Build, And They Will Come ...

Deborah Beale continues the diary of events around the Beale-Williams household during the building of the Shadowmarch enterprise.

6.2.01

Build, and they will come.

Isn't that a beautiful idea? I think about it as I look at our wondrous web site. Like any fond parent I dote on its smartness and loveliness. The idea that you build for the future is something you can believe in no matter how many times you fall down. I think about how the web is built on this idea. But I've been trying to learn from the failures, too. Our local newspaper, since technology is our local news here in the Valley, has been running features on the dot-com bust. A significant factor for most web businesses that went down was overestimating the numbers of consumers out there, and how many people are on the web.

When I was building the budgets, I settled on an income structure based on what I thought were pretty conservative figures — just a fraction of Tad's English-language sales. I did this so we would have time and space to develop.

Mind you, there is nothing like building an enterprise with your own money to make you very, very careful in your thinking.

Anyhow, our site is out there. And now we shall see.

6.3.01

Tad and I talk in our office about the difficulties we're having selling our manuscripts for illustrated young children's books. We lean back in our chairs and stretch out our legs and Review Things.

We read a great deal of children's fiction to the little birdies, and we think our stories compare favorably to what's being published today. But we don't seem to be getting anywhere. One thing that puzzles us is, Tad's name and record seem to mean little. We're veterans in this game — well do we know that success in one category does not mean you can automatically cross over to another and bring your sales with you. Many a publishing folly has arisen from muddled thinking like that.

But it should give us a foot in the door with the book trade ("Tad Williams? Oh, yes, he does pretty well. Writing kid's books now, is he? Well, we'll take a few, he's got some pretty loyal fans out there.") And that's the first hurdle for any publisher.

I mull over something I often think about — how in any one area of life, there's a language, a code, known mostly to insiders. Perhaps we aren't sending the right signals with our stories. Perhaps, however solid and real our stories are, we don't strike the right zeitgeist-chord.

Of course, zeitgeist is sometimes just another word for trend. One trend definitely irritating both of us right now, is celebrity fiction in children's publishing. It's purely market-driven, of course. But the profound emphasis on the bottom line that you see in things like this works against publishing's own need to lose a little money on authors as they grow.

We wonder whether we are encountering corporate lassitude, the sort that comes from editors who receive little reward or recognition for developing writers. In some situations doing this can even threaten someone's job.

One time, there was something like resentment, too. For one of our manuscripts we received a rejection letter (we'll probably frame it one day) which, besides containing some bad advice, had an angry subtext. Our agent, "Mr. Wonderful" Matt Bialer, speculated that it might be something like a corporate chip-on-the-shoulder, that is, children's publishers are sometimes not taken seriously within conglomerates, and this particular publisher was reacting to the idea of a writer successful elsewhere, thinking he could write for children. I knew what Matt was getting at. I've worked on children's books and he's right about how such publishers can be treated.

Still, you want to go to New York and stand in a lobby somewhere and yell —

But we're professionals! Can't anybody see that!

Tad is more impatient with all this than I am. I have days when I remind myself of how many excellent new books there are, and that I should be learning from them.

I'm going to email "Mr. Wonderful" and ask him for his thoughts.

6.4.01

Date: Mon, 4 Jun
From: Andrew I. Porter [former publisher of Science Fiction Chronicle, recipient of a Shadowmarch press release]

Dear Deborah: Long time no hear. Hope all is well with you, and you're Happy.

I still have the original "Tailchaser's Song" DAW poster with the pussycats gathering dust across the wall above the doorway in my loo....

Best, Andrew Porter

I've received some very nice messages from some of those old science-fiction contacts of mine, particularly David Pringle at Interzone in the UK and Gordon van Gelder at The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction. Andrew Porter, with this tale of his bathroom decor, makes me laugh out loud. So too does Paul Barnett of The Paper Snarl. To my surprise Paul, AKA the British writer John Grant, turns out to be living in the USA these days, albeit on the opposite coast. We swap a few expatriate observations, and I wonder how Paul came to be living here.

