The serialized publication/value price of Eden  actually relates to this post.  As I was working on edits yesterday, I clicked over to Google News – my home page for Internet Explorer.  I’ve customized my version to show certain types of stories, and yesterday up popped a Bloomberg Businessweek story of all things.  Naturally, I got distracted from my work and had to read the piece right away.  The romance genre meriting a piece on a prominant business site was worthy of notice, and its worthy of mention here.

The piece was titled:  Romance Fiction:  Getting Dirty In Dutch Country. It focused on how romance fiction is – even in this Friday the 13th of economies – on the rise.  The story mentioned the writer’s opinion that  the many and varied categories of romance, including Amish, knitting and paranormal specifically, helped keep romance climbing towards the top.  I don’t really disagree with the piece, I just don’t think the writer attributed the rise to all the right factors. 

  According to the article, publishers say that book sales declined by 1.9 percent in 2009 after a 3 percent drop the previous year and books appear to be “suffering a slow and rather boring death.”  The article doesn’t talk about ebooks, which have been undergoing dramatic growth. 

The piece notes that despite declining sales in books overall, one genre has been experiencing “steady and unusual growth.”  Yeah, that’s right, ROMANCE.  The Romance genre increased to $1.4 billion, up by $100 million, or 7.7% from the prior year.  In a down market and a down economy people are buying more romances than ever.  Well, duh.  When have we ever, ever needed to believe in happy endings more than today?

Mysteries can get your mind working on a puzzle instead of the Citibank bill.  Thrillers can tingle your spine and make you forget the debt collectors who keep jingling your phone.  Women’s fiction can remind you that you should spend more time hugging your friends and less worrying about the bank balance that won’t cover your bills.  Nonfiction can teach you to love yourself and to ignore the wolf at the door.  But only Romance can remind you that the heart matters more than the bottom line.  Only Romance guarantees that you’re plunking down those scarce dollars for a happy ending.  And more and more, if readers are going to spend money, they’re going to do it for work that lets them curl up and take a trip that’s going to end in a good way.  There won’t be a wierdo in a Freddy Kruger mask – unless the characters are into that sort of thing. 

It all reminds me of a conversation I had with a cousin who is a big used car dealer.  He had recently sold the new car dealership and was back to his real line of work.  I asked if he was worried about business in the current economy.  He tilted back in his chair and said, “Slick (that was his nickname for me), when the economy is good, the used car business is good.  And when the economy is bad, the used car business is great.” 

And just this week, my boss and I were talking to a Claims Rep for one of our insurance companies, who was worried about a hotel owner/insured.  His business had been going through some tough times but my boss had talked to him and things were going better.  That’s true all over the Grand Strand region of South Carolina this year.  The Myrtle Beach International Airport has said that just about each month this season has broken the record set the month before.  I can tell you that judging by traffic jams and lines at restaurants, business in Myrtle is booming. 

Our good fortune in Myrtle is partly due to the bad fortune of our brothers and sisters along the Gulf Coast.  And I see license tags of many, many other states were I’d bet the folks would normally be vacationing along the Gulf beaches.  And we sympathize for the owners in those states that were already suffering and are now suffering more.  But Myrtle’s growth is due to much more than just fortunate geography. 

Myrtle Beach has always been one of the cheapest family friendly places to vacation.  But even so, last year, business was down in Myrtle.  I think its that after such a long stretch of stress, people need a break.  They can’t afford Vegas or Atlantic City.  The pricey beaches of Florida and the Mouse that requires a golden budget or the rich folk areas of Florida are beyond too many budgets.  But a vacation in Myrtle?  It’s an affordable splurge. 

Used cars do good in good years and great in bad years.  Everyone has to have a car to get to work.  In good years, many folks will trade the three year old car they bought new for another new car.  In the present year, which is not just bad, but is the worst year I can ever, ever, recall, most people will drive their car until it just won’t go anymore.  Then, they’ll get the best deal they can on an older model in the best condition they can afford.

But we’ll all still look at the Mercedes, or the Ferrari or the restored to cherry condition Vette or Mustang.  And we’ll sometimes weave fantasies about the guy driving that car.  A writer might build a whole book around those fantasies.   In other genres, the car might be hot and police might be looking for the driver, who just killed his business partner.  It might be driven by a man whose identity was just stolen as part of an elaborate plot to overthrow the government or to control some imporant part of a big buisness.  It might be driven by a killer who washed away every trace of blood before he garbed himself in a designer suit to look for his next victim.

But if the reader is very, very, lucky, the writer who spotted the bad ride was a romance novelist.  Then the driver will be a bad boy billionaire who can buy everything he could possibly need and most of what he wants.  He believes he can buy everything but he’s about to be taught a lesson in love by……his secretary, or his ward, or his best friend’s little sister.  No matter what smart lady teaches the rogue that the one thing he can’t live without doesn’t have a price tag, the story WILL have a happy ending. 

And just like Myrtle Beach’s gain may be another resort’s loss, the romance writer’s gain is more and more another genre writer’s loss.  But that’s okay.  Romance writers are a friendly bunch and there’s always room for new converts.  The Bloomberg piece talked about suspense writer Kelly Irvin who’s new book is…………..yeah, you guessed it………..a Romance. 

