The Princess and the Frog ~ public domain
Beauty and the Beast ~ public domain
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ~ Stieg Larsson
Game of Thrones ~ George R. R. Martin
Lolita ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Leda and the Swan ~ W.B. Yeats
The Color Purple ~ Alice Walker
The Handmaid’s Tale ~ Margaret Atwood
Oedipus the King ~ Sophocles
The Bible ~ A bunch of dead priests

I read these stories in book form before realizing how deeply offensive and immoral they all are. I doubtless would have bought similar stories online if some right-minded corporation hadn’t taken drastic action to control what kind of literature can and can’t be sold on the internet. Thank heavens PayPal has stepped in to save my mind from this filth!

Richard Seymour is an English screenwriter, journalist and author and a lovely fellow. His first novel, Members Only, was an innovative philosophical comedy based in the afterlife. I met him first on the internet on various philosophy discussion forums, then in real life when I lived in Cornwall. He was kind enough to answer some questions on the subject of self-publishing.

With your background in freelance journalism, what motivated you to take the leap into fiction?

I became a freelance journalist because it gave me the flexibility to write fiction. As for what motivated me to leap into fiction, I really don’t know. I do remember one night not being able to sleep. My head was a jumble of noise. I gave up and decided the only way I’d get any sleep would be to write some of it down. I had a little, hand-held computer and wrote about a thousand words without pausing to think. The next morning I assumed it would all be rubbish; but when I read it back I thought it was quite good. It became the beginning of Members Only, almost word-for-word unchanged from that night.

Did you shop your work around to traditional publishing houses or agents before you decided to self-publish?

I did. I am not sure I gave it a good enough go, though. I was probably wasting my time with publishers anyway. I should have gone for agents. I spent a lot of time on each submission and if I got replies they were polite rejections. I had already self-published by then though. I just wanted to get my book out there. What happened then was that it was read by someone with a connection to the film industry. She said she wanted to turn it into a film; so I dropped everything and wrote a script. My idea was that it would be easier to get a book published if it were being adapted for the big screen. I probably should have tried pushing for both.

Why did you finally decide to self-publish your book?

I met someone who had some success being self published. He was making more money per sale than he would have done had he been published the conventional way. It was true he had to do all his own marketing, but then a big publisher won’t necessarily do much promotion for you either. I also liked the control I’d have over the process. But more than anything else, when you have a baby you just want to show it off to the world one way or another.

How did it feel to get it onto the market?

It was an immense relief. It was also interesting. You see, when a person reads your book it becomes something slightly different. The creative process doesn’t end with the author. It begins with the author but continues with the reader. I know what my characters and their surroundings look like, but I have no idea what they look like to someone else; and what they get from the story never ceases to surprise me. A good author is nothing without readers with imagination.

How did it feel a year later?

It’s one thing having your own mother tell you your book is good, but quite another for a complete stranger on the other side of the world to send you an email telling you how much they liked it. I remember writing Members Only and so often wondering if there was any point; if anyone would ever read it. Well, they did. Ordinarily you cannot just produce something out of thin air. You have to take a material and turn it into something. But that’s not true with stories. A story that existed nowhere in the universe can suddenly be made to exist. It is pure creativity. You’re genuinely adding something that was not there before. And that continues to happen with every reading. I’d have liked to have made more money from it but I’ll settle for that right now.

Last year, I got an email from someone who had found Members Only through Book Crossing. It had been left in a crack in a wall at a bus stop. That made my day. And just recently someone picked it up at a second-hand book shop and said he loved it. You never get tired of that. What sort of a person would I have to have been to have just thought: all those readers, but I only got paid for the one!

Once Members Only was published, what steps did you take to promote it?

I should have done more. I think I was exhausted by it all. I had spent years writing Members Only and I just wanted to move on to something else. I created a website, I had a Facebook page . . . but it was a pretty poor effort really.

