Kristine Kathryn Rusch » Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, On Writing » The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles
The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles
The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Last week, as the stock market took yet another tumble, I saw a big-name trader get interviewed on the evening news. The trader said—not flippantly, but tiredly—“You know how it goes in the markets. Traders either respond with greed or terror.”
Economic analysts have been talking about fear a lot in the past three years. Ever since the stock markets took a horrible nosedive in the fall of 2008, we’ve seen the effect of fear and panic on the markets. Fear does feed on itself, and sometimes, not even greed can overcome it.
Last week, I wrote a rather scathing post about writers accepting crap deals from their publishers. The post got a lot of hits and a lot of comments—apparently, y’all love a good rant. But I was angry. And still am. The column didn’t lance a boil. Instead, it revealed a layer of molten lava underneath. Fury? Yeah, I’m mad—at the entire traditional publishing system.
As the week continued, more stuff happened. I exchanged e-mails with several more writers, some of whom remain deliberately obtuse. Others see the problems, but for some reason either believe it is personal or it doesn’t apply to them.
The rest of you have been marvelous, just marvelous. Seriously. You’ve sent nice letters, you’ve donated, you’ve made great comments on the blog. And if I had a different genetic makeup, I’d write only for y’all, because you get this stuff:
Writers Are Responsible For Their Own Careers.
Writers Are Professionals.
Writers Are In Business, And Should Behave Like Business People.
Thanks to all of you who do get it. I’ll continue to write for you, but I can’t entirely shut up about everything else (Oh, such great understatement there.)
In private e-mails, in person, and in the comments section, so many of you have mentioned the word “fear.” You’re frightened you’ll make mistakes. You have made mistakes because you’re afraid to take risks. You continue to make mistakes because you “don’t have as much courage” as I do. It’s ironic really, because what are you afraid of? Making mistakes.
So I figured I’d jump back on the “Unexpected Gold in Self-Help Books” series with a piece on Fear. (In fact, it was the piece on Fear I planned to write last week that started this fine mess. I jettisoned that piece.)
The problem with the “Self-Help” series is that it’s geared to writers, and fear, right now, isn’t exclusive to us. In fact, a lot of what’s happening to writers is happening because everyone else is terrified.
On the same day that I’m writing this, Amazon has unveiled its new tablet. We all knew it was coming, and there’s been a lot of discussion about it. But the thing no one saw was the price point.
Essentially, at $199, Amazon is giving the Kindle Fire away. And what’s more, Amazon has lowered the price of the Kindle to $79. Now, granted, that Kindle is wi-fi only and lacks most of the bells and whistles. But Kindle has moved from an expensive purchase for most people to a purchase that can be repaid by foregoing three hardcover books. And if you download a few books for free to replace those three on your Kindle, well, then you’ve more than paid for the reading device.
That’s what Amazon wants. As one analyst said today, Amazon is the mirror image of Apple. Apple, a device maker, has low-priced content to encourage you to buy devices. Amazon, a content provider, has low-priced devices to encourage you to buy content.
I know, without doing much websearching, that the Amazon announcement has struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishing. Traditional publishing still hasn’t figured out how to make money on e-books, and traditional publishers are doing their best to piss off readers.
Even Mike Shatzkin, whom many in traditional publishing consider the guru of the e-publishing world, doesn’t completely understand the importance of readers. I usually don’t recommend his blog because, although he often has good stuff, he’s so entrenched in traditional-publishing think that his blogs are only about 50% useful for the way that publishing is going—and I don’t want to explain which 50% of what article is worth your time.
This time I will provide a link and explain some of it, because Shatzkin is the guy that traditional publishers listen to. Remember, as you read his work that he’s a traditional publishing guy writing for traditional publishers. He’s not writing for professional writers, like I am. That makes a lot in his various blog posts irrelevant to us (or just plain offensive). I am pointing it out to you in this case because I want you to see how traditional publishers—even forward-looking folk—think.
Witness: “We know that agents and authors will accept an e-book royalty rate of 25% of net receipts in today’s environment, where 70% or more of the sales are still made in print. We don’t know if the threat of the alternate publishing options will force the royalty rate up if sales fall below 50% print or 30% print.”
Honestly, what he discounts here are midlist writers. So many of us have projects and series that traditional publishing abandoned, so we decided to do it ourselves. Then we discovered that we could sell consistently and at good numbers, which is now making most of us wonder what we will get out of traditional publishing at all.
What Shatzkin and his ilk don’t recognize are the professional writers who have decided that 25% of net is a ridiculous number, writers who have decided that we’re not even going to offer our books to any traditional publisher who wants to give us no more than 25% of net as a deal breaker. Some authors are fighting this, but most are simply walking away.
The writers who remain either don’t realize they have options or are operating in a fear-based way (like those six authors mentioned last week). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Because there’s some interesting stuff in Shatzkin’s blog, that I don’t even think he realizes is there. I had to parse out this part: “We know that content-creating brands that are not book publishers are using the relative ease of publication of e-books to deliver their own content to the e-book marketplace.”
