The Last Colony | John Scalzi | Talks at Google

I generally leave my appearances up to the audience. What you guys want me to do? If you want me to do a reading from the last colony, I can do that. If you want me to do a reading from something else, I can do that. If you want me to extemporize on how the web has been important to me, I can do that as well. If you want me to go ahead and straight answer questions, I can do that. If you want me to interpretive dance, I can do that. But you really some things you can't unsee. So it's really, really up to you. What you guys want. So. So reading, talking, questions, any preferences? Any preferences? Anyone at all. I just want to know where I can get a brain pal. Where you can get a brain pal? Do you, you know what? Do you really want a brain pal? Here's the thing that bothers me about the brain pal, and I'm the guy who thought these things up to some extent, which is one night you get your bright and shiny brain pal and you spend all day doing stuff, and then at 4 o' clock in the morning you get Russian Viagra spam and it never goes away. And all the spam filtering in the world can't get it out of your head. And I honestly feel that the first wave of users are going to be, there's going to be huge amounts of suicides because all they have in their head, Ambien, Xanax, all this, and then they just finally jump over a bridge. So this would be my concern. So I'm just saying be careful of what you wish for. The nice thing about the brain paddles in the books is that they're a closed system. But if you've read the Ghost Brigade, you find out even that closed system can be hacked and sometimes to a very detrimental effect. So it's a very, very bad thing. I have to tell you all that I'm really excited to be here at Google. For one thing, I'm actually using you guys. I'm on tour for three weeks. The tour ends on my birthday. So my birthday present is I get to go home and see my family. But one of the things that I needed to do is while I'm on tour, I'm writing up the sequel to the Android's Dream, which is the book that came out just before the Last Colony. And I'm writing it on Google Docs and applications. And because I'm going all over the place, sometimes I need to sit down at somebody else's computer and just pop it up and Write. And it's actually been very, very useful for me. And it's also really good because then my editor can ask me, well, how's progress coming? Well, in fact, here it is. And a lot of it's lorem, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But from a distance it looks like I'm actually writing. So thank you all for that. And then I also checking my email through Google, you do need to fine tune your algorithm because I am getting a lot of Russian Viagra spam. Just a little feedback. Yes, lots of it. It's like, do you need Viagra? It's like, thank God, no, not today. But it's actually been very exciting because I've always been a little bit of a geek. I've always been one of those people who's like, ooh, let me try out new things. And so every time you guys do something goofy, I'm like, I'll sign up for that. Click. So you guys have really been. It's like the techno smack. So I appreciate that very much. You've been very good to me in that regard. And in fact, one of the things that I find really interesting is that the web in general has been very good for me. One of the things that we're having a discussion now, particularly in science fiction. I don't know how much of you are obsessively following my life right now. Yes, you're the one who I saw with the scope. But one of the things that we're doing right, that I'm doing right now is I'm running for president of the Science Fiction Writers association of America because I'm an idiot. And what had happened with that was I got the ballot and it was a single candidate ballot. And the folks who are running, despite you know, their sincerity and so on and so forth, I don't feel are quite tuned in to what writers are doing today, particularly in how we're using the Internet. And so I'm running for this position. And it's basically the SIFLA has divided itself into two camps, which are the old dudes and the web scabs is basically what it comes down to. Pixel stained techno peasants. Yes, Pixel stained technopeasants. The current vice president, current outgoing vice president of SIFUA launched a tirade about the dangers of the Web, ironically on LiveJournal. It was uploaded for him by someone else, but where he was talking about one of the great big dangers that we or one of the things that he really didn't like about SIFU these days. Is the increasing influence of the web scabs, the people who give away work for free. And by this, you can read that Cory Doctoro equals demon, and all the other folks who are doing this are his little imps. So this has been a very exciting time. Obviously, once that happened, it's just a huge eruption of people who have been published recently going, you're insane. This is the best thing that's ever happened to us. Now, I would like to actually use my own story as an example of why the web is actually the best thing since Buttered Bread for writers. As many of you know, or maybe you don't know, I sold my very first book, which is Old Man's War, which is the beginning of this series of books, for which Last Colony is the third one. And in a very unusual way, because I didn't bother submitting it to publishers, I didn't do any of that stuff. What I ended up doing was I posted it up on my website. And the reason I did that was, I don't know how many of you have written novels. Go ahead and raise your hand. How many of you would rather jab out your eyes than to go through the submission process ever again? Yeah, okay. Because the submission process is you write your novel, you pour your heart and soul into it, you print it out in this big box that used to be some pine tree somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. You mail it off, and it just disappears for a year. It goes into Schrodinger's black box of editorial selection. It exists in an indeterminate state of maybe it's accepted, maybe not. And there's just in the box with the actual document is some poor editorial intern and a vial of poison. And you don't know whether you've been accepted or rejected or the intern has been poisoned until your manuscript comes back. And it takes, if you're lucky, if you're lucky, it only takes a year for you to be rejected. And then the document goes out again, and you wait another year. And basically, by this time, if you were to have a child, your child would already be going to Stanford, more or less, by the time that you get your book accepted, which would be good, because then you can pay for maybe about three days worth of Stanford for what you get for your novel advance. It's not a really remunerative process there, unfortunately. I thought about all this fact, and I was just like, I don't want to bother at this time. I'd already written some nonfiction books. I'd already been published. I'd already had a career as a writer. I figured it doesn't bother me if I just put this up on the web. When I put it up on the web, I was like, I'm going to take this and I'm going to put it out there and it's going to go out and it's going to people who want to read it will be able to read it, it will stay here, it will live. And that's as far as it's going to go. And so I said, fine. So December 2002, I serialize a chapter a day and it ends right around Christmas. And a couple days later I get this email from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who is the senior editor of Tor, and he says, I don't know how committed you are to this whole electronic publishing