And Still I Persist

John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades (both of which I highly recommend), gives a revealing look over on his website about how much money he has actually earned writing and editing science fiction over the past several years. For example:

2006 was the first year I received royalties on sales of Old Man’s War. The book had earned out on its advance roughly halfway through 2005 — but royalty statements are tallied up only twice a year (halfway through the fiscal year and then again at the end) and it takes a few months after that for the information (and checks) to be sent to agents and authors. And even when your book is in the black, there’s another publishing accounting practice called “reserves against returns,” in which the publisher holds some of your royalties in escrow just in case more than expected copies of your book come flooding back to the publisher from booksellers. What this reserves does (or, at the very least, did for me) is to retard the flow of royalties to the author by one royalty statement, which is to say, by another six months. So although Old Man’s War was published in January 2005, I waited seventeen months to get my first royalty check.

If you read Scalzi’s full posting (and you should), you’ll understand just how hard it can be to work up to full-time-salary-equivalent income as a writer. I managed to do it for a few years in the late 1980s (mostly writing for BYTE Magazine), but it’s tough and usually involves (as Scalzi notes) a long lead time and a certain amount of luck.

Be sure also to read Scalzi’s follow-up posting on why he wrote all this (quote: “…because someone should.” Italics his.), as well as his other follow-up posting on how his science fiction writing income fits within all his other income.

My own writing field, information technology, took a major, major hit with the 2000 Tech Crash — trade press publishers found themselves stuck with warehouses overflowing with now-unsellable 500-page books on various dot.com development technologies and tools. I attended the Waterside Productions Publishing Conference in 2001 hoping to find publishers interested in some of my book proposals; what I mostly found were publishers trying to survive and looking at significant cutbacks and consolidation. As far as I can tell, the last such annual conference was held in 2004, though I don’t know whether that reflects on-going struggles in the IT trade publishers or a decision on Waterside’s part that the conference just wasn’t worth it.

Anyway, kudos to Scalzi for having achieved what he has; it is no small thing. And go buy his books. ..bruce..

Yes! Really! Jobs has his own blog! I mean, read this entry and tell me that this isn’t really being written by Steve Jobs:

Well the engineers want to kill me but you know what, I know how to design products. And I’m sorry, this circuit board for the iPhone is just way too friggin ugly. There’s no balance. You’ve got this long skinny piece on the left and then nothing on the right to balance it out. And the big chip should be right in the middle, not off center. And the two little gold pieces on the right should be lined up straight. I mean there’s a million problems with this design. Just look at it. You’ve got all these little skinny lines on one side then big fat lines on the other, with loads of space. WTF? So I told them go back and redo it. I want it perfectly symmetrical. They’re like, Steve, nobody is gonna see the circuit board. I’m like, Yes, but I’ll know it’s in there, and that will ruin it for me. They’re like, Steve, it’s not just about looks, because the thing won’t work right if we move the chips the way you want them. I’m like, You know what, try it. Just do it and let’s see. They’re like, Dude, with all due respect, we’re electrical engineers, okay? We know what we’re talking about. One guy goes to the white board and starts trying to give me a lesson in how electric current flows through a circuit. I’m standing there, just shaking with rage, and I’m like, Excuse me, but please put down that marker and then go to your desk and fire yourself. Okay? Thank you. No, I’m serious.

After he left the other guys told me he was the lead engineer on the project. Oh well. Too bad. Guess you’ll all have to work that much harder now eh?

Folks, this is probably the single most important product we’ve ever made. This is going to define the new Apple. This thing has to be like a Porsche. Or a really well-made Swiss watch. I want it to be perfect. Inside and out.

Of course, Steve takes his shots at other people, such as Bill Gates and David Geffin and Nicholas Negroponte.

And while we’re speaking of Jobs, here’s a video roundup of some of his favorite expressions.

Now, having mocked Steve a bit, I will be frank: I give him full credit not only for saving Apple but for saving personal computing in general. Here’s a simple thought-experiment: imagine what the state of personal computing would be today if:

• Apple had never been founded
• The Apple II had never been released
• The Macintosh had never been released
• Jobs hadn’t come back to Apple and saved it from its rapidly approaching oblivion (e.g., being purchased by Sun)

I’ve been involved in the personal computer industry for over 25 years, and I can tell you that it would likely be a very different place. In fact, someone with more time and talent than I have should do a “A World without Apple” video matching the “A World without America” advert from 18 Doughty Street.
Enjoy. ..bruce..

Due to the ever-increasing flood of spam comments, we now require that you register with the site before you can leave a comment.

Also, I am considering switching the underlying blog engine from WordPress to Joomla. (Or, to be precise, “Joomla!”) From what I’ve seen so far, Joomla doesn’t work quite as well as a blog, but I continue to have problems with WordPress allowing me to log in and write posts from any system other than the desktop system in my office from which I first set up this blog. Since I do 90+% of my work on my laptop, this has a definite impact on keeping the blog up to date. On the other hand, I’m writing this from my laptop right now, and it would be a pain to move all the entries over, so we’ll see. ..bruce..

This is just too cool:

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect possible life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated….

The data indicate the two planets are drier and cloudier than predicted. Theorists thought hot Jupiters would have lots of water in their atmospheres, but surprisingly none was found around HD 209458b and HD 189733b. According to astronomers, the water might be present but buried under a thick blanket of high, waterless clouds.

Those clouds might be filled with dust. One of the planets, HD 209458b, showed hints of tiny sand grains, called silicates, in its atmosphere. This could mean the planet’s skies are filled with high, dusty clouds unlike anything seen around planets in our own solar system.

“The theorists’ heads were spinning when they saw the data,” said Dr. Jeremy Richardson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

I grew up during the first age of planetary exploration, culminating with working at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston during the Voyager 1 flyby of Saturn in November of 1980. We had a large screen TV (early projection-style) set up in the lobby at LPI and had a direct feed from JPL as images came in. I got to listen to planetary scientists react and debate in real-time to what the images revealed.

We’re now embarking upon the second age of planetary exploration — but this time, we’re exploring planets outside of our own solar system. I suspect that what we find will only underscore J. B. S. Haldane’s famous aphorism: “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.”

Hat tip to Slashdot. ..bruce..

I love it when I see someone actually crunch the numbers. In these two articles, Randolph Harrison at Capitalism 2.0 applies real-world financial analysis to the Second Life economy — and decides that it matches the characteristics of a high-yield investment program, if not an all-out Ponzi scheme. Here are the articles:

• Second Life: Revolutionary Virtual Market or Ponzi Scheme?
• The Linden dollar Game

Give the recent resurgance in media coverage of Second Life (including a three-part series on a local news channel here in Denver), these articles are worth reading. Hat tip to Valleywag. ..bruce..