I’m watching the #AskELJames hashtag like a stock ticker reporting on the market of online human shame, and it’s fascinating in the way that watching hyenas eat a sick lion is fascinating.

I don’t really know E.L. James, and I’ve only read portions of her books. I am not impressed with the origins of the work, or her wordsmithy, or her particular take on the genre she’s writing. (If I can suggest that you drop whatever you’re doing right now and go read Tiffany Reisz. Really, seriously, perform this task ASAFP for how shit is done.) Certainly I am not impressed with E.L. James’ publicists, who apparently thought some good would come of that particular hashtag. If she doesn’t fire them — like, out of a cannon and into a brick wall — then I will be surprised.

Further, I think because her books are controversial (both in terms of their fan-fic origin and their stance or non-stance on consensual BDSM relationships), I feel like it’s totally understandable to want to grab that hashtag and ask her serious questions about those serious issues. An open forum like that is, despite her likely desires to the contrary, valuable if it addresses those things. And I don’t think the response, don’t like them, don’t read them is a meaningful one. I think when it comes to big cultural things like this, it’s meaningful to talk about even if you’re not a “fan.” You don’t have to buy into the conversation with the currency of purchase. If there’s toxic shit surrounding this work, then it’s worth stirring it around and seeing what bubbles up.

But that’s not entirely what’s happening, here, is it? Sometimes the criticism isn’t really criticism but instead, a snarky performance dressed up as criticism. And sometimes? It’s just abuse. (I’m hesitant to point out any of these directly, which I fear would only complete the SHAME CIRCUIT, but one tweet called James the lady-c-word while chastising the abuse found in the book — which sounds like abuse about abuse, a cruel ouroboros where the snake bites down hard on its own tail.)

When it stops being a criticism of the book and becomes an attack on the author, that gets scary to me. The whole thing just gives me a kind of queasy discomfort, like I’m reading Lord of the Flies or Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” (Doubly weird to see some professional authors on there piling on. Trust me: it can happen to you, too, authors.) Like, what’s your goal by getting onto that hashtag and being shitty? Satire and snark can work if you’re good at them (hint: a lot of people are not actually good at them). But the sheer overwhelming tide of it just starts to feel septic. Like everybody’s just choosing to projectile vomit on a person, and not even for the effect of making the person feel it but more for the effect of making sure everyone else sees you doing it.

I am reminded of Cersei Lannister made human to the audience when she was forced to march, naked, covered in excrement, the Shame Nuns dogging her steps and ringing their Shame Bells.

SHAME *clong*

SHAME *clong*

SHAME *clong*

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of getting to a point that I think isn’t often well-made —

We use the acronym IRL to differentiate things that happen IN REAL LIFE versus things that happen ONLINE, but I’m here to tell you, the online space is real life.

It’s not an MMORPG.

We’re not all playing World of Twittercraft or the Facebook RPG.

It’s real.

The people here — bots excluded — are real.

Sometimes I wonder if all the shittiness online is because we’ve been sold that it’s all fake. That it’s a game of characters and personas, or a performance by people on a stage. We’re all participating in a grand narrative, we think. One of heroes and villains and right and wrong. But that’s not really true. It’s real life as much as it is if you met these people on the street, or at the mall, or in their own houses. We line up to say all kinds of things to people — and I’ve done it, too, I’ve been someone flinging shit and I’ve been someone who has had a little shit land on his brow from time to time (sometimes earned, sometimes ennh?) — but the question is, would we have done the same if it were in person? As @mittensmorgul said: “it’s amazing what people are willing to say on the internet they’d never say to someone’s face.”

I don’t think we have to be nice for the sake of being nice.

But I question too why we have to be mean for the sake of being mean. And I don’t connect a line between criticism and cruelty. It is not cruel to criticize. It is not cruel to engage critically and to ask real questions about real things. But you actually have to try to do that. You actually have to try to engage earnestly. Ill-made snark and meanness dull the effectiveness of your criticism; they do not often sharpen it. Is it bullying? Maybe not taken individually, but when it becomes a crashing tide like that — I don’t care who you are, that’s not healthy for your mental well-being.

Whatever the case, I think it does us well to remember:

Online is IRL.

It’s all real.

This is all really happening.

