You may not be able to pronounce “Eyjafjallajokull” but publishing people planning to fly to London for the annual book fair that starts April 20th are undoubtedly saying “%##@#&$%$” in light of the closure of Heathrow Airport because of ash hurled into the European atmosphere by the aforesaid Eyjafjallajokull. That happens to be the name of the volcano in Iceland that erupted with a vengeance, compromising air travel all over the continent.  The resulting cancellations are rebounding to flights in the US.  Publishers and agents packing for their flight to London may have to hang their clothes back in the closet if atmospheric conditions don’t clear up soon.

Details here.

RC

Just as settlement of the Google copyright lawsuit seems to be coming to a head as  the judge reviews the voluminous briefs, another body of aggrieved copyright owners has staked a legal claim.  These are photographers and graphic artists whose illustrations, they claim, are not adequately provided for in the case before Judge Denny Chen.

It seems that some publishers permitted Google to include illustrated books in Google’s search program, but the photographers and artists who provided the illustrations say their interests have not been protected.

“Google’s settlement with authors and publishers largely excluded photographs and other visual works,” writes Miguel Helft in the New York Times. “Legal experts said it was not unexpected that Google would face claims from groups that were not part of the original case and are not covered by it.”

“We are seeking justice and fair compensation for visual artists whose work appears in the 12 million books and other publications Google has illegally scanned to date,” the Times article quotes the  general counsel for the American Society of Media Photographers.

We’ll be monitoring this development to see whether Judge Chen will consider folding these new claims into the existing case or rule that they must be pressed in a new and separate court action.

Read details in Visual Artists to Sue Google Over Vast Library Project

And for in-depth coverage of the author and publisher lawsuit against Google and the proposed settlement, you can click here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Fantasy and science fiction writers are fortunate to have an extant magazine market for their short stories. It’s provided a blessed incubator for talented newcomers, one that novice writers in other genres no longer have at their disposal. But the fantasy, horror and science fiction magazine market has diminished since the heyday of the pulps and the opportunities to learn your craft writing short stuff have become more and more marginal.

So we welcome an announcement by Tim Holman, Vice-President and Publisher of Orbit, the fantasy and science fiction imprint of Hachette, that it has launched a digital publishing program devoted to short fiction.

Here in full is the company’s press release.
RC
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Orbit, the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprint of Hachette Book Group, announces a digital short fiction publishing program launching later this year.

Orbit (US) has offered to publish digital editions of all original short fiction written by its authors. The digital editions will be distributed widely through major retail channels, for reading on a variety of devices. Authors will be paid a royalty for each story sold, rather than the flat fee more common in the short story market.

Tim Holman, Orbit VP & Publisher, said: “We know that writing short fiction is important for many of our authors. By offering to publish their short fiction – and to publish it quickly – we will be providing a new way for them to connect with readers. The initial response from our authors has been great, and we are looking forward to launching the first stories later this year.”

Maja Thomas, SVP Hachette Digital, said: “Publishing timely and well-priced short fiction has long been one of HBG’s goals. The digital reading revolution and the proliferation of new devices and mobile platforms now make this possible.”

Launched in 2007, Orbit (US) is the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprint at Hachette Book Group. Its authors include Joe Abercrombie, Iain M. Banks, Greg Bear, Gail Carriger, Karen Miller, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Brent Weeks.

Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a leading trade publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the second-largest publisher in the world. HBG publishes under the divisions of Little, Brown and Company, Little Brown Books for Young Readers, Grand Central Publishing, FaithWords, Center Street, Orbit, and Hachette Digital.

About a year ago we asked if you would be happy with 100 million visitors and 5 billion hits a month on your website – if it also meant that you were losing $40 million a month to service all that traffic.

The website in question was YouTube.  Its owner, Google, was struggling to find a way to make money on all those eyeballs, and happily it has begun to find a path to profitability. (See YouTube Goes Hollywood.)

Now it’s time for another conundrum. How would you like to own a service hosting 50 million messages a day – that isn’t minting money?

