Jim Baen's Universe

Salvos Against Big Brother

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The Nature of Transitions

Written by Eric Flint

I left off at the end of my column in the last issue of the magazine by posing the following question:

Even if it’s only a mental experiment at the moment, what would happen if electronic publishing did become the dominant form of publication—or even the almost exclusive form? What if any changes would be needed in the various policies that I’ve advocated so far?

In the end, it’s the answer to this question that underlies the position on electronic copyright issues taken by just about everybody in this debate. Why? Because the “trump card” that advocates of restrictive polices and harsh penalties always haul out is this one. They may concede many other things, in the interim, but what they argue is that:

1) In the final analysis electronic reading will become the dominant format for publishing, and when that happens—

2) Electronic piracy will becomes a monumental problem for authors and publishers, possibly an insurmountable one.

I’ve even seen some people go so far as to argue that authors will soon be deprived of their livelihood altogether, if the looming menace of online piracy is not dealt with. The fact that this argument rests upon the utterly preposterous notion that a given branch of production is determined by a specific form of paying for the labor required does not prevent people from advancing it.

And it is an absurd notion. The reason authors can make a living is not because of copyright or any specific form of compensation. It’s because there is a demand for their product, which is stories. That demand is just about as stable and steady as any economic demand in the world, short of food and clothing and shelter. So far as archaeologists and anthropologists have been able to determine, story-telling is the oldest art form practiced by the human race and there is not one culture that has ever existed that does not engage in that art form.

In short, an economic activity that is at least one hundred thousand years old, economically and culturally ubiquitous, and just about as deeply rooted in human society as the production of food, is . . .

Going to vanish, because of Ye Dastardly Online Pirates.

For Pete’s sake. The worst that electronic piracy could possibly do would be to force a complete change in the methods by which authors and publishers derive their income. That’s . . .

Possible. After all, the forms of payment which authors have received over the centuries have changed quite a bit and have always been subject to fluctuation. As for publishers, the publishing enterprise itself didn’t really exist in the modern sense of the term until the advent of the copyright era in the early eighteenth century. Prior to that time, “publishers” were either patrons or printers, who paid for the publication of something either by shelling out money from their own pocket or by doing the printing themselves.

But so what? Making a living a different way is still making a living. The only thing that could even theoretically deprive authors of a livelihood would be if someone invented an artificial intelligence that was capable of writing stories that were as good as stories written by humans.

Is that possible? In the short run, no. The forms of artificial intelligence so far developed have two characteristics in common. They are all far superior to human intelligence when it comes to what you might call brute force numbers crunching. And they are vastly inferior to human intelligence—or even animal intelligence—when it comes to anything intuitive. That’s why even very expensive AIs, such as planetary rovers, have a difficult time doing something as simple as navigating across a surface—which any toddler can do quite easily. Or an insect, for that matter.

Story-telling is not numbers crunching. In fact, it’s about as far removed from it as I can imagine. The ability to tell stories well is so completely bound up with the author’s life experience that it’s hard to even imagine how you’d train an AI to do more than rudimentary story telling.

(An aside, here. Yes, I know that some AIs have already been programmed to “tell stories,” just as some AIs have already been programmed to carry on a conversation. What happens in both cases, however, is that the story and the conversation only work within very tightly defined limits.)

In the long run . . .

It’s an interesting question, actually, and one that lends itself to science fiction. My own view of the matter is that if an artificial intelligence is eventually developed that can tell stories as well as a human being, then that AI has a reasonable claim to being a person, not just a machine. And, that being so, the person is entitled to get paid for its work just like any other person. Or you have slavery.

But I’m going to leave that aside, here. There is certainly no projection by anyone that I know of that, in anything like the foreseeable future, any kind of artificial intelligence will be able to replace authors. So, for the purposes of this series of essays, I’m going to assume that if people want stories, they have to have authors to produce them.

That being so, how could authors not get paid? The form of payment might change, but the fact of it can’t.

And, indeed, in the many centuries—no, millennia—prior to the advent of copyright, authors existed and they did indeed get paid. Usually, of course, “authors” were story-tellers, since the trade was primarily an oral one until the invention of the printing press.

How did they get paid? By patronage, in one of two main forms: private or public.

The principal form of private patronage was for a wealthy individual to pay for the production of stories. In essence, the author did what amounted to “work for hire,” except for a single person instead of a publishing house or company. He or she wrote the story and exchanged it for an agreed upon sum. Thereafter, the author had no right to any further income from the story.