On your website, you write that Members Only will be published as a serial under a Creative Commons license. What made you decide to release it for free?

Theopen source advocate Tim O’ Reilly (I think it was) says that a new author’s problem is not piracy but obscurity. He’s right. You need to build a readership. One of my favourite authors right now is Jasper Fforde who wrote the Thursday Next series. A friend of mine gave me one of his books and I loved it. Do you know what I did? The moment his next book was released I bought it. Without hesitation. The Creative Commons license I chose allows others to develop Members Only in other formats, just not for money. Perhaps it goes back to the sense I have that you can’t really own a story. All you can do is begin one.

Having said that I dropped the serialisation idea and just published the whole lot as a PDF. I will release it as an eBook and charge a nominal amount. What I think I will do is offer a free version,either the whole lot or perhaps as a short story, a cartoon strip or something like that. I haven’t decided yet.

If you could do it all again from the very beginning, would you do anything differently? 

It’s possible to self publish without having to go through a company. There is nothing stopping you going directly to the printers, for instance. You need to know what you’re doing, and I know someone who does. Members Only is currently no longer being published as the company I went with is not longer operating. When I re-releases it it will probably be that way.

What’s next for you as a writer? Is there another novel in the cards?

I had planned to write a sequel to Members Only, but I really wanted a break from it. I have an idea I am very excited about for a novel called Ace & H: An Epistemological Adventure. I have already started sketching out ideas for it. I am turning a short story I wrote years ago into a radio script. (One of my ambitions is to have a play on BBC radio.) I am also moving into screen writing.

Anything you’d like to add?

We all dream I suppose of writing a novel and it becoming a best seller and of making lots of money from it. I think if you’re still unpublished that thought can really get in the way. When people start businesses they accept they will lose money in the first few years; and they don’t expect to be WalMArt. It’s the same with writing. I think it helps to just want to tell a story and then to let go of it. That doesn’t mean you can’t make a living from writing. You can. But it is easier to fall in love with someone if they’re not holding out a collecting tin. And you want people to fall in love with you. Think about your favourite authors. You don’t just read their books; you have affairs with them; you get involved in relationships with them; they get inside you for heaven’s sake!

Ed: Funny Richard would mention the last bit. I had a very realistic naughty dream about Kurt Vonnegut shortly before his death. I still feel kind of conflicted about it. There was a bit of an age gap, to put it mildly. Not only that, but the whole event took place in a hospital with nurses and concerned family members milling around. He was in a hospital gown and everything. Still makes me shudder, and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s from pleasure or horror. I feel much more relaxed about my dream of having dinner with Terry Pratchett and his lovely wife in a roofless house under a brilliant, starry sky. I woke up wanting to send them a thank you card. Can’t say the same for the Vonnegut dream. In fact, I never even told anybody about it until now. Anyway…. PUBLISH

Enjoying the sights and sounds of Montreal

Swedish developers Per Thulin and Karl Tannergård have created a browser-based music player that streams music from Youtube, SoundCloud and Official.fm.   Youtify comes with a unique feature:  through integration with flattr’s social micropayment platform, it allows listeners to donate to artists with the click of a button.  For indie musicians, that’s an interesting proposition.

How Flattr works

Flattr users contribute a monthly amount of their own choosing to the service and content producers add a flattr button to their website.   Over the course of the month, users click flattr buttons whenever it tickles their fancy.  At the end of the month, the user’s monthly donation is evenly divided between the owners of all the buttons she clicked.

How Youtify works

Since Youtify is not a distribution platform, you can’t upload anything to it.  The content comes from elsewhere on the interwebs.  Youtify just helps find it and keep it coming with an intuitive, music-player-style interface.  By creating an account you can create personalized playlists, connect your Flattr account and start throwing musicians a bone.

How to use these tools to busk on the internet

1. Your first step is to upload your music to SoundCloud.  (Youtube and Official.fm’s flattr integration, if any, was not immediately obvious to me).

