Author: David Biddle

The Word Thieves: Navigating the New Landscape of Plagiarism

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment
This essay appeared in Talking Writing in April. Talking Writing is rapidly becoming a high-quality online source of information for writers and content-providers of all sorts.  

By David Biddle for Talking Writing

Imagine that a rigidly controlled country you’ve always longed to visit suddenly undergoes a revolution and opens its borders. Its currency value is ridiculously low, making travel a bargain. Do you snap up airline tickets and book a hotel right away?  Or does the prospect of traveling in a land where laws and concepts of ownership are in flux give you pause?

Ecstasy of Influence book cover
For me, that tantalizing country is The Land of Getting Published, now dominated by a digital publishing frontier. I no longer need an agent or even an editor to get me there (though some copyediting help is always useful). With my self-polished text and a decent cover layout in hand, I can publish my own work in just a few clicks through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Lulu, or any of several dozen other online resources. With Amazon’s Kindle Select system, I set my own price for my stories (at or above the minimum of $2.99 per download), and I collect 70% of the royalties.
There’s just one catch: word thieves. The digital frontier is a wide-open vista for both publishing and plagiarism. Sure, the good online conglomerates provide some control through rights management options and encrypted filing, but, really, in this age of electronic access, anyone can copy and paste my words—or yours—and call them their own. And, as notions of “open source” content gain more traction in the literary world, who’s to say that such a copy-and-paste action constitutes theft and not just artistic “borrowing”?
As I’ve ventured into the digital publishing frontier, I’ve realized that plagiarism is an issue every electronically published writer has to examine. We all need to understand the various forms it can take and make our individual decisions about what we’re comfortable with—and what we’re not. And your decisions, like your travel choices, may end up being very different from mine.

Plagiarism Type 1: Piracy, Pure and Simple

Literary or journalistic plagiarism is usually thought of as a rogue writer copying someone else’s words, maybe making a few grammatical or stylistic adjustments, and then slapping his or her own name on the “new” work, giving no credit to the original writer. This is considered theft of intellectual property. Along with the legal ramifications, there are far deeper moral and ethical issues.
Theoretically, current Internet technology should make ferreting out plagiarizers, media pirates, and content counterfeiters astoundingly easy. Ten years ago, plagiarism experts predicted that Google and new apps on the horizon would reduce pirating problems dramatically. This prediction has yet to come true, maybe because the ease of piracy has risen even more quickly—or because there are more pirates in the world than plagiarism investigators.
The Bulletin book cover
One amazing case among the many plagiarism stories to pop up in recent years is that of the Montgomery County Bulletin, a now-defunct weekly alternative paper in a Houston suburb. In 2008, Slate writer Jody Rosen received an email from a reader saying, “I believe your…profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale without attribution [by the Bulletin].”
Rosen investigated, uncovering a bizarre saga that he reported under the title “Dude, You Stole My Article.” He discovered that the Bulletin essentially cobbled together feature pieces from other people’s work, publishing them under the byline of the paper’s primary writer, Mark Williams. The Bulletin made its money through paid ads, using stolen content that cost nothing. Rosen’s story brought down this newspaper, but it also showed how far those looking to make a fast buck will go if they can get away with it.
In January 2012, as I prepared to write this essay, an account of what may be the mother of all plagiarism cases appeared in the magazine Fast Company. In “Amazon’s Plagiarism Problem,” NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg tells the story of a writer who self-published erotica using Amazon’s Kindle System, then discovered that stories showing up higher on the “best seller” list were published by someone who had plagiarized her work. Further digging showed dozens of fictitious authors self-publishing scores of books that were primarily copies of free stories from the online adult fiction site Literotica (along with, oddly enough, blatantly plagiarized copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Lewis Carroll’sAlice in Wonderland).
Penenberg’s piece and a subsequent NPR episode titled “On Amazon, an Uneasy Mix of Plagiarism and Erotica” focus mostly on how Amazon and other online stores deal with these radical cases of “content farming”—which is, not very effectively. As Penenberg notes, “the sheer volume of self-published books mak[es] it difficult, if not impossible, for e-stores like Amazon to vet works before they go on sale.” Amazon will remove content based on plagiarism complaints, but the process is slow—and plagiarists are quick to repost under new pseudonyms.
If your comfort level with this type of plagiarism is zero, you’re surely not alone. These are pretty clear-cut cases of out-and-out piracy. But let’s look at the opposite end of the plagiarism spectrum.