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 21:13:29 EDT
Subject: Re: wow...

Hi Deborah

To tell you the truth, I don't really notice much about America, although I find things like capital punishment and the lack of a national health service pretty depressing. The appalling truth is (pause here for a nauseating surge of violins) it doesn't really matter much what country it is outside the windows when Pam and I are together. Makes you puke, dunnit?

Fond wishes --

Paul

I laugh even harder than I did at Andrew Porter's toilet decor. And I'm just so pleased for him. Makes the rest of this childcare-less day brighten up no end.

6.5.01

Total bitch day. The nanny's child-molestation case (on which she is a juror) drags on and on. I am all out of emergency backup childcare.

We can't get out and vote on a local school-bond issue (I've been a US citizen for a couple of years now). You can tell it's sensible and necessary by the quality of the opposition, which is hysterical anti-tax rhetoric that promotes itself as truly caring for children. I don't remind Tad that we intended to vote — he doesn't need to fret about that too.

Anyway, it's me and the kids all day. I try and make it fun for them, but they're mixed up and out of sorts too.

Normally I'm quite sanguine when child-care arrangements break down. If I can't work because I have to take care of my little birdies, then I just push work out of my mind. It's easy, actually. Being with them can be hard work and sometimes boring but mostly it's a blast. My kids fascinate me. They are such complete little persons already. When Connor was born, I had a profound realization, gazing at him perhaps an hour old, lying on my scrubs (10.5 pounds, c-section, don't get me started —). It was: But you have nothing to do with me. You are so much your own person, right from the start.

So if childcare is in the way of work, then usually I let go of work. It's never been hard before.

I should also say that in our household the childcare does not automatically fall to the mother. Tad is as involved as a father can be, and then some. Normally when the childcare goes down he takes his share of the overspill.

But this time, everything is different. Unsurprisingly, the launch of Shadowmarch is all-demanding. Therefore, Tad just has to be more present for that. I don't have a problem with that. I am just bloody fed-up.

Late at night, tired, I sit in bed watching the financial news. Outside, the arms of the redwood trees creak and dance. Our owl is hooting, a feral, deep call. I have never seen this owl but the hoot makes me think he is one of the big tufted owls. The glowing light of the bedroom and the tranquility outside bring me back to myself.

6.6.01

I have a few hours for myself in the morning, so I spend 'em banging out more press releases.

Tad is lost in production detail, the sort of thing I should be doing, but whereas yesterday he was cheerful, today, at his desk behind his computer, he is just stressed.

The kids have a virus — Coxsachie virus, or Hand, Foot and Mouth. For Connor it's a few spots on his legs, but Devon has a sore mouth and blisters on her tushy and the soles of her feet. Now she really is miserable.

It's pretty contagious. The last of the emergency childcare backs off, unwilling to expose her own kids. (They got it anyway.) Today, unlike yesterday, I no longer care. Besides, I just want to comfort and nurse my little birdies.

Then, in the evening, our new kitten grows sick.

In the car, in the dark, on the way to the emergency vet, I'm laughing. Everything horrid is now sort-of funny. I'm also thinking about how these little creatures, kittens or any pet really, get under your skin. When I brought this one home five or six weeks ago, it seemed to me that whatever I felt for him was but sentimental schlock compared to the raging Greek drama that comes with being a parent. But now I'm worried enough to leave my children behind and my dinner unfinished to rush the little guy to someone who can make him right again.

It turns out to be something bacterial. He has a lot of stomach pain and a super-elevated white-blood-cell count. Loaded down with antibiotics and relief, I head back home. When I get there, Connor our son bursts out of his bedroom (it's now eleven at night). He has to see the kitten — he has to make sure that Jupiter has really come back from the vet.

It's then that I remember how, a few months ago, another of our cats did not come back from the vet.

