Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In 2009, Mat Kearney came out with a song called Closer to Love, which is, apparently, a favorite of the DJs on the station I listen to. It still plays in rather heavy rotation for an older song, and I hear it at least once a week. The song isn’t one of my favorites, but it has a line that stops me every time I hear it, because it’s so true.

We are, as Kearney states, just a phone call from our knees.

Dean and I have had those calls throughout our lives together—when my father died, when Dean’s stepfather died. The calls that just take your every day life and turn it into a completely new life, one that changes things so utterly, you can barely remember what life was like before that moment.

We had one in August. Our friend Bill Trojan had died, leaving Dean as the executor of an estate so messy that a lawyer friend of mine (who handles estates) called it one of the top ten estate stories of all time. My friend did not mean that in a good way.

Our lives changed in that moment and, I swear, almost cost Dean his life one night. He blogged about this after the estate closed in February. Even though his blog is extremely clear, it doesn’t quite convey the pressures of living in this high-stress environment for months on end.

And that comes after years of dealing with changes in our profession, some of which we’ve only begun to understand in hindsight. It comes on the heels of some difficult changes in our personal life, which I’m not going to go into here. We went from high stress to high stress for almost a decade, and then, just as it seemed the stress would ease, Bill died, and we realized that we had no idea what stress was.

I’m not writing about this to complain. We’re both honored by our friend’s trust in us, and we’re trying to do our best by him. We both miss him every day that we go without a curmudgeonly phone call, filled with both complaints, laughter, and trenchant observations about the world.

It is simply an acknowledgement of the fact that Bill’s death not only caused a disruption in our day-to-day lives, tore up our hearts, and changed how we live, but it also had an impact on our writing.

Professional writers who’ve been to our Oregon workshops—the Master Class in particular—call these events “life rolls.” When we taught the Master Class, we (along with Loren Coleman) invented a role-playing game that mimicked the way a long-time professional writer’s career works. Before I go any farther, no, we’re not teaching the Master Class right now, because publishing is in such flux that we have no idea how to present it in a way that will be useful to professionals five years from now.

Maybe, some day, we’ll do it again. Once things settle down.

Back to the role-playing game, which we called (unoriginally) the Game, we had disruptive events coincide with every writer’s role-played career. Those events were called “life rolls.” Sometimes they were positive—for example, you got married (of course, you’d lose money for the cost of the wedding plus weeks (maybe months) of work, but you might not have to pay all the bills on your own any more).  More often than not, the rolls were disruptive. We took one bestseller (in the game) out for five years with a succession of life rolls that prevented her from working.

For years after the Game’s invention, our students would send us personal experiences and add, “This belongs in the Game as a life roll.”

Yep. Bill’s death belongs in the Game as a life roll.

In order to deal with this monster estate in a timely way—a way that wouldn’t permanently eat up what little funds Bill had left and our own savings—Dean let almost everything else go.  He tried to write in September and somehow managed to finish some really good stories, but as October and November came along, he simply couldn’t concentrate any longer—at least, not on something like writing.

He is only now turning his attention back to writing, eight months after we got that knee-dropping phone call. And I’m pleased he’s doing so. I also understand the struggle. When my dad died, I couldn’t read or write for six months (which plunged me into a living hell, because everything I do involves reading and writing). The counselor I was seeing at the time told me such reactions are normal, and it would ease, but in the middle of it all, it seems like there is no way out.

When we realized how hard it would be to deal with Bill’s estate, we agreed that one of us had to keep our day jobs, which meant that I had to keep writing rather than go to Eugene every week with Dean to clean up the mess that Bill had left behind.

I finished a novel, continued to write this blog, wrote some other nonfiction, and finished three novellas. The novel and the novellas were real struggles, which I blamed on the projects themselves. The nonfiction wasn’t as hard, partly because I used to work in radio on a daily (sometimes hourly) deadline, and I’d trained myself to write fact and opinion under the most difficult of circumstances.

I started the next novel on the schedule and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, never feeling like I was getting traction, always feeling confused and out of sorts. I wasn’t finishing anything, even though I produced my daily word count plus, and I’d often have to review what I wrote just to remember where I was.

The year from hell continued, with lots of other disruptions, so that we got to the point where we actually hated to hear the phone ring in the hours before we got up. (People who don’t know us call then; our friends call in an emergency.) I keep track of the day in my desk calendar, and not a week went by without me losing an entire workday to an emergency of one sort or another.  Yet I persevered, continuing work on the never-ending novel, taking time to write a short story or two under deadline, and this column as well.

Until earlier this week, when I swear that my brain melted. I looked at the book and realized I had 100,000 out-of-order words with no real hope of figuring out what I was doing or where I was.

I talked to Dean about it, and he finally convinced me to let him help. He would read the book and see if he could find the common thread or if I had written past my ending or if I even had a book at all.

I told him I had no idea why this book wasn’t working and why, even though I was writing, I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around what was happening.

He smiled at me. He then gently reminded me that we’d had a heck of a life roll in the fall.

I shook my head. He had the life roll. Look at that blog post of his: he went through a lot. I stayed home and worked.

“Sometimes,” he said, “being the support staff is harder.”

I disagreed then, and I disagree now. I’ve never seen a man work that hard in my life. That hard or that long or with that much focus. I was, and am, impressed.

Yet I know he was right about being support staff. My brain was busy these past eight months with Real Life. Imaginary worlds just weren’t as vivid or as important as they usually were—and that included other people’s books, television, and  movies. I had little patience for anything that didn’t grab my attention immediately.

I had an unacknowledged life roll.

And I had to acknowledge it—not just acknowledge it, but also acknowledge that for me, at least, it still continues. In the past two months, two more friends have died and so has my uncle. The friends, while not close friends, were still people I enjoyed and who passed away too soon (one at 50, the other at 62). My uncle, whom I hadn’t spent a lot of time with since I moved out West, was an influential person in my childhood, and so losing him was,  in a sense, the reminder of the loss of an era.

