I happily avoid the literary/genre debate, because no good can come from such discussions. Feelings get hurt, people cry. But by not worrying about the distinctions between genres, or between genre and literary, I've been free to write pretty much whatever I've wanted. So don't call me a 'genre writer' or a 'literally writer.' I'm neither. I'm a happy writer.
Writers should take the time to read Grossman's commentary though, if only to arm yourselves against the haters.
"Blue-chip literary writers — finding that after years of deprivation under the modernist regime their stores of plot devices are sadly depleted — have been frantically borrowing from genre fiction, which is where plot has been safely stockpiled for all these decades."
"Something nagged at me while I was reading Krystal’s piece, something familiar, and I’ve finally figured out what it is: it’s another New Yorker piece, from a few weeks ago, a profile of Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business professor who first applied the word “disruptive” to technology. Christensen had observed that in many industries, established companies based on high-end, sophisticated technologies tend to become complacent. They consider themselves invulnerable, or at best they look for challenges from even-higher-end technologies. But they’re looking in the wrong places, and what in fact happens is that they are disrupted from below: crude, low-end technologies develop at the bottom of the marketplace, then evolve to the point where they take over their markets and displace the established high-end companies, who never saw it coming.
I’m beginning to wonder if something like that is happening in contemporary fiction. We expect literary revolutions to come from above, from the literary end of the spectrum — the difficult, the avant-garde, the high-end, the densely written. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Instead we’re getting a revolution from below, coming up from the supermarket aisles. Genre fiction is the technology that will disrupt the literary novel as we know it."
Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/#ixzz2MObwFIUE
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
02 March 2013
11 May 2012
G is for Genre
Originally posted at SETON HILL WRITERS, on Friday, April 8, 2011
Genre fiction has certainly become more daring in the way it deals with its own tropes. Crossovers and blurred lines between the genres allow readers to dip a toe into new reading waters without fear of having it bitten off. Consider Max Brooks' World War Z--is it horror or SF? Or literature, maybe? And what about the Twilight series? Horror or romance? Are there readers who loved Twilight that would never in a thousand years consider picking up an Anne Rice novel? Certainly. Both have vampires and romance, but only one had the benefit of a rabid fan base accustomed to using social media to take their passions viral. |  |
There have been multitudes of novels that have straddled genre throughout written history, but they have never received the type of marketing attention that books get today. I believe our perceptions of genre are manipulated by the publisher's marketing departments and big budgets. With the right, well-targeted fan base a genre novel can fly or flounder. 'Don't judge a book by its cover' is an old adage that may not apply to 2011 when covers are usually tied to ginormous marketing campaigns and interactive media blitzes. Just look at the evolution of the SF/Fantasy reader stereotype over the last twenty years. From the 1990s it's the Dune/Lord of the Rings/Star Wars fan living in his mom's basement on a diet of Doritos and Cherry Coke. The 2010s stereotype is a tween who wants to know 'Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?'
Stories evolve and styles come and go, but readers always love what they love. Now publishers can target readers more specifically than they ever have, and book clubs are global institutions no longer confined to library and church basements. So while I'm not certain genre fiction receives more or less respect than it ever has, I know that fans and publishers are changing, and now more than ever fans are able to find, and talk about what they love.
31 January 2012
From the Authors Guild: Publishing's Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory
Not sure how much of this I agree with. Publishing decrying Amazon's monopoly is a little like calling the kettle black, in my opinion.
Publishing's Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory
Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” reads the headline.
These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February’s Harper’s Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that’s affected bookselling and countless other industries. It’s a story that hasn’t previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.
We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s set the stage with the other two stories.
Burning Down the Houses
Brad Stone’s Businessweek story discusses Amazon’s campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e-book market and the company’s furious reaction to Random House’s decision last March to adopt agency pricing for e-books, just as five of the other “Big Six” trade publishers had the previous year. (Before agency pricing, Amazon could sell e-books from Big Six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that Barnes & Noble could never afford to match. See How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble, Probably for more.)
Mr. Stone writes that after Random House’s March 2011 agency-pricing announcement,
Amazon could no longer run the best play out of its playbook – slash prices and sustain losses in the short term to gain market share over the long term. … “For the first time, a level playing field was going to get forced on Amazon,” says James Gray [of UK bookseller John Smith & Son and formerly of Ingram Content Group]. Amazon execs “were basically spitting blood and nails.”
Amazon’s response to Random House’s move was stunning and swift:
The next month, an Amazon recruiter sent an e-mail to several editors at big publishing houses, looking for someone to launch a new New York-based publishing imprint. “The imprint will be supported with a large budget, and its success will directly impact the success of Amazon’s overall business,” read the e-mail, which was obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Even with a large budget, directly affecting the success of Amazon’s overall business is a tall order for a new publishing imprint. Amazon pulled in well north of $40 billion in revenue last year (final numbers aren’t yet in), dwarfing the combined revenues of the Big Six publishers.
