My awesome publisher, Permuted Press, is having a Black December Sale. You can get tons of great horror titles for super cheap–or free.
Including my novel, THE HOLE, which is just $2.99 as an ebook all this month.
So check it out. And download some free books.
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I’m super thrilled to announce that THE HOLE is now available as a wonderfully narrated audiobook from Audible! What’s more, you can get it completely free!
To get the book for free, all you need to do is sign up for an Audible trial membership. That comes with one free book (which rather obviously ought to be THE HOLE). Download your book, cancel the membership, and keep the book. Easy and you don’t pay a thing. (Though if you like Audible–and you should because they’re great–then keep the membership and support them so they can do more of my books in the future.)
My novel benefits greatly from the terrific narration of Mark Boyett. I was completely out of the loop when it came to production, so I had no idea who’d be reading it until the finish product popped up on Audible’s site.
Lucky for me, Boyett is perfect. He nails the book’s tone and brings Elliot and Evajean to life. Interestingly–to me, at least–he brings them to life every-so-slightly differently than I imagined them. Elliot is less sure of himself by a tad than I’d thought him. Evajean is quieter. But it works. Really well.
In fact, my only complaint (and it’s the kind that’ll bother me and probably nobody else) is that Boyett pronounces her name “Eve-a-jean.” In my head, she’s “Eh-vah-jean.” So there you go.
Anyway, I love it. And I’m sure you will, too. Given how much better Boyett’s reading makes my prose sound, I now consider the audiobook the definitive version of THE HOLE.
So what are you waiting for? Go get it.
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Facebook’s new “frictionless sharing” has the Internet in a tizzy. Even lawmakers are piling on.
The basic idea is this: It used to be if you wanted to, say, share the song you’re listening to into your Facebook account, you had to click on it and tell the program to “Share.” You had to take action. Frictionless sharing changes that. Now, you can give a music-streaming service like Spotify permission to automatically share everything you’re listening to, in real time, to you Facebook friends. Of course, Facebook gives you a great deal of control over who can actually see it–and you can turn it off on an app-by-app basis at any time.
(For example, I have Spotify setup to share my listening habits, but in such a way that only I can see them. So I get the benefits of the cool pattern recognition and timeline features, without having to tell all the world what songs I dig.)
People are, in general, reacting pretty negatively to this. (Or, at least, the most vocal people are reacting negatively.) However, in doing so, they’re often confusing two distinct criticisms of frictionless sharing. One is that it’s silly. The other is that it’s wrong.
Frictionless sharing is silly.
When I first heard Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announce the feature, that’s exactly what I thought, too. Who is this thing for? I simply don’t care enough about the musical tastes or cooking choices of my friends (let alone my acquaintances) to want to see what they’re listening to or eating in real time.
Parents used to complain about how much their teenagers were always on the phone. Now it’s texting. But the underlying social urge is the same: Teens can’t get enough of each other. They’re all, “OMG! Did you hear what so-and-so did? I know, right?” Ubiquitous social content is the bread and butter of 13 year old girls.
Still, most of Facebook’s users are adults–and adults are content to get all the juicy details about their friends rather less often.
So it’s not immediately clear who this feature is for–other than, of course, Facebook and its advertisers. Which makes it appear, from the user’s perspective, downright silly. Except that the user’s mistaken. Frictionless sharing definitely is for Facebook and its advertisers. But it’s also for you.
But is frictionless sharing also wrong?
If frictionless sharing is just silly, then it’s easy to ignore. But if it’s wrong–like in the sense of ethically not-good-at-all–then we have more reason for concern.
So what’s wrong with it? There’s the privacy problems, of course. If you’re broadcasting everything you listen to, then you better be certain you don’t have any guilty pleasures. But this is easily fixed: either only make shared data visible to yourself or don’t allow sharing in the first place. Yes, Facebook’s privacy controls can be confusing, but the recent updates actually allow application developers to make the pop-up permissions request box more clear than it was before.