thing, but I kind of like your book and I'd like to publish it. Would that be ok? I'm like, yeah, ok. And he was honest. He says, it's not going to be life changing sums of money. And he was wildly correct about that. But then he says, well, as long as we're buying one from you, we might as well buy two, which you can subtext there. As long as we're getting you cheap, we might as well get you cheap twice. And he says, so do you have a second book that you would like to sell us? And of course I didn't. So I said, why yes, I do. And the answer to that was, and this is the pitch that I sold the book that became the Android's dream on this is the entire pitch. Man solves diplomatic crisis through the use of action scenes and snappy dialogue. And he goes, great, we'll buy that. And so I've had this. So I have this book up on my website and I told people, oh, it's going to stay up. You can read it, you can enjoy it if you want to. Just have fun with it. And I had to take it down and I posted up, I'm sorry, I can't let you play with this anymore. I kind of sold it. And then immediately after I posted that, I started getting emails from other writer friends and more or less verbatim, these are quotes. Die, die, you blankety blank, blankety blank die. Because you're not supposed to do this. You're not actually supposed to just put your stuff up on the web and have it magically get sl. You know, it's like Lana Turner at the fountain, just sitting there and someone, you, you are going to be our star, Lana Turner, a lot more attractive than I was, but nevertheless the same sort of dynamic. And I told people, I said, it's a fluke, it's weird, it's not going to happen again. It's certainly not going to happen. To me, this is like being struck by lightning, only, you know, no exit wounds. It's very good, but honestly, it will never happen again. So a year later, I sold Agent to a Star is another novel exactly the same way. He got another wave of that. And I said, ok, that was twice. And that was weird, but it's not going to happen again. It really isn't going to happen again. And since then, I've sold two more books the same way. So I've stopped telling people that they can't sell books online in this way because every time I say it, I'm made into a liar. And I guess if I wanted to sell a lot more books, I should probably say it a lot more often. But. But in fact, it's been incredibly useful to me. And one of the things that's really interesting is Old Man's War is no longer technically available on the web. But if you go to arXiv.org, you didn't hear me say this, you didn't hear me say this, but if you go to archive.org and you look at the December 2002 archives, it's there. And so anybody who really wants to, to find this or they can pirate it or do whatever they want to do with it, it's there. It's not that hard to find online. I found it online. It's just not that difficult. And the argument, the counter argument has always been when you have something that's out there for free online, that what it does is it undercuts the sales. And I will tell you what I was just telling Chris. The book came out in hardcover, sold really well, came out in trade paperback. It sold very well. We have it now in mass market paperback. The first printing of that was in January. We printed 50,000 copies of it. And that was supposed to last us through the year. It's now April, we're going into a second printing. And when all is said and done, there's 100,000 copies of old Man's War out there. And they're being bought, they're being sold, I'm getting money, my child is going to go to college. You know, all of these things happen. There is, anecdotally speaking for myself, there's been absolutely nothing but positive benefit for having these things out there electronically. And there are other people I'll give you another example of this. Peter Watts has this book called Blindsight. Great book. If you're ever feeling really good about yourself, read the book that will cure that for you. But it's a fantastically written book and it's just everything you want hardcore science fiction to be. It came out first printing was Fairly small, about 3,000 or 4,000, and it wasn't doing spectacularly well. And in fact there was some danger of it not going into a second printing or anything. And Peter Watts was basically out of desperation, he released it into Creative Commons license so that anybody could read it, download it and see it. What happened from there is it's gone into a second printing, it's gone into a third printing and, and it's nominated for the Hugo this year. You know, speaking as someone whose book got nominated for Hugo, it just a little bit of a difference to, you know, the fortunes of your book. He's a perfect example. Charlie Strauss released his book last year, Accelerando, another Hugo nominee. When Old Man's War, Spin and Accelerando were nominated for the Hugo last year, we all put out electronic editions so that people who are going to WorldConsult could read them in that, in that, read them for consideration. Those books finished. First place was Spin, second place was Accelerando, third place was Old Man's War. Wind, Place and Show were the books that were released electronically. Time and time and time and time again we're seeing that what the web is doing is saving a lot of careers and a lot of authors from needless horror, horrible, pointless, disappointing obscurity. You know, I would still be, you know, I would still be sitting there writing corporate brochures for mid cap stocks. You know, if I hadn't have done this thing with putting my stuff online. And it's, but what's really difficult is letting people, or trying to convince a large group of people who have basically lived through another economic model that this new economic model is not a threat. I mean, this is one of the reasons that, you know, you have such an argument about copyright, you have such an argument about Creative Commons, is that the previous generation of writers is really afraid that if you sort of let it go that it's just never going to come back to you. And one doesn't want to do that horrible homily. You know, if you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, then you'll get a three book contract or whatever. But, but, and so every time they're like, oh, I'm scared That someone will take my stuff, oh, I'm scared. I will never see any money off of this. But the thing that we keep telling people again and again and again, the most dangerous thing for a writer is not piracy, it's obscurity. The most dangerous thing for you to do is to put out a book and nobody knows it exists because one, you're not going to get book two in a series. And second of all, you've poured your heart and soul into this thing for all this time and you got nothing for it. People are like, I put out this book. Oh yeah, that's great. Where can I get it? And this is a really big problem. Now. One of the things that I find very interesting. I don't think it's actually necessary that you have to put your book online. I'll give you another example of this. Really. The only book I have online officially is a book called Agent to the Stars, which is a shareware novel I first wrote in 1997. I was going back to my 10th year high school reunion and I was known as the little writer dude when I was at school. So I was worried that if I went back to my 10th year reunion and they said everybody would go, so have you written that novel yet? No. You're pathetic, aren't you? So I wanted to be able to say, why, yes, I've written that novel. And so I wrote it. But I wrote it as a practice novel. I didn't put any pressure on myself to make it good and I just said to see if I could do it. And once