Luring a substantial contingent of bestselling authors away from the Big Six seems the only plausible route for an imprint to affect Amazon’s overall business. Amazon needed someone with a substantial industry pedigree to pull this off. Amazon quickly – in time for last spring’s Book Expo America -- landed just the man for the job: Larry Kirshbaum, formerly of Warner Books.
Just three months after Random House’s announcement, Amazon had all but declared war on the six unruly members of its book supply chain. Jeff Bezos had $6 billion in cash, the patience to absorb losses for years, and a former Big Six chief to lead the fight. The long-running behind-the-scenes battle for control of the publishing industry had finally broken into full public view.
Barnes & Noble’s New Role: The Contender
While Amazon directly threatens traditional publishers with its new imprint, it continues to undermine the ecosystem on which book publishers, and most new authors, depend. Julie Bosman describes this well in her NYT article, focusing on the last remaining brick-and-mortar bookseller with nationwide clout:
Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense suddenly seems a reach. …
What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.
“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.
Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It’s new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.
To understand just how precarious things are, realize that last year’s Borders’ bankruptcy represented an enormous reduction in browsing space, shuttering 650 stores. (B&N has about 700 stores.) One benefit of the loss of Borders should have been a short-term lift to B&N’s 700 stores and the 1,500 or so remaining independent bookstores. B&N’s sales were indeed up in the nine weeks before Christmas, Ms. Bosman reports. How much? Borders’ collapse led to a bounce of just four percent, compared to the prior Christmas. That’s what’s passing for good news in brick-and-mortar bookselling at the moment.
There is a bright spot, however. Barnes & Noble, led by William Lynch, has exceeded all expectations in the past two years with its launch of the Nook. B&N’s 300-member Silicon Valley office, after giving Amazon’s Kindle developers a two-year head start, beat Amazon to the tablet market by fully twelve months, and introduced what’s generally seen as the state-of-the-art e-ink reader, the Nook Simple Touch, eight months ago.
B&N, in other words, has been out-engineering Amazon, and Ms. Bosman’s story is the best account we’ve had of B&N’s efforts. In the process, B&N has seen its e-book market share climb from zero, two Christmases ago, to roughly 27% today.
B&N remains vulnerable, however. The engineering race against Amazon continues, and Amazon has leverage for acquiring content for its Kindle (see Contracts on Fire: Amazon’s Lending Library Mess) that B&N can’t match. And, critically, one tool that should help B&N, our antitrust laws, is instead poised to undo it.
This brings us to an unlikely tale of books, chickens, beer, and a Silicon Valley gentlemen’s agreement.
The Backstory: Amazon, Chicken Processors & Silicon Valley
Harper’s cover art rivals Businessweek’s: an enormous businessman wearing a gray pinstriped suit is preparing to literally eat the competition, a jumbo handful of gray-suited men and women. In the article, “Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets,” (key excerpts at link, full article by subscription) Barry Lynn views the state of book publishing through a different lens.
Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department’s interpretation of antitrust law based on “Chicago School” theories of efficiency and consumer welfare. The upshot appears to be that non-consumer markets (business-to-business markets and labor markets) are often insufficiently protected from monopolies.
To a chicken grower, for example, the relevant market isn’t restaurants or household consumers of chicken, it’s the market of chicken processors. Through a variety of machinations, including long-term contracts and the physical placement of processing plants (think baseball, before free agency), chicken growers now routinely have a market of only one processor to sell to.
Chicken growers own their land, buildings, and equipment, and all of the debt and risk that go with them, but these entrepreneurs have no real control over their economic lives. Growers buy their chicks and feed from their poultry processor, for example, and processors often require growers to make new investments in buildings and equipment. The processors, Mr. Lynn seems to suggest, have something much better than mere capital: the economic power to dictate how others use theirs.
It’s not just chicken growers who face constrained markets, Mr. Lynn writes. In free-wheeling Silicon Valley, computer engineers and digital animation workers employed by Apple, Google, Intel, and Pixar, among others, were subject to a secret agreement not to bid on each others’ employees, according to a Justice Department lawsuit filed, and settled, in 2010. (On Friday, former employees of some of the companies filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in San Jose based on the Justice Department investigation.)
It’s even hit beer. The 1,750 U.S. microbrewers may appear to operate in a competitive environment, but they nearly all sell through two distributors: ABI and MillerCoors control 90% of the distribution market.
For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Amazon controls every growing segment of the industry: online physical books, downloadable audio books, online used books, and e-books. Amazon commands about 75% of the online market for print books, and 60% of the e-book market (a percentage that decreased from Amazon’s reported 90% two years ago, as a result of agency pricing).
Mr. Lynn reports on a conversation with the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the U.S.:
He explained that Amazon was once a “wonderful customer with whom to do business.” As Jeff Bezos’s company became more powerful, however, it changed. “The question is, do you wear your power lightly? … Mr. Bezos has not. He is reckless. He is dangerous.”
The head of a small publishing house in Manhattan, Mr. Lynn reports, was even more blunt:
“Amazon is a bully,” he said, his voice rising, his cheeks flushing. “Anyone who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around. They do not exercise their power responsibly.”
