Year End Wrap Up Part IV: Demography

You know, there are so many other, probably cooler things I could do for my final year end wrap up. I had some pretty hilarious recollections of my life written out in screenplay format. Like, me getting beaten up as a child. Or striking out badly (how was I to know that epic poetry doesn't count as poetry when trying to pick up girls?). But let's be honest. Let's be clear about who I am what I stand for. Transperancy. Reaching across the aisle. Maverickism. Or TRAAM for short. That's my platform and that's my promise. So today I thought I'd discuss you. All of you. My beautiful and loyal constituents (vote for me).


Geography: I wish it'd break down where readers' are in more detail than merely country, but I'll deal. As you might imagine, it's almost all American. That's fine, except that there's one little thing. The agency gets a lot of queries from Canadian authors, both first time and already established. I've got nothing against that. But I have few enough hits from Canada that one could reasonably dismiss it as coincidence they found the place at all. Seriously. There are half as many Koreans who've seen this blog. And South Africans. And a lot of other things. There's actually twice as many hits from Russia. So a word to my writerly colleagues in the Great White North: Don't be such hosers, eh.

Browser and OS: About 46% of viewers use internet explorer. Then there's roughly 25 each for Firefox and Safari, then a host of other things I didn't really look at. Presumably smart phone browsers or something. Or maybe from the South Africans. Who knows? Interestingly though, Microsoft has 50% of the OS but Apple's got 40. 40 is a substantially larger number than the 25 commanded by its primary browser. 40 is also enormously more than the 10% or so of the market that apple machines make up. It's all good. As Basil Fawlty would say, I'm attracting the right customers. If not the elites, then at least the elitists.

Awww come on! I kid. I kid 'cuz I love. Really. I do. Please don't leave. Vote for meeeeeee. Don't you know-nothings know anything? Why, if it weren't for that generous campaign contribution Jobs gave me I'd never have secretly abused my authority to get him a transplant. Bosom buddies. That's what we are. As loyalists to Jobs it is your duty as good, God fearing Americans to VOTE FOR ME. I am not a crook.

Referral sites: Almost all of this actually comes from my bio over at the McVeigh Agency website. Anyone find me a different way? I'm reaching across the aisle to you. Speak up. Or I'll cry. Regardless, there are ocassional little bumps in traffic because someone will tweet about me, add me to their list of of links on their own blog, or do other things like that. Which is super cool of you all. I appreciate the votes. For me.

Total numbers: The biggest traffic actually came in October. I think this little blog o' mine first really went public towards the end of September when it wound up in the aforementioned staff bio at work. Presumably many people flooded in when it first went up and then left. Or they just don't check as regularly as they did in the beggining. It went from almost 1,200 in October to a little over 700 in November. Arrgh, my ego! However, it's at nearly 800 for December (and we've got this post yet!). I feel that this is evidence of a steady upward trend as our brand (me) gains traction with the core demograpbhics and jargon, jargon, jargon, buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. Long story short, I dunno if those numbers are good or not. But I'm pretty happy with it. And I'd like to keep those numbers rising slow and steady. Long as they're back up for the next election cycle.

Design: The design of the site is pretty much what it was from the start. I've been experimenting with different things in the sidebar, but I've never been a bells and whistles kind of guy. Apart from making the links garish and therefore easy to see, I've left a default template almost untouched because the brutal simplicity of white on black works well with my heavy handed soap box nonsense.

What you're doing: Jesus christ. Stop producing so much stuff. I still need to read Damien Walter Grintalis' piece that we represent. It's already been through the editorial ringer though and I wasn't one of the original people to do so. It's going to be a strange coversation with the boss. And that sample I linked to a while back for Jeremy Shipp's got me curious, so I should probably buy one of his. Meanwhile, I read several followers' blogs, though I rarely if ever post. I try to follow some people on Twitter. I should do more of both but... Why are you fuckers so prolific? I can't keep that shit straight. I follow like ten people and I already need Tweetdeck or whatever because I can't figure out where one conversation starts and another one ends. Or who is in on what? That's why I'm proud to announce that I'm making Travis the Howler Monkey my Official Campaign Social Media Guru or OC-SMEG (He's a real smeg head.) for short. I wanted Eduardo, my Thesis monkey for the job, but frankly, he had better things to do than to (how shall I put this?) monkey around on that godforsaken Twitterverse. Although you'll note I now follow God on Twitter. And God follows Justin Bieber. Truly, he works in mysterious ways.

In conclusion: Vote for me.

Year End Wrap Up Part III: Presolutions

Success
**I will not scoff at heavy handed religious moralism this holiday season. I actually managed to do this. I was so busy all the time that I couldn’t spare a thought for morality. ‘Sides, there was plenty else to scoff at or be otherwise annoyed with. First and foremost would be the myriad people who traveled a thousand miles to the heart of Manhattan to LOOK AT A TREE. Seems sort of backwards, doesn’t it?
**I will not play Dick Dale's version of Hava Nagila very loudly when carolers appear. I didn’t even have to pretend to be Jewish. I guess the Bear traps, pit traps, trip wires, and claymore rigged mines did the trick. I watched The Hebrew Hammer just to be safe, but I’m a little sorry I didn’t get to crack out my Billy Crystal impression. I can fool the best of them. You know what the old Jewish ladies tell their daughters and granddaughters? They say “Why don’t you settle down with that nice Crew boy? He’s quite a kvetch.”

*Drum roll*

HAI-YO!
**I will not publically humiliate myself more than twice a day. Easy fo’ reezy. Once you realize that humiliation is all in the mind, you can train yourself not to be embarrassed no matter what a huge ass you are. Supposedly some people even make a very good living that way. I’ll have to look into it.

** I will groan 30% less while reading the average query. Mission accomplished. All I had to do was reject ‘em 30% sooner.

Maybe?
**There is someone I would like to hurt very badly. I will not do this, although this is less a pre-resolution than a result of my confounded pacifism and legal concerns.
** I will conquer my pacifism.
** Pacifism defeated, I will conquer the world. I will then rewrite the legal standards and be free to hurt that person very badly. For everyone else, beer and skittles.So I haven’t actually taken over the world yet, but I’ve made some really impressive progress. Remember that post I made on December 11th? About American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent? Originally I’d planned that for a few weeks earlier but I was held up by a group called U.N.I.O.N. (Underground Nerd Information Obstruction Network). They’re a cabal of hackers that secretly rule the world from their mother’s basements. Or so they claim. They found some stuff on my hard drive, confronted me (some things they didn’t want posted- leaking of trade secrets), and long story short, I gave the first State of the U.N.I.O.N address a few weeks back, organized that hack on Citibank etc. in defense of Wikileaks, and basically, I’ve been organizing my greasy, brilliant sub-human compatriots. Soon, very soon the promised world of Beer and Skittles shall be here.

Fail?

**I will actually edit at least one of my own works in progress. Okay, yeah. No. I meant to do this between Christmas and New Years but after having apparently fallen off the face of the earth for four months, friends and family were crawling out of the wood work and demanding my constant attention. Boo. Well, joke’s on me. Shoulda seen it coming.
**I will whip my writing group into shape. To be fair, the productive part of the group has been more productive. The rest have become even less productive though. I dunno if you can even call it a dedicated writing group anymore.

Epic Fail!

**I will get a heart even if it means finding the Wizard. Okay, for the new year, I’ve decided to reword to “I will obtain a heart even if I must tear it from the wizard’s chest. Because frankly, my odds of success go way up under those conditions.

Year end wrap up Part II

My top five coolest bands discovered this year list continues! I meant to do it all at once, but there was more information than I thought. This should be a quicker section. Good, eh? Who wants to read about my crazy bands on Christmas? Get a life.

So, last time we left off with the Red Elvises and how they got me on a surf rock kick, and how one of those surf rock bands had a psychadelic edge. So that's where we'll pick up.

Dukes of the Stratosphear: After I played the (superior studio version) of this Red Elvis song for a friend, he commented that it reminded him of the Dukes. The who? I asked? The Duke of Earl? Don't ask. The Duke of Earl (or just "the Duke" for short is a running gag in my family). But no, the Dukes of the Stratosphear are basically an alternate name for XTC for them to concentrate on super funky pseudo psychadelia. I'm really not sure precisely what their problem is, but I think they're more fun as the Dukes than as XTC anyway. Coolsville, daddio.

Fifth and finally, because I know you're expecting something I found in some roundabout way from this tenuous connection to the Red Elvises, I present to you a band which has absolutely nothing to do with any of the rest of this which was quite simply placed in front of me by my brother. And that band is

Me First and the Gimme Gimmmes: I'm not really even sure what to say about this band because I don't know them that well. Here's what I know. They have a weird membership of people who come to them from other bands, and lots of...guest band members? The other thing I can say is that they do hard rock and heavy metal covers of folk rock and other random stuff (Somewhere Over the Rainbow? Really?.)My favorite is Blowin' in the Wind, which only takes a minute and a half the way they do it. Now that's talent. But check out that version of who put the bomp in the whatever. 'Cuz that's hardcore.

Well there you have it. The best five bands I first encountered this year. Join me next time as I examine my success with my Rejectionist pre-resolutions and then, if all goes well, on January first we'll dive into my promised editing for readers. I've already been told that "the edits were made of pure awesomeness. They'll help immensely. You should, like get a job in publishing or something."

Awww gee. It wouldn't feel right to get paid to help improve manuscripts. Which I guess if I work in publishing will never be a worry.

(Insert sound of drums rolling here).

