The Author's Journey

December 5, 2009

Oceanview has hired a new person to handle book signings with the chains. I give her a welcome call and, “since we’re talking” she suggests that it’s as good a time as any for her to collect information about me and my book. It’s one of about twenty books she will be working on in the next few months.

It’s a discouraging conversation. She reminds me – and I know I’ve said this about others – of a real estate agent or perhaps a printing company rep. Of course, her job is ultimately selling books, and she probably should have that superficial perky brightness that so many women in sales cultivate. However, I must say she doesn’t strike me as particularly knowledgeable. And our conversation about book signings revolves entirely around local independents, and by local I mean the San Francisco Bay Area. She asks me if there are any bookstores that would be good locations for signings. She asks me. I say in so many words, “I write books. I don’t make lists.”

I do learn from the conversation that there is rather intense competition for the privilege of setting up a card table in a book store and sitting behind it, hoping somebody will come by and buy one of your books. (These are called “meet-and-greet” signings, in contrast to readings.) You have to work at it even to get the opportunity.

There’s a term in sales: low-hanging fruit. These are the sales opportunities you go after first, the easy ones. I don’t fit into that category. Given my “platform,” or lack thereof, I’ll be lucky if I get any help from her at all.

I realize that if I’m going to get any results from the Oceanview marketing organization, I need to sell the wonderfulness of Fortuna much more effectively. I think the key is getting them to understand the significance of the trend towards online gaming as an alternative to watching TV. It’s huge. Millions do it. And it’s a phenomenon that hasn’t been well covered in the media.

I think what I have to do is launch the book in Second Life. That will attract some interest.

November 3, 2006

I have been putting this moment off for a couple of months, but  the time has come for me to go online and test what I’ve narrated against what the online reality is like. I type www.secondlife.com into my browser window and start the process. You can join for free, but for a few dollars a month you can make yourself eligible for land ownership. I click the ownership option and provide my credit card information. That’s it.

Except it doesn’t work. I can’t get past the gorgeous vista presented on the home page (with graphics highly reminiscent of the hugely successful computer game from a few years back, Myst). I realize this could turn into a mini-nightmare, involving the purchase of a new graphics card, crashes, loss of data, a $250 dollar house call from a PC technician…. None of this is likely, I know, but I’m slightly nervous.

I think the problem may be in my firewall settings, and I read through the dense and confusing directions about how to change them. The Czechoslovakian computer geniuses who have provided these directions have the best security software in the world (AVG) but they don’t write too well.

Changing the firewall settings doesn’t work.

Finally, I call up Linden Labs tech support. I start to explain the problem but before I get very far the technician stops me.

“Have you installed the program?” he asks.

And there it is.

I had assumed that you log on to Second Life the way you log on to any other site. In fact, you have to download and install a player, or “client,” to use the technical software term, before you can actually participate. I make the tech stay on the phone while I go through the installation.

I choose “Boy Next Door” as the base for my avatar, and spend perhaps half an hour editing my eyes, nose, mouth, arms, chest and so on. I end up looking vaguely Asian, not my intent, but it’s the best I can do. And then, suddenly, there I am, in the New Citizens’ Plaza of Second Life.

Almost immediately, I realize that Fortuna is okay. There are details in SL that differ from the book. You “walk” using the arrow keys, rather than pointing and clicking. (The point-and-click technique was used in earlier games like the aforementioned Myst.) You communicate by typing, not via voice synthesis. But these are minor details.

I cross the plaza, attracted by signs offering free clothes to replace the jeans, white T-shirt and sneakers I’m  wearing,  which brand me as a newbie. A young woman is standing beside me, and we strike up a conversation. I tell her I’m writing a book.

“No way!” she types. “So am I.”

To be continued…

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May 1, 2006

My birthday is only a few days off and today, I luck out with a present I could hardly imagine. Business Week has a cover story – a cover story! – about Second Life, an online role playing game or MMORPGs that consists entirely of user-created content. 

When I initially showed the first page of Fortuna to friends, they all loved it, but several voiced the same concern: People won’t know what an avatar is. I would argue that readers could get the meaning from context, that the use of the word was part of the book’s exoticism… but in fact, I have been concerned about this.

Part of my mission, after all, is to sell the book. And the last thing I want to do is create a stumbling block for the acquisition editors. I  learned long ago that when you’re pitching a creative concept, every detail has to be perfect. In business meetings, there are always a couple of people who will focus on any possible negative, however trivial. Maybe the word “avatar” needs an asterisk. Maybe I need a little paragraph prior to the opening scene where I explain the phenomenon of MMORPGs.

I do not want to re-write the first sentence. I’m in love with it.

