For the last several years, a pretty vibrant indie ebook business has grown up around Amazon.com and its affiliates. Amazon’s Kindle bulletin boards grew a lively community of writers and readers.
In the last couple of months, Amazon has cracked down on writers promoting their own books on the boards. By all accounts, there were writers who spammed promos about their work all over, in appropriate and totally inappropriate places. But lately, some writers have gotten emails from Amazon telling them they cannot put book titles in their signature lines, can mention one title only in a post and only if someone has asked them for the information. One smart writer got on a board the other day and asked a few antagonistic readers if they would hold JR Rowling to the same standard if she decided to post there. The question does a good job of showing how absurd the situation has gotten.
Writers have been herded into a ‘Meet Our Authors’ ghetto where they basically talk amongst themselves, with few readers making the trek. The writers are mystified. Don’t we make Amazon money? What sense does it make. Businesses work for their own strategic interest so they should be predictable.
Here’s my take on how this does make sense, from Amazon’s point of view:
The key move was about a year ago, when Amazon decided to offer authors 70% royalties on their ebooks if they self-published.
Who doesn't like Steve Jobs? Amazon...
At the time, Apple was looking to outflank the publishing business (and the Kindle) by cutting themselves in for a piece of book royalties (the old 35% model) for anything sold on the iPad. Amazon and publishers were scared to death of something like iTunes for books. Jobs makes all the money and tells publishers (and writers) how much they can have. And kills the Kindle, which was otherwise looking like a success for Amazon.
On the other flank was Google, which, at the time, was touting it’s ‘let’s-digitize-every-public-domain-book in the world and offer writer’s royalties if they fill out the proper forms in time’ strategy. That looked like a monster. Google would end up with a milllion quality books available for free (or the cost of watching their advertising) -who’d pay money for anything else? Who’d buy a Kindle?
By raising author royalties for ebooks to 70%, Amazon struck back big time at both competitors and at the publishing business. It killed Apple’s strategy instantly and changed the monetary value of books rights even for books that had been neglected for years–suddenly they could be instantly profitable for the writers with almost no outlay–which played a big role in killing Google’s planned settlement. All of this served Amazon’s purpose.
Joe - the John the Baptist of ebooks
It served their purpose to publicize Joe Konrath and Amanda Hocking, because it convinced mainstream writers to think about abandoning their publishers and go ebook. The move changed the economics of the publishing business to a point where it probably isn’t economically feasible for existing publishers in their present form.
Having a million previously-unpublished writers publish their own ebooks and then camp out on Amazon, using and demanding attention and resources this huge corporation would rather spend elsewhere is probably NOT one of the consequences they spent a lot of time thinking about.
And now that those competitors are gone or severely weakened – and Amazon is going into the publishing business – there is little advantage to them helping writers as a group. Those of us that make money, I guarantee we’ll get whatever attention we can earn with our bottom line. The rest are back in the wasteland – a slightly different wasteland than the old days but the same neighborhood basically.
It’s not all negative. What’s positive is that the past year or two has taught a lot of people that they can find writers they like outside of the NY publisher world.
I think it’s going to be up to indie writers to evolve away from Amazon’s farm, to organize ourselves and create the equivalent of publishing imprints, where we vet the quality of the books we endorse, share some royalty money for shared publicity and where readers can come to a website knowing there will be ten or twenty good writers there, that if they don’t like my work, they’ll like one of the other writers they’ll find onsite. Everything is temporary. We seem to be coming to the end of one stage. We have to start planning for the next.
Okay, I’ve lowered the price of Mindbenders to 99 cents!
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (if you’re a fruitfly–if you live more than a week or two, maybe twice in a lifetime..)!!!!!!!!
Anyway, don’t miss this chance to read the book that Tom Monteleone, author of the NY Times bestselling Blood of the Lamb, called, “A dead-on thriller for the decade . . . . I can’t imagine anyone reading this and not wanting more.”
Or the one that caused F. Paul Wilson, author of the NY Times bestselling The Keep and the Repairman Jack novels, to enthuse: “Ted Krever has been a writer to watch, now he’s a writer to read. Do not miss MINDBENDERS.”
