Kristine Kathryn Rusch » Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, On Writing » The Business Rusch: You Are Not Alone
The Business Rusch: You Are Not Alone
The Business Rusch: You Are Not Alone
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Maybe the stars have aligned poorly. Maybe the various impending international debt crises have us on edge. Or maybe it’s this season’s abundant natural disasters. Or maybe it’s as simple as this: I’ve been blogging so people are writing to me.
But what I’ve seen this past month from established writers is an abundance of despair. I got a sad phone call from a friend, had a lot of sit-down conversations with writers who were ready to give up their dreams, and a nine-page single-spaced e-mail from a hell of a writer of dozens of published books, wondering whether or not to quit altogether.
Books that would have sold five years ago don’t sell now. Series that are growing are getting bounced from their publishers for not growing enough. Agents, unable to sell product, are telling their mystery clients to write romance novels and their romance clients to write thrillers. Other agents are starting backlist e-pub companies and robbing their clients blind. Still other agents are blaming the writers for the fact that nothing is selling well and encouraging them to sign terrible book contracts.
Bookstores don’t carry paper books any longer. New York Times bestsellers can’t find their backlists in stores. American authors with bestselling novels overseas are being told that foreign countries never pay the promised royalties, only advances.
Traditionally published bestselling writers look at their royalty statements, see that their e-books sell only 30 or 100 or 200 copies in six months, and wonder how the hell upstart self-published writers whose books have ugly covers and whose interiors need copy editing manage to sell tens of thousands of e-books each month.
Editors who once had to tiptoe around their biggest authors are telling those writers to change what they write because their sales have decreased, and clearly, their writing has gotten worse over the years. Writers whose rabid fan base numbers 10 or 20 or 50K get told that their books no longer sell to that fan base even though the writer is constantly getting e-mails from that base and is signing brand new books for that base.
Publisher sales figures are impossible to get. An estimated laydown of 50,000 becomes an estimated 17,000 one month later. On the royalty statements issued six months after that, that laydown then becomes 5,000 books with another 5,000 in the reserve against returns. But, that same book, tracked by Bookscan (which only covers 50%-70% of the book market [and maybe less now]), shows sales, sales (not books shipped), of 30,000.
But even if Bookscan’s numbers are true, the book’s editor says, thirty thousand is pretty insignificant for that genre or for that particular series or for that particular writer. The writer will have to take a smaller advance and accept worse contract terms. Or the writer doesn’t get offered another contract period.
And of course, of course, it’s the writer’s fault. The writer misread the numbers, wrote down the wrong amount in the initial phone call with the editor on the laydown. Oh, it wasn’t a phone call, but an e-mail? My bad, the editor says. It was a typo. I didn’t mean 50,000. I meant 5,000.
So, the writer says, if you only printed 5,000 and I sold 5,000 and the book is still in print and still being ordered, then my book is doing well, right?
Wrong. We overpaid your advance, the editor says. We never ever should have paid that much money on a book that would only sell 5,000 copies.
Sound familiar? It should to many of you. I get letter after letter delineating problems like this all the time. If I hadn’t gone through something similar five years ago, I would be thinking, “What the hell?” But I’m not thinking that because I know how it feels.
One writer said that on her bad days, she wonders if she needs a tinfoil hat to confirm her craziness. Another wrote on a blog that the despair from all of the changing facts made her contemplate suicide. Still a third took all of the blame herself, and started writing vampire romances even though she hates them, thinking that her award-winning, bestselling romantic suspense novels had somehow gone horribly downhill and she hadn’t realized it.
What I write back each and every time or find myself saying in conversation (often to a weeping writer) is this:
It’s not you. You’re fine. Your writing is as good as ever. The business is changing and you’re caught in the crossfire. It’s not personal, even though it feels personal. You are caught in the middle of a nightmare. The rules are changing, and no one knows where any of this is headed. Talk to other writers. You’ll see. It’s happening to all of us.
Believe it or not, knowing that it’s not personal helps. It gives the writer a chance to breathe, to look around and see that the changes in the industry are happening, and they’re hurting all of us.
You don’t believe me about the changes, about the ways that publishers are shifting the world beneath our feet as we try to walk forward? Then read this blog by agent Kristin Nelson about Random House’s most recent royalty statements. Random House has decided unilaterally to pay its authors 25% of net on e-books even if the author’s contract calls for something else, like 50% of gross. After you read her post, read what the Passive Guy, an attorney who no longer practices, has to say about this behavior.
Or what he writes about the rights grab that Harlequin is making. Read my post about the industry changes, “Writing Like It’s 1999,” or my post from two weeks ago about Barnes & Noble, which has since been confirmed by B&N employees and some other links you’ll find in the comments section.
What’s worse is that the people we once thought were our advocates—our agents and our editors—can’t help us any more. Both agents and editors are suffering in their jobs, but in different ways. Agents—who are savvy about business—have realized that they can no longer make money in traditional ways, so many of them are looking for other ways to make money. And often, those ways hurt the writer. See what agent Peter Cox says about this, about the way he’s fighting to keep some semblance of decency in his profession.