Public patronage took various forms. The most common was the activity that’s called “busking.” Here’s the definition of the term by Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary:

busk (v.i.): to entertain by dancing, singing, or reciting in the street or in a public place.

Musicians and mimes have never stopped busking. You can find street musicians in most cities in the world. Mimes and other dramatic street performers are less common, but you can find them also. If you walk down La Rambla, Barcelona’s famous central boulevard, you will see one living statue after another. Each of those performers, as is true of busking musicians, depends upon voluntary contributions from the public for their income.

In times past, many story-tellers made a living the same way. And there’s a resurgence of busking for story-tellers today, which takes the form of posting stories on the internet and asking for donations.

But there were other forms of public patronage. Plays have been staged by cities throughout human history, in many civilized cultures, and until relatively recent times the cost of producing those plays—which includes, obviously, the cost of paying the playwrights—was borne by the municipality. Or, perhaps, by a major religious institution in that municipality.

Of course, the form of payment does have an impact on the type of story produced. It’s not an accident that the dominant modern form of story-telling, which is the novel, is almost entirely a phenomenon of the copyright era. That’s because of two factors: First, from the author’s viewpoint, writing a novel requires many months of labor. Secondly, it’s a difficult form of story to sell to a large audience. By the nature of the story, novels are intended to be read by one person at a time.

So, in the pre-copyright era, the principal forms of story-telling were either purely verbal recitations—a good example being the various medieval legend cycles—or they were stories that were adapted for public performances. That means plays, basically.

They weren’t the only forms. Poetry was often a prominent form of story-telling, also. (People don’t usually think of poems as “stories,” but that is in fact what they are, albeit often told in a very stylized manner. That’s true even of something like a haiku, in the final analysis.) That’s because poetry lends itself very well to patronage, where novels do not.

The point here is that, in the worst conceivable eventuality, the transformation of publishing into a predominantly electronic form might force authors to change the form in which they told stories. It might, conceivably, force authors to either abandon old methods and develop new ones or lose their livelihoods.

And . . . so what?

Being blunt about it, a person has a right to try to make a living as a story-teller. You do not, however, have the right to dictate to the public the form in which you choose to tell the story. That’s their prerogative, not yours.

In fact, the public’s taste has continually changed over time, forcing authors to adapt. And, every time a change needed to be made, not all authors were able to make the adaptation. That was tough for them personally, of course, but that’s just the nature of the trade of story-telling. It’s a very chance way to make a living, and always has been.

Let me give you an example of such a change, from the history of science fiction. In its origins, science fiction was a predominantly short form genre. Outside of a few early novels by a handful of authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, most science fiction writers beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century made their living—insofar as any of them made a living at it at all, which was only a handful—writing short stories for magazines. Occasionally, an author was able to get a novel published, but in that era of the science fiction genre novels were few and far between.

So, an author depended on writing short stories, for the most part. And, not surprisingly, this state of affairs benefited authors who were adept at writing short fiction, and penalized authors who were naturally inclined to write much longer stories.

Then, during the course of the 1960s, the genre went through a profound sea change. Science fiction and fantasy went from being a predominantly short form genre to an overwhelmingly novel genre, in a period of about a decade. The change began in the early 1960s and was over by no later than 1975.

Today, the few science fiction and fantasy magazines still in existence are struggling. Adjusting for inflation, they no longer pay anything close to the rates they paid for short stories half a century ago. Today, it is absolutely impossible—no matter how productive they are and how well-published they are—for a science fiction author to make a living by writing short stories. You simply can’t do it. Even if you got three short stories published every month—a production rate that no author has ever maintained in history—you’d earn less than $10,000 a year, which would put you below the official poverty rate even as a single person.

It was never easy for an author to sustain themselves, writing short fiction. But, especially if they could get a handful of novels published over a career, they could manage it. Today, they can’t. There’s simply no money for short fiction, worth talking about. The market for it is now so small that producing short fiction is, for any commercially successful science fiction author, a pure sideline. (In terms of money, at least. Some authors may continue to write a lot of short fiction either for the personal pleasure or for the sake of winning literary awards, or both. But they do not depend on that writing for an income. They can’t.)

To give you an example of how minor an aspect of an author’s income short story writing has become, I’ll use myself as an example. My first novel, Mother of Demons, was published in September of 1997. My first collection of short fiction, Worlds, is scheduled to be published in February of 2009. And in the eleven and a half years between the appearance of those two books, I will have published something like thirty novels. And I’m only publishing this one volume of short fiction on a “what the hell, why not?” basis. I offered it to my publisher for no advance at all, just royalties.