In these bad times, the romance genre is the Myrtle Beach vacation that more and more readers are plunking down their hard earned dollars for and getting in their used car to drive to, but that’s okay……… a happy ending is just around the corner!!!

How strange this is coming from a computer guy, right? 24 years in the industry. I was there at the birth of both the home computer and the publicly accessible Internet. You know what I never witnessed? The promise of a truly easy-to-use computer interface being fulfilled. If you’ve ever had to read instructions on how to simply make the computer do what it was designed for, then the computer isn’t really easy to use.

You don’t need to read a set of different instructions every year to operate a car. Even different makes and models of cars. They all work pretty much the same. They have practically the same interface.

How about other electronics? CD and DVD players work the same way, with the same sort of buttons coded in a universal fashion to tell the user how to operate the machine.

Before the smartphone, plain old phones all worked the same way. You input the unique number of the person you want to talk to, their phone makes a noise indicating that someone wants to talk to them, they pick up the phone and put it to their ears and mouths and you talk to them. This didn’t change for over 100 years.

Now, hold on, you’re probably saying “But AOFM, computers are open-ended devices! They’re not designed with just one thing in mind! They can do ANYTHING!”

Well that’s the problem in a nutshell. It’s a machine that emulates other machines. To do this, a programmer must either utilize the most commonly attached devices – the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer – or propose an entirely new device – another machine to be bought, attached, and configured.

Add to this the respective intellectual property rights of all the hardware and software AND the “freedom” of giving the user at least four different (but all as unintuitive as Chinese algebra) ways to accomplish a single task, and you land straight into machine hell, where you burn in hair-tearing, eye-bleeding, screaming frustation.

I visit that hell often, but I was in a particularly hot section the other night when I wanted to watch a DVD on my computer. Blade Runner Director’s Cut, to be exact.

I had a functional DVD drive in my computer; it copied data beautifully. I had fully upgraded Windows XP installed, works like a charm. At one time in the past, I had been able to just pop a DVD in the drive, and it would play just like it was in a dedicated DVD player.

But not that night, oh HELL no.

I had been swapping out DVD drives to fix a problem with my oldest son’s computer a few weeks before. I never got his problem sorted out, but I decided to keep the drives in their new locations and load the appropriate software to let mine play DVDs. Because hey, that’s what a DVD drive does, it… plays… DVDs!

But not that night, oh HELL no.

I tried everything I knew to fix the software. I uninstalled all DVD related software and reinstalled only the program that I thought would work, which I had actually paid for as opposed to the limited programs that came with the drive. I tried downloading free programs that specifically promised to play DVDs, which they didn’t. Finally I remembered a free program from my workplace that everyone seemed to have, VLC Player. I loaded it up, put the DVD into the drive, and it just worked.

This excursion into the fiery depths of digital Hades made me realize why the e-book readers were so popular, and why computers as personal devices are on their way out. E-readers have a consistent interface where you can accomplish a task in only one way, and with few exceptions they just work, dammit.

And that’s all you really need.

“Digital publishing and digital book selling will soon become the most explosive development in the history of our industry and will sweep aside those who aren’t participating,” Leonard Riggio, B&N’s founder and chairman, said during a recent presentation highlighting the company’s expanding forray into the digital market. 

The e-reader market is in the midst of a price war that is putting more and more of the devices into the hands of the book-buying American public.  Fewer readers visit the brick and mortar bookstores as more readers demand that the bookstores come to them, via their PCs, Macs, e-readers, iPods and cell phones.  Via America’s strong and ever expanding wireless networks ebooks get delivered to readers instantly. 

When American publishers lost control of the distribution system, they lost control of the readers and the writers.  Today authors like Joe Konrath have chosen to forego offered publishing contracts for some books, electing to get them out in print and ebook format on their own, thank you very much.  Books of writers doing it their way are, more and more,  transitioning readers to expect stories undiluted by editorial changes demanded by publishers.  An American indie book or ebook is becoming an intimate experience shared only by the writer and the reader.    

But even in the present economic downturn, America’s companies invested the time and resources to build the pipelines that allowed the Indie Revolt to succeed.   Those pipelines are being strengthened as demand encourages more investment.  Our writers can now write their books, publish them, sell them to readers and get paid via those same magic pipelines that funnel money directly into their bank accounts. 

In the heady atmosphere of power and possibility now held by the creators themselves, it becomes rather easy to forget that America’s Indie Revolt is not yet the world’s.  Imagine an American publisher today saying the following:  “Everyone knows that almost all publishers cheat their authors on their royalty payments, and there’s ­nothing the authors can do about it.”

Attitudes like that may have prevailed amongst that publisher’s American colleagues a few years ago, but they should be long gone today.  Because today, in our country, there’s a lot the authors can do about it – even aside from having an eagle-eyed agent.  In our country, the authors can punish the publishers by taking business directly to the people.  In the e-age, who needs the middleman?

The above quote is from a piece in The Herald/Herald Scotland about 4 young Italian writers who have joined forces to fight the ”predatory practices of the Italian publishing industry.”  In a month, their Writers In Litigation website got the support of over 50 authors to warn writers of industry practices and help them guard against “fraudulent royalty payments.”

