Sandal Press Blog

Recently, agent Scott Eagan made some news about Harlequin contracts and Ann voss Peterson’s post on Joe Konrath’s blog. I’d link to Eagan’s post itself but he up and deleted it. But, from what others read, one of Eagan’s arguments boils down to:

If you don’t like the terms, then don’t sign the contract.

It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? In fact, that’s the equivalent of what an employer said to us once. The Sales rep had gone and sold a system that hadn’t even been coded yet and we were told that we (the programming team) were going to cancel holiday plans, and work back every night and on weekends in order to make the deadline. (Meanwhile, the Sales rep in question got inducted into one of those stupid “Platinum Circle God of Sales” things that companies have and got an all-expenses paid trip to Barbados. Typical.)

A few of the engineers protested. They had families, commitments, and being expected to pull hundred-hour weeks because someone else screwed up was grossly unfair. “You don’t have to work,” the management told those engineers, “but we’ll sack you if you don’t.”

We’re not talking about Silicon Valley here. This happened in a small regional capital city of Australia where jobs were hard to come by, something the management knew very well. So every time I hear someone use the equivalent of that argument (“you don’t HAVE TO work weekends”, “you didn’t HAVE TO sign the contract”), my hackles rise.

The story for the contract for IN ENEMY HANDS makes interesting reading in its own right. (And nobody outside North America gets “The Call”. I certainly didn’t. I got an email.) Right after New Year’s Day in 2010, I was promised the contract to look over. I waited. Mid-January. End of January. February. Mid-February. The contract didn’t arrive in my Inbox till the end of February and, even then, looked like it was cobbled together from two other contracts. I knew I needed some help because, even though I had a couple of books on book contract language, I wasn’t confident enough to go it alone.

AGENTS

My first strategy was to entice an agent and, in fact, I got several who requested the full manuscript based on my email. Then, one of them emailed me back. She loved the novel, she said, and when could she call me? I swear, you could have heard me squeal up in KL! I gave her all my phone numbers and even suggested some time windows for her to Skype me, to help with costs at her end. The result? Absolute silence. The next week, I emailed her, apologising if she tried to call but couldn’t get through (impossible, because nobody called me that week), and suggested that we try again. Absolute silence again. For the record, that agent is still agenting and is considered, by Absolute Write, to be “very friendly and responsive”.

Other agents baulked when they found out that it was a Harlequin contract. On the minus side, they said that Harlequin never negotiated. On the plus side, they didn’t sign me up to then take 15% of that non-negotiable contract.

IP LAWYERS

The problem was, back in 2010, this was a new term to me. Of course, now I know about Passive Voice and the fact that it’s an entire industry, but I didn’t back then. And I was half a world away. And the one name I finally dug up as a good IP lawyer didn’t have any way of accepting overseas payments.

OTHER AUTHORS

So, no agent, no lawyer. How about other authors? There were a couple who I knew passingly, through comments on the same blog and so on. They had written for Harlequin. I contacted several, asking if they were interested in forming a little discussion group to go over some contract clauses and suggesting, in one case, that we might consider negotiating with Carina Press over the same clause in a joint fashion, to maybe increase our influence.

Without fail, ALL those authors turned me down, but it was the way they turned me down that was amusing. From, “I’m afraid my attorney handles that, so I’m in no position to help you”, to no answer at all, to my favourite: “I don’t need the money that the contract brings, so I don’t need to negotiate anything.”

It became quite clear that I was completely on my own. What next? Come back next week and I’ll tell you.

Passive Voice had a very interesting blog recently, referencing Ann Voss Peterson’s experiences with Harlequin, that romance behemoth, over at JA Konrath’s place. One of the many issues that arose was in the area of rights reversion. In the comments at Konrath’s blog, an anonymous commenter said:

The contract they offer their writers at the “digital first” imprint, Carina, is absolutely the worst of any of the e-pubs.

All rights, seven years, and while originally they offered 15% of cover price for 3rd party sales and 30% of cover for sales through their site, the NEW contract is 50% of the net on their site and 40% of the net on 3rd party. Sounds great… only they don’t define net, and they reserve the right to make your book a freebie.

On the bright side, out of print for Carina authors is now defined as “fewer than 250 copies sold in all formats in four consecutive quarters.”

