Updates…
by rsbakker
Regarding the vanishing American e-books, my agent tells me that Overlook has recently switched distributors, and that the kerfuffle will be sorted out shortly. If you decide to pass this along, please take the opportunity to shame those who illegally download. I’m hanging on by my fingernails, here, and yet the majority of hits I get whenever I do my weekly vanity Google are for links to illegal downloads of my books. I increasingly meet fools who seem to think they’re ‘sticking it to the man’ by illegally downloading, when in fact, what they’re doing is driving commercially borderline artists–that is, those artists dedicated to sticking it to the man–to the food bank.
As for pub dates, still no word from either Overlook (who will also be handling the Canadian edition) or Orbit. Sorry guys.
Also, I’ll be in Denmark to give a seminar entitled, “Writing After the Death of Meaning,” for the Posthuman Aesthetics Research Group (a seriously cool handle!) at Aarhus University on the thirteenth of this month. I realized writing this that I had simply assumed it wasn’t open to the public, but when I reviewed my correspondence, I couldn’t discover any reason for assuming this short its billing as a ‘seminar.’ I’ve emailed my host asking for clarification, just in case any of you happen to be twiddling your thumbs in Denmark next Wednesday.
Three Pound Brain 
I’ve purchased used hardbacks of the original trilogy, for which you have never seen any dough on the back end. Not to put you in a position of feeling you’ve got a hat out, but if you had a donation button on your site I’d gladly forward one of my favorite authors enough to buy a modest lunch.
i second the donation button! except you have to name is something like “buy me a beer?” or “support my crack habit.”
Here
Sure, it’s supposed to be for pirates to pay their penance, but you can repurpose it for a donation, heh!
I like to keep my donation-button covered in public… 😉
The middleman is the man, and I support sticking it to him (is that a pitchfork or a put a not-so-nice sticker on someone idiom?). Doesn’t have to involve ripping off the artist.
http://c4ss.org/content/21456
Oh yes, there’s been a lot of horseshit spilled on the topic, fallacies galore. The question is simply whether society is better off with midlist content providers, as opposed to a handful of blockbusters, a billion hobbyists, and government sponsored ‘official art.’ The first is generally mass culture pap, the last is generally special culture pap, and the hobbyists never get a chance to be heard, let alone develop.
The midlist is what people are arguing against, a class of professional artisans who put crazy things together for culture at large to digest.
If the middleman didn’t add value he would not exist. The middleman is the bogeyman of the idiot. Amazon, Walmart, every single store on the planet that resells goods. These are all middlemen. Without them you would have to go to the content source anytime you wanted something. I like that the grocery store has all the things I need to make dinner in one place. I like that I can browse books on Amazon and podcasts on itunes. The middleman adds value by making it easier for me to get the content I want. The middleman makes me aware of content I would not know about otherwise. The middleman makes both the producer and consumer better off.
Do middlemen (publishers, record labels etc.) add value to the transaction for the buyer or seller? Do they help the most able of the ‘billion hobbyists’ achieve professional levels of skill, or help buyers and sellers find each other more efficiently? Can art other than folk or outsider art survive without a business infrastructure?
Gareth Cox,
“If the lobbyist didn’t add value he would not exist. The lobbyist is the bogeyman of the idiot.”
It’s an old, common trick to use the existence (or speculated future existence, in 01’s case) of something as the case for it. Cart and horse reversal. Yeah, middlemen serve a function, but what is it? Speaking of lobbyists, for a relatively small fee, you can create artificial scarcity via the power of the state and pocket the proceeds. Scott’s books can be reproduced for next to nothing. You’re happy to pay a several hundred % markup for work a search engine can do? Scott should get paid, of course. That wealthy non-artists control many of the avenues to content (they’d control all if they had their way) is because they use state force to make it so.
Bakker’s going completely PARG
I wonder whether it’s a coincidence. It describes a good many graduate programs, if you think about it!
i assume you are referring to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARG
http://www.rscottbakker.com/ has a donation link up on the top right.
Although I really think it really should just be called “donate”. Sometimes straightforward is better as far as money is involved.