Neither man allowed me to use his name. Amazon, they made clear, had long since accumulated sufficient influence over their business to ensure that even these most dedicated defenders of the book – and of the First Amendment – dare not speak openly of the company’s predations.
Mr. Lynn then turns to Amazon’s blackout of Macmillan’s buy buttons, two years ago this week:
At the time, Amazon and Macmillan were scrapping over which firm would set the price for Macmillan’s e-books. Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less. This scorched-earth tactic, which guaranteed that Amazon lost money on many of the e-books it sold, was designed to cement the online retailer’s dominance in the nascent market. It also had the effect of persuading customers that this deeply discounted price, which publishers considered ruinously low, was the “natural” one for an e-book.
In January 2010, Macmillan at last claimed the right to set the price for each of its own products as it alone saw fit. Amazon resisted this arrangement, known in publishing as the “agency model.” When the two companies deadlocked, Amazon simply turned off the buttons that allowed customers to order Macmillan titles, in both their print and their e-book versions. The reasoning was obvious: the sudden loss of sales, which could amount to a sizable fraction of Macmillan’s total revenue, would soon bring the publisher to heel.
This was not the first time Amazon had used this stratagem. The retailer’s executives had previously cut off small firms such as Ten Speed Press and Melville House Publishing for bucking their will. But the fight with Macmillan was by far the most public of these showdowns.
In the late 1970s, when a single book retailer first captured a 10 percent share of the U.S. market, Congress and the regulatory agencies were swift to react. As the head of the Federal Trade Commission put it: “The First Amendment protects us from the chilling shadow of government interference with the media. But are there comparable dangers if other powerful economic or political institutions assume control...?”
***
Today, … a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books. It does so by employing the most blatant forms of predatory pricing to destroy its retail competitors. … [It] justifies its exercise of raw power in the same way our economic autocrats always do: it claims that the resulting “efficiencies” will serve the interests of the consumer.
The book industry is in play, and has been for a while. The good news is that people are finally starting to pay attention.
Publishing's Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory
Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” reads the headline.
These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February’s Harper’s Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that’s affected bookselling and countless other industries. It’s a story that hasn’t previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.
We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s set the stage with the other two stories.
Burning Down the Houses
Brad Stone’s Businessweek story discusses Amazon’s campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e-book market and the company’s furious reaction to Random House’s decision last March to adopt agency pricing for e-books, just as five of the other “Big Six” trade publishers had the previous year. (Before agency pricing, Amazon could sell e-books from Big Six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that Barnes & Noble could never afford to match. See How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble, Probably for more.)
Mr. Stone writes that after Random House’s March 2011 agency-pricing announcement,
Amazon could no longer run the best play out of its playbook – slash prices and sustain losses in the short term to gain market share over the long term. … “For the first time, a level playing field was going to get forced on Amazon,” says James Gray [of UK bookseller John Smith & Son and formerly of Ingram Content Group]. Amazon execs “were basically spitting blood and nails.”
Amazon’s response to Random House’s move was stunning and swift:
The next month, an Amazon recruiter sent an e-mail to several editors at big publishing houses, looking for someone to launch a new New York-based publishing imprint. “The imprint will be supported with a large budget, and its success will directly impact the success of Amazon’s overall business,” read the e-mail, which was obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Even with a large budget, directly affecting the success of Amazon’s overall business is a tall order for a new publishing imprint. Amazon pulled in well north of $40 billion in revenue last year (final numbers aren’t yet in), dwarfing the combined revenues of the Big Six publishers.
Luring a substantial contingent of bestselling authors away from the Big Six seems the only plausible route for an imprint to affect Amazon’s overall business. Amazon needed someone with a substantial industry pedigree to pull this off. Amazon quickly – in time for last spring’s Book Expo America -- landed just the man for the job: Larry Kirshbaum, formerly of Warner Books.
Just three months after Random House’s announcement, Amazon had all but declared war on the six unruly members of its book supply chain. Jeff Bezos had $6 billion in cash, the patience to absorb losses for years, and a former Big Six chief to lead the fight. The long-running behind-the-scenes battle for control of the publishing industry had finally broken into full public view.
Barnes & Noble’s New Role: The Contender
While Amazon directly threatens traditional publishers with its new imprint, it continues to undermine the ecosystem on which book publishers, and most new authors, depend. Julie Bosman describes this well in her NYT article, focusing on the last remaining brick-and-mortar bookseller with nationwide clout:
Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers’ marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense suddenly seems a reach. …
What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.
“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.
Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It’s new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.
To understand just how precarious things are, realize that last year’s Borders’ bankruptcy represented an enormous reduction in browsing space, shuttering 650 stores. (B&N has about 700 stores.) One benefit of the loss of Borders should have been a short-term lift to B&N’s 700 stores and the 1,500 or so remaining independent bookstores. B&N’s sales were indeed up in the nine weeks before Christmas, Ms. Bosman reports. How much? Borders’ collapse led to a bounce of just four percent, compared to the prior Christmas. That’s what’s passing for good news in brick-and-mortar bookselling at the moment.
