Vicious Cross-Posting!

Photo by Jeff Kubina

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kubina/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

A writer friend and colleague of mine recently complained in the IWOSC forum that his press release had mysteriously appeared on a strange website. Here's my (cross-posted) reply:

"The situation you find about your press releases being posted on other blogs has happened to me quite a few times.

I'm not an expert in these matters, but my interpretation is this. Your PR release is essentially a public document because you've put it on the Web with the express purpose of inducing anyone who is interested to spread the news. It's certainly not unheard of in the news industry for a publication to simply run a lot if not most of the text of a release as an article. It's lazy journalism, but the original poster hardly complains because you're getting what you want -- your story out to the world.

But what's happening here is that these blogs are content whores. They surround themselves with click-thru ads and promotional URLs. They know that search engines seek out pages that change frequently. So they seek out content they can lift, any content, even it it's dated. For example, my release that I'd be reading from my novel Rubber Babes at Dutton's keeps getting reposted, even though Dutton's is long closed.

If you find that the other website has links to objectionable material, I'd say you're within your rights complaining to the webmaster and asking for the post to be removed. Some of these sites appear to be offshore so I wouldn't bet on them taking any action, but it's worth a try.

If the item did not originate as a press release -- say, it were a post on your own blog -- then this "cross-posting" without your permission would be a copyright violation, I believe. But when you're putting it out there as a release, its getting recycled is not necessarily a bad thing from the standpoint of your exposure. You just don't want to get into a situation where links to your own site get blocked because somehow the search engines have "associated" you with inappropriate content. For example, if you try to post an article on ezinearticles.com, they might block it if they think your links back to your own site lead, in turn, to nasty places."

Gerald Everett Jones

Author of the Rollo Hemphill novels
- in paperback and ebook -

Book Review: Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

In the virtual scheme of things, my comic-novel hero Rollo Hemphill is now twentysomething. So it might at first seem odd that I'd review a book about a curmudgeon. Perhaps Anne Tyler's sixty-one-year-old Liam Pennywell is simply Rollo in flash forward, a boychik who wakes up one morning to find out his youth is so yesterday.

Here's some brief background, no more than you'll read in publicity blurbs: Liam is teacher in a private school in Baltimore. He was trained in philosophy and his academic credentials far exceed the mundane requirements of his job. Then he loses his job. Soon afterward, he has a traumatic experience that requires healing and readjustment. In the process (the length of the book), he regains his bearings. Hence the title's allusion to the Biblical captain and his navigation device.

Much of life is ordinary, or so Anne Tyler seems to say. And that's the wondrous part of it, she apparently believes. She writes that way and always has, as far as I know. Her sentences are straightforward, spare, honest. The events she describes seem not at all unusual. Her characters are people you know, and they usually don't dare to be the least bit different.

Much of the time, when their lives are proceeding in ordinary ways, they don't surprise you. Tyler is careful to give lots of detail, including ingredients of their lackluster meals and frequent mention of their clothing choices, moods, and physical complaints.

But then the character does something unexpected. In an Anne Tyler novel, it usually doesn't involve picking up a gun or taking an overdose or punching out the most powerful man in town. No, sometimes it's nothing more than a look, an odd comment, or a gesture. But it's the result of a momentous decision, typically something remarkably brave or generous.

Her characters surprise you this way only a few times in each book. In Noah's Compass, you can count those times on the fingers of one hand. But they're stunners. In reading her other books, I have often wondered how as a writer she achieves this effect. When I reread those passages, I can usually find the sentence that marks the revelation or the turning point. But the words are, in themselves, unremarkable. The trick, I believe, is in the meticulous layering of narrative and detail that went before. Some critics have called hers an "angel's eye view" of her characters. Because she loves them so much, even the outwardly nasty ones.

I won't give you any spoilers from the book, because I don't want to deprive you of those surprises. I'll give you an example from my own (ordinary) life. When I was Rollo's age, a young female coworker dropped by my place on a Saturday morning and asked me if I would help her look for an apartment in the neighborhood. I did so gladly. She was a looker, and I welcomed any excuse to get to know her better. After we pounded the pavement all afternoon, as the dinner hour approached, I suggested dropping into the local grocery to get some things we could cook for dinner. It was an Anne Tyler moment when she picked up a carton of eggs and asked:

"Won't we need these for breakfast?"

Learn from Anne Tyler, and stay alert. The ordinary could become wonderful in the blink of an eye.

Rollo Scores in India!

I was pleased to learn that the adventures of Rollo Hemphill are selling at Flipkart.com, an active online bookstore site in India.

Don't give a blank e-book reader!

A friend asked me today whether the Rollo Hemphill comic novels are available in ebook versions. Decidedly yes, for both titles. Just make sure you get the right digital format:

Amazon Kindle My Inflatable Friend Rubber Babes

Adobe PDF (read it on your laptop, even) both titles available from Diesel E-Books

Smashwords (EPUB for Nook, also Sony Reader format, others): My Inflatable Friend (free) Rubber Babes (1.99) Also see "Rollo Will Do You for Free" post on the Boychik Lit blog.

Audio MP3 (excerpts) click here (all free downloads) for iPod and such.

So upload the devilish little device with laughter, why doncha. These are mercifully short, amusing books, just the right length for an airplane read, with bite-sized chapters easy to ingest while you're waiting for some cute elf to bring your holiday lunch.