Oh, both of those are the same book! Wow, it must be pretty good! And only 99 cents, you say?!
That’s for those of you for whom $2.99 was a big outlay… these days, that could include most of the former American middle-class – and, by the way, in case you’re a member of that recently-assaulted group, this book actually explains how you got mugged and who’s behind it! I can’t say more – if I tell, they have to kill me. And then I wouldn’t be able to raise the price back up to $2.99 in a couple of days…so don’t miss this chance, just in case I’m still alive on Tuesday.
(Okay, I just noticed the price hasn’t come down on Amazon just yet – 10:15 am Eastern time. But you know about it already – it’s like insider trading, but legal!)
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Click here to purchase on Amazon. |
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Other e-readers, click here for Smashwords. |
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Click here for trade paperback. |
I have a discussion group on Amazon called Thriller, Suspense and Mystery Writers and Readers (See! You’re a member already!). Here’s a link.
We had a little fracas the other day with a typical Internet type, the kind who seems to get his jollies by ripping people’s work. And the conversation got me thinking about critics and why the whole concept of criticism is off-base.
Hunter-patron saint of druggies
First of all, the logic that a critic (whether professional or, in this case, amateur) can make informed judgments about what will be considered great art someday in the future is a joke. That decision gets rendered fifty or a hundred years from now and depends to an absurd degree on history we can’t foresee. Let’s face it—if there’s a libertarian revolution in this country in the next ten years, Ayn Rand will suddenly become one of the ‘great’ writers despite her shortcomings; if it’s a drug culture uprising, Hunter Thompson may rise to the top ten of all time, at least as patron saint.
It also depends on the evolution of artist’s careers and popular taste. If you asked movie critics in 1940 who was the best actor in Hollywood, who would they have picked? Not Jimmy Stewart—a callow youth. Not Bogart—a detective or gangster. Spencer Tracy? Nah, he’s just a buddy for Gable movies. Gable? Shallow. Cary Grant? A playboy light comedian.
Muni-thinking deeply
Who? Of course! Paul Muni! You can see him think! Oy, can you see him think. Nobody can watch him anymore. I suspect De Niro will be seen this way in fifty years.
However, none of this is the main point. So? Get to the main point already, dammit! Okay…
The main point, as far as I’m concerned, is that we like what we like. Some people love Garcia Marquez and Spider-Man (me, for example). Some people love Elizabeth Gilbert and Sex in the City.
The point of art really is to find what you need, to find what speaks to you. Whatever you think is good art—you’re right. If it makes you feel, it succeeded. The longer I live with the Internet, the more I’m convinced it’s essential nature is democratic. Hopefully, it will have that effect on art and criticism.
We are a universe of souls wandering around seeking meaning, so we need a universe of art to fill that need. And anyone who thinks there’s one meaning to the universe needs to get out more.
Lenny. Culture. See him brooding?
I’ve mentioned this before: I grew up in a household that had a reverence for ‘culture’, culture with an Old World reverence. Opera. Plays. Musicals were a step below, movies and popular music below that. Literature was right up at the top level.
Most of what I read to this day is considered literature. Bellow, Twain, Henry James, Garcia Marquez, Nick Hornby, Michael Chabon, Donna Tartt, Nuala O’Faiolain, Philip Roth. I wrote four books that were my variations on that vein and figured that was what I was going to do. They were stories about my own life, distanced just a couple of steps and looking back through a thin filiter. It’s a time-honored approach.
Twain. He writes better than me.
When I decided to write a thriller, it was a commercial decision. I wasn’t getting published, I thought it would bring me more attention and more money than straight novels. And I think I understood somewhere in the back of my head that I was getting lost. When you try to write literature, you’re up against Bellow and Twain and James, Chabon and Tartt and Faulkner and Shakespeare for Christ’s sake. How the hell can you ever know you’re any good? I’ve got an ego but there’s a limit.