Year end wrap up part I

So, a while back I decided to start doing lists again, as I used to do for a humor column back in college. For the most part, those were lists of the top five most non-existent things I’d like to see. Now that I’m an old man and even graduate school is now behind me, it’s time to temper idealism with some reality. So without further ado, here are the best five bands I was first introduced to in the past year.

1.The Red Elvises: This is where this year’s musical journey all began. Thanksgiving, 2009 my crazy Godfather insisted I watch a movie called Six String Samurai. Well, I got a Netflix subscription for Christmas, so I went ahead and put it on my list, and I’ve come to regard it as the best worst movie ever made. Ed Wood can suck it. First of all, I’d highly recommend the movie which involves Buddy Holly kicking ass in a post-apocalyptic wasteland which is both a parody of several famous works such as Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Mad Max 2, as well as being a sterling example of Retro Futurism, or a story that takes place in a future as it might’ve been projected in the past but which now obviously ludicrous. Take a wild guess who provided the extraordinary soundtrack for the movie?

That’s right! The Red Elvises. They also got a cameo (and were cut to ribbons pretty quickly.) Their payment for their work on the film consisted largely of music videos. Some were related to the movie and some were not. Either way, that was my introduction to them. I immediately went out and got the movie’s sound track and their 30 track, double CD greatest hits album. Ran me about 35 bucks between ‘em and well worth every penny. I listen to them A LOT. And for a few months nearly non-stop. After all, you’ve gotta love a band that teaches you valuable lessons (real cowboys start conga lines) and have the moxy to simply declare that “We are the Red Elvises, your favorite band.” They’re mostly known for being a retro rock group, maybe a little like the Stray Cats, but they do a little of everything. Disco. Reggae. Lounge jazz. Whatever crazy nonsense strikes their fancy. They are, in their own words, “crazy fatha muckas.” For proof, see their trademark “drum solo” where the whole band drops what they’re doing and all play the drums together. I’ve been dying to see them in concert even though they seem to be a lot better in the studio. On a sad note, one of their core members left to join a Russian circus. Does rock and roll pay so poorly today? What a bummer. Although it does make me think about Kurt Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle every time I think of it and that cheers me up a little.

2. Man or Astro-Man?: When I realized that the Red Elvises’ Surfing in Siberia was clearly inspired by Dick Dale’s classic “Miserlou” it put me on a whole surf rock kick. Turns out that whole early and mid nineties surf rock revival entailed more than the Beach Boys coming out with ”Kokomo.” Not that I knew it in elementary school, but there was some good shit going down. The very best of which is Man or Astro-Man? Imagine if you will, that somebody managed to breed the aforementioned king of Surf Rock, Dick Dale with the Ever-Awesome Semi-Indie, Weird-Ass Alt-Rock gods known as They Might Be Giants. The result is what you might call “Space Rock.” It’s like a really driving, heavy, modern version of surf rock with the addition of beeps, boops, references to Sci-Fi and even, yes, clips straight from bad, B-Rated movies. If that reminds you of Mystery Science Theater 3000, that’s alright. I’ll give you two guesses who performed that show’s theme song. And really, if they’ve got approval from both me and Joel What’s-his-face what more do you need? Check ‘em out.

3. The Mermen: Rounding out the surf rock kick is another band from the 90s revival. But the Mermen are weird. I mean, really weird. What’s that you say? Astroman is weird? Well, yeah, maybe. But they’re supposed to be. And I think that the Red Elvises and Astroman are better described as being silly. The Mermen just have a really unusual style. See, although the sounds are those of rock and roll, many of the songs are very…I dunno. Experimental, maybe? They’re these meandering musical odysseys that feel to me almost as much like jazz. With rock, you expect it to be quick, repetitive, to get your blood pumping. To me, the Mermen seem almost as much like Jazz. even on their more intense rock-ish albums like A Glorious Lethal Euphoria it’s a very different vibe I get from these guys than I usually expect from my instrumental rock. And they’ve got a really funky psychedelic edge too. Maybe not so great for cruising, but they’re top tier for white noise when I’m working on something else.

Let's Make a Deal

The results are IN folks. All over the country, people are raving about my extraordinary editorial prowess.

“Also, just to note at minimum your help resulted in me cutting about 2000 words from the story and thus far I have made 5000 revisions based on my own judgment after reading your review and- and I'm only at page 110” – F in Texas

Those words totally had it coming.

“Is it weird that as I was writing it, I kept picturing you staring over my shoulder saying 'less is more' or 'awkward phrasing' or 'keep it simple', then slapping me on the back of the head?”- J from Georgia

No, of course not. Well, okay yes. It is weird. But also awesome. If I could somehow bottle and sell this…this…editorial superego I’ve fostered in you, I’d be filthy rich.

“I think you’re a great editor. I also think one day you’re going to edit the wrong person and you’ll be found floating face down in the Hudson the next morning.” – D From New York.
Okay. Woah. That went to a weird place. Let’s back that one up, huh?

Anyway, now you too can try Crewd Editing for yourself right in the convenience of your very own home. “ That’s Too good to be true!” You say? Nothing is too good to be true when Robin Crew is involved. Here’s how it works. The first person to post a reply to this comment wins the right to send me 20 pages of a WIP and I will edit those twenty pages for you, Tears guaranteed or the money you won’t have to pay me for my work anyway will be returned in full. The first page –with edits will appear on my blog because as they say “kill one enemy to warn a thousand.” If the first to comment has no WIP, they may give the right to the second poster. This will be a recurring thing. And remember, I’m an “editorial Assistant.” NOT the agent. Impressing me (or earning my enmity) means little as I do not officially speak for any agency, but am merely offering my eagle like eyes, my razor sharp mind, and my hideously, painfully blunt mannerisms. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy (weirdo) then comment away!

A Teaser

Are you troubled by awkward dialogue? Do you experience dread at the sight of a comma splice or dangling participle? Have you or any of your readers witnessed plot holes, excessive narration or a complete lack of grounding in your writing?

If the answer is yes, don't wait another minute. Log in now and contact the professionals.

TEXTBUSTERS.

Our ruthlessly efficient staff sits bleary eyed at his laptop 24 hours a day, ready to serve all your textual investigation and elimination needs.

WE'RE READY TO EDIT YOU.

A common misconception

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the fact that everyone seems to buy into the idea that publishing is nepotistic. That you need to know someone to get inside, and that you're pretty much screwed without it.

It isn't really true. What is true is that it's a surprisingly small and well connected industry and people move from job to job and company to company with an extremely high frequency. So yes, people will give honest reccomendations as well as foist anoying authors or acquaintances off on someone else as a way of calling in favors. What isn't true is that this is a normal or even useful part of the process.

See, there are two general reactions when this happens. "Thanks heaps, asshole." Which was more or less how the director at Big Corporate Internship explained her sentiment when I helped her unjam the printer. The jam occured because of a 550 page manuscript a friend of her uncle's sent her for review. And she's a marketer. The other response is basically "Not on your life." As one of my professors says, it's something she does once a decade because they're always awful and she only did it as a gift for someone else in the industry who requested it and to whom she owes favors. I've never heard good things come from this. Even if your manuscript is good, going through this channel rubs people the wrong way and isn't likely to get you any more attention than otherwise. If anything, it makes the reader bitter. And hurts your chances. Ultimately, every time I think of the situation, I can't help but remember that infamous scene from Space Balls.


Lone Star: Helmet! So... At last! We meet for the first time- For the last time!

Darth Helmet: Before you die, there is something you should know about us, Lone Star.

Lone Star: What?

Darth Helmet: I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former room mate.

Lone Star: What does that make us?

Darth Helmet: Absolutely nothing.

That's Mr. Crew to You

You know, a strange thing’s been happening recently. The agency gets queries addressed to me specifically. And, some of them even identify me as Mr. Robin Crew. Now, on the one hand, I want to get angry and say “Mr. Crew is my father, the former teacher. I’m not so old I want to be addressed as Mister.” But on the other hand, they correctly identified my gender and even spelled my name with an “I.” Then, some of them claim to read my blog to boot.

I’ve always wondered about that. Do they? Maybe they do read it. Maybe they checked in when they made their query. Maybe they just noticed that I’ve got one and used it as a conversation topic. After all, sometimes I wonder about the logic. “I enjoy your blog, so I think you’ll enjoy this book which has nothing to do with your mad ramblings whatsoever.” Even then, who knows? Maybe they DO read it and figure we think alike. It’s all very strange. And it makes me suddenly hesitant to even read the query… in a good way for you. It feels like a conflict of interest. Like we’re secretly buddies. It’s an odd sensation. So come on. Be a pal. Stop humanizing yourself. It makes my job as "bad cop" so much harder.

From the author’s standpoint, it probably can’t hurt. Afterall, if I’m hesitant to reject you, I’ll spend more time with your manuscript in front of me. I mean, not to be the bearer of bad news, but you’ll probably be rejected anyway, but your chances (or chances of getting a little feedback) improve as the time I spend with your materials increases. Even so, I’m hesitant to recommend this method. It is, after all, an extension of precisely what you SHOULD do- research the agent, see what books they work on, whether you like them as people, and address them as a person and not some distant, magical book-selling tool that works in some other dimension which you neither need nor desire knowledge of. Adressing it personally, telling us how you found us or why you think you’re a good fit (quickly, please! “I saw your presentation at SCBWI.” “So-and-so who you represent recommended you to me.” “Editor What’s-His-Face thought you’d be interested.” “I was in that Webinar and you said it sounded interesting, so…”)That's all good.