That’s Twitter, a fabulous giant that proves once again that no matter how mountainous the wave of hits to your website may be, you are not a successful business until and unless you monetize all that traffic.  This is a fundamental law of business, yet more than one startup has been so dazzled by the hits lighting up its site that its creators were blinded into believing they had struck it rich.  In time they discovered that unless they converted those eyeballs into cash it was all in vain. Some learned the hard way: they went out of business.

In the case of Twitter, many clever developers have found a way to convert the eyeballs to cash – only they don’t work for Twitter. They are independent appsters who slipstreamed in the host company’s wake, battening on opportunities that Twitter’s management failed to see or capitalize on.

“Twitter has been unusually free about letting developers tap into its data and technology, through what is known as an application programming interface,” writes Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times.

That’s an elegant way of saying Twitter gave it away. But the company is beginning to figure it out and stop shy of giving away the store.  “If developers build something Twitter wants, the company has three options — let it exist separately, create its own version, or buy the start-up,” Miller explains.  It would appear Twitter is abandoning the suicidal option #1 and focusing on creating its own proprietary apps or  buying firms that advance its business agenda.

It would seem to be a sensible strategy but it may come at a price.  It’s easy to attract a stampede of customers when your service is free. But once it starts costing…?

And what happens when the apps that Twitter generates in-house compete directly with former partners? “When you go to write a Twitter application,” Miller quotes a developer, “you almost wonder, is Twitter going to come out with the same feature in a month and blow me away?”

These questions will hang in the atmosphere over Chirp, the first conference for Twitter developers commencing this week in San Francisco.  To see which way the wind is blowing – well, read your tweets.

You can read Miller’s coverage in full here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Take This Job and Shove It
By Richard Curtis

Most writers dream of leaving their day jobs (some have night jobs as well) and launching careers as full-time freelancers. In their eagerness to realize that goal, many of them quit as soon as they’ve made a few sales. This decision invariably turns out to be ill-advised if not catastrophic after the author discovers that he did not properly reckon the cost of independence, project the size and flow of earnings, or prepare himself psychologically. Even an author lucky enough to strike it rich on his first book should use the utmost restraint before quitting his job to become a writer. By the time he realizes he doesn’t know what to write for an encore, he may have raised his lifestyle to an unsupportably high plateau.

The questions of whether and when writers should go full-time are among the most common and vexing that agents have to deal with, and if an agent ever had a notion to play God, here is his opportunity. The responsibility for this decision is awesome and demands ten times the prudence required to advise authors about such matters as selecting the right publisher for their books. The number of factors is large and their complexity intimidating. It’s the kind of decision that should be reviewed with a great many people to collect as much input as possible.

An excellent idea is to make a list of pluses and minuses, what you stand to gain and what to lose. Often the right choice will jump out at you when you review this list. The secret is to make sure you have enumerated all the factors. Then you must be brutally honest with yourself. You do not want to subject yourself and your family to needless suffering because you erred on the side of wishful thinking when you drew up your scenario.

My first rule of thumb is to determine whether you have enough work lined up under contract to guarantee employment for one to two years; that probably means you have reached a level of skill and reliability your publisher can count on. I seldom permit an author to include in his expectations income that is not absolutely guaranteed—royalties, foreign rights sales, movie deals, and the like—unless there is a solid history of such windfalls in his track record. If you’ve never sold British rights to your previous books, if you only hope your next book will earn royalties, if your father-in-law thinks your book is a natural for the movies, I toss these items out of the equation, because they are only fodder for self-delusion and disappointment.

I do, however, include in the equation the renewal of current contracts after you have fulfilled them, particularly if you are a genre writer. If you have a three-book contract in an ongoing series, I tend to consider it a likelihood that you’ll be given another contract at the expiration of this one. If you’re an established mainstream writer with three or four books under your belt and a potful of good ideas for new ones, I’m disposed to take for granted that you’ll land a new contract when you complete your present book.

The renewal of contracts means money payable on signature of those agreements, so that when you look down the road for money to be earned after fulfillment of your present commitments, you should be able to count on income from new deals. It is also reasonable to figure that you’ll get more money per book than you’re getting now, because it’s likely the publisher will feel you’re a better writer and there’ll be more of a sales record to justify raises. There is also a tendency among publishers to give raises to their regular writers if for no other reasons than inflation, longevity, loyalty, faith in the future, and humane motivations. You have to ask for these raises, but there’s a good chance that if you don’t push it too hard, your publisher will give you a little more the next time around just because you’re a nice person.