What happened then was, the thriller stopped being ‘just a thriller’ about thirty pages in, as soon as I found the first couple of characters and became allied to them. Suddenly, it was another of my novels, as personal as any of the others, except this one had some rigid expectations. If it didn’t cook along, if there wasn’t something exciting or really interesting happening every thirty pages or so, it would fail outright, no matter how interesting I thought the characters were.
And the stakes were different—it wasn’t about writing a beautiful sentence. It was about telling a story. I’ve tried to read Ludlum and Dan Brown. I’m not knocking them—they know how to spin a yarn. But I wasn’t intimidated in their company. Rightly or wrongly, I felt I’d know if I had something good when I was done.
And that’s how it worked out. I wrote the thing, got rejected twice by agents and went back at the book with a machete. And learned, finally, how to cut ruthlessly, like it wasn’t mine, like it was just a story that had to be told. And after I was done with ‘Mindbenders’, I went back to ‘Green’, which had a great idea for a novel and some of my best writing—but the good stuff was submerged under reams of showing off, of things that didn’t mean a thing to a reader, only as very foolish reassurance for me. It was a bad book until three weeks before I put it online—now it’s the best thing I’ve ever written and I think it stands as a good book.
Good enough. That’s my new standard. I’m not Faulkner or James or Twain. But I can write a good story if I put my heart in it and take out everything else and that‘s what I learned to do writing ‘Mindbenders’. Because I never really approached it as a ‘genre’ story. I can’t approach any story that way. I have people in my head and I have to put them on paper. They have to live. They are, in a way, my family. When you think that way about characters, there’s no such thing as genre.
The other thing that came to me in the writing of ‘Mindbenders’ was that genre these days might speak to our lives a bit more directly than ‘literary’ works. I’ve spent most of my life in a world where the obstacles seemed to be internal. I had to learn to be my own best friend. I had to overcome my own limitations. It was very easy to see the world this way as a privileged American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But in the past several years, the challenges no longer come from within. When I talk to people on the street and in the store on my day job, there’s a restlessness, an anger and frustration. We’re being assaulted by entrenched interests—banks, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, politicians of both parties, by a justice system and a political establishment that ignores our needs and an economic system that’s producing incredible wealth for a few on the backs of the rest. We have seen the enemy and, for the first time in decades, it isn’t us anymore. In that kind of world, a thriller can become very personal literature. It can express a view of the world to come in a way that internal narrative no longer can.
When I was in college, Gato Barbieri was all the rage.
‘Last Tango in Paris’ came out in the middle of my college years and, if you see the film today, the music is the only thing that holds up. Brando could improvise a scene here and there (and some of the most affecting scenes in the film are his inventions-the monologue over his wife’s casket, for example) but when you asked him to fashion a narrative, he couldn’t do it, as Francis Coppola found out to his dismay a few years later on ‘Apocalypse Now.’ So ‘Last Tango’ now seems overblown and self-indulgent—except for the music, which is the same shrieking, emotional bath it was at the time of release.
I went to the record store (that was a place where they sold bins and bins full of those big vinyl discs that needed a needle to move along the grooves—they had lasers in those days but only the military could afford them—just pointing this out for those of you who just went ‘Huh? Record store?’) and found the ‘Last Tango’ soundtrack and, shortly after, something called ‘Under Fire‘. I played them both constantly for a few years and have rediscovered them periodically ever since.
They are unique and wonderful and trying records, all at once. Gato Barbieri seemed to know only two gears—first and fifth. Which made his transitions pretty amazing sometimes but it also meant he spent a whole lot of time reprising the same line over and over and pushing it ever upward into shrieks and screams in a range no tenor sax was ever meant to be played before Coltrane arrived. I played one of my favorite cuts for a friend in his basement a few years ago. When we got upstairs, his wife remarked that it sounded like one of her nightmares.
But with him, you take the good with the bad. He is relentless but his best music is truly passionate, truly the music of someone who’s determined to leave nothing on the table, to get it all out there. The songs were clearly recorded live in the studio, because they’re full of little inconsistencies and momentary hesitations that only happen when a band is making it up on the spot. And his band at the time was a miracle, great musicians who ended up leading their own bands after: Lonnie Liston Smith on keyboards, Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto Moriera on drums, Mtume on extra percussion. They created this amazing swirling, living sound around Gato’s fierce center, like the chattering of a rain forest around the cries of a big cat on the hunt.