Thing is, I ain’t the agent. I’m not even Junior agent although I’d love that and if there were a budget for it, I think the bossman would approve. I’m a mere assistant. I get veto power, and the boss listens to my advice, but in the final analysis, I have no guaranteed power to choose what we represent, which IS AS IT SHOULD BE. Ultimately, “M” is the one who has to line edit and sell the books, so he needs to be the one who makes the final call. Addressing me is still totally a point in your favor. In some ways, that’s even more appealing to me. “Lookit me! I’m a big, important man now.” But problems arise. Some authors are still addressing people who are no longer at the agency. Occasionally, they’d address people who would never be involved with queries. And I’m not the only reader of the pile anymore. The boss does to, as do some interns. Or junior assistants. Or whatever we’re calling them.

Much as I enjoy the ring of authority that “Mr. Crew” carries, I still think you’d be better off addressing the boss. Trust me, I won’t be insulted. It’s his agency. And I can only imagine what the junior assistants think. Like “Man, who is this hotshot who gets Fanmail/Queries?”

American Nerd

One of the perks of Big Corporate Internship is books. Lots of books. It’s a magical world where brand new hardcover books are free, but tiny lunch sized bags of potato chips are $1.25. I don’t ask. I just check out the free book cases. It pays to check back frequently. That’s how I got a copy of “American Nerd; The Story of My People” by Benjamin Nugent.

You know, it’s actually really interesting. It isn’t as heavily cited as much of the Non-Fiction I read, but it also makes it good, light reading for the train compared to the last book I reviewed here, Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. It also tangentially covers topics of race relations and US history in ways you may not have thought of them. For instance, Nugent argues early on that the ultra manly 20th century with its focus on football, danger, cars and so on was an inevitable throwback in the face of education, office work and unskilled labor replacing physically demanding jobs. There’s also the section on how Jews and Asians are routinely labeled AS CULTURES as being nerdy (and often weak or effeminate) because of a greater emphasis on learning while Africans bear the unique burden of being too human and therefore animal-like. Needless to say, some pretty scary stuff but you can see why he’d make the connection. People certainly act like these things are absolutely true. He also tries to define a nerd, which is more complicated than you would think. I used to have a whole taxonomy of nerdliness but junked it when I realized there was already a famous Geek Hierarchy.

Ultimately his definition revolves heavily around nerds acting highly mechanical. Now really, have I ever pretended to be inhuman in order to escape the backlash my insightful but tactless analyses might inspire? Oh wait. Yes. All the time. Well, even so, it’s a good read with an important message.

“The Pathos of Being a Nerd is that because you are comfortable with rational thought that you are cut off from the experience of spontaneous feelings, of romance, of nonrational connection to other people. A nerd is so often self loathing because he accepts the thinking/feeling rift and he knows and cares that other people accept it too. To be a nerd is often to live with a nagging feeling of one’s own incurable heartlessness.”

I liked the early section of defining and theorizing about the nature of the nerd more than the second, which is about first hand stories. For one, I don’t feel like they mesh. For another, I am a nerd, and don’t need to be told what pwnage is. And in many of the anecdotes, it’s hard to see where his theory fits in, even though I feel like his theory is generally correct.

It won’t win any awards, but if you are or know someone who is, may secretly be, or could be in danger of becoming a nerd, you might want to give it a whirl.

How Being Shot in the Face Taught Me To Live Part II

Fast forward, and just recently at Big Corporate Internship, there was a promotion with Groupon to buy heavily discounted books directly from the publisher. It was a huge disaster. Arranged at the last minute, it got no promotion, and the custom website landing page was hideous and dumb. But the real loss, according to those around me was that, as some of us (myself included) expected, independent booksellers, or Indies for short, were highly offended. The intern who sits next to me and is in one of my classes didn’t get it. Well, one of his jobs is to monitor the Twitter feed. I asked what people were saying. The most recent Tweet at the time went something like “Do they even realize that they’re spitting in the face of independents everywhere?” He was a little surprised by this, but he doesn’t know the industry as I do yet.

Independent booksellers see themselves as a cultural bulwark. Arbiters of quality. They are allies of publishers in that one makes and the other promotes worthy material. Independents routinely receive discounts of 50% or more on books in addition to all sorts of free material. The book industry is also saddled with quite possibly the worst return policy of any business in the world, which involves having to frequently take back damaged hardcover as well as allowing paperbacks to be pulped on site. If you’ve ever seen the “if you bought this book without a cover, it was reported destroyed to the publisher” bit, now you know what it means. It means the publisher lost not only the sale, but the product- a product still easily saleable. Compound this with JIT (Just in Time) delivery systems which see books purchased, returned, and re-purchased before they’ve even been paid for the first time, and you can start to see how unfavorable the situation is to the producers of content (publishers) and why, as an example, author royalties tend to be based on net sales rather than SRP these days (i.e. in the past, an author would get 10% of the cover price of say, $25.00, or $2.50 per book. Today, they’d be much more likely to get 10% of whatever it was sold for, probably between $10.00 and $12.50 for a per book royalty of $1.00 –$ 1.25). Admittedly this is the case for general book retail, but independents, though often class acts individually are full of hot air collectively and they love to complain that they’re being ignored, that big chains are given unfair preferential treatment, and for that matter, that no one reads and nuts to all of you losers for not conforming to their standards.

As far as the Independents are concerned, even acknowledging, much less promoting our ability to sell books directly to consumers is a traitorous act that destroys the harmony between our businesses. And most people I work with were quick to grovel and kiss their butts and beg forgiveness because Indies still sell a fair number of books. And you know, if they sell, I'm happy to send promotional materials and whatever, but they need to get over themselves. Put their money where their mouths are and actually be those local community authorities they claim. Anyone who's interested should check out "Reluctant Capitalists" by Laura Miller, which details the growth of chain stores, Indie's incessant whining, and ultimately, their formation into a vast organization that closely mimics chains and undercuts their own explanation of why they're so important.

Regardless, I learned from getting shot at. Hide behind that gravestone all you want. Pretend the situation hasn't changed. Go ahead. They’ll get you anyway. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. There can be no greatness without audacity. Indies are scared because the digital age has reduced the need of a middle man. Online retail has already clearly proven that their superior distribution and bulk orders results in greater availability and lower prices. Falling back on a status as cultural authority- an authority publishers have historically granted the Indies purely for their own benefit- is all brick and mortar retailers have left. And let me stress that it can work if you ARE an authority, a store with a specialty, with author events and book clubs and what have you. But for the generalist bookseller, Indie or otherwise, it’s one more competitor. They act as if this makes publishers evil. Does it? We offered the people lower discounts as a one time offer than we give the stores every day of the week. And let’s face it, direct distribution, if publishers can organize it, is better for everyone. It means low prices. It means high availability. It does these things precisely because it cuts out the middle man.

This is only the beginning. Give it a few years. I wouldn’t be surprised if Print runs were decimated because everything will be ordered Print on Demand from the publisher, their printer, or an online retailer (and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the agency model associated with e-books applied to POD from generalists like Amazon). The problem of returns will be gone. Books will theoretically remain “in print” forever since they will be perpetually available if you want it. Selection will be enormous. And there will still be book reviewers everywhere you look. So who wins? Consumers and producers. Who loses? Only the middleman- and only if they’re not smart enough to leverage their cultural authority.

Conventional Publishing wisdom is to protect these Indies like they were family. As for me, I say fuck ‘em. We’re never going to get anywhere by digging in and pretending the paintballs aren’t raining down. We have three choices: We, as publishers, can cower behind those gravestones like I did in the paintball course, we can run away and get shot in the back, or we can rush the mansion.
I may not know precisely which way to run, and we might not all make it, but I don’t doubt for a second that it gives us far better odds than staying resolutely in our hidey-holes.

Depends on Your Definition/How Getting Shot in the Face Taught Me to Live Part I

Okay, so I have a bit of a confession. That cover for Have Degree; Will Travel? I made that for a class. To date, I've written about fifty pages of it. If you're interested, you can click the picture. There's a marketing-copy synposis and an author bio on there. If it still sounds cool after that, I could talk about it more in the future, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it being published. You'd be better off with Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing books (and his style is similar to mine, but, y'know better) or Knight Life series. If the politics of high fantasy interest you and the wacky hijinks don't, check out pretty much anything written by Jennifer Fallon.

In any event, I know what you're thinking. How do I square this trickery with my stated promise never to lie to you. Well, it's simple really. A lie is an intention to deceive. I am almost fundamentally incapable of deceit. I didn't try and deceive anyone (maybe I succeeded?). Look closely at the text on the cover. I've got a review quote from an author who has been dead for over a decade, and my bio claims I wrote another book- a Hugo winner no less, while I clearly stated this is my first book on the blog. Basically, as a story teller, I can say any kind of crazy nonsense I want long as I don't expect you to believe me. What a great loophole. For instance, if you ask me what I thought of your book, I may have to tell you it sucks. And in the next breath when you ask where I'm going for vacation, I'll tell you all about this great little beach front cottage I've got on the Sea of Tranquility.

In any event, although I know I'm spinnning off ever more into ego-stroking tripe, there's something important I want to discuss, and when we get to the end of it, you'll understand. And after that, I promise I'll do some book reviews. I'm also toying with the idea of giving away chapter critiques. But more on that later.

A couple years ago, I helped arrange my brother’s Bachelor Party. There was a big round table between all us groomsmen, very democratic. We made general choices and then left details to those with the guts to take charge. Fun conversations, but not much effifiency. And lots of sore feelings, too. Go-karting? Nope. Skydiving? Nuts to that. We ended up paintballing as our big second-day activity. That was absolutely the bottom of my list. I tried everything to dissuade the group. Concerts. A minor league baseball game. I pushed those Go-Karts and skydiving pretty hard. But in a Democracy, being the Best Man doesn’t ensure victory.