Another important factor I weigh when discussing with authors the decision to go full-time is increased productivity.

At present, because you’re only able to devote an hour or two to your writing in the evenings, and maybe twice that much on the weekends, you are not capable of turning out more than two books, say, per year. But if you launch a full-time writing career, you may be able to double or triple your annual output, meaning double or triple the revenue. There is also, I’ve observed, a tendency for writers to improve the quality of their work after they become full-timers, because they’re exercising their skills to a greater degree, and (domestic distractions notwithstanding) their concentration increases. And if you do become a better, faster writer, the prospects for raises in pay from your publishers become even better. The process, in due time, becomes self-perpetuating.

Having painted the future in broad, and slightly rose-tinted, strokes, it’s time to focus on the hard realities of budgeting your money after you make The Big Move. Get out that legal pad and set up two columns, Income and Expenditures. So far, so good. Unfortunately, that’s about the only straightforward thing about setting up a budget, because when you start to analyze each item, you quickly see that simple concepts and definitions are elusive.

When you work for “the man,” you most likely receive a regular paycheck from which certain mandatory deductions are withheld. Among these are federal and state income taxes, sometimes municipal ones as well. Social security contributions are also compulsory. Then there may also be deductions for disability insurance, worker’s compensation, medical insurance, union dues, stock option purchases, pension contributions, and donations to the boss’s pet charity. Your net take-home income has been 20, 40, even 50 percent or more of your gross salary.

When you become a full-time writer, however, you suddenly find yourself in the position of “taking home” a “paycheck” from which nothing (except commissions, if you have an agent) has been deducted. At first glance that’s great. At second and third glances, you realize that the heavy burden of responsibility for many of those obligations, formerly taken care of by your boss, now rests on your own shoulders. You will have to set aside enough money to pay income taxes, social security, and other taxes such as unincorporated business taxes, occupancy taxes on your business property (your office, that is); medical and/or disability insurance premiums; pension contributions (you may now qualify for a Keogh Plan savings account); and whatever other “benefits” you wish to continue enjoying as carryovers from your erstwhile job. So, the $50,000 per annum that you project taking home when you go full-time may translate into less than $25,000 of disposable income after you set aside all the obligations your employer used to pay on your behalf.

To your projections of income from your writing, add income from your spouse’s job if any, investment dividends and savings interest, and other sources of guaranteed revenue such as teaching, lecturing, or consulting income. And you must not rule out your savings as a potential source of income. Because delays are more the rule than the exception in the publishing game, it is entirely possible that you will have to tap the principal in your savings account or liquidate a long-term investment in order to tide yourself over between checks.

Because many major expenses are payable quarterly (such as estimated federal taxes), semiannually, or even annually, you might consider opening a savings account for those obligations only. You can then earn a little interest on the money you have set aside to pay those bills. Needless to say, you must never invest that money in speculative ventures.

When you try to tote up the “expenditures” side of your projections, you once again discover that nothing is as simple as it seemed to be when your boss took care of things. You will immediately see how costly medical insurance is, particularly when you are no longer participating in a group health care plan. The social security rate for self-employed people is higher than for those in “respectable” jobs (writing has not been a respectable job for twenty-five years).

And then there are those “bennies” and perks you took for granted when you worked for that company. If you had an expense account, you will now have to absorb that portion of the benefit that was formerly spent on yourself, in particular travel and entertainment. No longer can you charge the firm for your spouse’s meal when you take clients or customers to dinner; no longer can you bill your boss for mileage incurred on that side visit to Disneyland during your business trip to Los Angeles. And because current tax law permits you to deduct only a percentage of legitimate entertainment expenses, you’ve also lost that part that your company absorbed in tax on the nondeductible part. Say good-bye to the free use of the postage machine when you mailed off your personal bills; to the telephone from which you called your publisher, your agent, your kid in college, your mother in Florida; to the photocopying machine on which you ran off copies of your manuscript after everyone had gone home; and to the office word processor, computer, coffee maker. Say good-bye to the paid vacation. You want a vacation, you now can take fifty-two weeks a year if you want, only you have to pay for them out of your own pocket. Say good-bye to sick days on salary. Say good-bye to the company car and the company jet and the company dining room. Buy your own car and jet and dining room.

