For some time as a writer I’ve wondered why so many books that I and others have found good or even excellent seldom ever get discussed by the critics and reviewers within the F&SF field, and why so many of those books that get praised are demonstrably weaker than all too many of those that are never mentioned. The most obvious answer, and the one that comes up the most often, is that it’s just a matter of taste. That’s certainly a factor, and one that can’t be discounted, but I don’t think it’s the only factor and not even the dominant one.

What first got me to thinking about this was a conversation I had several months ago with several of the noted and leading reviewers of a magazine that publishes a great number of reviews every month. The magazine reviewers explained that they liked to concentrate on “newer” writers and books that readers might not have seen or heard about. That’s a reason with thought behind it, and one that has a certain validity.

Then, the other day I read a review column about the “best” works of 2009 by one of the newer “flavor-de-jour” reviewers who’s currently everyone’s darling, so to speak. Rather than explain, I’m just going to lift a few phrases from the column, each phrase about a different book: “fearless deep dive into worlds of fantasy and of sex…avant garde fantasy elements”; “wonderful ability to be utterly modern”; “strange scenes involving bizarre fish and other monstrosities”; “never blinks in its depiction of horrors of the mind and the body”; “gleefully subvert most of heroic fantasy’s tropes”; “strange creations and enchanters”; “beyond the idea of cyberpunk or the New Wave in its approach”; “kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality”; “potent sampling of the author’s Southern-tinged dual gonzo and horror impulses”; “most experimental and formally daring genre fiction of the year”; “interesting fantasy experiments”; “extraordinary credit for publishing an anthology with few marketable names.”

I understand the appeal of the new, especially to critics and reviewers. After all, who wants to write reviews, year after year, that say something like, “XXX provides another well-crafted, well-plotted, and well-written work with virtually no flaws… sure to please those who have followed…” Even writing a review that states “YYY offers yet another well-designed and enchantingly written experimental novel whose plot and characters are based on the musical motifs of…” gets old after a well-established author achieves yet another milestone or artistic triumph, particularly if he or she does so without excessive sex or rhetorical fireworks.

Coupled with the praise of newness is also, so far as I’m concerned, far too much praise for the violent violation of taboos and the equating of explicit and often vulgar sexual episodes to excellence or insight or being daring. As I think Marion Zimmer Bradley once said (and she should have known, having written pornography under pseudonyms), “Describing sex in detail is like describing plumbing.” Technical manuals and descriptions, whether about technology or sex, should definitely be limited in good fiction.

Seeing newer or unrecognized writers getting exposure and praise doesn’t bother me in the slightest (although I do admit to a bit of jealousy because I would have liked a share of that when I was new and unrecognized), but what does bother me — a lot! — is that all this gushing over newness and shock value is equated with excellence, and all too many excellent works are overlooked in the critical pursuit of “newness.” But then, I suppose I should remember that the very term “novel” comes from the Latin, through French, term for “new.”

The other day, when almost a foot of snow fell on Cedar City, I heard someone remark, “so much for global warming.” Yet even this early in the year, a great number of climate scientists are predicting that 2010 will be among the warmest years on record. With normally comparatively balmy Washington, D.C., suffering its worst blizzards in decades, and Siberia colder than in half a century… how can this possibly be?

For the same reason that people insist that e-books of new publishers’ releases can profitably be sold for $9.99 — personal experience! Forget about all those hundreds of pages of publicly available financial statements, or the percentage of books that fail. Just because individuals can copy an electronic file for next to nothing, that personal experience means that electronic books shouldn’t cost anything, either.

Human beings gather patterns to make their way through life, and those patterns are all concentrated and analyzed on a personal level. Even the stories and anecdotes have more impact on humans, far more, than do facts and statistics. The problem with this experiential and anecdotal approach is that — without “outside” information and wisdom — it’s lousy for dealing with events larger than the life and attention span [or lifespan] of an individual.

Take the problem of global warming. It’s been a cold winter in much of North America and parts of Europe and Asia — but the area above the Arctic Circle has been running as much as twenty degrees above normal. That’s because for the past several decades, in the winter, wind patterns have confined the chill to areas well above the Arctic Circle. This year the warmer air has disrupted those patterns and sent comparatively “warmer” air south — except that comparatively warmer air is a lot colder than what we’ve experienced in recent winters. Even so, the overall temperature of the northern hemisphere is predicted to be warmer than it was last year, but since none of us happens to live near the north pole, all we see is that it’s colder where we are. That’s experiential information, and it’s limited to where we are.

