Kristine Kathryn Rusch » Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, On Writing » The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 1999
The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 1999
The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 1999
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
When change hits in the arts, it hits hard. Tonight, I was reading an article in the April Vanity Fair about the movie All The President’s Men. The last two paragraphs of the article discuss how, in 1975, Sidney Sheinberg at MCA came up with a new way to release movies. Once upon a time, folks, movies released slowly, one or two theaters at a time, and worked their way across the country. It meant that the studio had to make fewer copies of the film, and that movies could become “sleepers”—films that actually built word of mouth over time.
Sheinberg decided to amortize costs by sending hundreds of prints of the film to theaters all over the country, and to run a nationwide advertising campaign at the same time. The movie he chose to do this with? Jaws.
That little idea changed the way movies got marketed—and did so damn near overnight. All the President’s Men got released just after Jaws, while this system was still in flux.
“Jaws was a good, populist movie,” Robert Redford, star of All the President’s Men, said. “But it became the flagship for a campaign that overtook American movies. It became a slick package, advertising-directed, about selling popcorn and product placement. I thought the timing of All the President’s Men very fortunate, because it was a very honest and unpolluted film. I’m not sure if we could have managed it in its purity a decade or two later.”
Over the years, Redford has fascinated me because he has always had one foot in the business world even as he built his artistic career. He started the Sundance Film Festival when it became clear that the smaller films—which All the President’s Men was—had no shot in the changing market. The festival helped give films like that, films that didn’t have the benefit of timing, a shot.
Why am I talking about movies here? Because I want you to see the rapidity of change in that industry. A marketing and business decision that was quite wise from a studio’s point of view ended up having a major impact on the kinds of films that got produced, distributed, and sold to film audiences. Say what you will about the auteurs in the 1970s, most of them wouldn’t have had a chance had they started in the 1990s. And it had nothing to do with their talent.
It had to do with the way the business had changed.
The publishing industry is going through the exact same kind of rapid change. It’s extremely fast—so fast that I mentioned in a blog a few weeks ago that I now give out different advice to newer writers than I would have given them just months before.
Writers have to learn business and they have to learn the new business. If they don’t, they’ll go by the wayside quickly.
I’m worried about this, so worried I’ve mentioned it several times in this blog. And I’ve been worried that my friends and fellow established writers aren’t moving with me. Here’s why:
Over the last month, it has become increasingly clear to me that the publishing industry is making changes that emulate the music industry. Those of us who exist on the periphery of the music industry have heard for years that new artists and even established ones can’t make money in the traditional music industry.
I didn’t understand that until I read Jacob Slichter’s So You Wanna Be A Rock ’N Roll Star several years ago. He wrote about a system in which a musician who signed a deal with a major record label could end up owing the label tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. He delineated it all out in a long book that showed just how the label ended up taking a naïve artist and putting him into debt.
Slichter said this was why so many rock bands disbanded—because the band itself was a legal entity and as a legal entity it was in hock to the studio. The only way the musicians could continue to perform and try to earn money from their music was to create a new legal entity and abandon the old one. Otherwise, they were working in a kind of indentured servitude.
Think this is just sour grapes from one musician who didn’t make it big? Look at a link that a reader from last week gave me. It’s from a magazine I’ve never heard of called Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll and was written by rock producer named Steve Albini. I’m not so sure how dodgy this website is that I’m sending you to—I don’t know if they violated Mr. Albini’s copyright by reproducing this piece. I’m going to trust that they didn’t, because y’all need to see these numbers.
For those of you who can’t be bothered to check the link, Albini lays out the line-by-line “costs” that the musicians agreed to when they signed their record deal. The musicians received a $250,000 advance. But by the time the album got released and the tour was completed, the advance was gone—and the musicians owed the record label $14,000.
You’re understanding me right. The “standard” contractually negotiated costs that the musicians agreed would come out of their pockets came to $264,000. The only way for the artists to recoup that loss was to sign a new deal with the label, often at lesser terms. If the label even wanted to sign them. (That part is courtesy of Slichter)
How much did the label earn—with the same costs deducted?
$710,000. In 1990s dollars.
Albini also lists how much each “player” made. He includes a producer ($90,000), a manager ($51,000), an agent, ($7500) and a lawyer ($12,000).
He writes, “The band is now ¼ of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 in royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never ‘recouped,’ the band will have no leverage and will oblige.”
When I read Slichter’s book, I thought, “Thank God publishing hasn’t figured out how to do this to writers.”
Well, folks, guess what. It’s 2011. Publishing has figured it out.
Just this afternoon, as I looked over yet another contract addendum for a friend—this addendum sent by a big-name agent who didn’t even bother to check the addendum against the original contract terms—I saw the agency rider added into my friend’s contract. The agency rider—the thing that says the writer authorizes the publishing house to negotiate with and pay the agent in the writer’s name—was awful. My friend had edited it down to something similar to what was offered ten years ago, but I know dozens of writers who probably never did.