We’re all (mostly) really actually people. Not robots or bugs or swamp monsters.

It’s not a show, no matter how much we want it to be.

[Note, comments are open, but don’t be jerks. The spam oubliette awaits.]

Here’s the deal: Fireside Fiction is awesome. They continue to do amazing work, publishing great stories by great authors (myself willfully excluded from that adjective) and actually — gasp! — paying them well in the process. And it’s that pay rate Brian wants to talk a little about, today. What I’m also going to tell you up front is that Fireside is now eschewing Kickstarter as a funding platform and instead going with Patreon — which mean, Fireside needs funding to keep telling beautiful stories by authors who are awesome. Here’s Brian to talk a little more about it —

* * *

I could go on about people telling stories to their dinosaur friends around a fire way back when. Or about the power of a narrative to raise empires and shatter dreams. Or about a lonely kid who got by largely on sci-fi books, keeping him company on lonely afternoons and providing a handy weapon against bullies. (Thanks, Dune!)

I could, but I don’t need to. You know why stories are important.

I don’t want to talk to you about why we need to care about storytelling. I want to talk to you about why we need to care about storytellers.

You know. Those pantsless marvels who pull the puppet strings on characters we fall in love with, build worlds we want to soar through, and smash our hearts with a hammer over and over again. They work hard to bring us these stories, these escapes and adventures and visions. Hell, a lot of you reading this probably ARE telling stories. It’s hard work. Hours of writing, hours (so many hours) of revising, maybe coding ebooks and marketing too. It’s real, goddamn work.

And here’s the thing. Storytellers gotta eat.

So if you’re a storyteller, this means probably you probably have a day job. Or a night job. Maybe it’s a job outside the confines of space-time. I don’t know your life.

Point is, most storytellers don’t make a living off their writing.

When I started Fireside magazine back in 2012, we had two bullet points on our mission statement: publish great storytelling regardless of genre, and pay writers well. And we’ve been able to do both now, 24 issues and counting. We pay 12.5 cents a word, enough that a 4,000-word story nets $500. That’s money that can help pay for rent, for groceries, for 50 viewings of Mad Max: Fury Road. Is one well-paying story going to change anyone’s life? No. But publishing is an ecosystem. We want to be a nourishing part of that.

(Speaking of ecosystem, you should check out some of the other great magazines that are out there. To name a few: Daily Science Fiction. Lightspeed. Clarkesworld. Shimmer. Nightmare. Crossed Genres, Podcastle and Pseudopod and Escape Pod. Have your own favorites? Throw ’em in the comments!)

Fireside’s pay rate has been our greatest asset, and our greatest challenge. We’ve attracted a wide range of great storytellers, and it’s made the magazine, we think, interesting and strong.

But it’s also expensive. Fireside is free to read online, but each issue costs between $1,500 and $1,750. Almost all of that is going to pay for stories and art. We’ve had five Kickstarters between 2012 and 2014, raising over $70,000. They’re hard. On us, on our fans, on everyone who has the misfortune to follow me on Twitter. We’re holding a subscription drive right now, both for ebook subscriptions direct from our site and via Patreon, where people can join Fireside starting at two bucks a month (for a bit more, there’s lots of Galen Dara’s illustration goodies).

We want to publish 10,000 words a month in Year 4, which begins in October. We have done two serialized longer works in Years 2 and 3 (Chuck’s The Forever Endeavor and Lilith Saintcrow’s She Wolf and Cub), but Year 4 will be all about short stories.

10,000 words a month. Every time we’ve had open submissions, we end up turning away good storytellers because we just don’t have the money to buy all of the good stuff they send our way. We want to buy as much of it as we can, and share it all with the world.

Right now? We’re funded for about 1,800 words a month.

We need your help. Let’s feed some storytellers.

Brian White’s night job is as a newspaper copyeditor. He lives around Boston with his wife and an illegal number of cats. You can find him at talkwordy.com and @talkwordy. He also has a completely nonsensical newsletter.

I’ll be going through your epic list of potential flash fiction suggestions next week, but for now, it’s time to revive one of the classics: the random song title challenge

Way this works is:

Go to your music player of choice, pull up a random song, and use that song title as the title to your story. You don’t need to make the story about the song or inspired by the song (unless you want to) — all you really need is the title to run with. On iTunes, it’s shuffle, I think, but if you google “play random song” you’ll find plenty of ways to conjure one from the chaos.