Editors have another problem. They’re overworked since so many of their colleagues have been laid off. Editors love books, and love finding new writers, and that crazy-making stuff I listed above—the thing with the shifting numbers?—it happens in a publishing house too. The editor is often the last to know how well one of her books is doing.
She’s told by the sales department that the laydown will be 50K, then discovers that only 17K was shipped. She goes to make a new deal with the author only to be told by the publisher that in-house numbers show that the book sold less than 10K. She checks, finds out that the book went back to print for a second time, which means that the 17K should have sold. When she asks about it, the publisher ignores the protest, saying, Make your offer based on the 10K, and if the writer doesn’t like the pay cut, then let her go.
Evidence to the contrary—Bookscan numbers, previous letters, second-and-third printing marks inside the books themselves—don’t matter. The editor must do her publisher’s bidding or lose her job. And eventually that wears the editor down. Either she doesn’t care any more or she gets angry at the writers (and their agents) who are the only people she can safely get angry at and still have a job.
She’s feeling pinched, because if none of her authors sell well, then her job is on the line. And the books might be selling well, but she doesn’t know it any more than the writers do.
But the editor can talk to her colleagues and realize that they’re going through the same tough times. The agents see this happening to client after client and know it has nothing to do with the agenting, so it must be the writers themselves.
But the writers—oh, the writers—they work alone. And often they have no one to talk to. Many writers don’t tell their writing colleagues because these writers don’t want to be perceived as failures. When the writers tell their fans that the next book in a series won’t appear, the fans blame the writer.
The writer is often all by herself, struggling to make one-tenth of the income she made just five years before, confused as to why her once-popular books aren’t selling to publishers despite evidence that the fans still want the books and the books are selling. Her agent is telling her to write in a new genre. Her editor won’t take her calls.
And she can’t escape to her writing, to those stories she always made up to give herself joy or comfort, because her writing is the problem.
Is it any wonder so many writers use the word “despair” these days when discussing their writing life? Is it unusual for so many writers to walk away from a decades-long career and return to teaching or bartending?
I wonder just how many writing casualties there have been in the last decade, writers who silently walked away from their computers. Writers who’ve decided to give up writing for a salaried career. Writers who no longer tell people that once upon a time they published five novels. Writers who can’t even read any more because they don’t want to think about how they failed at the very same thing.
I don’t know about you, but I often look through my bookshelves, searching for some favorite writers, trying to see if they have a new book out, and I don’t see anything since 2003 or so, nothing new, no hint of anything new, no write-up in the “Where Are They Now?” section of RT Book Reviews, no website, no blog, no Facebook page. No obituary. No nothing. Ten years ago, they were writing book after book. Now they don’t seem to be writing anything.
I could have been one of those casualties. I almost was.
Three things saved me. First and foremost, my very patient husband who kept asking me this: If you’re not going to write, what do you want to do? He promised to move if I needed to go to school, to help fund my education or new-business startup, whatever I wanted to do, knowing full well that the word “want” was the key. I didn’t “want” to do anything else. I wanted to write.
Second, I don’t just write in one genre or one length. I’ve always been a writer first. I write nonfiction, short fiction, mystery, romance, fantasy and science fiction. I have written advertising copy and screenplays. I have ghost-written novels and ghost-written business documents. If my novel career died—and for a few years there, it looked dead—then I could fall back on other types of writing.
Finally, I’m good at business. I did the math and realized that no matter what else I did—teaching, editing—I would never earn as much money as I did from short fiction or nonfiction sales. It helped that the local radio station was looking for a news director at the time, a job I was eminently qualified for (probably overqualified for, considering all my radio credentials). That job paid double my last radio job. But I would have been working 60 hours per week, and making less than I did if I just wrote nonfiction and short stories. I didn’t have to sell another novel. I could make a living wage in other ways.
I was lucky. My crisis came early in this publishing shift, and I had a way out of it that included writing. In rapid succession, I fired two different agents and learned just how much they got in the way of selling subsidiary rights. I started getting Hollywood deals. I started selling foreign rights again. I hired another agent, an ethical one, and learned through him that the problems I was having were happening across the board.
I sold nonfiction. I sold short stories. And I persevered. And about the time everything started collapsing for other writers, I was able to rebuild my novel-writing career. In addition to the under-contract novels with traditional houses, I had some other good fortune. My own personal downturn left me with three growing series that no publishing company wanted, so I was able to experiment with indie publishing. Venturing into indie publishing was easier for me and Dean than it was for others; we’d already owned a publishing company back in the dark ages before all the technological advances, so we weren’t afraid of giving these new opportunities a try.
Within three months, we learned through publishing novellas related to just one of my series that the “fact” that “no one” made money in electronic publishing was not a fact at all, but a lie, caused by ineptitude and numbers manipulation. (See Kristin Nelson’s blog or this post of mine.)
