This is the website of Simon Morden, author of the Metrozone series, published by Orbit Books in the UK and USA.
Here you can read Simon’s latest News and Blog Posts, find information on his books, read published essays and get in touch with the author.
(Hell’s teeth, Morden – you’re such a nerd)
Well, that was interesting. Having fumed righteously against piracy in all its forms, I was contacted by a real live pirate (arrrr!) who put his side of the story. And I’m such a bleeding heart liberal, I not only took the time and trouble to read what he had to say, but also think seriously about the points he made.
And surprisingly (to me, at least) I am partly convinced: it’s certainly more nuanced than I allowed for. So I’ll try and go through some of the issues raised again, but this time with my special They Live glasses on. And yes, I do have plenty of gum.
Do I own the copyright to my work? Yes. Yes I do. And yes, my ability to charge for my art depends on me being able to assert that right. As the original creator of a piece of fiction, I can choose to do one of several things with it: I can give it away for free (under a Creative Commons licence) like I have done with Thy Kingdom Come, for example. This way, the work can be distributed freely without alteration, but also without allowing anyone else to attach their name to that work. I’m happy to do that with older pieces of work – and one of the things I have to think about next is whether I do the same thing with Heart. I can also release excerpts of my work as ‘tasters’ (or advertising, if you like). If you like what you’ve read so far, you can then continue to read when you purchase a copy.
Do I need paying for my work? Again, need is relative. Which is something I’ll touch on later. But for the moment, I live in a scarcity-driven capitalist economy. The future is not going to come and save me, supplying me and my family with fabbers and a Mr Fusion for all my energy needs. Likewise, I cannot eat a good reputation. One day I will. I have worked in a Gift Economy before, when I was a research scientist at a university. I provided not just my employers (the Natural Environment Research Council) with original research, but the whole world. In return, I was given enough money to live on: for the length of my contract, it didn’t matter if I produced one paper in a peer-reviewed journal, or half a dozen, but whether my contract was renewed at the end of it did depend on the quality of what I’d done already, that is to say, my reputation. I believe this is also a workable model for artists. But we’re not there yet.
Do publishers actually do anything? Or, why is your royalty rate so low? Publishers do lots. Editors improve a manuscript, sometimes immeasurably so. Copy editors, likewise. I’ve had my arse saved by good copy editors too many times to either dismiss the work they do or to think they’re not worth paying. They, like me, have to eat. Then there is the layout, the cover art (hi, Lauren!), the publicity, the mailing room even. All of that happens so that you know the book exists, and that it’s of a minimum standard of quality. Someone other than the author has read it. It makes some sort of sense. It’s written in a language as it’s meant to be written. The publisher has put their reputation behind it. And that’s part of the immutable cost of books. I’ve said nothing at all about printing, which is almost, but not quite, pennies in the pound. The way a publisher recoups these up-front costs (they haven’t made a single dime until the book sells), which includes the author’s advance, is by charging for the product. I know there’s a lot of kvetching about the cost of ebooks, but the cost of a professionally edited and designed ebook isn’t much different from the same book in dead tree form.
Isn’t this publishing model broken? Probably. Guy Haley also entered the fray a couple of days ago, and has had a lively time of it. In his follow-up post, he makes the entirely cogent point:
Would I rather sell ten million books for £1.00 (at my 8% I’d get £800,000) or ten thousand for £7.99? (I’d get £6392) What the hell do you think?When they first started, Penguin paperbacks were cheaply priced, mass produced, but not, and this was the point, not pulp. They were good books, keenly priced, and I think that industry-published ebooks need to go the same way, and soon. I have no control over the pricing of either print or electronic versions, but it seems entirely possible that there would be more profit, not less, on an ebook as a whole if it was substantially cheaper. But not free. Not free. See above regards to quality.
Piracy does not equal lost sales. This is where things start to get fuzzy. I would agree that not every pirated copy of my book is a lost sale. Some most certainly are, but not 100%. We’re arguing about proportions here – what ratio of pirated copies would have turned into sales, all things being equal? It’s a fruitless question, because there’s no definitive answer. We’ll stick with the ‘some’ value. But anecdotally, it can be significant. Lucia Etxebarria found that value too great, and has vowed her next book may well be never.
“Literature is not a profit-making job, but a passion,” said Kelly Sánchez, one of the least vitriolic critics. “If you had a real vocation then you wouldn’t stop writing.”
You could argue, that having won a couple of really very well paid literary prizes, Ms Etxebarria doesn’t need any more cash. But what Sanchez is saying is “work for free”. Not many employees would work a second month if at the end of the first month, their boss told them that their job should be a passion, and they didn’t need paying. And Etxebarria’s book in question wasn’t published as an ebook – it was scanned and pdf’d. See above, regarding the publishing model. But again, if every book was 100% pirated, only a very few writers would pay for their words to be professionally edited. Only a very few independently-wealthy writers would write full-time. The quantity of quality books would not only decrease (and dramatically so), but the demographic of writers would change (and dramatically so). Neither is healthy. An individual download is a drop, but mass piracy is a flood. Writers can probably afford an umbrella, but that’s not going to be much use when the twenty-foot wave tears up the whole town.