Plus the deaths resonated with Bill’s, and with my thoughts of late. Dean and I are putting our own estate in order, and I have started a series that will eventually appear on the blog about estate planning and small business. Part will go in the Freelancer’s Guide, because I realized I had missed that topic, and part will appear here, in the Business Rusch. And then I’ll combine it all into something that stands alone.

Yep. Another project. But one that’s necessary, I think.

The brain is starting to come back. And as it has, I realized I haven’t written about life rolls in quite this way. I wrote about setbacks in The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, but because I was dealing in general with freelancers, I didn’t talk about the way life rolls can impact writing.

And they do. Because like it or not, life rolls mess with our brains, our creativity, our energy, and our ability to concentrate.

I know this. I’ve known it for a long time. I have taught professional writers about this for more than ten years now.

In fact, I’ve just watched another friend go through this same kind of slog during the same period. Her father died a few days before Bill, and she had a novel due (and a real day job). She did her best, was just a little late, and only recently mentioned that writing feels fun again.

I reminded her about life rolls.

Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.

The fact is that no one does a job at 100% when something major is happening in life. We all lose focus and concentration. Some places offer family leave or compassionate time. Others put employees on reduced duties or take the employees off the complicated problems and put someone else on that job.

It’s just, as writers, we don’t have the luxury of putting someone else on the task. We either delay the deadline, slog through, or abandon the project altogether.

In the middle of this mess, a book dealer told me about Tony Hillerman’s first missed deadline, which occurred when Hillerman’s brother died, and Hillerman became executor of the estate. Hillerman had a long career and, from what the dealer told me, this happened in the middle of it. I’m sure the dealer—who is a good friend—was offering a sideways life lesson that I was ignoring.

I did my job. I finished my deadlines—except the one, the 100,000-word novel that needs an editorial eye, which it’s getting at the moment. I’ve kept my editor at the traditional publishing house informed as to what’s going on, and he’s understanding.

I’m not. I want to be robo-writer, the person who can write through anything. But I don’t know any writers like that. That’s why we included life rolls in the Game.

Some things just slow you down or take you out for a while. And while I understand that, I sure as hell don’t like it.

The thing is: I’m not sure if that 100,000-word novel would have been a mess even without the life roll. Every now and then, I take on a project that’s a stretch. Or sometimes it’s even beyond my current skill set. And I do that with or without a life roll. Those projects get tossed and restarted, redrafted usually, because I told the story in the wrong order or from the wrong character’s point of view, or I wrote until I figured out what the story was, and then I had to actually write that story, not the story about writing the story.

In other words, even when life is normal, my process is a messy one.

It all goes back to something Neil Gaiman said once. He said that something you write with a headache is as good as something you write when you’re feeling fine. And it shouldn’t be.

But it is.

So as messy as my life has been these past few months, as hard as it’s been to concentrate, I’m probably putting out the same ratio of good to bad stuff that I always do. It just feels worse than it is.

The key is something I tell my students: You have to give yourself a break. You must look at your work as if you still had a day job. If you’d call in sick to a real job, then don’t write today. If your boss would tell you that you’re being ineffectual and you need some time off so go home, dammit, then you should really knock off writing for the day. If you’d take a vacation or compassionate leave or family time at the day job, then do so as a writer.

Oh, that advice is so easy to give. So hard to take.

Dean told me two weeks ago, as more stuff happened in our lovely little spat of life rolls, that I should take April off. Instead, I’ve written my usual number of words of fiction, my weekly blog, and a few other nonfiction pieces. I’ve also started the major research on the estate article.

I didn’t want to take April off. But I did want to quit focusing on the Impossible Book. So I started a project just for me, something fun. And I’ve knocked off early more nights than not. I’m actually caught up on my television viewing for the first time in years. I’ve read two novels on the day they arrived in the mail, something I haven’t done in longer than I care to think about.

And I’m starting to noodle the idea of a vacation. Somewhere easy. Somewhere close. Somewhere fun.

Life rolls knock all of us to our knees, whether the rolls come by telephone or via e-mail or by a simple knock on the door.  We’ll all spend some time on that floor wondering how the hell we got there.

The key is not that we’ve fallen, not even how long we remain on our knees with our hands hiding our faces, but how many times we’re willing to get up. Once we get up again, then we go forward in the new reality, forging a new path.

My students have heard me say that countless times, and I’ve spoken from experience. But it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve said it or how many times I’ve lived it: I still need someone else to remind me about how difficult life rolls are and how different we are after we’ve recovered from them.

Don’t hear me wrong: I’m not giving anyone an excuse to skip writing. I’m telling you to evaluate your life and realize that at times, the writing will be hard, the business will be hard, life will be hard.

All we can do is get through that, and then go back to what we love.

Sometimes the key to surviving a life roll is to just get through it.

I hope I will do so with the same grace under pressure that Dean has shown these past eight months. He’s been amazing. In fact, when that knee-knocking phone call came last August—and it was a phone call—I’m not even sure Dean went down. He just started moving forward with great purpose and a built-in recognition that everything had changed.

Apparently it takes me longer.

I guess it’s time to deal with the fact that I’ve had a life roll. Now I need to deal with the fallout from it.

Time to stand up and face the music.

I just hope the music isn’t a three-year-old Mat Kearney song with a devastating lyric. I’d like to listen to something else for a while.

I’ve written this blog now for three years (Jeez, as long as that stupid song has been out), and I generally focus on business. When I was writing the Freelancer’s Guide in this space, I remembered the emotional component of business. I’ve been ignoring it of late. I’ll bring bits of the emotional side back in as I continue.

Thanks to all of you who support the blog. If you like what you read, if you’ve learned something, if you’re a frequent visitor, please leave a tip on the way out. The interaction, from comments to donations, keeps me writing the blog. So thank you.

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“The Business Rusch: “One Phone Call From Our Knees,” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This week, the Department of Justice filed its lawsuit against Apple and five publishers. Three publishers settled immediately with two, as of this writing, going forward—Penguin and MacMillan.

I am not a lawyer, so I cannot comment on the filing.  A few have, including Charles Petit on his website. He points out various things not discussed in the filing, how the filing shows multiple hands on the complaint (legal and “policy wonks”), and talks about other publishing concerns.

