Update: Amazon finally got back to me on this, and apparently their use of the image is legit. I’m not terribly surprised, nor am I outraged, etc., but raised a BS flag on this one because I couldn’t find anything to back it up. However, Amazon pointed me to point 4 of the Author Central terms of service, which reads:

“I’ve received confirmation from the concerned department that as mentioned in the terms of agreement you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free right and license to use, reproduce, distribute, transmit, perform, modify and display all Submitted Materials in any media formats solely in connection with the Services and the marketing, promotion and distribution of the Services. The rights you grant to us in this paragraph extend to us and to any person or entity designated or engaged by us or acting on our behalf and are in addition to any rights we may otherwise have.”

They also pointed to point 5.5 of the KDP terms of service (which I won’t bore you with here), although upon reading that I don’t think it applies to this case.

Oh, well, I guess that explains that. I’m okay with it, now that I can see the text in black and white. And as I’ve said before, I’m not going to complain all that much about Amazon, as without them I wouldn’t be here. But it does go to show that you always have to read, heed and somehow remember all the fine print!

Listen, I love Amazon. Really, I do. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them, but would still be back at the National Security Agency, banging my head against the literal cubicle wall and counting down the nanoseconds of the years ahead until my minimum retirement age. But something interesting happened the other day: Amazon pilfered my book cover.

I was notified first by one reader on Facebook, followed by several others on Twitter, that they’d received a promotional email from Amazon that morning (on 19 May) with the graphic you see here in the upper right. Looks pretty cool, eh?

The reason they brought it up is that the background bits with the sword and stars looked awfully familiar. Maybe a bit like the cover of EMPIRE?

Well, maybe more than just a little bit. I overlaid Amazon’s graphic with a 300 pixel-high image of EMPIRE’s cover and it was a perfect match, as you can see here.

Now, it wouldn’t have been such a big harumph if Amazon had at least pointed the reader toward EMPIRE or one of my other books, but that wasn’t the case.

I reviewed the Kindle Direct Publishing Terms of Service (KDP TOS to those who enjoy acronyms), and I couldn’t find anything in there that led me to believe that Amazon could take copyrighted book covers, airbrush out the title, and use the resulting images for promotional purposes without crediting the author/publisher.

So I fired off an email to KDP customer service and got an interim response back from “Raghu M.” noting that he’d notified the concerned department (whichever one that was) about the issue, and would monitor things and follow up as soon as he could provide an answer.

That was all fine and good, although the one thing that irritated me was that it was one of those “you can’t reply to this message” messages. I believe that customer service should be a dialogue, and hate having no way to discuss the issue short of having to send yet another form message in which I’d have to explain everything over again, as there wasn’t even a case or ticket number to go with the original query. Gah.

I decided to write an email and sent it off to Amazon in hopes that it’ll reach someone in the executive echelons above reality, not so much that I expect more action from them, but because I don’t really trust things to get kicked around in the customer service mystery box. And, besides, someone in the corporate chain should probably be aware that their marketing people are engaged in copyright infringement, especially since Amazon comes down like a ton of bricks on people for even a hint of the same.

What did I tell them? After explaining (and showing) that the graphic was clearly derived from the cover of EMPIRE and was used without my permission and, so far as I can find, without being covered in the KDP TOS, I told them that as recompense I would be quite happy to have EMPIRE (or, better yet, one of my paid books like REDEMPTION) featured in a special promotion. That way everybody wins: Amazon and I get more royalties, and readers will get some sort of special something. I said that I was certainly open to other ideas, but tossed that out for consideration.

So, we’ll see what happens. It’s always something…

Fear The Penguin!

As I’ve discussed previously, among my biggest pet peeves are the predatory practices of vanity press companies like Author Solutions (which is part of the Penguin Group) and its subsidiaries, which take terrible advantage of authors by hoodwinking them into paying outrageous sums of money to get their books published. What’s even worse is the number of aspiring authors lately who are not only falling into this trap, but dragging other unwitting folks into the tar pit by asking them to pledge money to Kickstarter projects the authors set up to pay for their vanity press publishing packages. No. No, no, no!

If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter, it’s basically a way for people with project ideas who need funding to find financial backers, most of whom are just regular folks willing and able to contribute a small amount of money. But, like interest, small amounts add up.