I cannot afford your book. Here the rubber hits the road. I spent most of my teens with my head buried in a book. I often read late into the night because I couldn’t put the book in question down. And to a very great extent, I hadn’t bought those books at the bookstore. They were either library copies, or second-hand (those, I still have most of them), gleaned for tens of pennies from jumble sales and second-hand book shops. Quite literally, I could not afford to buy all the books I read. I couldn’t afford to buy so much as a tenth of them. My pirate contact – I shall call him The Captain – says this (and English is not his first language, but I’ll quote verbatim):
To me reading is like breathing. I suffocate without books, information etc. … And since the book trip is really some 4-6 hours depending on number of pages .. well I have to breathe books the other 29 days
The Captain can’t afford to buy all the books he needs. Not wants. Needs. He lives in a place which, without giving too much away, was recently a war zone, and civil society struggles to provide health care, let alone an abundance of second-hand books. Now, I grew up in rural Berkshire in the seventies and eighties, but I recognise myself in him. Far too much. “I have to breathe,” he says. Ouch. The stricter reader of this may well say, “Of course he should pay. I had to. It’s still stealing.” So it is, but, but… I’ll have to think about what to do about this. It would be brilliant if I could give away electronic versions of my books to those people who genuinely couldn’t afford them, or at least heavily discount them, while asking those who could to pay more, or even full price. But I can’t. There’s no mechanism to do so. If anyone’s got any bright ideas, please do comment, or email me on the Contact page.
Is there a solution? Probably. I’ll let you know when I work it out.
Posted in: From the Author, Non-fiction by Simon Morden on January 30th, 2012
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Right then. Piracy. SOPA/PIPA. Stuff like that.
I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, people who download music, films, books and audio that they would have ordinarily had to buy in order to listen to/see/read are stealing copyrighted material from their copyright holders. Downloaders make it increasingly difficult for artists to firstly, earn anything from their work, and secondly, make a living from their work so they can give up the day job and concentrate solely on their art.
In the case of the Metrozone books, they were pirated within a couple of days of being released as ebooks. Orbit (and their parent companies LittleBrown and Hachette) try and get those copies removed from file-sharing sites as soon as they can: they do so because the person uploading those files has no right to make them publicly available without the copyright holder’s consent.
And that copyright holder is not Orbit, or some faceless megacorp. It’s me. I’m the creator of the work, and it’s my copyright. By torrenting my work, you’re denying me income which I could put to good use – like repairing my roof and walls, which badly need doing, or saving for my children’s education.
Furthermore, because I’m losing digital sales, the next time I sell a book to Orbit, my advance goes down. Lost sales for the publisher results directly in lower advances for authors. Which means that fewer authors will be able to support themselves, and perhaps their families, with their work – and the vast majority of writers make peanuts as it is. With long, long hours and little pay, they’ll have to do something else instead of dedicating the time and effort into producing good prose.
And unlike musicians, authors don’t have an alternative income stream. Why have the cost of live concerts gone up in the last few years? Blame the downloaders. The live experience is the one thing you can’t stream. It always used to be that a band would tour to promote the album. Now the albums promote the tour, because there are decreasing returns from the physical and digital recordings. Sure, you can go and hear an author speak, but aside from Neil Gaiman (who I understand charges an outrageous fee simply to dissuade folk from booking him: he’d rather be writing), I can’t think of many writers who the general public would pay to go and look at. I’m no oil painting, and Toby Leonard Moore (who reads the audio versions of the Metrozone) is simply better at speaking my lines than I am.
I don’t get much from each sale. But I do get something. Other people get somethings too. The cover artist. The editor. The copy editor (and they’re worth their weight in gold). The publicists. The lawyers who draw up the contracts. The distributors and the booksellers. My agent (who is also worth his weight in gold). I don’t have a problem with that, and neither should you.
There is, of course, very little I can do about any of this, except two things. And you can do them too. Firstly, don’t pirate copyrighted art. If you like an artist’s work, you’ll want to support the artist so they can produce more of it. So do your best to pay for it. I’ve no problem with you buying second-hand books, and I’ve no problem with you going to the library (all my books are registered with the UK’s PLR scheme). The more you support artists, the more art there’ll be.