2.  Sign up for a Flattr account and sync your SoundCloud account.

3. In Flattr, tag your tracks with “music”, select file type “audio” and submit them to have them listed in the music catalog.

4. Profit!  Watch that virtual spare change trickle into your virtual guitar case.

I should mention it’s also fun to pop on your headphones, hit play and just listen to whatever random flattrable music comes up.  That’s what I’ve been doing the entire time I’ve been writing this post and setting up all my stuff.  This is a great way to discover and appreciate (with money) new artists.  I’m going to go put some funds into my account and start flattring!

Starting next week, a number of Ubisoft’s legitimate PC customers will be unable to play their games because of problems with the titles’ digital rights management (DRM) antipiracy schemes.

A handful of Ubisoft games won’t be playable while the transition takes place.

The publisher has announced that it is “transitioning the hosting of many of its online services from a third-party data center to a new facility” starting on February 7, and as a result, most of its games will lose online functionality. However, because some of Ubisoft’s PC and Mac games feature DRM that require a constant online connection to the publisher’s servers, those games will be completely unplayable when the publisher takes those servers down for the transition.

That’s a fantastic business decision, Ubisoft.   Fight piracy by implementing technology that renders your product dramatically inferior to cracked copies of your product.

From Michael Geist:

The music industry is… demanding a series of changes that would make Bill C-11 look much more like SOPA.

For example, the industry wants language to similar to that found in SOPA on blocking access to websites, demanding new provisions that would “permit a court to make an order blocking a pirate site such as The Pirate Bay to protect the Canadian marketplace from foreign pirate sites.” Section 102 of SOPA also envisioned blocking of websites:

A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet  Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order. 

The music industry also wants Internet providers to be required to adopt a termination policy for subscribers that are alleged to be repeat infringers. According to the industry document:

To incent service providers to cooperate in stemming piracy by requiring them to adopt and reasonably implement a policy to prevent the use of their services by repeat infringers and by conditioning the availability of service provider exceptions on this being done.

This demand would move Canada toward the graduated response policy that could result in loss of Internet service for Internet users. There is no indication in the music industry document of due process or even proof of infringement.

Read the whole post here.

The absence of due process is the most worrying feature of this legislation.  I’m not averse to some kind of debate over whether ISPs should be held responsible for policing the online activity of their subscribers.  They shouldn’t, of course, but I welcome the chance to win people over to my way of thinking.

What should never be up for debate in a democracy is whether the bald assertion of some aggrieved, powerful party is adequate reason to invoke strict government-sponsored, tax-funded punitive measures on individuals suspected of minor acts of civil disobedience.  Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?

If that idea bugs you as much as it bugs me, write to your MP.

Pro tip: political staff are more likely to read your email if it is not a duplicate.  Even if you can only come up with a few sentences, customize the content of the email form.  Better yet, call or write a letter.

Arcade Fire

Independent musicians were among of the earliest beneficiaries of innovations in communications and digital technology. In two short decades, our ability to make and share music been completely transformed. Where once thousands of dollars had to be invested in studio time, artwork, mastering and printing records to manifest one album, we can now produce virtually unlimited tracks of comparable quality in our own basements for next to nothing. Where we once had to choose between signing an exploitative distribution deal or barging into every record store in town with a box of CDs under our arms in order to get records on the shelves, we can now deliver our work to the whole world without even leaving the house.

Likewise, the internet has brought a revolution in broadcasting. Any sufficiently motivated music lover can now set up a server and broadcast their favourite music around the clock and around the world, distributed through directories like ShoutCast and TuneIn. I’m not going to pretend I know how any of that server-client stuff works, but I am going to introduce you to a few great radio stations where you can hear non-stop, ad-free streaming indie music around the clock.

SomaFM maintains 21 listener-supported, ad-free internet radio stations. Find something that suits your mood and play it in a pop-out player or open the station in iTunes, WinAmp, Amarok or VLC.