The story hit all the major news outlets. Let me caution you as you read these news articles: reporters are generalists. They have to be or they can’t do their jobs well. As generalists, they must rely on “experts” and “analysts” to interpret a news story, particularly one like this, which relies on some arcane knowledge of an arcane industry (publishing), some technical knowledge of a technical industry (e-commerce), and a legal education in both politics of the law and the law itself (to understand the DOJ).

A reporter is only as good as her sources. And on a story like this, reporters usually have no sources at all because publishing is a poorly covered industry. Most reporters hope to break into “real” writing one day (“real” writing being getting a book published), so they’re both in awe of the publishing industry and afraid of rocking a boat while covering it.

In other words, what you read in the mainstream press comes from sources of dubious provenance, press conferences (the DOJ), statements from the parties involved (usually drafted by lawyers to avoid any legal issues), and whatever is in the media already (usually misinformation or partial information). Add to that the need to cover a complicated case in either a story that lasts 30 seconds to two minutes (TV/radio) or in about 1,000 words (print/blogs), and you have the makings of severe misunderstandings.

What does the DOJ case mean for writers, traditional or indie?

Um…no one knows.

Not yet, anyway. It depends on how things transpire. If MacMillan and Penguin settle, then we can actually discuss what the case means for us, if anything. Sometimes large corporate lawsuits have an impact on the vast business in its internal practices, but means nothing to the cogs in the machine (us small fry). Sometimes large corporate lawsuits change everything.

Is this one a game-changer? Again, we don’t know.

We would be having a different discussion if we worked at Penguin or Apple or MacMillan right now. Or if we worked at (or ran) Amazon or Barnes & Noble. (The announcement of the filing had an immediate negative impact on B&N’s stock price, for example)

Readers might also see some kind of impact years down the road, especially if we bought books through the iBookstore. As Michael Cader in Publishers Lunch pointed out on Wednesday, don’t expect any immediate changes in any ebookstore, including Apple’s iBookstore. The settlements aren’t final for the three publishers—there’s a sixty-day review period in which anyone can comment on the terms of that settlement directly to the Justice Department—and of course, the lawsuit against the other two publishers and Apple has just been filed, not litigated. (And if you don’t know the difference in those terms, you’d better not be writing mystery novels and/or ever bring a lawsuit yourself.)

So pretty much anything you see in the press aside from the facts of the filing itself is most likely speculation.

Although you won’t be able to tell it’s speculation from all the screeching that is already going on.

Why didn’t they go after Amazon? the pundits are asking. Amazon is the Big Bad here. Forgetting, of course, that the five publishers and Apple were responding to Amazon’s domination of the marketplace in 2008-2010 when the actions cited by the DOJ occurred.

And as Charles Petit points out, a resolution in this case will have an impact on Amazon and Amazon’s relationship to its publishers because Amazon also uses a term in its contracts that Apple used in its—the Most Favored Nation clause. This clause was specifically cited by the DOJ, and referred to in the settlement with the three publishers.

If the Most Favored Nation clause becomes poisonous in relationships between Apple and its publishers, then it follows that the clause will become poisonous to other retailers and the publishers they deal with.

All of that is arcane legal stuff that I barely understand.

However, I do understand two things: the impact a lawsuit of any type has on a business, and the subtle effect that media coverage has on perception.

Let’s deal with the impact of a lawsuit first.

If you’ve read this blog for the past three years, you’ll notice that I often advise you to settle problems early to avoid even the possibility of lawsuit. For writers, that usually means making certain that you understand contract terms so that you know what you’re signing. You have to know what you’re giving up as well as what you’re settling for. You have to know how those terms will apply to a successful project as well as an unsuccessful one.

A corporate lawyer friend of mine has stated his position repeatedly: if a case goes to court, someone has failed. Not because they’ve failed at negotiating their contract, or because they’ve done something wrong, but because someone—somewhere—has been intransigent and is unwilling to compromise. [Note that my friend is a corporate attorney, not a criminal one. He works in the civil side of the law, which, by the way, is where the DOJ brought this lawsuit. It’s not a criminal complaint, but a civil one.]

Avoiding court and all that a legal case entails has been my friend’s job for decades. Even before I knew him, I did my best to avoid court even when I had the law on my side.

Lawsuits cost both time and money. Often, the only winners in a case are the lawyers themselves.  Lawyers bill for their time. They get paid money for that time. Lawyers will profit from a lawsuit because that’s how their business is structured. Most people’s businesses aren’t structured that way. If you’re being sued—or if you’re doing the suing—you will lose both time and money. You will not profit.

John Sargent of MacMillan is standing on principle—or so it seems from the statement he released on Wednesday. He is clearly aware of the benefits of a settlement. He writes, “It is always better if possible to settle these matters before a case is brought. The costs of continuing—in time, distraction, and expense—are truly daunting. But the terms the DOJ demanded were too onerous….”

He goes on to explain the legal thinking from MacMillan. Then he adds (and I think this is his true point), “It is also hard to settle a lawsuit when you know you have done no wrong.”

From our (the writers) perspective, what John Sargent and the other CEOs did or did not do doesn’t matter. That is truly a matter for the courts now—at least in the case of MacMillan, Penguin and Apple.

But Sargent’s insistence on his innocence here opens his company to all kinds of risk that he clearly hasn’t considered. Seeking Alpha, a website devoted to stock market opinion, analysis and “vibrant, intelligent finance discussion,” Dana Blankenhorn has an article titled, “Apple, E-Books And The DOJ: Even If You’re Right, You’re Wrong,” which is a fascinating look at what the costs of a case like this to a company.

Blankenhorn, a business journalist who spent years covering the Microsoft antitrust case, focuses on Apple in his discussion as well he should. Apple is publically traded and its stock is riding high at the moment.  Blankenhorn believes this suit will have a serious negative impact on Apple’s creative culture, and he may be right. He dismisses out of hand the impact of the suit on MacMillan and Penguin, saying they can compartmentalize.

He’s wrong about that.