I dealt with some of this last week in my blog post and my husband Dean Wesley Smith has a post on something similar that you absolutely must read.
But we both know that most writers won’t listen to us. And it has us both scared for our industry. Writers are signing away their rights, just like the musicians listed above did, because these writers aren’t savvy enough to understand industry change and how it impacts art. (Like Redford mentioned in that above quote.)
Once upon a time, publishing was a monopoly. I’ve used this chart before. From about 1920 to about 2006, this is how publishing worked:
Writers provide content (product) to Publishers.
Publishers distribute that content to Distributors.
Distributors distribute books to Bookstores.
Bookstores distribute that content to Readers.
Now, however, writers can do this:
Writers provide content (product) to Bookstores
Bookstores distribute that content to Readers
The middleman is no longer necessary.
Many writers find this scary. They don’t understand that they are—and always have been—in business. So they don’t act like business owners.
Business owners invest capital up front to start a business. They recoup that investment over time, and eventually earn money from that investment.
When publishers started paying advances, they—in effect—told writers not to bother their pretty little heads with business. “Write,” the publishers said. “We’ll take care of your bills while you finish that book.”
Writers got used to this. Writers forgot that they had to take risks of their own like other small business owners. And right now, that attitude is biting writers in the ass—and most of them don’t even realize it.
As I have written these blog posts all year, I’ve gotten e-mails and private comments from long-time professional writer friends which, in effect, say things like, “We need agents. We can’t market our books otherwise.”
Or
“Publishers are the only ones who can get us into national bookstore chains.”
Or
“I have no way to reach foreign markets/Hollywood/the gaming industry without my agent.”
And you know what? Ten years ago, that was all true.
Publishers had a monopoly on distribution. Unless a writer became a full-fledged publisher, invested tens of thousands of dollars on a single book, and knew how to work the system, the writer could not get his book into a bookstore. How do I know this? I owned a publishing company twenty years ago. I know how hard it used to be. I remember the footwork Dean used to do to get one bookstore, two, five, or ten on board. It was labor-intensive. He courted distributors for years, before one took on our company.
It’s not that way any more. Now, I can reach you with this blog. I can take the novel I finished on Monday, pay a savvy editor to go over the book, pay a copy editor to make sure I don’t change my main character’s name midway through, pay a cover designer to make me a lovely cover—all for a flat fee—and put the book up in two major national bookstores by the end of the week. One of those bookstores has sister stores in the U.K. and Germany.
Of course, this is an e-book. Putting up an e-book is spectacularly easy—and suddenly you have a worldwide market. If you’re willing to go to other distributors, you can have your book in more than 20 major national bookstores within two weeks.
If I spend about $50 on CreateSpace and add a small fee for my cover designer to design a wrap-around (front and back) cover, I can have a trade paper edition of my book that will be listed in the catalogues of major distributors. I don’t have to do anything else. I don’t have to court those people for years, like Dean did twenty years ago.
And if I’m really willing to put myself out by designing a small catalogue of my work, I can send that to independent booksellers, give them a discount, and have CreateSpace produce and send them the paper books.
And suddenly, I am a publisher—with as great an ability to reach the consumer as any of the so-called Big Six publishers. In fact, I can reach more readers because I control all of the rights, and I can opt to go into overseas markets that they can’t penetrate.
The monopoly isn’t just broken. It’s shattered.
Most writers don’t realize that. Most don’t want to do the “work” because they don’t know how little work they have to do.
What, really, must they do? They must pay someone up front instead of letting that person take a percentage of the work in perpetuity. See Dean’s post on this. Please. See Dean’s post.
So let’s discuss agents, because that too is important.
Once upon a time, I had an agent. Hell, I’ve had a lot of agents. And I needed them.
Every writer did.
In the days before the internet, before the ubiquity of e-mail, before instant messaging and Skype, agents had a purpose. Writers hired agents for their connections. Agents got books in the door with a reluctant publisher. Agents found partner agents overseas. Agents got into Hollywood studios.
And writers paid the agent for those connections. Writers, essentially, needed an agent to open all the closed and locked doors.
Some writers, salespeople all, did the work themselves. They booked a trip to New York, managed to get into the editor’s offices, and got their work looked at.
But those writers were rare.
Then the internet came along. And web pages. And e-mail.
The doors became open. All that secret information that agents got—which editor was buying what, who edits for the biggest publishing house in France, what’s the name of the literary scout for such-n-so studio—could be Googled.
What’s more, if you had a successful book or hell, even a midlist book on a hot topic (say, vampires), then the foreign editors and the Hollywood scouts came looking for you.
On the internet.
Through your e-mail.
I get letters all the time from interested foreign publishers, and from movie people. I just closed an option deal last week with an independent producer who found me through this very website.
And that is not unusual.