Secondly, don’t approve of piracy. It might seem just a bit, well, dad-like (guilty as charged) to withhold your approval. But if your friends torrent and download like bandwidth was going out of fashion, that doesn’t mean you have to. It’s not a victimless crime, and it does hurt people – the very people who produce the fantastic music, brilliant film or riveting book you’ve just enjoyed. Hurting people, ripping them off, that’s just not cool, especially when they’re in no position to stop you. It would be lovely if pirating art became socially unacceptable, and those that did it, frowned on and ostracised.
On the other side of the coin, do I want kids to go to prison for five years because they’ve downloaded a copy of Equations of Life? No, I don’t. As someone pointed out, someone torrenting a Michael Jackson song could end up with a longer gaol sentence than the doctor who killed him. Neither do I want websites that promote legitimate content taken down for a single rogue link.
SOPA is sledgehammer to crack a nut. It’s virtually unworkable, and the effort to make it workable is so great and the disruption it would cause so widespread that it’s completely counterproductive. The internet would become unusable within days.
There does need to be something though, that protects artists in the digital age. Real, physical art is difficult and time-consuming to reproduce. Digital art can be copied millions of times, perfectly, and distributed at the click of a mouse: the old copyright laws can’t cope with this new reality. So the solution may mean that sites like megaupload.com get taken down and their owners sued: claiming ignorance when the majority of traffic consists of copyrighted work seems more than a little silly. Whatever the final answer is (and there probably won’t be one), copyright holders need a quick and easy way to not only remove illegal content when it goes up, but prevent it from going up in the first place.
The bottom line is that copyright is how artists make money. Without any way of asserting it, we’re in trouble. You can, however, be part of the solution. Which is a positive note to end on.
Posted in: From the Author, Non-fiction by Simon Morden on January 20th, 2012
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Someone on a forum I’m part of posted the following question: “Is there a link between being spiritual and being creative?” This was my response:
Creativity is part of us, and part of us all whether we are specifically Christian, generally spiritual, or completely materialistic. Story-telling (the bit I’m most concerned with), like music or representative art, transcends both time and geography – people tell each other stories, make music together and daub pigments on things throughout history and across wildly different cultures.
The question arises, does spirituality feed creativity? The answer is sublimely simple – yes, of course it does, but then so does pretty much everything else. Certainly, a great deal of creativity can be expressed within a formal religious context (providing that isn’t taboo), and a society’s religion provides a context for creativity.
A further question, though, is whether spirituality can inspire sublime works of art in an individual who otherwise would be mediocre? This is a much trickier claim to pin down: if you pick some of history’s greatest artists, it’s often individual genius and a large sack of cash that’s the potent combination, rather than anything else more numinous. Despite the popular image, there’s nothing more likely to depress creativity than starving in a garret or being so dog-tired from the day job that all feelings of creativity are sapped. Patrons are critically important to the production of great art – and it’s often the patron who decides on the subject matter. You could even argue that it’s the spirituality of the patron that’s important here.
I’m lucky in this respect. My wife earned enough that when we were divvying up child-care duties, it made much more sense for her to keep going to work and for me to stay at home. When the kids got older and were at school during the day, it meant I had time to write – in the warm, with a full belly. And even luckier, no one tells me what I have to write except the publishers, and even they realise they don’t have me over the same barrel that a lot of authors find themselves bent over: I don’t rely on them for a roof over my head.
So I’m sorry to be so prosaic, but those are often the realities.
Which was pretty much an off-the-cuff response, but does include Morden’s 3rd Law of Writing “Marry someone rich”, so clearly I’ve been thinking along those lines before. I’m just wondering if part of the new publishing model that’s always just around the corner might include, how shall we term them, stipends for writers, rather than an advance?
Posted in: From the Author, Non-fiction by Simon Morden on January 15th, 2012
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No, not that sort of vibrating…
The Metrozone series – all three books, no less – have been nominated for this year’s Philip K Dick award. I am properly stunned. Dick is one of the authors I not only enjoy, but admire: big concept stuff, played out at the personal level.
Congratulations to all the nominees – I’ll be dining out on this for a while!
Posted in: From the Author, Metrozone, News and Updates by Simon Morden on January 10th, 2012
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When someone emails you (hi, Frank!) a highly complimentary note regarding the Metrozone books, and ends it with “I have some giant rabbits to make”, you just know you’re reaching the right people.
Frank's rabbit
2011 has been an extraordinary year – I’ve sold some books, I’ve got some more lined up, people have (mostly) liked what I’ve done so far. 2012 looks as if it’s going be be really hard work – Ignite is rich seam to mine but oy, that seam runs deep – but I wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s probably going to be hard work for you, too. There’s an awful lot of things in the world that could really do with fixing, so if you don’t already, can I suggest you volunteer some of your time, doing something you feel passionate about, in your local community? The world starts just outside our front doors.
Here’s to you, and the difference you make. Happy New Year.
Posted in: From the Author, Ignite, Metrozone, News and Updates by Simon Morden on December 31st, 2011
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