In English? “We know that writers are self-publishing e-books.”
Then he writes: “We don’t know if book publishers will develop an e-book publishing expertise that will make them able to persuade those brands in time to go through them, the way they have in the print book world, rather than disintermediating them.”
Okay, that’s where I had to parse it out because of all the unclear antecedents and the garbled business jargon.
In English: “We don’t know if book publishers can develop ‘e-book publishing expertise’ that will convince writers to abandon the direct-to-consumer marketing through the internet and let book publishers continue to publish e-books.”
That’s a fact, folks. And the facts are why publishing professionals love Shatzkin’s blog. But beneath all of that factual business language is sheer terror. Because if traditional publishers can’t convince writers to return to the traditional publishing fold, then what will happen to traditional publishers?
They will become insignificant—or at least, less significant than they are now.
It’s rather astonishing to me that the traditional publishing guru of e-publishing ignores the trends among the indies. Right now, indie publishers and self-publishing writers are way ahead of traditional publishers—on e-book design, on pricing, on marketing, and on distribution.
Let me use one more example from Shatzkin’s blog: He tells general trade publishers to “reconsider your commitment to publish illustrated books in any time frame more extended than a year or two and think about sticking to straight text, unless you have paths to customers for those books that do not go through bookstores. If we do end up in an 80% e-book world anytime soon, and we very well might, you’ll want to own the content you know works (for the consumer) in that format, not in what you don’t know works in any way other than print.”
It sounds sensible. He’s saying that illustrated books don’t work as ebooks yet, that customers don’t want them, and that publishers should, for the short term, reconsider what they’re doing with illustrated books (but publishers! try to hold onto the rights of those books so you can publish them once we figure out what we’re doing).
The problem is that his premise is wrong. Illustrated books do sell. At least, on the indie side. The problem in illustrated book sales is price point: illustrated children’s ebooks from traditional publishers are too expensive.
Indie authors are selling illustrated children’s books at good New York numbers. For example, Rebecca Shelley has sold thousands of e-books per month of her illustrated middle grade Bees in My Butt since Christmas, on Nook alone, a platform that favors illustrations. She doesn’t have the figures for the same period from her iBookstore sales, but she’s convinced her sales will increase this Christmas because of the iPad. (I’m sure the Kindle Fire will help her here as well.)
She is not alone. There are a lot of successful children’s writers, and a lot of successful illustrated books, many of them indie-published. As Rebecca and I exchanged e-mails tonight (with me asking to use her name so I could promote her work), she mentioned this:
“Up to this point, all of my illustrations have been black and white. But the Nook color has the most amazing interactive children’s picture books. You turn the Nook sideways and it gives the full picture book double-page layout. Plus it has a read-to-me feature, that reads the book to the children as they turn the pages. Every child (even the older ones) that I’ve shown these Nook picture books to has gone crazy over them.”
The advice that Shatzkin gives here shows both the fear and the arrogance of traditional publishing. Stick to print books until we know there’s a market. But of course, they’re not looking at the self- or indie-published titles, so how does traditional publishing know whether there’s a market or not? And somehow Shatzkin and others are ignoring things like the Nook picture books—because…why? I have no idea.
Shatzkin advises that it’s best to stick to the print book until we know if there is an e-book market for illustrated books. But the indie authors aren’t ignoring print. Many authors like Rebecca Shelley are also doing their own paper books as print-on-demand. As Dave Bricker said in the comments to the Shatzkin blog, “While retail outlets shrivel and big publishers figure out how to reinvent themselves, other players like Amazon and LSI [Lightning Source Inc] have already stepped in to solve the printing and distribution problems for indie publishers.”
And traditional publishing has its eyes closed and its fingers in its ears as it’s singing “la-la-la” to pretend that the indie and self published world is full of unsalable crap that is…inexplicably…selling.
Over the weekend, I saw Moneyball with Brad Pitt (based on Michael Lewis’s book, which I really need to read). Moneyball is less of a sports movie than a business movie, and there’s this marvelous sequence in the early part of the film. Pitt’s character has decided to use a statistical analysis to “buy” cheaper players to round out his roster, a job traditionally reserved to the baseball scouts.
A scout, knowing that he is about to lose his job, gives Pitt the Speech: We scouts know how players work, we find the talent, you won’t have a team without us, we have history and arcane knowledge that you (puny human) could never ever know…
Of course, in the sequence of the movie, we come to realize that the scout is wrong. That his arcane knowledge is as useful to baseball as alchemy is to physics.
The thing is, as the scout gave that speech, I was laughing so hard I nearly hurt myself. Make the scout a traditional book publisher. Make Pitt a reader. You have read a version of “The Speech” all over the internet—you readers won’t survive without traditional publishing, because you won’t know the good from the bad.
But here’s the thing: traditional publishing has forgotten that they’re in the market of pleasing their audience—and their audience is readers, who don’t care if they buy a book from Bantam or directly from Rebecca Shelley, so long as that book is good. If the book is good (and trust me, Bees in My Butt is good), then the readers will buy the next Rebecca Shelley book, whether it is published by Rebecca Shelley or by Bantam Books.
