united states currency eye- IMG_7364_web (Photo credit: kevindean)

The dominant meme* in contemporary civic life is “I am getting played.”  It is what unites the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement. A recent analysis published in the New York Times by pollster Andrew Kohut put it this way:

“The issue here is not about class envy. Rather, it’s a perception that government policies are skewed toward helping the already wealthy and powerful … What the public wants is not a war on the rich but more policies that promote opportunity.”

No matter what happens, people on top come out better than before, and it comes at the expense of the rest of us — they get all the upside and we get all the downside:  bailouts, TARP, Solyndra, tax policy.  Every stupid thing goes up on their side of the scoreboard every time.

Whenever I hear Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say “Where are the jobs?” I automatically ask “I don’t know, where did you put them, fool?”  Whenever I hear a Republican say it is wrong to tax the job creators, I automatically hear “the overseas job creators.”  These guys think they can crater the world economy and come back and get reelected four years later by simply pretending the guy after them did it, like a five-year-old learning how to lie.  They think they can play us.

Democrats are not much better.  They are taking their sweet time in writing and releasing the actual rules that will go into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill because they need ample opportunity to negotiate favorable campaign contributions, these rules are the Democrats’ leverage, and they know that Democrats do not win national elections without generous support from Wall Street, period.  So the new rules will be as toothless as Democrats can get away with — but we won’t know it until after the election.  And the whole malevolent cycle of “financial innovation”-to-bubble-economy will start again. They think they can play us.

If the left and right could just see that the enemy is not the other side but the guys at the top who are convinced we can be played every time and all the time, then the majority (the overwhelming majority) of Americans would be able to get what they want: a real opportunity.

On the right, that would mean honestly confronting whatever counterproductive, deeply personal umbrage they seem to take at having a Commander in Chief who is a black man, as well as not allowing themselves to be distracted by meaningless catchphrases like “the liberal media” and “war on religion.” For the left, it means giving up their stupid, reflexive habit — unsupported and unsupportable — to use the mechanisms of American government, particularly the tax code, to redistribute wealth.  Both sides need to stop living in Bobblehead America, where people only talk to people they already agree with.  Once these things are completely abandoned, both sides will be considerably less easy to manipulate.  Then maybe we can begin to define our country at this point in history; what it means and who it is meant to serve, and truly make some progress.

*[meme: "a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes."]

Ebooks are anything but a threat to publishing. Electronic books, because of their protean nature, friction-free internet distribution and constant updatability, provide the publishing industry with a whole new business model; one arguably a whole lot more viable than the one they have now in its ability to attract younger readers. They just aren’t looking at it in the right way.

Much has been made of the fact that ebooks are never “done.” They can be edited, rewritten, reshaped, redesigned, etc. at any point, and all the publisher has to do is re-upload the book to their key distributors. I have heard that publishers currently use aggregate data generated by Kindles to determine if readers tend to stop reading a given title at a certain point, and go back and “fix” the book and redistribute it.

But what if you designed it that way? What if the publisher added subsequent material to a title and then resold the same title to the same reader again, as well as new readers? Here are just the few skimpy ideas I generated myself.
• A book about the Kardashian phenomenon, with an updated material with the latest wedding/divorce/sex video scandal. New photos could be easily incorporated on an ongoing basis.
• A political book about a specific election that develops subsequent chapters after the election is over. Publishers could even make entertainment value out of accountability — they could do a subsequent edition that reviews everything the author got right or wrong.
• A series of novels with user generated material incorporated into them. This could result in almost endless sales to the same customer.
The critical idea is to design the book — and by that I mean the narrative and meta-narrative — with a clock built into it. There are so many possibilities that I don’t want to mess this blog up by trying to think of a few. Publishers just need to reframe past buyers as the most likely audience to “sell deeper” into. These customers have already demonstrated commitment and engagement, and younger readers in particular will be open to buying a new version because they want to see what the difference is — this happens in the music world all the time.

When I wrote an e-novel, American Shaman, Book 1, making it as entertaining as I could was my primary goal. My second goal was to create a franchise (Books 2 and 3 are already underway). But if you think of it, every title can be a franchise.

Geser and Alma Mergen, main characters of American Shaman, Book 1

In 1998, I found a copy of a Siberian shamanist mythology on a very early web site.  I found it intriguing, though I am not a shamanist, and I did some more research.  “Shaman” is a Siberian word meaning “excited man.  A shaman is healer who can exist on Human Ground and Spirit Ground, who can interact with the dead, demons and spirits without becoming their instrument.

