Amazon to Pay by Page Turn + WORD Jersey City Reading

The behemoth strikes again. By behemoth, I mean Amazon, the global retailing corporation that also is the world's largest bookstore, and a major force in contemporary (American) publishing. According to a Monday report in The Guardian, the most recent big news in the annals of Amazon's publishing ventures involves its decision to start paying writers based on page turns. Page turns! This policy won't, however, affect all authors whose ebooks are available on Amazon. Yet. Right now it applies only to self-published authors whose books appear in Amazon's Kindle Owner's Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited services. But it portends a shift in publishing that writers may want to pay attention to.

Amazon, as a book publisher, originally paid self-published authors royalties once a customer read 10% of an ebook. This unfairly penalized authors of longer works (compare a 600 page novel to a 60 page novella, or long form essay), who got nothing if readers stopped reading before the royalty trigger. Some authors then decided to start dividing up works into shorter pieces to ensure their royalties, leading to a potential flood of material--or more than already exists--on Amazon's site. So Amazon came up with a new plan to address the problem, as well as a system to normalize the meaning of "page" in ebooks and what counts as "reading it"; think time spent on the page, standardized fonts, and so on.

In The Guardian, Amazon says of its rationale,

We’re making this switch in response to great feedback we received from authors who asked us to better align payout with the length of books and how much customers read. Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it.

In other words, if you write that 600 page novel and someone reads it all the way through, you'll be paid more than the author of a 60 page novella. But if a reader gives up 10% of the way through the longer book (i.e., 60 pages), both of you will earn the same. It should also be noted that the payments will come from a limited, dedicated pool of money Amazon calculates on a monthly basis--based on total sales?--so authors will be competing against each other directly for royalties.

As I noted previously in a February post on ebooks and surveillance, this is part of the advancing corporate intrusion into what had previously been for centuries a private experience; since the advent of silent reading of codex books, no one truly knew how much or in what ways you read. With e-reader tracking, this information is readily accessible by all e-book publishers. E-devices, however, can now track you down to how far you get into a book, what you reread, and where you stop reading, as many readers do with many books. These activities are being commodified and financialized, quietly in the cases of the e-reader companies themselves, but overtly now with Amazon's new move.

In my earlier post I also suggested, following the lead of Francine Prose, who wrote about e-reader tracking in The New York Review of Books, that this surveillance and the data resulting from it would begin to reshape how some authors imagined their work, which is to say, their aesthetics. It's a direct line from anticipating, based on data, what will draw readers, to feeling pressure to write based on what will generate page views--and turns--and then from there to publishers' demands to do so. Longer books with each element shaped by data about what keeps readers turning pages...of course this is something some authors may grasp intuitively, and some books that fit this criterion are very well written, and true works of art.

But the write-by-the-numbers approach could also have disastrous effects on literary production, while also further breaking down the already shaky publishing system's financial base. This may sound like dystopian view of things, but we have, as I pointed out, the example of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. If no one ever reads a book to the end or stops halfway through most books, most authors will earn even less than they already do. And as the examples of the journalistic and music industries show, will any but a very few earn a fair and liveable amount for their creative labor?  The lure of market-based thinking is a strong one these days. Amazon is a apex predator corporation, and other publishers, especially the bigger ones, will feel the need to follow Amazon's lead.

Put the two together...well, let's write that horror film another time.

***

Many thanks to everyone who came out to last night's reading at WORD Bookstore in Jersey City! Thanks also to everyone at WORD, especially Caitlin and Zach, for making the reading possible. It was energizing to see a healthy crowd, filled with so many familiar faces, and to be able to share with a live audience something I hadn't yet read aloud--the final pages of "Rivers"--from Counternarratives.  

Also, thanks to WORD for having a good number of copies of Counternarratives in stock, and to everyone who bought a copy. I have one more New York area reading, on July 1, before heading off to Ithaca for Image Text Ithaca, so please come out to McNally-Jackson Bookstore, where I'll be reading and participating in a conversation with Christine Smallwood!