Now I have more work—both indie and traditional—than I can possibly do this year. But only because I survived the despair. As I tell my students, it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked to the ground. Nor does it matter how long you remain there. What matters is whether or not you get up.
So…
I know a lot of you are feeling this despair, and I know you need help getting back on your feet. I’m not a counselor, career or otherwise, but I do know a few things because I’ve been there.
Think about these things:
1. Realize that what you’re going through is not personal. Even if your agent told you that you aren’t the writer you once were. Even if your traditional publishing editor says no one wants to read your work. Those things are not true. They’re excuses to cover up something that’s going on in the agent’s office or in the publishing house.
What is happening to you is happening to all traditionally published writers right now, from New York Times bestsellers to writers who’ve sold only one novel. The flux in the industry has had a huge impact on your career because the flux has had a huge impact on the traditional publishing industry.
What you’re going through feels personal because you can cite examples of things that have happened that are unique to you. You have a different career than I do. You might publish in a different genre or you might have been in the business longer.
But realize that all of us have seen our traditional sales decline. All of us have been told that you can’t make money off your e-rights. All of us have been told that the reason our books aren’t selling to expectation is because of us and not because of the changes in the industry.
Bullshit. Walk into a Barnes & Noble like I did earlier this month, and then tell me why midlist book sales are down. Look at the rise of e-readers and ask why your agent—who can’t sell your new novel to a traditional publishing house—is so eager to reissue your backlist electronically.
Realize that it’s not personal, no matter what your agent and your editor tell you. Then realize that this change is having a financial impact on you, and if you want to continue to make a living as a writer, you need to understand the changes.
2. Feel sad. It’s okay to be down. The industry we learned as young writers doesn’t exist any more. It’s a different industry. Learning how to survive in a different environment is hard. Recognize that. And it’s okay to feel sad about the changes.
3. Learn the new world of publishing. As I said in “Plan For the Future,” it will take time to understand what’s going on. Take the time to learn it.
It will also take time for the flux to settle down. I don’t know what kind of publishing industry we’ll have in 2016. No one does. We don’t know which traditional publishing companies will thrive and which will fail. We don’t know what kind of e-reader we’ll be using then, but we know that we will use one. We don’t know what kind of work people who once called themselves agents will be doing. We don’t know—and we won’t know for a while.
It’s hard to exist in continual transition, but that’s what our industry is going through. The writers who will survive will surf the change, constantly watching the waves, and trying to figure out what works. Will those writers crash and burn? Sure. Surfers do every day. But these surfing writers will also be the ones in the position to catch the right wave and ride it all the way into to shore. Be one of those writers. Don’t get stuck pining for the past. Exist in the present and scout the horizon for hints of the future. You can do this. You can survive it.
4. Have a back-up plan. Traditional publishing was once the only game in town. It is no longer. We’re still used to thinking that it is. So when folks in traditional publishing tell you that you can no longer be a writer, you tend to believe them. So indulge your fears. Believe those folks for a minute and ask—like I did—what else you can do.
Then do the math. Can you make more money doing that other thing? Do you want to do that other thing? Do you need a vacation from writing? Do you need to try something else for a while?
If you do need to try something else, then go for it. But remember: only one thing will destroy your writing career, and that one thing is simple. If you quit writing, then your career is over. Are you willing to destroy your career all by yourself by giving up or are you willing to fight for that career?
If you’re willing to fight, then ask yourself a series of questions: can I write in more than one genre? Can I write under more than one name? Can I write short stories or nonfiction or novels? Can I learn indie publishing? Am I willing to invest in my own writing by paying flat fees for covers and editing, and then uploading the books myself?
You took a chance when you became a writer in the first place. Now the industry you’re in has changed, and the times call on you to take another chance. Your fans want you to write another book or finish that series. Your fans don’t care if you get published by Bantam or by your own press, so long as your fans can find the book.
So believe in your readers. Trust them. They like your work. They want to read it.
The new world of publishing has given you the opportunity to get your work back in print. Take that opportunity. It will benefit you.
5. Have fun. Do whatever it takes to make writing fun again. Maybe it’s as simple as writing that book of your heart, as the romance authors call it, that book you’ve always wanted to write but your agent/editor told you there was no market for.
Or maybe you should write a book just for you. Promise yourself that you’re not going to show that book to anyone. Just use it to get your groove back. Play. Experiment. Become the joyful writer you were before you had an agent or a book contract or a published novel, before you had a reputation that needed guarding or fans who had expectations.
Have fun.
We all got into writing because we love it. We would write on our days off. We would write in our downtime. We would write when our friends went on a picnic or to the movies or to a football game. We would write because we wanted to write.
The key to surviving in this business, the key to turning the despair around, is to find a way to have fun again.
Me, I’m enjoying the hell out of the fact that I can write anything I want. If a traditional publisher doesn’t want it, then I can publish it myself. If I don’t want to license it to a traditional publisher, I don’t have to. If I want to write it because I want to write it, then I do.