There is a bright spot, however. Barnes & Noble, led by William Lynch, has exceeded all expectations in the past two years with its launch of the Nook. B&N’s 300-member Silicon Valley office, after giving Amazon’s Kindle developers a two-year head start, beat Amazon to the tablet market by fully twelve months, and introduced what’s generally seen as the state-of-the-art e-ink reader, the Nook Simple Touch, eight months ago.
B&N, in other words, has been out-engineering Amazon, and Ms. Bosman’s story is the best account we’ve had of B&N’s efforts. In the process, B&N has seen its e-book market share climb from zero, two Christmases ago, to roughly 27% today.
B&N remains vulnerable, however. The engineering race against Amazon continues, and Amazon has leverage for acquiring content for its Kindle (see Contracts on Fire: Amazon’s Lending Library Mess) that B&N can’t match. And, critically, one tool that should help B&N, our antitrust laws, is instead poised to undo it.
This brings us to an unlikely tale of books, chickens, beer, and a Silicon Valley gentlemen’s agreement.
The Backstory: Amazon, Chicken Processors & Silicon Valley
Harper’s cover art rivals Businessweek’s: an enormous businessman wearing a gray pinstriped suit is preparing to literally eat the competition, a jumbo handful of gray-suited men and women. In the article, “Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets,” (key excerpts at link, full article by subscription) Barry Lynn views the state of book publishing through a different lens.
Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department’s interpretation of antitrust law based on “Chicago School” theories of efficiency and consumer welfare. The upshot appears to be that non-consumer markets (business-to-business markets and labor markets) are often insufficiently protected from monopolies.
To a chicken grower, for example, the relevant market isn’t restaurants or household consumers of chicken, it’s the market of chicken processors. Through a variety of machinations, including long-term contracts and the physical placement of processing plants (think baseball, before free agency), chicken growers now routinely have a market of only one processor to sell to.
Chicken growers own their land, buildings, and equipment, and all of the debt and risk that go with them, but these entrepreneurs have no real control over their economic lives. Growers buy their chicks and feed from their poultry processor, for example, and processors often require growers to make new investments in buildings and equipment. The processors, Mr. Lynn seems to suggest, have something much better than mere capital: the economic power to dictate how others use theirs.
It’s not just chicken growers who face constrained markets, Mr. Lynn writes. In free-wheeling Silicon Valley, computer engineers and digital animation workers employed by Apple, Google, Intel, and Pixar, among others, were subject to a secret agreement not to bid on each others’ employees, according to a Justice Department lawsuit filed, and settled, in 2010. (On Friday, former employees of some of the companies filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in San Jose based on the Justice Department investigation.)
It’s even hit beer. The 1,750 U.S. microbrewers may appear to operate in a competitive environment, but they nearly all sell through two distributors: ABI and MillerCoors control 90% of the distribution market.
For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Amazon controls every growing segment of the industry: online physical books, downloadable audio books, online used books, and e-books. Amazon commands about 75% of the online market for print books, and 60% of the e-book market (a percentage that decreased from Amazon’s reported 90% two years ago, as a result of agency pricing).
Mr. Lynn reports on a conversation with the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the U.S.:
He explained that Amazon was once a “wonderful customer with whom to do business.” As Jeff Bezos’s company became more powerful, however, it changed. “The question is, do you wear your power lightly? … Mr. Bezos has not. He is reckless. He is dangerous.”
The head of a small publishing house in Manhattan, Mr. Lynn reports, was even more blunt:
“Amazon is a bully,” he said, his voice rising, his cheeks flushing. “Anyone who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around. They do not exercise their power responsibly.”
Neither man allowed me to use his name. Amazon, they made clear, had long since accumulated sufficient influence over their business to ensure that even these most dedicated defenders of the book – and of the First Amendment – dare not speak openly of the company’s predations.
Mr. Lynn then turns to Amazon’s blackout of Macmillan’s buy buttons, two years ago this week:
At the time, Amazon and Macmillan were scrapping over which firm would set the price for Macmillan’s e-books. Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less. This scorched-earth tactic, which guaranteed that Amazon lost money on many of the e-books it sold, was designed to cement the online retailer’s dominance in the nascent market. It also had the effect of persuading customers that this deeply discounted price, which publishers considered ruinously low, was the “natural” one for an e-book.
In January 2010, Macmillan at last claimed the right to set the price for each of its own products as it alone saw fit. Amazon resisted this arrangement, known in publishing as the “agency model.” When the two companies deadlocked, Amazon simply turned off the buttons that allowed customers to order Macmillan titles, in both their print and their e-book versions. The reasoning was obvious: the sudden loss of sales, which could amount to a sizable fraction of Macmillan’s total revenue, would soon bring the publisher to heel.
This was not the first time Amazon had used this stratagem. The retailer’s executives had previously cut off small firms such as Ten Speed Press and Melville House Publishing for bucking their will. But the fight with Macmillan was by far the most public of these showdowns.
In the late 1970s, when a single book retailer first captured a 10 percent share of the U.S. market, Congress and the regulatory agencies were swift to react. As the head of the Federal Trade Commission put it: “The First Amendment protects us from the chilling shadow of government interference with the media. But are there comparable dangers if other powerful economic or political institutions assume control...?”
