Welcome to Fail Month, apparently

[oloriel]

I admit that I was mildly amused by the most recent Amazon fail. For those who don't know, Amazon.de apparently sent out a few hundred pre-ordered copies of the most recent A Song of Ice and Fire instalment last week. Official publication date: July 12th. The same apparently happened - on a smaller scale - with Amazon.jp. Afterwards, several German bookshops also put their copies of A Dance with Dragons (that is, the book in question) on the shelves and sold them.


Personally, I don't think it's a big fail, but then I still keep trying to finish the first book and just. can't. arse. myself. unless I'm linked to the CTG machine and even then it's a struggle -- anyway, so I don't actually care. I do remember waiting impatiently for various instalments of Harry Potter, though, so I understand about the plight of fans who've been waiting for a book for a long time. Typically, my first reaction was rather "Oh those lucky people must be so happy" rather than "OH NOES, SOMEONE WILL POST SPOILERS!!1!".

But it's apparently a big fail from the POV of the publishers (OK, I kind of see that) and the author (well, that's his prerogative), who put up an LJ post along the lines of "Heads will roll" (no, literally. There has been mention of heads mounted on spikes. In the comments, additionally, of golden crowns and balls cut off and fed to the goats. Incidentally, I am not certain that goats would eat balls - swine, gods yes, they'll eat anything but coffee grounds and citrus fruits*, but goats? - but then I also doubt that you could, in this or any other world, get a cooking fire hot enough to melt gold... I digress). - I'd link, but I don't want the pingback bot to alert the angry hordes of GRRM fans to my little ramble here, so I won't. --

Anyway, you wouldn't believe how much that bothers me. Heck, I don't believe it myself. It's not my fandom, after all, and I mostly just keep vacillating between "wow, that author sucks for hating on fan fiction indiscriminately" and "hm, ok, he actually asked for linguists to develop a conlang for the HBO series, maybe he doesn't suck quite so badly". (I know all these things because while I am not a fan, several people on my flist are and I remember stuff, whether I care or not.) Well, after the George W. Bush rhetorics I'm back on the "sucks" swing for good.
Not that it matters.
I mean, I know he's just blustering. Obviously. What may actually happen, or not, I wouldn't know, is that Amazon.de and .jp, and possibly the independent booksellers if they actually manage to find them from the US, get sued. No actual heads are going to roll or be "crowned"; no balls are going to be cut off and fed to the goats (or swine).

So why does it bother me so much? I have no idea. Perhaps it's just because I don't like the guy. Or perhaps it's because I kind of find it embarrassing by proxy when people do that kind of thing - that is, bluster and threaten, no matter what the reason. I find it particularly embarrassing when they do so in some kind of official function: I can kind of understand when the fans, who have been waiting for what, seven years?, for this book, get angry and emotional that others are already reading when they have to wait for two more weeks, because two weeks can be a long time, especially when you're trying to avoid spoilers. But the author? I don't buy the "he'll loose money because people will put up illegal online copies and then nobody will buy the book anymore" thing (like that might not just as well happen after the street date). Quite honestly, either people will read an illegal copy (out of impatience, say, because a legal copy isn't available to them yet or because they have all the other books in softcover so they're waiting to buy the next one as a softcover, too²) but still buy the book as soon as they're able (just as people may stream episodes of TV series they don't get where they are, but will nonetheless buy the DVD once it's out), or they wouldn't buy/have bought a legal copy anyway. This doesn't mean that I approve of piracy; I just think that the real problem is elsewhere.
But I digress again.

Anyway, I don't buy the "loss of money" argument, not on the scale that's propagated at any rate. I kind of see the "bestseller list" point (as in, bestseller lists may only count copies sold after the official publication date, so if the book is leaked earlier, those copies aren't counted) - although I have to wonder, do copies sold in Germany and/or Japan actually make it onto the New York Times Bestseller List? (This one's a genuine question, btw.) And how relevant are 180 copies (that's the number of books Amazon.de apparently sent out early) in terms of bestselling lists? (Another non-rhetoric question.) This may be the naïve view of someone who only dreams about writing bestsellers instead of actually doing it (or even actively trying, at the moment), but I would've thought that if you're talking bestsellers, you're talking about several thousands of copies, in which case two hundred can't have that much of an impact. And how much of a difference does it make whether you're "the #1 NYT bestseller" or just somewhere else in the Top 10, particularly with genre fiction (which people will either read no matter what, or won't read no matter what)? And if a place on bestseller lists is actually in any way relevant, isn't it just for reasons of publicity in the end? And can't a "scandal" like this generate just as much (if not more) publicity, so monetarily it's all the same?