See? Even I get over the top just trying to describe it. The sound is primal and, to my ear, totally unique. I get moments of clarity and beauty from that music like nothing else.
Like most things that unique and that demanding, it couldn’t last.
The MOR years-ick
After mining that vein hard for seven or eight years (the fine Latin America series of albums), Gato folded his tent and went to work for Herb Alpert. Alpert built pre-recorded backing tracks for Barbieri to play and multi-track over. The music got tamed. He didn’t shriek so much. The little hesitations and the overwhelming, overbearing explosiveness went away. I lost interest and can’t listen to them. They seem to me examples of how an artist goes wrong.
Gato’s beloved wife passed away in the 80’s and he went into hiding for a while. But I’ve seen videos of him in recent years—he’s featured in the wonderful ‘Calle 54’ film of several years back. He’s in his 70’s, a bit fragile-looking and wistful for the old days but the band still rocks behind him and that powerful, primitive shriek still comes out of his horn. And the music is again that music of the Latin American jungle, that strong melody and constant swirling percussion.
So maybe it’s proof that you can right the ship even after it’s sunk. You just keep playing.
By Claudia (VA, USA) on Amazon.com:
This is that rare piece of fiction based on fact in such a way as to make the lines between the two seem to blur. Mindbenders is built on the work done by both the US and Soviet governments as they attempted to harness the most powerful instrument on the face of the earth – the human mind – as yet another weapon in their massive arsenals. More experimentation has been done in this area than most people realize, and Ted Krever obviously did his research very thoroughly before writing this book. In this novel, he deals with remote viewing, telepathy, and other things that some consider ‘tricks’ of the mind, but which many believe are far closer to reality than myth.
The novel is well written and well edited, with a storyline that takes hold in the first few pages and doesn’t let go until the plot has unwound in ways one would not expect. The characters are well developed, ‘warts and all’, as the saying goes. The story takes the reader from the swamps of Florida to the catacombs of Rome while dealing with life and death, and war and peace.
These are not, for the most part, ‘nice’ people, as their actions demonstrate, and they each have their inner struggles, their secret demons. When reading this book, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the potential reality lies close to the surface. Perhaps because it’s a subject in which I’ve long been interested, but I couldn’t read it without knowing that while it is fiction, and a fascinating story, the underlying dynamics are all too possible.
Rome
This is a novel, a story that came forth from the mind of the author and found its way to the pages of a fascinating book; however, one of the most interesting aspects of the story is that it is not so far from reality that something very much like it could not happen. The story shows how powerful forces of the mind could be used for overwhelming evil or redemptive good, and we can but hope that the latter would triumph in any battle between the two.
The ending certainly is an ‘ending’, but I see plenty of room for a sequel one of these days, if the spirit moves Mr. Krever, and we are fortunate enough to have him write it. I was sorry when it ended, which I think is the way I want to feel when I’ve been fortunate enough to stumble on a really good book.
Mindbenders ebook: on Amazon and on Smashwords
Mindbenders in trade paperback
Every novel is an Odyssey for the author. My book ‘Green’ began with a simple premise and a clear course ahead. It ended nine years and a thousand miles later, at a destination with little resemblance to the one I started for and the journey having rendered me a different person.
I began with a question, about one of my best female friends. We care deeply about each other, laugh at the same things, admire each other’s gifts, know we can count on each other in good times and bad.
I found myself wondering: Why aren’t we in love? That would be so damn convenient!
When she invited me to Ireland, where she raises and trains horses, I took little notebooks and my laptop and made notes the whole time in character. Seeing the trip as fiction from the start freed me up. I got nervier and a bit more irresponsible. I actually had more fun than I would have if I’d been me at the time.
I wrote down a conversation between two men in a pub—and embroidered it, took it further, while I could still hear the rhythm of their voices across the room. And, just when I thought I’d finished this little piece of fiction, one of them made a comment that perfectly capped what I’d put on paper. It was flat-out eerie.
