Traditional publishing never worked, it was an industry ruled by chance and blind luck. Its demise will be the best thing that’s ever happened to authors as the royalty system is rearranged and bureaucratic fat is removed from the system.

Roth did just fine as a writer before he began penning novels and getting advances, he taught and wrote small pieces on the side – getting an advance isn’t the issue, being paid at all is. Are a lack of advances the issue, or could that be theoretically compensated for by – oh, I don’t know – changing up the royalty system?

Let’s take a quick look at the royalty system, here’s how Wikipedia explains it: “Hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors. On paperback it is usually 7.5% to 10%, going up to 12.5% only in exceptional cases.”  How does this compare to the sale of e-books?  Well, on Amazon if authors price their books above $3, they take home 70% on every sale, roughly five-times as much money for every single sale.

So instead of eighty to ninety percent of the profits going to people other than the author, authors are now able to take home the vast majority of the profits generated by their work.

That’s what’s going to gut the literary industry – not writers themselves, the industry – the fact that the people who actually produce the art are going to be taking home the lion’s share of the profits, instead of the other way around.  The problem isn’t the emergence of e-books and print-on-demand publishing, it’s that the old system was broken.  A similar structure exists in the music industry, as the producer for Nirvana’s “In Utero” once colorfully explained:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke”. And he does of course.

In a nutshell, a $250,000 advance would soon turn into a grand total of $4,031.25 for each member of a band consisting of three musicians.   And yet the advent of online file-sharing and torrenting hasn’t made musicians obsolete.  Although the music on your local pop radio stations probably still sucks – you can now find awesomely talented obscure bands everywhere from Pandora to their own websites, where they often give away several tracks of their music for free.

The old means of distribution was choking ingenuity and creativity while enriching the pockets of industry executives who had precisely zero to do with the actual creation of music.

Morrison’s final misconception is about the nature of the long tail:

“The recent enthusiasm for the long-tail market does, however, obscure a very basic economic fact: very few writers and independent publishers can survive in the long tail. Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year.”

Without pre-selection and mass marketing, Morrison argues, the market can’t possibly function.  But here’s the thing, the market has never functioned rationally – rational and effective systems aren’t hallmarked by the randomness and chance discussed earlier.

Which is the point the rest of Morrison’s article should have but didn’t make: all of the industries he lists – movies, music, porn, computer games, newspapers, video games, newspapers, photography, telecommunications, and the internet – are suffering financial crises of at the bureaucratic management level, which is being mistakenly viewed as a fight for the survival of the artists who actually populate them with art.

Musicians aren’t the ones who’ve been hurt by the evolving open marketplace, it’s the record stores who’ve gotten the shaft.  And the same pattern is already holding true with literature.

With the advent of e-books, authors no longer need the means of production that the publishing industry once had a monopoly on.  And so in the scheme of things, there’s no better time to try and make it as a writer.

People still love reading, so as sales of physical books flow out of brick-and-mortar book stores like rats from the proverbial sinking ship, they’re going to flow into both e-books and print-on-demand options offered by companies like CreateSpace and Lulu.  Maybe there’s no better indication that the publishing industry as we once knew it is good as dead than J.K. Rowling deciding to release the e-book version of all the Harry Potter books from her own personal website.

Obviously Rowling’s situation is worlds different from an author who’s first trying to break into the market, but they do share a common thread.

In a process that’s materially no different at all than being able to casually stroll through a bookstore, taking your time browsing through as many books as you’d like, all an author needs to do is post his work up online so people can read it on their monitors. And then if they want the convenience of being able to it with them – either on their e-reader or by ordering a print-on-demand copy – all they need to do is pay a small fee.

Consumers have never paid for access to books, they paid for the convenience of being able to take the words with them.

Again going back to the music industry, it turns out people who illegally pirated music weren’t just a little more likely to actually buy music, they were ten-times more likely to actually buy music.  And the model of making your writing as free and accessibly as possible has already worked once when it comes to writing.  In 2001 when The Alchemist author Paulo Coelho had been struggling for a few years to break into the Russian market, he decided to take this novel approach: he set up a site where anyone could download a PDF of the book for free.  And how’d that work out for him?