Take a look at Shatzkin’s article, then realize that fear usually comes from fear of the unknown. And then realize how much he admits that traditional publishing doesn’t know right now. Granted, most of us don’t know how this marketing shakeout in publishing will work. But much of what traditional publishing doesn’t know is because of willful ignorance.
I’m rather astonished at all the ignorance. I’m going to pick on Shatzkin again, not because I have a grudge against him, but because he’s out there as the most progressive voice in traditional publishing. (Honestly, I wish he could take a lot of his blinders off, because when he does get a clear vision, it’s worth listening to.) I’m also picking on him because this one post makes things easier for me to use as an example for you.
In the post, he mentions that the Borders bankruptcy has decreased the number of brick-and-mortar bookstores. He also mentions that shelf space is decreasing for books and the link he uses to cite that is from Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Powell’s, a gigantic independent, has cut staff all year, citing decreased sales because of e-books.
Shatzkin ignores the real threat to the number of books on shelves. The way that Barnes & Noble has decreased the books it carries, replacing them with toys, and games, and scented candles (Yep, even scented candles). A number of B&N employees are furious about this. As one wrote to me a few weeks ago, “I got hired to sell books. Now I sell ‘book-related merchandise.’” A B&N manager went further, sending me photographs of the interior of the store as this change from bookshelves to toy shelves is occurring. The manager wrote, “Anyone who tells you that B&N’s [brick-and-mortar] stores will carry the same number of books as before is lying.”
B&N isn’t the only brick-and-mortar bookstore to abandon books. Indigo Books and Music has been Canada’s largest chain bookstore since the merger with Chapters in 2001. In addition to trying an e-book model through Kobo, Indigo is also diversifying the products in its brick-and-mortar stores. Indigo will offer its own line of “home décor and lifestyle products” because, clearly, there aren’t enough stores in Canada offering that sort of thing. (Okay, everything after “clearly” is my personal opinion. But jeez, how stupid is this?)
Any mention of this from Shatzkin or anyone in traditional publishing? Not that I’ve seen. I can’t help but feel that traditional publishers will be blindsided by just how few retail outlets they now have for paper books.
And the fewer outlets for paper books, the fewer reasons for writers to go with traditional publishers. Because all traditional publishers know how to do is produce books for a bookstore marketplace.
Several years ago, a packager contacted my husband Dean Wesley Smith to ghost write a thriller for a major media personality. The personality had fingers in a dozen pies, from casinos in Vegas to well-known music palaces in the South to several major TV markets and several niche religious markets. Dean was to write a thriller; the packager, with the assistance of the major media personality’s empire, would market that thriller to traditional bookstores, yes, but also to casino shops, the marketing booths at the personality’s public appearances, at the gift shops of major hotels, through the religious sites, and of course, through the multimedia empire.
The packager took this deal to traditional publishers, with a guaranteed sale of several hundred thousand copies of the book itself. All the publisher had to do was print the thing, and ship to bookstores and the various outlets. The multimedia empire would take care of the rest.
No publisher would take the deal. Not even for a reduced advance (this personality didn’t care about upfront money). The publishers “had no idea” how to market to these areas, so didn’t even want to try.
A year or so later, another friend tried this with one of his own books. Again, the publishers shut him down. They didn’t want to venture into new markets.
The problem is that all the old markets are going away. Yeah, the Publishers Weekly article on Indigo ended with a vaguely hopeful note: “But if Indigo has less space for books and less time* on the shelves to sell them, one…possible silver lining is that it might present opportunities for independent booksellers.” Exactly the conclusion I had about B&N several months ago.
Still, that’s all traditional publishing sees. If they can’t market books to bookstores and to some discounters, like Wal-Mart, where can they market books? And if they can’t see where to market books, if they can’t figure out how to find new places to do so, places that are fairly obvious if you just look around (depending on your product), then they’re of no use to the “content-creating brands”…um…I mean the writers.
And deep down, the traditional publishers know that. It makes them afraid.
And they are afraid. Just the fact that Shatzkin mentions the 25% of net as something that “agents and authors” might not accept in the future means that traditional publishing knows the deal is a bad one for us “content-creating brands.” The publishers are worried that we’ll figure it out, just like they’re worried about their entire industry.
Let’s go back to my opening: fear begets fear. And the fear in this industry is trickling through all parts of it.
Agents have it the worst right now. Agents can’t make a living if they follow traditional agency models. Why?
Pretty simple if you do the math. Over the past month, I have heard from writers across the board that advances are down 50%. Several bestsellers have told me that on the next book they’ve offered their traditional publisher, the bestseller has been offered an advance 10-50% of the previous advance.
In real numbers, let’s use a non-bestseller advance for Kris’s poor mathematically challenged brain. Let’s say that the bestseller’s advance was $100,000 five years ago. On the new contract, the bestseller is being offered half—or $50,000—all the way down to one-tenth—or $10,000.