Plagiarism Type 2: Transformative Artistry

Novelist Jonathan Lethem launched the definitive argument for a more lenient approach to copyright issues and artistic plagiarism in his infamous 2007 essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” in Harper’s Magazine (the essay also appears in his recently published book, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc.).
Lethem presents case after case of artists using the works of others to create substantially new works of their own, from Nabokov’s lifting of the plot for Lolita to Bob Dylan’s liberal lyric thefts and William Burroughs’ “cut-up method” of appropriating other writers’ text fragments. In sections with subheads such as “UseMonopoly” and “You Can’t Steal a Gift,” Lethem argues persuasively for viewing works of art as gifts to the public domain, rather than as property to be zealously protected and litigated over. The punch line comes at the end: an extended key referencing the copied sources for almost every line of the essay.
Reality Hunger book cover
In all fairness to Lethem as an artist, he writes: “Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.” But the full-frontal content of this essay is still in other people’s words. If you are ignorant of this conceit when you read it, the ending is quite a lesson.
Reading it, you might find yourself warming to this type of creative plagiarism (if it qualifies as plagiarism, given Lethem’s scrupulous attribution of sources at the end). You might even find it an inspiration—as, arguably, did David Shields, whose similarly constructed book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, came out in February 2010 and prominently featured a quote from Lethem on its front cover.
Reality Hunger is a declaration that literary fiction is no longer useful, and that reality—essay, memoir, reporting, and anything else we might call “nonfiction”—is taking over. Shields’s method for making this argument is to borrow text liberally from others in the vein of Lethem’s Ecstasy essay, demonstrating his stated intent “to write the ars poeticafor a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists…who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.” He did not originally intend to reference the quotes he excised, but at the last minute he relented to the dictates of his publisher and their attorneys and provided a key in very small print.
Are Lethem and Shields word thieves? Or simply innovative borrowers? If someone “borrowed” your words in this way, would you feel unfairly used? Or honored?
In fact, there is a legal principle of “fair use” that might be applicable in such cases. In a 2011 article for the New York Times called “Apropos Appropriation,” Randy Kennedy points out that fair use “gives artists…the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used.” He goes on to quote a law review article making the case that this is especially important “if the new thing ‘adds value to the original’ so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it.”
If all plagiarism could easily be sorted into either Type 1 piracy or Type 2 transformative artistry, taking a stance on it might not be so difficult. But of course, you knew it wouldn’t be that simple, right?

Plagiarism Type 1.5: Somewhere in the Muddle

The year 2010 was notable not only for the release of Shields’s book but also for several less transparent cases of literary plagiarism.
In February of that year, I read in passing about Gerald Posner, a writer for the Daily Beast, who had copped to using other people’s copy in his own news pieces. Posner was suitably (to some) chagrined and was later quoted by Henry Blodgett of Business Insider as having written in his blog: “In the compressed deadlines of the Beast, it now seems certain that those master file[s] were a recipe for disaster for me. It allowed already published sources to get through to a number of my final [sic] and in the quick turnaround I then obviously lost sight of the fact that it belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote.”
Axolotl Roadkill book cover
This is an example of the “accidental plagiarism” excuse—a standard operating statement of respected writers.
A few days after the Posner affair died down, Helene Hegemann, a then-17-year-old German literary sensation, was called out for copying from another source for sections of her book Axolotl Roadkill. As described in a New York Times article, “Author, 17, Says It’s Mixing, Not Plagiarism,” her defense was, essentially, an unabashed, Yeah? So!—which apparently, even two years later, no one knows what to do with.
Hegemann is not some dumb kid who just lucked out. Prior to Axolotl Roadkill, her play Ariel 15 premiered in Berlin and was then adapted for radio. In addition, a screenplay she wrote when she was 14 has been made into a movie, and word is that Axolotl Roadkill is destined for theaters as well. Even with evidence of plagiarism, her novel has been translated into 15 languages.
While Hegemann was being vilified in Germany, Michel Houellebecq, France’s major global literary export, was on the hot seat for copying sections of his newest (and least pornographic) novel, The Map and the Territory, from Wikipedia.
As reported in a September 2010 article in the Independent, “I Stole from Wikipedia but It’s Not Plagiarism, Says Houellebecq,” he eventually explained: “This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors. I have been influenced especially by [Georges] Perec and [Jorge Luis] Borges…I hope that this contributes to the beauty of my books, using this kind of material.” And then he won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize.
Here in the United States, the translation for The Map and the Territory has recently hit the shelves. None of the major reviews I’ve read mention anything about Wikipedia plagiarism.
So…piracy or transformative artistry? Compared to the hack thievery perpetrated by the Amazon erotic-content farmers and the bogus “newspaper” described in “Dude, You Stole My Article,” the artistic larceny performed by these three critically acclaimed writers may seem less severe.
And yet, appropriating someone else’s words the way Gerald Posner, Michel Houellebecq, and Helene Hegemann have done—without acknowledging sources prior to being exposed—can’t really be seen as borrowing for the sake of “fair use.” They have certainly concocted their stories like found-object writers, but, at least on an ethical level, it’s not clear they have added value or transformed the words of others by incorporating them and calling them their own. Whether they’re willing to admit it or not, they simply copied prose to make the writing process easier for themselves.
Was this stealing? I’d say so. But the consequences, at least for Houellebecq and Hegemann, seem to have been minimal.
And that brings us to what is really going on right now: Theft is just a different beast on today’s digital frontier.