Is anyone still reading this? Probably not. Time to come to a conclusion. For whatever reason, as I said, I'm terribly annoyed by the "If we find out who is responsible, we will mount his head on a spike"³ - in a way that I wouldn't be annoyed if the author had said, instead, "we are considering to take legal action" or even "we are taking legal action", even though that would amount to the same (or actually, in the real world, to more). So it's likely not just my vague dislike of the author interfering, but rather my inner pacifist or my general dislike for martial rhetoric in not-entirely-obviously-ironic context. At any rate, to me it comes across as unprofessional, graceless, and, quite honestly, stupid.

Does the author have every right to be angry? Gods, yes. Who am I to forbid him, or anyone else, to think, write or say what he wants? As long as he doesn't actually go and behead - or go and pay someone to behead - some poor sod at Amazon.de, how he reacts to this kerfluffle is entirely his own decision.
But do I have to like that reaction? No! Can I take it as yet further proof that This Is Not My Ship? Hell yes!
Does it matter? - Of course not. I have no illusions concerning the weight of my word in general, or even just in my small world: The people on my flist who're into the fandom will surely stay there - I doubt anything I'll say will make them second-guess their liking for those books. (Would I like that? Sure! But I don't think it's bloody likely.) The people on my flist who aren't, already aren't. Might I ruin the fun for someone? I suppose that's possible, but honestly, if your enjoyment of a fandom is dependent on my sharing it, something is clearly going wrong...
So does it matter? No. But this is my journal and if I care to express my irrelevant opinion, I can do that. (If I actually were an official book reviewer for a newspaper or something, I'd probably be a lot nicer. I'm a big softie, actually. I just rant here because I know it doesn't seriously hurt anyone - it takes quite a bit to make me so aggressive IRL.)


As for the Amazon Fail, I'm still mildly amused, and still congratulating the lucky fans who got their copies early, and still wishing the others that they'll manage to escape the spoilers. And that's that. Look how generous I am.

- - -

Next topic!

I was initially completely indifferent when the first posts about the LOTRFF chaos showed up: I never worked with LOTRFF at all; I may have read a story or two there, for the MEFAs, as the badly thought-out page layout looks kinda familiar (hint: grey script on black is not the best of ideas, particularly if you're dealing with great amounts of text), but that's about it. So I pretty much just shrugged.

Within a few hours, however, it transpired that this was actually a failfest of epic proportions. I'm too lazy to sum it up, but fortunately I don't have to: esteliel wrote a fine article here; if you want more, you can have a collection of related links here. Long story short: The owner of a LOTR fanfic archive sold said archive (which is her right, though I disagree with the way it was handled) to an investor who plans to make money with said archive (which is not a good idea, whatever else you may think about the guy). She, apparently, did not research him as well as she might have; he, apparently, is completely unaware of who he's dealing with in every direction...

Since then, I've been avidly reading along, because even though I have nothing to do with the concerned archive, it's been getting exciting. Which is actually why I posted those two links: I think this is so exciting that even people who are not in the fandom might find them educating and/or entertaining. So much fail! So much ignorance!