Tad sits on our coffee table and cuddles both boy and kitten. He smiles and goes, Can I fix you anything, baby?

Yeah, I say, and have a British moment. I want a nice cup of tea.

6.7.01

The worst of that virus has gone by and the kids are much happier. I manage to squeeze a little time, and join a Shadowmarch phone conference with Tad, Matt Dusek, and Josh Milligan.

Matt and Josh are working soooo hard. The nuts and bolts of the site are down to them. Right now Matt is coding for everything in sight, whilst Josh is trying to find a solution for what I think of as the Eudora problem.

Tad has many thousands of addresses in his Eudora email file. These are all people who have emailed over the past three or more years — fan emails. Tad replies to his emails religiously, no matter how many he receives a week (and it's considerable), although it’s been made tough this year by email software problems. Anyway, we want to send out an email blast and tell everyone the site is up and running, if they don't already know.

But we need to figure out a way to extract all those addresses and download them into a new file. And it's proving thorny. So thorny, in fact, that we have begun extracting them by hand, just in the meantime. This is sheer hard graft and it's becoming clear that it will take us weeks.

The day's bad news is, it's beginning to look like there may be no other way.

This is the stuff of enterprise. Once upon a time, when I was a book publisher, I was part of a start-up company. Heady times! But there you are, creating your new list on bugger-all money, and you do everything you can yourself. I used to say of my work, Oh, I made all this on the kitchen table ...

Now, in our phone conference, I say to the guys, Well, we're making this on the kitchen table.

They go — Whaa...?

But Tad, on the other side of our office, smiles at me.

I say, I'll do the job. Just let me at those addresses.

6.8.01

Well, my nostalgia and optimism are all very well, but today Tad thinks he's found a way to get those email addresses into an Outlook Express address-book file.

It's still bloody time-consuming, however. But there he is, frowning in front of his screen, lost in the task. Looks like it's getting done.

A little voice in my head prompts, But he should be writing ...

Actually, he would be writing, and it would indeed be me (with a little direction) messing around with those addresses, if it wasn't for — Oh, I am going to shut up about The Childcare Situation.

6.9.01

Most of the press releases have gone out now. We phone conference again with Matt and Josh, and discuss the marketing in general terms. I am beginning to understand how much I saw marketing the site in terms of my old disciplines, which were extremely time-specific, and ensured that any one 'product' (a word that none of us like) was actively sold in a short period of time, and then things moved on and the product sank or swam.

This is all so much more organic. Everything moves at a gradualist pace, and though we are all working very hard and the farming contingent in particular (our running joke with Matt) seems to be cutting back on a little thing called sleep, nevertheless there is a strong sense of being involved in something which has a life beyond us, and which also has a few things to teach us.

This has to be in some part a luxury deriving from how our business model works. Point one: there are no middle-men or women. There's only us, going directly to the people drawn to Shadowmarch. This is of course the nature of the beast: I call it web utopianism.

Point two, however, is down to us: we have devised our model so that it can move at this pace. I keep thinking of ink spreading on blotting paper. The numbers of visitors to the site climbing, the e-noise coming back to us from the people posting on the board (and it's a gratifyingly approving noise, too) — it grows out, it spreads, and still it's barely begun.

In the phone conference, we decide there are two ways forward with the marketing.

The first is (I nearly said old-fashioned) actual marketing and publicity. In the past few days I have heard from Nolan, one of our early bulletin board members. My first reaction to Nolan was —

HAAAAAA — LELUJAH!

PR is his business, he loves Shadowmarch, he has some great ideas. The question of course is where do we find money to pay him; but that will come. Anyway, we decide that Nolan is one of our resources for the future.

The second is — viral marketing.

What that means is: I have to get myself up to speed with what's happening virally out there; and maybe it can take us sooner than we thought into something we're all very interested in, namely, creating a little bit of flash animation to send out into the big wide world, promoting Shadowmarch. The last topic discussed in the phone conference is how we have definitely decided to begin charging for the site only after the fifth episode. We want people to have a good sense of what they are getting for their money.