I am not saying there aren’t also many hidden benefits to leaving our job for a full-time writing career. But somehow, the savings on carfare or on the expensive wardrobe you’re trading in for the freelancer’s uniform of jeans and T-shirts don’t seem to balance the hidden costs. And not everybody fervently believes that getting to see more of one’s spouse or kids is a hidden benefit.

The biggest challenge to the newly independent is the large lump-sum payments due with unforgiving regularity throughout the year. Among these, as I’ve said, are quarterly estimated federal income and social security taxes, but there are also state and local taxes and estimates and medical insurance premiums. This is not to mention those other lump sums you have to pay whether you are self-employed or not, such as automobile and home insurance, private school or college tuition, summer camp fees, repair contracts on major appliances, and the like. And these all have a way of going up. Add to them the cost of occasional but inevitable contingencies, the kind that always seem to rear their heads hours after your warranties expire and moments after you have served notice to your boss of your intention to leave his employ; washing machines giving up the ghost, television picture tubes burning out, automobile engines seizing, wisdom teeth impacting.

Aside from being fiscally unprepared to deal with these aggravations, you may not be emotionally able to cope with them. This is by far the graver problem, for while you can often juggle your accounts or hustle up some money to cover short-term deficits, it is much, much harder to find the psychological resources for dealing with that condition of perpetual anxiety about money that is the lot of most freelance people.

The truth is that not everybody is constitutionally cut out to work for him- or herself. There are those who are incapable of preparing a budget or of staying within its rigid boundaries. There are those who cannot handle the loneliness of freelancing and the loss of the social support that comes from working with others. There are those who lack self-discipline, those who, after years of punching in and out at a time clock, reporting to a boss or supervisor, adhering to rules and regulations and work orders, are at a loss to structure their own time. There are those who cannot set short- and long-term goals or keep to them. There are those who cannot live with the distractions of full-time domesticity. There are those who go to pieces at the prospect of drawing on their savings or selling off an investment to cover an unexpected expense. There are those who indulge their newfound freedom by tackling that Great American Novel they’ve always dreamed of, instead of doing the commercial projects that have to be done to keep their finances on a steady course.

Having tried the freelance life for several years in my twenties, I can testify to having flunked most of the above tests. Though I did produce a goodly number of books during that period, and earned a decent living, I found the loneliness and isolation very hard to bear, and the budgeting of money impossible. I had some savings salted away, but having been raised to think of drawing money out of savings as tantamount to filing for bankruptcy, I suffered woefully. Every month, when the time came to pay my bills, I developed all sorts of neurasthenic symptoms ranging from vapors to hysterical pregnancy. So, be as candid with yourself as you can be when you contemplate making this critical career decision, and ask your spouse, your best friend, your accountant, your attorney, your shrink, and your agent to be so, too. If they vote yes, then all you’ll need is a laptop, a pair of jeans, and a few T-shirts, and you’re in business.

Oh yes—don’t forget $100,000 worth of book contracts!

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It’s reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Of Taxes and the Writer
By Richard Curtis

Early in April a few years ago I got a call from a client who was preparing his income tax. This author wrote erotic fiction and wanted to know whether he could legitimately claim as a deduction his pharmacological treatment for a little affliction he had contracted in the course of “researching” one of his novels.

I told him I imagined the treatment would probably fall under medical deductions rather than research expenses, but the story does illustrate that even the most untrammeled literary spirits have to pay their obeisance to Uncle Sam sooner or later. With more and more authors incorporating, purchasing expensive computer equipment, seeking shelters for their taxable income, and in general being more businesslike in their approaches to the art and craft of literature, the accountant is becoming as important as the literary agent in guiding the destinies of writers.