The Italian group notes that their publishers cultivate “the impression that they are bestowing a privilege by ­agreeing to publish their works, rather than entering into a straightforward business deal.”  Sergio Nazzaro, one of the group’s founders, published a fictionalized account of a meeting with the editor that reflects prevailing attitudes of those in the country’s publishing companies.  In the fictional meeting, the editor tells the author that he pays low royalties and no advance because “There are lots of writers ­willing to write and to pay to get published, and many of them are very good. This is the cultural mass: there are more people who write than who read. And they’ll pay to write.” 

That attitude is precisely the sentiment that led to the downfall of America’s publishing royals.  The attitude infuriated indie authors for years but, like their Italian counterparts, they could do little about it in reality. It took technology and the rise of the wireless society to provide American writers the tools to change a theoretical insurgency to a new literary marketplace.   Borders, laws, and the realities that technology in other places hasn’t kept pace with America’s advances all combine to make it difficult for foreign  writers to publish and distribute with the ease that we in the U.S. now enjoy.

Reading the piece reminded me of a couple of things.  First, I don’t know if I’ve ever expressed how grateful I am to companies like Amazon and Smashwords for making e-publishing easy and profitable.  I also appreciate Amazon’s affiliate, CreateSpace and its new distribution system for making it easy to get paper copies of my book out on the digital shelves of nearly every major bookstore.  Someday soon, I hope, CS will have a returns policy in place that allows the stores to shelve the books in their brick and mortar locations.  I also owe a big thank you to Smashwords retail partners who carry my ebooks – Sony, Apple’s iBookstore, Kobo, and B&N.  SW’s partner Kobo is now distributing to Borders and some SW author’s books have also appeared there.  Not mine – yet – but maybe soon.  More shelf space always means more sales. 

Thinking of the Italian author’s struggle reminds me, also, of how petty some of our concerns are.  Authors on Kindle worry and gripe about Amazon’s new TOS that accompanied the e-tailers rolling out of 70% royalties to authors rather than the former 35%.  Sure, there are some issues with the new system but complaining about it is like complaining that our caviar isn’t Beluga.  Wouldn’t our Italian comrades like to have their largest complaint be about rules they have to meet to get a 70% royalty?

Frankly, I DON’T OFTEN SYMPATHIZE WITH ANYONE ITALIAN, but I realize that – perhaps – I’ve been unfairly blaming the nation for the fact that an Italian company downsized my programmer/analyst hubby a couple of years ago.  The economy went to pot in those intervening years and my tough times have, I fear, fertilized my tendency to paint with too broad a brush.  The Italians who downsized hubby were definitely in the same “haves” category as the Italian publishing company – family castle and all. And in considering the Italian manufacturing families’ attitudes, I begin to have a greater respect for the plight of the Italian authors. 

To my Italian brothers and sisters who also toil away at keyboards, I hope that the Indie Revolution hits your shores soon.  Please know that it is coming and prepare yourselves.  Soon the day will arrive when you will be your own publisher and your own editor.  It will not bring large up front advances, but it will bring independence and creative freedom. 

And to all those companies that made America’s Indie Revolt the new literary reality I say - thank you.  I hope that I and my fellow indie authors make you more than proud – I hope we make you rich.

Nothing will take the Indie Revolution to every nation on earth as fast as the bottom line.

So, lets say you are better off than most of us (me, especially) and you decide that this is the time to buy a house.  You hire a realtor and she drives you out to Neighborhood A to see a traditional ranch.   It turns out to be too traditional for you, but on your way to Neighborhood B to see the next house on the realtor’s list you pass a cunning little craftsman with a “For Sale” sign in the yard.  It has charm and character and doesn’t look turned out of a cookie cutter. 

So you draw your realtor’s attention to it and tell her you want to see that house.  She hems and haws and tries to evade but when you insist, the realtor finally gives you an answer.  “No,” the realtor says, “you can’t see that house. ”  She’s already met with the committee at the office.  They reviewed who you were and what you would like and dislike and composed a list of acceptable houses.  The craftsman wasn’t on the list so it’s not for you. 

In reality, that scenario may not have happened to you on a house hunt, but in the past it happened every single time a reader walked into a bookstore.  All of the books on the shelves had been screened for the readers by the publishing royals – agents, editors and publishing companies.  The royals decided what readers should want and only put the acceptable books out there for the bookstores to stock and sell.  So if a reader wanted a book, he or she had to buy one of those in the store.  And when the sale was made, the royals patted each other on the shoulder and said, “See, we were right again.”

Traditionally published author and Salon writer/co-founder Laura Miller wrote a piece recently that said all of us talking about the indie revolution have been focusing too much on what it means to “the reviled gatekeepers” in traditional publishing rather than to the readers.  Ms. Miller says that what the revolution has done, in reality, is to outsource the agents and publishers’ slush pile to the readers.  And, she wonders, what will happen when all of those “previously rejected” manuscripts “hit the marketplace,” swelling “the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and i-book offerings by the millions. Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?”

Ms. Miller’s piece says the public has “no inkling of two awful facts:  1) just how much slush is out there and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is.”  Well, gosh, she gave it 4 reallies.  So it must be bad, right?  Well then, readers must be much better off under the traditional system where the Royals screen the choices.  They’d be much happier with the traditional ranch instead of the craftsman – whether they knew it or not.   Why put the readers through the “awful” process of deciding for themselves?

