You’ve got to give Jeff Bezos credit for cojones, if not business savvy. The guy still hasn’t learned to stay off the trapeze without a net.

Motoko Rich of the NY Times and Christina Warren of Mashable both report this week that Amazon is back to swinging wildly from the highwire with a club, demanding a three-year contract from publishers and a guarantee no other bookseller gets better prices. For “other bookseller” you can, of course, read “Apple.” And Bezos isn’t asking nicely—he’s on the offensive.

Well, Apple has the same sentiments about pricing. Nobody wants to be underbid.

But Bezos appears oblivious to the bad fall he took only a few months ago pulling a high-profile stunt like this. Has he forgotten. . .um, he LOST?

And whether or not Amazon and Apple get the Mexican Standoff they want, guaranteeing neither wins the pricing game, that time-lock contract is one spangly costume blowing in the wind. A three-year lockdown? In this technological climate? Is Bezos joking?

Even in Silicon Valley, they don’t know where they’re going to be in three years. There’s Super-Top-Secret Classified stuff going on everywhere, NDAs popping buttons in all directions, deadly competition for marketshare with very real, very heavy millions of dollars hanging in the balance. Lock into three years of emerging technology with one company? I wouldn’t sign a that kind of contract locking me into a high-paying job.

Steve Jobs has five of the six big publishers onboard with him—Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin—and he’ll have Random House before he’s done. They’ve got the money, he’s got the time. He’s a wheeler-dealer. That’s what he does.

It’s not about bullying, Jeff. It’s about making someone an offer they can’t refuse. (Although it’d be nice if someone could teach Steve to pull his legs in and stop blocking the sidewalk in front of Palo Alto cafes, where he likes to do business on his cell phone.)

BUT. There is the possibility Bezos will succeed in splitting the market into Big Pubbers and Small Pubbers if he can offer small publishers deals Jobs isn’t interested in offering. Bezos is already courting the small pubs/self-pubs people. And, I have to say, that would be a fascinating development, reconfiguring Amazon’s rather tarnished persona as the “indie friend.” (Writers are indies, too, and they don’t necessarily appreciate seeing their already laughably-minimal profits chiseled even further just to promote Bezos’ stock.)

But are there enough nickels and dimes out there to balance the Ben Franklins? (See this article about The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in Wired in 2004—oddly retro for only five and a half years ago.)

And what about the reputation of a lot of what’s being self-published right now? Would Amazon come out looking like the champion of mom-&-pop businesses against the big box stores? Or just a franchise of cheap dimestore head shops?

Today let’s read a Scott Berkun article on time management. He calls it “The Cult of Busy.”

I have a real problem getting any writing done these days, besides blogging and emails and paying jobs. I used to spend hours and hours out in the sunshine with a notepad and a pen, coming up with fresh work, writing first drafts, noting down interesting ideas to explore. Or else I was writing actual stories and scenes, working on revision, reading great writers and taking notes, analyzing their plots and following character development and sometimes just copying out longhand the sentences I loved. I also spent a lot of time hanging out with my little boy.

But when am I supposed to do stuff like that now, when there are blogs to read and links to follow and conversations to have over IM about whether or not my friend in a cube in Silicon Valley gets M&M’s in the break room today? I mean—really. I’m not infinite.

Do you know when was the last time I wrote a story or even an article, just for the sake of it? Neither do I.

How busy are you? How much of your life (especially now that we have the endless blogosphere to mess around in) do you spend busily staying busy without actually accomplishing anything? How many evenings do you look up and say, “Huh. I had stuff to do, but the day seems to have just gotten away from me. . .”?

And, most importantly, how is this affecting your writing?

We’re talking about exposition today on the magazine.

Not till the knife of love gained sufficient edge could he cut out her figure from its surroundings.
—Elizabeth Bowen, “Ivy Gripped the Steps”

Exposition: the necessity for it to be sharp and succinct ties it intimately to line editing. . .yet it is simultaneously tied to artistic vision and also to the simple mechanics of plotting.