Your privacy isn’t really the root of the “it’s wrong” concern, however. You have control of that. What you don’t have control over is how Facebook uses the data it does collect about you. Call this the “You’re the product, not the customer!” argument.
To make money (Zuckerberg is in business, after all), Facebook could charge its users. At perhaps $10 a month, even if only 100,000,000 of them stick around, that’s still a billion bucks a month. Not too shabby. But Facebook doesn’t charge. From the user’s perspective, Facebook is free–and will stay that way.
What Facebook does instead is sell advertising, giving over a portion of each page to third-party marketers hawking their wares to Facebook’s enormous user base. And to do this–or, at least, to do it well–they need data. About you.
Advertising’s only annoying when it sucks.
We all claim to hate advertising. Except that we really don’t. What we hate is advertising we’re not interested in. If I pick up a copy of Better Homes and Gardens and flip through it, what I find are pages and pages of awful, annoying ads. Call these “spam.”
Back in middle school, though, when I grabbed a copy of Dragon Magazine, the Dungeons & Dragons periodical, off the shelf in the school library, I didn’t see those adverts as spam. No, they were cool. Informative. They were content.
The difference, obviously, is that Better Homes and Gardens is filled with ads for products I don’t care about. Dragon, on the other hand, featured ads telling me about things I actually wanted.
And that’s where Facebook’s data comes in. Facebook needs to gather data if its advertisers are going to give me Dragon ads (content) instead of Better Homes and Gardens ones (spam). In fact, the more data Facebook has about me, the more likely I am to see the ads as content instead of spam.
This is what frictionless sharing does. It’s also the answer to the “What’s in it for me?” question. Frictionless sharing lets Facebook improve my experience on its site by increasing the quality of the ads it serves to me. This is a win for its advertisers (they’re more likely to get a new customer), a win for Facebook (it can charge more for the ad space), and a win for me (I like learning about new products I actually want and enjoy).
This is why it seems so odd when people get upset at customer data gathering in general. If that data’s being used in a dangerous way, then there’s cause for concern. Obviously. But the reason Facebook wants that data is not to hurt me or you. It’s to make our Facebook experience better.
And, hey, you can always just turn it off.
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This review made my day. Here’s a taste:
THE HOLE is somewhat reminiscent of some Stephen King books. I’m not talking about the story itself, rather, how everything unfolds. There is a strong supernatural element to this book. If it weren’t written so well I might have found myself not believing it, but as the case is, POWELL is an excellent writer and ties everything in nicely. As well, it has a strong religious undertone that you won’t find out about until near the end. In no way, shape or form, is this book preaching anything, so don’t let that deter you. It just sets the pace for an entertaining read.
That last bit is particularly nice to hear. One of my concerns with THE HOLE (and as a first-time novelist, I have a lot of them) was that the religious elements would mean it’d be mistaken for a religious book. And it’s decidedly not. Yes, it has to do with the Mormon religion, but THE HOLE is in no way a Frank Peretti-style, Gospel-promoting, Christian-bookstore tale.
Anyway, Michael S. Gardner has a lot more to say in his really-very-kind review over at Living Dead Corner. I encourage you to read all of it.
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THE HOLE has appeared in the Kindle store! So if you’ve got a Kindle, you can head over and pick it up for just $9.99.
The print edition should be available on Amazon, B&N, and in stores on August 16th. You can already preorder it from B&N and Amazon will have it up soon.
And please, wherever you buy it from, go and leave a review.
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Coming in August. Here’s the full thing, uncropped:
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This book is too long.
E-book prices appear to be in a race to the bottom. When Amazon first opened its Kindle store, it priced most bestsellers at $9.99. Big publishers fought for higher prices, both to put more money in their pockets and to prevent “devaluing” books. But authors went the other direction. As David Carnoy explained in a recent article for CNET, “Just last year, the magic price point for a lot of indie (self-published) authors was $2.99.” Even this puny price–just a third what many mass-market paperbacks cost–didn’t last. Carnoy goes on, “But then something happened on the the way to the check-out cart. Some authors started saying, ‘Screw it, I’m not selling that much at $2.99, I’ll just go to 99 cents and see what happens.’ And bam, some of these books took off. And some really took off.”