For years, editors and agents and well-meaning friends crowded into my office, telling me that this story wouldn’t sell or that I needed to write that kind of novel “to make my name.” Now, the new world of publishing has enabled me to silence those voices. The only voice in my office is mine—and, um, that of the occasional cat who wants cuddles or dinner.
And that’s how it should be.
We have opportunities here. It’s hard to see them when you’ve been pushed and shoved against a wall, when you’re crowded into a corner, and people are telling you lies to further their own interests. Shut down the voices. Remember who you are and what you want.
Then pull yourself up a little and look around. Take a few steps forward. Therapists say that the best cure for that feeling of helplessness, that feeling of despair, is to take action.
The changes in publishing have made taking action in your career easier. You don’t have to go through an agent or an editor. You can do it yourself if you want. And if you want to remain only in traditional publishing, go back and read my blogs about surviving the transition. Realize that the industry is going through massive change, and don’t take any of it personally.
In the last ten years, almost every working writer has felt that despair that so many of you contacted me about this month. The despair is understandable. It’s survivable as long as you remember that it’s coming at you from the outside.
Your writing is as good as ever. The industry is what has changed. If you don’t believe anything else I’ve told you, believe that.
It’s not personal, even though it feels personal. The rules are changing, and no one knows where any of this is headed. Talk to other writers. You’ll see. It’s happening to all of us.
“The Business Rusch: You Are Not Alone” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Filed under: Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, On Writing · Tags: Barnes & Noble, Bookscan, Harlequin, Kristin Nelson, Peter Cox, Random House, The Passive Voice
129 Responses to "The Business Rusch: You Are Not Alone"
Outstanding,Kris. And dead on.
Wow, thank you so much for this! I’ve been going through this without really knowing what it was, and thought I was alone. I’ve always been so enthused about writing, have been published by indie press, have an open invitation to submit all my work to a top Hollywood movie agent who only accepts projects by referral, have short stories that are being considered for a joint project between my indie publisher and the Executive Producer for THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies, and yet I haven’t been able to interest a literary agent in my work. I also continuously see literary agents reprimanding writers online as though the writers are complete morons, I’ve seen sales figures posted online by New York Times best-selling authors that seem so ridiculously low, I don’t know how the authors even pay rent. Everything has seemed so off-kilter in the publishing industry for some time now, I kind of lost my mojo. I’m on the third rewrite of a science fiction novel that I know is my best writing to date, and yet I keep abandoning it, afraid I’m not going to be able to write it to a high enough standard. I continue to buy a lot of books, but often have difficulty reading them because, as you said, they just remind me of my failure to succeed. A few months ago, I finally tried self-publishing three novels and three short stories for 99 cents each on Amazon Kindle. My sales figures have been increasing on a regular basis, doubling within two months time and on par with numbers I’ve read are good for the first few months, and I finally feel a freedom to write the types of books I want to write. Some days since self-publishing, I actually see a glimmer of a long-lost friend off in the distance: my mojo, my enthusiasm for writing. Thanks so much for this brutally honest blog post, Kristine! I’m sure you’ll help a lot of writers. This has certainly helped me.
Excellent comments! Long ago I read William Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screen Trade” in which he said of the film industry, “Nobody knows anything.” Meaning that nobody really knew which movie would be a success and which would fail, or why. I took those words to heart, and I think they are as true today in the publishing industry as they ever were in Hollywood. The key is to ignore all that so-called wisdom and do what you love to the best of your ability.
(Of course, now I’m repeating what you said above.) Thanks for the insight.
I have been on the floor (literally last November, trying to get the razor blade out of my safety razor because I’d not placed a new book for 3 years, despite being an award-winning author, and thought I had lost all my talent). I blamed myself, obviously, though in truth my agent had recently died, and a reshuffle at my publisher had shunted my editor out of the door just as my seven-book series for them was coming to an end, so there may have been other forces at work.
Kris is right. Taking action saved me. During all-night sessions on the net when I was too depressed to sleep, I discovered Kindle and amazon’s kdp platform, and taught myself to turn a manuscript into an e-book with the help of the forum. I decided I would self-publish my reverted rights books as e-books (and my new manuscripts, if necessary!) and have just started a joint blog
http://www.kindleauthors.co.uk
with a few other authors suffering the same kind of thing. Do visit us and find out how we’re getting on!
The main thing is I am having FUN again, and achieving even tiny sales all on my own feels good. Also, that fun has recently translated into a four-book deal for a new series with a lovely new publisher. So do not despair, anybody who is still down on the floor suffering. The important thing, as ever, is to keep writing. You can only fail if you give up.
I’m afraid that the market is being glutted with garbage as well as good books. I’m afraid to put some of my stuff ‘up there’ for fear of being drowned in the flood of poorly written stories that were rejected by traditional houses and agents for good reason.
So, I’m holding off until I can figure out just what exactly is going on.
Thank you for this, however, as it explained more than I’ve been able to get about the changes from people too eager to become millionaires from their questionable product.
How bad off were the Luddites, anyway?
Wonderful, wonderful article, Kris. THank you.