DMPulse has launched a listener-supported*, ad-free indie stream on TuneIn, which you can access through your mobile device. 1) Go to your gadget’s native app store and get TuneIn for free. 2) Search for DMPulse in TuneIn. 3) Enjoy. SomaFM’s channels are also available on TuneIn.

Radio XY will open a stream in WinAmp, Windows Media Player, XMMS and iTunes on your computer, or on TuneIn for mobile devices. From what I can see, RadioXY is maintained by one die-hard, indie loving broadcast nerd in his spare time. Based on the quality of the music I have been listening to for the past hour or so and the cross-platform compatibility this humble station is the best of the bunch.

Pro Tip: If you are using TuneIn, use the little <3+ icon in the top right corner to add stations to your presets so you can find them easily later.

Happy listening!

Artwork from Alientrap's fast paced 2D platform shooter "Capsized"

I love this website.  Stop reading right now and go there.

Are you still reading?  OK then, here’s the basic overview, which you would have found if you had followed by advice in the paragraph above.

Indievania is an open platform for independent developers to sell their games directly to players and keep 100% of the profits. Our focus is on cross platform DRM-free games directly from developers with no middle men and no extra software for players to install.

Players can redownload games at any time after purchase, and developers can continually update their game and release new versions. All games are accepted at any stage in development, with popular new releases and special/promotions being showcased on the front page and our facebook/twitter streams – allowing developers to sell beta/alpha versions of their game to fund development.

Indievania was developed by indie developers Alientrap as an alternative to the many online based game retailers. The site was developed with open source technology and cloud based hosting to keep the costs low and allow for game developers retain all their profits directly – no funding for the site has been provided by any game studios or other companies.

Creative types  often share this in common:  whatever it is we make, all we really want to do is make it.  It is often unbearable for us not to make it.  The Work won’t let us sleep until it is made.  Until then, we exist in a state of total and perpetual absorption – all our attention focused on the next chapter, the next song, the next few lines of code, the next scene.

When it’s finally out, we enjoy a rush of cathartic euphoria that lasts right up until we notice the spelling mistakes, the bugs, the background lawnmowers or the cliché lyrical choices.

We budget for revisions because we know attentiveness to flaws in The Work and a willingness to address them is the mark of  ”professionalism” in an artist.  Some of us even enjoy the process.  We gently lay aside the fragile mystery that inspired The Work while we solicit constructive criticism.  During this phase, we meticulously maintain an emotional barrier between The Work and The Self for the sake of The Work.

Then one day The Work is what is “finished” (Artistese for “I must make this other thing.”)  When we feel it is ready to be unleashed upon the world, independent artists have no patience for middle men.  We just find a platform and release.  ”Ta-da!” we exclaim, “Here it is, world, enjoy it!”

I have met few independent artists who set aside a material, temporal or emotional budget for self-promotion.  The Work will sell itself, we believe.  If we build it, they will come.  But what if they don’t come?  Then that meticulous ego barrier we constructed to get us through the trouble-shooting phase begins to crumble.  We don’t see a lack of interest as obscurity, but rejection.  Even worse, it’s not The Work being rejected, but us.  Wildly inaccurate though these feelings may be, it’s still a bitter pill to swallow, so we forget about The Work.  We just leave it wherever it sits to make its own way in the world.

I’m not going to beat around the bush.  Nobody will come.  The Work won’t sell itself.  It doesn’t matter how good it is.  If nobody knows it’s there, The Work will languish in pitiful obscurity forever, earning nothing, reaching no-one.  This is what the army of suited vampires who produce nothing but still hoover up the lion’s share of the world’s entertainment spending understand that independent artists do not.  It explains why everything you hear on the radio is crap compared to whatever you carry around on your MP3 player.   It explains Adam Sandler.  It explains how Matthew Reilly sold three and  a half million books infested with descriptive sentences like “It was AWESOME!!!”  (Although, in fairness to Reilly, I still read the whole thing).