Definitely. Karma is bullshit anyhow, so just call it donations. I shot 10 bucks over for the depth of the cogsci material. Man you gotta usually pay 15-30 bucks for the kind material (per essay) he has written on here and disseminated free of charge!
LOL! Danke, Div/0.
Thanks for the link Frank, I donated 20 bucks just to show my support for a great author 🙂
RSB, is that seminar by chance going to be recorded or made available to the public?
Just found out that the seminar IS open to the public, bldg., 1584, rm 212, from 1:15 to 4PM. I have no idea about video… I much prefer me live, so I’m ambivalent about that…
suck it up, brother. if meaning is dead, then the public deserves to know what they are reading for!
Coming to Denmark again? Any chance to catch up Scott :)?
I can’t make it to the seminar, but could be there in the evening or thursday afternoon/evening 🙂
I’m not sure what they have planned for the evening that evening, but you are most certainly welcome to join us Lars! I fly out the following day, unfortunately.
Ah right, guess I’ll have to skip it this time. Hopefully I can visit London sometime in the near future 🙂
Shitty, dude. The next time then.
Speaking of TUC, are you going to address the issue of why Dragons don’t wear Chorae? Because that’s the biggest unanswered question at this point (according to some on westeros, anyway).
Oh, good… I was hoping to begin reading your third book in the first trilogy this summer. Of course having hibernated for the winter in my cabin, devoid of electronics I’m thawing out again in my Phoenix summer enclave reading and writing again as usual. Too bad I’m not a rich man to fly to Denmark and listen to your talk. 🙂
Craig! Welcome back to the land of the unliving!
I always find disconnecting a liberating experience, which is why I bury my web connection the way bears bury kills.
‘Summer enclave’ kind of sounds posh, you know.
If it makes you feel any better my buddy and I who discuss your series at length will be buying this new novel straight from the rack the day it comes out. Hope you get a release date soon. (Just IMHO) I have a feeling you will get a nice bit of publicity from the cult following you developed, and that buzz should give you a little bump. The newly swollen GOT crowd will hear about it, I’m sure (those that haven’t yet given it a try). Dark Fantasy is the new hot thing now, didn’t you hear?
I think the sooner the better too! The appetite for these kinds of things dries up when the economy takes a dive.
Shouldn’t (or alternatively, wouldn’t it be useful if) this update be showing on rscottbakker.com?
Yes… Now… How to do that…
Odd – you said back here the site picks up on the keyword ‘UPDATES’ (& ‘LITERATURE’). But you did here, and it’s not responding? Perhaps it needs one of the tags to be ‘UPDATE’ or ‘LITERATURE’, not just filed under the category of update? That or your web guy needs to fix this, it seems? Good luck with it! 🙂
I work in the games industry and a large majority of the people I work with pirate everything. This is despite being directly impacted by the negative effects of piracy. I have little sympathy for cultural conservatives but when I see theft on such a massive scale it makes me question my more liberal viewpoint.
in general though the problem is that the negative effects are unseen. I can’t point to the great games that were never made or the great musician who didn’t even bother trying. Libertarians make this argument to no effect on government programs and I think artists are equally doomed.
I would say you should shout your case to the rooftops and make the unseen seen, but… you won’t succeed and most will think you are just a whiner. Far better to admit defeat and punish the thieves.
Of course I don’t want you to actually shrug because I enjoy your books quite a bit.
The battle’s already lost, I realize. It’s a victimless crime simply because the victim is never present, so our intuitions will always let us off the hook. TPB just happens to be all about hypocrisy, so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t call it. An honest whiner–that’s my doom.
Piracy is used a bogeyman. At it’s simplest, piracy is merely a corrective market force that illustrates the difference between how goods are supplied and how goods are demanded. Itunes and Steam exist because piracy pointed out to suppliers how consumers wanted to consume media. Pirates are generally the biggest spenders ironically. The greatest limiting factor of more sales for media is disposable income.
I bought every copy of Prince of Nothing in softcover. Then I pirated all of them because I wanted to read them on Kindle. Then I rebought them once they were available on Kindle because the official versions had better formatting. Then I bought a few signed hardcopies. That’s how I consume my favorite media. I just want the best version of it. If you don’t want to then I honestly don’t see the need to judge you.