But his point about Apple is valid. Let’s just look at it in a publishing context.

He writes, “Simply put, having Justice Department lawyers around is bad for any company. Especially anti-trust lawyers…. That’s due to the peculiarities of the antitrust law—actions that seem perfectly natural in any other context take on a whole new meaning when you’re seen as trying to create, or enforce, monopoly rents. The result is that stuff has to be saved, things have to be remembered and (more important) hands have to be stayed before they do many normal business activities….Apple has plenty of cash to fight this. That’s not the issue. The issue is what happens when lawyers go into other departments….”

The problem here for the publishing companies is that, as part of this suit, the Justice Department will be looking at book prices and profits. When you look at book prices and profits in an old-fashioned business like publishing, which has really not updated its computer systems to account for e-books in particular, you will be looking at accounting practices.

Accounting practices include royalty statements, and relationships with authors. Many of the bigger publishers have fudged the royalty statements and their e-book accounting systems, either deliberately or because of antiquated systems. See this post to understand what I mean. In at least one case, systems have not yet changed within the publishing house.

If the two publishers involved in the actual case change their accounting practices now, is it something the DOJ will look at as a way to avoid parts of the lawsuit? Is it just normal business practices? Or is it something more sinister?

Because as Blankenhorn writes, “actions that seem perfectly natural in any other context take on a whole new meaning” when antitrust lawyers are investigating a company.

Personally, if I were CEO of a publishing company being pursued by the DOJ, I’d settle like HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster did, even if I had done nothing wrong.

The costs of having lawyers, intent on finding misdeeds, examine the way that these businesses are run would be too high for me to risk–again, even if I had done nothing wrong.

Blankenhorn points out that Microsoft won its case with the DOJ after fifteen years. He believes the fight seriously damaged Microsoft and turned it from a competitive company into one that isn’t competitive.

He adds, “I know from having covered the story what the presence of the Department of Justice lawyers did to Microsoft over many, many years. This is a path I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

Right or wrong, the CEOs of MacMillan and Penguin are taking huge risks with their companies at a time when the entire industry is struggling.

So what does this mean for writers?

As a writer who keeps one foot in traditional publishing, I’ll be keeping my eye on the earnings reports from MacMillan and Penguin, the sideways news stories that come out of this case, and on the companies’ overall good health. Because there is stuff to be found in the accounts of most traditional publishers due to old-fashioned systems, neglect, and long-standing disregard for contracts and contract terms. Today’s decisions by two major publishers will have an impact that will be felt in a variety of ways. We just don’t know what those ways are.

Now let’s discuss media coverage.

The media will lose interest in this case relatively quickly because they don’t understand it. If they do cover it, they’ll cover it from the perspective of Apple and tech companies, not from the perspective of publishers. We’re seeing that already. When the news broke on Wednesday, I had to go through three different articles to find out which publishers settled and which didn’t. In some ways, I’m being as negligent as some of the journalists, because I’m not going into the filing and getting the names of the divisions of the corporations and/or conglomerates actually named in the suit. In other words, I’m not being specific either, partly because I’m lazy and partly because I hate reading legalese unless it pertains directly to my own career.

(All right: 90% lazy, 10% legalese)

So how will the media coverage impact indie and traditional writers? Simply put: pricing.

I’m on a lot of listserves with other professional writers, and for the most part, the majority of the listserves haven’t even discussed the DOJ filing. Most writers who’ve been in this business for a long time know that this stuff is above their pay grade and whatever happens happens. Some writers, though, seem to have just become aware that something happened—even though this has been in the wind for months—and are now panicking based on mainstream media reports, worried that the suit will cause theft of the writers’ profits (!) (These writers should really look to their contracts first. I’ll wager the writers signed contracts that’ll hurt them worse than any DOJ suit will.)

The DOJ case is about collusion to set prices and to keep those prices artificially high. Whether or not that actually happened is another matter, and will eventually be determined (or not) as the case goes along.

But as the media reports this, talk of e-book prices has hit the airwaves for the first time, as far as some consumers are concerned.   Richard Alan Dickson, a businessman turned writer, made this comment on one listserve I’m on (and I reprint it here with permission):

“For those who might still fear the suggestion of raising their e-book novel prices above $2.99, or $3.99, or $4.99, think about what the general public will be hearing as this issue spins in the press for the next few weeks….Will your e-books priced at $6.99 or $7.99 (and even, gasp, $8.99) really be considered too expensive when the press spins a price of $9.99 as selling a book at a loss?” [emphasis mine]

I learned long ago that people listen to media coverage with half an ear. And one phrase that’s being repeated over and over and over again in this coverage is exactly the one that Rick pointed out: publishers consider novels sold at $9.99 underpriced. Sold at a loss. Cheap. (Look at NBC Nightly News’s coverage of this story on the day it broke as an example of what I mean.)

In other words, folks, those of us publishing indie will actually benefit from this week’s press coverage—if we are willing to price our books above bargain basement pricing (free/99cents/$1.99).  The media is repeating that $9.99 novels are bargains. And those listening with half an ear will absorb that thought, and never examine it. So when they see your e-book priced under $10, they know they’ll be getting a bargain.

And those folks pricing at 99 cents or $1.99? Well, their books will be treated like those books sitting outside a bookstore in bins to attract customers. Readers usually give those books a glance, then walk on by. Only readers looking for something special or bargain hunters actually stop.

I want readers to buy my books the moment they come out, not because the books are cheap or on some bargain shelf. I want readers to see that the books have value.

Ironically, traditional writers are running scared, because their publishers are running scared. Amazon has already announced that it will lower e-book prices on some titles, most likely titles from the companies involved in the DOJ suit.

So what kind of impact will the DOJ suit have on writers? Hell  if I know. But I do know that the media coverage will have a positive impact on the indie writers who price their books between $4.99 and $9.99.

The coverage is doing us a favor.

The rest of it…

Well, let me simply say that I’m glad I’m not Penguin, MacMillan or Apple going forward. I have a lot of lawyer friends, and no disrespect to them but I’d hate to have to do my job with a bunch of lawyers looking over my shoulder. That’s the future for those three companies.