And SB, fabulous insight.
An awesome post, Kris! I’m at a different stage of my writing career than those you were primarily talking to, but I can only imagine how perfect this heartfelt piece was for those who are in the crosshairs right now.
David L., I advocate not trying to get an agent at the moment if you don’t have one. Right now that business is in flux, and the agent you hire today might become a publisher or quit the business tomorrow. Wait a year or two and see what happens in the agenting business before deciding on that front. If you have an agent, monitor their business to see what they’re doing and how they plan to continue with their business in these changing times. Please see my surviving the transition post on agents for this.
As for getting a publisher, I have been dealing with whether or not to do that for months on this blog, ever since October. Go to this link and find the pertinent articles. http://kriswrites.com/business-rusch-table-of-contents/business-rusch-publishing-articles/ The short answer is simple: it varies as to who you are and what you want from your career.
Thanks, Steve P., Nancy, Dave H. & Rose.
You’re welcome, Marilyn. I’m glad to have helped in whatever way I did. It sounds like you’re building a heck of a career. Congrats on all of it–and on having the courage to put things up yourself as e-books.
As for rewriting, you might want to go to my husband’s blog. He’s updating his “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing” series and he just finished a bit on rewriting that might apply to you. http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=4398.
Good luck with it all.
Katherine, thanks for your honest comment. I know the despair you felt has happened to too many writers. I’m glad you found your way out of it. And I’m really glad you’re having fun. Because if we can’t have fun writing, why are we doing this? Thanks so much for the comment.
Irene, I think you should not worry about the “garbage.” It’s always been with us. Not every book published traditionally is good. And your definition of garbage is different from that of other readers. So give it a try. And if you need a gatekeeper to tell you if your work is up to snuff, try writing short stories for traditional short story publishers. See my post last week on how you can benefit from that: http://kriswrites.com/2011/06/22/the-business-rusch-short-stories/
Thanks, Kris! I’ll definitely take a look at your husband’s website.
Great, Marilyn.
Thanks, Kris. Great post. As Dave H says, I’m not in your target audience for this post but it stills helped immensely.
One more comment, then I will shut up.
“It’s not personal, even though it feels personal.”
Of course it’s personal, but it’s impersonal as well, because *evolution* is always personal (whether one actually has offspring or not). What we are seeing is as natural and inevitable as the decline of an old species, one which overspecialized to dominate its environment, and then found itself outmaneuvered by a faster, nimbler species when the environment changed.
When I get scared of what’s happening in the industry, I remind myself we’re all part of evolution, whose ONLY law is “Change or die”. Faced with those alternatives, the choice is easy.
Thank you for sharing your writing with us.
I am a reader. At age 8 I was reading an entire Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys book every day. At age 13 I read Gone With the Wind in 4 hours.
One year for my birthday my husband got me a Kindle and a hammock. I’ve read books and bought their sequel without ever getting off the hammock.
In April 2010 my husband lost his job of 25 years and life became very simple. Food, shelter and clothing for the children only.
He found another job, thank God, but the fear is slow to recede. Pre job loss I bought books with abandon. Now I check with my husband before I pay even a dollar for a Kindle addition of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
I fear I’m not alone in this.
There is an interesting story in today’s Wall Street Journal about self publishing.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584004576417602085440540.html?mod=WSJ_Leisure%26Arts_LEFTFeatures
No matter what else happens the very human desire for story telling will go on, and the clever will construct a business model for making a living doing just that.
Katherine
Walter Jon Williams your comment made me LOL and I rarely LOL whilst online. Plus your assessment of the situation was spot on. Kristine, as an artist who once did many illustrations for many publishers and thusly got monetarily and creatively screwed in many ways, I feel everyone’s pain. When I moved strictly to gallery work, I instantly felt free to paint what I want, when I want—kinda like a writer might feel going indie. Even so, I can equate working with an art gallery much like working with a publisher and their e-book royalties. I can understand the 15% royalty structure in traditional publishing when it comes to hardcover and paperback books. However, when it comes to ebooks, the royalty structure in traditional publishing seems way off. An art gallery typically offers a straight 50/50 monetary split for any painting sold by any new artist they take on (and that’s on the gross not on the net). Now if that new artist starts to sell well for the gallery and gain popularity, he then gains more leverage. At this point he can negotiate his half of the commission up to 60% or even 70% or take his talents down the road to the next gallery who will pay him what he’s worth. It seems to me that ebook royalties in traditional publishing need to fall somewhere within this type of model otherwise I don’t see traditional publishers surviving any of these changes. After all, even the lovely ladies working in the Nevada brothels get to keep 50% of gross. Just sayin.
What will we do when the present Amazons and Smashwords of the new publishing world morph into the only behemoths on the block and start raising their rates and lowering ours?
Perhaps all authors should take a cue from JK Rowling and begin, in a serious way, to consider indie publishing from their own websites as their ultimate goal. That’s not to say they shouldn’t continue to publish their books through the other eretailers/distributors, but if they put all their eggs in the edistribution basket, they will, over time, be giving the same power to those edistributors that print publishers once wielded.