Recently, the Economist had an article chronicling the pattern for economic booms and busts, and the patterns date back to before the Dutch tulip boom, and they all proceed in the same fashion, whether the commodity is tulips, South Sea or Florida land, stocks, or real estate. So why doesn’t anyone learn? For two reasons. First, often those who fuel the boom didn’t live through the last one, and they have no experience, and, second, because, as human beings, each of us likes to think that we’re unique. That is a survival trait, necessary for beings who have self-awareness, because it would be too depressing for most people to carry on without that spark of uniqueness. And each of us is unique — just as each snowflake is unique. And just as the patterns and uses of snowflakes are limited by their structure, so too are human interactions limited, if to a far larger compass. But our sense of uniqueness blinds us to the fact that human patterns repeat, time and time again. We can read about past patterns, but most people dismiss them with the thought, “I’m different. It won’t happen to me.” Yet it does, and all too often.

Another part of the reason is that there’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom, and an old saying illustrates that: Knowledge is as old as the oldest cave painting or hieroglyph, but wisdom is only as old as the oldest human being.

A number of those of us who either served during the Vietnam era or lived through it had great concerns about military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq and opposed it from the beginning. We weren’t and aren’t against our troops, and we certainly don’t like either the ideology or politics in those areas But we lived through Vietnam, and we saw how it is almost impossible to combat ideologies, especially ones fueled by fanaticism, without the total commitment of the entire nation and the expenditure of far more in lives and in resources than any administration would be allowed to make in the political conditions that exist. Yet the decision-makers vowed that the military effort would be limited and surgical and effective. Those were essentially the same terms used by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the early 1960s, and that war dragged on for almost fifteen years and killed more than 55,000 Americans. We’ve now been fighting in the Middle East and Afghanistan for close to nine years, and matters still aren’t anywhere close to resolution, not to mention the restrictions on everyday freedoms that having to combat the terrorist backlash has placed on all Americans.

But two administrations have vowed that matters would be “different.” How different? Well… one difference is that we don’t have a draft, so that national outrage over casualties is muted, even if career soldiers and National Guard troops are being deployed time and time again — like the former student of my wife who’s still in his twenties with something like five National Guard deployments. And we’re using far more high-tech gear. So we’re not losing nearly as many soldiers, but a lot more of them are surviving with high levels of physical and mental disabilities, and the resource cost is getting astronomical, at a time when our failure to learn from past experience created the second largest economic meltdown in a century — and thus drastically reduced tax revenues… and boosted the deficit and thrown millions out of jobs.

Yes, each of us is unique, and all too many of us are uniquely unable to see and learn from wider knowledge, the past experience of others, and impartial and non-experiential knowledge, because, after all, we are unique, and oh-so-different from our forebears, and we’re practical and see clearly everything around us. And that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

One thing that the Macmillan-Amazon debacle highlighted is, to me, a very disturbing aspect of American society — the idea that everyone has a right to everything cheaply, and that if a copy of something can be made inexpensively — or for almost nothing — then that’s everyone’s right. Thankfully, not everyone, and perhaps not even a majority of Americans believes that, but millions clearly do. The reaction of the ten-dollar-or-cheaper e-book demanders is merely the latest manifestation of the idea.

People who copy music, either recorded or sheet music, without paying for it, people who download illegal torrent copies of books, people who plagiarize others’ ideas — all of them are part of this movement, and they justify it with slogans such as, “Information should be free” or “The marginal costs of producing e-books are nothing” or “the music industry is gouging the listeners.” In the area of books, the e-book buyers tend to ignore the fact that authors get less than half as much from an e-book as from a hardcover, or the fact that the vast majority of authors hold down daytime jobs because writing doesn’t cover the bills. Everyone concentrates on the five percent or so of authors who actually make a living at writing. The same pattern holds true in music as well, and I have to ask if the lack of technical perfection and musical quality in so much of what is popular is the result of the “cheap at any cost” philosophy? Might that just have something to do with the fact that a smaller and smaller fraction of musicians and singers can support themselves by their music?

And then there are the banks, who are working diligently to reduce their costs, by making you print your statements out, or having you use your computer to monitor your account, and by trying to run banks with fewer and fewer employees while paying less and less interest on deposits. Or the various state legislatures who insist on not raising taxes while more and more children pour into the schools and colleges, and while teachers’ salaries are frozen and classroom sizes increase, while state universities have to hike tuition because the state legislators want to keep taxes “cheap.”