***
Today, … a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books. It does so by employing the most blatant forms of predatory pricing to destroy its retail competitors. … [It] justifies its exercise of raw power in the same way our economic autocrats always do: it claims that the resulting “efficiencies” will serve the interests of the consumer.
The book industry is in play, and has been for a while. The good news is that people are finally starting to pay attention.
25 January 2011
5 Rules for Indie Publishing
Back in September or October, Heidi and I really started kicking around the idea of flipping the Big 6 the bird (more my idea, I don't think Heidi approves of flipping of said bird) and following the course Joe Konrath, David Morrell and others are plotting.
We spent a week or two trying to figure out what criteria we'd use to ultimately make the decision to publish on our own, and came up with 5 rules or guideline we'd use to aid in our decision-making.
Here they are (count 'em, kids) for your perusing pleasure:
1. Know why you're publishing independently
This is a no-brainer. Independent publishing can not be a last resort after years spent collecting rejections from agents, big publishers, small publishers, ePublishers, etc.. The decision has to be--HAS TO BE--the writer's first choice.
Why?
If you are not going to treat your book the way a publisher--who'd spend thousands of dollars to print, market and distribute--is going to treat it, then independent publishing probably isn't going to be for you. You have to love it enough to make sure it receives the attention it deserves and have to be 100% committed to selling the crap out of it and believing in it. You have to believe you know what's best for your book.
It's your baby. Don't leave it locked up in a hot car while you drink beer.
2. Know risk to gain ratio
Our experience with a major travel publisher taught us a few things. It taught us that a publisher isn't always going to do the things it says it's going to do. Our publicist's campaign for our book consisted of sending .jpgs of our cover to bookstores prior to signings that we'd set up ourselves. Our publicist contacted no local media and couldn't even get us postcards or promotional material to take to conferences and conventions we'd attended on our own dime. We didn't expect subway posters and bus stops, but c'mon. Don't pee on my leg and tell me that's what I paid for.
Then the publisher printed a second edition of our book while continuing to call it a first edition and we haven't seen a royalty statement in months.
I know that some people have great experience with publishers. We haven't.
I'll gladly collect 70% instead of 12% to do the work my wife and I have been doing since our book was released--to promote a book that I've sweated and lost more sleep over than a publisher ever would. And I know that if I fail, the failure is my own.
But I'd rather fail on my own than fail because my query wasn't good enough, because a publisher cut my print run, because I got a contract for a print run I could never sell out, because marketing decided my book was urban fantasy instead of supernatural suspense, because the release date coincided with a release by Snooki or Nicole Richie.
And I'd rather take 70% of $2.99 for a book I spent 10,000 hours on than take 10% of $19.99 for a book a publisher spent a week on.
3. Know what you're compromising
->I'm losing the valuable experience of thousands of cumulative hours shared by the agents, editors and marketing departments who'd have a hand in publishing my book.
But I trust my associates from Seton Hill and the friends I've made at conferences and conventions to give me the same type of support. I know the relationships wouldn't be the same--some would be less personal, some more--but it's a price I pay. (And I wouldn't trust some of the professionals I've met at conferences and conventions with a laundry list or a recipe, let alone a manuscript. I'm looking at you, ------ -----------!)
->I'm losing national distribution.
We know that's not true anymore.
->I'm losing credibility.
I'm not sure that a Big 6 contract guarantees credibility either. I have a master's degree, am adjunct faculty at a distinguished university and am a member of The Authors Guild. I've worked with a major publisher on a big non-fiction project. I'm not Stephen King. But neither is Snooki.
4. Know that you are the company
You pick your release date. You choose a cover. You market it. You go to conferences and signings to represent yourself and the book. You are responsible for your own finances. You deal with complaints from readers. You contact local media. You set up signings and purchase all of your own promotional material. You pay somebody to format the book or you format it yourself. You get the pat on the back. You hang your head when readers point out typos and plot holes that you've missed.
5. Know if you have the time and energy
In addition to writing the book, you do all of the things mentioned above. And then you have to write another book. There's a lot of discussion on Konrath's blog about authors with multiple books doing better than authors with only one. Check out http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ to read what people who have a hell of a lot more experience in independent publishing (and 'real' publishing) than me have to say about it.
I don't know if independent publishing is for the faint of heart. But seeing that I'd have the freedom to write what I want instead of writing what I hope an agent would want is a very liberating experience. And if it bombs it bombs. I change my name and write something else. Or not. I can do whatever I want.
As the writer I should've always had that power--not the marketing department or a CFO. Sometime I get the impression that a lot of editors and agents and publishers put writers at the bottom of a very tall ladder. I think independent publishing puts writers at the top.
And look, I wrote this whole post barely mentioning the way the publishing industry has eaten itself into a very awkward and ugly corner. Let the agents have Snooki. I think the readers are smart enough to follow the writing.
We spent a week or two trying to figure out what criteria we'd use to ultimately make the decision to publish on our own, and came up with 5 rules or guideline we'd use to aid in our decision-making.