Will Someone Not Think of the Authors?
This incredible shrinking price has provoked genuine questions about the future of the book, however. Today, a new fiction hardcover retails for around $30. Amazon discounts that, as do many bookstores, but even the discounted price far exceeds $0.99. Authors happily put in the long, long hours it takes to write a novel in exchange for their (surprisingly small) cut of $30. (“Surprisingly small” typically meaning somewhere between 10% and 15%, or $3 to $4.50.) Earning $3 for each copy sold without doubt beats the 29 cents Amazon gives an author when his book sells for $0.99.
The result of these one-tenth royalties, the worry goes, is fewer books. Who wants to put in the long, long hours it takes to write a novel if you’re only going to pocket a little more than a quarter each time someone reads it? (At $2.99, Amazon’s kickback to the author jumps to $2, which looks a whole lot better–and a whole lot closer to print book rates.)
Let’s set aside the reasonable counter that, at $0.99 (or even at $2.99), readers are likely to buy quite a few more novels than they did at $9.99 or $30. After all, no matter what the price, people only have so many hours in the day to read. It’s also why I believe $0.99 novels won’t mean fewer novels. Instead, $0.99 novels will mean shorter novels.
And that’s a very good thing.
Most Books are Too Long
Ed McBain’s first 87th Precinct novel, Cop Hater, publish in 1956, ran 166 pages. A decade later, in 1968, McBain published Fuzz, at 288 pages. By 1989, with Lullaby, the page count ballooned to 432. The length of McBain’s work fluctuated, but never settled to anything approaching Cop Hater’s sub-200.
Elmore Leonard’s famous 1961 novel, Hombre, runs a mere 208 pages. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is only 217 pages, while Raymond Chandler’s classic, The Big Sleep, is only 139. Would any of these giants of fiction been better longer?
These books are just right.
A place exists for long books, of course. Sticking with the crime genre, James Ellroy’s magisterial L.A. Confidential is 512 pages, without an ounce of fat. (The novel’s famously spare prose style in fact resulted from his publisher telling Ellroy that the original manuscript was far too long, Ellroy said to me at a book signing once. Ellroy went back and removed every unnecessary word, so as to bring the length down without impacting the labyrinthine plot.) Long novels can develop character and setting and mood in a way short novels often can’t. Long novels can, in that sense, be richer than their shorter peers.
But most authors don’t write rich novels. And most novels need not be rich. The bulk of fiction is not Charles Dickens or Marcel Proust, nor should it be. The bulk of fiction is story and stories frequently are better shorter. Infinite Jest (1104 pages) is great, but an armful of books like that would make any of us long for And Then There Were None (272 pages).
In Praise of Short Books
Few people walk out in the middle of a movie, even if it’s rather bad. Few of us will drop a novel once we’re more than a third in, even if the prose is miserable. We engage in such irrational behavior not because we’re crazy or because we don’t understand sunk costs. Rather, we stick with mediocre (or worse) storytelling because we want to know how the story ends.
In this way, long novels ask a great deal of their readers. If the novel is wonderful, the extra time the author demands will be repaid with dividends when the final page is reached. But most novels aren’t wonderful and almost all of us can think of several books we finished and thought, “That was okay or even pretty good, but it could’ve been half that long.”
The simple fact is that most novels are too long. We authors could learn a lot from the masters of the pulps, who churned out tale after rip-roaring tale, offering huge entertainment in very small packages. We may think our opus is worthy of 700 pages, but it’s probably not. And a 700 page book means asking our readers to forgo the other 350 page book they could’ve read if ours had been half as long. Or the two-and-a-half other books they could’ve read if novels averaged a reasonable 200 pages.
Cheaper Books are Shorter Books
That’s exactly what I predict will result from the price of novels dropping to a buck. Authors won’t give up writing (if we did it to get rich, few of us would be writing today, anyway). Rather, seeing that they’ll only earn a quarter for every sale will make writers look at their works not as monuments it took them ten years to craft and so it better take the reader that much time to appreciate. Instead, authors will shift back into the pulp mindset, seeing their books as stories to be written quickly for maximum entertainment, before moving on to the next.