Remember, too, there are at least three books in Rollo's unfortunate saga. The third comes out in 2010--Farnworth's Revenge: Rollo's End. (Spoiler alert: It's not necessarily the demise of Rollo, more like the target of the old man's ire?)

Of course, Amazon or Barnes & Noble will be happy to ship you paperbacks in case, like me, you're so bewildered by the profusion of ebook formats you don't know which to buy.

Gerald Everett Jones

Author of the Rollo Hemphill novels
- in paperback and ebook -
www.boychiklit.com

Rollo Will Do You for Free

For a limited time, Rollo's first comic adventure, My Inflatable Friend, will be available as a free ebook download in EPUB, Sony Reader, and plain-text formats on SmashWords. List-price ebooks are still available for platforms Kindle, Ingram PDF (DRM), and Mobipocket.

If you then yearn to read the sequel, Rubber Babes, you'll have to shell out $1.99, also at SmashWords.

Like so many players in the 21st century publishing biz, I've been puzzling over what business models will emerge for ebooks. And while we're at it, we should figure out how people are going to pay (if modestly) for all kinds of creative content, including music and movies.

I was really flummoxed by the article in the NY Times the other day about libraries doing online lending of ebooks. Almost certainly, the public should not have to pay to check a digital edition out of the local library database. But you'd think the library should either pay a somewhat higher "master-copy" fee or account for the rentals and pay a modest per-rental fee. That's pretty much what happens in the DVD rental market. Libraries loan DVDs, too, but not yet online, although that day is coming. Buying physical copies of CDs or DVDs simplifies per-use lending. But why on Earth would ebook readers have to "wait in line" for digital downloads? Yes, I understand why the publishers are pushing that, but it's a ridiculous imposition on the consumer.

At this point, I believe that "free" is an essential part of any electronic publishing business model--at least for products that have not yet achieved the status of name brands and household words.

That's frankly why Rollo is dropping his shorts and baring all--for nothing. In Hollywood, they call it "exposure work" for obvious reasons.

Dan Brown doesn't have to give it away, ever. The rest of us will have to learn how to do "garage-band marketing" and sell out of our virtual trunks. Until we don't have to.

West Hollywood Book Fair Photo

Last Sunday (October 4) in West Hollywood Park.

Here's some of the gang doing the meet-and-greet with aspiring and working writers at the IWOSC booth.

(L to R) Linda Lichtman, showrunner Lyn Corum, Sally Hawkridge, and The Boychik.


Photo by Joshua Barash

Book Review: 'Dark Mission'

Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA (Enlarged and Revised Edition) by Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara has to be the most astounding book I have ever read. If only a fraction of it proves true, it will still be a stunning revelation.

For example--

• If there is just one artifact on the Moon or on Mars, that's significant. The authors present evidence, although not totally convincing, that there are thousands of "anomalous" and "unnatural" features on both bodies.
• If NASA has deliberately degraded just one photo, that is extremely troublesome.
• If there is anything to the theory of hyperdimensional astronomy and its application to celestial navigation, human technology will take another giant leap.

I do have some objections, some of them significant, to the authors' presentation:

• They often make too much of too little, then use the conclusion as a foundation for an entire line of argument. For example, what if in that "meaningful" photo of Gene Cernan listening to Bush, his smirk is from a bad case of intestinal gas? We've all been there. Also, as to the the "Data head" on the Moon, it certainly looks like a curious artifact, but it could just as easily be a fragment of a religious icon as a piece of a robot. To then speculate that it contained a computer from which data was downloaded is a ridiculous stretch. Those are just two examples of many unsupported leaps to conclusions in the book. (I'm not belittling the importance of finding the object--just the authors' interpretation of it.)
  
• Cause and effect seem jumbled in some arguments. The ultimate significance of 19.5 and 33 degrees could be more practical than mystical, as an extension of Hoagland's own arguments. If hyperdimensional geometry can truly govern advanced celestial navigation, the selection of those parameters may be crucial to mission success for practical, physical reasons, not because of some religious correlation. In other words, sacred geometry is more likely to be derived from, and an effect of, the way the universe is built. Selection of specific dates for landings may also have some consistent, practical, rationale other than ceremony or astrology.
  
• I don't see many of the objects the authors do in the satellite photos. Quipping that some people have a perceptual handicap that prevents them from seeing such features insults my intelligence. And the reproductions are terrible.
• Please hire a good copy editor next time. As with so many self-published and small-press books, a profusion of typos and inconsistently applied style rules conveys the dismal impression that no one besides the author thought this book was worth publishing.

All that said, even if portions of this book are unreliable or just plain wrong, its contribution may ultimately prove to be momentous. Seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote volumes on planetary orbits, which he believed to be mounted on crystalline spheres that hummed a celestial chorus to the glory of God. It took the genius of Sir Isaac Newton to extract from all that superstition just three concise laws of planetary motion, which he translated into mathematical equations. Were it not for our understanding those three laws, modern celestial navigation would be a hopeless dream. (Also, Newton himself harbored all kinds of bizarre notions and spent literally years of his life writing about them.)

Hoagland says Heaviside did the same to Maxwell but missed some essential stuff, to the lasting detriment of science. Maybe he's right.

So I don't mean to scoff just because I'd like more rigor in the arguments. I suspect some of this is true. I just can't tell you which parts.