Here they are (count 'em, kids) for your perusing pleasure:
1. Know why you're publishing independently
This is a no-brainer. Independent publishing can not be a last resort after years spent collecting rejections from agents, big publishers, small publishers, ePublishers, etc.. The decision has to be--HAS TO BE--the writer's first choice.
Why?
If you are not going to treat your book the way a publisher--who'd spend thousands of dollars to print, market and distribute--is going to treat it, then independent publishing probably isn't going to be for you. You have to love it enough to make sure it receives the attention it deserves and have to be 100% committed to selling the crap out of it and believing in it. You have to believe you know what's best for your book.
It's your baby. Don't leave it locked up in a hot car while you drink beer.
2. Know risk to gain ratio
Our experience with a major travel publisher taught us a few things. It taught us that a publisher isn't always going to do the things it says it's going to do. Our publicist's campaign for our book consisted of sending .jpgs of our cover to bookstores prior to signings that we'd set up ourselves. Our publicist contacted no local media and couldn't even get us postcards or promotional material to take to conferences and conventions we'd attended on our own dime. We didn't expect subway posters and bus stops, but c'mon. Don't pee on my leg and tell me that's what I paid for.
Then the publisher printed a second edition of our book while continuing to call it a first edition and we haven't seen a royalty statement in months.
I know that some people have great experience with publishers. We haven't.
I'll gladly collect 70% instead of 12% to do the work my wife and I have been doing since our book was released--to promote a book that I've sweated and lost more sleep over than a publisher ever would. And I know that if I fail, the failure is my own.
But I'd rather fail on my own than fail because my query wasn't good enough, because a publisher cut my print run, because I got a contract for a print run I could never sell out, because marketing decided my book was urban fantasy instead of supernatural suspense, because the release date coincided with a release by Snooki or Nicole Richie.
And I'd rather take 70% of $2.99 for a book I spent 10,000 hours on than take 10% of $19.99 for a book a publisher spent a week on.
3. Know what you're compromising
->I'm losing the valuable experience of thousands of cumulative hours shared by the agents, editors and marketing departments who'd have a hand in publishing my book.
But I trust my associates from Seton Hill and the friends I've made at conferences and conventions to give me the same type of support. I know the relationships wouldn't be the same--some would be less personal, some more--but it's a price I pay. (And I wouldn't trust some of the professionals I've met at conferences and conventions with a laundry list or a recipe, let alone a manuscript. I'm looking at you, ------ -----------!)
->I'm losing national distribution.
We know that's not true anymore.
->I'm losing credibility.
I'm not sure that a Big 6 contract guarantees credibility either. I have a master's degree, am adjunct faculty at a distinguished university and am a member of The Authors Guild. I've worked with a major publisher on a big non-fiction project. I'm not Stephen King. But neither is Snooki.
4. Know that you are the company
You pick your release date. You choose a cover. You market it. You go to conferences and signings to represent yourself and the book. You are responsible for your own finances. You deal with complaints from readers. You contact local media. You set up signings and purchase all of your own promotional material. You pay somebody to format the book or you format it yourself. You get the pat on the back. You hang your head when readers point out typos and plot holes that you've missed.
5. Know if you have the time and energy
In addition to writing the book, you do all of the things mentioned above. And then you have to write another book. There's a lot of discussion on Konrath's blog about authors with multiple books doing better than authors with only one. Check out http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ to read what people who have a hell of a lot more experience in independent publishing (and 'real' publishing) than me have to say about it.
I don't know if independent publishing is for the faint of heart. But seeing that I'd have the freedom to write what I want instead of writing what I hope an agent would want is a very liberating experience. And if it bombs it bombs. I change my name and write something else. Or not. I can do whatever I want.
As the writer I should've always had that power--not the marketing department or a CFO. Sometime I get the impression that a lot of editors and agents and publishers put writers at the bottom of a very tall ladder. I think independent publishing puts writers at the top.
And look, I wrote this whole post barely mentioning the way the publishing industry has eaten itself into a very awkward and ugly corner. Let the agents have Snooki. I think the readers are smart enough to follow the writing.
07 January 2011
Another Perspective on ePublishing
Steve Manning takes a level-headed approach to ePublishing from beyond the realm of Amazon vs. the Big 6.
WHY I WOULD TURN DOWN A SIX-FIGURE BOOK ADVANCE from Wordpreneur.com:
Unedited Guest Article by Steve Manning
People are always astonished when I tell them that I’d never settle for a six-figure book advance, that I’d simply turn it down flat. But when I explain the math to them, it all starts to make sense..
WHY I WOULD TURN DOWN A SIX-FIGURE BOOK ADVANCE from Wordpreneur.com:
Unedited Guest Article by Steve Manning
People are always astonished when I tell them that I’d never settle for a six-figure book advance, that I’d simply turn it down flat. But when I explain the math to them, it all starts to make sense..
06 January 2011
Shout-out from across the pond!
Many, many thanks to Tim Merrick for the kind words!