So we went paintballing. Most of the guys had gone once or twice. I hadn’t. It was hot and humid and my breath kept fogging up the plastic visor on that tight helmet. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. Poorly coordinated, a sizable limp, and working on virtually no sleep to boot.

Which is to say; I was really bad at it. Sort of figured I would be. I was an average shot, maybe, but I couldn’t really run or sneak very well.

So for the first few rounds we play, we’re part of larger groups before the owners prep some stuff just for us. Which was nice, I guess. Usually they require 12 people for private groups and we only had 10, but they made an exception because it’s important to shoot the bachelor before his wife gets a chance to complain about the paint stains.

Now, in our very first match, we were on the side which is given an essentially impossible situation. The enemies were pre-fortified in a mansion with crates of additional ammo, and we had to get to them through a long field with tiny “gravestones” as our only cover, without the real world option of sneaking up at them. In other words, we were pushed into a suicide run against enemies who could fire at us continually from under far better cover, a literal and tactical high ground, superior numbers and limitless supplies. At the very start of the rush was a slick, muddy jaunt down hill before trying to clamber up. One of the paintball range guys pretty much pushed me down the hill and were it not for some creative rolling and whatnot, I probably wouldn’t even have made it to cover, but in the process, I twisted my leg. Plus, I’m fat, have a big head and broad shoulders. That “gravestone” was no cover at all for a guy of my size. In the end, I think I only moved one or two spaces father ahead before someone got me with a lucky shot.

I justified my near refusal to act on the pain in my leg and the awkwardness of pushing myself into a position from which I might actually move but the simple fact was that PLAYING IT SAFE WAS A GUARANTEED WAY NOT TO ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING AT ALL.

Have Degree; Will Travel

I just wanted to share this one. Because I wanted to make wrapping paper out of it for Christmas (as a preview and IOU of next year’s gift) my publisher agreed to give me a quickie mock-up of the cover for my first book, Have Degree; Will Travel which is slated for an October 2011 release. Pretty sweet, huh?

A second post?

Holy crap, right? Two in one day. You must all be very excited. Or confused. Well, truth is crazy/funny contemporary The Rejectionist has a pre-resolution uncontest I totally forgot about when I was planning all my updates. Whoops. So here goes. Feel free to join in. The "rules" are posted here.


Pre-resolutions for December
1) I will not scoff at heavy handed religious moralism this holiday season.
2) I will not play Dick Dale's version of Hava Nagila very loudly when carolers appear.
3) I will actually edit at least one of my own works in progress
4) I will groan 30% less while reading the average query.
5) I will get a heart even if it means finding the Wizard.
6) I will whip my writing group into shape.
7) I will not publically humiliate myself more than twice a day.
8) There is someone I would like to hurt very badly. I will not do this, although this is less a pre-resolution than a result of my confounded pacifism and legal concerns.
9) I will conquer my pacifism.
10) Pacifism defeated, I will conquer the world. I will then rewrite the legal standards and be free to hurt that person very badly. For everyone else, beer and skittles.

Surely you can't be serious?

Bad news, everyone. Leslie Nielson died earlier this week.

“Surely,” you say. “Surely you can’t be serious?”

Well, I am serious. Shirley is dead. Long live Shirley. Anyway, do you all have any idea what this means? It means Steve Martin now has a monopoly on the Silver-Haired-Comedian-Who-Is-Actually-Kind-Of-Funny-But-Who-Appears-Almost-Exclusively-In-Awful-Movies business. I’m considering starting an anti-trust suit that would break up Steve Martin into two or three different comedians. Competition drives the market and all.


Also, for the last month or so I’ve been seeing this “Xtranormal” text-to-movie thing all over the place. Well, I’m nothing if not late to, and then dismissive of “the party.” So I looked them up. Apparently they’ve been named November’s Meme of the month. Well, if it’s good enough for a comparison to Chocolate Rain or the Battle Toads it’s good enough for me. Well, actually, it’s pretty crappy but I made a sample movie and enjoyed it a lot anyway. It has a lot to do with my nostalgia for Spider-Man Cartoon Maker. I may be the only person who ever liked that worthless program. And I felt they extreme limitations imposed by crummy software actually made it even more fun. What I wouldn’t give to show you guys “And Now for Something Completely You Suck,” but I haven’t got a clue how to export Spiderman Movies and besides, on my now 8 year old laptop the animations ran at triple speed because the program had specs that low. Still pondering whether or not I should spend money on doing Xtranormal. What do all’s y’all think? My demo movie was inspired by a real professor I had, the only Jesuit in four years at a Jesuit school. I had him give a sermon on Erin Brokovich. My only problem with the movie is that the robot voice sounded a little too human for the good Father. Anyway, would you lot like to see my mad ramblings in the form of robot-voiced-anthropomorphic-animals?


Finally, a news aggregator brought me this great article/editorial about why Men’s Magazines are failing. It’s got a lot of funny bits in there about the disconnect between covers and content, how the magazines can be described as “cars, tits, danger, six-packs, tits, booze, football, tits, and tits” And some keen observations of male consumers and how we really feel about this stuff. It’s rare that I identify as strongly with some random article written by someone I’ve never heard of as I did this one. Now, it came to me as an e-mail in plain text. So it wasn’t until after I read it, I realized from the linked source that it’s from the Independent in England. You guys thought I was joking about becoming British in my old age. Joke’s on you it would seem.

Transformations

All work and no play makes Robin something something. Spent most of my holiday weekend doing work for a class or one job or another. The amusing part is that I've begun to consider my work for the agency sort of a reward for the rest of it. I think I've gotten all that I'm going to get out of school, which is fine since this is my last semester, and Big Corporate Internship isn't bad. I do get free books and there are those departmental lectures I go to. It's just that the day to day work is so humdrum. Lots of mailing and data entry and things like that. And being that it's a big company, interns usually don't even know WHY we're doing what we're doing. They say comb this, double check adresses and make a mailing list for publicity and I do. That said, some fun things happening at said agency include

1) Author Laban Carrick Hill has a book that's a contender for the 2011 Caldecotts. For those who don't know, Caldecotts are one of the big awards for children's books, specifically illustrated ones. I never buy books because of awards, but schools and libraries do. Just being a contender is a pretty big deal. So congrats to Mr. Hill.

2) I read a rather unique novel written by one of the house authors on Friday and Saturday. I actually had to really rush with my feedback, which is a shame. Suffice to say that normally, anything remotely resembling poetry that isn't an epic sends me running for cover. However, this novel in verse was really quite enjoyable. It ain't perfect but it's damn good, and, despite being nine million pages, actually a really quick read. Being that the author reads and frequently posts to this blog, I demand bragging rights when it gets sold. As if I had anything to do with it being so neat.

On a side note, said novel in verse was a sort of romance/coming of age/emotional transformations drama. And it got me thinking about personas. I think I mostly have three. One is the persona I reserve for myself and mostly involves quiet contemplation. Believe it or not, I'm a meditative kind of guy. Errr, provided I'm doing two or three things whilst I meditate. So really, introspective and reflective more than meditative. But whatevs. Then there's my public persona where I become a clown. A british clown in particular, given my tendency to use terms like "bugger" and "telly", my ocassional lapses into cockney and most obviously, the addition of "bloody" onto every third word. Finally there's robo persona. For a guy everyone seems to think is crazy, I'm frequently hyper rational, and the more people you surround me with, the more I become the voice of reason. Here's how this works.

Big crowds at the house. Many relatives to visit. No plan for how to do so, and a lot of work that needs doing. I pull my brother aside.

"We need to consider the most logical method of discharging as many familial obligations simultaneously as possible." I proceed to outline a plan to hold off on one visit until the next day when we can visit two at once and so on. My brother just looks at me.

"What the hell is your problem?" he asks before wandering back to the kitchen.

Now alone, I reflect on the situation. A mental image comes to my mind in which "familial obligations" are a gooey white substance, and I discharge them by popping pustules. This makes me laugh out loud.

"What is he cackling about in there?" someone asks from the other room.

"Who knows? He's freakin' crazy," my brother says.

"I can bloody well hear you, ya bloody bastards," I announce before retreating to our cold, subteranean basement to read a novel in verse without interruption.

Five Days finale?

Finally we’re coming to the end (days 3, 4 and 5, I guess?) of our bizarre query mini-series. This time I’m just going to bang out the details really fast. I hate having to spell everything out. Best if you can see the problem yourself.

Autistic Baby Super Heroes- Got a query from a woman bemoaning the lack of literary heroes for the autistic-and-under-ten crowd. So naturally she felt she’d fill it with an autistic super hero toddler whose sidekick is his talking spandex costume. If I recall, their nemesis is a hanger. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be some veiled morality play about how abortion is evil or if I’m just an awful human being for thinking that. Oh, and she’s a psychic medium who communicates with severely autistic children who can’t speak. After reading her query, I had only two questions-would she hold a grudge? And as a psychic medium would she be able to track me down?

Smartass- Got one query from a guy with a fairly interesting but familiar sounding story. The query letter was about a paragraph long and riddled with typos, which was par for the course. The manuscript was a mess. Then I realized it sounded familiar because it was virtually identical to Wiseguys, the book Good Fellas is based on. Some time after rejecting him, he sent a followup telling us that we were fools and he’s glad “none of you blood sucking agents” signed him because he printed it POD, made a site, a trailer, and was selling it personally. And after two months of making promoting it his full time job and spending several thousand dollars, he sold five hundred copies. Yeah. Really sorry I missed out on working with such a pleasant, upwardly mobile fellow.