It’s honestly the supplier’s job to meet the demand of consumers. The concept of copyright has only existed for a few hundred years. Creative works were profitable before then and they’re profitable today with the dawn of the internet. To be blunt, the very reasons I love Bakker’s works makes him a hard sell for mainstream audiences. This isn’t strictly a piracy issue. All media is pirated and the studies I’ve read show that piracy hurts the bigger name brands more for various reasons I’m too lazy to get into now. Bakker is a great enough writer that if he decided to analytically assess what sells and ‘sell out’ I have no doubt he could generate a bigger hit. Instead he chooses to write his vision as he sees it and that vision is as divisive as it is great.
“Sticking it to the man” sure sounds like a perfect example of post-hoc rationalization to me. I’ll accelerate my campaign of browbeating likely types into acquiring TDTCB legally to give you a try.
I buy softcovers new from Amazon and hand them out on street corners… Ok not street corners, but I do ship them to people who express interest.
I’ve done the same thing for birthday/Christmas gifts for likely souls.
Is there a significant difference, from your end and/or POV, from the pirate ‘market’ regarding your books sales, and the second-hand market such as used book stores?
I always imagined that ‘the artist’, book/music/whatever, gets the same kickback from both markets, but never see complaints about the latter. Is there a difference? Should I feel bad that I pick up 90% of my literature from used bookstores, library sales, warehouse sales, etc., for $0-$3 per book?
I’m not at all advocating for piracy, its stealing no matter how you slice it, just wondering at the separation between outright stealing and under-the-table markets.
Unrelated: Thanks for the update! Small posts like these, even when they don’t contain much information, are always much appreciated and well received from back corner of the TSA community that I sit in.
Content creators generally make zero money from secondary markets. My view is that secondary markets increase the size of the total market. A guy buys gta5 on day one knowing he can resell it for $20-30. The cost for him to purchase the game is now 20-30 dollars cheaper. So even though R* makes nothing on the secondary sale there are more individuals willing to buy the game at all then there would be without the secondary sale. Pirating doesn’t have this benefit of reducing cost for the initial purchaser. Not sure how it works for authors but I bet it’s similar. That said most people in the games industry hate secondary markets and my views are definitely the outlier.
Its like having a smaller % of a larger market, rather than 100% of a small market.
But yeah, the video game industry people are not a jolly group. Everyone is always irritated about something.
Depends if you have to need to have the less shiny version because of fiscal reasons or if you just want to be frugal – if the latter, sending a modest donation through is probably bigger than the cut the author gets per book AND it’s cheaper than the book!
Hmm, hard for me to separate the two, so maybe the former? That’s a good point though, some self and fiscal examination is in order.
Just a reminder that downloading is not, nor ever will be, a crime. It is illegally HOSTING copyrighted material that is illegal. The morality of it is something that can be debated.
That being said: buy the stuff you want to see more of. If you want more books like TSA, or more shows like GoT make sure the people making these things get your money in one way or another. (I pirate GoT since HBO hasn’t made it convenient to get the show without a full cable subscription, but I understand they may begin offering HBO Go standalone soon).
The pirating of videogames is particularly offensive to me, since the effort required to create a top-notch product is actually inhuman.
You might be right, but most pirating/tormenting sites force you to upload simultaneously as you download, so even if you think there is some legal precedence that says the download is fine (which I disagree that there is), its still quite difficult to avoid doing any uploading, making the argument pretty much irrelevant anyway.
Bottom line, if you are downloading stuff, authorities can lawfully arrest, charge, and incarcerate you, as well as seize property. They never will, but that doesn’t mean its legal. Granted this only hold US and most European countries.
Also, its illegal to own the pirated material, so again, even if the transfer of data is fine, its irrelevant, Storing/having copyright material that you did not purchase will again put you in jail.
It doesn’t help that most of the laws regarding intellectual property and anything regarding computers are draconian and will get you into more trouble than mass murdering children.
>Bottom line, if you are downloading stuff, authorities can lawfully arrest, charge, and incarcerate you, as well as seize property.
IF you are torrenting and simultaneously uploading as you download, yes. IF you know for fact that the person distributing the material had no right to do so, yes. There are an infinite number of ways to create plausible deniability, and as you mention this is virtually unenforceable. I received a warning letter 13 years ago from my campus ISP, and got smart.