The chances of a writer being audited by the Internal Revenue Service are a little better than those of the average working stiff because most writers are freelancers, and taxes on their income are not usually withheld as they are from persons on company payrolls. Thus, even though the odds that anybody will be audited are going down because of staff cutbacks at the IRS, a free-lancer’s tax return may be more provocative than that of someone who works for Boeing or IBM. Your best defense, should the fickle finger of the IRS single you out, is a well-kept set of records, primarily your canceled checks, your receipts, and a journal or ledger recording details of every transaction for which you are claiming a deduction, particularly those for which receipts are not ordinarily given, such as public transportation, certain tips, and the like.

In general, authors are entitled to “write off,” or deduct from taxable income earned from their writing, certain costs incurred in pursuit of that income. Among those costs are agent’s commissions; rental of office space; editorial and secretarial assistance; purchase or lease of computers and other office equipment; office supplies, such as toner cartridges and paper; travel; the cost of entertaining editors, agents, producers, collaborators, and others related to their professional endeavors; and books and other research material.

Naturally, not all expenses are deductible; other expenses may be deducted over a period of years; others are only partially deductible; and still others are deductible only at your peril.
Because of the feast-or-famine nature of the freelance life, you don’t necessarily have to earn money in any given year in order to write off expenses. You may be working on a long-term project and a whole year or more may go by without income. Yet you may still claim the costs incurred that year and deduct them from whatever other income you received, such as interest or stock dividends, your spouse’s income if you’re married and file jointly, and the like. Even if you’re not a professional writer at all but simply a would-be writer who has yet to realize a dime from his work, you may nevertheless write off your expenses for a period of years before these activities come under the definition of hobby, the costs of which are not deductible.

So much for famine. But there’s also tax relief for those who feast. One form of it is the government-sponsored IRA’s and other tax shelter plans, which are designed for freelancers and other independent breadwinners who do not earn regular wages. By putting some of your income into such a shelter, you in effect lower the amount of income you claim for that year and pay taxes on it only when you draw that income later in your life, at retirement age, when you will presumably be in a lower tax bracket. Meanwhile, your tax shelter account will be appreciating through interest or dividends or (if you invest the money wisely) through capital gains on investments.

When it comes to taxes, the name of the game is deductions. Let’s talk about some.

Capital purchases. Capital purchases are major items such as machinery and furniture. These might include your personal computer and printer, a desk, photocopier, file cabinets, a fax. The government considers such purchases investments, and because investments are subject to depreciation, you are usually not permitted to deduct their purchase price in full the year you purchased them. Rather, you have to spread the cost out over several years for tax accounting purposes. Thus, if you buy a PC and a printer, you may only be able to “depreciate” them over five years; that is, deduct a portion of the price from your income each year for five years. On the other hand, you may be entitled to an “investment credit,” a direct credit against your tax liability. Investment credits are a form of reward the government gives businesses for buying capital equipment. The principle is that such investments pump money back into our economy and keep it healthy, so investment credits encourage you to buy furniture and equipment.

Straight deductions. Most day-to-day necessities of the writing profession come under this category. Assuming you can furnish receipts, these are fully deductible, and deductible wholly in the year in which you pay them. They include paper and other stationery; pens and pencils, paper clips, rubber bands, and other office supplies; postage; messenger bills; photocopy bills; legal, bookkeeping, and accounting fees; dues and professional organization fees; editorial and secretarial assistance; agent’s commissions and expenses; phone bills; interest on loans; and certain state and local taxes, such as unincorporated business taxes, city rent or occupancy taxes, and the like.

Although many of these costs are indisputably business expenses and are seldom questioned by the IRS as long as you furnish solid documentation, some of them do fall into a gray area where eyebrows might be raised or IRS computers, programmed to seek variations from certain norms, might “flag” the questionable item. Writer’s Digest is a pretty safe magazine subscription to deduct, but Vogue? Sports Illustrated? Well, if you can demonstrate that you wish to write for those markets or that the information they provide applies to a writing project you’re developing, those subscriptions will be arguably legitimate. The same might be said of a television set. If you hope to write for television or consider TV a good source of information for your books, stories, or articles, you may be able to get away with writing off all or some of the cost of the television set.