Of course, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. As a nation, we want everything as cheaply as possible, but we also believe that our incomes or wages or salaries should increase every year. Exactly why did so many manufacturers shut down U.S. facilities and outsource to Asia, Central America, or other third world countries? Or automate and reduce the number of employees? Because very few of them could compete on price while paying the wages, salaries, and working conditions demanded by U.S. workers and required under state and federal regulations. In addition, investors and lenders demand higher and higher profit levels. That combination translates into higher prices, unless costs can be reduced, and Americans generally won’t pay higher prices — except for certain luxury goods… and those often only in “good times.” The result? Fewer high paying manufacturing jobs and more lower-paying service McJobs… with even more pressure for “cheap” goods, because more people have lower incomes… or none at all.

So, “price-sensitive” manufacturing industries have automated or fled the USA, if not both, of necessity, while everyone complains — even while shopping for the lowest possible price for those goods. Along the way, we tend to turn a blind eye at the working conditions in those countries, yet rail against Chinese manufacturers of defective drywall, or toys with lead paint, or other unsafe products.

What almost everyone tends to ignore is that not only does price reflects the sum total of inputs, plus profit, but that not complying with safe working conditions and not enforcing good environmental practices also reduces costs, and much of the lower prices of many, many imported goods, including cheap CDS and other bottom-line electronics, is effectively subsidized by such practices as child labor, slave labor, terrible working conditions, and environmental degradation in third world countries. Of course, what makes it work is that, bad as those conditions may be, they’re often far better than what existed before.

But what happens when there are no more third world countries willing to accept such conditions? When we run out of places to which we can export costs, so to speak? Or will we end up destroying our own economic system in pursuit of the “cheap at any cost” and become someone else’s third world country?

As of this Friday morning, Amazon still isn’t selling any Macmillan [or Tor] books, despite a statement six days ago that they would capitulate. Now… to be fair, Amazon didn’t say when it would resume selling Macmillan products; it might be in the next hour, or it might be a year from now. [NOTE: As of Friday evening, sales of hardcovers and paperbacks resumed, but not the majority of e-books, and the issues raised below still are open questions.]

Some who know the book industry and Amazon have speculated that the promise was designed to mute the reaction from readers and authors, while the reality was to punish Macmillan for not falling into line with Amazon’s future view of how e-books and books in general should be sold. Certainly, there’s a case that can be made for this. Amazon was willing to lose tens of millions of dollars in establishing itself, and if Amazon believes that, by losing more tens of millions of dollars to “punish” Macmillan in order to shape the future of bookselling, then that’s a small price to pay for eventual success and market domination.

Another possibility is that, because Amazon has not updated its software, except on a piecemeal basis, since its founding, the abrupt “re-structuring” of the “Buy” buttons produced a cascade effect that has overwhelmed the programming capabilities of its staff and technicians.

And a third possibility is simply that Amazon was lying when it said it had to capitulate. One small fact that supports this view was the phrase in the Amazon statement of “capitulation” that declared that Macmillan had a “monopoly” over its products. Duhh… Every producer has a monopoly over its specific products. Ford can’t sell brand-new from the factory GM products. Kroger doesn’t get to sell Wal-Mart’s “Great Value” store products. Tor doesn’t get to sell Berkeley or ROC books. What the Amazon statement reveals is Jeff Bezos’ view that Amazon has the “divine right” to sell all books from all publishers on his terms. Not that this is really anything new; it’s been obvious from the beginning that such was his goal.

In addition to the fairly obvious use of strong-arm techniques and misleading and/or misinformative statements, what also disturbs me about this “vision” is the hypocrisy behind it. Amazon has positioned itself as a champion of readers, claiming that it wants to make low-cost books and e-books available to everyone at the lowest possible prices, as well as trumpeting the widest possible selection. Yet the tactics used by Amazon are designed, or will have the effect, as I suggested earlier, of reducing the diversity of books available to readers, because books which sell in smaller volumes will either have to be priced higher or subsidized by better-selling books. Yet, if Amazon is successful in forcing price levels down so that the better-selling books have far lower profits, publishers will reduce the numbers of “different” books that do not fit in whatever the “flavor de jour” of the marketplace may be at any given point, because either their prices will be comparatively too high and readers won’t buy them, or because the profits from better selling books won’t support subsidizing them. There is already tremendous pressure in the publishing marketplace to “homogenize” and “popularize” publishers’ offerings, and Amazon’s tactics, if successful, will increase that pressure, because, in order to compete, other booksellers will have to follow suit.

Readers are already a minority in the United States, and intelligent readers more so, and whether “accidental” or deliberate, Amazon’s failure to resume sales of Macmillan books does tend to suggest to me that its agendas are anything but good for the future of different, thought-provoking, and diverse books — no matter what Jeff Bezos may claim. And, if the problem is “merely” technical, then should we really be quite so trusting of Amazonian pronouncements? Should we really trust a multibillion dollar entity that can’t fix its “Buy” buttons?

