My sons are growing up fast, and one of the things my wife has been having fun with is teaching them the concept of family.  She will ask them “who is a Henrion”, “who is a Ross” (her maiden name), “who is a Holdwick” (my sister’s married name).  They seem to be having a lot of fun with this, but are still baffled as to why their cousin will never have the same last name as them…unless they move to Kentucky.

The family tree on my father’s side is truncated due to the fact that he spent a lot of his youth in an orphanage in the Midwest.  Personally, I know very little about his family history.  I was contacted by someone on Facebook awhile ago concerning my family ancestors and I was left to plead ignorance.  I do have a doppelganger on Facebook who lives in France and he seems to be much younger and cooler than me.

So I decided to start Googling the family name.

I found a Daphne Hardy Henrion who has a very cool story.  Apparently she worked on the English translation of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon during 1939-40.  Being a close intimate of Koestler, she brought the manuscript to England and even suggested the name of the book. This according to Wikipedia…which of course is never wrong.

She took the name “Henrion” in 1947 when she married (well after the Koestler episode) which diminishes some of the coolness factor…but that point can be easily overlooked.

Darkness at Noon is a a dark and powerful book.  It pointedly shows the fallacy of blind obedience to ideology; in this case, communism.  Having read the book several times, it was fascinating to see the family name associated with it in some way.

Read the Wiki here

So I am claiming a piece of history.  From here on out Daphne Hardy Henrion will be my great-great-Auntie, which practically makes me a close confidant of Arthur Koestler.

Jealous?

I for one am not a proponent or enjoyer of advertising.  The limited tv I watch is made so much better by DVR, to skip through the commercials.

We were having a discussion about the back ads in ebooks to correspond with our printed editions.  You know, those pages at the end of a printed book which tell you about sequels or other writers you like?  Yes, those pages that not to many people actually read.  Well, certain folks are focusing on stuffing more of those into ebooks.

But putting on the marketing hat, I saw something yesterday that would be both a marketer’s dream and possibly a reader’s nightmare.

It came from trying to watch Sunday Night Football online.  The game qued up using MS Silverlight (?? Which totally sucks by the way).  Before the video proceded I had to sit though a 10 ssecond commercial for Chevrolet.  I am sure you have seen this on other TV websites.

When I booted up my Nook to read before bed and selected my book (WAR by Sebastian Junger…which is amazing), the screen flashed “Opening Book” for a couple of seconds and then the text appeared.  Hmmmm…well ->

Instead of saying “Opening Book” , why couldn’t the flash screen say “Check out the New Chevy Camaro”.

Why could it not be an advertising screen based on the content of what I was reading? (an ad for The Army, or Kevlar, or plane tickets to Kabul?)

Why could it not be an advertising screen based on the content of my digital library? (ummm…I’ll keep that one private).

Why could it not be advertising that is not static, like back of book ads are?  It could be dynamic.

Just sayin’…that little flash opening screen looks like some prime real estate for advertising dollars.  And you have a captive audience.  To be truly EVIL…you could then charge readers to have advertising turned off.  WHAAAAHAAAAHAAAHAAA!

“It’s absolutely absurd to devalue our product but I’m not surprised because our industry is populated by nincompoops.” - thebookseller.com

To start, let me say that I am not an economist.  I have an MBA, but that just gives me enough background to be extremely dangerous.  I’ve read various philosophers, Smith, Marx, Hayek, and Friedman and act as if I know them by heart.  That being said…

Value.  That word has been batted around since the ebook pricing wars began with Amazon selling digital books well below the cost of the printed versions  I don’t think I need to go into the backstory, everyone interested in this post will know it already.  Agency models, 9.99 price boycotts, old school vs. new school, and all the Chicken Little blogs and reporters in this industry saying that publishers are all doomed to rot in a hell of our own making.

The argument over devaluation is classical in a sense.  In effect, who determines the value, the reader or the producer?  Even the all knowing Wikipedia doesn’t have an answer:

The economic value of a good or service has puzzled economists since the beginning of the discipline. – Wikipedia

It is an argument of whether a book has instrinsic value or subjective value.  Does the thing itself have value apart from anything else, or does it only have a value which is assigned by the user?

We all come at this from different sides.

As a writer or producer, we lean toward the instrinsic side, knowing the amount of labor invested in that book.  The hours of the writer, editor, designer, and packager.  Not only that, but also the capital investment to fund these processes.  From a producer’s mind, the cost of these functions lie in the finished book. In that sense, the book has a quantifiable value.

From the consumer side, the value is subjective. As a reader, I am not interested what the cost of bringing a book to market is.  I am only interested in the amount of enjoyment I am going to receive from reading it.  My estimation of my enjoyment potential is what is translated to the value I am willing to give to the book.  Laying on a book table, it in a sense has no value until I, as a reader, want to pick it up.  It’s like standing in a crowded room with a thousand conversations going on;  I am only willing to listen to someone that I think is interesting, and will only exert my ears to hear them if what they say is something I deem valuable.

The free market allows this battle to happen between customer and producer until a general price is set where both sides are reasonably content.  There will be those on the producer side who will not sell at the market price, deeming it too low and an insult.  On the flip side, there will there be readers who think the set price is too high.

Its an interesting dilemma actually.  Does a piece of writing have an intrinsic monetary value?

The subjective theory of value also assumes a restricted amount of product in the end.  In the digital world, copies of the product are infinite.

Any goods that are in unlimited supply would have no value. In other words, those useful items that are of insufficient quantity to satisfy demand have a price, and those that exist in numbers superfluous to demand (or that satisfy no wants) are free. Wiki-McKnowitall

Publishers, producers, and writers obviously can not eat by taking up that idea wholeheartedly, and readers, I assume, would not expect enjoyment at zero cost.