Why?  Because the world is not full of cookie-cutter people.  And because THERE IS NO SLUSH.   The so-called slush pile is just the insulting term for all of the books that the Royals decided didn’t suit their vision of what people should be reading.  Wasn’t the world a better place when no matter what readers chose, it would be an ”acceptable” choice?  The Royals and Ms. Miller certainly think so, but I disagree.  I think most readers and surely most American readers would have rebelled against being force-fed years ago – except that most of them never realized the system existed.  Most of them never knew that there were piles of amazing books in every genre that they’d never be allowed to choose. 

Readers were not better off in the days when piles of writer’s visions and dreams were locked away in an “acceptable” version of a Nazi death camp.  Readers were not better served in the days when the Royals kept the work that was too different locked away until the writers surrendered and their dreams died.  Only the publishers were better off when they held the keys to the kingdom.

What does the Indie Revolution mean to readers?  Whatever they want it to mean; whatever they allow it to mean.  The vast variety of new work out there now and coming soon is as wide and varied and different as the people who will choose to buy and read it.  It means that the marketplace of ideas is wide open and writers can create what serves their vision.  No longer do writers have to try to fit their work into a pigeonhole that a traditional publisher might find acceptable.  It means writers can be as different and daring and original as the folks who will buy their work and take their journey to make it their own. 

The destruction of the slush pile created a new world for writers, but it created a new one for readers too.  The idea of that new world likely terrifies the former traditional publishing empire because it surely scares the stuffing out of Ms. Miller.  Her piece says that to date people hadn’t seen “the vast majority of what didn’t get published” which is a good thing.  Because ”it’s enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that stuff being introduced into the general population.”   

Ms. Miller, like the traditional publishing world from which she hails, disdains the new indie world just as surely as the publishers have for years discounted the readers who will nurture the indie world, fertilize it and make it grow.  Contrary to popular belief in the circles of the literary elite, the “general population” is composed of some pretty bright, pretty discerning readers.  With the indie books, just like with the traditional ones, they’ll read the cover blurb and flip through the book before they ever decide to plunk down their hard-earned dollars.  For the ebooks, they’ll read the free excerpt and get a pretty good idea of the voice of the author before they hit the buy button. 

When all of “that stuff” gets introduced to the readers, they’ll have all of “that stuff” and the regular stuff from which to choose.  And that reality only scares the old world order, the traditional publishing royalty.  It means that the power has passed from their hands to the hands of the “general public.”  It means that the value of the stamp of a traditional publishing house decreases as readers pick their purchases based on the author’s voice and the author’s vision. 

When the slush pile gets outsourced a magical thing happens – it disappears.  Today the work can only get labeled “slush” if the authors choose to allow it to be insulted and denigrated.  It gets locked away only if the writers give away their power.  More and more, writers are choosing to take their work directly to their audience.  On the real or virtual shelf, it’s not slush.  It’s a choice that the readers wouldn’t have had just a couple of years ago. 

Yes, readers who find themselves in a real or virtual bookstore now face two paths that diverge. Some of them will continue to take the well-traveled one blazed by the traditional publishing Royals. But others will take the new path and enjoy a new journey where no agents or editors exist to filter or distill the voice and vision of the author.  Those who travel the new road will enter a new place.  It may be more raw, more bold, and more dramatic.  But that’s okay.  Some readers are like that too.

It’s not a traditional ranch world anymore.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, there is a huge price war going on among companies that sell e-reader devices. It seems that the Apple cart (via the iPad) has upset a bunch of people, mainly those people who thought they had the e-book and e-reader device market cornered.

I knew that the $400 price tags on Kindles wouldn’t last long, because even though it put many different technologies together in a synergistic fashion, it was still a device with a singular purpose (as are its immediate competitors like the Nook) – in essence, a digital book.

The iPad, like the Amazon Kindle, didn’t introduce any radical new technology; it assembled existing technologies into a neat little package that ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.

Tablet computers were conceptualized back in the days before GUIs were even invented, so Apple didn’t invent the idea of a tablet computer.

Tablet computers, with varying degrees of interaction, had been manufactured by other companies since the early 1990s, so Apple didn’t invent the form of a tablet computer.

But Apple did make a computer that utilized a number of robust interdependent technologies, and that computer had the right form and was introduced at the right time to break the collective inertia of the buying public.

And even though the competing devices may someday add other functions besides downloading and displaying e-books, the public perception of them is already set. The perception is that the Kindle, Nook, etc., are one-trick ponies whereas the iPad has no boundaries.

And, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, perception is reality.

So I rarely hope anybody else has their tailhook at their desk over a weekend, especially a holiday weekend.  Rarely.  But this weekend is an exception.   This weekend every darned programmer and web guru in the Amazonian Kingdom best be chained to their desks – including the fathers in the group.   At least one of ‘em deserves to be chained, and with a big new system change-over coming at the end of June where the whole staff is most likely working on bits and pieces of the new system, someone supervising the chain-deserving code monkey didn’t do his or her job.  Somebody screwed up royally. 