Granted, I’m quite a ways toward one end of this spectrum—but I’m by no means at the extreme edge. There are some very successful science fiction and fantasy authors today who have never published any short fiction. Never. Not once. That would have been completely impossible thirty or forty years earlier, for the good and simple reason that they couldn’t have gotten published at all.

And, sure enough, that profound change in the market punished some authors and benefited others. To start with the happier side, the change was a blessing for an author like Frank Herbert. Herbert wrote short fiction, to be sure. Like any science fiction author at the time, he had no choice. But it was never particularly easy for him, compared to some other authors.

In his first decade as a writer, beginning in the early 1950s, Herbert published about twenty short stories. During that same stretch, Christopher Anvil—an author for whom short fiction came naturally and easily—published almost twice as many stories. To look at it from another angle, Herbert never got more than four short stories published in a single year, and he only managed that twice—in 1954 and again in 1958. In contrast, a natural short story writer like James H. Schmitz published nine short stories in 1962 and did it again in 1965.

Christopher Anvil had an even more impressive streak: eight stories in 1964, eight stories again in 1965, eleven stories in 1966, eleven stories again in 1967, and six stories in 1969. In a short five years, Anvil published about as many short stories as Herbert did in his entire career, which spanned more than three decades.

And Frank Herbert was in no sense a failure. He was a successful writer, even in his early years. He simply wasn’t a writer for whom short fiction came naturally and easily. Still, he adapted as best he could to the demands of the market and soldiered on. Then, the market began to change, and Herbert came into his own. By the 1970s, he was one of science fiction’s major and most successful novelists.

On the flip side of the coin, James Schmitz and Christopher Anvil hit hard times in the 1970s. Although both of them wrote a few short novels—four, in the case of Schmitz (one of which was really a long novella) and five in the case of Anvil—they were naturally short form writers, and struggled once the market changed.

Schmitz never made the transition at all. His last two stories were published in 1974, and they were probably written two years earlier. He was still a relatively young man at the time. Well . . . not old, at any rate. He was sixty years old in 1971—a year younger than I am, as I write this essay—and he still had a decade of life ahead of him. But for all practical purposes his writing career had ended.

Anvil kept going. But a writer who had been very prominent as a science fiction short story author in the fifties and sixties now faded from the scene. He published only nine stories in the rest of the 1970s, after 1972—fewer stories than he’d published in some single years, in his heyday. Then, eight stories in the 1980s, and four stories in the 1990s. The last of them was published in 1995.

Then . . . nothing, until I bought a story from him for one of the anthologies of his writings I was assembling as editor, in 2005, and a second one that I bought from him for Jim Baen’s Universe in 2006. The point being that the man is still perfectly capable of telling a story, it’s just that the market changed under him.

So it goes. That was not the first time such a literary transition has happened in history—not by a country mile—and it’s not going to be the last time. Look back over the centuries of literature, even restricting it to the English language, and you’ll see continuous and complex changes taking place in the publishing market—each and every one of which forces authors to adapt to them.

Did you ever wonder why the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky always seem to drag in the middle? Typically, they start with a bang and end with a bang. But the middle . . .

Why, exactly, does Brothers Karamazov need to be nine hundred pages long?

Well, literature professors will insist that’s because of the innate essence of the story, it being a recognized masterpiece of world literature. And I’m certainly not going to quarrel with that judgment of the novel, taken as a whole, because I agree with it. But as a commercially successful professional author, I will also tell you a darker side of the truth. “Darker,” at least, if you view literature as a sacrosanct and well-nigh saintly pursuit which is untainted by any coarse material concerns—a view of the trade which almost no actual practitioner has ever taken. Me, I just think it’s funny.

Here’s the truth. Dostoyevsky had a gambling problem, was chronically in debt—and the standard form of publishing novels in his day was to serialize them in magazines. So, in order to sell a novel to a magazine, he’d send the editor the opening chapters. Those, typically, were brilliant. To this day—allowing for the fact that I have to judge based on translation—I think the opening hundred pages of so of The Idiot is the best writing by any novelist at any time or place.

Then . . . well, bills had to be paid. Bills to gamblers, to make things worse. And if you’re a good writer—much less a literary genius like Dostoyevsky—it really ain’t that hard to figure out ways to . . .

“Extend” a story, we’ll call it. Chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter, since that’s how you get paid. By the chapter.