Mr. Everyman- Got a query recently from this older fellow. Actually, he seemed like he’d be a great guy to talk to at a barbecue or something. But his book was a memoir. About his totally ordinary life. That was his tagline. The ordinary life of an ordinary man. Sure, he was personable and clever, but what’s the hook to the memoir? Still, it might’ve been worth perusing until I saw the table of contents. It had a hundred chapters or so. A total word count of 324,000+ words. In the face of such verbosity, what can I say?

German Bros

A little over a week ago, I was able to attend a presentation by the international sales coordinators at Big Corporate Internship. Unfortunately, there were some distractions. For one, lots of facts and figures rather than what it is that they do. For another, a very attractive young woman in a low cut blouse who kept reflexively putting her pen in her mouth and taking it out every 20 seconds or so, always holding it ever so lightly. Fortunately, I’m a master of looking at one thing and listening to another and I still got most of what was going on. Here’s some highlights-

-International Sales are still strong. If anything, they’re getting stronger. Europe likes indie stores, and the rapidly expanding Asian Market (comprised largely of people learning English) favors big, fancy, world class operations. Everywhere the sales are pretty big and expanding. Hooray?
-International Sales’ return rates are very low. Part of it may be how they do business abroad, but mostly it’s the high shipping costs to everyone from the Publisher, to distributors like Baker and Taylor, and then to the stores themselves mean that they don’t buy if they aren’t pretty sure about what they want. Compared to sales in America where things are bought, returned and re-bought before they were even paid for the first time, it’s a pretty favorable model.
-The England office handles most of the sales in Europe and former British colonies, but has also moved on to producing about 80% of its own material for the domestic British market. Their original materials have a tiny share of their native market, but it’s increased at an extraordinarily rapid rate considering they’ve only been doing their own acquiring and editing for maybe five years.
-Canada insists it’s better than America in everyway including but not limited to education, pollution, crime rates (with the exception of car thefts), hours worked per week (28?) Vacation days per year (20?), average amount of sex, and average disposable income. What a snooty lot. They’re still just distributors for headquarters though. Uppity Canadians better remember that America is the media exporter and Canada the importer. Where’s their superiority now? That said,dude did make it sound like a wonderland, so if they had equivalent media production I just might move there myself, long’s I don’t need to deal with self important nationalists.
-Germany buys more books in English than any other foreign country which doesn’t speak English as the primary. Thanks guys. According to the presentation, 2 of BCI’s books are in the top 20 at the German Amazon right now- The Bro Code and the Play Book both by Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother fame. Weird. On another interesting note, South Korea was number two or three, with a similar proportion to another mid-size Asian Nation. You’d think given that Japan’s population is triple that of the ROK’s that they’d buy more, but I guess they’re media exporters just like us (#5 in sales I think). But then again, so is Korea just on a smaller scale. Korea, you’ve impressed me once again. Shame about that whole divided history thing. Remind me one of these days to try and convince my country to give a rat’s ass about what you’ve been doing since the war. Some day when I have lots of time and don’t mind wasting it on an unconcerned Joe Public.

Well. I was going to finish up the Strange Query mini-series here, but I think I’ve been babbling for too long already.

So Join me next time for “The Query to end All Queries” OR “Five Days and Four Nights in Fabulous Rejection Pile Part III.”

Five Days and Four Nights Pt. II (Pronounce “Ptew!”)

First of all, let me just say that apparently 4/5 voters think I'm really awesome. Hooray for me. And also loaded questions. 1/5 said I was fairly awesome and 0/5 said I was barely awesome. I think two weeks is a bit long for a poll though, so I'm ending it a couple days early and moving on.

Continuing my mini-series of notably strange queries is a book whose concept and author I kind of liked. For starters, it had a really kick-ass opening line which I won’t repeat here, but met any challenge you could make for a clever, pithy, memorable, brief, funny, cynical opening line. It was great. Got my attention immediately. When I quoted it to others at the agency, they laughed out loud hearing it. They did not “LOL” they laughed. As in, I saw their reactions. Threw back their heads and guffawed like wolves howling at the moon. It was just that good. I further felt a connection with it because it was a young (college age) absurdist. I really wanted to take the guy personally under my wing. I actually asked my boss at the agency if I could contact him privately and help him with his book because I was so convinced this kid had potential. Unfortunately I was told it would essentially be a conflict of interest, so I did not.

Anyway, he clearly did need my (or someone of equal or greater skill than myself) to help him out because the majority of the included narrative was… well, it didn’t flow quite right. It wasn’t very much like a book. It was like reading a stand up act. A series of loosely connected events injected with humorous insights that came straight out of left field. In short: he writes like I write. He’d make a good comedian. It doesn’t translate so well to a novel.

I made the amateur mistake of giving him some feedback. I also totally overlooked the fact that his original query didn’t contain an actual query letter, just the sample. I sent a personalized request to see it rather than our form “please see our rules regarding submission” response. The result was that this bright eyed youth, who probably hadn’t gotten anything back from any other agencies yet (except rejections perhaps) was very interested in a dialogue. Which I wasn’t. These issues are pretty much yae or nae and after reading, I could see that there was absolutely zero chance we’d rep that book or that author no matter how much potential I thought the kid had. It was a sort of painful and awkward situation from which I had to extricate myself.

Oh well. If you’re out there, kid, I’m still rooting for you. And for the rest of you, I think his work in progress was called The Longing of Shina Ryo or something like that (a title which reminds me of the also awesome and absurd animation called “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”). I’m still hoping that he’ll really work it and find an agency that does that kind of book and that we’ll all be able to see it in print some day. Good luck, young’un.

For the rest of ye, the lessons are as follows, as I have said many times; pick agents who represent your kind of work, follow their submission guidelines, and try not to sound pushy- even if you aren't too demanding, with how busy agencies can be, you don't want to risk it.

Next time, some words about a presentation on International Sales I attended last week at Big Corporate Internship and a rapid fire multi-piece conclusion to the all time strange queries series in "German Bros" OR "Five Days and Four Nights In Fabulous Rejection Pile Pt. III"

Five Days and Four Nights in Fabulous Rejection Pile

I don’t want to repeat myself too often, but query letters are a subject on which I spend an inordinate amount of time at the agency, and it’s something every author wants to know about. I’ve already discussed issues of copy editing, pitch, length, and various other elements, and surely I will again. So this time, I’d rather present a few case studies in how not to be published.

My absolute all time favorite has got to be The Messenger of the Covenant one. So, this author sends us her NF book proposal. Okay, well that’s already a little odd because we don’t really do non-fiction unless it’s a memoir or something with a narrative, but I let that slide. So the book turns out to be an examination of the mythos of the Messenger of the Covenant which runs throughout Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Well, we also don’t really do spiritual books, so this author was really missing the mark on who to query in two ways at once. Not a good start.
The proposal itself was fairly professionally done with a detailed table of contents and what not. The book’s hook was that it made the claim that the Messenger was a Jewish woman. Okay. Cool. I think that’s the only thing that kept me reading although the scriptural basis for this argument was not explained in detail within her query. Then came the chapter summary in which she put forward the case that SHE was the Messenger of the covenant.

Nope, that’s it. I’m done. I send a rejection. Two months later we get a reply from her saying that she never queried our agency, but it just so happens that she is in fact writing a book and it must be providence that we found her, so she re-pitched her crazy book to us.

Lady, listen. It was an e-mail. I hit reply. Your original query is right there. How can you possibly say you never queried us? Besides, I went out of my way to NOT personalize the form rejection at all. No “This was neat, but that needs work.” No “It’s neat, but we don’t really do that here.” No “send us your next work.” I mean, nothing. Just pure, uncompromising “go the hell away.” So why are you still talking to me? Did you honestly think that I spend my day making up e-mail addresses and sending preemptory rejections to everyone in the universe? What the hell? Suffice to say, if I ever see another query from that particular author, all the claims that she’s switched to a new medication and she’s doing much better won’t convince me to read her seriously again.


Join us next time for “1001 Awful Queries” OR “Five Days and Four Nights Pt. II”

Robin's Rules of Better Business Part 1

Rule Number 1: Know Thy Mailguy

It may sound strange but this is probably the first and most significant rule in almost any job. Look around you at the office. Especially if you’re a director or an exec, how many interns, assistants and others appear to you as mere functionaries? Sure, getting to know the people at the top is important to rising through the ranks. But you’d be surprised how much your success depends on how well and how quickly these “mere functionaries” do the work you want them to do.

Recently, at my big corporate internship, I was barraged with requests from three different departments to do these mass mailings all at the same time. Nevermind the actual work of it. I go from being super busy to bored out of my skull lickety split, ‘specially around these parts, but that’s office grunt work for you. The real problem is that, believe it or not, marketing interns do not have much in the way of shipping supplies Truthfully, nobody does in this place. Sure, padded envelopes if you know where to look, but I needed boxes. Big ones. And kraft paper. And bubble wrap. I had very little of these things, only that which I personally squirreled away from incoming packages. I had enough for maybe a quarter of the stuff they wanted me to send.

Fortunately, I had made a point of getting to know the mail guy from the start.

He introduced me to the mailroom staff, who let me take as many boxes as they had and hooked me up with as much bubble wrap as they could spare. Not much, but it was enough to get the job done, albeit with a minimum of protection. When that still wasn’t enough boxes, the mailguy showed me to various departments around our massive, labyrinthine building which frequently toss boxes. And he helped me take a giant pile of them back to my place so I could get the job done. Then he stalled the UPS guy so I could get it all out the same day.