It’s now a myth, an old and tired myth, that you need agents to open these doors. In fact, agents will often close the doors by believing that if some young producer is interested in Property A, then the agent can leverage that interest with a studio so that the studio will pay big money for Property A. I’ve had agents promise that kind of thing all the time, and it has never panned out.
But since I stopped using agents on my Hollywood nibbles—guess what? I have Hollywood deals. When I was agented, I only had one option in twenty years.
Now I have options running all the time.
Because of access.
And because I’m making my own decision. And because I do worry my formerly pretty little head about these things.
Most of my colleagues do not realize that the industry has changed, that everything they learned when they were starting out no longer applies. They don’t realize that the business part of their industry has changed dramatically, that the deals they’re signing, the people they’re working with, would fit just as easily into the music industry of the 1990s.
Here’s the flat truth of it, my friends: If you are a midlist writer and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most modern terms, and you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for you, you will not make any more than your advance on that book. And the advance is not enough to live on. You will not be able to reserve e-book rights to you. Those rights will be a percentage of net, which in most contracts is undefined. And you will have to sell world rights so that the publishing industry can adequately exercise those e-book rights, making any money you would receive on foreign rights vanish.
If you have what I’m now beginning to believe is the standard agency rider in your contract, you will also lose a percentage of any auxiliary rights sale to that agent even if you fired that agent in the meantime and someone else negotiated the deal. Plus that agent will be entitled to a percentage of any work you write using that series, those characters, that world, or anything resembling that.
There is a line item in Albini’s article at the end. Someone else made money on that album deal. It was the previous label ($50,000). Change the word “label” to “agent” and you start to see the scope of the problem here.
If you are a New York Times bestselling author, and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most modern terms, and you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for you, lucky you. You have the chance and I mean chance of earning more than your advance. You better be a top-ten New York Times bestseller and you better stay on the list for longer than one week. Because all the things I said above will apply.
The only difference? You’ll get a sizeable six-figure advance, and if you’re smart, you’ll write at least two books per year. Until the opportunities dwindle, and they will.
Do you know how many former New York Times bestsellers I’m friends with? Do you know how many of them can’t get a traditional publishing deal for more than a five-figure advance?
Most of them.
If they’re offered a deal at all.
Folks, all of the things you learned about agents, editors, and book publishers used to be true.
Ten years ago, you needed an agent to open the doors for you in traditional publishing.
Ten years ago, your editor—who loved books (and still loves books)—could go to bat for you within the publishing house and actually win the fight, protecting you, her author.
Ten years ago, traditional publishing—while not a friendly industry (I don’t think there are any)—did not screw its artists the way that the music industry and Hollywood did.
Ten years ago.
Not any more.
Things have changed so rapidly that the contract I signed last September is not a contract I would sign today. Not because of the advance or even because of some of the contract terms. But because it’s a multi-book contract. And honestly, y’all, I want to decide from book to book if I want a traditional publishing company to handle everything.
Sometimes I will. Sometimes I’ll use a novel as a loss leader. Sometimes I will want the traditional publishing house to take all of the risk.
Sometimes.
But not all the time.
And certainly not for multiple books in the same series. Now, if that series isn’t being well handled by my publisher, I want the option to do it myself. If the book is being well handled, I want to ask for a greater advance and better contract terms.
I have clout for the first time in my lovely little midlist career. I plan to use it.
Most of my friends and colleagues will slowly discover that they can no longer make a living as a writer. They’ll wonder what happened. They’ll wake up one day—after their latest multi-book contract is complete—and wonder what the hell happened.
They changed industries. They moved from a hidebound old-fashioned industry to a Hollywood-level shark pit—and they didn’t even realize it happened.
It is happening as quickly, if not more quickly, than Robert Redford described with All the President’s Men. Redford, savvy business man that he is, saw the writing on the wall and decided to help save the kind of movies that he loved.
I am trying to save writers whose work I love. The only way to do that is to get them to realize that they have moved to a hostile and unforgiving world, one that is willing—no, eager—to take advantage of them.
The agents that they once trusted now answer to their agencies instead of to the writer. Those agencies are trying to steal a percentage of the writer’s copyrights.
The editors whom they (rightfully) love have completely lost clout in their own industry, and often can’t keep the verbal promises that they make.
These writers need to learn business, and they need to learn it fast. Because as Dean delineated out in his most recent column, the scammers have moved in, willing to take advantage of the writers who are unwilling to invest in themselves, unwilling to pay flat fees to companies that can do the work for them if they can’t do the work themselves.
I’m sorry to tell you to stop trusting people. I know some of these people are your friends. Sadly, some of these people are my friends. In fact, many of these people are my friends.
And it breaks my heart, it really really does.
But please, go look at that music industry link. Then realize that this is what’s happening in publishing now.
If you want to do all the original work, create the content that everyone else is making a profit on, and get paid less than you would earn at 7/11, then don’t learn any of this.
