Nebula Express
Science-Horror
In the tradition of Ridley Scott's Alien

"Nothing Seems Right/Near The Speed of Light."

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Marketing, Shmarketing. A more complete title for this article would be: The New Marketing: Readers and Authors Seeking Each Other, Without Publisher Involvement. A new relationship is evolving between authors and readers, which seems to be largely leaving publishers and other middlemen struggling for a reason to survive. Having been both participant and observer since the earliest days of digital publishing, I find a remarkable democracy evolving from the tyranny of the old Big Six print publishing monopoly. These days, the digital (download delivery) publishing age approaches its twenty-year mark (arguably, 1993ish to 2013ish). Its logical evolution has exploded into a paradigm-shifting revolution. Today, we'll take a look at how author self-marketing has developed, from the days of publisher-driven reviews and endorsements, to today's new spirit of finding each other that exists between authors and readers. As our examination of reader-driven websites like Goodreads and other social networking sites shows, readers are actively looking for authors, and authors are increasingly bypassing traditional channels for direct involvement with readers (which adds to the continuing erosion of publisher relevance).

Early 'E'. When I first went digital in 1996, today's explosion into electronic publishing was unimaginable to almost everyone (the reading public, the Big Six New York City publishers, librarians, bookstore staff, you name it). I saw quite clearly that, if digital held the promise it most surely did—among other things, to eliminate most of the expenses of paper printing (e.g., ink, paper, manufacturing, inventory, transportation, retail space)—then the eventual digital industry would bring greater selection and lower prices for the reader. It would bring new freedom to authors, who would no longer be arbitrarily and ruthlessly prevented from ever being published, by print's dubious gate keepers. For readers, it would open the door to thousands of new authors, many of them far more talented, though sometimes more niche-based than New York's fast-food grinders. As it turned out, the Luddite period was relatively short. Almost overnight, in historical time spans, the Gutenberg technology was stood on its head by space age technology. Much as the Big Six dinosaurs refused to comprehend that their sand hill began rapidly melting, technology entrepreneurs (even despite a hiatus of nearly a decade due to several back-to-back, disastrous economic recessions) began pushing out various new forms of reading technology that promises, by around 2020, to completely seize all redoubts of the text markets (e.g., books, magazines) in a variety of presentation platforms (computers, network computers, phones, dedicated readers, pads, and, my prediction, coming full-color superpads that will easily encompass the desired sprawl for advertising with text and images including video and sound files flowing around them). In one form or another, all this seemed ergonomically logical and predictable even in the early to mid 1990s, when e-commerce did not even exist yet. In balance, the imminent disappearance of the entire print industry comes as no surprise. Neither does the increasing irrelevance of 'publishers,' and the obsolescence of artificially created lengths like 'novel' and 'short story' (fodder for a future article).

Incubation. The early Web was an incubator of brilliant and original ideas that have not, by and large become obsolete, but continue to grow in relevance and importance. To blow my own horn for a moment: I was the world's first author to publish the first, entire, proprietary e-novel (actually, two of them), in weekly serial chapters—Clocktower Fiction, 1996-1997 (now Clocktower Books: Heartbreaker, SF novel, now retitled This Shoal of Space; and Neon Blue, Suspense novel).

Early Ideas. When e-commerce came along in the late 1990s, authors were increasingly releasing their work in the form of free sample chapters. Authors (and e-publishers) tried all sorts of innovative approaches geared to the new medium. Some used an organ grinder approach, with a hat on the ground for spare change (or checks sent) after the reader read the complete work. There were, of course, the occasional evolutionary dead ends, like the man who published his book in chapters, each of which cost one dollar. His theory was that, if you liked the current chapter, you'd surely like the next. You sent him a dollar, and he sent you the next chapter. Try buying books a chapter at a time at your bookstore. Readers did not bite, signaling that (a) the approach was too different and cumbersome; and (b) frankly, a read interrupted is a read terminated early. Some early ideas were derivative of well-established, Old Publishing practices, like sending out Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs), though in PDF form, and garnering reviews. There was a whole cottage industry of early Web-based writers, publishers, and reviewers, whose primary flaw was that it consisted largely of writers in touch with other writers. Readers operated in a different arena, seeking print (and eventually e-book) reading at sites like Amazon.com. Barnes-Noble.com briefly entered the digital publishing arena, and then bailed out for reasons largely stuck in the head of CEO Leonard Riggio. Many of the digital upstarts (publishers, authors) knew they were totally shut out by the Big Six, meaning they could not enter the print market at all.