I don’t blame any artist for not wanting to throw their precious Work at the mercy of a mob of indifferent business people.  However, indie artists need to understand the implications of this choice.  The Work won’t publicize itself.  If ruthless multinational entertainment corporations aren’t going to publicize it, who is?

We are.

I’m not going to pretend I have any answers.  I still shitcan my music and writing for intolerably lengthy periods of time while I do boring stuff for money.  However, since we released our first indie game last month I have made a few observations.

 When we consider the path success, we miscalculate the necessary ratio of exposure to quality.

Exposure is more important than quality.  I hate to write it down.   Nevertheless, it’s true.  If Matthew Reilly can sell three and a half million books, so can you.  But, you should contemplate how many full-time jobs are devoted entirely to getting the word out about Matthew Reilly’s terrible books and budget for it.  Devote a little time, money and emotional energy to self-promotion every day.  Tweet, blog, advertise, promote, solicit, submit, compete, and connect.  If you ever want to make a living from your art, you must promote it.  Every day.  Forever.

We need to maintain the emotional barrier between The Work and The Self despite our obscurity.

Don’t take it personally.  Remember the happy place you went to when you showed The Work to your best friend and she enthusiastically pointed out all your typos and run-on sentences?  Stay there forever.  You really can’t promote The Work and worry what people think of The Work at the same time.  If you succumb too much to caring, you might spend so much time reworking your “finished” project to satisfy a handful of critics that you leave yourself no time to win over new fans.   Independent artists must prioritize.  Know what stage in your creative process you are at and commit yourself to it.  Begin –> Finish –> Refine –>  Publish –>  Promote.  Don’t backtrack.

We must be shameless.

Don’t be shy.  When our game was “finished”, we worried so much about our “brand” that we didn’t promote our game at all. Our advertising campaign was this:  we tentatively reached out to our close personal friends, asking for positive reviews, and hoped positive reviews would sell the game for us.  Our miserly approach to publicity resulted in just enough five star ratings to fail to surpass the App Store’s threshold for showing any ratings at all.  Since we have no friends with Android devices, this approach was entirely ineffective on the Android market.  When Google offered $75 of free advertising, we snapped it up, set our maximum bid to a stingy 5 cents per click – and hit our $10 maximum daily spend by lunchtime on the first day.  It’s too soon to tell whether this week-long bump in exposure will result in a bump in sales, but it will make a significant dent in our obscurity.

Math is our friend.

Think in terms of sales per eyeball exposed rather than total sales.  Would you rather sell your work to one percent of a million people or one hundred percent of a thousand people? The proportion of people who will purchase your work once they know it is there is probably pretty consistent once you bust out of your immediate network of family and friends.  For us, the proportion of people who upgrade to the paid version of our game after trying the free version varies only slightly from one distribution platform to another.  However, the number of people who try the free version to begin with is hugely volatile – and it directly corresponds with our ability to put the game in front of eyeballs.

We don’t have a budget for promotion.  So we’re trying to make good use of everything we can find for free – tweeting, blogging, making pages for Facebook and Google Plus, getting all the buttons, tracking all the statistics, bothering review editors, designing ads, researching the successes and failures of other independent artists all day long, every day.  I kind of miss last week, when I’d never even heard of half of the stuff I started doing this week.  The learning curve is steep and  intimidating.  Every social network has its own unique etiquette and most will burn you quite ruthlessly if you don’t conform to it. In taking on so many at once, I kind of feel like I’ve exploded into a dozen different people.   But it can be fun, too, and a great way to connect with other indie creators.

Distribution has always been a dismal landscape for the indie film-maker.  While amazing leaps forward in video technology and communication potentially allow just about anybody to make a movie these days, a handful of distributors still maintain a stranglehold on what gets shown in theatres.  This ensures that almost all of it is predictable, soulless, formulaic Hollywood crap that navigates through a hostile maze of focus groups and accountants with delusions of grandeur before anyone ever hears of its existence.