But if that idea scares you, if the idea that you might never earn more than your advance, and maybe not even all of that, then invest in yourself. Learn to say no.
And stop working on a business model that’s ten years out of date.
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“The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 1999” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Filed under: Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, On Writing · Tags: Agents, All the President's Men, Dean Wesley Smith, Jacob Slichter, publishing, Robert Redford, Steve Albini, the movie industry, the music industry, Vanity Fair, writing
136 Responses to "The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 1999"
Another great post, Dan. I have the Eszterhas book and haven’t read it yet. Looks like I better.
And I find it deeply ironic that I am typing this while I sit in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard with a view of the Kodak Theater….
Exactly, Richard. Thanks.
Thanks, Pat. Yes, I find myself giving advice I would have considered “bad” ten years ago all the time now. But the fact that the industry has changed has given us a lot of opportunities. They do come with some up-front cost.
I’ve been saying that in other blog posts, Anne. I think we have a lot of opportunities now.
I love that, Jerry. Thanks.
A book as a ‘loss-leader’? This is what happens when you treat writing like a business. Of course publishing is changing, particularly in the UK where the bookstore model has collapsed. But self-publishing has NEVER been the way forward, even on ebook – except if you have the skills to market and distribute. Simply throwing up a website and waiting for the customers won’t work. As for getting good deals – this is what an agent is for and a good one is worth his/her 10 per cent. The problem is, of course, convincing someone else that you have talent enough for them to use their own skills to sell your work. After that the problem is in finding one who is good – any who ‘close doors’ are just bad agents.
Of course it is easier to do it yourself. That way you won’t get edited, or need to justify plot or even grammar. Of course you will get ‘Hollywood deals’ – TV and movies eat ideas and if they trawl websites and see a way of picking up plots on the cheap, they will grab them. Better than actually employing an expensive scriptwriter.
Self-publishing brings more bad books than good on to the market. In the vast readership potential of US/Canada you might not notice the results of this, but in the tighter UK/European demographic, it simply means that the finite readers get warier and more selective. In other words, they will take books they see as quality and they see quality through advertising. So you are back to publishers with enough clout to shout loudest – and those are still mainstream publishers.
No matter the medium – ebooks or once-were-trees – the message remains the same.
Write a good book and they will come.
John Walters- That is so cool that you were at a Clarion West! I’ve heard about it when reading some of the older authors (and Kate Wilhelm is one of my favorites right now. If she’s in F&SF it’s an extra treat) and have one of the paperbacks that they put out from the early 80′s. I always imagined it was a place where you got together at night to sit on cracket leather couches, sipping someone’s homemade lemonade and discussing everyones ideas of what makes a great writer great. It would be nice if there was more of that today, and by more of that I mean more of mentors that didn’t charge (I know Clarion West did) but instead had the thought that they wanted to pay forward the Gods of Literacy by helping a new Prophet. (And yes, Dean and Kris’ blogs are very, very helpful in learning about the wild world of prose.)
Gerald M. Weinberg- Thanks for your comments. I totally agree with what you and Kris say about agents, that they are not needed. I think I should have gone deeper into what I said earlier: I think that new writers consider agents because they worry about making it on their own, but I also think that they consider agents because they write alone. Meaning, locking yourself up in your room and typing day after day after day after day can get lonely, and I think sometimes new writers (and maybe some old ones too) think not so much that they are agents but instead that they can be trusted friends who you can talk to. I know that that is not what they are for and no one should think like that, but I think some writers do and I think that is why the bad deals that Kris and Dean talk about will still have new writers signing those contracts.
James A. Owen: Totally cool to be on the same comments page as the creator of Starchild.
First time I read through this, I could hardly breathe. I’ve been working on novels for DECADES and subbing to agents. Second time through, I have a question: with the upwelling of ebooks, how do I know if it’s “good”? Second question: I have myopia when it comes to the final run-through of a novel. Even if I pay someone to edit, can I trust that they are being straight with me and not simply pandering? With flat-fee (and I’ve seen this happen), the editor takes the cash, “reads” the book, says, “Yep. Best-seller for sure.” Then rides off into the sunset, bank account fuller — and the writer proceeds to epublish…and the thing STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN and they crash and burn. Granted, Darwin’s Law. HOWEVER, as a reader, even shelling out 99 cents a crack, I’m gonna get leery of every CHRONICLE, SAGA and SERIES that comes out…hmmm…wandering here. Focus: is there an independent guild or club or group that might HONESTLY & RELIABLY “certify” ebooks in their genre for consumers AND act as a reliable clearing house for a writer’s near-finished work?
Great article, Kris. I find the change in the publishing world both freeing and more demanding of authors – we can more validly (and more profitably) publish ourselves, but we have to be become savvy business owners at the same time, as you say.
[...] Rusch has written an excellent article comparing these new moves to predatory practices in the music industry. [...]
Kris, I hope I got all the serial numbers filed off to your satisfaction.