And, to be honest, I am quite proud of being part of this fandom right now. Because yes, we may look harmless and mostly we're just playing around, but we are also intelligent and well-informed (better, obviously, than Mr. Investor here who thought it'd be a good idea to cash in on fan fiction based on the literary property of possibly one of the most litigious (AWESOME NEW WORD I LEARNED THERE!) copyright owners around. And - get this - who thought he'd escape the danger of lawsuits by registering his business in the UK rather than the US, showing how utterly clueless he is of what he's dealing with). And occasionally we're well-organised, too. Figure that someone who apparently used to work for Facebook didn't expect that...
And we're still nice enough to inform him of the potential trouble he's heading into. I mean, we could just quietly let him think he's about to strike gold, withdraw our own content, make popcorn and watch while the Tolkien Estate sued him for all he's worth or while he got into major trouble because whoopsie, his precious content (what would be left of it after most people withdrew their stories...) contained such dangerous stuff as, well, everything you may find in fanfic - kinks of all shapes and sizes, RPF, incest, slash, het pr0n, you name it.

Well, ok, "we" are not just doing it because we're such good people. Partly "we" are pissed off because an outsider is trying to cash in on "our" collective efforts - writing fanfic is no less hard work than writing o-fic****, and while most fanfic writers are happy to write with no revenue but reviews and fandom fame, writing with no revenue while someone else is making money from it is rather a different matter. Partly "we" are afraid that once one fandom site captures the legal attention of the Tolkien Estate, all others may get into trouble as well, justified or not. Partly "we" want to make clear that just because "we" occasionally name ourselves "fangirls", we're not children with no clue about business and legal issues and even, God forbid, our own rights.
I mean, I myself? I am totally watching this in delight because the combination of "people on my side being awesome" and "people I generally don't like being foolish" is just, well, pleasant. Not particularly charitable, that.
But there's still some part where, I think, "we" genuinely want to keep someone from harm. At least, that's what the great amount of constructive criticism and questioning suggests. If everyone was just in it for the drama and bloodshed, things would look quite different.

There would be more talk about heads on spikes, for instance...


Ah, fandom. Keep being awesome. Or batshit. Whatever, as long as you are.

- - -

*Yes, really!

²I don't know why publishers don't seem to realise that. I mean, I am the impatient sort of person who will buy the hardcover or the over-sized deluxe softcover just to bloody own it already - but I know several people who won't, who want all the books of the same series on their shelf to look like each other and who do have the willpower to wait for the appropriate paperback edition no matter how long it takes, or who'll read the book elsewhere - borrow a friend's copy, go to the local library, or yes, read some online version of, erm, questionable legality - and then (and this is the important part) still buy the paperback edition of a book they already know by then just to make up the set, so the author and the publisher will still get their money.

³There, now you can google that line if you want to read the original entry and don't already know where to find it, so there's no need to link anymore.

****whatever GRRM appears to believe.

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Something I only realised overnight: You and the good cowboy both seem to labour under the assumption that all o-fic has to be scifi/fantasy. I was rather thinking of all sorts of o-fic, be they fantasy, some other genre (historical, criminal, romance, you name it) or even - gods forbid - postmodern non-genre high literature. In which case the world-building point is sorta moot anyway. And yet I wouldn't automatically say that (say) "Rebecca Gablé" is inferior to GRRM because she didn't go and invent War-of-the-Roses England all by her onesies. Heck, personally I think "Lian Hearn" was too lazy to set her Otori-novels in actual historical Japan, and thus "created" The Three Countries...

Which is actually an argument I've read levelled at fantasy literature: Authors are too lazy to do the research, so they create their own world. Which is (in general) nonsensical, of course, but I guess it goes to show how different conceptions of research, creation and the effort involved therein can be!

Finally: Of course a good FF writer isn't automatically a good fiction writer in general - or the other way round - just as not every published writer is a good writer. And I absolutely understand you can't believe my assertions that I find world-building relatively easy without knowing the result. I don't know your worlds, either. ;) But like you, I know many published invented worlds that don't work - for me, anyway.

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

You and the good cowboy both seem to labour under the assumption that all o-fic has to be scifi/fantasy.

I don't know where you got that from. We were solely talking about fantasy here nd of course therefore I only gave examples from it. Therefore I'm a little taken aback by your assumption, especially by snide remarks like that:

or even - gods forbid - postmodern non-genre high literature. I

I don't know if you ever saw or cared my reading list but - le gasp - I actually do read other genres than fantasy and I would never compare any writer of different genres in terms of so called "quality". For example I highly appreciate and enjoy horror literature, something that so called scholars would not touch with a ten foot pole because they think it's just for the cheap rack in the supermarket.