Amazon’s DTP Platform publishes Kindle pieces from indie authors and includes a dashboard to monitor sales.  The numbers don’t go backwards unless there was a return or two OR unless a code monkey didn’t do his job right.  Early Thursday evening (June 17th) over about a two hour span, the DTP numbers of indie authors went backwards without any returns.  Sales disappeared. 

For many hours, nothing was heard but the weeping and gnashing of teeth of authors roaring their displeasure on the Kindle forum.    Oh – and the growling.  Don’t forget the growling.  Amongst the indie authors are many folks, like me, who’ve found the “hope”  hopeless and who’ve had enough ”change”  to destroy their world.  For us, every dollar counts and we don’t appreciate seeing them swallowed by the great Amazon giant. 

I sent Amazon an email.  As the hours stretched without a reply, I sent another.  Judging from the Kindle forums, I wasn’t alone.  Enough of us may have sent emails to fill up the big, bad, Amazon mailbox.  And all of us started to weave grand conspiracy theories.  Nobody can do conspiracy like a bunch of writers.   Finally, all the commotion got the Great One’s attention.  Either that or they wanted to get us to stop emailing.

Amazon posted the following on the forums: 

Posted By: dtpadmin

Created in: System: Global Announcement

Posted: Jun 18, 2010 2:59 PM

Dear Publishers,

We are currently experiencing a reporting issue that is affecting the display of sales information on the “my reports” page of our site. While recent sales may not be displayed correctly, we have verified sales are being recorded. Our engineers are working to have this corrected as soon as possible.

We will post a follow up once we have confirmation this reporting issue has been remedied.

Note the date and time.  The FUBAR Monster ate sales about 6 pm on Thursday, June 17th.  Not a peep was heard from DTP until almost 3 pm on June 18th.  And we’ve been peepless since June 18th - Friday afternoon.  Today is Sunday, June 20th and the system has been down since early Thursday night.  For nearly three days it’s been broken and as I type, it remains broken. 

What do I want them to post?  First, I’d like an explanation that’s better (and more HONEST) than “glitch.”   If it had been a “glitch,” it would have been fixed by Thursday night.  A glitch is a little bump in the road that has to be either smoothed over or navigated around.  It doesn’t take 3 days to fix a glitch.  Somebody made a mammoth error – a FUBAR Gigantus.  So I’d like Amazon to respect the writers enough to realize that most of us are quite bright.  If they’ll give an honest explanation of what the Mammoth Error was and how it occurred we’ll understand the process.  If they’ll tell us what they were trying to do or achieve at the time, we might even be able to summon a little understanding and tolerance. 

I’d also like Amazon to post details about what they’re doing — exactly and not generally –  to fix the error.  We’ve got enough computer geeks on the forum that they might be able to contribute helpful ideas and suggestions.  I’ve got a geek in my house and if Amazon would post details, Mr. Quack could probably help them navigate around their Everest Error. 

Most helpful of all would be pictures or real time video SHOWING that the entire programming staff at Amazon is at their desks, working like the Dickens’ and won’t be allowed to leave until they get it right.  I want to know that when there is a crisis that the staff was not allowed to walk out on Friday afternoon and say they’d be right on top of it – first thing Monday.  Why?  Because I can’t do that and I expect you can’t do that either.  At my law firm, when there is a deadline or a problem we have to work until the job is done, regardless of whether it’s a Saturday or a Sunday. 

Finally, I’d like them to post something showing a little bit of a sense of humor.  Print a picture of Paul chained to his desk and sitting on a potty chair.  Say – this is Code Monkey Paul.  He had a small tweak to make to the system that he should have made in the test environment.  He should then have debugged it and run data through until it was right and he knew it was right.  ONLY THEN should it have been moved to the live environment.  But Paul had an important poker game with the boys on Thursday night and he wanted to get out.  It was already 6 o’clock so he said, screw it, and moved the code over without testing it properly.   Paul is paying for that choice now.  Paul will be here, on the job, around the clock until he gets it right. 

Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE CODE MONKEYS.  I’m married to a code monkey.  My hubby can make an IBM AS400 stand up and say ”Who’s Your Daddy?”  But these days he’s working hard at a part time job in a PC environment that doesn’t involve what he’s been trained to do.  His current part time gig does nothing to remind him of how damned good he is at what he does.  He’s one of the best RPG Code Monkeys in the jungle, but right now there are too many code monkeys chasing the jobs.  So he’s surviving.  He’s taking a certification course that in August will allow him to get out there and get the kind of good job he should have had all along.  He’s working hard for his family, trying to get skills that in a couple of months will get him a good job and take some of the stress off of me and that will hopefully help us get back on track.   Mr. Quack is a survivor and in today’s market, that’s what you damned well have to be.

What my hubby is going through, and what many other talented computer folks out there are going through is a mental image that never leaves my mind as I think about Amazon’s FUBAR.  All of the Code Monkeys like Mr. Quack are the reason that I want proof that Amazon’s pack of monkeys know how incredibly lucky they are to have their jobs and that they have been there every single second since 6 pm on Thursday working to get it right.

Yeah – throw Paul the Code Monkey a box of bananas every now and then, but keep him right there at his desk doing his job until it’s done.  Because on this Father’s Day there are too many Fathers who are older, experienced professionals who would be right there until they got it right.  Unfortunately, in this job market work ethic has become as lost as hiring the experienced professionals who’d have gotten it right the first time. 