I was done, I didn't bother distributing it. I went and put it online and I told people, here it is, if you like it, send me a dollar from 1999. Which is when I put it up to 2004, when I told people, stop sending me money, I don't need your stinking dollars anymore. I made $4,000 off of it. It was just people mailing me $1 bills and it was just pizza money over and over and over again. But that's the only novel that I have up. What I do have is my own personal website, which is called the Whatever. And it's been up since 1998. It gets 25,000 people a day. And I just blather on about whatever I feel like blathering on about. And that actually works as promotion. I mean, they're not getting the novel, but they're getting me. And you end up working with a built in fan base. And this is one of the things that is really interesting to the publishers because let's say you have author A and author B. All things being equal, they're about the same writers as writers and they have about the same skill and talent for telling a story. One of them has a web presence and gets maybe 2,000 people a day, the other one doesn't. All things being equal, which is the guy you're going to go with or which is the gal you're going to go with? You're going to go with the one that's already got the built in fan base. If you can even capitalize. 10% of these people, 200 of these people buying this book for a first time author, that is not an insignificant portion of that first print run. It will make a difference between this book earning out or this book just going straight flat line into the remainder bin. These things matter. And so this is actually a very, it's a very important thing that's going on right now. And it's really sort of frustrating that we are fighting the battles of whether this is a good thing or not. I mean, I'm preaching to the converted here, you know, and it's no joke that you folks are causing a lot of the old line writers a bunch of headaches with that whole indexing thing that you've got going on. And in fact, should I actually become president of sifua, you know, you will probably see me here again going, we need to talk about this, you know, because a lot of my people are concerned about this. But I'm just telling you what's going on. I'm letting you know you'll see me and I'll be like, I'm union man now, Chris. So I mean, but these are things that, you know, the battle that we are having is, it's really the cliche is the buggy whip manufacturers complaining about those horrible new fangled new automobiles. But it's a true thing. And the real irony of it is that not only is the electronic world incredibly helpful for publicity, so on and so forth, but I honestly don't think that the print medium is going anywhere. And I will tell you why. This is my theory and I've been saving it up so I could say it here at Google so you could tell me I'm full of crap. Which is, let's say this is how books are completely different from music and movies and almost every other sort of popular media. Let's say I have a song, okay, how do I access that song? Two things have to happen. There are two steps. First, that song Gets transmitted back in the old days into long players or to cassettes or to now currently into MP3 files or DRM protected WMA files. And then it gets put into an ipod or you would put it into a cassette player, or you put it into the record player. There was two steps that had to be done in order to do these things. When you watch a movie, you have to buy the video cassette or you have to buy the DVD which goes into a player. There's always the, the medium on which it's recorded and then there's the player. This is a performative media. This is all you need to access this file. The software is up here. The module that you need is already built in. Presuming you're literate, you can all read right, Then you're good to go. And this is why I don't think that books are going to go anywhere anytime soon, because they are convenient. They, they are easy. If you start doing ebooks on a mass scale, what you're doing is you're adding that extra intermediary step. The real analog to a book is not an MP3 player, it's a guitar. You know, it's the same performative medium. Fortunately, you don't have to do chords in order to access this book, but it's the same concept. And so when we're arguing about whether books are in danger of being overtaken by electronic media like movies have or like music has, we're not really discussing apples to apples. We are discussing apples to pomegranates, apples to oranges, apples to squirrels. It's really that much different. And I think that's the case. Yes, sir, you. Isn't the reason that. Speak up, sir, because I'm. Is there reason that we're comparing apples to oranges, that I think most people would say that the orange hasn't come up with a suitable replacement to a book? A few people say that, you know, reading an ebook on their computer or. A lot of people don't think that's a very enjoyable experience. Right. And so, you know, books aren't in danger because there really isn't an alternative yet. Amazon's still selling books like crazy, but, you know, nothing saying that some sort of electronic paper or other medium couldn't come through. It's a really interesting thing because there is a drive. I mean, Sony, among other people are trying to do the E book readers, and I believe Amazon is planning an E book reader as well. There is definitely a drive for those sort of readers. I don't think Any of those readers are going to be successful. One, there's a high entry cost. All those things cost 300, $400. And then you will have to pay for the file. And this is of course where the publishers fall down because they're charging for full price for these electronic files, which is as much as I love my publishers love you Tor. It's idiotic. It's idiotic because you don't have the same. You're not pulping trees, you're not shipping them places. It's all on a server. There needs to be commensurate sort of pricing if you want them to be successful. Now the fact that there is not a commensurate pricing, of course, tells you just how successful a lot of the publishers want these things to be. And then there's a DRM that slaps up on top. Right. For example, I recently there was a science fiction book I loved when I was a kid. It was called Ariel by Stephen Boyett Boy and his unicorn, like you do. And it was a lot of fun. It was written actually very well for not even just for a unicorn story. Right? Exactly. And it's now out of print. I couldn't find it, but there's an electronic edition so I downloaded it for the. What is it? The Microsoft reader. But I have to stay at my computer to read it. And as much as I am a creature of the electronic age, I don't actually like reading long form material on my computer. Eventually your eyes dry out, you forget to blink, your corneas turn into shriveled transparent plastic disks and it's all over. E readers I honestly think are going to go nowhere. If things are going to happen, what we're going to see is multi purpose things. Cell phones are a perfect example of this. Originally all they did was make phone calls. Now you can do everything on your cell phone except honestly beam up to the enterprise. I mean, I can take a picture, I can play games, I can listen to music. I can just do everything except possibly make a phone call because interference or whatever. So it will be a multipurpose tool that will be the first really successful ebook reader. Some people would say the Apple iPhone might be the thing that does the trick, but whatever it is, it's still going to be an ancillary market because fundamentally $8 or $10 for a book is really not that much. Yes, sir.