The people who get in trouble are the ones that seed massive amounts of copyrighted material.
This debate will get stranger and stranger as the Semantic Apocalypse progresses anyways, or Stross’s accelerando becomes prophetic. If your brain is enhanced so that it can store memories with high fidelity, are you breaking copyright by hearing a song and not immediately telling your enhanced brain to bin it?
I once saw a guy at an electronics store systematically speed reading a book – and I wondered why. It occured to me latter he might have a photographic memory and was effectively stealing the book. Don’t even need transhumans when you have Disciples!
“There are an infinite number of ways to create plausible deniability, and as you mention this is virtually unenforceable.”
An illegal act being deniable and unenforceable doesn’t make it any less illegal.
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/05/follow-up-on-dennett-and-mental-software.html
http://philosophyofbrains.com/2015/05/10/phenomenological-utopia.aspx
The new donating is called seeding.
?
is this a dumb idea? someone could post pirated versions of a work with a watermark or something that reminded the downloaders that writers need paychecks so please buy an authorized copy or donate
When I google R Scott Bakker. I get wikipedia, your website, amazon and goodreads etc. No links to illegal torrents or downloads. A lot of good reviews also 😉 So my next book (hardcopy) will probably one of yours.
I wanted to piggyback on a bit of what has been said here. When doing vanity searches, always use private browsing (incognito mode etc). Otherwise you are going to get personalized results that in no way resemble what someone else searching for you might end up with. If you are getting lots of illegal download links, it’s because that is what the search engine thinks you find the most compelling.
My search for ‘R Scott Bakker’ goes 15 pages deep before I get to any torrent links.
You do this sort of thing to keep up with reviews, rip-offs, and what not, and you never use open search parameters. Doing it at least once a week for links only a week old keeps the numbers down (I literally can’t remember the last search I did for all links of all ages). The number of illegal downloads always varies.
You do this sort of thing to keep up with reviews, rip-offs, and what not, and you never use open search parameters.
That’s what a regular person who’s heard of you and is looking you up does?
http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php doesnt make the first page with that google, but its the best place to got for questions;/answers about the books!
Hmm, pardon me about saying so, but since you site is dedicated to identifying the clown in one’s self…
You complain a lot about being “a mid-list author”, and that piracy is stealing your sales, but from where I sit, it looks like you are just trying to pass the buck. Consider the perspective from my deskr-chair:
1) Your personal site is static, never updated, and even the links you have for book purchases only bring you to a corner of amazon where you can’t even buy new copies, just used or 2nd-hand market ones.
2) This blog (which is your only active thing on the internet) you have specifically TOLD fans/newcomers not to imbibe for fear of driving them away,
3) Your social media outlets are nonexistent, or at best non-engaging
4) Your foray with GdM was mediocre, delivering what seemed like half a story and a too-quick ending. The False Sun was far superior.
5) The last time you had a shot at some exposure (again GdM) you instead decided to stick your foot in your mouth (making fun of Tolkien if not a great PR move, funny as it was)
6) You refuses any attempts to interact with fans (i.e. participating in forums, reddit, interviews, etc.).
To me, either be satisfied with your lot, or do something to change it. Maybe ask Mark Lawrence or Brandon Sanderson for pointers.
If you are in fact doing something and I’ve missed it, I’d love for you to prove me wrong. However, if I’ve missed it, there’s a good chance that most other people have as well, and thus it was ineffectual. Its just part of existing in the 21st century. You’re far more likely to be successful by engaging people rather than being actually talented. If you can manage both…
If you want to be the crossroads you claim to want, to be a bonefide best-selling author, to be well-read/known, to continue to write full time… you’re going to have to do something other than what you’ve done so far. If not, thats cool, but dont expect much sympathy when you make posts about piracy and low sales.
/rant
It’s a drag you think I phoned in “The Knife of Many Hands” — I spent months working on it!
I am, and always will be, a monomaniac, all focus, very little fringe. More and more the world demands you attend to the fringe in certain calculated ways, especially when in the content-slinging business like I am. Until someone develops a cure for the inability to multitask, this just means my road will just keep getting bumpier.