Last month I gave a strong selling new author’s story a one-star review on Amazon because the product sold for my Kindle was overpriced at $0.99 for a single short story, even though I liked the story.
As soon as I can bear to finish a recently published offering by the same author, a “re-imagining” of one of my favorite series I’m going to give it a another one-star review, partly because it’s overpriced at $11.99, but mostly because the book is a particularly turgid episode of “L.A. Law” set on the stellar frontiers instead of any kind of respectful new perspective on a science fiction great.
The good news is that the ebook price of this stinking pile of text dropped considerably in the last month. The bad news is that I have to finish the damned thing before I can honestly eviscerate it in a review. He might deliver a worthwhile payoff. I might win the powerball and be able to afford to have 200 tons of horse manure delivered to his front door to properly compensate the new author in kind for his take on the greater author. Smart money is on the fertilizer provisioning.
But my review on Amazon.com is going to cost him money, and that is another aspect of the business that needs to be kept in mind. Very possibly the failure of this book and the degree it is pissing off fans of the long past author would have been swept under the table twelve years ago. Now the execrable new offering will drag down his review numbers forever. Along with the flattening of the the publishing pyramid, there is also a flattening of the feedback pyramid.
Wow. Eye opening and riveting! I can’t help but to feel slightly good about my decision to self-publish with Createspace and Smashwords. Thanks for this informative article. Now, I just need to find something about self advertising. ; )
Just read that some agents are developing publishing arms which only reinforces your argument – why shouldn’t writers then go straight to market? Great post, thanks. Here’s the link http://www.thebookseller.com/news/more-agents-explore-publishing-models.html
Fascinating. (I came here through a link at LJ from pjthompson.) The Trust Me post where you talked about people having to change their thinking really caught my attention.
Thank you for taking the time to write these posts (I’m going to have to keep reading!) — and thank you for continuing to write your fiction, which I have also enjoyed.
I have no idea who you are, Orm, because of course, you wouldn’t put your name down or sign your e-mail. I know you’re not an agent, because agents no longer charge 10% and haven’t for decades. So I’m assuming you’re just a writer buried in the myths.
Here you go, buddy. I never said you should put up a crap-ass product. And I take offense that you think my multi-bestselling award-winning career of several decades would suffer because I decide to self-publish my work. I haven’t gotten worse as a writer because I do things myself. I hire editors and copy editors, professional book designers, and since I owned a publishing company–one of the largest in science fiction twenty years ago–I know how to produce books. And I’m teaching others how to do the marketing. It’s not hard.
Agents have embezzled from me, screwed up excellent Hollywood deals, and have never ever gotten me a good book deal in the US. Now, I will say that one foreign agent did a good job for me in France–and then my agent at the time decided to move away from that agency, and partnered with a terrible agency that nearly screwed up my succeeding deals. I’m not alone in this. Just last night, I was talking with six long-time professional writers who are self-publishing their work and who had story after story after story about agent screw-ups and how when they left their various partner agents (like Hollywood agents) they actually got real deals.
And I don’t know what you call “cheap,” when the last deal I did was for mid-six figures. It came from an internet contact. Is that cheap?
We agree about only one thing: Write a good book and they will come. Wait! You’re not talking about readers. You’re talking about mainstream publishers. So we don’t agree. Write a good book, and readers will find you. If you write a bad book, they’ll ignore you. Just like they do when some publisher mistakenly publishes a book that’s not up to snuff–which mainstream publishers do quite often.
Guy, writers never know if their work is good. If you don’t believe in your story, but you’re done with it, put it up under a pen name, and charge a few bucks for it. Over time, readers will let you know. They sample new books now on their Kindle, and if you have a lot of samples downloaded, but no purchases, then the work probably isn’t up to snuff. Sampling is a godsend, and will put control in the readers’ hands. Readers really do know if a book is good or not–and tell their friends if they like what they have read.
Patrick, the book offended you. I get it.
But you’re putting a lot of power in those reviews. They rarely cost writers money. In fact, if you look at bestsellers, you’ll see a pretty equal ratio of “I loved this” to “this sucked to high heaven.” What matters is word of mouth. And yes, your review of that writer’s work is word of mouth. But it’s less effective word of mouth than your best friend telling you that he loved that very same book. You’ll still buy it.
I do agree about the flattening of the feedback pyramid. As I said below, the readers are coming into control, and if all the reviews of this book are terrible, no one will buy it. But I know which book you’re referring to (I asked him to take the author’s name out; hence the serial numbers comment) and a lot of people like it. So, like anything else written by a good writer, some people will love it and others will hate it. And that’s a good thing.
As for pricing, 99 cents is fair for a short story, I think. Whether or not you’re happy about spending that 99 cents is another matter, but 99 cents is a good short story price imho.