The mythology I found was the story of Geser, the first shaman.  There are three critical phases in the making of a shaman: Selection, Initiation and Training.  The Training itself has three steps: the Trial of the Mind, the Trial of the Body and the Trial of the Spirit.  I decided to write a contemporary story about the making of a shaman, focused on the Trial of the Spirit, that wove the ancient mythology into the modern story.

In American Shaman, Book 1, a young Siberian guy named Geser is selected and initiated, but his training is cut short before he joins a gang of smugglers and ends up in Invent City, Texas. The gang specializes in stealing luxury cars, getting them over the Mexican border and shipping them to suddenly wide open Russia (the story takes place at the close of the millennium).  One day, Geser is contacted by Icci, the spirit guide in charge of Geser’s shaman training.  Icci tells Geser he must undergo his third and final trial — the Spiritual or Moral Trial.  Icci tells Geser he may not survive this trial

So Geser must find allies to leverage his strength while dealing with the leader of the gang, Raven, who unexpectedly graduates from stealing cars to murder to protect his business. Geser  tries to stop one of the murders, but he cannot, and he must go on a journey to discover his own strength, strength found in resilience, persistence and belief.  In the end he must do battle with Raven on Spirit Ground.  But Geser cannot prevail without the help of Alma Mergen, a young junkie Geser saves from addiction, who must push herself to believe things and do things she doesn’t think possible, even as she is doing them.

Included in the story are trials undertaken by the first shaman Geser, which inform and comment on the trials of modern Geser.  The story also includes original illustrations of the action Spirit Ground, along with ancient Siberian shaman drum paintings, photographs and other graphics.

When I was writing the first draft of American Shaman, Book 1 I got in a conversation with a kid visiting a comic book website at the library.  I told him about the story and he asked me “What are the shaman’s superpowers?”  I thought about that for a long time; years, really.  I decided Geser’s superpowers would be the same powers all young people have access to: he can learn quickly; he can be strong yet flexible; he can be persuasive by listening closely to others; and he could have the courage of his convictions.  Together, these superpowers are a whole lot more useful than x-ray vision or time travel.

The target audience for this e-novel — and it is only available as an e-book, is young adults, age 16 to 26, who grew up reading about magic but now want a more real magic.  I tried to create something that hasn’t existed before, and most of all, I tried to write a good, entertaining story with depth to the content.  You be the judge.

American Shaman, Book 1 is available at Amazon Kindle, NOOK, iBooks, and Sony Reader

The powers-that-be seemed monolithic yet sclerotic; the distribution system suddenly seemed permeable, even wide open, as long as you were prepared to define success on your own terms; the hunger for something different and new was palpable everywhere you went; making your voice heard suddenly seemed like the only thing worth doing, more important than breathing.

That was what it felt like to be young and conscious in 1978 when the punk movement took over the world. And that is what the world feels like now, as far as publishing goes. Back then, it was three-chords-and-an-attitude, a loud amp, a xeroxed flyer you could staple to a utility pole and a perverse visual scheme (Seminal text: Dick Hebdidge’s “Subculture: The meaning of style” — read it, know it, USE IT!). Today it is a decent narrative and some writing ability, a sense of how to work Web 2.0 and social media, and a perverse visual scheme.  (See July 20th post: “Does the rise of e-books spell the end of text-driven books?” below.)

In many ways the publishing industry is even lamer than the music industry was back then, which is saying a lot. They don’t give anybody under 35 anything they want, and an entire “underground” content-and-distribution system has developed as a result. Back then it was “left of the dial” college radio stations and cassettes trading hands like samizdat (illicit manuscripts in the Soviet Union). Today, it is comic books stores and word-of-digit through social media and downloads. But now the whole thing has broken wide open with the ability to upload and distribute ebooks through Amazon, NOOK, IPad, etc, and the availability of free Kindle apps for smartphones and other platforms.

Back in 1978, people all over the US, and all over the world, had their own (overlapping) epiphanies when they first heard The Stooges, The Ramones and Velvets’ first record (the equivalent of Chaucer for the nascent punk). After the first couple of songs, they’d say “I could do this shit!” By the end of the record, it would be “I am GONNA do this shit, right fucking now!” There will be some kind of epiphany like that for this generation of conscious, mouthy individuals, we just don’t know what it is yet. It is probably out there already, waiting on your ass.

My band was called The Beans. We sucked and I loved every second of it. My ebook is called “American Shaman, Book One.” Check it out. Call me a liar. Call me a fraud. Call me a geezer. At least we will both know we are awake.

“American Shaman, Book One” includes original illustrations, drum paintings, photos and other images.

Seems like an odd question, doesn’t it?  Of course, books will be primarily text.  Isn’t that what a book is?