Josh makes a good suggestion: a discount rate for people who sign up early.

Matt is investigating more payment solutions.

The phone conference over, I suddenly receive a very enthusiastic phone call from the bank we went to see about their payment solution. They like our business a lot and want us to go with them. Ooh! What a nice little boost.

My grubby daughter is playing outside in the garden. She looks like a little weed. It's very hot ...

6.10.01

Another boost — Tad emails me with a posting from the site. It's from Martin L. Cahn, the editor-in-chief of Demensions Webzine. He says some very nice things about our venture, calling Shadowmarch "an excellent example of what online 'publishing' could be if more established authors took the risk (along with their traditional publishers.)" Thanks, Martin.

Late at night, there's a car crash outside our house. This is the second in a few weeks — our streets are very dark, and I think people sometimes take this as license to speed up, not slow down. Tad grabs flashlights and goes outside to find a tearful but thankfully unhurt woman. Her car's a mess. So is she, in the emotional sense, and quite unsteady: she begins making noises about how "they'll get me for this now." Tad stays with her until the police arrive and he can be sure she is safe, but he has little doubt about what really caused her to crash.

6.11.01

THE NANNY IS BACK.

I go to my computer and collect my email. My computer crashes. I clear that up then spend the day finishing the Countdown piece for the site. Jupiter the new kitten sits on the top of Tad's G4 cube and for the second time in a week shuts Tad's entire system down while he's working. Chunks of unsaved writing are lost — only a page or so, fortunately, but Tad really shouts.

I suppose that light sensor switch is pretty cool. But the person who designed it probably keeps dogs.

6.12.01

Tad is drying the cordless phone with a hair drier. Last night I dropped it on the lawn — it slipped out of my pocket when I was playing with the little birdies, and I didn't notice. So it stayed out and early in the morning received the full benefit of our sprinkler system. Now anybody who calls us complains that our voices are coming from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Naturally, the timing is pretty bad. The corporation we have been talking to — the one who made us an offer that we regretfully found easy to reject — is about to phone-conference with us. They say they want to talk to us about their "proposed financial strategy". We're intrigued as to what this means. We really would like to do business with them, but we are not about to sell ourselves and Shadowmarch short.

Tad finishes drying the phone with five minutes to spare. But he has to yell his way through the entire phone conference. He manages to do so with style. It's very funny.

The corporation talks to us, appropriately, about the minutiae of their operation and the minutiae of ours. After a while they hit us with the same financial terms as the ones we turned down. It's disappointing. One way or another we try to make it clear that for us this is not the way to go. When they ring off, Tad and I talk about other things that are a bit off-key with the offer. On the surface they look and sound good, but the shadowplay says other things.

The thing is, if you wait for the perfect situation, the perfect solution of any kind, your business will quickly suffocate. Everything you do has to be a combination of optimism, determination, and risk-management. Will we find a way to strike a deal with these folks? Or will we go it on our own?

"Mr. Wonderful" Bialer gets back on the phone to us. We discuss the post-meeting signals he will send them, plus also the questions I raised with him about the difficulty we're having, selling our children's book manuscripts. I'm a little fired-up because last night I read Connor a book whose story notably had no subtext. It was flat and literal-minded, and despite a little bit of surface charm, as meaningful as a soap-powder ad. Plus there was a big loose-end in the plotting that went nowhere. It reminded me of Tad's speculation, that there are in children's book publishing a high proportion of what he calls (with full justification) "amateur writers" — cheap and disposable, and what the hell's it matter when it's all about the pictures anyway.

(Of course, it should matter and does matter. The books Connor returns to again and again are the ones driven by great writing — William Steig, Maurice Sendak.)

Matt Bialer says maybe all my observations are true to a degree. But he's unperturbed and confident. He's been talking to another agent he knows who sells a lot of children's fiction, and she told him, Don't worry, it's just that it's a world apart and it's tough to get inside. All you need is persistence. Just keep going for it.