Not everyone (actually, not anyone except maybe Oprah) has the platform of JK Rowling and certainly it’s not easy to drive eyeballs to the website of a virtual unknown. In the not so distant past, Amazon was an unknown. It can be done.
Ah, but it does take capital, that oh, so elusive green stuff.
So here’s an idea that works in the bricks and mortar world of real potters, at least here on Cape Cod. Potters (clay throwing makers of crockery and other ceramic goods, not boy wizards) formed a cooperative. They share costs and some forms of distribution. They still maintain their independent shops. They support each other.
Those writers being abandoned by their paper publishers can formed a cooperative edistributor. It would not only acted as an etailer for their eformatted books, but could also acted as a clearing house and/or atelier for those aspects of epub production the writer could or would not do him or herself. The most important aspect of this etailer would be that the pricing and allocation of revenues would be in the control of the cooperative, through the writers themselves. Over time it could, and IMHO should, grow to rival any of the present edistributors.
So, when the time comes that B&N or Amazon thinks they’re the only game in town and they can now call the shots, the writers will have already established an alternative outlet. Their fans will already be familiar with that outlet. If an edistributor starts making what the writer considers unreasonable demands, her or she can say “no” and pull their books. Without another established place to distribute the books, they will once again be at the mercy of a corporate behemoth.
Now is the time to embark on such an enterprise.
Perhaps those who have posted their hand wringing, razor blade searching, head banging despair here, could form the core of such a cooperative. It seems their print publishers have handed them a great gift–the time and motivation (if not necessity) of exploring other venues.
And who knows, it could be a lot of fun.
I’m glad I read this. I’ve heard nothing positive about the publishing industry in months, maybe years, and relapsed into passivity marketing wise, even as I kept writing. All I could tell myself was “Thank goodness I like my day job.”
Excellent article, and thank you for balancing the bad news with the good news. I’ve been stalled in my writing also–mainly because of life events and the business of marketing my two published books (“and now, for her next act .. the author turns marketer, blah, blah …”). What really helped me was to step back and think about and face up to what I actually wanted from a writing life. I read a book, “The Van Gogh Blues” by Eric Maisel and it completely switched my thinking. With too many other glum and weary life events to pull one down nowadays, I was damned if my writing was going to be another glum depressor. It sounds odd, but I found it liberating to think of my writing as something that fed the deeper part of me–not some product-driven and penny-pinched industry. As an incidental outcome, my writing improved when I regarded it on a more personal level. It also helps to go get a day job, as I have. When I worked freelance or didn’t work, the despair simply crushed me.
Thanks, Katherine. I’m glad your husband found a new job. I think you’re right about the fear: my mother lived through the Depression. Her family was poor before that, and things got worse. She worried about every dime, even when she no longer had to. (My father, whose family had money in those hard years, never worried like she did.) I don’t think it goes away once you’ve experienced it. And I think you’re right: I think a lot of people watch every purchase now, people who never did before.
Thanks too for the link.
Brian, you made me LOL with the brothel reference.
Niiiiice. I used to own an art gallery, and we did split things that way for artists. And you’re right. It was on the gross. It would be nice if traditional publishing went for this model, but I don’t see it. Right now, traditional publishing isn’t offering much that a writer can’t do herself with some ingenuity. Or at least, a midlist writer. Some of the bestsellers are still getting perks that the rest of us can’t get, but that’s changing as well. Interesting times….
There are cooperatives already, Mary. Bookview Cafe is one. I’m sure there are others. I hope writers form more of them. But make sure you have iron-clad agreements. I used to live in a town filled with long-established co-ops, and often they had labor/financial issues that rivaled those of big corporations.
I also think readers will get used to being able to find a writer’s books on her website. Then the reader can chose the venue for ordering: the website itself, e-tailers, or brick & mortar stores. Right now, readers get upset if they can’t find a writer’s website to get the news on the next book. I think that’ll morph into wanting the next book off the site as well.
Glad it helped, Paul.
Great post, Aine. Thank you. I think you’re spot on about figuring out what you the individual writer wants. It might be different from my goals or someone else’s goals. Once you figure those goals out, you can then decide how to achieve it. As you can tell from my post, I believe that writing should be fun. So when it becomes drudgery every day, all the time, something is wrong. I think a lot of writers feel that way. I hope these new opportunities change all of that.
The Business in book/e-book form?
I try to read your posts religiously (or secularly in my case) but I miss some due to multiple problems listed in this post. I consider Amazon. I have ten books out, contracted for more, but having the same contract/royalty issues you mention, so what does that truly mean? Not much. I don’t have a backlist. I write a book every four months to stay a full-time writer, which leaves little time to write something new to sell to an indie or publish on Amazon. In other words, all your posts are a manual of sheer survival in this business and when I miss one or don’t have time to read it, I know I missed something important. Living in a rural area that only has the slowest of dial up, hopping from post to post can be time consuming. It would be great to have them all in book form with wolume 1, volume 2, and so on as you keep our heads out of the nooses. Hell, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. As you said, no one else in the industry seems to be telling us much. A source of genuine information is priceless.
