This week, I was delighted to learn that my novel For the Win was one of three young adult novels selected for the the Kansas National Education Association’s Kansas State Reading Circle list; and then to learn that the Vermont School Library Association, Vermont Library Association and the Vermont Department of Libraries had awarded the state’s Green Mountain Book Award to my novel Little Brother, this being a readers’ choice award for students in grades 9-12. My sincere thanks to the readers, teachers and librarians who’ve chosen my books for these honors — they mean the world to me.
My latest Guardian column is “In the digital era free is easy, so how do you persuade people to pay?” and it’s a first approximation of a taxonomy of reasons to buy stuff that you can download for free from unauthorized sites. I find that discussions about digital sales are often muddied by arguments about whether a particular strategy is good or bad for business, and I hope that by enumerating as many of the selling-propositions as we can and the strategies that complement or undermine them, we can improve the debate:
Buy this because you’re supporting something worthwhile
This is the proposition made by indie artists and it’s one reason so many major entertainment companies hive off “indie” labels, imprints and brands. Supporting the arts feels genuinely good – knowing that your money is going to someone who made some work that moved you and entertained you. This may be the most powerful motivator of all, but it’s also the trickiest.
For this to be really effective, the customer needs to have a sense of the person or people behind the work. That means this proposition favours artists with highly visible, personal public profiles, and not every artist has it in them to hang out there in the world with their audience. Some people are just shy. Some are worse than shy – some artists have negative charisma, and every time they appear in public (physically or virtually), they reduce the business case for buying their works.
The paradox of this proposition is that most high-profile artists got their profile through the good offices and extensive expenditures of a publisher, label, studio or other intermediary. But artists who are backed by these intermediaries are seen as less “worthwhile” than their independent counterparts – after all, the proposition is “support an artist,” not “support a giant company that takes most of the money and gives some of it to an artist” (no matter how much the artist may value that arrangement and believe it to be a fair one).
In the digital era free is easy, so how do you persuade people to pay?
The Guardian’s Comment is Free video team recorded an interview with me after the TEDxObserver event. They’re editing it into a series of quick pieces; the first one, about kids, privacy, and social networks, just went live. I really like the way they put it together!
I’m absolutely delighted to announce that I’ll be the guest of honor at the 75th Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ, Nov 18-20 2011. Philcon is the oldest science fiction convention in the world; it’s one I’ve attended a dozen times or so, and I’m honored to be invited on such an auspicious occasion.
This week, I’ve read another of my favorite Mark Twain stories, A Petition to the Queen of England, a tax-time gem.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
I’ve recently lent my support to Worldreader, an innovative nonprofit program that distributes ebook readers to children in the developing world and then exposes them to a large library of donated texts from writers from across the world, as well as newspapers and other materials. I was delighted to give them access to all my books (of course), and put them in touch with a large group of other kids’ and young adult writers who were happy to do the same (including my hero Daniel Pinkwater, who travelled in and wrote about Kenya and has a real love of Africa).
WR: What advice do you have for kids in developing countries who are just beginning to read and only have recently gotten access to books because of technology advancements?
Cory: I have a couple of pieces of advice about reading. One is that the most dangerous thing in the world is someone who has only read one book. The great thing about reading is that you can triangulate your ideas among lots of different authors, different times, or different place. When you read widely and broadly it shows you that everything is relative. It shows that there is a lot of ways of looking at things, and often times, problems can become solutions if looked at creatively.
The other piece of advice I would give them about reading electronically is to not allow their collections to be tied to one device or platform. Devices come and go, but data can live forever. The only way you can maintain access to them is if you insist on the ability and the right to move the books into any format or any platform you want to.
Yesterday, I recorded a fun, hour-long chat with Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt on the Triangulation podcast — the audio is linked below, but there’s also video if you’d prefer.
Tor.com is running my short story Chicken Little, which originally appeared in the Frederick Pohl tribute anthology Gateways (a book that also includes work from Bear, Benford, Brin, Bova, Gaiman, Haldeman, and many other worthies). Chicken Little is the story of a product designer at a marketing company who is charged with coming up something to sell to an immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat.
The first lesson Leon learned at the ad agency was: nobody is your friend at the ad agency.Take today: Brautigan was going to see an actual vat, at an actual clinic, which housed an actual target consumer, and he wasn’t taking Leon.
“Don’t sulk, it’s unbecoming,” Brautigan said, giving him one of those tight-lipped smiles where he barely got his mouth over those big, horsey, comical teeth of his. They were disarming, those pearly whites. “It’s out of the question. Getting clearance to visit a vat in person, that’s a one-month, two-month process. Background checks. Biometrics. Interviews with their psych staff. The physicals: they have to take a census of your microbial nation. It takes time, Leon. You might be a mayfly in a mayfly hurry, but the man in the vat, he’s got a lot of time on his hands. No skin off his dick if you get held up for a month or two.”
Chicken Little also appears in my DIY short story collection With a Little Help, and on the audio edition, in a reading by the amazing, multi-talented Emily Hurson (who also has a sideline as a zombie voice in the recent Romero movies!).
This week, I’ve read another of my favorite Mark Twain stories, The Petrified Man, a perfect April Fool’s season tale of a prank gone wrong.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