Writers are balking at this, particularly since the publishers are asking for more rights, worse terms, at these lower advances. (I just turned down one such deal myself. My negotiation wasn’t for more money, which I knew the traditional publisher wouldn’t do, but to have the contract be a print-only contract—no e-rights. The publisher (who does a crap job on e-books and doesn’t even publish them on time) said e-rights or nothing. I walked.)
If the writers are getting one-tenth to one-half of what they got before, a traditional agent is also getting one-tenth to one-half of what they got before. The agent’s income is based on 15% of the writer’s income. So instead of getting $15,000 from the writer’s $100,000 deal, the agent is now getting $1500 to $7500 on that writer if that writer even takes the deal, which many of us are not.
Add to that, this problem: because hardcover sales are down significantly and e-book sales are up, royalty payments are way down. That 25% of net on ebooks means that the publisher pays very few royalties on huge numbers of books sold, whereas in the past, if those books had sold as hardcovers, the publisher would have had to pay 15% of cover price, even if the book sold below cover.
Agents are, in a word, screwed.
I didn’t think about this too closely until this week also, because Trident Media Group, the big Kahuna of agencies, has decided to become publisher. Yeah, Trident contorts itself by saying it’s not a publisher, but it is. They’re going to publish writers’ backlists and probably front lists. We’ve discussed why this is a bad idea for writers, not to mention illegal under agency law, but the point here isn’t the fact that Trident is out to screw its writers.
Trident is out to save its business. Because the old model—based almost entirely on bestsellers—isn’t functioning any more. And this publishing model from Trident is a Hail Mary Pass from a company trying to pay its (huge) overhead and keep its prestige in an industry that doesn’t need it any more. (Not two months ago, Trident’s chairman called agents doing e-publishing a conflict of interest. And now Trident is doing it. What can this strategy be except a desperation ploy?)
Fear, fear, fear.
As the fear trickles from the publisher to the agent, imagine how the traditional writer feels. The writer who doesn’t want anything to do with indie publishing, who sees self-publishing as something horrible. Those writers are only hearing about the fear from their traditional publishers and agents. As a result, these uninformed writers believe that “publishing” is collapsing, when in reality, it is the old business model that is failing.
Because the writers are afraid that publishing is collapsing, they’re grabbing onto whatever gets thrown their way, no matter how bad it is.
These are the writers (for the most part) that Shatzkin and his friends are doing business with. The writers who have no idea that next to the sinking Titanic are small yachts available to any writer who will leap from the Titanic’s deck to the waiting yacht.
The bad business deals that I mentioned last week? They’re proposed by publishers who are terrified they will no longer have product to sell (and no place to sell that product, even if they produce it). They’re advocated by agents who are scrounging for every single dime they can find to save their own smaller sinking ships (those suckers are nearly underwater now, maybe the smokestack visible). And they’re being accepted by writers who have blinders on and refuse to look around.
For writers, we are in the best publishing environment we’ve ever been in. We just have to learn a few new skills—or pay a flat fee to someone who already has that skill. Then we will make more money and get our books to more customers than we ever have before.
But so many writers indoctrinated in traditional publishing refuse to see it. Case in point? After I wrote my blog last week, I got ten private e-mails from various writers, all of whom had friends who had signed those free short story deals with traditional publishers. About half of those writer friends were romance writers, which shocked me. Because up until a few years ago, if you wanted to learn business, you went to the romance writers. They knew business better than anyone.
But now, they’re just as scared as their mainstream, nonfiction, sf, and mystery counterparts.
Fear is no way to run any business, be it a traditional publishing house, a literary agency, or a writing career. Operating out of fear means that you’ll make mistake after mistake after mistake.
Sometimes mistakes are good; you’ll learn from them. But mostly, mistakes made out of fear are the kind of mistakes that destroy businesses.
I have said repeatedly that I don’t expect traditional publishing to go away. I do believe it will be greatly diminished, and several companies will disappear. It’s becoming very clear that many literary agencies are on the ropes as well. Trying a business model that is illegal and unethical isn’t the way to save a dying business—it’s one of those business-killing mistakes. (If your agency has just added an e-pub arm, run. That business is clearly in trouble and trying to save itself. It’s not going to be thinking of your business at all.)
A lot of writers will lose their careers in this fear-climate. Not because it’s a bad time for writers, but because the writers haven’t learned how to operate in the new environment. Above, I said that traditional publishing has its eyes closed and its fingers in its ears as it’s singing “la-la-la.” A lot of writers are doing the same thing.
The sad part about that is that if the writers just open their eyes, stop singing, and listen for a few minutes, they’ll have a better career in five years than they have now.
But so many of them are afraid to change. There’s too much they “don’t know.” And, like traditional publishing, they’ll ignore the information around them, and will figure out what to do—much too late.
Thanks everyone for the great comments last week, the informative e-mails, and the behind-the-scenes letters. I appreciate it all. I also appreciate the donations, which help me fund my nonfiction habit.