What is exposition for?

Exposition is for stepping outside of the reader’s vivid experience of living this story—summarizing what could almost always be better said in scenes—and in a way that both moves the plot forward, creates layers and complexity, and illuminates the story beneath the plot, the real, hidden agenda.

All that?

Yes, all that.

You can see why fiction has moved away from exposition (nineteenth-century novels are chock full of the stuff) toward scenes. Because, as hard as scenes are to write, they’re a thousand times easier to do right than exposition. . .

Read the full essay on The Art & Craft of Fiction.

Hey, folks, I’ve been interviewed on Bob Spear’s Book Trends Blog!

Bob’s a bookstore owner who ventured into self-publishing many years ago, way back before it was fashionable. He made a success of his early nonfiction and is now back—blogging about the experience of self-publishing his series of mysteries, beginning with Quad Delta.

Do you ever wonder what the heck an editor DOES all day, anyway?

I told Bob.

For those of you waiting for the winner of the vote on my book cover: it’s #4. This wasn’t a democratic decision. You guys were all over the place, making me feel quite clever for not coming up with a single dud (yes, in spite of Kathryn messing with me about #2—Kathryn). But once we put together all the feedback we got on the first three and created #4 out of it, that seemed to get the most enthusiastic response.

Also, when I was reading up on ebook pricing today, I realized that starting a title with an A, as in Art, puts you at the top of all alphabetical lists. Which can only be a good thing.

Thank you again to everyone who voted. What an amazing resource you are! I blogged about you today on my weekly She Writes post.

Kathryn sent in this NPR piece by Lynn Neary on ebook pricing, which references this even more detailed and in-depth NY Times piece by Jason Epstein.

I’ve been looking into ebook pricing. Kindle, of course, is racking up “best sellers” that turn out to sell for $.99 or even go out free, screwing with the playing field beyond all reasonable comparison. Smashwords allows buyers to set their own price on some books, presumably at the author’s discretion—I’m sorry, these are obviously amateur “published authors,” not serious writers (you can tell by the blurbs), folks who don’t need either editors or designers, just to see their name on a book cover in the wild hopes that they’ve somehow accidentally written a best seller. Innocence beyond innocence.

eBooks.com has a more realistic range of prices, from $3.95 to $30 in the Fiction category. Sadly, the classics are the cheapies. Jane Austen is $3.95, actually cheaper than a modern rip-off about Mr. Darcy. Even Agatha Christie is priced higher. Anna Karenina goes for $4.95 on the same page as a collection of Tolstoy’s stories for $28.95. Novels priced over $20 tend to have the word “erotic” in their descriptions. For Whom the Bell Tolls for $15. A “re-imagining” of the Brontes’ life during the writing of Jane Eyre for $15. While Wuthering Heights itself goes for $3.95? I’m sorry—I can’t read any more.

Over in the category of Literary Arts & Disciplines (it’s not broken down any further in the main menu, although, oddly, Science Fiction gets its own category as distinct from Fiction), under Composition & Creative Writing, we find 346 titles in a range from essays by nineteenth-century giants like Samuel Butler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain for less than $10 to the whopping $60 for a tome on writing about avatars. Wait—$64.95 for one on medical writing. Here’s $79.95 to learn how to write narrative and $80 for a book on comedy. Whoa—$115 for a book on information design (how to make things complex?). I don’t think the $125 book on composers counts toward literature. But there are lots more books in the $50-80 range. Oh! A book on point-of-view for $140! Something from the Edinburgh Press on writing fiction in general for the fabulous price of $164.99. And the queen of them all, an instruction book on writing prescriptions for (hold your breath) $229.95!

You can even buy an ebook on greetings for $6.95.

These are all ebooks, people.

My head is reeling.

Now, I have to give an award for this title: I’m Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck, apparently fiction mis-categorized here.

