Ralph Amissah converted a couple of my books to his really exciting format SiSu. SiSu uses simple human-reabable markup and auto-creates several ebook formats, including PDFs, HTML, Docx, Epub, and plain old .txt (my fave!). I’ve really been looking for an easy way to “single-source” my books from manuscript to finished files, and this looks like a good candidate. Check out the conversions:

Little Brother

Content

The SiSu converter is free/open and runs well on my Ubuntu Linux machine.

Back in Feb 2009, an editor I like asked me to write a short-short story for a series she was putting together for one of the big, slick science magazines. I liked the market, the editor and the premise, so I wrote a piece and turned it in. Everyone at the publishing house was enthusiastic about it, and they sent me a contract, asking me to rush it in so that they could get it into the next issue.

But the contract was awful. It asked for really dumb rights, like the right to make movies and action figures and other stuff from my story, and they weren’t paying nearly enough for that sort of thing. It also had all kinds of indemnity in it — by signing it, I was promising that I’d pay off anyone who claimed I broke any law in any country in which the magazine had assets (lots of countries!).

This isn’t that unusual — but what happened next was. I told them I wouldn’t sign over anything except print rights, and that I wanted the indemnity revised so that I was only guaranteeing that I wouldn’t break US laws, and that I would only indemnify them for finally sustained damages (that is, after a trial and appeal). This is totally standard, something I’ve done with publishing companies like the New York Times, Conde Nast, Time Warner, Nature, etc.

The magazine was willing to take out the rights grab, but they refused to negotiate on the indemnity. Stonewalled. They didn’t answer emails — months and months of emails. When I heard back from the in-house editor, he just said that the CEO wasn’t willing to change this language, ever, and tough. He wouldn’t answer any questions about it — any queries were met with months’ more silence.

What’s worse, I’d already done the work, and I wasn’t getting paid for it. It may seem dumb to write work on spec without seeing the contract, but in practice, this is how it often works. Contracts are pretty standard, and editors work on short deadlines, while contracts departments often seem to exist in their own rarified and plodding universe. I’ve often written a story, had it published, gotten paid for it, and then gotten the contract for it. It’s a dumb and backwards way of doing things, but that’s how it goes sometimes. But it sure made me feel like a sucker and an idiot as email after email disappeared into a black hole. They’d asked me to do work, I’d done it to their satisfaction, and now they wanted me to swallow a bowl of crap before they’d pay me for it. It felt awful, a sense of powerlessness and anger.

Finally, I turned to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grievance Committe. John E Johnson III and Michael Capobianco, two of the committee’s members, asked me for a complete history of all my interactions with the magazine (I’d kept good records). They went to work for me, calling and emailing the editor and his boss. In the end, the magazine wouldn’t negotiate the contract, but they did send me half the money (I’ve just cashed the check) as a kill-fee.

And that’s the point of this post. Many people ask what the point of SFWA is; I’m guilty of wondering this at times myself. But here is something that SFWA does really well: back up individual writers with the collective might of the organization and the tenacity of its volunteers. I can’t thank Michael and John and Griefcom enough. John was kind enough to supply this quote: “Cory Doctorow deserves credit himself. By presenting us with a legitimate grievance, by having kept proper documentation, and by displaying great patience, Cory made it possible for Griefcom to resolve this matter satisfactorily.” – John E. Johnston
III, Grievance Committee Chair, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

I still can’t figure out what the magazine’s angle was here. They’re out my killfee, they never got to print the story, they had to pay a leading artist to produce some really stellar art for the piece that they’ll never get to use, all because they didn’t want to make a totally reasonable, standard change to their contract. Who can comprehend the irrational mysteries of giant media companies?

The lesson is: keep good records, get the contract before you do the work, and when you get the shaft, call SFWA.

Griefcom and You

My latest Publishers Weekly column, “Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?” looks at the competitive risks of selling books, articles and other copyrighted works for iPad-like devices that use DRM to prevent your readers from switching to competing platforms.

Apple will tell you that it needs its DRM lock-in to preserve the iPad’s “elegance.” But if somewhere in the iPad’s system settings there was a button that said, “I am a grownup and would like to choose for myself which apps I run,” and clicking on that button would allow you to buy e-books from competing stores, where exactly is the reduction in elegance there?

Apple will also tell you that there’s competition for apps—that anyone can write an HTML5 app (the powerful, flexible next generation of the HTML language that Web pages are presently made from. That may be true, but not if developers want their app to access the iPad’s sensors that allow you to control it by moving it around and making noises, or to the payment system that allows apps to be bought and sold with a single click. It’s an enormous competitive setback if your customers have to laboriously tap their credit card details into the screen keyboard every time they buy one of your products. And here’s a fun experiment for the code writers among you: write an app and stick a “buy in one click with Google Checkout” button on the screen. Watch how long it takes for Apple to reject it. For bonus fun, send the rejection letter to the FTC’s competition bureau.

There’s an easy way to change this, of course. Just tell Apple it can’t license your copyrights—that is, your books—unless the company gives you the freedom to give your readers the freedom to take their products with them to any vendor’s system. You’d never put up with these lockdown shenanigans from a hardcopy retailer or distributor, and you shouldn’t take it from Apple, either, and that goes for Amazon and the Kindle, too.

Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?

Hey, Bostonians! I’ll be dropping by the Harvard Coop bookstore in Cambridge on April 30 from 1900h-2000h. I’ll be signing books and reading a little from my next one, For the Win. Hope to see you then!

Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft reviewed my upcoming YA novel For the Win today, and had lots of nice things to say about it:

Forget Doctorow’s outspoken politics, this guy can tell a story. The pacing keeps things moving, and for a book about unions (and virtual unions at that!), it zips by page after page. What really makes the book work is that so much of the action is externalized in the real world. They don’t just battle with keyboards, but with their fists. The stakes are high, and there is so much more to win and lose — it’s not just video game lives they are fighting for, but their very own existence! And since they are fighting against such brutal conditions, organizing and striking can cost them not just their livelihoods, but their lives. There are the occasional sidetracks Doctorow takes to explain things like gold farming, virtual economics and even inflation and deflation. While interesting, these were not my favorite parts of the book. I kept wanting to get back to the story and the characters.