PS I’m aware of the Freelancer’s Survival Guide, but the industry has changed so much in only two years, your new posts even more relevant now…Survival Guide 2: Turn Off the Gas and Get Your Head Out of the Oven? Should be a joke…but like so many others who’ve commented, it’s not half the joke you wish it was.
Thanks, Rob. Yeah. The Survival Guide is for the general freelancer and needs updating. The Business articles are changing all the time. But I plan to put the 1999-surviving the Transition up as an e-book…as soon as I can get it all into one form. Like you, I have so many deadlines that I’m juggling everything from sleeping to eating. Which reminds me…I really should have breakfast.
So I am thinking about doing exactly what you suggest. Just trying to figure out how to make it all work.
Your latest post on the sorry state of the publishing industry, “You Are Not
Alone,” was brilliant. And a must-read for authors. What a compendium of
horror stories! I’ve linked in my blog, Facebook, and Twitter posts.
Thank you for bringing all this to our attention. You and Dean have been
sources of inspiration and information for me as I navigated my way to
publishing my new novel, “HUNTER.” Thanks for all you do.
– Robert Bidinotto
Thanks, Robert! I’m glad our posts have helped. Congrats on the new novel.
[...] malaise emanating from the publishing industry (and please check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s fabulous blog on the subject), I’m back with fun news. It’s that special time of year known as Shore [...]
I just heard you and Dean are coming to the Superstars next April, in Vegas! That’s so cool! Can’t wait to meet you two!
Wow. News travels fast. We just agreed this weekend.
It’ll be nice to meet you too, Melissa.
Great piece. I am dismayed that you linked to a blog talking about RH 25% royalty rate for ebooks that makes no sense, and no one seems to notice! Pub rant compares a 25% of net ebook rate to a 25% of list for mass-market books and comes to the starling conclusion that 25% of list is more than 25% of net.
Does anyone think most RH writers earn 25% of list on mass-market? Of course not. Yet a ridiculous straw dog is set up and many authors unthinkingly bow down because they like the conclusion, 25% net sucks.
And what do you mean by 50% of gross? Do you mean list or revenue after costs, which are never disclosed? Do authors really get these kinds of deals? If you mean 50% of list then the publisher would have no income under a typical wholesale model. 50% of list under the agency model seems possible, author gets 50% list, publisher gets 20%. Do these deals exist in the real world among the big 6?
So while a 25% eroyalty rate may not be fair it seems better than what most authors currently get.
Bloggers do a disservice to compare this rate to some mythical, poorly defined royalty rate just to raise people’s ire. The problems, as you point out, are real enough.
I’ve been reading all of your posts with much interest. I’m one of the many, many authors who couldn’t crack the wall in trad publishing so I sold my first book to an epub. It did very well. Six years later I have more than 100 releases out there, write for four different established houses and happily take my checks to the bank each month. I have built a strong following and enjoy a wonderful fan base. I never have to worry b=about my royalties being cut or a laydown with mysteriously changing numbers and my publishers all treat me with courtesy and respect. I’m glad I got my foot in the door when the change was happening. There are some excellent epubs out there and I urge people who are despairing to explore them. The time is definitely right.
Thank you so much! This was an awesoem post!!
Awesome post! Oops!!
Jm, my contracts from ten years ago say that I get 50% of gross or retail list price for e-books themselves, depending on the contract. So if I had such a contract with Random House–and many writers did–then getting a blanket 25% of net (net being undefined) is a significant paycut and a breach of contract. Many writers got these deals and better before 2005. Some got a 75/25 split, which means that those writers (bestsellers, usually) got 75% of the retail e-book price and/or gross price (if the book was farmed out to another vendor). That was in the 1990s. Many of those contracts still exist as well.
I went back and reread Kristin Nelson’s blog. Her problem is clarity for people who aren’t in the publishing industry, which apparently you are not. She’s not comparing e-book royalty to mass market royalty. She’s describing a book type. In publishing, using a mass market only price means that the book did not have a hardcover edition. So the e-book would have been priced the same (in traditional publishing) as the mass market. Hence her $7.99 figure, and mention of mass market. She was trying to be clear, and instead muddied the water. What she should have said is this, “On an e-book for a book which sold as a mass market.” That’s all.
There is nothing mythical here, and no blogger making things up or doing a disservice to anyone by trying to inflame things. Kristin Nelson is writing for folks in the publishing industry or folks who want to be part of that industry, and she assumes they understand the terminology of the industry. She wasn’t clear for folks outside the industry. That’s all.
And whether you think it is a problem or not, what Random House is doing is violating contract terms in a big way, which then voids the contracts. Writers–probably many big name writers–are being cheated by an accounting trick or ripped off by some deliberate corporate decision. I do hope the writers involved check their facts, hire attorneys, and stop this.