If this blog has helped you in any way, please consider leaving a tip on the way out. Thanks!
*The article mentions that the amount of time books will be on the shelf has decreased from 90 days to 45.
“The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Filed under: Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, On Writing · Tags: Barnes & Noble, Borders Bookstores, Brad Pitt, Dean Wesley Smith, E-Books, illustrated books, Indigo Books and Music, middle grade books, Mike Shatzkin, Moneyball, Powell's, Publishers Weekly, publishing, Rebecca Shelley, The Passive Voice, traditional publishing, Trident, Writers
85 Responses to "The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles"
Wonderful post, Kris, with some great comments too. (I’ve always loved that Machiavelli quote.)
Sometimes it’s the things we know that aren’t so that trip us up. Shatzkin says:
“We know that rate of growth is mathematically prevented from continuing for even three more years (because it would put ebooks at 160% of publishers’ revenues if it did!)”
Depends how you look at the market. Maybe in three years, traditional publishers will have 80% of their revenues in ebooks sales, but indie sales — er, content-creating brands delivering their own content to the e-book marketplace — will match those numbers. Total ebook market then equals 160% of traditional publishers’ revenues. Not inconceivable.
LOL, Paul. It’s stunning, isn’t it?
Tori, thanks for the mention of the conformity experiments. Those things are scary. I try to forget about them. But I think you might be onto something there.
Exactly, Marilynn. We are partners–in fact, the main partner, since we provide what they sell. The problem is that in the past writers have not acted like a partner, but like a grateful supplicant. We must change that behavior now.
Thanks for the info on mark-ups. I had no idea. That makes sense then.
As for free stories/romance, um, well…yeah. I had that thought on the difficulty of selling a romance short these days. As for how impossible they are to do, that’s not true at all. Until the mid-1980s, the dominant form of short fiction for women in the “slick” magazines was the romance short. Those stories paid the best too. But with the loss of that market–from Redbook, Woman’s Day, etc–then there was no market at all. It went from the best paying short fiction market to nothing in the space of about five years. So romance shorts can and have been written. We just need a market for them–and we have it now. Our own short fiction, tied to our books, on the e-readers. (and in our own collections.)
Yeah, jmike, I did follow the link. But even if you look at the entire confusing sentence that he wrote, it makes no sense if he’s talking about HufPo, etc. Because he can’t disintermediate HufPo or any of the online news sites. He means writers.
John W., I love your football analogy. And Chris Y, DeLorean. Yes.
Jenni, good point on the small toys. Now we just need to integrate them with books.
LM, I love the idea of a PM for indie deals. How fun would that be? And Bridget, good points.
Daryl, every grocery store I’ve been to lately has cut back their book section as well. By about half or more. The loss of shelf space this year alone is enormous.
Foxessa, thanks for the post. What you’re experiencing is quite common right now. Thanks for putting it out there for others to see. I’m hearing writers who don’t understand the business calling this “insulting” as if the loss of advances, etc, is personal. It’s not. It’s fear. Publishers don’t know where they will make their money. I love your analysis. You’re right–and right to stick with the folks what brung ya to the dance in the first place.
Thanks, Russ. I suspect you’re right. The box stores might cut back as well. Or maybe that’ll be the only place people can find books…
You’re welcome, Scott.
And Loren. 
Carole, thanks for the post. And you’re right about backlist. Get that reverted and get it up!
I also think you’re right about fear. None of us want to cram something new into our busy lives. But it’ll save our careers–and probably make our futures. So time to learn.
I love your method of starting with novelettes. We started with short stories, and then moved to bigger fish (novels). It’s been fun.
Thanks, Alice, for checking. But here’s the dirty secret about guidelines: they’re designed to discourage you from submitting, not to encourage you. That’s for all publishers, because they want to cut down the amount of stuff they get. If you send something to someone who says “agented only” they will read anyway because they’re afraid you’re the next JK Rowling, and they don’t want to miss you. Go look at Dean’s posts on Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. He deals with this. (You can follow the link I posted below.)
Alastair, that percentage thing bothered me too, so I asked Dean about it. He says it’s some math formula. But someone else took it apart in the comments on the Shatzkin piece, and Shatzkin came back with an explanation. I think you’re right and he’s wrong. No one seems to acknowledge that readership and book buying is expanding. Everyone in traditional publishing believes it’s a finite market–which it is, I guess, when you keep selling to the same people over and over again.
Kris & Daryl,
The cutting back on the grocery store book section is happening down here in Albuquerque as well. For example, about two months ago Smith’s reduced by half the amount of shelf and floor space they devoted to paperbacks. And they used to have quite a large paperback section (much larger than the typical grocery store), so this is significant.
What? Illustrated ebooks don’t sell? Gee, I’d better rethink my business model. Thanks for the heads-up, Mr. Shatzkin!
Carolyn
(watches the mom and daughter sitting in the next bench read the Toy Story ebook on their iPad)
I think what Shatzkin is worried about is HufPo and other such content-creating brands disintermediating the publishers when it comes to ebooks (which, according to the article he linked to, is what they’re starting to do), not the other way around. At least, that’s how I read his following paragraph:
“We don’t know if book publishers will develop an ebook publishing expertise that will make them able to persuade those brands in time to go through them, the way they have in the print book world, rather than disintermediating them.”