(If you’re wondering, that is not how authors get paid for a novel today. I will negotiate a lump sum with my publisher, to be paid in various installments. Typically, two: half the advance on signing, half on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript. There will be no stipulation as to the length of the novel, although it’s tacitly understood that it will be at least one hundred thousand words long and will not exceed two hundred thousand words unless I discuss it with my publisher. And no mention will ever be made of how many chapters the book might have.)

Charles Dickens published under the same set of circumstances as Dostoyevsky, by the way, which I personally suspect explains at least in part the length and structure of his novels.

My point here is not to ridicule any authors. (Or publishers, actually, since if anyone got taken to the cleaners it was them.) I’m simply making the point that the specific way that authors make a living is inextricably and intricately tied to the specific structure and demands of the market at any given time. And that, in turn, is determined by many things—not the least of which is the dialectic between a given technology and a given audience interest.

I do not doubt for one moment that the changes that have taken place and are taking place in the technology of publishing, the shift—however slowly or quickly it takes place—between paper and electronic publication, will over time have a profound impact on the specific way that authors make a living. I don’t doubt it, because you can already see it happening.

But that is not equivalent to a threat to the livelihood of authors, as such. The fact that some authors will suffer from the change is no excuse for them or anyone else trying to prevent those changes by legal fiat. They have no more “right” to a specific way of earning money as authors than authors have had at any point in the past.

Had James H. Schmitz or Christopher Anvil advanced the proposition, in the late 1960s, that legal measures should be implemented which ensured that their preferred style of story-telling remained the dominant one in science fiction, they would have been subjected to ridicule. And rightly so.

Yet the fact is that many of the proposals—and certainly the logic of the arguments—advanced by people today with regard to the advent of electronic publishing and the “threat” of online piracy are every bit as ridiculous and absolutely no different in their underlying logic. Under the claim of “protecting the livelihood of authors” what they are actually demanding is that legal policies be adopted that protect specific authors who choose to tell stories in a specific manner and sell them in a specific format.

This is a point that Cory Doctorow has made a number of times in various essays he’s written on the subject, for which he invariably gets pilloried by some authors. But the problem isn’t with Cory, it’s with his critics. I don’t always agree with Cory on the various issues involved with the general subject of copyright—at least, in terms of what we each emphasize and don’t—but on this issue, he’s absolutely right and his critics are absolutely wrong.

So let me finish this essay by making this point as clear as I can:

If electronic publishing—and that includes the reality that it’s very easy to “pirate” electronic text—is a form of publishing that some authors and publishers have a hard time adapting to, then that’s just too damn bad for them. As my father liked to say whenever I’d whine about something as a boy, “things are tough all over.” If they can’t cut the mustard, then it’s just a fact that over time they will fade away.

What they have no right to do is to demand that their present situation be enshrined by law. What they have no right to do is to demand that copyright “protection” be made so restrictive and onerous for the public that the fundamental purpose of copyright is actually undermined.

Here’s the flip side of the matter, which these doom-predictors never want to acknowledge or admit. Changes in publishing have been happening for centuries. They always harm some authors and they always benefit some other authors. And the same is happening today, as electronic publishing grows in importance.

Some authors may be harmed by that growth—although I should state here, for the record, that I have yet to see a single author advance a persuasive case that they’ve been so harmed. What is absolutely certain, however, is that other authors have benefited from the change.

How do I know that’s true? Because I’m one of them. One of the most prominent ones in science fiction, in fact. I’ve learned—and I’m still learning—how to use the changes in publishing to my benefit. Just as my publisher, Baen Books, has done the same from its standpoint as a publishing house.

In later essays, I’ll explain why the fears of people concerning the “danger of online piracy” are grossly out of proportion with the reality, even if we assumed that all publishing was electronic. The worst of those fears are just plain silly. In point of fact, the changes that will be forced upon authors and publishers by the inexorable demands and features of electronic publishing—and, yes, ease of “piracy” is one of those features—are very small compared to the enhanced opportunities that come with it. And I’ll also describe, in considerable detail, the various methods that I’ve used and Baen Books has used to take advantage of the new opportunities created by electronic publishing. What will become obvious is that while electronic publishing certainly requires some adaptations, the adaptations are really pretty small potatoes—certainly when compared to the benefits accrued as a result.

But even if it were true that the growth of electronic publishing forced drastic changes in the way authors chose to tell stories and make a living from them, then that would simply be something they’d have to accept. Those of them who could adjust to the change would prosper; those who couldn’t, would not.

And what else is new? That’s the nature of transitions.

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