Thanks, Martha!
Desiree, it sounds like you made a fantastic decision at just the right time. Thanks for the post.
Fabulous post, Kris! I can see why you are a successful writer in general.
I’ve been slowly coming to the same conclusions about (the evil) publishers taking advantage of writers in the past few years in particular, and BTW, in the romance genre in particular. I see, sadly, it’s not my imagination.
But! Thank goodness for the indie publishing option!! and co-ops and all the other wonderful things that can happen when smart creative people put their heads together.
The main thing is, that writers need not despair, but they do need to talk to each other and support each other. Great message!
Thank you, Stephanie. You’re right: a lot happens when writers talk to each other.
Thanks Kris for the reply,it does clarify things to me.
Is publishing really that messed up that RH would violate so many contracts? I still find that hard to believe.
Do you know the current ebook royalty rate for most publishers? I read that for Harlequin,until very recently, it was 6 to 8% of list so a 25% of net would be a win for he author if the book is not too heavily Discounted.
Royalty rates of 50 to 75% of list for ebooks seems almost too good to be true, leaving the publisher little ton nothing to pay the distributed, unless they self distribute. With the amazon agency model a publisher would get 7 bucks for a 10 book, paying 5 to 7.50 to the author. As long as ebooks were unimportant it probably didn’t matter to anyone. How times change.
Back to RH. Does anynone know what really is happening, are authors getting more money or less than the contract stipulates?
And you are right, I am an interested outsider with no dog in this fight except I like to read good books at a fair price.
The publisher violating the contract doesn’t void it. It is just a violation that can be corrected through legal action. Otherwise either side could get out of a contract by not meeting a condition. I think, when the dust has settled, we will all find that RH has not violated contracts and authors royaly checks will be larger. Cases where the author loses probably has less to do with malice than incompetence.
The wise advice is to check the royalty statement carefully.
Yes, publishing is that messed up that something like that would happen, RH. The old royalty rates from 10 years ago are based on paperback and other subsidiary rights deals. Then publishers felt that they needed to change things and writers let them.
Standard now is either 15% of gross (undefined) or 25% of net (undefined), neither of which is good, since gross & net are undefined and can mean anything the publisher deems it to mean. Harlequin is considered egregious because they’re not following standard and are again trying to change the terms of an existing contract.
Contracts are contracts. And there are no standard contracts. My book contracts from the same publishing house differ from another writer’s from the same house. So writers have to check their contracts and their royalty statements before taking action. If RH is violating a contract and doesn’t remedy, then they are in breach of that contract. Right now, considering what is going on, I’m pretty sure corporate decided to take this action and figured they’d worry about it only if someone noticed.
Suits in publishing tend to be hush-hush and only pertain to one writer. So it would behoove writers of RH as a class to see what is going on, and take action as a group, and publicize what they find. Imho.
Of course, it goes without saying that not all publishers take advantage of all writers. It may be only a minority of cases, but those cases feel unjust and are rightly talked about.
I wonder if there’s a way to come up with some reliable statistics based on a significant data pool? (not my area of expertise—I’m not even sure what a data pool is. I made it up. I write fiction.) (But you get my point.) Even with all the above stories about publishers lying about sales figures etc., it would probably be good to have a big picture perspective before assuming that it’s a blanket problem.
Stephanie, please see this post: http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/20/the-business-rusch-royalty-statements-update/. Yes, not all publishers have the problems we’re discussing, but some very major publishers do, and I know of pending suits against at least two of them. Not one or two suits, but dozens from all genres, including nonfiction. So right now, with some publishers that have a large percentage of the traditionally published market, it is a blanket problem.
Kris
Thank you. Yet again you hit the nail on the head: this is a most brilliant summary of what’s going on in publishing.
Yes, it’s a shock. No, things will never be the same again. But as one door closes, another opens. And every exit is an entrance.
Perhaps what annoys me most about some of the big publishers is how they’re trying to shackle their authors, prohibiting them for writing ANYTHING for ANYONE else, or for themselves as Indies, under ANY name.
In England, there’s a law about Restriction of Trade – you have the right to do what you do to earn a living. This kind of contract would go completely against that.
Who would sign away their writing life like that? People are. Authors, desperate to be published, hoping that the old times will come back, are agreeing to these onerous and destructive contracts, which bind them in chains for as long as two or three years.
Hang in there, writers. Persistence pays. Write with joy and write well, and you’ll find readers, in whatever format they choose to read.
Kristine, thank you so much for this. I am an illustrator who writes in my off hours, and would like to say that what you have written here basically applies to quite a few industries.
My husband is a thirty-year music veteran and most of what you write about here applies to the world of music as well (well, with a few name changes and such…).
As for myself, an illustrator/part-time writer, the past three or four years have changed drastically from the point of view of what sells, what art directors look for, what they do and don’t tell you, what collectors want, and on and on.
Perhaps the creative world as a whole is changing, and we all have to try to adapt to it. I wish an instruction manual had come along with these career choices…