I’m interning at this giant corporation, see (in addition to my work at the literary agency) . And a few years back, before I started grad school, I was actually running a mailroom and working as the assistant Facilities manager of another company. Here’s something I learned by doing this; “functionaries” know their stuff. They know damn near everyone. They know where the supplies are. They know what the processes are. And in my case, I did everything from security cards, building maintenance, working with third party contractors, and approving payment for the supplies you wanted to changing toner and cleaning out the bloody fridge every Friday for lazy bums too good to toss their own putrefied fruit cups. Even if the “functionaries” are huge jerks, you still need them. It’s just a bonus if they’re as awesome as the mail guy in my office. And let’s face it. These people do not win awards or get recognition or bonuses or raises or promotions. No one works their way up from the mailroom anymore. Hell, our mail room is an independently contracted third party hired by building management. There’s no incentive for them to be as awesome as my mail guy except work ethic and job satisfaction. So do them, and consequently yourself a favor. Know thy mail guy. Say hello in the morning. Thank him when he breaks his spine to deliver ten giant boxes of books to you only to be rewarded with a similar outgoing pile. Shoot him a joke now and then. Do the same for interns and assistants and other “lowly” staff members. I think you’ll find that any good leader will need the support and loyalty of “functionaries” more than they need the approval of their peers.

Join me next time in “50 Ways to Lose Your Reader” OR “Five Days and Four Nights in Fabulous Rejection Pile”

The Insanity Defense

Okay, so remember how I offered interviews and cross promotion and stuff? Well, one person's moved on that so far. You can see the resultant guest blog post here. It's chock full of my usual great advice, extreme hyperbole, and randomly inserted foul language. I've even been told that I've covered the topic in mustard and put it to bed. If you can figure out what that means without any help, you deserve a cookie.

Anyway, today I'd like to discuss something that's only tangentially related to Publishing. Unless you happen to be Seth Godin, in which case you probably get this sort of thing every day of the week from publishers. It's a little thing I like to call the Insanity Defense. Essentially, it's a method of "winning" every debate no matter how badly you've been outmaneuvered by claiming that the other party is crazy. This is especially easy to do if the person on the other side of the table is actually saying something new or significant. No matter how foolish "classic wisdom" can be, most people will unerringly take it over a well reasoned argument. Here's a few recent examples from my own life.

Example 1: I go to get something to drink one night and my mother is watching TV. It's a Geico commercial parodying the antique road show but doesn't really say anything about Geico until the very last second, and then it's just the name.

Me: Man, what a failure of a commercial. They didn't even try and sell us anything.
Mom: It's not a failure. All we have to do is remember who they are.
Me: Really? When was the last time you changed insurance?
Mom: Before you were born.
Me: I see, I see. And when have you ever changed because of a commercial?
Mom: Well, never.
Me: Fascinating. Do you know the difference between one company and another?
Mom: Not really.
Me: And how many insurance companies can you actually name?
Mom: Well, Geico. And Metlife.
Me: So the commercial which just ended and the one you've had for at least a quarter century. Anything else?
Mom: Allstate. And that one with the hands.
Me: That is Allstate.
Mom: Oh.
(Pause)
Mom: How about that woman with the face?
Me: The one Jesse hates? Progressive.
Mom: I think that's it.
Me: And how many insurance commercials have you seen in your life?
Mom: At least fifteen every night on prime time TV alone. Tens of thousands, easily.
Me: And you're going to defend their efficacy after everything you just said?
Mom: You're crazy. Of course they work. I mean, that's a given.

Really? It is? What if insurance sells because you're legally obligated to have car insurance if you drive a car? Just a thought.

Here's another- I was reading the Onion a week or so ago in the school computer lab before a class. The girl who sits next to me saw what I was looking at, an article with a name like "Kim Jong Un Privately Doubts He's Crazy Enough to run North Korea"

Her: What's that?
Me: The Onion.
Her: And what's the onion?
Me: It's a vegetable. Tends to make people cry. Delicious when sauteed.
Her: You know what I mean. Is that article for real?
(pause)
Me: The Onion is comprised of humorously false news stories.
Her: Well that's stupid. Why waste your time with fake news?
Me: They might be made up, but they can still be significant.
Her: Nothing fake can have significance.
Me: Didn't you used to teach a highschool lit class? What exactly did you teach them? Because I'm guessing the works of Hemmingway and Shakespeare weren't much use seeing as how they're fake and all.
Her: You're crazy.

Huh. Coulda fooled me. Indeed, I must have fooled myself. Because I thought that was a pretty infallible argument that undercut her only stated reasoning (which was no reasoning at all but a hypocritical axiomatic statement). But I must be wrong.

How does this relate to publishing? Well, I mentioned Seth Godin before. He believe the whole infrastructure is inherently broken. I wouldn't go that far. Not every author is Seth Godin. They don't have the experience or desire or following to break free. The problem is, publishers know that and assume everything will continue exactly as it has because that's how it's supposed to be. And I think they're shooting themselves in the collective foot. Unsurprisingly the people most agressive in their belief that changes are coming are A) Agents who mostly use it as a method to try and negotiate better contracts for their authors (e.g. e-book royalty rates should be higher because we don't need you to publish it.) and B) The tech crews, who are apparently the driving force behind eliminating "windowing"- releasing the e-bok after the hardcover for fear it would cannibalize sales. However, I've only seen a handful of people within the industry who look even farther than costs or methods of production or release dates. And you know what? Depending on how prominent e-books become and how well publishers shift in the future, the business might continue almost unchanged. One department's budget gets slashed and given to another. Fewer dollars on production, more on editorial or marketing. But it could also overturn the whole structure. I don't know that I'd go as far as Godin in saying that it's fundamentally broken, but I have a mental image of a time where publishers work on COMMISSION in a SUPPORT ROLE while AUTHORS retain COPYRIGHT. Naturally, most people I talk to think this is crazy. Even suggesting higher e-book royalties is crazy in their eyes. Even my feeling that sales departments are losing value as retail outlets shut down is viewed with suspicion even though it's the logical outcome and obvious parallels between companies like Borders and B&N can be drawn to FYE and Virgin music retailers. I think it's not crazy at all. And yet people tend to categorically reject not just the single most extreme end result I bothered to hypothesize, but every single element that could make it happen.

I dunno. Maybe I am crazy. Or maybe I just like to be prepared for whichever way the wind blows rather than assuming it will always be exactly the same. Either way, I beg you all to put the Insanity Defense aside, now and forever.

Join me next time in "A Corporate Fairy Tale" OR "Robin's Rules of Better Business"

Zen and the Art of Interning

Recently, I was able to attend a library conference hosted by Big Corporate Internship held in our building. It was pretty interesting. Here’s a few things I noticed.

1) Librarians are really loud. People were complaining and slamming their office doors in protest and stuff. That made me giggle a little.
2) It was virtually all women- and the men were about ten years younger on average, though because there were literally only three men in the room if you discounted one of the company’s editors, and one of them couldn’t have been much older than myself.
3) Boy, they don’t mess around about what books they want people to push. They open with one book which also gets an author Q&A and was the focus of a big book giveaway, plus a special speech by the children’s publisher and one by the editor. The rest? Eh, who knows. Big thing here, come and get it. Hot off the press.
4) An interesting note about covers. I thought that book was some touchy-feely tragic teen romance. That’s not entirely inaccurate, but the author likened it to a Handmaiden’s Tale (an excellent, classic dystopian) and mentioned that the problem was that women only live to 20 and men to 25, creating a population problem which reminded me of Logan’s Run, and coincidentally, I actually just watched the movie version of Logan that very morning at like 4 AM. Because y’know. I lead a blessed existence. Without insomnia, I’d have no culture at all. Anyway, once I actually heard the premise of the book, I had to agree that it was a good cover, but I think that must be one of the hardest jobs in publishing- making a cover attractive, explain enough in so little space to outsiders to give them an idea of the contents and have something that resonates closely enough with the text to feel right to people who are actually reading it.
So, I moved some things around, but it was nothing compared to the heavy lifting and things I had done for the event earlier in the week. I had to pop out really early because time stands still for no man and I work for three different departments, so yeah. But it got my Friday started on a good note.
Naturally, Karma decided to crack me upside the head as soon as I got back to my desk. One of my three bosses wanted me to create a bunch of new lists for professional conventions of what books to send for display there. And the only interesting one: North East Political Science Association’s deadline was already past, so I wound up not doing it. I had to move straight on to Gerontology. Egh.
Naturally, every book was something like “Last Days” or “Mind Over Menopause” and I was starting to really hate myself. Then I remembered the Zen (Chan in China) tradition of masters asking answerless questions of their followers to meditate upon for hours at a time until it drives them absolutely ape shit. So I decided that if Karma had declared war on me, I’d fight back with everything I’ve got. I am not a number! I am student rc81201n! Anyway, I asked myself “What the hell is wrong with me?” and after about 3 seconds of quiet meditation sitting in the lotus position with my hands folded in a Mudra in the shape of Mt. Meru, I got a cramp and decided “Don’t Worry; Be Happy” was a good enough solution. That Lotus/Meru crap is too Tibetan for Zen anyway. And never mind that the exercise is supposed to be about the process of meditation and not the end result. Considering Zen Monks have been ordained for declaring that Buddha was a pound of Flax and then smashing urns filled with rice, my answer seemed good enough for a first try. They love that spontaneous nonsensical crap.
Not one to rest on my laurels or my lotus (?), I returned to work and saw my next title was “Dare to be 100.” I couldn’t help it. I immediately began composing a song titled “Dare to be Senile” hence parodying Weird Al parodying The Talking Heads and suddenly all was right with the world. Apart from the stares of colleagues.