On the other hand, maybe “content-creating brand” is a good way for individual authors as well to look at one aspect of what they’re doing. It certainly seems in line with what you and Dean have been suggesting as far as authors viewing themselves as serious businesses that need to market themselves by producing a lot of content.
Honestly, Jmike, I think we will never know without asking him. The unclear antecedents make that sentence mud. The jargon makes it thick black mud. Dean and I went through it twice, and we figured it was writers and publishers. Otherwise, it really doesn’t make sense, since he’s taking about marketing books. Why would Hufpo and such matter that much to publishers, when publishers try to get their works reviewed there? I really do think he’s referring to writers. But what he actually says is such a mess, we might be able to find the fountain of youth in there if we try.
If you’re right and I’m wrong, then I’m even more offended. Because he is dismissing writers as masters of their own fates entirely if your interpretation is correct.
I have been writing short fiction, sf and fantasy, in order to grow stronger with my writing. I write a story, sit on it for a month to get a new perspective on it, make whatever revisions I feel are needed, then show it to readers and see what I might need to change. After that, I submit the stories to magazines, provided they at least pay 5 cents per word or are highly respected in the field (such as Electric Velocipede or Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet). The plan is to self-publish any stories that don’t sell to these markets, along with any stories that finish their exclusivity periods at these markets and exhaust their reprint potential at places with decent readerships. While I work on these stories, I have a novel I’m slowly revising. My tentative goal has been to submit this novel to publishers once it’s ready, hoping by then to have a few good short story credits to help on my cover letter.
After a year of rolling stories through this process I have sold two pieces and am running out of markets to which to submit some of the oldest stories. Very soon I’ll be preparing an epub version of a story or two. Once I have five or more self-published stories, I plan to collate them into story collections.
Reading posts like this, so recently after having learned about the announcement of the new Kindles at prices that I expect will push a lot more e-reader units during this Christmas season than were sold this last year, I am more and more convinced that I should get in on this self-publishing thing to a greater extent. It’s a frustrating process, as I know that you’ve experienced, to have stories rejected over and over again by magazines before finding the editor who wants to buy it. I also really like the control that self-publishing gives, particularly since I have a graphic design and something of a typesetting and publishing background already. So I wonder if I should be self-publishing my stories out of the gate, rather than waiting to send them to magazines. Regardless of that, I suspect that by the time my present novel is complete then there will be little point in submitting it to traditional publishers because so much of the market will have shifted to electronic publication.
The one thing that has kept me interested in traditional publishers is that I write literary and extremely odd stories, and so having a large distribution entity that may get my book in front of a wide group of readers seems like the best opportunity to begin to reach that small fraction of readers who will be strange and literary enough to want my book. The books that seem to presently do well in the self-publishing environment appear to be backlogs of authors with preexisting audiences and / or pulp fiction of one sort or another (I use the term not to devalue the writing, which I respect and enjoy reading, but which I for some reason just don’t like to write myself). I would like to believe that self-published books of a more eclectic and literary angle will soon have a better chance of finding their audience than through traditional publishers, but I’m not seeing much in the way of numbers for these sort of books in what I read about self-publishing. Your thoughts on this?
Eclectic literary books, Richard, almost never find a market with traditional publishers. The ones you see on the shelves are the lucky ones. Most never sell to a publisher in the first place. I frankly don’t believe we know what the market is with readers because publishers are too afraid of the “different” to even try a good eclectic literary book. The pro writers I know who write them usually can’t sell them, and often turn to more “commercial” work.
As for your short stories, I’m confused. I have no idea how you’re running out of markets, unless you’re only looking at things that publish sf and you haven’t really looked at the literary and little magazines. Have you tried The New Yorker? Glimmer Train? Rosebud? McSweeney’s? Tin House? You need to pick up a Best American Short Stories edition, and start mining the markets that they list in the back. Skip the ones that pay in copies and go for the others. That will keep you busy for years on one short story. You won’t run out of markets that meet your minimum pay requirement for at least three to five years.
Short stories are worth publishing in traditional venues. Traditional publishing, especially with eclectic books, is a more difficult proposition. Traditional publishing wasn’t fond of literary or odd before the changes. I doubt they’ll accept any such books from anyone except already established names right now. I’d focus on building a backlist of novels and have people recognize your voice/style over time. Look at some of my earlier posts on the economics of traditional publishing companies to understand why they don’t want risk-taking books right now. Click on the Business Rusch tab and find the publishing series link.
That’s my opinion, since you asked…
Having 30 years ago deliberately formulated “JJ Brannon” as my writing “brand” [with the punning realization that the surname potentially derives from "son of the fire-sword", a type of which once marked livestock], since my extended-clan-family call me by a childhood diminutive of my middle name [Jerry/Jerald] and as an adult most of my friends call me by the diminutive of my first name [Jim/James], I separated my writing “self”, the one I present at cons, on manuscripts, and commenting in fora, as “JJ” and in shorthand as JJB.