The gray area gets even grayer with such deductions as travel and entertainment. At what point, if any, a dinner stops being social and starts being professional is often impossible to say, as is the point at which a vacation becomes a business trip. In order to legitimize these deductions, solid documentation is desirable in the form of receipts and canceled checks, a diary or journal, or other written evidence demonstrating intent and purpose. The IRS requires receipts for any claimed business meals of more than $25; for meals costing less (is there such a creature?), no receipt is necessary but a detailed journal entry or other memo is desirable. It should stipulate the date, place, persons involved, business purpose, and price. Home entertainment may be harder to document, since food and drink for business entertainment are often purchased with provisions earmarked for personal use, or food and drink already stocked at home may be used to entertain business guests. But here again, a combination of receipts and memoranda may at least convey to potential auditors the sincerity of your attempts to furnish good documentation. The IRS does assume that a certain percentage of a professional writer’s or freelancer’s income is going to be claimed for entertainment, and within that range it may not raise any questions. But because entertainment deductions are usually among the most inflated found in the average return, any inordinate claims will usually trigger intense curiosity.

The same is true of travel. Business travelers are obliged to document the purpose of their trip and expenses, and even though such trips may in fact be 95 percent play and 5 percent work, orderly records will allow the benefit of the doubt to be given to the claimant. Indeed, no connection between the place visited and the place written about need manifest itself, for who is to say that you did not write a story about Acapulco that was rejected and never published, or that after spending a week in London researching a novel you did not decide to set the book in Paris instead? But there are limits to the government’s credulity. The writer who flies with his family to Miami Beach during Christmas week may have a hard time convincing a gimlet-eyed IRS auditor that it was a research trip.

Probably the most common tax headache for a writer is what to deduct for the office in his home. If you have an office outside your home, you may claim the rent, utility, insurance, and related bills in their entirety. But what if your bedroom doubles as an office or you do your writing on the kitchen table? Until a few years ago, the IRS was liberal in its definition of office space in the home, but it has since become stricter, insisting that a room be set aside specifically and exclusively for professional use. If you have an eight-room home and use one room as an office, you may claim one-eighth of all your house expenses as deductible business expenses.

The telephone is another ambiguous item insofar as personal and professional uses are mingled on the same bill. In such cases you can assign a percentage of the bill to business use and note the long-distance charges for business calls. Perhaps the best way around the problem is to maintain a separate phone for business purposes.

A growing number of writers have become so businesslike about their profession that they have incorporated themselves. What benefits do they hope to derive? Is this something that every writer can or should do?

There are many financial, legal, and other good reasons for individuals to form corporations, but these are not always as clear for writers as they might be for manufacturing or service companies. One major benefit, for instance, is limited liability. With the threat of legal claims perpetually hanging over every writer’s head, what author would not breathe easier knowing that the only assets he’s in jeopardy of losing in a lawsuit are the rather meager ones retained by his corporation?

Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near that simple. The law recognizes how easy it is for wrongdoers to hide behind the cloak of corporate immunity, and thus in the “discovery” process of a trial it may be ruled that the personal assets of the head of a closely held corporation (meaning that only you, or perhaps you and your spouse, hold all the stock) may be vulnerable to a claim.

Furthermore, most publishers signing contracts with incorporated authors require them to furnish written “performance guarantees” that they will honor their contractual obligations and be responsible for the warranty and indemnification clauses of their contracts. After all, a corporation can’t write a book – or, what is more pertinent in this case, it can’t write a libelous, defamatory, obscene, scandalous, or privacy-invading book. Only individuals can do that, so authors must sign a document guaranteeing the contractual obligations of the corporations they own, and vice versa. This so vitiates the limited liability aspect of incorporating as to render it virtually impotent.

There are definite financial advantages for an author to incorporate, but these generally come into play only if that author is making a good deal of money, and making it consistently. Medical insurance can be paid out of before-tax income. A pension plan can be established, enabling you to shelter until retirement far more money than the government currently permits under IRA plans it sponsors. These pension plans usually have life insurance options, meaning that life insurance premiums may be paid out of before-tax income, a distinct advantage over the situation of unincorporated individuals.