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000… I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not.

Having your sales increase one-thousand fold seems like a pretty damn good business model.

Morrison fundamental lack of comprehension about what’s really going on might be best captured by one of his final points: “In every digital industry the attempt to combat piracy has led to a massive reduction in cover price: the slippery slope towards free digital content.”

The reduction in cover price isn’t a slippery slope towards free, it’s the culling of a bloated and archaic publishing industry whose time has now passed.   As the music industry and Paulo Coelho have proven, the more access potential customers have to art the more likely they are to actually spend money on it. Authors will now be able to glean more of the profits created by their work, instead of having to whore themselves out to an industry populated mostly by people who failed at producing what they’re now selling – quality art.

Writers are no longer subject to the whims and vagrancies of faceless executives, the only thing they need now is a little bit of determination and a willingness to hustle the streets a little bit, which is a whole lot better than the alternative of letting a corrupt and dead-behind-the-eyes industry pimp out their dreams.

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British Prime Minister David Cameron is looking to make like an autocratic Arab dictator, and use the aftermath of the anarchistic violence that just swept across England’s streets as a reason to push through reforms curtailing internet speech and increasing online surveillance.  This follows closely on the heels of the United States passing it’s own bill drastically curtailing internet anonymity, as it forces ISPs to log massive amounts of user data.

The history of the Isles cracking down on the dissemination of dissent goes back at least to 1644, when the English Parliament re-introduced government control of printing and publishers in response to John Milton’s essay arguing  against the Catholic Church’s strictures against divorce.  Milton’s response championed free-speech above all other liberal rights:  “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

But governments across Europe had been actively trying to prevent that for centuries, as at one time or another the roster of banned books included those written by Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Locke, Defoe, Rousseau, and Voltaire.  Limiting and controlling thought is nothing new to governments, and so it was this history of official censorship and censure that in 1776 led Thomas Paine to take an important precaution when he published the argument that caused the call for American independence to fully coalesce.

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In one of The Dark Knight‘s pivotal scenes, Alfred descends into a strictly ordered and starkly lit Batcave as Bruce Wayne is doggedly patching himself up. After helping his employer with some stitching, Alfred realizes that Master Bruce doesn’t fully comprehend the dystopian miasma of violence that the Joker has brought upon Gotham City:

Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the the Joker as a rubric for terrorism.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

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The Italian theorist saw every act of Symbolic Terror as a “chimera,” due to the paradoxical belief that “the people will not be free when they are educated but educated when they are free.” In simpler parlance: violent acts are necessary to first free the People from their manacling to false social assumptions both in terms of what is possible and what is Right.

It is violence that opens minds to new revolutionary ideas.

Minds that otherwise would remain locked by the bars of what is socially acceptable. Minds aren’t changed by ideas, but are changed after actions open them up to the possibility of new ideas. Actions, then, are what rewires minds and makes them capable of accepting, forming, and eventually implementing new ideas.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th weren’t the maniacal actions of an apocalyptic sect madly bent on the annihilation of America and its people, nor were they fueled by hatred and an irrational predilection with death and mayhem. Neither death nor mayhem were even main goals of al-Qaeda. They did not seek to kill as many innocents as possible, but to dramatically attack buildings which served as the most vivid symbols of America’s dominance and control over the world. The people inside the buildings were invisible to the attackers, and so were largely incidental.

And their attacks were meant not to cause mayhem per say, but a coordinated and documentable violence that would be broadcast to the entire world. Violence that would show their people, the audience was not only the American public but Muslims across the world, and the message was that American hegemony was not invincible and could be successfully assaulted.

It is almost universally assumed that 9/11 was aimed at the American public. We interpret it in terms of how many lives were lost, in what it meant to us, in how it affected us, and it resulted in us asking the question Why Do They Hate Us? It is assumed that 9/11 wrought a destructive toll – in terms of fathers and friends and loved-ones lost, billions of dollars of damage done, airline revenues turning into debt, even a destruction of our own national innocence.

But if you really look at it, 9/11 very clearly wasn’t just about killing innocents.