Trust me, I have tried, Wilshire. I’ve had bouts of success, then I stumble. I still can’t even keep up with emails from my immediate family, let alone the world. But I’m done warring with what I am. You get to an age where you stop beating yourself up for not being all those things you demand you be, let alone what others demand. You tell yourself that your weaknesses leverage your strengths, not because it’s true, but because it’s too toxic tell yourself otherwise.
I wouldn’t say phoned-in, but far from the quality of False Sun or 4 revelations. It felt rushed.
Besides, I’m terribly greedy. If the choice is between getting TUC(etc.) sooner rather than later, or activity on various media platforms I don’t pay attention to (which would be all of them), I’d certainly choose TUC.
Maybe TUC will go out with a bang, and you can hire some soul like bakkerfans up there to do your PR/outreach for you. The best of both worlds.
What do you mean with “making fun of Tolkien” Wilshire? Was it in the interview? Maybe I misunderstood it but the comment on Tolkien did not feel offensive to my ears.
GdM asked some people who their favorite villain was. Bakker’s response was Frodo with a good paragraph describing why. It wasn’t directly offensive, or rather it shouldn’t have been, but Tolkien enjoys some kind of mythical god-hood, and any words, satirical or otherwise, are widely seen as blasphemous. In hindsight, from the position of someone “trying to make it”, it probably wasn’t the best idea.
but the Frodo comment was gold! got a good laugh out of that–i’d wager it’s more good publicity than the vanilla-ish comments from the other writers
ooohhh snap!
If not, thats cool, but dont expect much sympathy when you make posts about piracy and low sales.
How does “You don’t do modern day PR” equate to “Don’t expect sympathy about piracy”?
It’d make more sense if this had been a ‘reach the masses by genre, lit guys!’ and you’d said ‘Part of reaching them by genre is PR, dude! PR IS genre!’. But here, what’s the connection between lack of PR and no sympathy about piracy?
The complaint, from what I can tell, isn’t really about piracy, but about lost sales. IMO, it seems like a scapegoat more than anything else, as detailed above.
I’d be more sympathetic if it seemed like all was being done to boost sales, and piracy was seemingly the main factor in keeping sales low.
I’m not advocating for piracy, or saying that it isn’t, in fact, hurting sales to some degree, but some writers manage to become best sellers despite piracy, and I believe Bakker can as well.
Make sense?
No, I’m confused. Are you trying to take it Scott wants ‘the pirates to stop pirating so as to increase sales, rather than me do promo work to increase sales’?
I’m guessing if there were no pirates, he still wouldn’t do promo work! At a guess Scott is aiming for some sort of audience reciprocation. A mutual relationship, rather than one side chasing after the other side like it’s a spoilt child. I suspect Georg RR Martin’s delay between books is a strategic denial toward a similar goal as well. What he’s (not) doing? What are we doing? But that’s a big guess. And as it’s a guess, I’m left confused as to how to approach your comment.
The old joke about Lou Reed is that the Velvet Underground only sold a few thousand albums, but everybody who bought one started a band. They were hugely influential, and if the capacity to inspire other artists is a reliable indicator of artistic merit they were artistically very successful without having been commercially very successful. Lou Reed also famously did not care for the Beatles, and dissing the Beatles for a rock musician is like dissing Tolkien for a fantasy novelist. If dissing Tolkien alienates some fantasy readers those readers might not be the ones who will respond to your work anyway. Kellhus is about as different from Frodo as two fantasy heroes can be, and if you’re fed up with Tolkien derivatives like the Belgariad and the Sword of Shannara and (even though I loved it) the Wheel of Time you might be glad to see a fantasy novelist who’s fed up with them too.
That having been said, nowadays everybody’s in show business. Merely mastering your craft, whether your craft is fiction or music or basketball, is no longer enough to ensure a successful career, if it ever was. Human beings have more or less the same capacity to attend to things that we did 200 years ago, but far more things are competing for our attention, so we multitask. We attend to more things for less time per thing. When a writer today asks a reader to commit the time to read a 1000 page novel the writer is asking the reader to forgo many more things the reader could have done with that time than a writer would have asked of a reader 200 years ago for the same 1000 pages. Show business is how you convince a reader to give you that commitment.