Have to sort of disagree on two points. I agree that the E reader on the computer screen.

You're disagreeing with me. Yep. Okay.

I agree. The E Reader on the computer screen isn't necessarily going to be working out, but I'm looking at the electronic ink and the more book like portable, able to store my entire library and several DVDs as opposed to 15 bookcases at home type thing.

Right.

I think the real difference though, you mentioned the two different stages of bringing in. I think the thing that the publishers or owners of distribution and the like are worried about is the ability to do mass distribution by an individual. I mean, until we started doing MP3 files, I can like make a mixtape for my girlfriend, but I couldn't send that out to 50,000 people.

Right.

And once you get into a decent e reader, that's when you can start distributing a book out to 50,000 people.

By myself, I think that's true, but there are two things there. I think there are two things that are going on. Honestly, I believe I. I honestly believe, and I have nothing but anecdotal thoughts on this, but I honestly believe that the vast majority of people given an opportunity to support an artist or support an author are going to do it, provided they have the money. When I was 14 years old, I was really poor. I couldn't afford vans, which is why I have them now, because I can afford them. But I made mixtapes for my. Actually, when I was 14 years old, I pressed the record button on the radio. So I had these mixtapes where the first 10 seconds of every song I really liked completely missing. Then I went to high school and college and I made mix tapes from friends who had records and so on and so forth. Then I became an adult and I started making money and I went and I paid for my damn CDs. And now whenever, like the Nine Inch Nails album came out just recently, they've got that Year zero website where you can listen to the whole thing. And I was like, oh, Nine Inch Nails there. Itunes click downloaded it. Because the ethos of. I know Trenton Reznor theoretically doesn't need my money anymore. He's stocked up in hookers and blow for it until the cows come home. But in fact, it's not about whether or not he needs the money. It's whether or not I feel that it's my responsibility to support the artist. And like I said, going back to the shareware thing of Agents of the Stars, I didn't say to people, you have to pay me money. It was strictly shareware thing. And what we actually saw there is over the course of the years, I had maybe about 100,000 people download the document I made about $4,000. That's a 4% conversion rate, which oddly enough is what the shareware conversion rate was back in the 80s and 90s and stuff. If you like it, do that. There's going to be a core of people who feel it is their responsibility to, to support the artist. And I think that as long as the price point is low enough, you're going to see that. What you're also going to see, frankly, and this has always been a bond of contention. Again, the business model that exists for writing is good for what writers have been used to in the future. You're going to see, and Cory Doctorow talks about this a ton, is that we're moving from people who are auteurs to people who are performers. You know, I'm here performing like a monkey for you for a reason. You know, this is something that I'm good at. My website is a performance. There is, you know what that does is it creates the associative bond so that when I do different things, like for example, very recently I did this 1200 word novelette which is called the Sagan Diary, which is based on a character who are in the Old Man's Ward series of books. And what we did with that was we made an audio book of it so that people could listen to it. And we said, here's the hardcover. And it was not an inexpensive hardcover. It's $20 hardcover or $40 for a limited edition 2000 print run. We're just about sold out on the thing and we're looking about whether or not we're going to go and do a reprint. And because of the way that I've got the royalties with Subterranean Press, I'm making a lot of money off of that. But this is something that wasn't going to happen in the old school way of doing things because it is entirely tied to having that fan base on my website putting something out for them to experience the audio files and then saying, here's the. And now you're leaving. Here's the souvenir. And the souvenir is the limited, you know, 2000 limited edition collection of this book. It's a different economic model. And just as in the past, there are going to be some people who are successful in that economic model were not successful. Some people were successful and some were not. In this new economic model, some riders will be successful and some won't. Now the problem is that in the Venn diagram of who is successful, the overlap is going to be. We don't know how much of that overlap is going to. To be. It could be very small. It could be very large. The example that I say is a perfect example of this new model. Okay, I'm going to see a lot of hands when I ask this. Penny Arcade. How many of you actually read Penny Arcade? Okay, these guys give away their intellectual property for free. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you see them, they're doing a cartoon about video games. It's obscene. It's hysterically funny. You can't get enough of it. Anybody can basically take it and put it somewhere and do whatever with it. And what they do is then they sell the books. And I know that their first printing of their very first book was huge. They do the T shirts, they've got packs, they've got that convention, and there's going to be like 30, 40,000 people. And it's like, what, the third year or fourth year that they're doing it? Even their charity, they do the child's play charity every year. Last year, they topped a million in charitable contributions. A million dollars in charitable contributions. It started with these two guys, and then, you know, and now there's like eight people. But their media, their intellectual property, they give away, and they're just making a bundle on the ancillary. Now, is a writer who writes books going to be able to do the exact same thing? No, but what you're going to find is that there are a lot of opportunities for writers to do different things, to monetize everything else about their lives, except even necessarily the writing. I could give away the Last Colony for free in some form or another, but I'm still going to end up making money off of it some way. My mortgage will still be paid as long as I'm creative about how I go about doing that. Yes, sir. You in the back.

Two questions. As all of my books are also on the web, and that helps sell the printed book really, really well. So I agree with you 100% there. You mentioned audiobook. What I have been suggesting to my other author friends is that they read their books into a podcast, sell the podcast online, because people love to listen to books in their car when they're commuting and stuff. And there's usually a huge premium for getting an audiobook over the paperback.

Right.

So have you considered doing that? It's a form of self publishing. And have you considered publishing your own stuff?

Well, yes and no. There are two things that are going on. Contractually, I am obliged to allow Tor to or deal with audiobooks to some extent. So I don't have control over that in my own. Not for all of my work, for some of my work, for example, but with things like the Sagan Diary or some other things, I can certainly do that, and it's possible for me to do them. There are two reasons why I don't. One, I'm extremely lazy, which is actually a theme in my life. Why has my career taken the path it has? Because I'm extremely lazy, you know, but the other thing is that I don't actually listen to audio books that much personally. So it's not a sphere that I've been totally engaged in. One of the things that I do think is interesting, though, is that not only with audio books, but with short work, is this something where the Internet is a great medium for that? We are seeing a resurgence, particularly in science fiction. We have lots of podcasts, things like the Time Traveler or Escape Pod, where they are taking stories and they are having people perform them as, you know, podcasts or little tiny audio books. And those have been very successful. They are often listened to more than the actual text is read. And my feeling about that, of course, whatever works is whatever works. Now, we've been talking about all this sort of stuff, and we actually not actually talked about the books. I don't know how much time we have left, but if anyone wants to ask a question about the books as well, just raise your hand and we'll get right to that.

We should see if our friends in the other locations have any questions.

Folks, I'm seeing their legs. I'm not seeing the rest of them. Any questions, anyone? Bueller with a leg or something?

Okay, let's go back to anybody here.

