Pirates of Mars

Pirates of Mars by LJ local chris_gerrib is a near future space thriller firmly in the mould of Ben Bova's Sam Gunn stories or Allan Steele's Orbital Decay or Lunar Descent.  In that respect it makes a change - there isn't that much near future space stuff...  most of it tending to focus on the development of computer technologies.

Pirates, a sequel to The Mars Run, which I'm currently working through, looks at the growth of pirates in space around Mars in the 2070s - with no planetary police or over-arching political or military control, and a sparse and varied population, an industry is growing up to pirate incoming transports and ransom the crew and cargo.  The thrust of the novel is that the insurance companies have, finally, had enough and want to do something about it.

So far so good.  And good it generally is.  Chris has put a LOT of thought into space craft design and operations and his naval background shows in the ship operations scenes. My only quibbles are with the timeline, I think there's too much development for the 2070s, and I'm interested in knowing when he wrote the first drafts to put that in context.  I also think there are a couple of anachronistic uses of technology which don't make a lot of sense to me.  Using hand written receipts on Mars, suggesting their tech isn't up to Earth standards but a reliance on video and voice technologies over text based communications.

Those aside, I enjoyed it, and I'm interested in seeing what happens next.

Business 101...

I've been spending a lot of time recently working on our financial planning for a funding round, so numbers are really, REALLY fucking in my mind at the moment.  To let my brain decompress I've been reading a thread of Charlie Stross's blog about the economics of self publishing.  What has disturbed me the most is the most vocal people there seem to have ABSOLUTELY not a clue about basic business conventions and paradigms.  For this I cite the following:

Second, the model presented doesn't say Charlie should have to do it all himself, and that he's perfectly at liberty to sub whatever elements he fancies (same as anyone). Offload some copyediting, cover design, promotion, accountancy, etc. and he gets to spend exactly the same amount of time not writing the Iron Sunrise sequel. The difference is, with the non-typical, author-centric, model being presented, he maintains control and the majority of the profits - and nobody has a gatekeeper/rent seeker limitation on that control.

The amount of shear ignorance of how the world works in this paragraph boggles my fucking mind.  Honestly, I am boggled.  In fact, I'm so boggled, I need to go and get myself a scotch.  If you sell something, anything, let's call it a widget, let's call it a fucking book.  The money that comes in from that sale is something we call REVENUE.  Revenue is amazing stuff... it's the cash that comes in.

Profit, on the other hand, is a slightly different beast.

Profit is what Charlie gets once he's spent money on all those throwaway things in the paragraph there.  Those itty bitty things, like copyediting, cover design, promotion, accountancy, travel and the like.
SO let me correct this statement:

Second, the model presented doesn't say Charlie should have to do it all himself, and that he's perfectly at liberty to sub whatever elements he fancies (same as anyone). Offload THE copyediting, cover design, promotion, accountancy, etc. and he gets to spend WHATEVER TIME IS LEFT AFTER HE HAS MANAGED ALL THESE PEOPLE not writing the Iron Sunrise sequel. The difference is, with the non-typical, author-centric, model being presented, he maintains control and the majority of the COSTS- and nobody has a gatekeeper/rent seeker limitation on that control.

So what we're saying here is that as a small business owner, Charlie gets to have control over his costs, which include, because he's also the means of production, the time he spends NOT producing and managing all those sub-contractors we've got there.

I've run a lot of services businesses in the last twenty years (well, 18 actually) and there was one things that was pretty constant.  The profit margin made on top of the salary the producer needed to live on was about 10%... 15% if you were lucky.  AT best, moving to self publishing will net another 10-15% in income for a massive increase in work load and stress.  Which doesn't sound like all that much of a prize to me.

The idea that the Interwebs were going to dramatically change the dynamics of business about 11/12 years ago...  things like revenue and profit margins weren't popular ideas.... the nature of the interwebs changed everything.

Except.  It didn't...  It really didn't.

For the most part, contractors still use agents rather than do it all themselves - sure they can find their own work, but what they get to actually take home is only 20-25% higher than what they get by outsourcing that.

This is not complicated stuff.  Why on Earth are people having trouble with it?