Jon S. Lewis did a nice interview with me on his site about why I am doing some of these blogs. Take a look. Thanks, J.S. for doing that and the comments over the last year here.
http://www.jonslewis.com/writing/world-publishing/
Dean’s Short Bio
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith published traditionally more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he co-wrote The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and ghosts for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean wrote books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and wrote scripts for Hollywood. One movie actually saw film.
Dean also worked as an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He now plays a role as an executive editor for Fiction River.
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WMG Publishing Inc. is now my major publisher of all my coming novels, collections, and short stories.
Fiction River Volumes #1and #2 Are Available!
Fiction River, an original fiction anthology magazine is available for subscriptions. Unnatural Worlds, the first volume, shiped on April 23rd, 2013 and How to Save the World shipped on June 18th, 2013.
$6.99 electronic and $15.99 trade paper editions of Fiction River volumes are available at your favorite bookseller.
Or subscribe to future issues now.
Thanks, Dean. Much appreciated.
You got a couple of questions from R.L. Copple over there, so I thought I’d deposit them here for you to make them easy to find . . .
Dean, couple of questions.
One, are you planning on doing a chapter on piracy, especially ebook piracy in either the myths or publishing series? Maybe you did and I’ve forgotten, but I’d be interested to hear your take on that issue.
Two, it would be interesting to hear any thoughts you have on where the indie music industry is or will be different from the book/ebook industry, that is, where what happened there may not apply to books. Maybe a possible entry into the publishing series.
Enjoyed the questions and thoughts.
J.S., send R.L over here for his answers. Good questions.
I am not going to do a myth article about piracy because, to be honest, unlike some of these areas, I don’t feel like I can stay in any sort of balance. My belief is that I stop anyone with threat of lawsuit who is trying to make money off of my work. It is the same as going into my house and taking my living room furniture. Same thing. Theft of property is theft of property. You take something of mine and try to sell it, you will hear from my publisher’s legal department or my own attorney. And by the way, I have won a number of suits and got a settlement from SFFWA for theft of an article of mine. So no myth about piracy. It is just theft and should be punished as just that.
Now, note, I allow in my Sacred Cows posts to let people send them along to others who might be helped. But I have already stopped one person who tried to sell it online. Passing along with permission is fine, linking is fine. Theft is not fine. Copyright is a property right. Just think of it as your car and the topic makes sense.
And I will NOT LET THROUGH comments from the nut cases out there who think information needs to be free, you know the ones who believe that silliness gives them an excuse to commit theft all they want. Nope, my car is my car, my copyright is my copyright.
I just don’t know enough about the close internal workings of the music industry to comment much, but remember as C.E. pointed out a few times, the music industry and the publishing industry are not big single things, but instead are made up of huge areas that are often very different and have different rules of operation and standards. I talk about the fiction side of the publishing industry here. Sorry I couldn’t help you on that one.
Thanks, Dean. I think I was thinking about your comment about the similarities between the rise of digital music and how that shows it could happen just as quick with ebooks.
While I agree on some points, I think there are some major differences that has already made ebooks a slow adoption compared to music. As in, it’s already been at least fifteen years since ereaders first came out, and just now we’re beginning to see signs of life taking off. Unlike music, the change will more closely follow those who grow up with ebooks. You have folks like myself who while 50, prefer to read a book on my Droid than hold a big, heavy, have-to-use-two-hands to turn a page book. But still in my generation, only a small percentage will prefer an ebook because of what they grew up with. Music, on the other hand, has been in constant flux, especially within the last forty years. So change comes faster and easier compared to the thousand years of history of the paper book distribution method.
At any rate, I’m with you on piracy, but I wasn’t sure where you stood on it. Early authors, like myself, without a lot of money or legal help, can’t do much about piracy it seems. But I thought it might be a topic that would come up somewhere. But I’m following you on it’s theft. As a matter of fact, it was you pointing us to a blog post that caused me to write my own blog post on why it is theft.
Thanks!
What’s interesting about music is that downloads are still only 40% of sales after all these years. CDs are 60% in other words.
It makes me think that there will always be a percentage of people who will read physical books or no books at all — at least for the next decade or so.
And ebooks don’t really offer the same advantages that MP3s offer. All ebooks do is eliminate physical copies. MP3s do more than that — they allow users to buy single songs instead of CDs and they make the music more easily portable. Books have always been portable.
(And yeah, I get it that e-readers do allow the sale of individual short stories, but $0.99 is too high for a short when lots of ebook novels can be had at $2.99.)
In other words, it’s hard to tell just how much marketshare ebooks will grab.
Thanks for the link. Lewis’ interview with you was very informative. As was some of his responses to comments.