Prepare Yourself

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on live Internet feeds worldwide in 2010, it was clear that the digital media world was never going to be the same again. With Publishers Weekly reporting in January of this year that “nearly 1 in 3 Americans now owns a [tablet or digital reading] device,” we are well on our way to a digital business model for all text-based media.
The Map and the Territory book cover
In the wake of this revolution, people are fond of saying that the rules of the publishing industry are changing. The fact is, there are no rules to speak of anymore. Certainly, we still have the traditional model—and a few people continue to benefit from it—but the borders of The Land of Getting Published are now wide open for anyone who wants to put their work out digitally for others to read. And the hard reality is that ownership of text online just isn’t the same as with the hard copy model.
What we send into the liquid electron world is extremely public and profoundly interconnected. Imagine someone in Pakistan taking your blog entries, translating them into Urdu, tinkering a bit with the context, then calling them their own. How can you ever really know what happens to your words once they’re on the Internet?
You can’t. But knowing what could happen—and giving some thought in advance to what you’re comfortable with—can help you be prepared.
If you’re worried about becoming the victim of Type 1 Plagiarism, you can try to foil would-be pirates by choosing a unique sentence from each of your published works and Googling it on a regular basis. If Type 2 Plagiarism, despite its artistry, doesn’t sit well with you, you might brainstorm some ideas for mutually satisfactory arrangements between borrowers and those from whom they borrow. And if you suspect you might have a propensity for committing “accidental” Type 1.5 plagiarism, learn from Gerald Posner and make sure you’re keeping track of quotes from others in your writing files—or else work on your “who cares?” shrug à la Hegemann and Houllebecq.
Be aware, though, that not all exposed literary plagiarists emerge as unscathed as these folks. Lizzie Widdicombe’s February 2012 New Yorker essay, “The Plagiarist’s Tale,” about Quentin Rowan’s initially acclaimed novel Assassin of Secrets, is a powerful cautionary tale. The novel was recalled after it was found to contain many cribbed passages from other spy novels.
“The peculiar thing about Rowan’s case,” Widdicombe notes, “is that he could have obtained a degree of social permission simply by being honest about borrowing from other writers—by doing what Jonathan Lethem did, or by claiming that he was producing a ‘meta’ work.” But Rowan would not have felt comfortable admitting his method because, he told Widdicombe, “I honestly wanted people to think I’d written it.”

Leggo Your Legos

In the end, how comfortable each of us feels about plagiarism seems strongly connected to our sense of ownership toward our work, which is a personal issue for each writer.
Frozen book cover
In “Something Borrowed,” a 2004 New Yorker essay about learning he had been heavily plagiarized, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, wrote: “So is it true that words belong to the person who wrote them, just as other kinds of property belong to their owners?”
Gladwell struggled at first when he learned that big chunks of his journalism had been cribbed into dialogue for a Broadway play called Frozen. However, as he thought through the idea that his words had now been used for something completely different, he realized that “instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause.”
The process of writing this piece has forced me to examine my own feelings about owning my words, and I’ve made a discovery that shocked my copyright-conscious editors (who compel me to point out that my view does not reflect that of Talking Writing): For me, as soon as something is out there in the digital realm, whether a story or a piece of nonfiction journalism, I no longer feel tied to it personally.
I can’t think of what I’ve written as a gift exactly—it’s more a thing I’ve left for people to find in the woods. It’s like when I go out walking with my kids, and we leave a little Lego person standing on a rock or an action figure sitting in a tree. My stories especially feel like that now. I make them available on Amazon for a modest price, and people find them.
Similarly, I now pass on my accumulated knowledge about plagiarists to you, fellow traveler in the digital frontier. Pirates and borrowers, content farmers and transformative artists: They’re all out there, and you may find that awareness useful in your travels. You may decide to take precautions—the digital equivalent of wearing your cash in a money belt tied under your shirt—or you may decide, like me, that you’d rather not be looking over your shoulder all the time.
What matters is that you’re there, in The Land of Getting Published, with readers stretching out as far as your words can reach.