Jay, scroll back through this blog, and you’ll find a piece on promotion. Also, my husband Dean Wesley Smith is doing a series called Think Like a Publisher. I am–again–on a dicey internet connection so am not going to put the links up. You can find them though. Mine is here, and Dean’s is at http://www.deanwesleysmith.com
Thanks, Pen. Will check that out.
Thanks, Catherine. Glad it’s all helping.
And thanks to all of you who posted so far. This dang internet connection ate two of my posts, so I’m going to just do a blanket thanks at the moment.
[...] Source [...]
@ Patrick Lasswell:
You may not know this, but Amazon has a reporting system for their sellers to use when people put up reviews that aren’t actually reviews. Meaning, if you put up a one-star review because the work was shoddy, the characters were inconsistent, and so on, that’s fine — but if you say “I’m giving this a one star because it’s overpriced” the seller can report you. Your ‘review’ (complaint) may then go away. I don’t know whether Amazon will stop posting your reviews after several of these reports, but I strongly recommend that you not test this. (Among other things, everyone can see the price and can judge for themselves whether it’s too high, so you aren’t doing anyone a service by complaining for that reason.)
Folks, just got a second comment from the anonymous Orm which I have decided not to post. The only reason I mention that here is for the Great Orm, who is so confident in his/her/its opinions that he/she/it put a fake e-mail address on his/her/its post as well. I tried to privately notify him/her/it that I would no longer post his/her/its anonymous comments: If he/she/it wants to disagree with me as rudely as he/she/it is, he/she/it needs to sign his/her/its name. I will post his/her/its comment then.
That goes for most anonymous comments. If you want to make an anonymous comment, fine. I’ll probably put up the first one. But if you want to argue with me, then you need standing, and to have that, you must sign your name, have a valid e-mail address, and a link to your website (if you have one).
Now back to our regularly scheduled comments.
It’s not enough to generate incredible blogs, but I have to keep coming back day after day (sometimes several times in a day) to follow the debates, discussions, and wonderful tidbits I find scattered through your review posts as well! Nicely done, Kris.
Having been on the stale end of an agent-author relationship going bad, I can look back now and see how that helped me go from a working-career writer with a solid yearly income to a person who could not run away from the field fast enough for a few years. Not that I don’t share in plenty of the blame… cause I do. But mostly because I did not heed advice to run (don’t walk!) fast enough away form an agent who was turning into a book doctor/publisher/whateverthehell.
The ability to to take control of my own writing is a breathe of fresh air.
And for those who claim that more bad writing will be published, sure, that may be true. Almost certainly is true. But more GOOD writing will be published as well with self-publishing. We will find it the same way we’ve always found good fiction in the bookstores, we’ll sample and read and take recommendations and choose for ourselves what we want to read. EXACTLY the way other readers out there will. I discovered five or six bad writers on Amazon last night. I also found two new ones I liked, and have just become a persistent buyer of their works. (If you are buying blind on Amazon, and not checking a Sample first, you deserve what you get, just like buying blind at a brick-and-mortar bookstore.)
As for the ridiculous assumption that our work will get WORSE for not going through legacy publishing… people who say that aren’t reading broadly enough in their genre. There has always been bad fiction out there. New York does not have a magic wand to make us all better. I’ll stack my work against the market any time. Anyone not willing to do that (Indie -or- Legacy published) should stick to selling life insurance anyway.
Great post, Loren. Spot-on. Thanks.
Patrick, an other comment regarding the .99 price point :
Amazon doesn’t allow self-publishers to set a price under that .99 $, hence if a self-publisher wants to put his book on Amazon, he needs to price it at .99 or more.
Meanwhile, in some cases (don’t know which author/story you’re talking about), the book’s/story length is indicated, and unless it’s not consistent with the story’s effective length, you were forewarned before buying. Of course, if there were wildly incorrect indications, I suggest you to ask for a refund, and maybe report the story to Amazon for incorrect description.
Meanwhile, where I can, I encourage publishers (self or not) to put lingth indications, either as page count, or better, as word count…
I’ve just arrived at this indie writing business, it’s an exciting time. With change everywhere I’ll have no chance to become complacent.
I found your comment about avoiding multi-book deals illuminative. What we thought were landmarks are being revealed by seasonal rains as chalk drawings. New but temporary paths are needed. Thank you for the blazing.
Thanks, SF Reader. Good clarification.
Allan, love that chalk drawing on the sidewalk analogy. Exactly! And you’re welcome. I hope you find lots of interesting material on the site.
I meant to post this reply yesterday so forgive me if I’m reiterating what a lot of people have already said. Although I entirely agree with you, Kris, I can see a few problems. The great thing about e-books is that everybody can publish their own book. And the bad thing about e-books? Everybody can publish their own books!
Publishers and agents had a variety of functions which have been slowly eroded by technological advances. Now they really only have one function: they act as a filtering mechanism. If I go into a shop to buy a book, I at least know the book I buy has been assessed by various people in the publishing industry who then felt it was worth committing time and money to publishing it. The same can’t be said for your standard kindle book. There’s no real quality control. And this isn’t helped by writers banding together to give each other positive reviews on Amazon.