Bugger

You know what the problem is with writing these posts ahead of time whenever I happen to have a moment to spare? The documents end up on computers elsewhere, say, the school computer lab and are consequently not availible for me to copy paste from word to blogger when the time comes. Sigh. So I'll just have to do a different topic today, but it's an important one.

Namely- What is the value of a publisher? I can't tell you how often I've asked someone in the business if they think authors *really* need a publisher, and with a grand total of one exception to date the answer has always been "Have you ever read self published books? They're so bad! Of course authors need editors."

But that isn't what I asked. I asked if they needed publishers. It astonishes me that people, especially sales and production staffers are defending the entire industry model based on someone else's job. For starters, editing is far from the entirety of publishing. They also produce the physical product. Design the interior. Market it. After editing, marketing and publicity are the big ones. POD and e-books can get around the financial risks, and simple designs are acceptable, and since sales is only interested in selling into bookstores, if you aren't relying on brick and mortar outlets, who needs sales? And for a super niche product? You might be better off on your own. I've seen a few queries where some very knowledgable enthusiasts have sold say, 500 copies of some ultra niche hobby (model trains come to mind) to specialty stores. I wonder what an author like that expects big businesses to do for him. But there are still many functions that few authors are both willing and able to do for themselves beyond editing.

Secondly, editing is not the exclusive jurisdiction of book publishers. Agents edit to varying degrees. So do packagers. You could hire a freelance if you were so inclined, though that frequently amounts to freelance copy editing and not the comprehensive story/tone editing peformed by someone whose entire career and not merely next paycheck depends on the product ultimately produced.

Regardless, it feels to me like publishers are largely unaware, or possibly just refusing to acknowledge the danger of this assumption. Basically, if you listen to the more tech saavy people in the industry, like Michael Healy of the google rights registry, it's entirely possible that within the decade, if not far sooner, a tipping point will be reached and digital versions of the products become at least as important if not moreso than the physical. You can already see the ground work for this. Borders is basically bust and Barnes and Noble, rather than trying to fill the vacuum left behins is also contracting. Are indies expanding? Nope. How about other major chains? Nope. And this is at a time when still only 5% of total sales come from digital versions? What happens at 30? Or 40? You might be surprised to know that CD sales still rival MP3 sales. So many people think they're only 10 or 20 percent. Last I checked, I think they actually made up sixty percent still. However, that 40% that migrated absolutely obliterated the music retail business. What will production do with themselves when they only need half the initial print runs and then do all reprints through POD? What will sales do with themselves when there are only a handful of outlets to sell into? These departments are, in my mind, in grave danger which they refuse to acknowledge.

Now the fun question for you guys, since you're basically all authors is "how will this affect your working relationship with publishers and the payout you get for your book?" I have some thoughts. Maybe I'll even share 'em sometime.

Linkage

For those of you desperate to hear my zen thing, worry not. It'll be posted tommorow. In the meantime, I thought I'd check out what you, my readers are doing when you're not....umm, reading my blog. And let me tell you, it's no easy job trying to keep track of you lot and the myriad cool things you do. Here's just a sample of things from the other day.

First, samples of creepy-cool guy Jeremy Shipp's current book. I hadn't gotten a chance to read him before. I have some doubts about pacing, but it's just so beautifully "WTF?" You all should totally check it out.

Secondly, this budding novelist is so far ahead of the game for his age that it ain't even funny. Hell, I analyze things to death for fun and I wasn't half so dedicated to analyzing writing as this one. Keep it up, young 'un and you'll be quite a skilled writer before long.

Third, a self identified crazy person as if writers don't all have a hypersensitivity to their quirks) had a couple of really solid blog posts. One of them made me feel like I needed to rearrange my own posting schedule by deftly covering a topic I intended to revisit right arounf the same time. Thanks a lot. The other is an interview with an agent who knows what she's on about. How do I know? Because her advice to writers agrees with mine. What more sure fire test could there be?

Of course, there's a whole lot more going on than that. You lot tweet so damn much it makes my head spin. It also means I can't use my beloved "Tweeting is the natural act of the twit" joke. Lots of other good blogs and things too. Then again, for what little it's worth, I'd like to support each of your efforts, so I doubt this will be the last time I'll call focus on things you all write or call to my attention. And if there's anything you think I can help you with, my e-mail is in my profile. So don't hesitate to send me an e-mail demanding I pay you homage or whatnot. I'll help, I'll help. Just don't hurt me.

And if any of you need me (you poor bastards) I'm also availible for interviews, treasure hunts, masquerade balls/murder mysteries, performing as a magician for children's birthday parties and as a dancer for bachelorette parties. Rowr.

Democracy, Drudgery, and Domination

So apparently my first blog poll wasn’t much of a hit. I thought the question rather inspired, myself. “What salad dressing most reminds you of world domination?” The choices were Caesar, French, or Red Wine Vinaigrette. Caesar won in an epic landslide with an infinity percentage lead over the competition in a 1-0-0 vote. Between the recent elections and this poll showing, I felt the need to don a trench coat and my best Eric Idle impersonation and head out to ask The Man in the Street “just what is democracy?”

After hours of vigorous research, I obtained these responses
37 people ignored me entirely
16 shot me angry glances
9 said “Fuck off”
7 Didn’t know English
4 Pretended not to know English even though it was pretty obvious that they did

I love New York. Anyway, there were also several other responses in negligible amounts including one response of “Spare some change mister?” which I later realized was a brilliant lampooning of the undue influence money has on democratic processes. A real philosopher, that one.

Oh wells. I figured I’d get over it. After all, it was surprisingly light when I left home this morning. No driving in the pitch black amongst t miserable and bleary eyed shmucks more afraid of hitting runaway deer with their enormous tanks than my innocent little Camry. No sir. Now I dealt with miserable, bleary eyed shmucks more concerned about hitting deer than me when it was light outside. What a vast improvement. Until I got on my train and saw that it was ultra crowded because apparently the highly paid lawyers and such who I ride the train with down from Westchester into NYC, who make tons of money and insist that their snot is of more social consequence than your entire family ever has been and ever could be don’t know how to set alarm clocks. Yes. I can see how daylight savings time could be complicated. Fall back, Spring Ahead. It’s a lot to remember. You can’t expect these marketing moguls and brain surgeons to be able to remember something so difficult. They’re busy with more important matters. Like screwing you out of your money.

And on a final note, apparently the famed Nathan Bransford has resigned from being a literary agent. Oddly, I got this one straight from the horse’s mouth. Which is unusual since I rarely check his twitter feed, but then immediately saw the news reiterated in many other places. And oh was there wailing and beating of chests as if the man were dead. As for me, I don’t mind too much. Okay, so he was super cool. But his absence creates a vacuum of power and thus begins Phase III in my latest plan for world domination. Now all I need is a bottle of Caesar dressing, a pair of pliers, and a tuna salad sandwich and then the world will be firmly, inescapably trapped within the palm of my hand. Muahahahahaha!

Next time on Crewd Philosophy: Zen and the Art of Interning in which our hero attends a Librarian’s Conference and comes to understand the value of meditation.

Wheel of Morality

Well, with the elections behind us, it’s time for me to return to more literary concerns. Like morality. Wait. What?

Well, I’ve, been reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I don’t like him as much as I like Richard Dawkins. Or as much as Dawkins likes him. For those who are curious, Harris is one of the so-called “Four Horsemen,” a group of articulate, very public writers who have concerns about the use of religion in modern society. Time was, I was a bio nerd. It’s the coolest science because it isn’t mathematical like physics. It’s all observation, memorization and analyses. Like a social science. My favorite topics were micro bio (especially Virology), genetics, and evolutionary theory. Richard Dawkins is an Evolutionary biologist, who first became known for his theory of the Selfish Gene. Unsurprisingly, I’m a big Dawkins fan. Dawkins is really pushing Harris’ book (and others such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Because you know, he’s just awesome like that). So I’m reading Harris’ book.

It’s okay.

At the most basic, it has two premises
1) Morality doesn’t come from religion
2) Science can and should be the basis for morality.

On point one I agree fully. On point two... Maybe? He defines it too narrowly, but if you look past his definition to the substance, he has the right idea. Really, science already can and does inform morality. What he wants to say is “we should pay more attention to it.” Really, morality is a product of reasoning. Science, viewed as a reliable source of information and a good way to hone one’s ability to reason is therefore an important tool for making moral decisions. So in principle, I agree with the guy pretty much 100%.

The problem is that he also ACTS like I do. Except even worse. He’s extraordinarily abrasive, and highly dismissive of pretty much everyone in the entire world other than himself. Academics, scientists and journalists are broadly declared as living in Ivory Towers with stars in their eyes who are either to delighted by diversity to ever question morality, or who are liars putting on a show and making claims about morality they can’t reasonably support.

Okay, I understand. I’m an academic too, more or less. You want people to listen, you take your argument out a step or two farther than you expect people to go. Most people won’t rush immediately to your side. So your goal is to shift the middle ground. Like dragging a rug with a man standing stock still on top of it, you’re changing their position without them actually having to move. Establishing a new base line. But Harris gives the impression that he’s looking for a fight. If you fight fire with fire, you end up with a bigger fire. And on the one hand, he absolutely hates cultural relativity but admits again and again to multiple peaks and valleys (i.e. good and bad moral choices) available at every junction. So what exactly does he stand for? How absolute is morality in his mind? How much room is there for debate? Does he expect anyone to listen to him when he’s such a huge jerk all the time? All excellent questions. I have my own answers, but I’m curious to know his.