You also assume I only credit fantasy/sci-fi writers with world-building. Again, where do you take that fact from?

Just to be clear: For me world building comes into place whenever you have to write something you did not experience. AFAIK Mrs. Gablé doesn't have a time machine in her backyard so she had to do excessive research to build a believable world. For me it's a world because of course, it could've happened that way but it's pretty much likely it did not (hence "fiction"). It's a world as close as possible to the historical facts we know of the War-of-the-Roses-England and she had to do a homework to get it right, solid and believable (which was one of the biggest problems I had with one of her books because she used the quote "jumped over the cliff like a lemming" which found its way into our language because of a Disney film in the 1950s).

And I'm pretty sure there are tons of authors who avoid research and think it's so much easier to just create their own. Which it isn't and therefore the laziness always shows - from somewhere you must have your judgement that Hearn is one of those lazy people. Which just for me is another argument that world building is a hell more difficult than people usually assume.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

We seem to be talking at cross-purposes here.

We were solely talking about fantasy here nd of course therefore I only gave examples from it.

And that's all I said: You were only talking about fantasy. I wasn't, not initially, but I didn't catch that until today. Which is why I wanted to clarify that I was thinking of all sorts of o-fic.

The snide remark concerning postmodern non-genre isn't directed towards you, but rather towards the concept of postmodern non-genre. I don't believe in it, but many scholars (so-called or otherwise) appear to think that it exists, and that it is the only legitimate kind of literature, and everything else ("genre") is inferior. Again: I don't believe in that! But it's just as possible to write original fiction in that field as it is to write it in the fantasy, horror, or crime fiction genre, and I was thinking of all of that when I said that writing fanfic is (maybe I should've said "can be") as hard work as writing o-fic.
So I thought I should clarify that.

You also assume I only credit fantasy/sci-fi writers with world-building.

I don't assume that you do, necessarily, but it's what I do. For me, world-building doesn't come into place whenever I write something I didn't experience, but only when a world is created (more or less) from scratch. If I were to write a story in a setting alien to me - Napoleonic France, say, or Qin-dynasty China, or Shaka Zulu South Africa - I wouldn't be doing (in my understanding) any world-building; I'd be doing research and reconstruction. That is a completely different thing - for me. If you say that you see it differently, I accept that, but I wasn't aware of that before.

And I am sorry, but I do not see how Ms. Gablé's work in doing reserarch to paint a believable picture of War-of-the-Roses England is any harder than my work in doing research to paint a suspension-of-disbelievable picture of Age-of-the-Trees Valinor. I don't know if you've read the Silmarillion, but the cultural information you get there is extremely scarce. All you get is the historical framework - and even there, you have a variety of versions. In both cases, you have a "history" - a pre-existing world - to work from; in both cases, you have to do research and fill in the pieces. And I suspect there's a lot more useable information on 15th century England than there is on Númenor. Actually, I know - I've written for either (academic for one, fiction for the other; should clearly have done that the other way round, there's more money in that ;))...

Tangent: I was wondering about the lemming thing! Actually I was wondering whether they'd even know lemmings at the time. I didn't know the phrase came from the Disney film. We live and learn.

To be fair, Hearn's work isn't actually bad. I just got the feeling that she wanted to write a Samurai novel, but didn't feel like looking up all those pesky rulers and land reforms and battles and cultural implications, so she set the books in a fictional country with recogniseably Japanese culture instead. I don't know whether that feeling is accurate, or whether others (especially if they don't have any particular interest in real historical Japan) get that feeling at all. As we've seen with the "heads on spikes" things, my perception isn't always the same as other people's. :)

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

(Not to be nitpicky but what you said wasn't "you only talked about fantasy" but "you assume that all o-fic has to be scifi/fantasy" which are two pairs of shoes, of which the last one is pretty insulting, but if you didn't mean it that way it's okay.)

I didn't read the Silmarillion because LotR already bored me to bloody tears. Also we start to compare apples with oranges. So, to clear it up a little:

There's the fiction writer who has to built up a whole new world from scratch, plus characters that fit into this world, plus a plot and it all has to work out and be consistant. Nothing there but a blank slate.