Me, I’m going to follow my own advice on indie book pricing, continue to read the publishing business trades, and look at the earnings reports for the companies involved.  That’s the extent of my knowledge and involvement in this lawsuit. It should probably be yours as well.

A lot of traditional publishing has just discovered direct-to-consumer marketing (yeah, I know. Head-shaking). This blog is direct to consumer because I designed it that way three  years ago in the deepest darkest part of the Great Recession. I wanted to advise freelancers on how to survive as they started their new businesses (more businesses start in a recession than at any other time). I did that with The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, which is still free on this website, and will have a new edition at the end of the month.

But at the urging of readers, I continued this when I finished the Guide, and then because I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room, I decided to focus on publishing. You can read all of the blog posts for publishing if you follow this link.

When I write this blog, it takes a hefty chunk of my weekly output and turns it away from fiction which is where I make my living. So I do need financial support to keep the blog going.

If you got any value out of this or previous posts, please leave a tip on the way out. Thanks!

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“The Business Rusch: Writers And The DOJ Lawsuit” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Last year, I wrote a series of posts on how writers of all stripes can survive the transition from the old world of publishing to the new world of publishing. I’ve updated the posts and compiled them into an e-book called Surviving The Transition: How Writers Can Thrive In The New World Of Publishing. This book is for established writers, new writers, writers who want to stay in traditional publishing, and writers who never want to join traditional publishing.

Here’s the cover blurb:

Most writers run their careers the same way they did in the 1990s. But publishing has changed so much since then that any writer who works on the old model will no longer make a living. 

In this short book, international bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows you how to think about the new world of publishing, who to trust, and who not to trust. 

She also gives you a blueprint for survival—what to learn, what to ignore, and how to find help. If you are a successful professional writer—or hope to become one—then this book is for you. 

You can order the book in all e-bookstores, including Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords. If you want to read the older versions for free, click on this link and start with “Writing Like It’s 1999.”

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My website crashed just over a week ago, through no fault of my own. My ISP had a catastrophic server meltdown that took more than 36 hours to fix.

I had a startling realization in those 36 hours. This website has become an important part of my business.

Now, to many of you, that’s a well, duh. You’ve been coming here faithfully every Thursday for nearly three years. Some of you come for the free fiction on Monday, and the novel excerpt that appears in the middle of the month, and the recommended reading list. Many of you show up every time I make a short post or put up an announcement.

I appreciate that.

I didn’t really realize, however, how big this website had grown until it disappeared. Let me explain.

I’ve had a website for more than fifteen years. I got my first one while I still edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a job I quit at the end of 1996, although my issues of the magazine continued to appear for the first half of 1997.  I don’t remember what promoted me to get the website. I do recall writing an editorial about it, and having a reader correct me about the proper way to write down my website’s URL. I had no clue how it all functioned back then.

Now we call what I had a static website. It simply informed people who I was, what I did, and what books I had published. Not too many people had websites back then. Not too many people were on what we called “the worldwide web” back then either. Websites weren’t all that important.

Over time, I changed service providers. I expanded the site a bit. I got a lot of volunteer help designing the site, and keeping it up, which was really, really beyond me. Web hosting was expensive, so I hired a nice little service out of Seattle to handle it for me.

My website crashed once every quarter at least, but so did everyone else’s. What irritated me then was that my main e-mail ran through my site, and when the site crashed, so did the e-mail. I really didn’t care about the website disappearing, but a day without e-mail was worse than a day without sunshine.  Most of my business came through my e-mail, even all those years ago, so the silence was deafening.

Then I switched to the current provider, and while the site is hard to get to during maintenance, it’s rarely down for more than ten minutes. Until this past weekend.

And that’s when I realized how much things had changed.

When I designed the new site several years ago, I wanted it to run like a magazine, with regular features and reliable commentary. What I thought I would do and what I’ve actually done are very different things. The only thing remaining from my early vision is the Recommended Reading List.

The Business Blog came out of The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, which I wrote on my blog during the worst of the recession to help people whose layoffs forced them to freelance. Freelancing is hard, and I didn’t want them to fail when they had no safety net. The Guide is still on this site for free, and you can get the book as well. (Be warned, I’m currently updating parts of it. The second edition will be out later this year.)

I started the free fiction  a year ago Thanksgiving, and enjoy doing that. Plus it gives me incentive to put my backlist at the top of the work priority list so that I don’t repeat stories.

Weirdly enough, e-mail isn’t nearly as important as it used to be. I can reach almost all of my e-mail contacts through Facebook or Twitter or (heaven forbid!) the phone. It’s easier now than ever for my business colleagues to reach me. I’m not just relying on one tool there.

But the website isn’t static any more. More than 3,000 people a day come here most days, and significantly more on Thursday.  I am running that magazine that I wanted to run, and through the donations that I get on this blog, I’m funding it as well.

In the last fifteen years, my website went from “oh, yeah, I have a website too,” to the main way that my friends, fans, and colleagues interact with me online. It is, stunningly enough, the centerpiece of my writing business.

I knew that, but I didn’t know that. I think somewhere in my head, it was still the static website of the 1990s.

My business had grown in an unexpected manner, and I hadn’t even realized how big it had gotten.

What that means is that the service I bought from my ISP is much too limited for something of this importance. I need to move away from the cheapest service to one that gives me daily back-ups, a mirrored site (if I can find it), a rebuild, and more importantly, I need to back-up off-site regularly which I hadn’t been doing.

Before the crash, the last off-site backup I had done was in November, and then only because I was updating my word press theme. I have to change my habits, but more than that, I have to change my way of thinking.

My website is more than a promotional tool. It’s now an integral part of my business, and I must treat it that way.

What I’ve experienced here is something I’ll call “sneaky growth.” Most growth isn’t dramatic at all. It just happens, and we flow with it, making small accommodations along the way, but never really considering what that means.

Sneaky growth is the easiest to deal with and in some ways, the hardest to deal with.  Generally speaking, improper growth can kill a business. All good businesses predict their annual growth, and most businesses miss.