If you are in Jersey City, make sure to stop by WORD, which is at 123 Newark Ave., just steps away from the Grove Street PATH station. A few photos:

The Ace Hotel Artist-in-Residency

For Eric Garner

It is now almost a week since I spent an evening (too brief!) and morning as Artist in Residence at the Ace Hotel New York, in Manhattan, courtesy of the Ace and of Word Bookstores in Jersey City and Brooklyn. It was, to sum it up in one word, extraordinary. This residency, which I hadn't heard of before, has been taking place since earlier this year (I believe), and courtesy of Jenn Northington of Word, and Ben Sisto, of Ace, I entered the mix, so I gladly and heartily thank them again for the honor.

Since I've never held an artist-in-residency (visiting professorships don't really count, I think, nor do residencies to artists' colonies, like Yaddo, right?), in any of the artistic genres, this was truly a first for me, and though nervous, I was determined to make use of the time, space and resources, to tackle a few projects. One vow I made was to keep the TV off (except for Homeland and The Comeback, which I ended up watching on my iPad, so I didn't violate that); the other was that I'd only work on school-related projects that were absolutely necessary, so I did read my fiction workshop's final submissions.

The desk area, with some of their
and my materials (cf. the guestbook at center)

Some of the art materials
I had to work with

But I spent the rest of the time drawing, something that I do regularly but not in this sort of concentrated manner. I primarily wanted to draw out my visualizations of textual conceptual/performance scores I'd written up earlier, to see what they might look like if I mapped them, almost like choreographic charts. In addition, I worked a bit on the Emotional Exercises project, tinkering with the card design, and trying to think more carefully about the categories of exercises the cards might contain. I also wanted to let my mind draw from my inner well of creativity, and the murders of, horrendous grand jury verdicts concerning, and ongoing protests on behalf of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, among many other black victims of state violence, provided me with more than enough to think about.

As part of the residency, I had to take two Ace Hotel photo booth strips (I haven't done this in years, and it was fun); make use of some of the materials the hotel provided (paper, pens, a drafting board, etc.); leave some materials I'd worked on; write a message in the residency guest book (mine was a Venn diagram that included a drawing focusing on hypergentrification and artmaking, and of course a thanks to the Ace and Word); and not trash the room or engage in destructive hijinks (no problem there). I also received two drink tickets to the hotel's downstairs bar, the Breslin Bar & Dining Room, which was packed when C and I arrived, and later, around 11, when I took a short break and had a beer, and a gift card to a nearby restaurant, which I didn't use.

C and others I know had been to the Ace for meals and events, but I had only passed the hotel in the past, so it was exciting to have a reason to spend some time there. The room options vary, from bunk beds to loft suites, and the affiliated stores and cafe are pretty high end, as most Manhattan businesses appear to be heading these days (is there anything left for middle class people?). My clean, comfortable (small? mid-sized?) room, which looked out on what I think was steadily gentrifying Broadway was outfitted in vibrant hipster fashion, with modern and retro furniture and artifacts in equal measure.

There was a turntable with a selection of LPs, an industrial looking radio, and a refrigerator that might either vintage or vintage-style, but amply stocked, with $11 water (and up!) and more. The bathroom was small but immaculate, and included a Kennedy half dollar-sized square of black soap, supposedly great for one's complexion, as well as anything else you might want and could have forgotten. (Unfortunately, neither in the bathroom or at the front desk, nor at any neighboring businesses could I find the exact USB scanner cable I'd left at home!) To top it off, the main internal wall was covered with New York Times foolscaps from the 1930s; mine featured a strangely high number of images of Adolf Hitler's and other top Nazis' faces! (Obviously newspapers from that era would be likely to feature this murderous gang, but, uh, to know they're looking at you while you're working and sleeping...hmm....)

That's you know who....

Y'knowwhatI'msaying...?

Nazi portraits, page-long accounts of the Great Depression, and reports of the death of the King of the Belgians (yes, he was staring from the wall too!) notwithstanding--which is to say, ironically enough--I had a wonderful, very productive time. Here is the Ace Hotel's Facebook page on my residency. I do hope to perform (or find someone to do so) some of these scores this upcoming summer or at some point in the future, and publicly share the Emotional Exercises cards sooner rather than later. Weather, health and time will determine when and where, I suppose, but in the interim, I can look at these dream maps, as they were, to get a sense of what might be possible.