It was about lighting torches. It was about empowering a disaffected and largely hopeless group, and rallying them to the vanguard and the ideas of a man who was seen by many of those who share his faith as one of the most devout and pious men alive at the time.

Understanding how this could be possible is based on two rather distant predicates. The first is the fate of the Narodnaya Volya. After their assassination of the Tsar in 1881, Russia soon became a police state as the Tsar implemented oppressive polices to try and destroy the group. Soon thousands of police forces were sent into the furthest corners of the Motherland, on the hunt against a “tiny, clandestine band that had the advantages of mobility, surprise, and relative invisibility.”¹¹ And although the Narodnaya Volya was soon destroyed, the propaganda of their deed lived on.

Later that same year, American president James Garfield was assassinated by anarchists inspired by the actions of the Narodnaya Volya. And two decades after that, terrorists managed to kill President William McKinley. Soon the techniques of the Narodnaya Volya which had caused the Tsarist regime to expend resources on repression which might’ve been used to extend its stay in power, were copied across the world. Much of the violent anarchism that swept across early 20th Century Europe can arguably trace its roots back to the Narodnaya Volya and the propaganda of their deed. Bin Ladin is hijacking their fundamental manifestation of the propaganda by deed, but mixing in elements unique to our modern era.

The second concept needed to understand bin Ladin’s own take on propaganda by deed that hasn’t been explained yet requires returning back to the Middle East of the 1970s. Then, at the same time as city buses were serving as multi-ton wheeled canaries for the fumes of civil discontent, international jetliners were being directed in a different direction and on a more cosmopolitan course – although for many of the same purposes.

And, perhaps more importantly, they provide the necessary vehicles for conveying the tale of how bin Ladin began to act his dreams with open eyes.

It’s widely accepted that small class sizes, especially at the very start of schooling, lead to a better education.  And yet, nationwide, minority kids are enrolled in schools with larger kindergarten classes than whites.

So that’s public schooling, what about American private schools?  Well, things aren’t any different there. White kids attend private schools at a rate of 1 in 10, for blacks the rate is 1 in 25.  And in interviews white parents exhibit a clear and unbroken pattern: white families use their financial resources to place their kids in “whiter, wealthier, and less diverse school environments.”

The chairman of Shelby County’s school board, David Pickler, insists that race isn’t a factor and that “socioeconomics” are really what’s behind  his community’s opposition.  But with the median wealth gap between black and white families doubling during the recession and now reaching the point where white families have twenty-times as much wealth as black families, trying to separate the “socio” from the “economic” is at best ignorant, and at worst willfully bigoted.

The court system will shortly rule on whether the planned merger will go forward this year or if it will have to wait until the 2013 school year.  But regardless of this individual ruling, when you look at the deluge of data outlining the vast gulf between black and white educations in America, it becomes all too apparent that not only are our schools still separate, we’re still a desperately long way from equal.

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –

(read the book free online – get a copy for your Kindle – read the Reddit AMA)

Things had been looking up for black families, back in 1963 as MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech about 70% of black families were headed by a married couple. But that percentage steadily began to drop, between 1970 and 2001 it declined by 34%, double the white decline, and by 2002 it had bottomed out at just 48%.

But if the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the destruction of the African-American family, why did the decline in married black women triple during the first decade of the War?

In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up about half of those in prison for drug offenses.  (When you adjust for the fact that the Department of Justice simply throws prisoners who identify as mixed race half-black and half-white out of their data, the proportion is well over half.)  A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. And by 2006 America had, proportionally, almost six-times as many blacks locked up as South Africa did at the height of Apartheid.

Our penal system has grown so massive that the U.S. criminal justice system now employs more people than America’s two largest private employers, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, combined.

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This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.⁸

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this snowballed into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.⁹

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” however the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

The Washington Post reported in a poll in May of 2007 that African-American Muslims were three-times as likely as immigrant Muslims to have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and are only about half as likely to dislike the group.  On top of that, African-Americans are much more likely to feel like they have nothing to lose, the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and a black child is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent in prison.  In many cities the foreclosure rate for black families is three times as high as the white rate, and nationwide unemployment is about twice as high.