Publishing Information

Image Information
  • The cover image of the June 2008 Montgomery County Bulletin is used to illustrate the alternative newspaper involved in the case described by Slate writer Jody Rosen in “Dude, You Stole My Article.” The low-resolution scan of this image therefore qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. The image was scanned by Slate and reposted on Wikipedia.


Check out the May/June edition of Talking Writing now. The theme is “Creating Worlds.” 


“Beauty and ugliness. Creation and destruction. Freedom and fate.
All artists grapple with these opposing forces when they evoke the world.”

A Thinking Person’s Music: The Mystery of the Loud Guitar

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My new novel, Beyond the Will of God, is intended to remind readers of, or introduce them to, the playful, exotic, and mysterious elements of loud music that I believe we’ve forgotten. Beyond the Will of God seeks to thread the needle between serious mystery and quirky cosmic thriller. It is funky, humorous, and pathetically romantic — the way we used to be back in the day.

The book gets its title from a line in the Jimi Hendrix song, “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be),”:
…And you know good and well
It would be beyond the will of God
And the grace of a king.

In many ways, this story is a murder mystery…but it’s wrapped in the magic of music…and then rolled up into cosmic questions that we used to ask ourselves all the time. What is the relationship between mind and body? What is telepathy? Why is the truth about altered states of consciousness so delicate and hard to understand? Where is the communal power of music coming from? And what about the psychedelic experience and music? Is that magic real? Or just mental dust?

A few weeks before he died, Jimi Hendrix gave an interview in which he talked about his aspirations for the music he wanted to write in the future. He said he wanted his music to change, that it should be about healing and peace, and that music was first and foremost a spiritual tool.

I’ve been struck by that statement ever since I heard it nearly 30 years ago. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the combination of blues, soul, funk, melody, and poetic lyrics were an enormous force of liberation in The Americas (and Great Britain). Whether you listened to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?,” an Allman Brothers instrumental like “Hot ‘Lanta,” “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors, or, say, Jimi’s “Power to Love,” you were moved, you were freed, and you knew you were part of something gargantuan. That gargantuan-ness was best exemplified by the loud guitar.

I don’t want to sound like an old-school prig, but most people don’t feel that way anymore about what they listen to. There’s no question that the music of today is just as good as the music of that bygone era (I love everyone from Global Illage and Citizen Cope to Honey Watts and The Roots). But music used to be at the center of what was once a powerful cultural shift on multiple levels all happening at once — we were waking up to how profoundly powerful the magic of the human mind is. Listening to Marvin Gaye or Pink Floyd or Santana took the heart and the mind of the listener on a trip that was both oddly spiritual and physically alluring. The link between emotion, language, and the body was something we were all really truly committed to understanding…and Experiencing. [Don’t get me wrong here: musicians are still working at this level; trust me, I know many amazing artists. It’s never been about anything but getting to the spinning heart of the magic of the human soul…I’m talking about the rest of us.]

Can you dramatize all of these issues? Can you make a story up that calls the reader to the back fence when everything almost seemed to make sense? Are there still mysteries here worth exploring? How does a writer delve into all of this and leave the mythologies of the past open-ended in a way that still lets the reader bring their own intuitions to the dance?
The only way to find out is to read Beyond the Will of God. Stay tuned and consider buying this e-book when it comes out on June 15. If you don’t have an e-reader, you can download Kindle for the Mac and Kindle for Windows. Just go here: Kindle Apps

Or use this as your excuse to buy a new iPad or Kindle. You know you want one.

Remember, June 15 is the release date at the Kindle Store. It will be interesting summer reading.

And for those who know what they’re doing, if you send me your Kindle email address (found in your Amazon account in the “Manage Your Kindle” then “Manage Your Devices” section), I will forward you an advance copy of Beyond the Will of God at no charge. This offer is good through June 14. All I ask is that you let people know about this book, and/or that you review it at Amazon after June 15th.

-dcb

33 1/3: Real Books About Music

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Hopefully, a lot of you are thinking about the future of paper books these days. Books are objects. E-Books aren’t (although the iPad and the Kindle reader, and many other electronic tablet type thingies, are pretty amazing pieces of technology).

There’s just no question that digital text is going to have a massive impact on the publishing world’s business planning for the next decade. It seems pretty clear that paper-based books are going to shift in significance for people. By that I mean they’re going to become more valuable and more meaningful — although, it’s likely that sales will be dwarfed by e-books.