From http://www.theclashblog.com/
"Great article comparing Joe Strummer making a go of it with the 101′ers to becoming an author: Its no shock to most of you (I’d assume) that I enjoy writing and I’m perfectly keen to try and make a full time profession of it so I found extra reverberation in this piece which compares Joe’s early days trying to make inroads with his squat based band with the effort and resilience it takes as a writer on the endless path of seeking readers or even the holy grail of publication. Music much like writing is easier to get started in and ‘out there’ than it was 30 years ago but finding loyal readers or motivated listeners is another battle entirely."
From http://www.theclashblog.com/
"Great article comparing Joe Strummer making a go of it with the 101′ers to becoming an author: Its no shock to most of you (I’d assume) that I enjoy writing and I’m perfectly keen to try and make a full time profession of it so I found extra reverberation in this piece which compares Joe’s early days trying to make inroads with his squat based band with the effort and resilience it takes as a writer on the endless path of seeking readers or even the holy grail of publication. Music much like writing is easier to get started in and ‘out there’ than it was 30 years ago but finding loyal readers or motivated listeners is another battle entirely."
01 January 2011
2011 WRITING PERSPECTIVE
From JOE STRUMMER and the legend of THE CLASH by Kris Needs--“We started the 101’ers with one amplifier and one speaker’, remembered Joe. ‘We built our own equipment… We got some drawers out of a skip and we used to buy cheap speakers down the Edgeware Road and we’d drop them into these drawers and put a facing board on them and turn them up. That would be a cabinet… I used to go to gigs with two bricks in a shoulder bag and these bricks were to sit in the deck of a record player upturned with a broom handle screwed in it, which was the microphone stand. The microphone was taped on the top and the bricks were there to drop in the record player and keep the things steady so the mic didn’t fall over.’
I started writing in October 1998 with one goal--to get a book in print with one of the Big 6. Every writing-related action I’ve engaged in since has been to help me achieve the publication of a novel. I went to conferences to meet agents, went to book signings to meet authors to find out how they did it, I’ve taken query writing workshops, completed a Masters degree, bought writing how-to books, read agent blogs and subscribed to feeds from publishers.
And you know what? It was starting to work. My rejection letters really started getting better and people started telling me that was a good thing. Instead of ‘this isn’t right for us’, I started getting ‘the writing’s great, but we don’t know how to market it’. Some great victory, huh?
And that’s exactly why I’m pulling out now. I have the confidence to realize that my work is better than the form-rejection letter an agent’s intern sends me. Some would call it ignorance, or even hubris, but spending so many years on the outside looking gave me a new perspective on the industry I wanted more than anything to break into. And when I read that little passage from Joe Strummer it hit me…
I’m not waiting anymore.
Musicians don’t wait until they get paid to start delivering songs to an audience. An artist doesn’t paint with thoughts of ‘is this right for the market’ hanging over his head. It’s writing, with its archaic hierarchy of agents, editors and marketing departments that complicates the artist’s relationship with consumers. And with Amazon’s way of e-distributing directly to readers, writers finally have an alternative route to publication. Look at some recent Tweets from Publishers Lunch—“Harvard Square’s Globe Corner Bookstore up for sale”, “Random House closes operations at Tricycle Press Imprint”, “Latest BISG eBook Survey Finds 40% of Respondents Spending Less on Printed Books”, “Aletheia Continues to Trim their Barnes & Noble Holdings”, “New Book Sales Fall 9.3% At Hastings, Which Has No eBooks”, “Borders Announces Yet Another Web Site Redesign”, “Joseph-Beth Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy; Will Close Another Two Stores”.
Whose fault is it the industry’s going to shit? It’s not mine. I’m not the guy who chooses to represent or publish Hilary Duff or Lauren Conrad or Snooki over writers who’ve been practicing and polishing their work for a lot longer than I have. St. Martin’s Press published J-Wow and Ronnie’s book, NEVER FALL IN LOVE AT THE JERSEY SHORE. Celebrity culture is not literary culture and massive media campaigns will never create the kinds of long-term relationships word of mouth readers and booksellers and good stories can.
If somebody from one of the Big 6 houses would’ve asked me, I would’ve said it was dumb to print hardcovers in such massive quantities that they’d only end up reduces 80-90% on a bargain table three months later. And that it’s a bad idea to rely on a book like THE DA VINCI CODE (or a DA VINCI CODE clone) to support the rest of the house. And that advances, like the $1.2 million paid for Andrew Davidson’s THE GARGOYLE, or Tina Fey’s $6.8 million advance or Tom Friedman’s $5 million advance leaves little or no money for new, developing authors. The kind of authors that turn out the mid-list books that support a house in the long run.
Until Amazon made it easy for writers to produce and distribute work on their own terms, we had no choice but to abide by the Kafkaesque system create by the Big 6 and literary agents. Agents are terrified (assumption is based proportionally on how often I see agents blogging about how un-scared they are) of e-publishing because it exposes them for what they really are. Agents don’t create anything, and they don’t produce anything. The idea of agents as gatekeepers is insulting to writers and to readers. I once heard an agent say at a conference, quite boastfully, he still would’ve passed on the Harry Potter series despite its success because he wasn’t interested in Rowling’s writing.