Since I do it for myself, I tend to to do it with others, Initialize their names, such as my cousins LJ and RBS. Which is why I have always thought of you as KKR, in the respectful uncial.
It does not please me to think of you, KKR, [or myself] as “ccb”, in the sneering minuscule.
Keep up the good [fire]works!
JJB
By the way, as I forgot to make clear above, having followed the Mike Shatzkin link to the NY Times “content-creating brands” article, I’d say you and Dean have the right of the interpretation even if it is Mr. Shatzkin and the publishers who are confused.
Ignore Shatzkin and the NYT for the nonce, to perform a Gedanken experiment [for non-physicists, this does not allude to an arcane Thanksgiving-stuffing attempt]: Does **any** non-corpus corporate entity create “content”?
No, naturally not. Only people, who may or may not work for corporations, create content.
See, the comment is more insidious than one may apprehend at first glance. It’s not that Mr. Skatzkin & followers are confusingly referring to HufPo or Random House-Politico.com as “content-creating brands” but that Shatzkin & Co. actually confuse the reified Corporate-Entity Brands with the living writers who really create the content for those entities.
He & publishing industry to whom he blogs are de-reifying writers as interchangeable and anonymous widgets, mere commoditized cogs in their vast economic-machine.
How dare mere cogs insist on **owning** what they create.
In that light, we are not humans; we are all “house names”.
In support of the above, note how Shatzkin later refers in the piece to Eloise and Alice in Wonderland as “brands”.
Now, I am fairly happy to give Felix Francis a shot at entertaining me. He is neither his mother nor even his father, but he’s cordially close enough to divert me for an afternoon, being legitimately involved in the composition of books since childhood and equally legitimately passed the baton by his dad.
I have no intention, though, of buying a single Robert B. Parker knockoff, however faithful.
Soylent Green(TM) may be People, but ‘taint a Person.
*****
On a side note, after losing the Borders five miles from my house, a B&N recently opened off Main Street, Newark, in partnership with the University of Delaware.
I visited last week, hunting for a birthday gift. Excluding textbooks, there’s a good chance I have more linear feet of books than that particular store.
JJB
[...] speaking, if you haven’t been reading them this week. The first is Kris Rusch’s on “The Fear Chronicles”. The other is Passive Guy’s post on how to read a publishing contract. Both should be [...]
[...] the last two or three weeks there has been a lot of buzz about the changing publishing environment. Kristine Rusch has been blogging about the changing conditions of Publishers contracts, e-Book royalties being [...]
Thank you very much for the advice!
Yes, I had been running out of markets because I was only looking at things that publish sf. I will take your advice about the Best American Short Stories edition, for sure.
Another question for you, if you don’t mind. I set my minimum price limit on what I’ll sell a short story to a magazine based on one of Dean’s posts, where he said (if I recall correctly) that people are likely to make more on a short story if they self-publish than if they sell a story for less than 4 cents per word. 5 cents per word is SFWA’s minimum, and therefore magazines that pay that rate in sf often get higher quality submissions and larger readership, so I put my minimum up to that level unless the magazine holds some prestige that might help me build readership in the future. I figure I should do something similar with stories sent to venues outside sf, but I’m not sure what my best strategy should be to juggle readership, prestige and payment in general, in venues in or outside sf. Do you have a recommendation on a strategy I should consider? Am I over-thinking all this? I very well could be, but I want to make sure my short fiction builds me the largest audience it can while making me whatever money I can manage off it as well.
Having now read your publishing series articles, I completely agree with you that I should build an online backlog of novels. I’m going to keep writing short stories because I like them and they teach me more about fiction writing than novels seem to, but it’s time to bite the bullet and get the novels on the self-publishing fast track (oh, and mix up a few metaphors as well).
I may sign up for next year’s Character Voice and Setting or Short Story Workshop, by the way–depending on if I can afford them.
You’re welcome, Richard. I always go for payment first, because it usually coincides with prestige and audience. You want the most people to read your work? Go to the highest paying venue. The New Yorker, for example. Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s and others pay extremely well also, because they have the most readers–and in the literary area–the most prestige. I rarely go below 5 cents per word, except as a favor to someone I know, with a promise of more payment later. Good luck with it all–and I hope we get to meet you at a workshop in the future.
JJ, thanks. Great comments. (Should I add a trademark symbol on your name?) Thanks for mentioning the Eloise & Alice thing as well. It had bothered me; I forgot to include it. I too found it offensive. (The Parker knockoff is by a good writer, btw. And Parker finished some of Chandler’s work, so I doubt Parker would mind.) Sad about B&N. I couldn’t bring myself to go into one last week. I’m so mad at the brick-and-mortar decisions, even as I benefit from the Nook.
Kris,
Early this year I predicted that the Brick and Mortar book stores would be dead in two years. I may have been wrong, it may be one year.