I live in Ireland, and e-books have yet to become as pervasive as they are in the States. And those people I know who do read e-books tend to buy authors whose reputations were made long before the current boom in e-books – e.g. Sprague de Camp, Agatha Christie, Stephen King.
That’s a lovely myth, Aonghus, but the real truth of the matter is that readers have always decided what they want to read. Look at Loren’s post below. Sampling allows any smart reader to decide if a book is for them. Books that are awful won’t sell. It’s that simple. And they’ll simply linger on the sites, unread. Books that will sell, and sell well, with have readers behind them, spreading word of mouth. Yes, there will always be crappy books. There are now. Agents & editors are just readers like the rest of us, theoretically readers with great skill, but readers all the same. And they make a lot of mistakes. Right now, they’re turning down books by authors that readers want to read because the economics of publishing make it safer to buy a complete unknown, throw that book into the mix, and see how it will sell, instead of going with someone who has a built-in sales number. The publishers believe the new writer might do better. This is why writers from Connie Brockway to Joe Konrath initially put up their own books, because the publisher didn’t want to grow their audience, and wanted to try to hit one out of the park with a new (cheaper) writer instead.
So sampling comes in, and it’s easier on an e-reader than in a bookstore. You can sample dozens of books in an afternoon and maybe buy one or none at all, with no financial cost to you, the reader. And that’s a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong, Kris. I think e-books are the future. I’m really positing what I see as a big problem (the fact that the reader is inundated with unfiltered content) and wondering what the solution might be. I think there will be a solution in the long run. I just have no idea what it might be. And I’m talking from the perspective of an aspiring e-book self-publisher. I’ve spent the last few days checking out kindle books on the net, reading reviews and so on. This was my over-riding impression. Too much stuff. No quality control. Reviews that couldn’t be trusted.
Sure I could sample maybe a hundred e-books until I found one I really liked. Or I could walk into my local bookstore (which has an entire wall dedicated to fantasy novels), knowing at least that somebody spent a few bucks trying to publish these books and able to read a review on the backcover by somebody I know and respect – a course of action which, let’s face it, would take considerably less time and would also be more reliable.
Readers, in general, don’t look for “good books” to read. They either look for “good stories” or “stories I’ll like”. Sure there are some that are looking to be “wow’ed” by the authors use of English, but most are just looking to be entertained.
I’ll trot out a Fanfiction example.. Last night I stayed up WAY too late to finish up a wonderful Fanfiction. Each chapter had poor grammar, passive voice, typos, and just about every mistake you can imagine, but I liked it. It was a fun story. And I am not the only one. Here’s the thing, the story had over 12,000 positive reviews, and had a read count well over 3 million. Bad writing does not mean a bad story.
If the internet has shown us anything, it’s that people will hunt through the slush to find what they want. This “wailing and gnashing of teeth” is really getting annoying. Personally I love this new world, I get new fun stuff to read for a reasonable price. YAY ME!
On The Actual Content of the Article…
TLC had to declare bankruptcy.
Titanic never turned a profit.
The LoTR trilogy lost money.
Laypeople hear about these things and wonder how on earth they could be true. The problem is quite simply Parasites. Agents are parasites. Media corporations are soulless parasites. Is it any wonder that when the host finds freedom they scramble to find a new blood supply?
More on Sampling.
I think that, eventually, the market will respond to the buyers (not the buyers to the market) to deliver a better method of channeling fiction that you would like to your ereader. Amazon’s “If you like this…” program is a step in that direction. Maybe the system will spawn professional readers that will create listmania reading lists for us… whatever. I think it will simply evolve over time.
Right now, some of that is out there, but it is wide open and I’ve seen people game the system pretty well. It can help push that first sale, and it worked on me once or twice and I ended up buying something that didn’t measure up. So that writer made their $2.10 from me. Congrats. But I will never, ever, trust them again. If they had let me find this or a later work on my own, I’d be more likely to give them a second try some day. I LOVE discovering a new author with a body of work jsut waiting for me to collect and devour. But not now.
It’s a new frontier, sure. That’s what sea changes uncover. I choose to be excited about the new possibilities. Much, muchbetter than being scared of them.
Thank you for this post, Ms Rusch. I have finished a new novel and am wondering which way to jump with it – self-publish or give it to an agent. My present agent is retiring, which means I would need to find another.
I already have seven titles out there as ebooks, and I’m much inclined now, after your advice, to self-publish the new one too. My only reason for considering a new agent is the need for promotion (at which I am not very proficient), but your response to Aonghus Fallon is spot on: books have always succeeded on merit, and by word-of-mouth, and good books have usually failed because publishers have not done their job properly.