There are other benefits, too, but there are also disadvantages. The costs of starting and maintaining a corporation are not inconsiderable, and after you have paid legal and accounting costs, or spent so much time filling out and filing federal, state, and local withholding income tax, corporation tax, unemployment, Social Security, disability, pension, and other papers, you may find that you might have done just as well conducting your business as a plain old unincorporated human being. Besides, if the government feels you’ve established a corporation just to dodge taxes, you could get into trouble and end up paying heavy penalties and interest on back taxes. So before you start thinking about vying with Mobil for a place on the Fortune 500 list, consult your accountant.

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It’s reprinted in How to be Your Own Literary Agent, published by Houghton Mifflin, Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Now that our speculations about Apple’s tablet (including a name) have been put to rest, it’s time to play Speculation 2.0.  What are we speculating about?  How about a Google tablet.

Electronista says “Google is in the midst of crafting its own tablet to take on the iPad, a leak late Sunday may have revealed. CEO Eric Schmidt at a recent Los Angeles party purportedly told those gathered that the company is working on an Android tablet. Most of its details weren’t mentioned, but it would be both an e-reader and a general computing device.”

The Electronista staff adds: “Any tablet launch would be controversial for Google, as it would not only stoke the heated battle with Apple even further but risk alienating the company’s hardware partners.”

Can’t pass up a good rumor?  Then Google prepping its own Android tablet? is perfect for you.

RC

Tax filing deadlines are a source of anxiety for most citizens but few wring their hands as much as freelancers as they wrestle with such line-items as deduction of contraceptive devices (for research on relationship books) and charging off bathrooms where notes for novels are composed.

Sam Potts has created a Form 1040-Scrimp to guide freelancers in their preparation. It’s called A Tax Form for the Marginally Employed and you can find it in the Op-Art section of the New York Times. For instance, those claiming an area of their homes dedicated to writing can take advantage of the 98.4% Doormat Deduction.

If it sounds like your leg’s being pulled, see Potts’s freelancer’s tax form. If you’d like some straight skinny on how freelancers can deal with taxes, click here.

We figure we used at least 56 megawatts of electricity to compose this posting and we will enter it on Form 1040-Scrimp as soon as the electric company provides a receipt.

RC
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Below are comments by Frances Grimble of Lavolta Press on the controversy triggered by NY Times Ethicist Randy Cohen’s support for a reader who downloaded a book from a pirate website (See our original blog on Cohen here). Ms. Grimble’s remarks were posted in the comments box but as we feel they shed particularly bright light on the issues we decided they deserve their own posting.

Ms. Grimble did not provide the accompanying image.

RC

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Part 1
It’s a lot easier to just sit down and read a paper book page by page, than to scan it page by page and then go through it page by page again on an e-reader. I just don’t believe that many people would want to read a book in e-form so very much that they will scan a paper book they paid for, without also transferring that scan to other people. Pirates often do so for praise by their social groups, by the way.

It is also a false assumption that every book will be released as an e-book, or should be released as an e-book. Therefore, it is false to comfortably soothe your morals and other people’s by _claiming_ you’ll buy the e-book “when it comes out” and that you are merely “time-shifting.” Books sell in different quantities in different formats–hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, e-book, audio book. The publisher needs to produce the format(s) and quantity(ies) suitable for that particular book’s contents, and that will make back the costs and overhead, and that will pay the author, and that will generate enough profit to keep the business going. There are many books that simply cannot work as mass-market paperbacks, and there are also many books that simply cannot work as e-books. Furthermore, the publisher often does not even decide/plan whether to issue a book in a given format until another format has been on the market for awhile.

Most cheap e-book advocates conveniently assert that writers work for fun, not money. Not true. Writing at a professional level is very hard, very time-consuming, often money-consuming work. Even if it’s enjoyable much of the time, so are most other professions for the people who pursue them. Writers need and deserve to make a living just like members of other professions.

Publishing is very expensive. Everything-ought-to-be-an-e-book advocates conveniently sweep away the costs of editing, proofreading, indexing, photography, illustration, graphic design, page layout, cover design, publicity, marketing, accounting, legal services, computer equipment, office overhead, travel, and other expenses. It’s not all the print run by a long shot.