Wait, I gotta turn around because I actually can't. Why did you take bacon to your cat? Oh, God. I've gotten through the tour so far without actually having to answer that question, but I will do this. Hi, my name is John Scalzi, and I tape bacon to my cat. What had happened is I had a deadline for a book, which actually was the Last Colony, and I didn't have time to play online with all the crazy kids that come to my website that day. So I put up a list of things that I had to do that day, why I couldn't play with people. And I meant to be a very short list, you know, One, I have to answer email. Email. Two, I've got to do this. Three, I've got to do this. And they're all serious reasons. I get to number nine, and I run out of reasons why I can't play. And I was like, number nine, I've got to tape bacon to the cat. And so I post this up, and immediately my readers start talking about the physics of taping bacon to a cat. There's like, it's not possible to tape bacon to a cat because the adhesion index is not proper, because you've got all these individual strands of hair that's just not going to grip. And the argument went back and forth, and they were like, we think you should do it. We think that you should tape bacon to the cat just to see if it can be done. I bet you won't do it. I bet you won't. I bet you don't have the courage to tape bacon to your own cat. So I call up my wife and I say, do you mind if I tape bacon to the cat? And she goes, why are you taping? She's like, that's a very interesting question. Why are you going to tape bacon to the cat? And I was like, well, I kind of said I would do it on the whatever, and now they're daring me to do it. And she's like, you told people on the whatever that you would do this? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I did. And there was like a pause while she's waiting to decide, trying to remember why it was she actually married me. And she says, all right, fine, you're going to do it anyway. Go ahead and do it, but just promise me as soon as you do it, you'll take it off the cat. You know, just do it. Take your damn picture. Take it off. I'm like, all right, fine. So I go downstairs and I pull out the bacon, and I pull out the tape, and automatically the dog is interested. Hello, there's bacon involved. I'm here, and I'm trying to work out how. How I'm going to do the taping of the. So I lay out the bacon strips on the kitchen island, and then I put the tape down on the bacon strips, and then I lift them up to go to put them on the cat. And I discover my first major engineering flaw, which is that I've taped the bacon to the island. And so this is unusual, when the dog is like, I'll eat that. No one will ever know you're failure. So I give that to. I give that to the dog. And then the second time. So the second time here, I've got the bacon in strips like this. I'm tearing off the tape with my teeth and trying to fasten it onto the bacon just like that. And I've got my camera in one hand and it's slippery because of course now my head's covered with bacon fat. And I'm walking like this and the dog's like right here going, oh, ok, I'm ready if it should fall. And the cat's on the couch and she's like, I don't know what you're doing. And I'm like, hi there. And I just put it on and she looks at it and she looks at me and I'm like, okay. And I'm just start taking pictures. And then, you know, she's just laying there like, this is my life. And then she stands up and the bacon stays on. We have achieved adhesion. And I was like, I've got to document this because this is, this is the core of the engineering question at hand. We're doing this for the science. And she walks around and the dog is going insane by this time. She's like, bacon on a cat. It doesn't get any better. And so she's walking around and taking pictures and then finally it's done. I take it off and the cat's like, I'm going to kill you in your sleep one day. You won't know when. And feed it to the dog. And it's just the best day ever for the dog. I go upstairs and I put it on my website and you know, with the heading of, you people thought I was kidding. And then here's this bacon cat. And the Internet goes insane. I mean, it just goes. Because it goes on Fark and like at 3:15pm it goes on FARC. By 3:17, 6000 people have clicked through to my website and going, there's bacon on a cat. This I've got to see. Because apparently this is the God's awful truth. Apparently in the entire history of the Internet, going back to the days of the arpanet in the 1960s, no one else has ever taped bacon to their cat. They've got stuff on mycats.com they've done all sorts of indignities to cats online, but no one has ever thought to tape bacon to the cat. And it is fundamentally, this is what the Internet is for. Bacon on a cat. I'm there. It's the perfect hit. You click through, you've got five seconds of proof that bacon can in fact be taped to a cat. Then you're done and you go on with the rest of your day. It's just the perfect hit. And so usually my website gets about 20 by the time it was like 20,000 people visiting a day. It got 75,000 people one day, 67,000 people people the next day. And just hundreds and hundreds of links. The Nielsen rating people blog post said it was the number two link to blog post for that day behind some Chinese blog. And it was just amazing. And I'm sitting there and I'm just like, I'm always going to be bacon cat man. And so the next day I put up, you know, there's that website where you can make the fake motivational posters, right? And I made one with a picture of the cat and it says, perspective, fame, fortune, glory. Perhaps one day all these will be yours. But remember, nothing you ever do in life will be more popular than that picture on the Internet of bacon taped to a cat. Just for all you with your computers open, baconcat.com go look.

Two questions follow up. How much time did you end up wasting on that? And have you sold the rights to the motion picture yet?