Most businesses miss by a small margin on their estimates and no one thinks anything of it. But if you routinely read stock reports (and sadly, I do), you realize that when a business misses its growth projection by too much or too little, the stock price tanks.

That’s right. You understood me. If the business didn’t grow as much as predicted, the stock price goes down. We all expect that. But if a business grew more than predicted, the stock price also goes down. Why? Because rapid and unexpected growth kills more businesses than an unexpected loss.

This is a hard concept to understand, but Dean and I lived it when we were doing Pulphouse Publishing.  We had a growth plan when we started the business. Our first product, the hardback magazine, was a limited edition, set at 1200 copies. I recall doing our first projected profit-and-loss statement on the dining room table. We figured we’d sell maybe 200 copies of the first book, and the growth would be slow. So we did all our finances based on that.

Toward the end of the evening, I asked Dean to pencil out what would happen if we sold the entire run. He laughed, and said, “We’ll make a fortune.”

We did sell out the run before it was published, and had a waiting list for all of our books. And while we did make a fortune, we also spent a fortune plus some. The problem was pretty simple: our expenditures came first. The money came 90 days after the books got shipped to market.

We started that business in the hole, and we never really recovered. That we actually built the business from that mistake was both a good and a bad thing. It was good in the sense that we learned a lot, produced a lot of good books, and wouldn’t be where we’re at now without that experience. It was bad in the sense that we paid for it and paid for it and paid for it, long after we closed the doors. The amount of money that we lost on Pulphouse Publishing is staggering by today’s dollars. It was really staggering then.

All because we grew too fast—and we didn’t plan for it.

We’ve been on guard against rapid growth ever since then, and now whenever we start a business (and we’ve started a few since Pulphouse), we plan for no-growth, too-much growth, and not-quite-enough growth, as well as desired growth.

Most writers expect too much growth when they start. Last week, I covered how writers take on employees much too early, often in anticipation of a growth that might never happen.Those writers will never make a living at writing, because their expenses are too high for their actual income—and will always be that way.

There are other ways that writers expect too much growth. In fact, most writers publish one book and expect it to sell either a million copies and/or make them a million dollars. When it doesn’t do that, the writers get upset and quit.

That expectation is why so many writers constantly promote their works. These writers never do the math. They never think about the fact that they can’t reach their million readers by advertising or blogging or doing interviews. They can reach their million readers over years in a slow-growth method, if those writers write more than one book per year.

It’s pretty simple. People get tired of a single product and they lose interest in it. Or they were never interested at all.  But if you offer more than one product, then there’s more to tempt them. And once they’ve bought one thing—and consumed it (in our case, read it)—then they’re likely to become repeat customers.

James Patterson and Nora Roberts did not become repeat New York Times bestselling writers by selling to a new and different bunch of readers with each book. Patterson and Roberts (and every other bestselling writer that you’ve heard of) have a core readership that expands with each book.

I have more than 100 of Roberts’ novels in my house—and that’s not her entire output because I don’t read everything she writes. Dean has at least 30 Patterson books, maybe more, and he doesn’t read everything Patterson writes. I don’t read Patterson (except the one book Dean made me read) and he doesn’t read Roberts (except the one book I made him read), and I doubt either one of us will change.

But I’m one of Roberts’ core readers and Dean’s one of Patterson’s. And every day, some other reader picks up one of their books, likes it, then searches out both the new releases and the back-list.

That’s how writers grow a readership. Not by doing ads. (How many of you bought Patterson’s latest book based on the Nook ad that he did? If any of you did, was it because you were a core reader and were startled to realize that he had a book out? I can’t imagine that ad brought Patterson new readers. However, I suspect the ad brought the Nook new purchasers, and that’s what it was designed for. That’s why Barnes & Noble paid for the ad, not James Patterson. Patterson, at the time of the ad, had more customers than the Nook did.)

So, unrealistic expectations on both ends of the spectrum—too high and too low—are dangerous to business.

And so, in its way, is sneaky growth for the very reason that I outlined up front.

I did not have the right website provider for my needs. It took a crisis for me to realize that. The fault was mine, not the ISP’s. I did not have enough insurance—for lack of a better term—to deal with the problem I was faced with.

Nor did I have the right tools to handle it either.

Sneaky growth is a problem that writers often don’t recognize. Even if they do, those writers in traditional publishing have little control over it. The traditional publishers are the ones who deal with sneaky growth the most, and they usually mishandle it. Most of my traditional publishers have failed to handle my sneaky growth.

St. Martins Press never ever printed enough books to handle the demands of the Smokey Dalton series, and whenever a growth event happened (an Edgar nomination, a book tour!, an Entertainment Weekly  review), SMP didn’t take the books back to print to meet the demands. The company never sent me to Chicago bookstores, despite requests from the stores, and they often didn’t ship the books to booksellers who had put in late orders (after the first solicitation).

By taking the fourth book of my Fey series out of print and refusing to bring it back into print when the fifth book came out, Bantam Books effectively doomed that growing series.

A decision I made concerning sneaky growth killed one of my pen names. My agent at the time asked me if we should ask for a higher advance for those books. I agreed that she should try, and she got that advance. It was double the original advance. The next two books grew, but not at a rate that justified the advance. The publisher declined the next book. Why? Because the growth, while significant, wasn’t great enough to come close to that higher advance. The publisher didn’t want to “insult me” by asking me to take a smaller advance. In those days (the late 1990s), such a request simply wasn’t made. And to be honest, I’m not sure I would have taken the smaller advance. I would have thought I could get the same or greater money elsewhere. (I would have been wrong.)

Sneaky growth will be a problem for the indie writers who over-promote. Those writers will blame the growth on their promotion, and not on their writing skills. So those writers will miss the opportunity that the growth is providing them. Those writers will be so busy promoting that they won’t write the next book in a timely enough fashion to encourage the growth.

Note, please, that when I’m talking about the next book in this context, I’m not talking about the next book in a series. Just the next book under the same name. Readers come back. Not just series readers, but all readers. Readers believe if they like one book by a writer, they’ll like the next or the next after that.  So keep that in mind.