I too was once thrilled that HQ gave me my start, but I would do anything to have the rights back to my best novel – the one in the wrong category with an insanely off-putting cover.

Let me isolate one paragraph from Anonymous’s comment:

On the bright side, out of print for Carina authors is now defined as “fewer than 250 copies sold in all formats in four consecutive quarters.”

Anonymous, this is what I thought as well. And here’s why we could be both wrong.

We will be referring to Clause 21 (in my contract), entitled “REVERSION”.

21(a) When in the judgment [sic] of Publisher the Work is no longer in public demand or ceases to be salable or profitable, Publisher may give notice to Author of its intention to discontinue further publication.

So, essentially, Author may be cut loose at any time. Following directly on:

If at any time after the expiry of seven (7) years following the first date of exercise of any of the Rights, all of the following are or become applicable in respect of the Work,

Right, here it comes. Note the “after the expiry of seven” years. Onto the conditions, which I shall separate by line breaks in order to parse the sentence more clearly:

namely the Work is not in print (as defined in paragraph 21 (b)),
not for sale and
no other Rights are being exercised in respect of the Work by Publisher, its Related Licensees or Unrelated Licensees,

then the Author may make written demand to Publisher to exercise any of the Rights within eighteen (18) months from receipt of such demand.

Clauses 21 (b) then goes on to define “in print” (which includes the “aggregate sales of at least fifty (50) units in the four (4) consecutive accounting periods immediately preceding the Author’s request for reversion of rights” that Anonymous was talking about, but you can see she has a more recent contract than me because hers says 250 units and mine says 50 units and Carina point-blank refused to lift that figure to 100 upon my request. Sigh), but the heart of the matter has already been passed. And it is this:

no other Rights are being exercised…by Publisher

Well, I’m sorry, Anonymous, if an audiobook version of your book has been produced (as it has with mine), then that completely negates the right to ask for reversion after the seven years are up. You and I are, I’m afraid, well and truly stuck.

I was part of the launch line for Carina Press, but it looks like part of that “honour” was being stuck with the worst iteration of the available contract. More on that next week.

When we sat down to brainstorm ideas for BALANCE OF TERROR, Augustin’s sequel to IN ENEMY HANDS, we were sure that we didn’t want the couple-in-a-clinch that appears to be the standard for SF romances. In fact, we were so sure we didn’t want something like that that we went to surrealist artist, Derek Murphy, as the cover artist.

It’s no fun designing a cover that follows another cover and I’m sure we curtailed Derek’s overwhelming creativity by asking him to do so. Having said that, we feel he excelled himself with the cover of BALANCE OF TERROR and are completely chuffed by the result.

Having said that, two other releases have snuck in between now and the time of BALANCE’s release. They are YELLOW FEVER, a short story set in Singapore, and OVERCLOCKED, a cyberpunk novella set in the near-future.

2012 is turning out to be a busy year, and we couldn’t be happier.

I read a press release last week that said that the Kindle ereader (3G version) has been rolled out to international buys a week ahead of schedule. Well, from this part of the world, all I can say is, whoop-de-doo.

You see, we can’t buy the Kindle in Malaysia. Or Singapore. And I can’t understand why. If this international rolling out is based on possible revenue models, then the decision becomes even more incomprehensible.

Why? To elucidate, let me introduce you to the HDI. The HDI stands for “Human Development Index” which, according to Wikipedia:

is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standards of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare. It is used to distinguish whether the country is a developed, a developing or an under-developed country, and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life.

The HDI is a much better indicator (although still not direct) of the kind of income that an average country’s citizens earn because you can have a situation of increasing GDP with decreasing personal incomes. (Hello USA!)

With this in mind, based on the premise that a higher HDI == higher personal income == higher disposable income, here’s what I compiled, based on recent data out of a total of 187 countries. In south-east Asia, the Kindle is available for purchase in these countries. Let’s have a look at their HDIs, shall we?