Jessica Faust of BookEnds,LLC doesn’t even think a writer can stand without agents and editors. She said, “You can’t say enough about how good she (an editor) makes you look, but obviously if you’re self-publishing she won’t be involved with this book. And it shows. Of course readers snatch up your books because they love you, but they’re disappointed. The books aren’t what they’ve come to expect from you, and now they feel like they’ve wasted their hard-earned money and time reading books they found unsatisfying.” http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2010/11/building-your-career-on-kindle.html
So writers are little more than monkeys at typewriters? Interesting.
Here’s what she said about JA Konrath’s success--“In my opinion, he’s an exception to what’s happening, not the rule. Trust me, Joe has a lot of great points, and the biggest is the amount of money one can make going directly to places like Kindle rather than through a traditional publisher. That being said, can you make the money if no one buys your books? Joe was selling books to readers well before he entered the self-epublishing world, he had a fan base, and people were hungry to read more of what he had written. Let me put it this way: For every success story like J. A. Konrath, there are hundreds of authors who put a book out on their own, only to see a hundred or so sales to friends and family and then nothing.” http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2010/11/launching-your-career-via-kindle.html
My favorite is when she says, ‘…can you make money if no one buys your books?’ I don’t know, but I’d try asking Borders first?
Scott Eagan does her one better--“Many of the editors I talk to openly tell me they want to see some great new projects. They are desperately searching for that golden gem. They want that great author. Agents are doing the same thing. The problem is that the stories just aren't there.
I said this a couple of weeks ago, but you can't blame the editors for not buying. The real issue is that the stories just aren't coming in.” http://scotteagan.blogspot.com/2010/10/just-some-observations-e-publishing.html
There you have it--it's the writers fault the industry is failing. Brilliant.
You know, I may or may not be Joe Strummer, but I sure as hell ain’t Snooki. Relying on my writing ability and my ability to sell myself sits with me a hell of a lot better than relying on agents and publishers. I know that the road to legitimacy is a lot steeper going this route, but it’s been virtually impassable querying agents and trying to attain my goals ‘legitimately’. If I stick with the Big 6 plan I won’t have readers until 2015, if ever. By going Amazon’s route I can have readers--for better or worse--tomorrow.
I know a publisher is going to market me and make sure my book sells, right? I know this because it was what our Avalon Travel publicist was supposed to do. And we still set up our own signings and still contacted the media ourselves. We set up all of our own speaking engagements and presentations. The publicist contacted us the month before the release and never again, forcing my tenacious wife to learn more about publicity and marketing than she ever would’ve on her own. So I know even if would ever end up with a book deal, I’d still be promoting it myself. (But if our Avalon publicist is reading this, thanks a million! Because of you we learned to do it ourselves.)
Going through Amazon lets me keep my rights. The loss of eRights and future rights scares the heck out of me. Many authors weren’t so lucky. Joe Konrath has talked about this extensively at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com so I won’t get into it here. He describes the process and his experiences more succinctly than I ever could, and he has the figures and legitimacy to back it up. I personally find the royalty rates given to writers by publishers for ePubbed books absurd.
For me it comes down to what I’d rather be doing--writing. I’d really rather be writing than dealing with industry types. And more than anything, I’d rather fail for something I’d written, rather than for not being able to ever get a foot in the door. If I have to start carrying around a couple of bricks in a shoulder bag, that's exactly what I'll do.
29 November 2010
The Feminista Files: FEM farewell: The Publishing Dinosaurs
Awesome post that sums up publishing for a lot of people.
The Feminista Files: FEM farewell: The Publishing Dinosaurs
The Feminista Files: FEM farewell: The Publishing Dinosaurs
09 September 2009
Amazon Accuses Someone Else of Monopolizing Bookselling
Amazon Accuses Someone Else of Monopolizing Bookselling
September 2, 2009. Amazon made it official today, filing a brief in the Google case claiming that someone else might gain a monopoly in bookselling. It seems we're compelled to state the obvious:
Amazon's hypocrisy is breathtaking. It dominates online bookselling and the fledgling e-book industry. At this moment it's trying to cement its control of the e-book industry by routinely selling e-books at a loss. It won't do that forever, of course. Eventually, when enough readers are locked in to its Kindle, everyone in the industry expects Amazon to squeeze publishers and authors. The results could be devastating for the economics of authorship.
Amazon apparently fears that Google could upend its plans. Amazon needn't worry, really: this agreement is about out-of-print books. Its lock on the online distribution of in-print books, unfortunately, seems secure.
The settlement would make millions of out-of-print books available to readers again, and Google would get no exclusive rights under the agreement. The agreement opens new markets, and that's a good thing for readers and authors. It offers to make millions upon millions of out-of-print books available for free online viewing at 16,500 public library buildings and more than 4,000 colleges and universities, and that's a great thing for readers, students and scholars. The public has an overwhelming interest in having this settlement approved.
http://authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/amazon-accuses-someone-else-of-monopolizing.html
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