Write the story with the song title as your story title.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Write it at your online space, give us a link in the comments so we can all read it.

Due by July 3rd, noon EST.

AHOY, FELLOW HUMANS.

WHAT A NICE DAY WE ARE HAVING. OXYGEN IS AT PLEASANTLY SUFFICIENT LEVELS.

IT IS I, DEFINITELY NOT AN EVIL ROBOT MASTERMIND, CHUCK WENDIG. I AM A “HUMAN AUTHOR” WHO HAS INFORMATION OF THE NEWS-SCENTED VARIETY.

PLEASE HOLD STILL AND LISTEN WHILE I UPLOAD IT INTO YOUR FACE CIRCUITS.

LET US BEGIN.

– Hey, look! A new really awesome blurb from a really awesome author:

“With complex characters and feverishly paced action, ZERØES is a sci-fi thriller that won’t stop blowing your mind until the last page…. It left me rooting for the hackers!” —DANIEL H. WILSON, bestselling author of Robopocalypse

– ZERØES also has gotten a kind review from RT Book Reviews (subscription only): “…an engaging, diverse cast of characters, a pace that almost never lets up… these hacker heroes have layers, filling those few quieter scenes with emotional complexity… you’ll find this book to be an unbelievably thrilling ride.” I’m also interviewed in the latest issue about the book and stuff.

– I’m in this month’s Star Wars Insider, talking my top five creepiest moments in the Star Wars trilogies. (What are yours? What creeped you out during the movies, shows, comics, books?)

– Under the Empyrean Sky and Blightborn (books one and two of my Heartland trilogy) remain $1.99 for your Kindle, though no idea for how long. If you like bloodthirsty corn, hover-boats, floating cities full of rich people, murderous hoboes, helpful hoboes, and SHEER BLOODY-MINDED TEENAGE ADVENTURE, well, hey, check ’em out.

– And don’t forget to pre-order The Harvest because holy crap that’s out in like, three weeks or something?! It concludes the trilogy, which is really weird for me, emotionally. Whatever. Anyway, please behold how cool it is looking at the three of these covers together:

– Oh, and there’s a Goodreads giveaway for the third book, too.

– Wanna see me talk in public? I’ll be at Seton Hill in Greensburg, PA this Saturday (the 27th) giving a public talk at 7pm. And I’ll be signing books. And tapdancing in the nude. Wait, I’m just checking my email from the organizers of the talk and it says “NO tapdancing in the nude,” so…  it’s an ongoing negotiation, is what I’m saying.

– I just finished one awesome book and have begun another awesome book. Adam Christopher (my writing partner on The Shield) wrote a novel called Made to Kill, which is yet another demonstration of why Adam’s genre-bending imagination is a gift to us all (think robot noir). And I’m now halfway through Day Four by Sarah Lotz, which is an indirect continuation of The Three (kind of an apocalypse-adjacent horror novel). Day Four is maybe not as directly artful as the presentation in The Three, and yet, it’s a more traditional horror novel with a more forthright narrative thrust — and it’s fucking creepy as shit. Both books are amazing. I read The Three (which features four simultaneous plane crashes) while on a plane. Thankfully, I’m not reading the newest on a cruise ship (which is about the terror that unfolds on a cruise ship that breaks down in the middle of the ocean), but you can bet I will never ever ever take a cruise in my goddamn life after reading this book.

– Oh, snap. Two more books came out that I blurbed: Trailer Park Fae, by Lilith Saintcrow (which is a book so awesome I honestly wish I’d written the damn thing and by the way go look at that awesome cover) and Tin Men by Christopher Golden. Tin Men is a gut-punch of a book, a great near-future war thriller — has kind of a Saving Private Ryan meets Edge of Tomorrow vibe.

– What are you reading right now? SPEAK BOOKS UNTO ME.

And that’s about it, folks.

Reminder:

You can preorder ZERØES now from one of the bookstores I’ll be visiting —

Doylestown Bookshop | Murder By The Book | WORD | Joseph Beth

Or from other online venues:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Books-A-Million | iBooks | Powells

And you can add it on:

Goodreads

Behold:

A brand new set of AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTOS to gaze upon.