Cambodia — 139
Laos — 138
Myanmar — 149
Philippines — 112
Thailand — 103
Vietnam — 128

Or, to put it another way, every single one of those countries rate around, or in, the bottom third of the world in terms of quality of life. Now let’s have a look at the three countries which do not sell Kindles:

Indonesia –124
Malaysia — 61
Singapore — 26

Does that make any kind of sense? Yes of course someone in Myanmar who’s been under a repressive military junta for years has more disposable income to buy a Kindle than someone in Singapore, the most switched-on, gadget-crazy country in south-east Asia! You can see how I’m scratching my head here. The only reasonable explanation is that there’s some trade barrier thing happening in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore that isn’t affecting the other countries but that doesn’t quite cut it either because Singapore opens its legs to whichever large company happens to saunter by. They’ll bend over for a corporation where they won’t even do it for their own citizens.

A telco contractual conflict? But Amazon are selling Kindles without the wireless connectivity in south-east Asia:

Download Books Instantly: You can download books to your computer and transfer them to your Kindle via USB. Kindle wireless is not currently available in your country.

Of course there are workarounds, but WHY???? Very briefly, referencing Jeff Yen’s recent excellent blog post on his whole experience, here’s how to buy a Kindle and Kindle ebooks:

1. Create Amazon account.
2. Buy a Kindle but ship via a third-party mail forwarder that doesn’t require a US credit card.
3. Register a username and password when Kindle arrives.
4. Buy an Amazon gift card!
5. Go back to your Amazon account and erase all associated credit cards with a non-US address.
6. Install VPN on your computer.
7. Go to Amazon via VPN and change country to “USA” if necessary.
8. Shop and pay for ebooks using the gift card you bought in Step 4.

Not exactly trivial, is it? Here’s where another company can completely trounce Amazon if it’s quick enough off the mark and willing to throw some publicity dollars at the Asian market. But, as I’ve been reading complaints about the local non-availability of Amazon since 2009, and nothing much has changed since then, I’m not holding my breath.

All non-Amazon publishing players: victory is yours to lose and, believe me, you’re succeeding!

Sandal Press is proud to announce the release of an erotic short story, entitled STEEL & SKIN. Set in south-east Asia, it’s a tale of university student, Shanti, her love of books and what she does in the university library while no-one’s looking.

For an excerpt of the story, you can go to KS Augustin’s website. For a list of all etailers where you can find STEEL & SKIN, go to the story’s page at Sandal Press. At only US$1.99, it’s a cheap way to find out if you like Augustin’s writing style. Meanwhile, she’s just about to start on the edits for BALANCE OF TERROR, the sequel to IN ENEMY HANDS.

In case you’re updating your timetable at home, the next three d’Bastian books are slated next, with the last book (Book 5) currently planned for release in February/March 2013. We are also toying with a print omnibus version of all five books, so stay tuned for news on that.

I read a very interesting article in the paper on Sunday, entitled “Fantasy history is a novel idea“, written by Xu Junqian and picked up via China Daily/Asia News Network. It essentially talks about the huge boom in time travel romances currently taking place in China. To quote from the article:

Although time travel has been a common plot device employed by all genres in fiction and film across the globe for decades, the success of two time travel TV series in 2011, Palace and Startling By Each Step, both centred [sic] on a romance between a Qing Dynasty prince and a modern-day female office worker who is transported back through the ages — often via an accident, an electric shock, or even, in one extreme case, by falling down a well — has sparked a nationwide upsurge of interest in China.

The TV productions have led to writers of all ages crafting their own stories along the same lines. And, in fact, according to Cai Yi, marketing manager at the online Jinjiang Literature Site, “One quarter of our 650,000 online novels has a time travel theme.”

The kicker comes in the next paragraph where it says that “[o]f the website’s seven million registered users, 93% are female, and of the thousands of time travel romances on the website, nine out of 10 are the work of female writers ranging from 13-year-old schoolgirls to 40-something mothers and university professors.”

You should really go read the whole article because, while the entire essay is informative and fascinating, I’m only going to use one facet of the phenomenon in this post. And that facet has to do with the official response to this current trend in fiction.

At the end of 2011, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued a guideline discouraging broadcasts featuring time travel themes because they “casually make up myths, have weird plots and use absurd tactics”. The guideline was later upgraded to a full ban, prohibiting the shows from being shown or even made.

Now isn’t that interesting? A pastime that overwhelmingly involves women is banned but its male equivalent (video games, hokey action films) isn’t.(*)

However, before you start condemning China, I suggest that the only reason that they’re such an obvious target is because the administration is stupid. You see, here in the West, we have different ways to handle topics that appeal to mainly women. Ways that aren’t so heavy-handed.