Personally, I’m of the mind that a truly top notch education solves all. It gives us information and teaches us to reason, which is pretty much what he’s looking for, and does so organically rather than by picking fights, which would make it a much more long term solution. His book is largely comprised of “Here’s an example of a very smart scientist who is totally unreasonable about morality.” That’s all fine and good as far as it goes, but the argument is that science can determine morality (he defines the moral choice as that which is best for human well being). He constantly cites medicine as a self-evident example of science being moral. Better health = better life. But that’s about as far as he goes with it. He never gives it a practical application for real life issues. He just keeps yammering on about how the mutilation of female genitalia is not acceptable, moral relativity be damned. Dude, you’re preaching to the choir. And spitting in my face. And not telling me anything new. Turn around. Your audience is out there. This whole clog dance on my toes routine is getting old.

Still a good read for anyone interested in issues like social-behavioral theory etc. but is he as good as Dawkins? Not even close. And I still think that the neo-Hobbesian Rational Peasant by Samuel Popkin is the best book of this kind. Someone should tell Harris that he’s not the only smart man in town and that his objective view of morality should probably consider the significance of condescension.

Nobody Expects a Political Scientist

“ ‘Our two chief weapons are fear and surprise and Moral Ambiguity. Drat. Three. Our three chief weapons are fear, and surprise and moral ambiguity and an almost fanatical devotion to Machiavelli. Oh Bugger. Let me start this over.’

TERRIFYING BUT TRUE

Political Scientists surround you at this very moment aiming to destroy the foundations of this great nation. Regular scientists are a disease of the skin; Political Scientists a disease of the heart. While ordinary scientists chip impotently away at God with their so called “indisputable facts” and “hard evidence” their futile ramblings cannot put a dent in our blind faith. The Political Scientist is a beast of a completely different order. He wears no lab coat or glasses. He walks among us, hidden, unknown. With every breath he seeks to steal your freedom.

DON’T LET HIM.

The Political Scientist will tell you that Universal Healthcare keeps the country healthy, that longer school years will improve education, and that current data indicates that Democrats’ hard won battles for economic relief have helped keep our country’s economy from collapsing.

HE LIES.

Those things do not make sense. He speaks nonsense in order to destroy us all. Political Scientists are all Communists and probably Secret Muslims besides.

NEVER TRUST THEM.

The Political Scientist is a tool of The Vatican. Or the English Crown. Or maybe Huever claims to be in charge of China right now (we’re not really sure because we refuse to recognize the sovereignty of communist nations.)

BE EVER VIGILANT.

The Political Scientist will never rest until he has destroyed this country fully. Your steadfast devotion to unwavering bigotry is all that stands in his way.

AMERICA FOR AMERICANS.

This message brought to you by the National Council for Purity and Security.”

You know something? I was trained as a political scientist and I’m frankly pretty tired of being called a socialist sympathizer, or a panda hugging, namby-pamby, ineffectual intellectual Nancy-boy. So, ummm. If you’re also sick of me being called those things watch how you vote?

P.S. I threw up in my mouth a little when writing this. I’ll consider that an indication of success! Also, assuming you’re one of the six or so people who haven’t seen it yet, check this out.

Pretty Scary, huh Kids?

So, with Halloween coming up I’ve been watching a lot of really bad movies. Shouldn’t I be watching scary movies you ask? Well, I suppose, but they’re frequently the same thing. Truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever been scared of something I saw in a movie. To me, the exorcist was just a little girl with a foul mouth who spat on people. Weird? Yes. Fun? Yes. Scary? No. And truth be told I had as much fun watching Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Now that was a fun movie because it knew it was bad. It used that inherit awfulness to its advantage and actually made me laugh despite myself. I had a whole Mystery Science Theater style running commentary. Like when they got shot at by the aliens whose death-guns shot popcorn and the guy asks the girl “Are you okay?” I naturally butted in with a falsetto and said “Just lightly salted.” Good times are had by all who watch bad movies, whether or not they’re “supposed” to be scary. Talking about it with a writing buddy I’ve known for only a few months, he contended that there must be something wrong with me. That I must not feel fear or something. Eventually, I got him to admit that my neutral response probably has more to do with my hyper-rationality rather than my secretly being an android. I’ll have you know my emotion emulator is flawless, thank you very much.

How did I do this? Simple, I told him what I’m really afraid of- The Tea Party.

Now, to frame this, you should understand that my father is an ultra conservative American Historian who raised me on the Federalist papers etc. So although I am unquestionably a democrat, I’m probably more classically conservative than most republicans. What do I mean? Well, for instance, conservatives claim to stand for individual rights. I take that seriously and thus apply those rights to homosexuals, Muslims and other minority or unpopular groups, which the GOP does not. Near as I can tell, the GOP’s platform is generally “We’re always right because we’re morally superior” which I find offensive and frequently backwards given, for instance, the example above. Like anyone who believes they are inherently superior and therefore right all the time, the modern GOP’s power is supported and grows by instilling a large portion of the population with a sense that they’re not getting the credit their wondrousness deserves. In other words, a massive persecution complex based on the notion that any disagreement or criticism is somehow oppressive. This has spun off into the even more extreme “Tea Party” whose underlying ideology can be best described as “We’re always right because we just are.” How anyone with half a brain and a conscious can vote for candidates who demand Obama send the Czars back to Russia and don’t understand what the first Amendment means is beyond me.

I’m sad to say that my father, lover of stability and loyalty does whatever his party asks and is a devout Bill O’Reilley fan. We argue about this endlessly. Meanwhile, many of my best friends are extremely conservative (I’m looking at you Francis) but they know what they’re talking about and vote the way they do because it’s what makes most sense to them; and these people tend to distance themselves from Tea Party members just as they distance themselves from blow hard faux conservative spokespeople.

As a conservative democrat, I believe in democracy and I fully support your right to vote as you see fit. That’s why I must beg you to vote based on what your brain tells you makes sense, rather than the fact than because you’re enthralled with puffed up, know-nothing, egotistical braggarts.

Top 5

I was tempted to write a response to something a reader posted on Twitter, re: the quality of the modern rejection letter, but no. The lists are calling me. I mean, you guys heard Liu Bei. The lists must live again. And so I present the top 5 most non-existant bands of 2010

#5: Insolent Whelp Heavy Metal. Founded by Johnny Archer in 2008, the band's name is the nickname Johnny earned from his third grade teacher. Archer is the son of an upper class banker in London, and his mother is of noble descent. Archer was discovered in a night club performing a cover of George Thorogood's "Get a haircut and get a real job." Since then, his first album "Bugger off, mate" has taken him to the tops of the British charts and is receiving world wide attention, turning him into the next Coldplay. Johnny made headlines earlier this year when his father's bank shut down and despite rolling in money, he told his father to "grow your hair out and get a decent job."

#4: Egad's Zukes Retro Rock. Picking up where the Stray Cats left off, Egad's Zukes (formerly Egad and the men in Zuke Suits, formerly Egad and the Flying Trapeze)having a surprising string of top twenty pop rock pieces inspired by 1950s rock and roll. Each piece is an original, but they've been a mainstay on classic rock stations since their first album was released in Spring 2009.

#3: Struwwel Peter Gunn Instrumental Hard Rock. A german band of unusual taste, Struwwel Peter Gunn has found a surprisingly large audience for a band many would have been inclined to dismiss as "just another German death metal" band. Namely, each of their pieces is an original based on gothic folklore and 19th century morality tales, whose sound is as much inspired by the likes of Dick Dale and Duane Eddy as their contemporary metal associates. Their second album, Iron Heinrich Hoffmann, named after the Grimm Brothers tale "Iron Heinrich", also known as the tale of the Frog Prince, and Heinrich Hoffmann, author of Struwwel Peter, is expected to be released later this year. A runaway hit throughout Europe, the American release of their first album, "Something Wicked" met with lackluster sales in the states due to the complete inability of the average American to read, and consequently not picking up on the band's theme.

#2: The Un-PC Six Glam rock. Move over Scissor Sisters, because this band is the biggest thing to hit glam rock since David Bowie. the Un-PC Six is famously made up of the white guy, the black guy, the yellow guy, the red guy, the woman who thinks she's a guy and a dwarf. Even if you can't stand their music, you can no longer avoid the ubiquitous name and images of the band now known as much for their personal squabbling as for their extraordinarily creative and high budget live performances. According to our sources, band members have confirmed that any publicity is good publicity. The sources say ticket sales skyrocketed after the volcanic love triangle between White, Red, and the woman who thinks she's a guy hit papers, and then again when their original dwarf sued the band for replacing him because he wasn't short enough.

#1: Los Autores Locos con Sombreros Grande General Rock. Coming completely out of left field, this highly multinational band of aspiring writers hit the zeitgeist dead on and saw their first album go platinum after only three months, defying all logic, especially at a time when complete album sales appear to be on the rocks due to sales of individual songs through services such as iTunes. What is the secret of their sucess? Several things. For starters is their tendency towards large hats. On stage, each member of the band is only known by the oversized hat he wears. Lead gutarist Jose Antonio for instance is officially known as "pirate hat", drummer Chuck Weber is "top hat" and so on. Secondly, their songs, both original and covers are performed in the style and languages of more than ten countries, sung by band members who speak the language as a native. In performance, blue screens behind the band display karaoke style sing-along text in each of those languages for every song. And finally, their first album, "Universal Language" is brilliantly produced with an image of iconic American writer Edgar Allan Poe dressed in a white, rhinestone riddled suit and an oversized pompadour.

So there you have it. The top five most non-existant bands of the year. Don't you wish they were real? Somtimes being an idea person sucks, because after making stuff up, you have to come back to the real world and wonder what we did to deserve it.