They were forbidden from 'being published' (note the passive voice, no longer operative today among savvy authors who publish their own work, or have non-predatory contracts with New Publishers). It was a tyranny that already seems monstrous at this early remove. They dreamed of starting a parallel publishing world, with its own websites, review system, and awards. As it would turn out, today the print industry will soon consider itself lucky if it remains alive long enough to garner its own traditional awards, for which digital books are starting to successfully compete. It has been a world in which six publishers, and their acolytes, give each other awards. The world deserves better. "We pretend to be great, and they pretend to award us important accolades." This is not to take anything away from their authors, some of whom were as good as you get. It's a difference of two entire worlds—a Modern Age looking back at a European Medieval Weltanschauung. But what do we draw from this in today's article? The print cartel consisted not only of six publishers, but the entire train of distribution (two large wholesalers, Ingram and BT; two giant retail chains, of which only one promises to survive into 2012, B&N and Borders) and promotion (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and all the other shills of the print industry who have been only too happy to promote the Big Six and, for the most part, have ignored the country's 30,000+ small press publishers and the James Joyces and D. H. Lawrences publishing their own books. What is changing is that readers have long since stopped believing the review machine. How credible is a prop wash of adulation for every hyped up 'bestseller?' I have overheard many a bestselling author discussing how the New York Times bestseller list is losing credibility, when it seems half the print industry authors claim to have been on it. I've seen people throw touted books against the wall, after big name authors gained publicity by adding their names to the covers with breathless reviews, when they had not even read the book.

Readers and Authors Finding Each Other. Goodreads and other social networking sites have sprung up in recent months (Internet years), whereby avid readers are actively looking for new things to read, and authors (who are all avid readers by definition) seek out readers. Just as the larger print industry can no longer prevent thousands of talented authors from reaching readers, so readers and writers are inventing or exploring new channels to bypass the traditional channels in finding each other. Print publishers simply released most titles to the Trade. They shipped new books out in box trays, to be shelved as midlist in bookstores (while frontlist titles were put on prominent displays). They expected that in their fossilized industry, readers would decide for them what would sell and what wouldn't sell. The result was a slash-and-burn industry in which the vast majority of authors were shut out totally, before ever having a chance with readers; a vast proportion of those authors who did 'get published' (reach the midlist; note again the passive voice) were soon out of print, usually losing all rights to their book as well, so that there was no hope of ever resurrecting it. This is because, in the total buyer's market and monopoly that the Big Six in New York represented, the publisher as a normal practice would buy the rights for, say, paperback publication, and in their predatory contracts, steal any and all other rights, which they had no intention of ever using. This might be in the off-chance, one in a million, that a sleeper book, which they were too dumb to appreciate, might come into demand by the film industry. Also, the equity foundation of a publisher lies almost entirely in their backlist (books whose rights they have forever wrested from their passive, helpless authors). Ownership of many such titles apparently impresses buyers who do not really understand the industry. So much for a mediocrity sandwich, with a fragile slice of talent jammed between.

Social Networking. By means of Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, and a growing number of similar social networking sites, readers can communicate with each other and with authors. It is an open secret of publishing that readers have never had any publisher loyalty. Most readers do not even glance at the symbols and colophons of whoever published the book they are buying. If anything, readers are loyal to (a') a genre and (a") an author, in either order. This means that, as the New (digital) Publishing elbows the Old (print) Publishing out the door and over the cliff, all those middlemen of yore (agents, acquisition editors, book doctors, witch doctors, and just plain thieves) have lost relevance. More and more authors are beginning to enjoy the high splits given to publishers (and thereby to authors who self-publish), and will wonder why they need to split their hard-earned cash with middlemen. Ironically, the author's income often matches or exceeds the income he or she would earn in the print industry. Suggested list prices in digital are expected to be lower than in print, by factoring out vanished costs (paper, ink, manufacturing, inventory, transportation, retail, re-warehousing, etc.). One early assumption of digital publishing has proven to be utterly untrue: editorial reading and line editing are every bit as much needed, which in its roundabout way answers the early question 'is an e-book really a book?' As absurd as that bigoted propaganda of the former regime may sound, it was a big question in the late 1990s, even with the Library of Congress. As the New Publishing coalesces, and more money accumulates in its vascular system, there may well be new types of middlemen offering vapor and hot air at a price. Nevertheless, anyone with a keyboard and talent can write and publish a book these days, and thereby have a shot at either succeeding or failing with readers. The reader is the final arbiter. And if you go to Goodreads, readers are actively seeking out good new stuff to read. Maybe your novel will be the next big hit.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and explain it plausibly. A production company for the History Channel has flown him to Yale University, from his home in San Diego, for an interview next to the exemplar from Dura Europos in modern Syria. The episode, in which he is capstone speaker, is to be aired across the USA and Canada by the History Channel.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.