I ended up having to deal with it all day long and I just see Patrick Nielsen Hayden going, you idiot. You know, this is my editor. Have not sold the film rights to that yet. But if there is a film where there's bacon taped to a cat, I am so going to be hiring Bert Fields to sue. So. Well, there were people in the comments like, how could you be so cruel to the cat and also to the bacon? And I'm like. And then, you know, the good news is that people are like, clearly the cat was not harmed because it was scotch tape. You know, it came off very quickly. It was not an issue of, you know, animals were harmed except pet the pig. And in that particular case it was fine. And other people were just like all you folks who are freaked out about how he could do this to the cat. You need to relax. So proof that the Internet is sometimes self correcting because what can you do? Any other questions? Anyone? Anyone? Well, it's really interesting you ask that because one of the things that I found out is that that when you have spikes like that from a novelty item, you don't really gain that many readers. I actually did a very big post on this a couple years beforehand. I did this post which was called Being Poor. And it was in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina. And as you all know, there were a bunch of people who were left in New Orleans when it hit, when the hurricane hit. And there were some people who were just being all snarky going, why didn't they just leave? Why didn't they just get in their cars and Drive off and go do all that sort of stuff. And the fact is that they couldn't leave, they didn't have cars, they didn't have any way to go. And there's no way that you can adequately talk to people who have not been poor at one point or another about what it's like to be so poor that you don't have a car, you don't have an escape route. So I wrote this thing called being poor where it just talked about what it's like being poor. And partly from my own experience because like I said growing up I was government cheese child. You know, we got it in a big five gallon tub and it was unbelievably orange. And so I had that experience and I just want to say this is what it's like to be poor. And then that got it was a huge post. And what I found out was because that was something that people had to commit to and read and comment and so on and so forth, they wanted to know about who that writer was that had done that. And so there was probably about a 10% conversion that before that I was moving on about 8,000. Then after that it was definitely about 10,000, 11,000 visitors a day. There was a definite spike and they stayed. When you do something like bacon cat, very few people are committed to finding out what else you're going to tape bacon to. And so they hit, they see it, they get their hit and they go away. So honestly, if you want people, people to continue to visit your site, you actually have to provide them with content as opposed to pictures of your cat. Unless you are cuteoverload.com in which case that's all you do. In which case they know that that's behavior that they're going to see time and time again. Yes, ma'. Am. What do you think happens? And then we'll get to you. I see you over there.

She's got the mic so let's go to her first.