Another way that writers get surprised by sneaky growth is when we go out in public. A few years ago, I realized that my effectiveness as a teacher was waning because of the growth in my career. For many writers, I am the woman with some success in the front of the room. But for some writers, I am “Kristine Kathryn Rusch” their favorite author, and everything I say is True. This attitude makes any negative comment I make extremely damaging, and overinflates any positive comment I make into something so precious that it’s like liquid gold.

The other problem happens as well. Occasionally a writer will come to one of my classes to prove to me that I am as crappy and stupid a writer as they believe I am. (Why someone like that would spend the money to come to a class is beyond me, but they do.) So I limit my involvement in the teaching now to classes I can screen heavily, to make sure the writer-student is there for the right reason (their reason), not because of their reaction to me.

But it took a few uncomfortable classes to learn about that problem, a problem caused by the sneaky growth in my career.

This happens to writers who grow their way to a large fan base or a bestseller list. Stephen King used to faithfully attend the World Fantasy Convention, but he had to stop going when he could no longer walk the hallways without getting mobbed by fans. (He snuck into a few later on, but he could never enjoy them like he used to.) I watched the same thing happen to other writers over the years. I was rather surprised it didn’t happen to George R.R. Martin at the World Science Fiction Convention this past year, but I suspect that might the last worldcon where he can comfortably walk the halls.

Sneaky growth appears to the business owner after a marker makes it visible. The crash of my website for me, the inability to attend World Fantasy Con for Stephen King. That doesn’t make sneaky growth a problem, per se, but it does cause a change. Not in the business itself, but in your attitude toward it.

For years, you behaved one way. Now you can no longer behave that way because of the reality of your business. You probably should have made the changes some time ago, but you didn’t, because the growth was slow and steady and snuck up on you.

The way the changes in the website had snuck up on me. I was aware of the numbers of visitors that I had, but only in an abstract kind of way. It really got brought home to me when the site went down and I got dozens of e-mails and messages to my other accounts, informing me of it. (Thank you! Those helped.) Dean got more than a hundred messages about it as well.

It was both a lesson and a reminder. Growth happens in a lot of ways, some expected, some unexpected. The website grew while I was doing other things. Now I must make some changes, changes I probably should have made when the growth became obvious in the numbers, more than two years ago.

I’m playing catch-up now, which is what often happens with sneaky growth. It’s a nice problem to have, because with sneaky growth, the expenses usually don’t overpower the income like they do with rapid growth. Nor do the expectations overpower the reality, like they do with no-growth (or not-enough growth).

So I’m off to do research. But before I do, I want to thank those of you who have made this blog your Thursday destination. (And those of you who cross-over with the Monday folks [who are often a different group].) You’re one of the main reasons for the growth of this site. I appreciate it.

I also appreciate the financial support. Without it, the nonfiction side of this website wouldn’t exist. So, thanks, everyone. I could not do this work without you.

Click Here to Go To PayPal.

“The Business Rusch: “Sneaky Growth” copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: How To Make Traditional Publishing Writer-Friendly

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 A few weeks ago, Sebastian Marshall raised eyebrows throughout the writing community by writing an open letter to Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster.  Marshall identifies himself on his blog as a former entrepreneur who wants to become “the most skilled strategist of our era.” He freelances, and sold S&S his first book in December of 2010 for a $65,000 advance.

The book—which is a business book—had a due date of July 1, 2011. The contract called for payments in three increments. A third on signing, a third on acceptance, a third on publication, but no later than a year after acceptance. Standard stuff.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with publishing, this isn’t a large advance, especially considering the fact that it’s for world rights in all languages. For non-fiction, it’s a relatively middling advance, especially these days. Just so that you have a frame of reference.

His open letter says things went downhill from the moment the deal got made. And by downhill, he means that it took until March to get his final contract. Then he got his signing check six weeks after that.

Here’s the thing, y’all: this is normal. In fact, this is fast for traditional publishing.  Amazingly, he got a deal the week before Christmas (it almost never happens).  Then, factoring in the winter holidays, which were relatively short in 2010-2011 in publishing time, going only from December 24 to January 3 (meaning no one of import was in the office at that time, if anyone was there at all), the fact that he got his contract in the first quarter after the holidays ended is pretty startling. That’s the quarter it was due.

The book was (is?) clearly fast-tracked.

The six weeks from signing to payment might not be the publisher’s fault. They might have paid quicker, but the money had to go through an agent. Marshall didn’t say whether it took six-plus weeks for the check to arrive in his account or in his agent’s office. (I have had no agent who could cut a check within a week. Most took two, and one of the major agencies I was with took almost a month to cut a check. That’s right: they held onto my money for a month for no real reason except “policy.”)

So when I first read Marshall’s piece, I had the same thought his agent and editor had: He’s new. He’ll learn.

Then I read what he had to say.  Really read it.

In addition to the payment issues, he ran into another feature of publishing. Remember his business book got purchased because he’s a good businessman. In particular, he knows marketing and marketing strategy. So right after the book sold, he talked to the entire editorial team about his marketing ideas.

And the publisher didn’t implement a single idea. Again, not  unusual. Really, not. Except that someone kept giving the poor man deadlines to meet marketing goals as well as to write his book. For ideas no one planned to implement. That was just cruel.

But, folks, it’s normal for the editorial team to make marketing promises, and then go to the marketing team, only to have the  marketing team reject those promises. Marshall calls S&S out on that, not realizing that the entire industry is this way.

He writes:

“Here’s the thing—it’s the  year 2011, and you guys lack basic technology calendaring. Your editors don’t work with your marketers. There’s no rudimentary project management in place. There’s no consistency or fairness or transparency in the author’s contract process. You guys don’t keep your own promises….I think the system is the problem, it’s broken, and it should be fixed.”

Yep. That’s right.  For more than ten years, my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I have taught professional writers how to work inside  that system because it’s crazy-making if you don’t understand it.  A single writer can’t change it.  And if there weren’t alternatives these days, I would shrug and write off Sebastian Marshall as a guy who needs to learn how the business works.