We lump books we don’t like or feel comfortable with into special categories (“women’s fiction” versus “fiction”), we label  them (“romance is porn”), we say that such categories aren’t “real writing” or that such writers write “Mary Sue”s, or that such books are “unrealistic”…as if blockbuster action films don’t “make up myths, have weird plots and use absurd tactics”. But no, the men’s stuff is okay. It’s the women‘s stuff that requires radical re-education. And that’s in countries that are supposed to be tolerant, democratic, progressive, liberal…my thesaurus runneth over…yawn.

The truth is, having been a totalitarian system for decades, China has lost its subtlety. With everything under its control, you would think that they would take a more nuanced version of the popular wave but, alas, it must devolve to this imperialist running pig-bitch to set them straight.

Use Western tactics, China! Let the women write their books, but ridicule them in the press. I’m sure you have a lot of male literature critics who would do the job just for the love of it. (If you can’t find any, send out a masculine plea to the West and you’ll have more takers than you know what to do with!)

Have your lecturers and professors disparage romance and character assassinate any female academic who dares come up with an alternate view. Remarks such as “she’s getting hysterical” or “it must be that time of the month” are useful, especially if they’re accompanied by a knowing smirk. Despite student performance, give the males higher marks and let it be known that no nonsense — such as portrayals of the complexity of human relationships that doesn’t involve a penis as the major protagonist — will be tolerated from female aspirants.

And, because you can, China — because Western democracies are rigid with envy at the kind of opportunities that you have that they can’t (yet) get away with — why not convene a National Inquiry into Character? Say you’re doing this because you care for China’s women. Investigate why “the fairer sex”, “the mothers of our homeland”, the “blossoms of our founders” are doing such ridiculous things as writing time-travel romances. Have interviews, publish findings, wonder aloud if this is some kind of mental aberration? Hell, get it written up as a mental aberration. You can do it! That’s what’s so great about being China! Take the DSM IV handbook as your model and improvise wildly from there. All the Westerners are doing it!

Use every trick in your rulebook to attack, insult and denigrate anything that appears to put the concerns of women above the concerns of men and the State. Do this, and you may begin approaching the high standards that Western civilisation has set. But you’ve got to think first! And…you’re welcome.

(*) It may be that another reason for the ban is that the romances dwell on historical periods that predate the Communist Revolution. However, my answer to that is that the State Administration could merely issue an edict limiting the production of such shows to more recent eras. One can easily imagine a time-travel romance where a modern female office-worker goes back in time to help the Revolution, thus gaining an understanding of the hardships her predecessors had to go through in order to make her current life as bright and fulfilling as it is. It’s exactly the kind of turgid, clunky plot that sends totalitarian regimes into raptures. So why an all-out ban if there isn’t Something Else frightening the Chinese politburo out of their multi-pocket jackets? Independently-minded women? Shudder. The mind boggles.

A number of Sandal Press releases have been approved for inclusion in the Apple catalogue via Smashwords. This is terrific, except for one thing. I can’t find the pages to link to. I thought there used to be a page at Smashwords which deconstructed the iTunes URL, but I can’t find it now. It doesn’t help that I can’t stand Apple. Even when I worked in Silicon Valley, I refused to even apply for a job at Infinity Loop because I didn’t want to work for a company whose products I don’t believe in. It didn’t get any better when Jobs took over again because everyone in the Valley already knew what an arsehole he was, even if he was able to brilliantly tap into the zeitgeist.

Anyway, fast forward to today. I used some old links (from WAR GAMES) to see if I could decipher how to link to Sandal’s other books. I also found THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY. But when I clicked on “View More By This Author”, I was told that I couldn’t do that unless I installed iTunes. Well, what could I do? I was desperate. So I downloaded iTunes, specifically informing the installer that I DID NOT WANT any updates to the software.

What does Apple do? Install the Software Updater anyway, which it then proceeds to execute.

When I finally was able to look at the iTunes application, I got the distinct impression that it’s geared to music and appears completely useless at coping with ebooks. If I press the “View in iTunes” button on my browser (with iTunes open and the file association set up), I get nothing. Is there something wrong with the Apple link? Am I barred from seeing my book because I’m in Malaysia? Is the screen blank because I haven’t sacrificed my first-born yet at the altar of White Medicine-Equipment-Looking Things? Who the hell knows.