In an ideal world, novels would settle into a happy length of around 50,000 words–or a little over 150 pages. That’s more than enough space to tell most stories.
And it’s short enough that readers can finish it quickly and move on to the author’s next 50,000 word, 99 cent pageturner.
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Among some philosophers of the left, a popular heuristic for both critiquing existing social and political frameworks as well as proposing new ones is the ability of “the people” to define and shape their lives and their shared conception of the good. This is contrasted with the market, which is seen as atomistic, selfish, and prone to manipulation by small classes of powerful and wealthy actors. If only we could have more of a say in way our lives are lived, they argue, we could get past such horribles as poverty, racism, sexism, and consumerism.
What’s needed is more democracy. Democracy is the very embodiment of the people’s will. If we want more of that will reflected in our institutions, democracy is how to achieve it. Democracy is America’s great civil religion. Our politicians love pointing out that their pet policies represent “the will of the American people” or “what the people want.” But is democracy always and everywhere a good thing? And is it an end in itself? Is democracy a primary good?
A great deal of political rhetoric says yes. Much crude communitarian thinking, for instance, seeks only to maximize how many decisions are made collectively. Participatory economics (“parecon” to its fans) would have us turn over all questions of production to hierarchies of citizen councils, each voting on what kinds of shoes to make and, presumably, whether to manufacture iPods or Zunes.
Lost in this rush to promote democracy-for-the-sake-of-democracy is the crucial question of what, exactly, democracy’s good for. This means answering not one question, but two. First, if we are want to make a given decision politically, what’s the best way to do that? The answer to this one’s easy for democracy fetishists: Democratically! But the second question, if we’re honest with ourselves, is a little more difficult: What sorts of decisions should be made politically?
I’ve lost track of the number of classroom discussions I had during my undergraduate and law school years that saw the students, at the prompting of the professor, advocating popular control over this or that. We need to take power away from the corporations, the wealthy, the elite, and give it back to the people. If only the people could decide, we’d forever ameliorate life’s slings and arrows. But what I don’t recall is much of any talk about whether all these decisions–family structure, organic food, shoes, iPods, or Zunes–ought to be made by the people. The people, after all, means a majority, which means “made by the people” really entails some forcing their will upon others. (If everyone agreed, there’d be no need to vote because people would already be doing what we hoped to vote for.)
In fact, on those occasions when I raised the second question–”Which decisions ought to be made politically?”–I’d often get a quite interesting response. It wasn’t “all of them” or even a qualified “some of them.” Rather, professors would dispute the very coherence of question itself. Why? Because there are no decisions that aren’t political. Everything is politics and so everything is a political decision. And if every decision is a political decision, then asking which decisions should be political is as downright strange as asking which decisions are decisions. Within this ontology, it’s easy to then get to democracy as an end in itself.
Except that nobody really believes the conclusion of that line of thinking. If all decisions are political decisions and all political decisions should be made democratically, then it follows that all decisions should be made democratically. Which, I feel comfortable repeating, no one believes.
If democratic decisions always produce the right results, then democratic decision-making is always best. But majority voting obviously won’t always produce the best results. Majorities can hate minorities and want to deprive them of property, liberty, and life. What the democracy-über-alles folks really mean, then, is that democracy–true democracy–will always produce the results the democracy-über-alles proponents support. If the majority votes for something abhorrent, then it isn’t that democracy has led to a bad result but that democracy was prevented–by some nefarious agent–from properly functioning. (In other words, the people didn’t actually want what the people voted for.) Thus we can only ever know if democracy is really, truly working the way it’s supposed to by looking at the results and matching them to our own, intuitive (and often unprincipled) sense of what’s right and wrong.
The person who answers that all decisions are political decisions and thus ought to be made democratically, then, is making a simple error. He’s equating ”democracy” with “my own views.” He’s falling prey to an aspect of the politics of taste.
