Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • The other side of SOPA and anti-piracy legislation

    I like Michael Marshall, and his blog post about the other side of the piracy debate is worth your time. Not all anti-piracy sentiment comes from swivel-eyed loons or Disney.

    The government is supposed to be on the side of laws, isn’t it? Copyright is a law too. If they don’t defend that law in the new kind of social space that the internet represents, where will the laxity end? What other laws will be let slide on the grounds that they might impede the rights of Internet users to do what the heck they feel like? What about your right to privacy? You care a lot about that one, don’t you? What makes it so desperately important for the government to defend your rights there, but not defend others’ rights to be paid for their intellectual property?

  • “Long-term there’s no future in printed books”

    An interesting post on the appallingly named tech site Pandodaily: Confessions of a publisher, written by an unnamed “industry insider”.

    Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business. I think that’s what they’re trying to do–throw money around in an industry that doesn’t have any, until Amazon becomes not only the only place where you buy books, but the only place that publishes books, too.

  • I’m a chart-topper, baby

    As of right now, Coffin Dodgers is number one in Amazon UK’s technothrillers chart. That’s quite good, isn’t it?

    Sales are currently sitting at 2,323. That’s quite good too.

    This is making up for a spectacularly crappy day.

  • In which I suggest blacking out Wikipedia doesn’t really change much

    Today’s the big protest against SOPA, the latest bit of dangerous anti-internet legislation. I’ve written a wee column suggesting that it won’t change much in the long term, because lobbyists are fighting a long war:

    Copyright industries want the net regulated, and they’re willing to spend huge sums to make it happen: SOPA is a battle, but the lobbyists are waging a war.

    You don’t fight that by turning sites black. You fight it by supporting the EFF, and the ACLU, and the ORG, and by lobbying your elected representatives, and you fight it it in the ballot box. In the last general election just 55% of 25-34 year olds voted, while turnout for the 18-24 age group was a pathetic 44%.

    We need to do better, because the best way to fight bad laws is to stop clowns from getting into power in the first place.

    According to somebody on Twitter, that’s akin to telling women of the 1960s to shut up and know their place. I’m a bit baffled by that.

  • There’s bugger-all money in books

    Some interesting figures in this Guardian piece about new novelists:

    Kate Pool of the Society of Authors confirmed that new writers could expect an average advance of £10,000 around 20 years ago: “Now they’re lucky to get between £1,000 and £3,000.” Research by the society shows that 75% of writers earn less than £20,000 a year and 46% less than £5,000.

    As Ian Rankin says:

    “The internet has pluses and minuses. It’s easier than ever to get your stuff seen by people. But it’s harder than ever to make a living from it. Look at the money that publishers are paying for new writers … less than they paid 20 years ago. They know first novels don’t sell many copies and, if writers decide … to sidestep the traditional publishing route and sell their stuff by themselves online, they’re having to sell it for virtually nothing – 99p.”

    I’m not sure Rankin’s suggested tax breaks are the answer – especially at a time when library funding’s being cut all over the place – but it does demonstrate that whether it’s traditional publishing or self-publishing, most people aren’t making a living from it. The same, of course, applies to any supposedly glamorous kind of work: acting, being a musician, being an artist etc.  By all means do it because you love it. But don’t do it because you think you’ll make money from it.

  • The Guardian: the amazing disappearing newspaper

    I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while: The Guardian, the newspaper I’ve bought every day for more than twenty years, appears to be disappearing before my very eyes. I know why sections are being folded into the main paper, why pagination’s being cut and why some of the best columns are being killed – the paper’s losing tens of millions of quid every year and it’s desperately trying to cut costs – but as I read yet another “this is my final column” sign-off or see another section compressed I can’t help thinking that, if you want to reverse a decline in circulation, getting rid of all your content while charging more for the product probably isn’t the best strategy to adopt.

    I’m still paying for my paper, but I’m increasingly wondering why.

  • Wise advice for freelance anythings

    The most excellent John Walker has written a wee bit of advice for aspiring games journalists, and I reckon much of it is relevant to all kinds of freelancing.

     This job is a not a privilege. It’s something you got by being good at what you do – you earned it. Anyone who tells you it’s a privilege is trying to get something from you they shouldn’t have. That’s the language of those who want you to do just a little bit more work than they’re paying you for, or put up with conditions that don’t feel appropriate.

    …Make a fuss. Good grief, the number of times I’ve not been paid for work, or screwed over in some way, is awful. It’s generally down to incompetence rather than malice, but it’s unacceptable.

  • iTunes Match: get a better music library for £21.99

    iTunes Match, Apple’s music-in-the-cloud service, is very good – but it’s worth a look even if you don’t want or need cloud-based music. For your £21.99 you get two things: a backup of your entire music library (more than 10,000 songs, in my case, saving me the hassle of getting a bigger backup disk) and an upgrade for all your low bitrate music.

    If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.

    The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.

    That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.

  • Interesting, inevitable: buy the content and get the e-reader for free

    I spotted this little nugget yesterday:

    Barnes & Noble said Monday that it will offer discounts on its Nook devices to customers who buy a digital subscription to People magazine and The New York Times.

    For New York Times subscribers, it’ll offer a free Nook Simple Touch, a 6-inch e-reader that is priced at $99, or take $100 off on Nook Color, normally priced at $199.

    It won’t be the last time an e-reader comes bundled with a digital subscription, especially as the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper. Tablets will inevitably follow – the Nook Color mentioned above is similar to the Kindle Fire tablet. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t giving free devices to its Amazon Prime members already.

    The business model already exists: if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you essentially get the hardware for free; many mobile phones are free on contract, and so on. It isn’t hard to imagine somebody such as News International giving away a “free” Kindle Fire if you subscribe to the full-fat version of its digital service.

  • I’m making my books Kindle-only

    At the risk of helping to perpetuate Amazon’s vice-like grip on electronic publishing, I’ve decided to enrol my books in its KDP Select programme. There are various upsides to that, but it does mean that the books must be exclusive to Amazon.

    I don’t think I’m going to upset too many people – of the 2,100 copies of Coffin Dodgers I’ve sold so far, about 2,000 of them have been via Amazon – but if you really want to read Coffin Dodgers or Bring Me The Head of Mark Zuckerberg and don’t have a Kindle device or one of the many Kindle apps, then drop me an email and I’ll send you the book(s) in the right format for your device.

    I’ll blog more about KDP Select and my ongoing e-publishing adventures soon.