Using the internet, indie film-makers could potentially bypass the corporate distribution bottleneck altogether in order to reach a significant audience.  On the other hand, films are far more costly to produce than music, novels or games.  Even if the crew is willing to work for nothing, the bills add up.  Between location rental, transportation, costumes, make-up, props, proprietary editing and mastering  software, equipment rental and fodder for the crew,  making a decent movie will never be something introverted misfits can do in the privacy of their parents’ basements, investing nothing but time.  Because they have spent a lot of money getting their product in the can, indie filmmakers are highly motivated to do whatever is necessary to recoup their costs.  They are less inclined to make their work available for free and quicker to sell out to mainstream distributors than indie writers, musicians and developers.  I would have loved to list more indie film websites, but as far as I can see, there just aren’t that many out there.

Indie Movies Online streams indie movies for free.  There’s no catch.  They have obtained a proper, legal license to stream every film you will find on their website.

Vodo uses P2P technology to share and promote one free indie movie per month.  Downloaders are offered an opportunity to sponsor Vodo films for various incentives, like film credits or soundtrack music.  You will need to install a P2P client (such as BitTorrent) to access these films.  For P2P noobs, you will want to grab PeerBlock while you’re at it to help filter out government and mainstream media IPs – they are out to get you whether the files you are legally accessing violate copyright or not.

Free Documentaries.  I have been watching fantastic freedocumentaries.org since its inception.  No fuss, no muss, no fees, no subscriptions, no ads; nothing but streaming access to hundreds of great documentaries for free.  I adore this site.  Watch the BBC’s Century of the Self series to find out why.

TED Talks hosts 900 streaming videos from their two annual conferences.  TED conferences bring together “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).”  The video and sound quality is excellent and the content is free.

RSA Animate has very cool graphic white board illustrations of excellent lectures that challenge the way we think.  I can’t get enough of those things.

Wreckamovie has no content, but it is kind of cool.  I linked it here because it takes a revolutionary approach to the entire concept of film-making.  An offshoot of a successful cloud project called Star Wreck: In the Pirkenning, wreckamovie has created a global, cloud-based film-making community.  Members combine their expertise and resources to collaborate on high quality indie film projects.  Wreckamovie has created a communication hub for these projects and follows them through from start to finish.

Happy watching!

Before we get any further, you may want to take a look at Calibre.  We use this free, open source program to format and sync our e-books for a diverse array of gadgets.

Without further ado, here are six great libraries of e-books that are either covered by a creative commons license or in the public domain.

Calibre maintains a library of DRM-free books that are not in the public domain.   These books aren’t all free, but they are free of DRM technology that unnecessarily restricts how legitimate buyers view or share the books they have purchased.  There are loads of free or “you set the price” books in this library, and the books that are priced are much less expensive than conventional, DRM-plagued ebooks.

Smashwords is a DRM-free ebook publishing and distribution platform for self-published authors.  This site is very nicely constructed.  It takes you to a best-seller ranking of books in any genre for the price you want to pay (including “free”) in a few short clicks.

Project Gutenberg is a massive library of copyright-expired literature.  Their site hosts 38,000 high quality public domain e-books proofed by an army of volunteers.

The Online Library of Liberty covers 4000 years of classic literature.  The common thread is that all the work on this site contains significant musings on the subject of liberty.  The site is very attractive, comprehensive and easy to navigate.

Obooko is the Shangri-La of contemporary books, legally distributed by the copyright holder for free.   You won’t find any best sellers here, but you will find excellent work in whatever genre floats your boat.  Subscribers can rate books and leave feedback for the authors.

The Digital Book Index is not the prettiest website you will ever see or the easiest to navigate, but it does contain an absolutely massive collection of scholarly work, the majority of which is available for free.  There is also a meta-index listing other major ebook archives.

Happy reading!