Democracy is not a primary good. It is not the means to answer all political and economic decisions. Democracy is a valuable method for often getting at the “right” answer to many–or even most–kinds of political questions. But we should always remember that democracy means forcing the will of some upon others and making collectively those decisions that might better be made individually. In this way, it often clashes with autonomy and treats (many) individuals as means, not ends.
For any given decision–about how to structure our lives, how to relate to one another, how and what to pay for or support–we shouldn’t rush to vote. Rather, we should ask whether some people should have any right to make this decision for others.
Democracy’s good for a lot–but there’s a lot democracy isn’t good for.
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Here’s some questions of taste: Do you like smoking? Do you smoke yourself? Does it bother you when others do it? Do you like bicycling? Or do you wish all those hippies on bikes would get out of the road?
Now here are two questions of politics: Should we ban smoking, even in private restaurants and bars? Should we build more bike lanes?
It’s quite obvious that if we tallied up answers to the first set of questions and compared them to the second, we’d find a high degree of overlap. People who like smoking will oppose smoking bans. People who can’t stand bicycling will vote against bike lanes and other “pedestrian-friendly” policies.
These relationships extend throughout the political sphere. Foodies want to prohibit soda machines and force inner-city grocery stores to carry more vegetables. Urban-living aficionados want to build rail lines and end subsidies that make living in suburbia cheaper. Music-lovers want funding for public school music programs, while artists think kids should spend more time in school painting.
Many, if not most, political disagreements are not, in fact, the result of differing ideologies or interpretations of the facts. Instead, they are matters of personal preferences masquerading as policy issues. They are questions of taste thrust into the realm of the political.
This “politics of taste” can be found everywhere, even though advocates of it rarely admit that’s what they’re doing. The foodie doesn’t push for fresh vegetables by saying, “I like the taste of vegetables and so think everyone should eat more of them.” Instead, he offers policy arguments about nutrition or sustainability. Most importantly, politics-of-tasters discount the extent to which tastes genuinely differ.
Stripped of specifics, the basic politics of taste argument looks like this:
Some people say they prefer Y over X. I am smart and well-informed and free from nefarious influence, and I prefer X over Y. Thus all people who are smart and well-informed and free from nefarious influence will also prefer X over Y. Therefore, anyone who chooses Y must be stupid, ignorant, or under the influence of nefarious agents. In other words, anyone who would choose Y isn’t in the proper mental state to make good choices. Given all that, I should use the political process to choose for them, giving them X, even though they (say they) prefer Y.
Notice the use of “choose” instead of “prefer” in the sentence about other people. That’s important. Key to the politics of taste is the idea that other people really prefer the same things I prefer. However, for reasons having to do with ignorance or immorality or indoctrination, they are lead to choose that which they don’t prefer.
But what if the political process–an election, say–results in Y winning out over X? What if democracy leads to policies that run counter to my (enlightened, informed, obviously-correct) tastes? Well, then there must be something wrong with the process. It wasn’t truly democratic. Too much money in politics, the influence of labor unions, fear of reprisal by bosses or family members, or “false consciousness” have lead everyone who voted for Y to vote against their genuine interests. Obviously, the only thing to do is to fix those systemic errors in the political system and assure that, in the future, the obviously-better X wins out over the obviously-inferior Y.
The politics of taste coupled with politics as moral posturing is the chief cause of the unproductiveness of much political debate. If we want fecund debate, we need to understand the best arguments for opposing views and critically evaluate our own positions.
But when politics are really a matter of personal tastes and when we invest our political views with undue moral weight, we end up with little reason to understand the arguments of others or to doubt our own political stance.
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You hold your political beliefs because they’re correct, of course. If only other people would look at the evidence—really look at it—they’d find that it supports your position. If only they’d follow reasonable lines of thought to their unbiased conclusion, they’d find that you’ve been right all along.