Then there's the historical writer. He has facts to draw from but the research material he is faced with is basically limitless and the things he has to make up, like characters and plot, have to fit into this world he builds out of historical research. People can actually go into a library and look up if what he said makes sense.

Both, the historical and the original writer have to know their craft extremely well to create believable worlds which I think is a task a lot of people underestimate.

Of course, the writer Tolkien fanfic also has to know their craft, I never said otherwise. But it's still fiction out of fictional material. There is nothing to be done about who won the WWII or what material Roman mugs were made of. Someone has found it out and written it down and there's that.

Sure, historical research also has its limits and for a lot of facts you would need the aforementioned time-machine to check them out. But: the boundaries are fare more extensive than fiction. No matter how great Tolkien is, he was just one guy with one brain and at some point he died.

Therefore FF-writers have two major advantages: Towards the blank-writer you have the advantage that you have material to work with. And towards the historical writer you have the advantage that this material is limited - just what you said but the cultural information you get there is extremely scarce.

Now you could say: well, there are real world civilizations hardly anything is known about! True, but other than some forgotten real world culture the info in the Simarillion is not scarce because it's impossible to check with the means we have, it's scarce because it probably never existed outside Tolkien's brainspace. And maybe not even within. Maybe he never thought about missing slot A or B and you've got a hole, a blank space.

You can fill up those blank space yourself because who can contradict you? Your speculations about his fictional work are just as valid as any other fan's is. As long as it makes sense, it fits. What is "right" or "wrong" in a LotR-FF is mostly up to fan-discussion.

So I agree to you that writing in such a genre is a challenge and much closer to writing a history novel than anything else. And I understand you are proud of your achievements, which you very well can be. But that doesn't change my opinion that FF is only to a very limit comparable to original fic. You move in a very close circle here - if a original-fictional world isn't built solid, most readers will feel the lack of quality (even if your average reader can't pinpoint it).

... and that was waaaaaay too long, sorry.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Not to be nitpicky but what you said wasn't "you only talked about fantasy" but "you assume that all o-fic has to be scifi/fantasy" which are two pairs of shoes,

Yes, I see that now. That was indeed worded poorly - my apologies!

And don't worry about writing long replies, as long as they help to clear things up.
For me, writing in the Tolkien fandom is kind of between creating-from-scratch and historical writing, precisely because there is some information, but it's scarce and has to be filled up, so it's actually more work than looking things up in the library. And readers will notice just as much whether what you filled in is solid or "makes sense", within the known framework, as they will in an original-fictional context. Even if there's just 20 of them and not 20.000.

(Tangent -- If I were to go and change the names of the places and the king in my Númenorean WiP, for instance, only the most obsessed Tolkienists might still guess that it's based on the Akallabêth. It's so far off the map that it's essentially working from a blank slate, filled with bits and pieces of Mediterranean and Ancient Egyptian culture. In the case of Númenor, even the language - Adûnaic - only exists in pieces, and basically has to be reconstructed from scratch and the 50 or so words Tolkien bothered to write down.
Which personally I find harder, though more rewarding, than creating my own language where I am the only one who defines what's right. With Adûnaic, I always have to fear that I overlooked some obscure source that five other people know. And because only few people write Númenorean fic, those people will find mine. And there will be glorious, lengthy discussions on whether my use of the genitive here, or my conjectured lexical item there, is justifiable. And those discussions are far more of an effort than going to a library and checking some real-world history. And I assure you that fanfic readers can be very picky.)

And argh, despite this lengthy tangent on my own writing, my opinion doesn't actually have much to do with pride in my (personal) achievements (most of the time, I am not particularly proud of my writing. If I were proud enough, I would've tried publishing some. That Númenorean story with the serial numbers filed off, for instance. Or one of my o-fic pieces...). It's simply about how I've been experiencing this writing thing.

Meanwhile, you seem to place the same effort in a sort of tertiary place, after either starting from scratch or starting from real history. You're free and welcome to do that, of course, it's just not an opinion I share. :)

See, I write waaaay too long comments, too. >_>