I predict that you’re not going to be able to find 1st-Run books in paper form at bookstores and libraries by 2020, but once a book “proves” itself in the marketplace (electronically), you’re going to be able to buy it as a hard copy in real space. 
You’re going to have two options: 
1) a print-on-demand (POD) edition that may or may not be high quality (click here to read an article on a POD system called “The Espresso Book Machine”) 
2) a limited edition, special run of a book. Pricing for these efforts will be easier and more predictable if the book shows it can sell. 
My guess is people will be willing to pay more than the $9.99 standard e-book price for stuff they really love. More importantly, buying a $35 hard copy book as a gift seems to me a very powerful trend opportunity. Yes, I know we already do that, but pretty soon it could be a much stronger statement of friendship and love and esteem. “Oh, my God, you bought me a hardback copy of 50 Shades of Grey? Oh, my God! You are going to get lucky tonight…after I finish reading again.” See what I mean?).
There are also going to be lots of niche paperbound book offerings, without doubt — from poetry to anthologies to classics (like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough). In addition, the shift in value of paper-based books could very likely spawn new and creative offerings from entrepreneurial new publishers who understand that books are art again.

The most interesting enterprise I’ve come across recently is 33 1/3 (originally run by Continuum and recently purchased by Bloomsbury). 33 1/3 is a publishing venture that produces monograph/creative books about great vinyl music albums of the past. One of their latest efforts is penned by Jonathan Lethem about the Talking Heads’ revolutionary album “Fear of Music.” Check out an intriguing review of this book at The Millions here.
33 1/3 is working on their 87th book in the series now.  They cover everything from Pink Floyd’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” to “Zaareika” by The Flaming Lips, and U2’s “Achtung Baby.” These books are each printed in lots of a few thousand and possess all the valence of the albums they represent. Typically, they sell for $15. Personally, I think they could jack the price another $10 and more people would buy them. They’re artifacts. Very soon we will see them as works of art again. Won’t that be a wonderful world? 

Global illage: Music to Drift into the Wilderness With

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes you are blessed with good friends who have so much artistic talent they inspire the hell out of you. As I work through final edits and publication formatting for Beyond the Will of God, I have the privilege of listening to some of the most interesting music I’ve heard in a long time. My good friend Jim Hamilton, percussionist extraordinaire (a big-time student of Brazilian rhythm of all kinds), has provided me with a rough cut of extended compositions by an iteration (or something) of his electro-trip-jazz band GLOBAL iLLAGE.

Rest assured, if you pay attention, the most amazing music you will ever hear is yet to come.

I have no idea when these tracks will find their way into finished form, but you really need to be on the lookout for this album. It’s establishing one helluva supreme manifestation in my head. My novel Beyond the Will of God, is all about the transformative, transcendent power of music. It is a murder mystery wrapped up in a music mystery wrapped up in a set of cosmic questions. (And, yes, you forgot about those questions, I know, but they still require an answer!) That’s what this music is all about (except the murder).

So, I’m listening right now to some of the best free-form, swirling, groove beat, wilderness-inducing music I’ve heard since their first album, “SushiLove Sessions.” I’m kind of afraid to put on headphones and crank this stuff. Our house might float away…. 

The SushiLove Sessions was my go-to CD (a double disc tour de force) back in the early Naughts as I finished the second round of revisions to Beyond the Will of God and a teaser story called “The Significance of Music: The Egg Journals.” Sushi has an “ill side” and a “chill side.” They’re both right up there with my favorite intelligent music of all time. 
What comes to mind listening to the Global dudes is Weather Report, Miles Davis, Don Cherry, and Mahavishnu Orchestra all squeezed into a 21st Century Zip-Lock Baggie full of sparkling Brazilian and African World Rhythm served up through very loving, gentle melodic riffs that are actually surprisingly soulful and inventive all at once. This is dance music as tripped-out and far-fetched as anything you’ve ever heard, but joyous, full spirited and extremely touching in parts — and insanely wild in others. 
You can find out more about SushiLove Sessions, here. You can also track it down on either CD Baby, or iTunes. Buy it and listen to it when the sun goes down…or just before the sun comes up. I will try to keep you posted on when this next album is coming out. It’s amazing.
-DCB

Conspiracy Theory and The Near Future

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

A book announcement.

The 1970s were the pinnacle years for conspiracy theories in America. Uncertainties about JFK’s assassination got things rolling in the 1960s, but the stories got weirder and weirder the more we watched our great cultural heroes pass on into death well before their time — Kerouac, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, MLK, Jr., even Elvis — to name just a few.