And In the Too Weird to Be Real arena, it appears that Neil Gaiman wrote Beowulf. I’m flabbergasted. I’ve always thought that was the first known fiction in English—between a thousand and thirteen hundred years old.

The things you can learn on the Internet.

I should have asked you guys your opinions a long time ago. You have been really amazing about the whole book cover issue. I’m sorry—I’m a slow learner. I promise to do better in the future.

So today I’m going to ask your opinions on a subject discussed intelligently and at length by a guy named Craig Mod in Tokyo: the disposability of print books.

Craig was brought to my attention—and a lot of other people’s, as well—by the NY Times.

Is it true? Are there more cons to print books than there are pros? Is the digitizing of books a boon to humankind that writers and designers alike should be embracing, an opportunity for our skills and talents to blossom in ways that print books simply can’t handle? Is our attachment to print books an emotional attachment to familiarity rather than artistic common sense? And what about all those dead trees, anyway?

I love print books. I just bought 11 volumes of Thackerey with leather spines and corners, which—so far as I can tell—were probably printed in the 1890s, and they are absolutely the apple of my eye. I don’t own an ereader. I don’t have any plans to acquire one.

There is a concreteness to physical books that’s deeply tied to my identity, my sense of myself. I grew up in a house where bookcases were important and books embodied respect for the intellectual mind. When my parents bought an old Victorian in Bellingham to renovate in the early 1970s, almost the first thing my father did was build a wall of bookshelves across the study, finishing it with care in old-fashioned trim and staining and oiling it to look like it had always been there. He filled it with his books from his college days. That was the world in which he learned the marvelous flexibility of thought, curiosity, creativity.

My mother reads novels. Not cheap crap, but really amazing works by the great wordsmyths of the English language. Those books were around the house throughout my childhood, so I grew up on the nineteenth-century masters, as well as the wonderful language in books written in the early twentieth-century, the Moderns and Post-Moderns. Virginia Woolf’s experimental short-short stories were a part of my childhood experience. She taught me to look meticulously before writing and to choose words to match that meticulous eye.

The smell of those books has been with me since I first learned to read. The beauty of language and craft is tied intimately in my brain to the beloved smell of words.

Now, I’ve seen gadgets come and go for decades. I know how to write computer programs and recently spent a weekend commiserating with a friend who’s a programmer at Apple over the eternal superiority of Unix and C. I live in a house with more computers than media outlets. I could try to be a Luddite, but what would be the point? I work on computers cobbled together by my husband.

I have not been bowled over by the advent of ereaders. “We already have readers,” I say. “I’ve got stacks of them by my chair even as we speak.”

But Craig has really got me thinking about this. Is he right? Is it time for us writers and readers to quit clinging to dying illusions and move into a vibrant new literary reality?

Is that what you’re doing?

All right, everyone. You’ve been so great. But I need a final vote. We added a fourth option in the post below, based on your comments on what works and what doesn’t in the other three, and keeping in mind that at least one word has to be readable in the thumbnails they use on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Yes? No? Keep on mucking with it? Please don’t?

Okay, guys. I need your help.

We’ve been tinkering with the cover. This is one of the beauties of indie publishing (although I’ve been advised today that that’s a misleading term. . .authors who publish themselves are, technically, self-publishers and small publishers who publish other people are indie—although unless you name your publishing company after yourself who’s going to know?). Not only do I get final say in the design of my cover, but because I have a background in design I can keep tinkering with it right up until the last minute. Not that I advise this. What I really advise is that you hire someone with a background in design and then don’t tinker with nothing. But anyway.

Will you vote on the version you like best? You’ll notice one version actually uses a shorter title. I know, I lost the ampersand I loved, which was my reason for choosing this typeface in the first place. But—as you know—it’s all about the reader’s experience, never about the writer’s.

            

My guest post on She Writes for today is on the editing of THE ART & CRAFT OF FICTION. How’s it going? Well, it’s going. . .