This upcoming week's Artist in Residence is Deji Bryce Olukotun, the author of Nigerians in Space (Unnamed Press, 2014). Word to Ace and Word, and I'll looking out for what he comes up with.

Some of the score visualizations:

Some of the other drawings:

"I can't breathe" in New York City

Add caption

The desk when I'd begun
packing up

Publication Updates + Reading @ Word, Jersey City (w/ Vincent Czyz)

In a previous post, I mentioned several forthcoming publications, and I now have the links. First, a snippet of my translation of Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer is now live at The White Review: excerpt from "Letters from a Seducer." I recommend browsing all the new posted links, which include Humphrey Davies' translation of an excerpt from Lebanese-Ottoman writer Ahmad Faris al-Shidaq's Leg Over Leg, self-translations of new poems by South African writer Antjie Krog, a snippet of Chinese writer Can Xue's Vertical Motion by Karen Gernant and Chen Zipeng, and an essay, entitled "Afterword: The Death of the Translator," by George Szirtes, poet and translator of Lászlo Krasnahórkai, which should part of the ongoing conversations in translation studies and comparative literature. (If you can find one in a nearby bookstore, I also highly recommend The White Review's Issue No. 9, which includes an interview with Russia's pathbreaking writer Vladimir Sorokin, and visual work by the late experimental filmmaker, poet and artist--and no relation!--Jeff Keen--no relation).

Also, one of the shorter (very brief) stories from my collection Counternarratives is now live at the venerable TriQuarterly, which is now a publication of the Northwestern University MFA Program in Creative Writing. "Mannahatta" imagines the moment in which João Rodrigues (Juan Rodriguez), thought to be the first non-native settler of Manhattan island (and thus New York), makes his decision not to return to the Dutch ship on which he works. I was particularly happy that this story, which I wrote last fall in the midst of teaching and administrating, has been published, and that TriQuarterly, which I have read and admired for many years, is the periodical doing so. Many thanks to them, and the piece includes a brief paragraph about Rodrigues in case you do not know who he is (and we all should).

***

Last night, at the invitation of poet and Culture Society publisher Zach Barocas, author and Rutgers-Newark alumnus Vincent Czyz and I read at Word Bookstore's new Jersey City branch, which Zach manages. Although the series aims to feature local poets reading poetry, both Vincent and I write prose as well, so we mixed things up a bit, making sure, however, to keep the "lyric" in play. Vincent read first and began with a beautiful prose poem, then read an excerpt of the first story in his collection Adrift in a Vanishing City, which I urge you to check out (and which Samuel R. Delany has praised in an essay on Vincent's work). 

I followed with a brief invocation of Amiri Baraka, then read two short excerpts from the Hilst, including the opening section published in The White Review. I concluded with a brand new poem, "Power," which I partially wrote during the wild, aleatory Red Rover Series reading, "The Vulnerable Rumble," organized and curated by Jennifer Karmin, Laura Goldstein and Laura Mullen at Outer Space Studio in Chicago as a special event for the Modern Language Association's annual conference. 

We fielded several questions from the good-sized midweek crowd--it's always heartening when people turn out for a reading on a Wednesday evening--and then chatted with attendees afterwards. One young man was seeking to find out ways of using technology to transcribe interviews and espousing ideas about the death of originality, so that when I suggested to him that he check out the work of Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, two names that came immediately to mind, it turned out that he had Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011) in his pocket! 

Below are a few pictures of Zach and Vincent, and of Word, a store Jersey City and the surrounding area badly needs. Stop in, since it's accessible from all over New Jersey and New York City (it's just steps away from the PATH train stop at Grove Street), catch some of their events, but by all means, please buy some books there and support them if you can.

Zach Barocas, introducing the reading

Vincent Czyz, reading his work

And here are a few pictures from a couple weeks back, I think, shortly after the store's opening in December.

The café section of Word

Books! 

A browser 

Another booklover 

The well-stocked shelves