For years it was said that no one ever saw The Doors’ Jim Morrison’s body after he died and that his grave in Paris was empty. 

Conspiracy theorists had a field day when evidence of CIA misdeeds came to light during the Church Committee Hearings. No one had ever heard of Remote Viewing. The experiments performed by various military and CIA intelligence units on unwitting citizens using psychedelic drugs seemed like proof that the mysteries of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin were more than psychological fancy. 
As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s & 1990s, abandoned missile silos throughout the prairie belt of the US became decommissioned and old school Cold War paranoids became convinced the military was up to something far more dangerous than nuclear missiles. And then there were all the stories about secret “black helicopters” and paramilitary militia groups, bolstered by the realities of the Reverend Jim Jones, David Koresh, and other fanatic cult groups. 
My new novel, Beyond the Will of God, playfully links a good portion of these tantalizing “theories” together. Imagine as well that something far more important is at the root of what’s really been going on. Somewhere in the heart of central Missouri in the near future, mysterious music will filter through night darkened farmland. The dead body of an Amish teenager will launch a police investigation that leads to a great deal more than a simple homicide. Elvis will be seen roaming the countryside. A young, drug-addled clairvoyant will arrive in the area, confused about some odd power that improvisational psychedelic music has over human consciousness. The Sumter brothers and their unofficial militia group are also somehow involved.

Police Sergeant Jill Simpson teams up with Philadelphia tabloid reporter Franklin Harris to tie all of these issues together. These mysteries play out amidst the dense heat of rural central Missouri and on the edges of the almost forgotten city of Columbia. Secrets are revealed about the supposed doors of perception and the limits of expanded consciousness.

If you are looking for summer reading that is fun and thought provoking and far beyond the usual, this book is worth the read. I think of Beyond the Will of God as sort of a fairytale for Baby Boomers and other people who “get it.” It’s part thriller, part mystery, part science fiction, part paranormal speculation.

Publication is scheduled for June 15 at Amazon’s Kindle Store. Contact me if you’d like an advance digital copy (available by June 1). Just email me david.c.biddle@gmail.com and I will forward you a digital copy for your iPad, Kindle, Nook or most anything else.

See the top of the page to sign up for email updates regarding Beyond the Will of God and other stuff I’m working on.

And, lastly, for what it’s worth, please forward the link for this announcement to those who might be interested. Believe it or not, all the marketing studies out there say that word-of-mouth is the most effective way to sell books. I’m an independent writer. I need your help. Post the link on your FaceBook Page, email it to friends, Tweet it, whatever makes sense. I am Grateful!

-dcb

Our Real Great American Novelist

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

We’ve been reading a great deal lately about the issue of gender preference in the publishing world. More than anything, the proclamation a few years back that Jonathan Franzen had written the new Great American Novel (complete with JonnieFranz’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine) really upset a lot of people. Probably the most cogent questioning of this issue came in the form of an essay by Gabriel Brownstein at The Millions comparing Franzen and his book Freedom to Allegra Goodman and her book The Cookbook Collector. Read this excellent piece here.

There’s been a good amount of hand wringing on this topic too for years — mostly by women. I think they have a point. It’s not clear to me what is going on in the media world with the need to anoint a book as the next great American novel. Partly, I suppose, arguments against novels have been a mainstream occupation of contrarians and critics now for decades.  Anytime a big, sweeping book like Freedom or Don Delillo’s Underworld comes out those who are pro-novel in the publishing world (i.e., people who make their living funding novels) can’t help themselves. The fact that men seem to be the ones who supposedly write these great American novels is as much a “book-as-phallus” issue as it is anything else. 
But something that bothers me in all these debates is that many people seem to miss the fact that only one American writer has won the Nobel Prize since Saul Bellow won it in 1976. That American has written a number of great American novels. This spring she will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has also had to grapple with being categorized as a Black Woman Author, a Female Author, and a Black Female Author. She is, of course, Toni Morrison (who has also been on many magazine covers in her day). Her books obviously tell the story of the African American experience in the New World, but that story is in many ways all of our stories. She writes of love and revenge and lust and family turmoil, the urge to create, succeed, destroy, and kill. In this land of free willed creatures, those are certainly traits of great American stories.
More than anything, at least from what I have read of hers, Morrison shows the heroism of people (usually women) rising above the difficulties of circumstance and even the horrors and atrocities of life. Too often novelists of today get by with characters nobly accepting their circumstances or tragically being the source of their own ruination. Morrison usually steps far beyond acceptance and making peace with life. More than anything, it seems to me, what is required of a Great Writer of any kind is the ability to show us what it means to be Great in Life and to be part of this Great Country that continues to blow open the doors of history.
Photo from Guardian click here for article
The more I think about this issue of Greatness and the question of what it is that defines Great Art, I can’t help myself in the conclusion that Toni Morrison is truly our Great American Novelist. Books like Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz aren’t simple little entertainments.  
For those of us who care about books and stories — and the novel — we need to think more about emulating and learning from this great poet and creator and less about arguing whether men or women should get credit for defining things here in our times. 
Congratulations Ms. Morrison on your latest award. Please let us know when you’re coming out with your next work.  

