Publishing advances ruin publishers

Finally, an insider sheds light on the reasons behind the troubles publishing houses are dealing with: all those layoffs and cutbacks are not caused by the opportunity presented by the "economic downturn", not by readers who don't spend $$ on books that they cannot believe could be printed in the first instance, but it is the advances paid to authors...

"[...] what I do think – in common with most of publishing – is that the whole system of publishing advances is threadbare. It’s like the Windows operating system: the programme has been stretched and overwritten so much it is cumbersome and worn out. The fact that it just about “does the job” is why it’s still used." Read more.

Five kinds of spies

Knowledge of the enemy's disposition can only be obtained from other men. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: Local, Inward,  Converted, Doomed, Surviving.

When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "diverse manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.

Local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.

Inward spies is making use of officials of the enemy.

Converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.

Doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our own spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.

Surviving spies, those who bring back the news from the enemy's camp.

Hence it is that with none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded.

Sun Tzu, in Roots of Strategy, Art of War; 500 B.C.

Harold Pinter's Nobel Acceptance Speech

Found this on FM radio, am posting it cause it ties with the novel I'm writing

Press play button to listen (total 13 minutes).

Part 1:

Part 2:

Books (not) in translation

A French author writes to me to share his frustration at not being able to find a US or a British publisher to release his bestselling novel in the English language. What else could I say but: "You are not being singled out. English speakers are deprived of most of the books that are written in other languages. More books are translated from the English language than into it." Then I forwarded a link to the recently released data (pdf), which shows that of all books available to English speakers only about 2% are translated from other languages; whereas in Germany 13% of books are translations, in France 27%, in Spain 28%, in Turkey 40% and in Slovenia 70%.

The Guardian had an interesting article on the subject. In it we read that

mainstream publishers have a ready excuse for ignoring literature from around the world. "The idiotic notion is that there's enough being written in English, […] so you don't have to bother." English is so generally spoken that it's possible to read very widely and not notice that you're only reading books written in one language.

The Guardian notes that writers are beginning to realize that in order to enter into the English language world of books they must create in the English language:

Creative writing schools in the UK and America are now seeing writers already published in their own languages enrolling for writing courses in English, a solution to the problems of getting translated.

and

there's even a danger that the dominance of English-language publishing is putting other languages and literary cultures at risk.

I don't see it in quite as dark colors.  I recall this quote I read somewhere in my youth: "The boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our world." Books in other languages will continue to be printed, though perhaps not translated. In my view the real losers are / will be all mono-language speaking readers who are / will be deprived of glimpses into other cultures via books written in languages other than their own.

Authors' earnings

According to a report, Canadian authors' earnings (or lack thereof):

• Authors earned $32,000 on average in 2005. This was second only to “Producers, directors, choreographers, etc.” (who pulled in $43,800). The overall labour force earned $36,300, and the cultural sector labour force earned $32,900. The lowest-paid artists were visual artists and dancers, both of whom earned, on average, less than $14,000.
• Authors were the second-largest field surveyed in terms of numbers, representing 18% of all artists. Musicians and singers had the largest ranks with 24%.
• Eleven percent of authors reported no earnings in 2005.
• Fifty-four percent of authors are female, almost perfectly in line with the percentage across all artistic fields (53%) and slightly higher than the overall labour force (48%). Male authors earned $34,000 on average, while female ones earned only $30,400.
• Forty-one percent of authors were self-employed; the rest were “paid workers.” Self-employed authors earned only $21,400, while the paid workers earned $39,700.
• There were 24,600 authors in the 2006 census, up from 21,100 in 2001 and 15,200 in 1991. Average earnings are dropping, though: authors earned $36,500 in 1990, $35,800 in 2000, and $32,000 in 2005.

Creative stimulants

Witkacy, one of my favorite artists used to fortify his creativity with various stimulants. Whenever he painted or wrote he added a short note on the substance he used in his work. His paintings are particularly interesting for they bear witness to the artist's work. Underneath his signature one finds interesting information, such as date, followed by: "two beers, a shot of vodka and a cigar"; or, "peyote, two bottles of wine, 6 cigarettes", etc.

Well, sometimes I use creative stimulants in my work too, most frequently red wine. I find wine a happy serum that helps deliver satisfying results; yexy written under the influence of wine seems optimistic, as though in a mist. Inspired by Witkacy I tried something more potent and turned to vodka, alas it turned out most unreliable. The next day I opened the text I created to a pint of vodka and found it, well… too creative. Some 80% of words are badly misspelled and to the point that they are quite unintelligible; what makes the text even wackier are the auto-corrections performed by word-processing software. First that comes to mind is that its a classic from the canon of the Klingon Empire, but seeing as I cannot understand it it is probably better that I stick to red wine.

see Witkacy's notes in the corner

What is truth serum?

Here's an article on "truth serum":

The only way that interrogators can tap a man's memory is to ask him. But what if the person is unwilling to spill the beans or, at least, the real ones? If only there were only a way to plug a USB cable to the back of Kasab's head and just download the experiences.

While such technology may be the stuff of science fiction, Indian government officials have announced they will employ another technique that seems to leap from the pages of a 1940s pulp novel: truth serum. Also known as narcoanalysis, administering psychoactive drugs for interrogation purposes has been around for just under a century, but it has been viewed with skepticism from the start. Indeed, the practice is banned in most democracies, and evidence obtained from such an interrogation would have a hard time making it into an American court.

What does the term "truth serum" mean?
That's a term that was used to describe the use of certain drugs, most commonly barbiturates like sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, to try to extract truthful statements from people about their past experiences.  What the term really meant was that the people who used the serum believed that it made people unable to censor themselves and they would just empty their memories into a narrative statement.

A must read for some thriller writers, who far too often rely on "truth serums" to leap forward a story.