E-book advocates also pass around this meme that publishers have “always opposed” the borrowing of books, or the sale of used books, or something. Actually, I’ve never seen any data to back this up. In any case, what we are talking about is now, not what somebody might have said when Andrew Carnegie was opening his first library. The issue is one of quantity/degree. Publishers do lose sales when books are lent and they do lose sales of new books when used ones are sold. And they do lose sales of books when readers photocopy library copies.

The fact that many publishers and authors have financially survived the reading of such books does not mean they can survive e-book piracy _in addition_. Amateur piracy does count. If everyone makes just one copy for one friend, that’s 50% of the book sales lost. It’s all an issue of quantity/unit sales; so it’s false to assert that everyone survived photocopy piracy so they can now survive e-book piracy.

Part 2
I do believe in effective DRM, but none is available yet for e-book readers. Yes, anyone can copy a book with a ream of paper and a pencil, but the easier it is to pirate, the more people do it–and the more acceptible they think it is, because the publisher did not try to prevent it. Even more, however, I believe in not publishing e-books at all in the current climate of piracy.

Pirates often assert that publishers “insult their customers,” by using DRM and by court prosecution of piracy. However, someone who steals or passes on stolen goods is not a customer. Furthermore, I can tell you from experience that it is not “fun” for a writer to have readers assert that books–even though they’re worth reading and copying page by page–are not worth paying for. Or to see them issue threats on Internet groups that if they don’t like the price or format they’ll just steal the book by one means or another. It’s not fun to hear them assert that publishing is just a “failed business model,” and that writers and publishers should just go do something else, who cares what.

It’s not fun to hear people who know nothing about the business assert that it unnecessary to print books and that that is the only cost. It’s not fun to hear them assert that “publishers can always sell ads.” Supporting publications with advertising is now a failed business model. Look how badly most newspapers and magazines are doing, because people are not buying enough ads to support publication–even on the publications’ websites.

To me, as a writer and publisher, readers who denigrate the very books they simultaneously demand as some kind of right, and who either assert the right to steal them or who make all kinds of thin, roundabout excuses for stealing, are not customers I want. They are not readers I want. People who really value books cherish them and pay for them. They do not insult them and steal them.

Part 3
When someone has the right to sue you, it’s the law that matters–not what you feel ethically is OK. When you pirate, you risk getting sued by the copyright holder. If you are sued and you lose, you take the consequences–you may well end up paying tens of thousands more in damages and legal fees than you’d have paid for a legitimately bought book.

Therefore endless gyrations and arguments regarding what you personally morally feel is OK are pointless.

The Internet is exhilarating. It grabs you. It’s impulsive.

But…

Magazines are enveloping. They embrace you.  They are immersive.

That is the message going out across the land on the heels of a major promotion aimed at reminding the world – especially the alien occupiers of our planet known as Young People – how wonderful magazines and newspapers are and how much we would lose if they were to succumb to the forces unleashed by the Web Revolution.  The campaign brings together rivals who recognize that, in Benjamin Franklin’s phrase, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

“Together, we can change the conversation about magazines and share what we in the business know to be true: magazines are relevant, play an important role in society and have a strong future ahead,” says Ann Moore, chairman & CEO of Time Inc. “This campaign showcases those messages of relevancy and longevity.”

The press release, which you may read in full here, uses some persuasive metrics to drive home its point:

• Magazine readership has risen 4.3% over the past five years
• Average paid subscriptions reached nearly 300 million in 2009
• Adults 18-34 are avid magazine readers. They read more issues and spend more time per issue than their over-34 counterparts
• During the 12-year life of Google, magazine readership increased 11%
• Magazine effectiveness is growing. Ad recall has increased 13% over the past five years. Action-taking—based on readers recalling specific ads—increased by 10%.
• Magazines outperform other media in driving positive shifts in purchase consideration/intent.

One reason to return to print reading, omitted from these talking points, is that it’s good for you, especially for young minds, which a number of scientific studies suggest may be compromised by the distractions of screen reading and viewing.  (See Watching Books and The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction)

The magazine industry’s message is one we believe in and promoted in countless postings. Though the promo doesn’t include print books the implication is unavoidable. If you’re not sure, watch the video and say “book” every time you hear “magazine”.

RC