Ok, go ahead. Just a real quick question. Yes. So since they charge the same amount for an ebook and the call cost is a lot less, do you make the difference or does the company pocket it? I think it's the company. Then no. This is the thing is that in the contract model you might get a slightly higher royalty rate, but generally speaking, no. I mean it's all going toward the producer. This is also what happens with musicians on itunes and other places like that where the production cost is so much lower because it's just a file on a server. But often not only Are the royalty rates either just the same? They're often a lot lower. And this has been a real big problem. What needs to happen, and again, this is where something like CIPL would be useful, is to say, you guys are exploiting our work in this particular way. You guys are making a much larger nut off of this. We need a commensurately larger slice, and that's important. And that is something that. That doesn't happen because a lot of time the authors. Authors don't actually read their contracts. They leave it up to agents, or they're just so desperate to get published, they're like, yeah, whatever. And it presents a problem. Now, one of the things that has happened recently is 10, you know, five, six years ago, publishers would absolutely be like, you want electronic rights? Mazel tov. Nowadays, they will not let them go. You have to argue with them. And you have to say clauses like, if you have not exercised your electronic rights after a certain time, I need to have them revert back to me so I can do something with them. And it's a real big struggle because the publishers, again, want to have control over it, even if that control is to do nothing with that. So, yes, ma'. Am. In this new web promotion world, what is going to happen to the writers who aren't witty and charming? I mean, I'm never going to buy a book by Michael Capo Bianco, for example. Well, you have to. Yeah, it would be tricky to do in any case. Well, I mean, no aspersions to Michael Capo Bianco. I mean, the issue is, again, we're going back to the idea of the writer as author as opposed to additionally a performer. And it's very tough because writing is a solitary endeavor. If you've been with a bunch of writers, you know, that socialization is not really high on our list of skills, you know, which is kind of amusing because we are talking about the human condition. You would think there would have to be a little bit of that in there. I don't know what's going to happen to them. There are going to be some writers who are going to do just fine, even if they never do anything but write books, because their books are going to be so good or so timely or so topical that no matter what, people are going to buy them. There are going to be other people who are frankly marginal writers, but because they are so damn amusing, you know, they're going to be successful. There's nothing about publishing right now that has anything to do with fairness in terms of quality of material. The same day my old man's work came out, my very first book. There were other books that came out that were equally as good, if not better, and a lot of those have sunk beneath the waves. I won the Campbell Award last year for best new writer in science fair fiction. There were five other candidates, and speaking personally, I think three of them are better writers than I am. Honestly, they are just better writers. They put together better sentences. And part of the reason I won is because I am out here, you know, I am doing this sort of stuff. I have a huge web presence and people know who I am, and it matters. Is it fair that I got the Campbell Award when someone who even I think as a better writer did not? No. But this is the wrong universe for fair. That's not the way it works. So some of them are going to succeed, some of them are going to fail. It's just the same thing that happens now and then 20 or 30 years on when there's another revolution in publishing, whatever that is, it will happen again. There were previous revolutions in publishing. Twenty years ago, most of science fiction was mass market paperbacks and they were put in supermarket racks. Supermarket rack distribution was consolidated into one or two groups and the market fell out. The bottom just fell out for science fiction. It's really hard to find science fiction in supermarkets anymore, or even fantasy, unless you're Christopher Paolini or the Harry Potter books. But, you know, and because of that, the people who had been successful succeeding in that time frame, we're now completely lost at sea in this new generation. So every generation presents a new publishing or distribution challenge. There are always going to be some people who, you know, there are going to be cockroach writers who will always survive whatever you throw at them. There's going to be dinosaur riders who are going to die. There's going to be mammal riders who are going to ascend. You know, you're a dinosaur, you're a cockroach, or you're a mammal. You know, you'd think it's best to be a mammal, but it's probably better to be a cockroach. I plan to scuttle anything else and. Yes, sir. Wait, wait. So there's been a big fuss recently about blog comments and sustaining communities and Internet abuse and so on. And one of the things that is very striking about your site is that you maintain a very high level of conversation there. Right. How do you do that? I pay attention to what's going on, frankly. There are two things that go on. One, my site Has. I will post. I can post anything and people will comment about this. One time I was doing an interview and I was mentioning that the site pretty much functions without me. You know, if I give people an open thread to play with, they will play. And to prove this to this person who was interviewing me, I