Experiments in Kindle Consciousness: The Plasticity of Digital Indie Writing

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

I recently received two reader reviews on stories of mine available at Amazon’s Kindle Store. Both reviewers were rather unhappy. That’s fine. I know that fiction, like most everything else, is a matter of taste. Not everyone is going to like everything they encounter in life — from movies to food to music.

The experience of bad (sad?) reviews got me thinking about the Indie Author Experience and how different it is from the status quo, old school legacy publisher experience. As an indie writer I can edit and change my stories in a matter of a few hours and have them re-posted by the next day. Writers beholden to old school publishing houses (even small independent ones) are locked into their published content — even electronically — for a very long time. The process of bringing a novel or memoir or whatever to publication requires the extended efforts of many different people (a team, really) over a year to eighteen months…or more. Once a product is deemed complete, it goes out to the world and it’s pretty hard to change even if you’re lucky enough to publish multiple editions over the years. As an indie author it’s a heckuvalot easier to re-tool and re-vise. 
Thus, if a reviewer doesn’t like the ending of my story “House Sitting,” I can go back in and juice it up with an unexpected suicide, hot erotic encounter, or perhaps an amusing culinary domestic roadkill experience. Likewise, if reviewers don’t like the idea of creepy men going through laundry looking for a neighbors’ unmentionables, I can just censor that aspect of the story and offer an excised version that is more palatable for at least those who have taken the time to offer a review. In theory, multiple versions of an Indie story can be posted. If you think about it very long, the permutations here are endless.
However, in the legacy publishing world, none of those permutations make any sense at all. When you buy a book published by [name your well-known company] — whether on paper or digitally — you get what you get. In the movie world you might be able to get the “Director’s Cut” after a first run, but it’s rare to find a “writer’s edition” in the book world. This limitation is actually a function of what I think of as “the book as property.” I’m not going to get into it here, but digital offerings are something far different than property as we know it. The best term we might be able to come up with is “virtual property,” but I don’t think that really addresses what’s going on. The very malleability of an independently published text means that writers can treat their work more as a word sculpture that they’re working on while standing in a quasi-public square.   
Rest assured, I have not changed a thing with “House Sitting.” The story is what it is because that’s the way it was written and I’m very happy with what it says. Nor have I done anything with “Guda and His Son” because in a very few words I think that story says a great deal about cultural perception and 9/11. 
However, in pondering this whole issue — let’s call it the plasticity of digital indie writing — I realized that I have never liked the ending of “Jenna’s Mother.” It was just too abrupt and tone deaf. A new version has been posted this week. I like it much more and it says what I wanted the story to say much more definitively. In re-writing the ending, I also found several elements to the piece that required copy-editing and word changes. “Jenna’s Mother” is now better. The reading experience should be superior because of that. 
I offer all of this as a set of observations on how the Indie experience is different both for writers and readers — potentially, anyway. As the new world of publishing continues to develop, differences like this can and should be experimented with continually by both entities in the equation. 
In closing, it is important to note that the quality control issue for Indie publications is an obvious problem on many different levels. Better put, the quality control that traditional legacy publishers invest in each work offered in their name is exceedingly important. Forget grammar, punctuation, typos and wording, editors and their staff often turn raw talent into masterful stars and refine loose drafts and 2,000 page manuscripts into gems that transform culture.

I don’t think it makes sense yet to say that digital Indie books are taking over and that the old school folks are toast (or wadded up paper). There is room for both approaches for sure. And you as a reader should take both seriously. However, it is important to understand that there is virtually nothing buffering the relationship between Indie Writers and their readers. The plasticity of digital media is a profoundly new and powerful opportunity that allows writers and readers to connect and modify the world of letters in a new and exciting way. Readers should remember that they are supporting writers directly and that the works they buy are much more real and raw than what they might get through standard publishing venues.