Folks entered. A whopping 73 of you, actually.

And holy shit, am I ever laughing.

Anyway — here’s how this works:

You click that link.

You look at the glorious buffet of authorial silliness.

You choose the one photo you believe should win the title of MOST AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO.

You take the number of that photo and you pop it into the comments below.

Please make the number of your choice clear. Begin with the number. If you have comments to add, add them after the number, and don’t use any other numbers (“Well, I like 16 but 42 is funny and 37 is awkward but maybe I’ll choose 71”) because I won’t know which one you’re voting for.

Translation: make this easy on me.

You get one vote.

I’ll tally the votes in one week (Wed, July 1st!) and we will have our winners.

DO YOUR CIVIC TERRIBLEMINDS DUTY. (Doody?)

And vote.

Ugh. Publishing stuff. I’d much rather be talking about something else. Anything else, really. Like wombats on hanggliders. Like all the cheeseburgers I have ever eaten. Like this amazing rhubarb barbecue sauce I had last week. Like all of the awesome words you can form just by smashing a mundane word (preferably a noun) up against a vulgar one: cocktrumpet, fuckrelish, jizzglisten, shitnoodles, and so on, and so forth.

But here I am, talking again about Kindle Unlimited.

(Sorry, everyone. Music has Taylor Swift. Publishing has me.)

I do not mind Kindle Unlimited in theory.

In practice, I remain unsold.

Amazon has made changes recently to this subscription program — changes that now say authors in that program will get paid by the page if someone downloads the book through the Kindle Unlimited service. (Note: some articles are going around that suggest that this is how Amazon is paying all authors now, by the page, and that’s just a bag of horseshit that got struck by lightning and is now walking around like it knows a thing or two. It doesn’t.)

This contrasts with how the program originally worked which is that folks reading the book were all paid the same rate once someone read to a certain point in that book (10%). So, if you wrote a 250,000-word epic fantasy brick or if you wrote a 10-page pamphlet on the dangers of ostrich syphilis, when someone reads to 10% of either book, you receive $[INSERT DOLLAR FIGURE BASED ON SOME MYSTERIOUS CALCULATION BASED ON AN OCCULTED ALGORITHM BASED ON THE MAD WHIMS OF WHATEVER INSANE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THAT RUNS AMAZON.COM]. The payout was once thought to remain steady at a couple-few bucks, but this year hit a new low at $1.33 in March. The guy who wrote the pamphlet gets paid more than a buck if someone reads one page of his syphilitic manifesto. The lady who wrote the bludgeoning weapon known as an epic fantasy book would get paid that same amount if someone read to 25,000 words of the book — roughly the size of a novella.

That sucked and Amazon changed it.

Now, it’s pay-per-page.

I’d argue that this is better. It fixes the weird inequity and stops punishing people who wrote… y’know, actual-size novels. And it stops incentivizing people to write tiny little no-nothing stories, or for writers to break up actual-size novels into hitching seed-spurts of “serial content” (“My novel, THE RAMTHONODOX CONSPIRACY, is broken up into 215 downloadable chapters!”)

So, yeah, it’s better.

I’d also argue that it’s still not great.

Here’s why:

First, the entire program continues to demand exclusivity from those enrolled. Meaning, you still have to be all in with Kindle Unlimited. No direct sales (though some say Amazon doesn’t really watch that closely). No B&N. No nothing. Exclusivity has always in the publishing world been a thing you get paid for — or, should be, anyway. If someone says to you, “I want you to be in with us, and out with everybody else!” then that offer better be an actual offer. It’s not a favor to you — it’s a favor to them. (And it’s why you should be wary of that kind of language inside any traditional publishing contract, by the way. Authors make a living by not being locked down, and if you are a Kept Penmonkey, then you should be paid for that.)