Wow what a set of comments! Kris, even though you answered everybody, I still want to add a few things. First folks, please, please, listen to Kris. Read the FREE sample at Amazon. The button’s on the right on Amazon under the Add to Wishlist button where it says Try it Free. Did I mention it’s FREE? My experience says that it’s typically about 11% of the completed work. Not a bad sample. If you read 11% of a book and don’t know whether you like it, I can’t help. See the POD People take at http://podpeep.blogspot.com/2011/05/sunday-picture.html. Because of that my wife put what is usually the front matter, like the dedication etc., at the back of the ebook. Gives you more sample to judge the work by. We also posted both the length in words and in pages. If you didn’t make a dead tree version, format the book as a trade paperback (6X9 inches with appropriate margins) and count the pages. My wife’s book is 180,000 words or 450 pages. I wanted her to say the equivalent length of Dune, but she didn’t want to mislead anyone with spurious comparisons for something that was just being used as a well known length yardstick.
Will readers find a good book? I hope so, but you do have to do some marketing. I’m trying to get my wife’s book reviewed by some internet reviewers now. What sells now amidst the almost million books on the Kindle store? My best guess is currently: price, size of inventory, reputation, cover image, description, tags/key words, and sample, listed in order of importance for buying decisions. Personally I don’t like the ordering of that list, but no one I know makes money arguing with their customers. I think if customers insist on shopping almost exclusively for books under $3, they’ll get books sized to that price and short stories for $.99. It’s true that after people decide that you’re a good writer, they’ll buy more expensive books from you, that’s where size of inventory and reputation enter into the equation. Realize that under $2.99 the writer cuts their percentage in half, so they make about $2 on a $2.99 book and about $.34 on a $.99 short story. That’s the way Amazon set it’s pricing.
As to quality of self-pubbed books, I’ve certainly seen a lot of worthless dreck from the big 6, including poor spelling, ludicrous plots, paper-thin characters, and situations that just don’t even make sense! Were they really editing those? How many new writers have had an vile agent insist on changing the book before even showing it to the publisher? Ever read a book written by committee?
Thanks again Kris, not just for posting, but for answering those of us in the comments, and especially for caring about the industry and not just your own career. Please keep up the good fight! Don’t give up on us out here.
And that’s where we disagree, Aonghus. I would find both experiences equally reliable. And I used to be an editor. Maybe I’m used to regarding all fiction as slush, regardless of whether it’s published or not.
I did an entire post on promotion, Richard, just a few weeks back. Click on the Publishing Articles Tab and you’ll be able to find it. (I’m only in the hotel room for a few minutes before going onto a meeting, so I don’t have time to link for you.)
Thanks, Loren. Great post.
You’re welcome, Frank. I appreciate the kind words.
Right now, everything is changing, and I’m sure some of these systems will settle out. But we all need to find out what works in the new world and share it with each other. Other, more established writers helped me in the past. Most of these writers are gone now, so I pay forward. I figure the least I can do is help writers as best I can.
Thanks for this, Kris. I should admit my concerns are motivated largely by self-interest – ie. if I self-publish on Amazon (or rather when) what can I do to stand out from the rest of the pack? If my book was published via conventional means, I’d know I got the endorsement of an agent, then a publisher and that this would reassure readers, especially if I got reviewed as well.
On the basis of what you’re saying, seems like all I have to do is publish a really good book!
And write more books, so your readers have something else to read when they’re through with the first one.
Does what your saying apply if you’re a picture book
writer? I’m wondering since they don’t always look
so great as e-books and traditionally the editor
finds the illustrator and decides the look of the book.
If I had to pay an illustrator, too, that could get
really pricey. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
[...] served by self-publishing than traditional publishing. Her most recent salvo on this front was Writing Like It’s 1999, in which she suggests that the publishing business is becoming more like the music business, in [...]
Kris, thanks for all the amazing info. Had to click on the donate button just because of how profoundly you’re affecting my writing decisions these days. Please keep it up!
Great question, Kiki. I would say so, but not with a lot of authority. A former student of mine–a wonderful writer–is having great success with her picture books on Nook (not on Kindle) so I think it’s possible. I’m not sure how she goes about all of it however. Maybe others here know….?
Thanks for the donation, Sariah. I’m glad the information is helping you!
[...] article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was making it’s way around the writing blogosphere last week: (h/t Ed Driscoll) Most of my colleagues do not realize that the industry has changed, that [...]
I find it very frustrating that the people who said exactly these same things 12-18-24-36 months ago were pariahs, wackies, quixotic…
Oh, that hasn’t changed. Ron. You should see the private e-mail I’ve gotten, not to mention the second post from that anonymous character that I decided not to put up. I’m getting called all kinds of names. So it’s continuing. Ignore it. Times are changing. And it takes all of us a while to realize that the change is happening.
[...] Kristine Kathryn Rusch (she’s the one who exposed the royalty statement debacle that recently rocked the writing world) – The Business Rusch: Writing Like It’s 1999 [...]