I also predicted that the publishers might die out as well, and that is the one point that I disagree with you on. I cannot at present see a business model that will allow the publishers to survive. As Shatzkin says, we aren’t going to accept 25%. I get 35% on my $0.99 non-fiction books on Amazon, and I’ll be getting 70% on the upcoming $2.99 non-fiction books. The publishers can’t afford to pay me or you that percentage.
As to Indigo/Chapters, ever since I got my iPad I haven’t visited them very much. But when I do visit them, the book section shrinks every time.
Oh, and you are very popular in Canada. All of the writers I know up here know of you, and we all talk about you .
Wayne
http://wayneborean.ca
http://madhatter.ca
Yes, Wayne, but you and I want to control our business. So many writers just want to be taken care of. It’s rather sad. Traditional publishers will continue to exist, just like recording labels do. But in diminished capacity, just like recording labels. Otherwise we agree.
Thanks!
Kris, I’ve been following your blog for awhile, since it came to my attention via Frankie Robertson, and then again via PG. Thanks for being a voice for empowerment and inspiration, rather than fear!
It seems to me a lot of writers are having significant trouble seeing the bigger picture in the industry and where the industry fits into the overall market. I’ve twice been a business owner and still have a day job in IT in addition to my fiction career. Having a business focus has always been a part of how I define myself. My first experience with an industry crash came a decade ago from inside IT as firms in the industry were forced to remake themselves with more functional business models or face certain annihilation. (Along with every other industry that has fallen into the trap of taking customers for granted.) Publishing was one of those that I was certain was up next, and when I said that aloud back in 2003, everyone thought I was either delusional or a fatalist. (Does this mean I can claim supernatural powers to make predictions come true?)
Like the music industry, IT had no choice but to become more consumer- and content-driven. If customers aren’t getting what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and at the price point they want it for, they will go elsewhere. The elsewhere is a place where their wallet’s vote is considered valuable, acknowledged. Sometimes that acknowledgement is in the form of video games and streaming movies instead of books. Game developers treat their customers like royalty in comparison to how publishing treats their intelligent lifeblood, all the while assuming with great arrogance that they are the best judge of what their readers want, that readers can’t be trusted, and that they know best from among which titles readers should be *allowed* to pick. Readers have been treated as incidental for so long by trad publishers that it’s not surprising authors have been, as well. Propaganda is an amazing thing. If enough publishers and agents say that you must be a carpet in order to be in print, and they say it loud and often enough, everyone starts to believe that is just the way it is – better get used to it. Especially if the writer holds the assumption that they can’t do it on their own, with or without help, and that only the sacred blessing of a traditional house can save them from the doom of unpublished obscurity. Everyone is afraid except those self-published folks who are willing to step up, despite whatever fear they might feel, and own their work and their business. Those are the folks, to use your analogy, who are jumping from the Titantic to their own yacht. I recently signed a contract with a small press that was extremely fair, for a short in an upcoming anthology. I honestly can’t conceive of signing a contract with clauses the likes of which PG has been dissecting on his blog of late. There is simply no amount of money in the universe that is worth signing away all your basic rights. Your work, your creativity does not belong to anyone else and its unethical to ask someone to sign away those rights. Traditional publishers, it seems to me, are interested in owning and controlling an author’s entire life, not just their product. The more information that is available about contracts, royalties, the current business models and the fairy tales that the long-standing propaganda has seeded among the writing masses, the more, I hope, a healthy fearlessness will catch fire. (Hey, even the business-minded can have idealistic moments).
Roxy
Thanks, Roxy. Good points all. You’re preaching to the choir with me. I have been thinking about some of these things as well, particularly the part about forcingreaders into a mold. Ever since I typed in that Shatzkin thing, I’ve been noodling with it. So something may come of that. But thanks again for the good points.
45 days? can they cut their throats any more comprehensively? By the time a book gets reviewed in the newspaper- it will be off the shelf. I have never been able to get my hands on a Jennifer Cruise novel at the bookstore, even though I go directly after reading an interview with her. I want to see a book, and check a few pages, before buying it. Is that so crazy a notion?
Thank you for all of your good sense and hard work in this arena.
Oh, I hate to tell you, Ari, but they can cut their throats more comprehensively. When I started in book publishing in the late 1980s, the “turn” (meaning how long a book remained on the shelf) was 30 days max. Some books only had two weeks on the shelf. Then the big box stores came in with a lot of room, and that lengthened. So 45 days is still better than the 1980s…
But yeah, your point is well taken. It is almost impossible, in 45 days, to build word of mouth.
The viral video of the two year old trying to turn the pages of a real magazine as she does on the iPad says it all.
Actually, Virginia, I see the viral video not as a metaphor but as an example of fascinating parenting. So Mommy & Daddy are using an iPad to raise Baby. Me, I’d give my toddler $2 books for kids so the toddler can rip, tear, color, and eat those books like toddlers do. Not a $600-800 iPad that might have weird chemicals that hurt Baby when Baby puts the iPad in her mouth. But that’s just me…