In the end, a new pricing paradigm will evolve.  Smashwords has a “pay what you want” feature which is innovative. Rebecca Woodhead has an interesting concept as well here. Eventually, a new price per page count/genre type will come into being that most people will be fine with.  Who knows what that is, and who ultimately will set it?

1. I like this onesie, as I think it could go both ways, a skull if a boy, but with a nice hair bow for a girl:

2. This baby toy might work for either sex…not really sure who the target gender is:

3.   Perhaps a baby instructional tool about how to behave in the car?

The possibilities are endless.  Feel free to add your ideas below.

Jason at Smashwords

It looks really good.

This is a question I have thought about for several years after reading a work by a lesser known author who shall remain nameless.  The story he crafted took place in the deep south in the early part of the 20th century.  As you can imagine, the dialogue of the characters was peppered with derogatory slang and names, fitting for the context of the setting.

Historically, an author should paint the world as it really was.  It’s what makes the story believable.  Whitewashing the way people talked and thought about each other makes the fiction….fiction.

But what about contemporary writing?

I think this is an area where many writers struggle with writing authentic dialogue when it comes to character’s who have a side that violates what many of us hold as moral.  But by not using gritty wordage, the characters will fall flat.  But does a writer run the risk of having the character’s speech be equated to their own?

I think about the movie Gran Torino starring Clint Eastwood.  That movie had a racial slur every other second, to the point it became ridiculously funny.  However, it is those words that made Walt Kowalski, Clint’s character, real.  Film is different, in that most of us don’t sit through the credits to see who wrote the story and screenplay (Dave Johannson and Nick Schenk, by the way).  But books bring us more intimately involved with the writer.

For most aspiring writers, it is ground that is too treacherous to even walk through.  With the desire to get published and all the obstacles already in the way, why add a mountain to your path by having characters who sling slurs like…well, you know.

I am working on a story about a Midwestern guy in the border towns of Mexico.  As you can probably guess, whitebread man (I can say that, I’m white) has some ideas about the Mexican population…and if you think I don’t know what I am talking about, look at the newspaper or go to a UAW meeting.  But in writing the character’s dialogue I find myself holding back on his words simply because I don’t have the guts to put to paper what he would say. This self-censoring, though, destroys any and all sense of the real world.

So, my friends, what is your take on this?  Have you thought about or struggled with the same issue?  Do you worry that your characters will be interepreted as direct representations of your own heart?

I started its own blog page here which is probably better because it can be RSS-ified.

http://brodiejackson.wordpress.com

I am migrating the chapters that  were already posted there to the new site.

Get Yur Grit On!

Today I went through my library in the basement and started boxing up old books that I never read.  I like the feeling of having most of my books in digital format, and living in a small house with two growing boys, we really need all the shelf space we can muster.  I didn’t box up everything…I kept most of my classics in the stupid notion that someday my kids could use them…and then I came across a book that I had completely forgot about.

It’s a cheap mass market edition of One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  It’s about 15 years old, has a great price of $4.95 printed on the back, and shows the typical yellowed pages that these bargain editions are famous for.

This particular edition has a forward by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the famed Soviet poet of the 1950′s and 1960′s (and who is still alive and well today).  When I was in college, he was in my now-adopted hometown giving a very animated and enjoyable reading and I had the opportunity to attend.  I took with me this mass market edition and he was gracious enough to sign the introduction page, while saying “eh…they published this thing?”.  The script is very standard:

To Nathan, with my best wishes. Yevgeny

I look at this inscription now, after all these years, and think it’s still pretty cool.  For a couple of hours back in my younger days I was able to experience a literary persona and come home with my very own piece of history.  I can glance at that short scribble and remember what it was like to shake the hand of a person who is in the history books.  It’s a souvenir that has no digital equivalent.  If this would happen today, what? I’d have him sign the back of my e-reader?

That is the thing that an e-book can’t do.  It can’t turn itself into an artifact of our personal history;  a stack of paper that means more than a stack of paper.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my e-reader (Nook, if you are curious).  But there was a part of me that felt a bit of a loss today as I was boxing up all those books.  Some of them deserved to be put away, but some had a history to them that went beyond the typed page.

The ones that do are still sitting on the shelf.

I am a big fan of westerns…and I feel like a tool for even saying that!  I love the Sergio Leone films, the Robert B. Parker Appaloosa series, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and recently Robert Olmstead’s Far Bright Star.

I had an idea for a western that I have started plotting out.  As there is no one on God’s green earth that would ever consider purchasing it (agent, publisher, mom), I am going to serialize it and post it on smashwords like they did back before they had typewriters.  Plus this way it can evolve like a soap opera and at whatever pace I feel like.

Feel free to check it out if you like.  It’s not horses and gunfights.  It is the story of a man who is set to be hanged tomorrow for killing a town big wig.  What passes is his last day (?) on earth.

Enjoy!  Or not…

The Last Day Of Brodie Jackson

Has this ever happened to you?

I have been struggling for awhile now with the new story/novel/haiku I have been working on.  I just could not get it to flow, and it seemed that I just couldn’t keep myself interested in it.  You know it’s bad when even the person who is writing it doesn’t think it’s worth the time.

Then today, after week’s of mulling it over in my mind, an epiphany.

I feel that the general premise is solid, but the main character is (and has been) all wrong…and today, the right character came waltzing into the brain cavity, smacked me upside frontal lobe, and with the apparent hint of whiskey on his breath said “I’m here, ya b@st@rd!”

Because of this, I have no idea what needs to be scrapped.  But I guess I’ll find out.