And now, I’m convinced I won’t have to. It’s all there – in Business Week! How non-obscure can you get?

In the second paragraph, I read, “Anshe Chung [the woman on the cover] is an avatar, or onscreeen graphic character. (My italics.) The third paragraph explains, “Second Life participants pay ‘Linden dollars,’ the game’s currency, to rent or buy virtual homesteads…. But players can convert that play money into U.S. dollars… using their credit card at online currency exchanges.” And further on, “Chung’s firm now has virtual land and currency holdings worth about $250,000 in real U.S. greenbacks.”

The real gold is in the sixth paragraph. “All told, at least 10 million people pay $15 and up a month to play these games, and maybe 20 million more log in once in a while.” That’s – count ‘em – 30 million potential readers!

Take that, ye acquisitions editors of little faith. I immediately send the online link to Kimberley, even though she hasn’t seen the book yet. Call it pre-selling.

To be continued…

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October 12, 2005

I am on the phone with a friend I have known since grammar school. He is an executive in an insurance company now – something we would never have dreamed of when we were students at UC Berkeley together. He majored in History, I in English, and both of us were ready to do jail time for our causes if it came to that – which it did. But that’s all water under the bridge. Or is it?

I am telling him about another high school friend who has just returned from a class reunion, where he bumped into an old girlfriend of mine. She’s married now, kids, etc., but, as my other friend put it, she wants to get in touch. Fred is quite struck with this situation.

“You ought to write a book about that.”

“About what?”

“Getting together with an old girlfriend after all these years! It’s amazing how things happen. You should write a book about it.”

“I don’t know.”

“You should.”

I don’t say anything more. I know quite clearly that I’m never going to write a book about getting together with an old high school girl friend. But I also know right then, at that very moment, that I am going to write a book about MMORPGs. I will set my game in Renaissance Florence. That will give me the caché of Renaissance culture, which has propelled quite a few books onto the best seller lists lately. (Lucrezia comes to mind, a biography of Lucrezia Borgia, a sort of Renaissance femme fatale.) But because I’m writing about a game, I won’t have to concern myself with precise historical accuracy, a huge plus.

The book will be about how the hero – a computer genius at Stanford, one of my two alma maters –  tries to break through the barrier of anonymity imposed by the game and connect with the real person behind an avatar he meets online. I will call it The Florentine Game.

The notion that an NPR segment and a phone conversation could trigger the concept for a book makes no sense. But neither does the very idea of writing a novel. It’s a bit like deciding, upon entering high school, that you’re going to have a career as a point guard in the NBA.

Nonetheless, a few hours later I am at my computer, thinking about how my game would work. I design a spinner that the players – shall I call them novitiates? – will use to determine their station at the moment they begin the game. They won’t have a choice. Their status will  be determined by fate. Fortuna.

To be continued…

February 5, 2005

  I am listening to  Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio and I cannot believe what I am hearing. I have been vaguely aware of massively multi-player online role playing games, known by the awkward acronym MMORPGs in the trade. They are the Internet’s answer to the Dungeons and Dragons games my stoner friends used to play for days on end when we were in college. Well, maybe they’re just a little more than that….

Actually, games like Worlds of Warcraft and Second Life are a global phenomenon with millions of players, and I’m learning that they meld with what gamers call RL (real life) in scary ways.

Let’s say, for example, that you and I are partners on a mission in Worlds of Warcraft. Through some kind of trickery, I manage to steal a magic sword from you. And then – this is the possibility that amazed me – I sell that sword on eBay for $75. You can sue me. And, at least in some countries, you can win.

How could there be a market for swords, shields and other accoutrements of war made out of nothing but pixels? The answer harkens back to the medieval ambience shared by so many of these MMORPGs: It is about sloth, the Fifth Deadly Sin. In MMORPGs you can’t kill a powerful dragon with any old sword. You need a special sword, and the only way to get it is by killing x-hundred dwarves (or other beings who are relatively easily to kill). This takes a lot of time. What if, instead of spending endless boring hours dwarf-killing to get that sword, you could simply buy it? Well, you can.

In fact, there are 21st century sweat shops in Third World countries where young males sit in front of monitors twelve hours or more per day killing those dwarves for you and selling their spoils to brokers, who in turn make them available on places like eBay.

The larger point is, transactions in MMORPGs can have financial ramifications in RL. And this raises some interesting questions. If you role play in Second Life, the online environment created by Linden Labs, what happens if you win a million Linden Dollars in a lottery? That’s about $4000 at the current rate of exchange between L$ and US$ (and there is one). Is that “money” taxable?

And, because nobody takes these games seriously, is this is ultimate money laundering opportunity?

 To be continued…