But we should look at the ‘structure’ of digital publishing and the preferences of the market.  First off, adding illustrations and photos to a bound, printed book is expensive, particularly if you want color, and potentially difficult.  It typically done if it is required by the subject matter and the author’s vision of the manuscript.  But adding visual content to a digital book is a piece of cake.  You would almost be foolish not to.  Inserting color digital images, art or photos, into an e-book can be accomplished with a few keystrokes, and all the e-readers will soon be color-capable (most of them are already).

But much more importantly, a page filled with text alone is not very attractive to young readers.  Virtually every form of entertainment they have ever looked at is visual, and they rely on visual cues to determine setting, character and ambiance with a fluency that (old) people who read text-driven books can barely appreciate.  And the ultimate evidence is available to everyone: comic books and graphic novels are huge with the younger audience.  Regular books?  Not so much.

This was very much on my mind when I put together “American Shaman, Book One” for publication.  Once I decided that e-book was the best way to reach my target audience, I immediately started developing images to enhance the story.  Indeed, the initial idea was to create a graphic novel, but the more I wrote the more I realized that prose was the best and most economical way to tell a story that incorporates myth and big time shifts with contemporary storytelling elements.  Once I  completed the novel, I was happy with what I had.  But I knew adding images would make it more attractive to my target audience.

The image strategy can be seen in the pictures above.  I used original illustrations in the graphic style supplied by the estimable illustrator Jim Siergey to illustrate scenes on Spirit Ground, the place shamans go to heal the sick.  Jim is unbelievably talented (check his website) and great to work with.  He has a national reputation and I will be forever grateful that he took me seriously enough to collaborate with me.  He also supplied line drawings I used throughout the text that were witty and fun.

In my research for the book I stumbled across something called Siberian drum paintings.  They are line drawings on the drumhead of shaman drums. (In Siberian shamanism, the shaman drums himself into a trance and journeys to Spirit Ground — the drum is called the “shaman’s horse.”)  They were really cool, almost like comic books in that they illustrated stories familiar to the tribe.  Some are incredibly well-executed and beautiful.  In an odd way, they interacted with Siergey’s contemporary drawings, like two artists conversing across thousands of years, and I even found one that almost certainly a contemporary version of a drum painting (see if you can identify it!).  I included many of these drum paintings in the book.

I also incorporated a few photographs of models portraying the two main characters, Geser and Alma Mergen.  This was a risk, but my thinking was that the young adult audience may be so dependent upon visual cues that they cannot conjure the image of a character based upon a paragraph description.  We will see if it was a risk worth taking.

Above are examples of all the images used in the book (including chapter-ending “motifs” from the Buryat region that Geser originates from).  I think many e-books will start spending as much energy and space on interesting images as they do on the words, because that is what the audience will expect.

And, of course, all hell breaks loose when e-readers can support video information…

I wrote an e-novel, “American Shaman Book One,” and just as I finished it, my niece Carly came to visit me in Austin.  We were talking about the book, because she was just out of college and therefore smack in the middle of my target demographic.  I was picking her brains about how to get the word out about it when she said this intrinsic thing: “I’ll read all day online.  But when it comes to a [printed] book, you know exactly how much work it is going to be the minute you pick it up.”

Every publishing/marketing move I have subsequently made was informed by her observation.

Think about it — she was giving me the manifesto of her generation: “What comes to me from a screen is cool and I can’t get enough of it.  Everything else is tedious.”  From that moment, I never thought twice about publishing it as anything but an e-book, I simply waited until the e-book market had matured enough and there were enough ancillary services, both publishing and marketing, to do it all myself.  That time is now.

What makes it all possible is a phenomenon called “platform agnosticsm.”  It is a technical, giggle-worthy phrase that simply describes what we have all observed — young people are quite content to watch “Transfomers” on their smartphones.  Sure, it’s better in a theater with a gazillion watts of supercompressed Dolby sound and popcorn available in the lobby.  But it’s all good and it doesn’t matter that much.

For people over 35 or so, e-books represent a compromise — books are cheaper, more available and more portable through a Kindle, NOOK, IPad or Sony Reader, or whatever platform they use.  But they prefer the old-school paper-and-print bound book given their druthers.  But younger readers actually prefer the screen.  If publishers want to reach them, they need to understand that.

What made  launch of “American Shaman, Book One” possible was not the e-book market reaching a certain level of penetration among book buyers.  It was not the long-rumored shakeout of platforms that never seems to happen.  Indeed the alleged “platform war” is a total red herring, if you ask me.  What made the whole thing come together was when Amazon released a free Kindle app for smartphones, PCs, Macs and Blackberry.  Bingo — I have access to my entire target market!  Game over.  Hit send.  Let’s get busy.