Of course, this is what you believe about yourself. Other people—those blow-hards, bleeding hearts, or extremist loonies—who don’t share your political stance must’ve come to different conclusions not because they really looked at the evidence and followed reasonable lines of thought to their unbiased conclusions. No, those other people are just stupid or evil. They’re stupid because they’ve misinterpreted the evidence—and that evidence is so clear that only an imbecile would do that. Or they’re evil because they hold to a moral system repugnant to all that is good and humane, a moral system that leads them to such obviously wrong politics.
All of which is, in the case of the great portion of those of us with political opinions, utter bullshit. Progressives aren’t progressive because they carefully and without bias considered the evidence and found progressivism to most closely match it. Conservatives aren’t conservative because they carefully and without bias considered the evidence and found conservatism to most closely match it. Instead, there’s something else going on—and it has nothing to do with principled investigation leading to reasonable conclusions.
The Geography of Political Preference
To immediately see what’s wrong with the politics-as-principle idea, we need only ask ourselves why political persuasions map so well geographically. Why are urban areas (typically) blue, while rural are (typically) red? Why is nearly every college campus filled with progressives, while every mega-church is filled with conservatives? Why is the middle chunk of America overrun with red states, while the coasts mirror the blue of their sea shores?
Before positing answers to those questions, though, let’s temporarily abandon politics and turn to something much less likely to cause rioting in the streets. Why do people throughout the south dig country music, but folks in upscale urban areas throughout the north loathe the stuff?
It can’t be genetics. Americans move around all the time, so if there were an overriding genetic component to musical taste, you’d expect to see interests spread relatively evenly. But does that mean that listeners objectively sampled every musical genre, comparing its qualities, and decided which was most appealing on an individual by individual basis? Of course not. For most of us, we like the music we like because that’s what our friends like. If everyone in your high school can’t get enough Kenny Chesney, chances are you’ll fill your iPod with country, too. But if they’re instead fans of Jay-Z, then you’re more likely than not to develop a fondness for hip-hop.
This isn’t just because we tend to like what we’re exposed to, though that is part of it. What’s guiding much of our musical taste is a desire to fit in. We want to like the same things our friends like because we want our friends to like us. Only a very few are legitimately non-conformists—and those who are tend to be outcasts because nobody can figure out how to relate to them. The rest of us want to share tastes because it gives us something to talk about, something to agree on, something to share and experience together.
This tendency to conform isn’t necessarily conscious, either. Few of us say, “I want to fit in so I’m going to buy the same records as the cool kids.” In fact, the people do consciously shift their tastes to match their social environment are often looked down upon as poseurs and ridiculed for “not being themselves.” No, we instead do our conforming very much unconsciously. We think we really do like heavy metal or Christianity or high school football because those varieties of music, religion, or sport are the best. We don’t realize that they’re the “best” because they’re the ones, in our particular circumstances, it feels the best to like. And it feels the best to like them because, in liking them, we share them with our peers.
That’s why musical tastes appear geographically. It’s also why communities share political views.
Politics as Conformist Moral Posturing
These pressures are even greater when it comes to political beliefs. Unlike music and sports, politics provoke moral judgements. The weird kid who only listens to New Wave is just weird. But the guy who thinks the government shouldn’t collectively bargain with its public employees is one tiny step away from Hitler.
Political taste, then, drives us toward conformity and in-group/out-group thinking much, much more than music or clothing–or even, in many cases, religion. Because politics is so caught up in morality, and because all of us like to see ourselves as moral people, we come to associate being moral with having certain political views. This insulates our political opinions, whatever they might happen to be, from evidence and argumentation. If we admit that organic food isn’t healthier and better for the planet or that illegal immigrants aren’t the cause of all of America’s economic woes, we’re not only changing our political views, but we’re undermining our very own moral foundations.
We want to fit in. We want to be liked. We want to be good, decent people. And feeling all of those things about ourselves demands seeing ourselves as reflected in the judgements of our peers. Thus we have a deep and powerful motivation to profess beliefs that will be judged kindly by our peers. And there is no better way to convincingly profess a belief than to actually believe it.
That is why political debate almost always turns rancorous. And it is why, for most of us, our politics aren’t actually based on principle.
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