I think Kickstarter is a fantastic idea. But I think raising Kickstarter money to publish through a vanity press like Author Solutions is lunacy (for a great rundown on Author Solutions and author exploitation in general, check out David Gaughran’s blog). The would-be author is asking people to fund a book project that is never going to get anywhere and will never make back what the author and his or her supporters have put into it. Why? Because these companies make their money from the authors, not by selling books. If you ask people to fund your project and then hand the money to a vanity press, you may as well have just thrown it out into the street. Actually, that would be better, because the people who snatch up the money could put it to better use.

The reason I’m fired up about this particular issue is that it came up the other day with a relation of one of my wife’s friends, and I’ve also gotten several messages on Twitter asking me to support Kickstarter projects for authors going to publish with Author Solutions companies.

Maybe if I shout this here it’ll be loud and clear:

Handing over your book to companies like Author Solutions that demand a big wad of cash up front from you, the author, is not self-publishing, it is vanity press publishing. There is a huge difference, and it is a terrible thing for the author. Do not do it.

With true self-publishing, the amount of money you need up front ranges from absolutely zip to perhaps a couple/few thousand dollars to pay for specific things that many folks aren’t able to do themselves. The two most common examples that immediately come to mind of things that might be expensive enough to warrant a Kickstarter project are cover art, which can range anywhere from $50 to over $400, and professional editing, which can be as much as a few thousand dollars for a full-length novel (prices will vary, of course), although I’ve found that you can often find people to do a very creditable job of editing for free or very minimal cost. You could also come up with some other innovative Kickstarter projects, like funding the production of an audiobook or translating the book into other languages.

In my mind, all those would be very positive uses of Kickstarter funds for a novel that you self-publish. Because at the end of the day, the author remains in control of their work. You retain all the rights, other than the nonexclusive rights you grant to retailers like Amazon to sell your work on your behalf for a cut of the revenue. You remain in control, so if you want to change the price of your work to be more competitive or for a special promotion, you can. If you want to make it free as a loss leader (a book you give away to entice readers to buy your other books), you can. You can do whatever you want with it to help it grow and entertain or inform readers.

If you pay for a vanity press to take care of it, you won’t have all that. What’s more, at the prices they set on their books, you’ll never make back what you put into it. Not even close. Why? Because no one’s going to buy books at premium prices from an unknown author. And the vanity press company you paid to publish your book doesn’t care, because they already made their money from you. That’s how their business model is set up; proceeds from any book sales is just the icing on their cake. Yes, they have all kinds of fancy rhetoric up front about how they can “help” you, but once they have your money for one of their packages (that often range into the thousands of dollars), you’re just another sucker. I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but that’s the truth. Just…don’t…do it.

So, if you’re going to use Kickstarter to help fund your book project for cover art, editing, etc., I think that’s great. Just please don’t give away that money to a vanity press company, because in the end it’s not just you getting screwed, it’s all the people who believed in you enough to give you their hard-earned money.

Well, technically I guess this is Reaping The Harvest teaser #2, as I posted a blurb from the book on Facebook a week or so ago, but I never claimed to be a math genius!

Anyway, here’s a little something to whet your appetite (and remember, this is a rough draft and might have bloopers!)…

* * *

Kiran was gripped by a nightmare. It visited him every time he closed his eyes, and it was always the same.

It began with him blinking open his eyes to find himself aboard the Indian Air Force IL-76 transport that was supposed to carry them to the United States. It always took him a moment to remember that he had just escaped the horrors of Hyderabad, that his men had sacrificed themselves so that he and his cousin Vijay, who lay strapped in a gurney, could live. A nightmare within a nightmare.

The plane had stopped in New Delhi to take on more passengers. Government officials, members of high-ranking families, some scientists. They were faceless, fearful ghosts in his dream who poured into the plane and took their places around him and his cousin.

Vijay spoke to him, but Kiran couldn’t remember the words now. Vijay, too, had become a ghost, his dark skin having faded to a pale, translucent shroud over his skull as the big four-engine jet took off and turned northeast, heading toward Turkey, the first refueling stop on their way to America.