An almost unfathomable number of African-Americans have passed through our penal system, coming out on the other side much more racist and disposed to violence than they were when they went in.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And although although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is three-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.²³

And when the shootings begin, it won’t take much for the establishment to begin reprisals. The level of trust between the police presence in innercity America and it’s African-American inhabitants typically falls somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

Widespread arrests will be made to try and find the terrorists responsible for the violence, and when some of the men – most of them innocent – getting arrested resist and the police respond with force, the flames will be stoked further still.  Based on past precedent, the police probably won’t be the initial targets – Jewish community centers and American military installations likely will be – but once law enforcement officers begin their investigations and raids, inner-city ire will be shifted against their presence.

Especially when such incidents are recorded on camera, as Rodney King and others have already demonstrated.

Rodney King was just one man being smacked around by a few cops, and yet his arrest set inner-city Los Angeles ablaze. Imagine what will happen when dozens of such arrests are recorded and played back not only on the Evening News, but available for free download on YouTube and other internet sites. Another preview of the unrest this will stir was provided when the unarmed Oscar J. Grant III was shot in the back on New Years Day 2009, and the entire incident was recorded on a camera phone and downloaded online.

It’s not hard to imagine what the response will be when some of them inevitably result in the suspects’ deaths – an inevitable result when the police fear for their own lives because they think they’re arresting a devious and sinister terrorist who has already tasted blood.

It won’t take much.  In every major modern insurgency, only about 10% of the fighters have been hardcore ideologues who believe in whatever cause is being championed, while the other 90% of the fighting is done by locals who are simply protecting their own turf against an invasive outside power.  Utilizing martial language like “insurgency” may seem like a bit of a stretch when describing our inner-cities, but it shouldn’t:

The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to police presence in black communities as “The Occupation.”  In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically “assume the position” when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what.

And yet when you dig deeper you’ll find that the D.C. Sniper’s blueprint in and of itself wasn’t really novel, as the attacks it was modeled off go back further still – to the first time an imperial Western power attempted what was perceived as colonization of the Middle East…

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –

available in print next week, like on Facebook or follow on Twitter to get the announcement!!

– what Amazon readers are saying about Tremble the Devil –

“The most accessible book on terrorism ever written  –  An eye-opening read, deeply philosophical and scathing in the  best way  –  Brilliant, and wonderfully written on top of that  –  No right or left, just facts and history  –  A hugely absorbing and very timely offering – There is no question that when it comes to terrorism, Tremble the Devil  is the textbook  –  I highly recommend this book for those who want to  know more about terrorism, the origin of radical Islam and its  fingerprint in the world today  – Cuts through the media blather to give an honest accounting of  the sort of complexity inherent in analyzing and understanding the  phenomenon of terror  –  No other author has so intricately written about terrorism in such detail”

Tremble the Devil tells terrorism’s story using engaging allusions to everyone and everything from Jesus Christ to Beer Pong and from Malcolm X to Friday the Thirteenth. Each chapter begins with a hook taken from artists ranging from the Rolling Stones and Jay-Z, to William Blake and Tupac Shakur. And it packages the social insights of The Tipping Point along with the compelling colloquial style of Freakonomics.

All of this is woven together in an intriguing and salient book that reads like a novel.

It is, however, a work of non-fiction that divides the aforementioned three levels of comprehension into three parts, and illustrates terrorism theory by recounting the most important modern attacks and tying them to the past, each other, and the future – in the process creating the richest and most complete work on terrorism to date, a book that will change the way you look at everything from organized religion to sports drinks.

Tremble the Devil is a lucid explanation of terrorism in all its forms, you can get yourself a copy below, or spend as much time as you’d like reading the entire book online – totally for free.

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Tremble the Devil is the first work of non-fiction that’s available up online in its entirety for free, but after reading a bit and deciding you’d like to keep going offline you can purchase a lend-able copy for your Kindle from Amazon, and if you don’t have a Kindle but would still like to read the book offline you can always download the free Kindle app for your iPhone, PC, Mac, Blackberry, iPad, Android, or Windows Phone.  Besides reading Tremble the Devil that’ll also allow you to download and read anything off of Amazon, including their selection of free books – including dozens of the classics.