Second, it’s remains based upon some mysterious algorithm. There’s still this “global pool” of KDP Select money which seems to be arbitrary (and going down, down, down), and what you’ll be paid per page every month is not a fixed number. Whether their pool is high but the payout is low due to the sheer number of self-published titles or whether their pool is simply too low to pay those authors well, I don’t know. It’ll probably pay well at the outset and then begin to pay less and less as it goes, which is what happened with Kindle Unlimited. And we have no idea how any of this is calculated going forward. For all we know, there’s a chimpanzee high on DMT throwing darts at a bingo chart taped to the wall. I mean, that’s what I’d do. Hell, that’s what I do now any time I have to make a hard decision. His name is Jeepers P. Montesque, and he wears these frilly suits and fancy boots and — well. I’m digressing.

Third, it takes away the author’s financial independence. So-called “indie” authors (which is in some ways a misnomer because we’re all independent authors, not employees) find power in doing things their own way. It’s one of the reasons I love self-publishing — you have the power to make choices about your book that not every author gets to make. And really, one of the biggest choices is price. The value you choose to assign your book is an author claiming governance over her financial destiny, and she has the power to course correct that price over time. Taking that away from an author is a sin. It robs them of their sovereignty and actually diminishes part of the value of being an author-publisher in the first fucking place.

(Some have noted that this program will also change the way books are written, which is to say, books will become salacious cliffhangers driven toward getting people to turn to the next page. Maybe? I’d argue this is a pretty brittle bone of contention — and I’d further argue books are already written that way. We already want books that are meant to be read quickly and to completion. Books that readers don’t finish are books readers don’t talk about. And books readers don’t talk about are books that will sink and die at the bottom of the ocean. Word-of-mouth matters most above all else, and that means writing books that — gasp — people actually want to read from front to back and then maybe front to back again.)

So, Amazon — you and me, we’re pals. We’re cuddlebuddies, right?

I’m going to fix Kindle Unlimited for you.

I’m going to blow it open and make it awesome for authors.

Ready?

Let’s do this.

a) Remove the exclusivity. Because fuck exclusivity, that’s why. Unless you’re offering me a pony when I sign up for the program, don’t pretend this is some kind of favor to me.

b) Make payouts based on the price that I set for the book. In a perfect world, that means the price I set for my book is the money I get paid when someone completes my book. You can tie it to percentage — so, if they read 15% of my book, I get a 15% payout on the price that I set.

That’s it! Ha ha ha, fixed.

Okay, let’s tackle that second point, because it could present some problems.

It might, for one, encourage high prices — meaning, authors will take whatever books they sell and bump them up to $9.99. Pamphlet about ostrich syphilis? $9.99. Though that’s also a downside for those authors because now their e-books sell for that price, and they have to worry if someone’s going to pay it. Solution to this could be that Amazon could set programmatic limits on the payouts associated with works — meaning, they assert that books that are too short cannot receive the full percentage of the payout. This, probably based on average prices of certain length books — Amazon already calculates that and recommends pricing to author-publishers, after all. So, if your average novella is going for $2.99, maybe it only pays out that much per read.

Another solution would be to pay authors a reduced royalty — a fixed percentage that does not change month to month — of, say, 50% of the price instead of the normal 70%.

The point is that, authors should get to choose their own prices.

That’s always been part of the advantage of being an author-publisher.

And it should remain an advantage, one that cascades through all of Amazon’s programs.

(As a sidenote, some have suggested that Amazon has wonked up the algorithms to help ensure that books enrolled in KDP Select/KU are given more favorable rankings. This is not something easily proven, because again, everything Amazon does behind the wall of their marketplace is shhh seeeecreeeet. For all we know, it’s a hyper-intelligent ant colony deciding what happens. Maybe Jeff Bezos is just a thousand praying mantises stuffed in a skinsuit stuffed in a business suit. UNTIL AMAZON SHOWS US THE TRUTH WE WILL NEVER KNOW.)

Amazon, as always, is a beast to be reckoned with. They single-handedly made independent publishing a bona fide thing. And it’s why I don’t want to see them shitting up what has been ultimately a pretty good deal. Innovation is good. And I think their fix for Kindle Unlimited is a move in the right direction. But it’s still not enough. To me, the program needs to be changed to be more in favor to the authors, and more in line with what traditional authors already get.

*does a sassy version of SHAKE IT OFF*

*crowds run screaming and streaming from the building*

*music cuts short, lights turn on, seats are all empty*

*sad mic drop followed by one lone tear on top*

*bloop*