So yeah, Amazon, you’d best be working around the clock to fix the FUBAR.  It best not “magically” adjust on Monday morning.  To the Senior Staff at the internet giant, I say, look very carefully at what happened, how it happened and how hard your team is working to fix it.  Because if we get a Monday morning miracle, Amazon’s HR folks should be posting “help wanted” notices saying they’re looking for seasoned, experienced professionals – not young, low cost wanna bes who have pretty pieces of paper. 

Happy Father’s day to my Code Monkey.  I hope he remembers that he’s the best monkey in the forest.  I’ll toss him a banana any time!!

Last night I decided that I wanted breakfast for supper.  Okay, maybe recalling that IHOP has those cheesecake stacker pancakes right now had something to do with it.  The other factor – if one needs more than the idea of cheesecake as an incentive – was that at suppertime we could get into IHOP.  You’ve got to remember that the family Graham resides in Myrtle Beach which is a tourist town. 

Tourists, God love ‘em, come down on vacation talking a good game.  You’ll hear them in line at the grocery store or passing by at the mall talking about how stupid folks are to travel to somewhere different and still eat at the chain restaurants.  Like I said, they talk a good game.  Anybody who lives in Myrtle and has tried to get into an Olive Garden for supper or an IHOP for breakfast knows that it’s all talk.  Locals will drive up to those places, see the throngs crowding around, and leave and go somewhere else.

So there was a stroke of genius in my madness last night.  It occurred to me that maybe breakfast for supper was a Southern thing and maybe IHOP wouldn’t be crowded.  And EUREKA!!  Once in a great while – I’m right.  It was so not crowded that my kids, seeing the nearly empty parking lot, wondered if it was open.  But it was and not only did I get my cheesecake stackers (strawberry), but we were seated in a nearly empty section that allowed the family to have a loud and raucous debate.  (Apologies to the one smart diner – a single man – who decided to leave and likely swore off the ideas of marriage and children for life.)

Mr. Quack brought up a debate we’d been having at home as he is in the throes of designing the man tittie cover for the serialization of my WIP, a regency historical.  He doesn’t get my reference to “Eden Without The Apple.”  He’s also convinced that readers wouldn’t get it either and would be confused by theological implications.  I replied that women drawn in by  man titties wouldn’t be thinking about the Bible at the time. 

Men are such linear people.  They seem to lack the ability to compartmentalize their thinking the way women do.  If women suffered from the same malady, they’d never be able to plan a grocery list while doing laundry, fielding calls from their boss and working on their new book.  But anyway, Mr. Quack asked the ducklings – what does the apple in Eden mean to them?   The eldest promptly replied – temptation.  Mr. Quack raised a brow at me and looked at his seedling approvingly.

I said, no, don’t just think about the apple.  Think about the whole phrase.  What would Eden have been if the apple hadn’t existed?  The eldest duckling – whose genius IQ made him a National Merit Finalist and won him a full ride at UCF (The University of Central Florida)- then said the following.  That without the apple Eden would have been a perfect place occupied by beings who had the intellect and sentience of animals.  Mr. Quack nearly burst with pride. 

I ground my teeth in frustration.  No, no, said I – you’re thinking too logically.  Just consider the image.  A man and woman in Eden without the apple would be perfectly happy forever.  The youngest duckling suggested that if the Mommy title was too confusing, Mommy should consider a different title.   The eldest, King of All Things Linear, suggested “Eden Forever” or “Eden Always.”  Ahm, yeah – it’s been done. 

Much fun ensued while the men of the family (everyone but yours truly) listened to me describe my vision for the book and what I’m trying to emphasize with the title.  Ideally, I’d like to get the concept across that my hero is a Duke or, more accurately, a Duke Regent – meaning, he’ll lose the title to the person who marries the heroine. And I’d like to communicate the whole Eden without the apple thing that’s based on a conversation between the hero and the heroine’s late father (the Duke).  I’ve even considered “The Duke’s Eden Without The Apple. ”

Mention of the latter title re-ignited the whole debate about imagery, biblical implications, sentient beings, etc.  Likely to shut everyone up so he could have the floor, my baby duck (a 12 year old destined for a career in talk radio if he doesn’t achieve his goal of being a history professor) came up with a brilliant suggestion.  Drum roll, please… “The Duke Of Eden.”  To me, that might get the message across.  It would convey that the hero would come to realize that his Eden isn’t the title.  Not bad.  It bears considering.

Since the evening had kindled my romance author side, I came home and watched “Kate and Leopold” on Starz on Demand.  That reminded me of a blog debate that ensued over on the Dear Author website when someone wrote a blog post that savaged Johanna Lindsey’s new Malory book – “That Perfect Someone.”  I, of course, had to chime in with a comment in defense of Lindsey, since all the earlier commenters had sided with the author.  After my comment, a few folks typed more favorable messages. 

I adore Ms. Lindsey and admire her creative genius with the Malory family saga.  My favorites were James’ and Warren’s tales.  Many of the commenter said it was “undeniable” that she’d lost her touch with writing the series.  Hogwash!  I’m currently reading one of the later tales – Boyd’s story – and am enjoying it greatly. 