I suspect by now a good many readers know that, as a result of a disagreement over the pricing of e-books, Amazon has “temporarily” removed all Macmillan titles [which includes Tor titles… and all of my books] from its online sales operation. For some time, Amazon has been listing the majority of its Kindle titles at $9.99. In addition, more recently, it has been making the Kindle titles available, at least in the case of my books, almost simultaneously with the initial hardcovers.

Amazon wanted the price to start at $9.99 and decrease from there. It’s hardly surprising that Amazon wanted a ten dollar list price because Amazon had been losing $4-$5 on all those ten dollar e-books, at least in the case of new releases, in the hopes of establishing what amounted to a market monopoly on e-books, at least until Apple’s latest news. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, justified this stand by saying that e-books should be cheaper than hardcovers because they don’t have to be physically printed. But… e-books already are cheaper.At $15.00, an e-book of one of my titles is 46% less than the list price, and more than 10% below the super-discounted hardcover price.

The reader advocates and Bezos have made the point that the incremental or marginal cost of “producing an e-book” is almost nothing. Unhappily, this argument not only misses the point, but is fallacious. Here’s why.

First, the production costs of a book go well beyond the paper and binding. The president of HarperStudio, a division of HarperCollins, noted in the Los Angeles Times that his costs for an e-book were three dollars less than for a hardcover, not the $18 less claimed by Amazon. The reason for this is that the author has to be paid, or he or she isn’t likely to keep writing books. Then there are editors, assistant editors, proofreaders, and copy-editors to be paid. They happen to be there as part of the review and quality control process, and, until you’ve read the first drafts of some authors, you have no idea how critical they are. Then there are artists and illustrators, and even e-books have covers, even if only electronically reproduced. In addition, there are the sales representatives, who have to persuade booksellers to buy books. Why are they necessary? Because the booksellers don’t have enough people and enough time to sort through every single book published each year, among other things. There are also contracts attorneys, publicists, and accountants. Like it or not, publishing is already one of the lowest profit margin industries in the U.S. Last year was so bad that virtually every single fiction publisher either laid off employees or didn’t hire as many as left through normal attrition.

The argument used by some readers and Amazon is that e-books are an “afterthought,” something that can be created electronically after all the other costs are attributed to the hardcover and mass market paperback. Yet… if the devotees of e-books are right, and they are the wave of the future and end up becoming a major fraction of the copies of most fiction titles, how can a publisher not spread the costs across all formats being sold?

Second, what’s been overlooked is the fact that a tremendous number of book titles actually lose money. Depending on the publisher and the year, that can range from as little as 30% of all titles published to more than 60%. That means that successful books not only have to cover their own production costs but the losses from unsuccessful books if the publisher is to remain in business.

Third, hardcover sales of successful books effectively subsidize paperbacks or less successful books. Ten-dollar Kindle books would have created price pressures that would either reduce the sales of hardcovers or replace them with e-books, and as more adaptable e-book reading devices become available, that would reduce overall revenues even more than would $15 e-books. This, in turn, would reduce the ability of publishers to try “new” authors and approaches, and would likely result in more “mass” entertainment and less diversity in a field that is already having trouble publishing books for limited audiences.

What about the small presses? Aren’t they supposed to fill that gap? Some are, and in the F&SF field, they’ve done well… BUT… what most small presses cannot do is offer a national exposure to a range of new authors. Doing that takes the resources of a large publisher, and they’ll do less of that in a marketplace based on the lowest possible price.

Now… is all this just a ploy to “justify” the status quo for my own benefit? No. I already have a defined “brand.” Even over the short time Amazon is boycotting Macmillan I will possibly lose some revenue, and had Amazon prevailed in its demands for ten dollar e-books, I probably would have lost more over time, wherever the e-book pricing point settled, but not enough for the publisher to stop publishing me. But that’s because I’m an established author, even if I’m not rolling in the millions as some are. Had Amazon been successful, it would have hurt beginning and mid-list authors, and it could have destroyed some careers, because what Amazon wants is to sell lots of cheap books, regardless of the effect on authors or discriminating readers.

I don’t have a problem with “cheap books.” I do have a problem with Amazon claiming lofty arguments for those “cheap books” and rationalizing their predatory scheme with fallacious arguments, supported by what amounted to blackmail, and their low cost to Amazon being subsidized by everyone else.

And from Amazon’s grudging concession to Macmillan, so did a lot of other readers.