There’s no telling how this is all going to end up for all of us, but it’s clear that the new world of digital publishing is so open-ended and filled with potential readers and writers are in for an interesting ride as we move through the next decade. Stay tuned…and if you haven’t yet purchased a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or whatever, now’s the time. Things are getting very interesting…

What is Beyond the Will of God? (contains a full prologue excerpt)

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment


And they also threw this in my face, they said,
Anyway, you know good and well
It would be beyond the will of God
And the grace of a king.

– Jimi Hendrix, “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”

Beyond the Will of God is a mystery coming out in Summer 2012. It ain’t your run of the mill whodunit, though. Somehow everyone forgot all those conspiracy theories and weird coincidences that kept popping up in the late Sixties and all through the Seventies. More than anything, the music of folks like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and The Allman Brothers (even The Beatles and Elvis if you were paying attention) spoke to something deep and wild in each of us. Do you remember?

Beyond the Will of God brings you back to that place, and offers a great deal of whacky ideas and provocative characters all related to a series of murders that take place in central Missouri during the heat of summer when the insects are buzzing and the air is thick with possibility once again.
Here’s how the book opens:
Prologue
  
Journal Entry 1397: Cecil Miller
I found it on a number of bootleg recordings first, but there are a few examples of it on studio works as well – all from groups who understand what is possible. On the live recordings, you hear it best. There’s a certain moment where something happens with the music and everything comes together. You have to know what to listen for, though, or you won’t experience it.

>snip<
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I was required to delete the rest of this prologue due to my agreement with Amazon in their KDP Select program. For what it’s worth, buy the book. It’s worth it. Just click the cover near the top of the page and you’ll be taken to the Amazon page.

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This novel will be independently published through Amazon’s Kindle system over the summer and then more widely distributed in the Fall. If all is successful, a paper print version will be ready by Christmas. You can still buy Kindle books and read them on your computer or iPad or smartphone. Check out Amazon’s Free Apps online.


Go to the top of this page to subscribe to this blog, or come back weekly for more information and more excerpts and more…

“Something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you? Mr. Jones.”
-DB

Thoughts on Story Pricing: Trying to Care

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been experimenting with the pricing of my Kindle stories this past month. My book of short stories (Trying to Care) is currently for sale through the Kindle Publishing Direct system. The collection is written for people interested in questions of marital fidelity, mature love, and caring for family members at many stages of life. The title story is about a guy who watches his mother on closed-circuit video instead of visiting her at her senior housing complex. There’s a story about a husband who thinks his wife murdered the family pet; another about weirdness taking care of the neighbor’s house; and then others about love and quitting cigarettes, visiting a mom in high rise housing, and a Pakistani father and son working at a gas station on 9/11.

Each of the six stories can be purchased separately for $0.99 just like a basic song on iTunes. Originally, I’d intended to make just four stories available separately. If you wanted all six you could by the book for $2.99. That’s a decent deal. However, I have been paying careful attention to pricing scales that other more seasoned indie writers recommend. A collection of short stories like mine is more reasonably priced at $4.99 – $5.99. I chose to price it at $4.99. I also ended up posting all six of the stories at $0.99. You can find everything at my author page by clicking here.

All of this is experimental. A lot of folks on Kindle aren’t posting short stories to the extent that I am. Not a lot of writers seem to see the $0.99 option as a meaningful pricing model. Makes total sense to me, though, so I’m keeping it for the moment (even though a lot of iTunes songs are now $1.29). In fact, I’d say that one of the amazing advantages of this new digital publishing world is that writers can in fact publish short singles (fiction or non-fiction) at a very modest price. We don’t get much by way of royalties this way, but the idea, obviously, is depending on volume.
Today, in the interest of further experimentation, I’ve now dropped the price of Trying to Care the book, to $3.99. The logic is that at $4.99 you only save about a dollar off of buying all six stories. So, if you bought one story as a single and then decided you wanted the entire collection, you wouldn’t save anything at all. At $3.99 you save two bucks and hopefully would buy the collection after reading a single knowing that you still save money. I probably should just publish four stories and keep things at $4.99, but we’ll see what happens with a $3.99 set for the next few months.
If you’re interested in reading good, non-linear fiction with attention to character, emotions, and the meaning of relationships (and the confusion of being a real person in the world), you should check out these stories. They’re not your run-of-the-mill anything…and I’ve made sure they are well-edited.
While a Kindle or iPad is highly recommended, you can also download Amazon’s computer reading software for either Windows or Macintosh. They’ve got smartphone apps too…Go here for all the apps that’s fit to download.
Whether you buy my stuff or other indie writers work, know that you are supporting committed and thoughtful writers working hard to provide readers with quality stories. Any feedback you may have, please send it my way.
Happy reading…