Having finally stumbled upon the “iTunes Store” link on iTunes, things start to look promising, but then I find that the Search facility at the top of the application is close to useless. I even try the “Power Search”, and even though I have seen at least one Sandal book just a few seconds ago, I’m now told that there are no books meeting my search criteria. I can search by broad categories (“Fiction & Literature”), but can’t narrow it down to, say, “Fantasy” or “Science-fiction”.

As I’m trawling through iTunes, getting more and more frustrated, I wonder why so many Apple users appear so euphoric about a company that can’t even organise its own storefront properly.

So, I’m sorry Apple users, you’re on your own. I’ve been trying to insert links to make your book-buying easier, but I can’t. It seems very strange that an etailer would make it so damn difficult to help spread the news about its products (a complete contrast to Amazon), but that’s Apple. And everyone wonders why Amazon is the giant in the ebook field? Let’s face it, I wish it wasn’t true, but the rest of you just aren’t good enough.

Amazon seems to draw heated opinions from people in the publishing world. Some see Amazon as their saviour, others as their nemesis when, in truth, Amazon is just a business. Yes, it may be a business that’s bedrocked in publishing, but I don’t see them as either my hero or my enemy. There are things Amazon does that Sandal Press will be happy with, and others that we won’t be. Because of its size relative to ours, we just have to go with the flow.

Part of a sensible strategy as a small self-publisher, however, is spreading it around. Not just having a relationship with one retailer but with many retailers. In this way, we maximise our exposure to readers. Should be a good thing, right?

But what happens when we want to boast about our exposure? What website bling is available to us self-publishers who want to talk about our books at Kobo? Or XinXii? Or Smashwords? If Amazon is the giant in the room, and we’re aiming for healthy competition to help keep Amazon a reasonable smaller-sized giant, how are the other etailers (i.e. Amazon’s competitors) helping us do this?

In a word, they’re not. If you visited this blog over the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed an Amazon carousel over in the sidebar. The carousel contained all of Sandal’s books on a neat little wheel. When you moused over a book, you got a snapshot of how many reviews had been received for that book and what the average score is. You could then click through to Amazon itself.

What I didn’t like about that carousel was its lack of choice. If you clicked, you could only go to Amazon. But what if you wanted to buy the book from, say, Smashwords? So, a couple of days ago, I went looking for an Amazon-type carousel that would go to the book’s product page at our website so that the reader could choose what etailer to use.

You’d think that would have been a rather simple chore. You would be wrong. I spent a gruelling two days with WordPress plugins, widgets, PHP code, stylesheets, and so on. What I got was very nice but it still doesn’t match the sophistication of the slim Amazon vertical carousel.

And that’s the problem. One reason Amazon is so big is because they make it so easy for self-publishers. Just go to a Widget page, pick your books, configure the colours, size, speed of display, and so on, grab the code and stick it on your page. By making it easier for you, Amazon increases its own outreach. Helping you helps them. In contrast, other distributors are concentrating on their own business and ignoring the potential for wider exposure through the very clients they are servicing. That would be called a strategic mis-step.

It’s too late for Sandal Press. As you can see, I have managed to find a workable scrolling vertical gallery that is distributor-agnostic, and we’ll continue with versions of such a widget. But it still highlights to me exactly how far other distributors still have to go before they can capture the kind of exposure that Amazon has already established. Talk about wasted opportunities.

There were two notable pieces of news in publishing this week. (I’m sure there were more, but I mean to say two that struck my fancy.)

First is the welcome news that Paypal has backed down on its ban of erotica material from various etailers. I say “erotica”, but the classification was much broader, throwing much into question, including depictions of sex with, say, shifters who are in mid-shift, forced seduction scenarios, and child marriages. (I can think of a few historical romances that would be banned, for example.) Now, Paypal says it’s only going after potential illegal images and text if it includes child pornography themes.