What sort of got my goat about the blog piece and the comment trail was that several folks were irate about the books’ lack of “historical accuracy” in scenery, descriptions and dialogue.  Imagine – Ms. Lindsey throughout the series has DARED to employ a writer’s license to create the world she chose!!  What was she thinking?  Isn’t a writer locked into the historical reality? 

That brings me to my point about “Kate and Leopold.” As far as I can tell, it was a movie that wasn’t based on a romance novel, although I’d surely have enjoyed reading the book if it had existed.  The hero of the piece was the dashing and charming Duke of Albany and he’d invented the elevator, naming it after his butler, Otis.  Are these details historically accurate?  Well, no.  Not at all.  There was a Duke of Albany – and the first was Leopold who was the youngest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.  The real Leopold, being a  royal hatchling, never had money troubles and was never forced to sail to New York to marry an heiress.  The real Leopold sought a bride because he thought marriage would get him away from his mother.  In the end, he couldn’t secure his own bride and the Queen arranged a marriage.  The lad was a hemophiliac who died before his son was born.  Needless to say, he had nothing to do with inventing the elevator.  Did any of that interfere with my enjoyment of the movie?  Heck no.  I was in the writer’s world and the writer’s reality was my reality. 

So what if Ms. Lindsey’s characters don’t use titles “correctly” by regency standards?  So what if they don’t speak in the stilted verbiage typical of the time?  Those and other things bothered the author of the blog piece and many of the commenters.  They didn’t bother me and they don’t bother legions of Lindsey’s fans and they don’t interfere with the story — they advance it. 

When I open a book – whether it’s science fiction, fantasy or romance – I enter the writer’s world.  The writer can change the Regency or Victorian era – rules, tradition, dialogue and all - to suit her story.  I bought the book to experience the author’s vision and I don’t give a re-fried frog if that vision mirrors or twists history or reality.  If I’d wanted history, I’d have bought a history book.  I want ROMANCE and I want the story to take me somewhere different, somewhere better. 

So you see, IHOP Insanity causes a strange aftermath.  Eat breakfast for supper and pretty soon you think you can spend a meal creating a book title.  Then, you think you can go home and immerse yourself in a fictional world where reality is suspended and rules don’t exist. 

Humpf, what’s next?  People who think they can write books on their own terms, without crawling into a box and closing the lid?  Writers who think their story tells about their characters in their world? 

The next thing you know, the world may be full of writers like me who think that readers have enough imagination and creative prowess to open a book because they want to visit a place where love trounces rules, limitations and boundaries, a place as limitless as …Eden Without The Apple.

As you know, Mary Anne wrote on June 6th about serialized books and how they could open up new (but actually very old) ways of making electronic distribution a little more interesting for the reader and more educational and fun for the writer.

Well, the very same day a bigwig in the e-publishing industry wrote about the very same thing, listing a subset of the same authors my wife listed in her blog post.

Same-said bigwig posted on the same topic on the bigwig’s site the next day. That same day, the bigwig wrote about it on a bigwig political & news site.

Wow, that’s an unbelievable coincidence, isn’ t it?  Predicting on the very day the very topic and even the very list of authors that the bigwig was going to write about, before he did so!

It’s like my wife is psycho psychic or something!

Pauline aside, a host of acclaimed books have been serialized. One of the first was One Thousand And One Nights which introduced famous characters like Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin.  One of the most famous serial authors was Charles Dickens who published each chapter as a serialized piece.  That’s why most of his work is so long - more chapters equal more money.  Dickens’ left off each piece with a cliffhanger.  Famously, for his chase story The Old Curiosity Shop,  American fans waiting at the docks to meet the ships bringing in the next installment shouted at the ships’ crew demanding to be told whether Little Nell was dead.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created his Sherlock Holmes  tales as serial pieces for a magazine.  Thomas Hardy created many pieces via serialization, including Tess Of The D’Urbervilles.  More recent writers have also returned to the format.  Stephen King has dabbled in the genre.  King began offering “The Plant” in serial form on his website, charging $1.00 for each of the 6 chapters that he’d written.  However, in late 2000 he abruptly halted the project, leaving readers without an ending.  Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities was serialized by Rolling Stone magazine, and Douglas Clegg got a 5 figure advance for serialization of his novel, Nightmare House.

Some of the next entries to the long list of serial novels will be a couple of the new ones that I’m currently writing.  I’m planning to serialize my new historical (tentatively titled either The Duke Regent’s Dilemma, The Duke Regent’s Eden, or Eden Without The Apple — Hey, it’s a work in progress, people).  I’ll also be serializing my new contemporary – at the intersection of love and the law like E-mail Enticement and Griffin’s Law.  The contemporary is titled The Office Ink Spells Murder. 

Why serialize?  Well, it’s an experiment but it seems to serve a whole bunch of useful purposes.  First, let’s recognize the elephant in the room.  Yes, Virginia, serializing the books will add to the family coffers and that is always a good thing.  Hey, if Dickens didn’t sneeze at the money, I won’t either.  And while making money is always an important goal, it’s not the only one.