So I had a start. It took two other women to get me to the home stretch.
The first I met for one date. She was obsessed with the torment of being beautiful—her every anecdote turned on this issue. My first reaction was ‘we’d all love to have such problems’, until I realized it really was a prison. Attractive women have a power they did nothing to create, can’t control and know will wither far too soon. It’s a corruption that’s almost irresistible.
I met the other woman in NY the night before my second Irish trip, the following year. After eight exchanges of email the next day and twelve the next, I knew I’d met my soulmate, the person I’d waited for all my life. As soon as I said I was moving up my flight home to be with her, she decided she couldn’t remember my face and wondered if we could possibly get along in the same room. And made sure, once I returned, that we couldn’t.
It’s harder to have your heart broken in middle-age. You don’t expect the sting, you don’t have forever to recover. But it left me with an ache I had to understand, to explain. So I wrote. It’s the only way I come to understand anything.
They tell you as a writer that your job is to raise good questions. I surprised myself, after 16 drafts and almost nine years, by finally coming home with some answers.
Links to: Green e-book on Amazon
On Smashwords (for e-readers other than Kindle)
Green trade paperback
And all those other familiar action slogans…
‘Mindbenders’ the ebook is now on sale on Smashwords and Amazon . Only 99 cents!
Want to know more about the book? Mindbenders. Want to read an excerpt?
I’m doing this because, at the moment, I want readers more than I want money. But act now, because I’m not at all sure how long I’ll feel that way.
The only thing I ask – since you’re getting such a deal – is that you write a review (I’m not asking for a rave, just an honest review) on Amazon and, if you’re a member, on Goodreads. Reviews – a variety of reviews – attract other readers and that’s what I’m after. And in truth, I’m pretty confident the book will satisfy most of the people who read it.
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Another, less happy, thought:
I participate in something called Operation Book Drop, which sends me a list of emails for servicepeople in Iraq and Afghanistan so I can offer them free copies of my books to read. So I just sent out a ‘Mindbenders’ coupon to a list of maybe 150 soldiers – and immediately got nine ‘could not deliver’ messages in return. Sure, some of them are hopefully mis-spellings or folks that are no longer in the service – but, looking at the list, surely some of them just aren’t there to receive the email anymore. Whatever you think of these wars – I’m not a fan – it reminds you what these people are doing and risking out there.
Godspeed, soldiers.
I was fascinated by the powers of the mind long before my research for ‘Mindbenders.’ But I’ve realized I should be sharing some of the research directly here, because it explains that the outlandish things I have Max Renn, my main character, doing are not really so outlandish—and because the research is so optimistic about the capabilities of human beings, if we only begin to make use of what we’re learning.
Start with this—it’s a very simplistic video overview of some of the things I’m talking about, and will be talking about frequently from now on.
Start with the fact that scientists discovered decades ago that viewing electrons in motion actually changed their trajectory. Our thoughts have a physical component. We can influence matter on a subatomic level. As per this.
Therefore, if the Universe is made of electrons and we can influence the activity of those electrons, we can influence the Universe. Quantum physics has found a consistent (if mystifying) framework to the universe that supports the concept of a universal subconscious, that explains why optimists live longer than pessimists, why prayer and positive thought have a physical effect.
If you want to insert God into this, that’s okay with me but God isn’t built-in here. It’s the simple realization that life is, at its most basic level, truly interactive.
In 2005, a science website called The Edge asked 13 scientists—the most empirically-driven of human beings, “What do you believe that you can’t prove?” They got 11 answers. Here are the only two that jibed:
Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, “Visual Intelligence”
don't try this at home
I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience – the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds – is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.
Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,”The Mind Made Flesh”
I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance – so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ lives.
or...
Now, are there lots of charlatans and phonies out there hustling this stuff to make a buck? Of course, there are—no matter what you believe, there’s someone trying to exploit it for money. But there’s a host of real science backing this up
And then there’s this, which isn’t specifically mind power, but somehow I think it’s related. A story about someone who seemed to be lost to the world but who was just out of touch. It takes a few moments but is worth every second it takes. Listen here.