A lot of the blogs I follow have slung mud at Paypal about this whole debacle, and I only found a couple of interesting snippets in the business papers, like the Chicago Tribune. I say this because, when the controversy hit a couple of weeks ago, I thought it an incredibly bone-headed move on Paypal’s part. Why would it deliberately shoot itself in the foot when it’s primarily an online merchant? By handing down such draconian measures, it assured that its own revenues would plummet. Does that sound like a smart move to you? So I looked further afield and, when Paypal said that it was cracking down because of demands from the brick-and-mortar institutions, like Mastercard and Visa, it all became a bit clearer.

Now, interestingly, this is what we find:

“Visa would take no action regarding lawful material that seeks to explore erotica in a fictional or educational manner” and “[Mastercard] would not take action regarding the use of its cards and systems for the sale of lawful materials that seek to explore erotica content of this nature.”

When it comes to financial institutions, does it really matter who’s lying? But the truth is hinted at in this very illuminating paragraph from the Chicago Tribune article:

PayPal is relaxing the policy after the main credit card companies made a distinction between extreme pornographic images and e-books that explore such topics with only the written word.[my emphasis]

So it looks like Visa and Mastercard threw Paypal under the bus after the unexpected tsunami of bad feeling hit. Gotta love those finance guys.

And speaking of entitlement, may I introduce Scott Turow, President of the Author’s Guild. (Actually, I didn’t know who the hell Turow was before I looked him up in Wikipedia. In case you’re wondering, it looks like he writes mostly genre fiction, based largely on his legal background.)

Turow had a letter recently at the Author’s Guild blog about the US Justice Department filing an antitrust lawsuit against five large trade book publishers plus Apple. This is news that Turow describes as “grim”, no doubt because he can see none of those billable hours being added to his own personal tab.

Something struck me as “off” about the letter and it wasn’t until I parsed it a little more finely that it became obvious.

Firstly, I didn’t know – at the time of initial reading – that Turow was/is a lawyer, although I had heard of the Justice Department filing. Still, it struck me as strange that an author advocate would say:

“We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded”. No way of knowing??? How about the impending court case?? Isn’t that going to be a way of finding out? Good grief. My political antennae quiver when I hear statements like this. (“We must look forward”, “Nothing can be gained from revisiting the past”, etc.) It is sheer bullshit and exactly what I don’t expect an author’s advocate to say.

Neither do I expect an author advocate to say:

That’s why we publicly backed Macmillan … even though Apple’s agency model also meant lower royalties for authors.

Really? In all the options available from thousands of creative people, this was the option you went with? One that disadvantages the very people the Guild is supposed to represent? And then, as I went over his letter once again, it also struck me anew that, in nine hundred and twenty-three words (excluding salutations), Turow only mentioned authors – y’know, the people he’s supposed to be representing — for the very first time after five hundred and twenty-five words and doesn’t talk substantively about an author’s situation until the fourth-last paragraph.

He also says the following, which is truly bizarre:

Marketing studies consistently show that readers are far more adventurous in their choice of books when in a bookstore than when shopping online.

I don’t know what marketing studies Turow has been reading, but they must exist in a parallel universe because, in this universe, I know that buyers (and I include myself in this) are far more adventurous online, based on nothing more than price points. And let’s not even talk about the convenience of having a library in your bag, or the smaller global footprint from going digital, or the bigger range of books available, or the instant gratification kick.

And if you’re an aspiring writer, or even a mid-lister, you should know that Turow doesn’t give a shit about you:

For those of us who have been fortunate enough to become familiar to large numbers of readers [he’s talking about himself, of course!] … [online bookstores] will have little effect on our [oops, Freudian slip, Scott dahling?] sales or incomes. Like rock bands from the pre-Napster era [oh good frickin’ grief!], established authors can still draw a crowd … For new authors, however, a difficult profession is poised to become much more difficult … [P]ublishers won’t risk capital where there’s no reasonable prospect for reward. [hear that, new author? You don’t give any publisher a “reasonable prospect for reward”. Now push off, why don’t you?] They will necessarily focus their capital on … familiar works by familiar authors.

So what the President of the Author’s Guild is saying is that the number of “established authors” will soon dwindle to an exclusive, rock-star cabal (of which he is one, aren’t we lucky?) and, folks, he doesn’t appear to be too sad about that.

Not bad for the President of an organisation purporting to represent authors, is it?

I have included links to David Gaughran’s take on Turow’s letter and also to Konrath’s and Eisler’s always irreverent insights.

Because it’s damned hard work.