turned ed and on my website I wrote. And now for this important news announcement. My toe hurts. And I posted it three minutes later. Comments about my toes. Well, why does your toe hurt? Have you stubbed it? This happened to me once too. And then they were off and running and there was nothing and I had nothing else to do with it. And it went for 40 or 50 comments. People discussing toes, my toes, their toes, toes in general. Don't we love toes? But so you know, it's a very active thing. But one of the things that you have to do is there are two things you have to remember. One, it is your site. It is, you know, you are responsible for what happens on it. And if you're not willing to accept responsibility for that, then the jerks will come and they will basically dump all over your site. And then all the other jerks will come and they will dump all over your site as well. And then it will just be this happy dumping ground and it will be miserable and nobody will want to come to your site. The other thing is that when you own up to the fact that it is your site, you also own up to the fact that you have to moderate. You have to be the person who rides herd. You have to tell people when they are getting out of line. You have to be willing to delete people when they say some damn fool thing or you have to be willing to tell them you have to stop this particular line and go on. And I've always been very clear, because I am an egotistical jerk, that this is my site, I am the law here. And I want people to argue and go back and forth and so on and so forth. But if you get out of bounds, I'm going to squash you like a bug. And every once in a while, someone will come by and they will try to troll and I'll tell them, you can't do that here. It's like, you can't tell me what to do. And then of course, I kill file them. They go right in and they're like. And they don't understand what happens because most of them don't understand about IP Denning. It's like, ha, ha, ha ha. But they disappear and they don't come back because it's my responsibility. A lot of the problem with the Kathy Sierra thing, and a lot of us have discussed this one, let's grant that what happened to her was remarkable, remarkably uncivil. It was horrible, and it's just proof that some geeks can't go out and play in polite society. But the other thing that was going on was the sites where all this horrible stuff was happening. Where were the people who owned the site? Where were the moderators? Why weren't they stepping on the head of this crap as soon as it happened or as soon as they saw it? I mean, right now, somebody could be on my site posting something horrible, and I wouldn't see it until later on when I jack in and see what's going. But as soon as I see it, it's gone. And this is the breakdown of civility, if you want to call it that, is not that the blogosphere in general needs to police itself. It's that individuals need to police their own sites, and they need to understand that what happens on their own sites has repercussions, because everything is transparent. I can go to any one of your. If all of you have a blank, you know, I can go to it. I can see what's going on and we can respond to it. And you have to own up to that. And if you don't want to do it, then your site is going to turn into a cesspool and horrible things are going to happen on it, and that's bad. But if you actually moderate, then two things happen. The trolls don't come around because they know that they're not going to be able to play. And the people who do come around are so happy that they can actually have an intelligent, useful conversation that they will stick around and they will become part of the community. And they will also say, hey, these are the rules around here. So that happens on my site. Patrick and Theresa Nielsen Hayden's site Making Light is another one where they're just gorgeously argumentative and yet at the same time, remarkably civil. Teresa Nielsen Hayden does this great thing, and there's now a widget for it called Disavowing. So when someone is just obnoxious beyond words, she doesn't delete the post like, I will. I'll just. It deleted because this guy was a jerk. She will take out all the vowels. And so someone who really wants to commit to reading it will actually still be able to read it, but for everyone else, it's just a blur of syllables. And you can just. You just go Blink and you go past it because you know that the moderator said, this person has been uncivil, and what they say have said is not worth listening to. And a lot of people are like, well, that's a restriction of my free speech. And this is like, you need to go back and actually understand the Constitution and then come back and try again. Because the Constitution does not say that your desire to be a jerk. Your desire to be a jerk ends at my sight. I don't have to put up with your crap. If you came into my house and were a jerk, I would sic my dog on you. You know, if you were just. Or I would call the police, I would get you out of my home. My website is my home. It's a huge presence for who I am. It is my public face. And I don't tolerate people being jerks. It's just that simple. I tolerate them being jerks up to a point, so. Because sometimes I am that jerk. You know, that's the other thing. You know, sometimes I wonder if I'm the best person to be moderating, but it's my sight. Somebody. Yeah, yeah, the hate mail will be graded. I get a lot of hate mail and I send it back with corrections going, you can do better than this. And people really, really, really, really hate that. Which, of course, is the whole point.

And I think we need to be wrapping it up. So any final comments?

Again, thank you so much for coming. You've been a lovely audience. Thank you for listening to me blab. And thank you, Google. I really appreciate it.

Thank.