 Serializing the books will help in the writing/creative/editing process.  Readers’ comments can hurt, but they’re the ultimate judges.  Those comments are my Simon Cowell moments and, like the best of the American Idol contestants, I can use the comments to edit, revise and polish the book before it’s finished and published.  In that way my readers can participate in the creative process and become an important part of the work.  Heck, with the historical, I haven’t settled on the title yet and reader feedback would help with that as well.  I’ll have to work on growing a thicker skin but readers’ opinions are always to be valued – even the bad ones – because a reader took the time to review a book.  Like they say in Hollywood – any press beats no press. 

Getting serialized versions out there also keeps something new being published fairly often.  Writing a full book takes a while, so there is apt to be a long period when nothing new is added.  I think keeping readers who like my work having something new fairly often will keep them checking back more often.  Someone who’s read part 1 will hopefully stay on the look out for part 2 and 3 and 4….

Serializing a book and getting each piece out for 99 cents should also stir interest in the other work that’s out there.  So it will be a good marketing tool.  Maybe those buyers will come back and invest the $2.99 (a dirt cheap price IMHO) to buy one of the other books.  So getting my WIPs in the hands of readers for a price beyond dirt cheap should be a good investment in the health and well-being of all my books. 

I’m going to serialize them on Kindle first.   I’m not sure about Smashwords.  SW distributes to all the other channels – Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony, Apple, etc.  And I’m not sure whether or not the big e-tailers would be interested in a serial work.  It might work on the SW site, and I’ll probably put it up there come to think of it.  As to putting it out for distribution, I guess I’ll email SW Guru and the indie author’s best friend, Mark Coker, get his opinion and then go with that.  Going with Coker’s coaching has turned out to be a good thing all the way around.  Coker regularly gives out pointers on his web site and I recommend the SW blog to all indie readers and for sure to all indie authors.

How often the pieces will appear may vary, along with the length.  Dickens may have gone with one chapter at a time, but to give the readers a good value and a decent helping of the work at a time, I’m thinking of 2-3 chapters per piece.  I’m already upwards of Chapter 6 in each MS, so I’m a little ahead of the game with material.  I’ve had my lightbulb moment with each book, so I feel pretty certain I’ll finish both of them – not finishing would be unfair to readers and poor business on my part. 

The first to appear will be The Duke Regent’s Eden.  How soon it’ll appear depends largely on my graphics guru, Mr. Quack.  Hubby’s “blessed” with projects at the moment – his father wants him to do a political piece, I want him to do a book trailer for E-mail Enticement, and I want him to do the cover for the new serial historical.  However, because serials are time sensitive and because that project will add to the family coffers for the serial and for all the books, Mr. Quack will surely give the cover priority.  After all, his interest is as vested as mine in the coffers. 

Mr. Quack does face an interesting dilemma with the new cover, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the subject of his mid-week blog update.  I’m asking hubby to boldly go where men prefer never to tread.  As we speak, he’s looking for good stock photo material featuring…. MAN TITTIES.  Why?  Well, women like to look too and I’m interested in the marketing aspect of having a fine brawny speciman on the cover of the historical serial.  The contemporary, love-and- law murder mystery won’t provide such fodder for experimentation. 

So, keep a keen eye out on Kindle and (likely) the SW site for the first installment of the new serial.   I’ll blog more about the plot when we get closer to publication.  It’ll be interesting to see if the new serial format, AND THE MAN TITTIES, steer the good ship Quacking Alone to greener waters.      

As an old guy who has followed technology since cell phones resembled my BFF, I was more than a little shocked when the news broke that Apple had become bigger than Microsoft.

I really shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

The three big things that Apple always did while Steve Jobs was in charge was innovate, innovate, and innovate. While Jobs has had failures both inside (Lisa, Newton) and outside Apple (NeXT), he always manages to learn things from them and, most importantly, to keep the good stuff. In other words, Apple doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Since Microsoft inherited its 800-pound gorilla status from IBM back in the late 80′s/early 90′s, it hasn’t innovated as much as it has… ahem… “borrowed”. Which isn’t necessarily a bad business model – hell, it’s how Apple got a little kick-start from Xerox. But innovation wasn’t the most important component of Microsoft that got Bill Gates his billions upon billions. What was important was making sure Windows and other Microsoft products were an indispensable part of affordable computers.

That model worked great up until the computer became affordable and small enough to break out of its bulky box and take on myriad forms. Computer processors became a ubiquitous and almost magical raw material. The futuristic dream of electronic convergence – one device combining practically all communication, information, and entertainment functions you could want – was no longer so distant.

While Microsoft has done an admirable job trying to keep up with this rapid evolution, it suffers from having lost Bill Gates as its visionary leader and from its stuck-in-the-mud paradigm for devices. It got fat, happy, and lazy – an easy position for an 800-pound gorilla.

Apple and Jobs didn’t have all that bulk to lug around, so when it saw alternate paths to profitability open up in portable music devices and “smart” phones – simply computers in different, specialized forms – it could easily make quick turns onto those paths and blaze their own wide trails. And now, thanks to the advent of e-books, they’re paving the separate roads and merging them into a glorious new superhighway, right past Microsoft’s gorilla cage.

Believe it or not, I’m telling you all this even though there’s not a single Apple product in our entire household. That’s how crazy all this stuff is.