But they never made it. Kiran thrashed and murmured as the dream exploded in fire and metal shrapnel that swept the huge cargo bay, chopping the ghosts there to bits (he had never thought that ghosts could bleed, but their blood was always bright red in the dream) before they were sucked out the gaping hole torn in the side of the plane, just aft of the wing. The ghosts of men, women and children, nearly a third of those on the plane who’d been unfortunate enough to be sitting in the wrong place, or had foolishly been up and moving about the hold, had been taken as the cabin suffered explosive decompression. He could see through the tear in the side of the fuselage, could see the right inboard engine streaming flames that turned the bodies sucked from the plane into torches, fluttering like burning moths through the night sky.

Beside him, Vijay screamed. Kiran remembered hanging on to his cousin’s hand and the gurney, which had been strapped down. The plane dove and twisted, and Kiran was sure that they must have rolled upside down, but perhaps that was only part of the dream, too. Other ghosts, free of their restraints, tumbled about the hold. Some followed the others out the hole. Some fell to the deck plates when the plane began to level out, where they lay very still.

The plane’s fall from the sky seemed to take a long time, far longer than Kiran would have imagined had he not been dreaming it all. He knew that in the end he would wake up, cursing himself for a fool, before donning his uniform for another day that duty to his country had set before him. He knew he would wake up. He had to.

Yet the plane still spiraled down and down. The fire from the engine had died, but it still glowed from the heat, and thick dark smoke streamed from it, and he could see now that the trailing edge of the wing was a tattered mess. Beyond was only darkness, no sky, no stars, only darkness that rushed up to meet them…

Sometimes I think I should poke my head out of my cave more often. But when I do, I usually find things that scare me back into the blissful ignorance of mental hibernation, or goofing around on Twitter, which is often the same thing. Take this morning, for example. I happened to poke around in the news feeds and (somewhat belatedly) found out about the so-called Monsanto Protection Act, which sent me running back into my cave.

As you may (or may not) know, I wrote Season Of The Harvest out of a sense of disbelief that the shenanigans of the agricultural biotechnology industry, led by companies like the infamous Monsanto, were driven merely by corporate greed. While most readers have enjoyed the book as a sort of sci-fi thriller, it’s really based largely on science fact. All the places are real. Most of the technology is real. The depiction of people in key positions in the government who are indebted to (or simply vassals of) the biotech companies is real, although modified, of course, to fit the story. The whole thing, seen together, seemed to outrageous, too sinister, for mere profit.

Then we leave sanity behind completely with things like the Monsanto Protection Act, which is the unofficial name given to Section 735 of the “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013,” or H.R. 933, an appropriations bill that President Obama signed into law in late March. This was one of those sneaky little inserts that lawmakers stick into larger bills hoping that either no one will catch it before it’s signed into law, or the bill is too important to quibble over for long without dire consequences to the nation at large. Such was the case with H.R. 933, which essentially was a continuing resolution funding bill to keep the government running for a while longer until a more permanent budget can get sorted out in Congress (good luck with that, too, right?).

So, what’s so awful about poor little Section 735? As the International Business Times reports:

The “Monsanto Protection Act” effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (aka GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise concerning GMOs in the future.

Yes, you read that right. Someone could come up with irrefutable proof today that GMOs cause cancer or some other threat to public health, and the courts wouldn’t be able to say boo to Monsanto or the other agricultural biotech companies. They could keep on planting and selling their seeds and dusting the resulting crops with Roundup until the mutated cows come home.

The only good news about this farce is that the law is only in force until September, when the resolution ends, and that it raised a stink across a wide spectrum, from environmental groups to the Tea Party. Unfortunately, President Obama signed H.R. 933 into law (not that he had much choice, I suppose, other than shutting down the government), so we’re stuck with it through the end of the fiscal year.

But the really bad news is that, despite the sneaky manner in which the legislation was introduced, a frightening precedent has been set. Considering the hundreds of millions that Monsanto alone spends on lobbying Congress, how many of its former employees occupy key positions in the government agencies responsible for food safety, and that even one of the Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas) was a former attorney for Monsanto, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could see a “real” law giving the biotech companies a blank check.

And if that happens, what you read in Season Of The Harvest and other books like it won’t be nearly as terrifying as reality.