WillWiles No question of deception - just no return.

@PD_Smith If she can find people to donate, I wish her the very best of luck. Maybe I'll try it for my next one...

Cheers for that offer :) Not sure I follow re publishing deals: a good publisher can transform the fortunes of a book...

@doingitwrong I honestly think you should consider it. The more I look into book publishing deals, the more they seem like insane robbery.

@WillWiles It seems inferior to the old model, in which a publisher took on the risk and people got a book for their contribution. Advance sales of the book - buy it now, I'll write it later - would make more sense, but a book for $100!!

I can't help but feel gloomy about a culture maintained by tipjars and T-shirt sales.

@timmaughan What about just writing the book first? Then if it's any good you get my cash?

@doingitwrong Yeah, that's an amazing idea. It's not true art if no one is starving!

@timmaughan ha. I prefer you're not a true artist if the passion isn't enough to make you work in your spare time. Get a job! I've got a full time job, write a popular anime blog, write freelance AND I'm writing a novel. No one's starving here!

 

@jomc (Author of Tomorrow Museumbookfuturistmicrofundng might work best for grants but first we need a tony wilson of publishing

@timmaughan what, someone with ZERO business sense? You do know his story, right?:P

@jomc not businesswise! someone with good taste who reader/donators would trust with selecting good authors to fund.

@timmaughan Ah, I see. I'm still not convinced, as an author, we even need funding. At least not until the publishing stage. If we can't write in our spare time then we're in the wrong game. I'd rather pay my own way and take the hard slog than take handouts.

@jomc i'll suffer the hard slog as well, and i resent the expectation of authors to be their own cheerleaders... but i'd love to see small publishers try different funding strategies -- tipjars, work as nonprofits, etc

@PD_Smith Microfunding can only be part of the answer. Agreed - we need people w/ vision in publishing!

'Crowdfunding' in photography RT @merelbem: Check out http://bit.ly/bhhSAc and http://bit.ly/bpig11. Am writing on the subject.

@WillWiles Isn't that the classic publishing model? Individual publisher with known tastes who people trust to find good books?

Before money ruined everything as usual.

@PD_Smith Absolutely (although a role filled by agents too). But I wonder if editors are less keen to take creative risks now... I was also intrigued to see the idea of nonprofit orgs funding creative work in The Spirit Level (http://bit.ly/bBrYFP)

@jomc interesting. here's a nonprofit publisher: http://www.concordfreepress.com/ they give away their books for free

@doingitwrong Crowdfunding not just a financing tool. Also promotional. Building a dedicated base of rabid fans might be main benefit.

@jomc I see Google "launch early and often" vs Apple's "castlebuilding" as the perfect metaphor for the two approaches

Tim Maly's Space

Hi! I'm Tim Maly.

This is a dumping ground for when I need to write something long but kind of off topic from my main site.

The main site is about cyborgs, architects, and our weird broken future and it's called Quiet Babylon.

You should follow me on Twitter: Click here.