6.13.01

I find myself wondering if a Roman-army campaign might have been something like the making of Shadowmarch. That is — minute planning — lots of small mundane advances — then comes the occasional big and thrilling (or terrifying) action.

Falling into both of the first two categories, the email-address file, containing the Eudora addresses, is finally done. Tad made a breakthrough of some kind, and wham! There it was.

The house-cleaners come. It takes me and Dena the nanny a total of six woman-hours just to prepare the house for them. Yeuch-oh. What a pigsty.

6.14.01

Tad says he can no longer keep up with all the postings on the message board.

That's a small milestone, and it was obvious that the postings would become voluminous pretty early on, but still, we're cheered by this. Plus, it just makes us happy that people want to join in.

I ask what countries we're receiving postings from.

Tad says: "USA and Canada, but an increasing German presence —"

"Well, that's no surprise," say I. (Tad's German publishing — I raise my hat to Klett-Cotta — is excellent.)

"Good contingent of English Brits," Tad continues, "plus Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Australia and New Zealand —"

"Heard from the Sabistons?" I ask. Tad shakes his head.

[The Sabistons, NZ Tad-readers, sent us our baby-crib mobiles — honeybees flying around hives. I have a soft spot for the Sabistons.]

"Malaysia, Denmark, Barbados, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Finland, France, South Africa. Oh, and Japan."

"Wow," I say.

Sometime later it dawns on us that our payment solution really does have to be international.

6.15.01

Josh Milligan has been fretting about early trends. He wants to know the numbers. Matt has written the appropriate bit of code, and now we all watch eagerly. The numbers are climbing in a most gratifying fashion. All on no more marketing than a press release and word of mouth!

But we don't know what it really means, and we won't, not until we start charging. That is definitely not going to happen now until after Episode Five. We're building out the site. We're building so they will come.

Nevertheless, we all now feel that sorting out the payment solution is a growingly urgent priority. We will definitely go with Josh's lower price for early sign-ups. We will also not send out the email blast until the payment solution is in place and functioning.

Today Episode Two goes up. We wait to see what the message-board habitués will think. Tad is going to ask people there for opinions re. payment solution.

6.16.01

I'm at my desk. Behind me Tad's talking to Jupiter, the new kitten.

"Hullo, little cat in the morning of your life."

[Purr.]

"How are you? Busy figuring things out, huh?"

[Louder, an Ooh-scratch-my-ears-too purr.]

"Yo' ears too big an' yo' head too small."

I say, "He's definitely less insane than Henry and Riley." [Two beloved purebreds from past years.]

There is a silence.

"Whoops," I say, and duck from the room before Tad can list all the reasons why Jupiter is completely overbred and hopelessly mad.

One thing to know about writers and their cats is, cats provide a wonderful object of contemplation whilst the subconscious is processing plot demands. Therefore Tad, who, of course, generates more plots than most, spends much time on his butt watching his cats. He has a zillion complaints. God knows what it will all mean if we ever get a dog.

Tad reads this and tells me, I'd happily watch something other than cats. In fact, I would happily watch something eat these cats. Let's get a komodo dragon.

6.19.01

Once upon a time I worked for an extraordinary man who taught me many things and told me many stories.

One such concerned watching his first wife bargain for a carpet whilst they were on holiday in North Africa.

Two thousand dinar, said the man selling the carpet.

Twelve hundred, said my boss's wife.

Eighteen hundred dinar, said the carpet-seller.

A thousand, said my boss's wife.

Something like this has occurred with the second offer from the corporation with whom we've been negotiating. My ex-boss was very amused by his wife's bargaining, even though it meant they were escorted from the souk. We're amused, too — I mean, what else can you be? And then we escort them from the souk.

So that's it. Right now, we are, as we planned from the first, out on our own.

I'm nervous.

I tell myself: Build, and they will come ...