But he’s not just some new writer who needs a clue. He’s a businessman who understands how to make businesses efficient. And he’s aware of what’s going on in other businesses, and the other options in his new business of writing.

And in this piece he writes something very important. He writes:

“I think you really ought to speed up. It’s not so hard. Modern businesses run fast, there’s people who know how to make that happen. Three months from agreement in principle to contract, followed by a six week breaching-of-contract delay? Not okay.”

You really ought to speed up. Modern businesses run fast.

They do run fast. Traditional publishing does not. It runs on 20^th century time. Early, pre-computer 20^th century time. For example, in today’s mail, Dean just got an advanced reading copy of a book he agreed to blurb, a book with a publication date of 2013. (You read that right. 2013. Spring. Eighteen months from now. And the book is done except for the proofing.)

Now realize as you read Marshall’s post, that nothing has gone wrong. His traditional publishing experience is—by traditional publishing standards—a damn good one.

He got a nice advance, he’s been treated well by the Simon & Schuster editorial department, he got a contract in the usual period of time, and he got paid relatively quickly in New York publishing terms. But this is a man who is used to working in the modern business world, and the experience he’s had has left him feeling angry, disrespected, “ignored, lied to,” “jerked around,” and oh, so much more.

He writes, “I’m a hell of a lot less sensitive than most artists; I’m not even an artist, really.”

And the kicker—for me, the truth to what he was saying—is this: “Most artists aren’t businessmen. So they’ll stay afraid, desperate, clinging to your company like a life-raft in a sea of obscurity and toil.”

Oh, boy, is that true. Oh, boy, do I want that to change.

Because we are in the midst of a huge change, a gigantic change, one in which we writers can essentially say, Take this crap you’re tossing at me and shove it.

We can change the industry from within, as long as we start demanding respect.

My initial attitude toward Marshall’s post was part of the problem, not part of the solution. Because he’s right. And the kicker is that he has been right for as long as I’ve been in the business which is (guessing) probably as long as he’s been alive.

The way that traditional publishing works is just plain ridiculous.

And we, as artists, don’t have to take it any more.

The nice thing is that we also don’t have to leave traditional publishing to change things.  If more of us who dislike how traditional publishing operates remain in traditional publishing, even part time, then we can change things for those clueless writers who will never understand that they deserve some respect.

Here’s how.

1. We make one-book deals.

Yes, yes, I know. Traditional publishers will offer you a lot more money for multibook deals. And isn’t a multibook deal security for the writer in a tough publishing environment?

In a word: No.

Right now, publishers are trying to lock up every single right they possibly can. They’re trying to lock up as much product (read: your books) as they possibly can for the best deal that they can possibly get.

If they successfully publish your first book with their company, then sign on for the second. Then if they do that well, sign on for the third.

Give them an incentive to court you. Make them work to keep you in their publishing house. They see it as security to have as many books under contract as possible, just like writers used to.

Do not give them that security.

And don’t believe the hype—from them or your agent. Your agent, by the way, will want the multibook deal. Why? From their business perspective, the multibook deal makes more sense. They get guaranteed money over a long period of time (15% of what you make). They don’t have to work for that money after the initial deal is completed.

Sure, they might have to make a phone call or two, track down a check or two, maybe nudge someone in the publishing house once or twice, but after that, the agent doesn’t have to do anything.

Compare that with renegotiating a deal every year, and running the risk of having the author walk away from that deal if the deal isn’t to the author’s liking. Twice the work for (maybe) half the pay.  If you were an agent, which deal would you argue for? The multibook deal, of course.

So your  agent, with skin in the game, cannot be trusted to advise you on this one. Trust me. I don’t know you. I have your needs as a writer at heart.

One book at a time.

If you don’t believe me, go back to my post called “Writers and Traditional Publishing Companies,” and look at what happened to Dr. Yvonne Thornton. Ask yourself, would you want to have a multi-book deal in her situation? The publishing company still exists after all, and they just might hold her to the contract, if the sales of the first book are good enough.

It’s better—and easier—to leave a company if they do badly with a one-book contract than it is with a two- or three- or ten-book contract.

Besides—and here’s the best part—if your one book does really really well, then you can negotiate for better terms on the next book. And even better terms on the third book.

You can’t do that with a multibook contract.

Ultimately, though, the one-book contract makes everyone act responsibly and stay on their game. If the publisher drops the ball, then you can walk—either to another publisher or to self-publishing.

If you drop the ball, then the publisher doesn’t have to work with you again. Really, it’s a win-win for both  you and the publisher (although not for the agent).  It’s not the way that things are done, but it’s the way that things should be done.

So hold out for your one-book contract and then….

2. Negotiate the hell out of that contract.

Note I use the word “negotiate.”  According to my handy dandy Encarta World English Dictionary, the word “negotiate” means “to attempt to come to an agreement on something through discussion and compromise.”

Discussion and compromise does not mean accepting the deal that you are offered because you’re afraid you’ll lose the deal. Nor does it mean fighting to the bitter end on every tiny unimportant detail.

You must figure out what the important details are to you, and then you must negotiate—either through an intermediate (agent, attorney) or on your own.  Do not skip this step. Always negotiate, and do so from a position of strength.

If your agent tells you that he doesn’t even want to attempt to negotiate certain parts of the deal that are important to you, then fire the agent. Or, if you don’t want to fire him, then take him off this deal, do not pay him 15% of this contract, and hire an attorney to handle the rest.

You can shepherd a negotiation, even if you aren’t talking to the other party. It’s not easy the first few times—in fact, it can be nerve-wracking—but you can learn to do it. If you’re scared of this and it makes you take bad deals, then look up the chapters on negotiation in my Freelancer’s Survival Guide. You can find them for free on this website, in the entire book The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, or in a short e-book called How To Negotiate Anything.

As for what you want from this deal, well, that will vary according to the reasons why you’ve gone into traditional publishing. Some writers might want an excellent e-rights percentage; others might not care so long as they have a huge advance with very few payouts.

Do make sure that you have a time limit on how long the publisher can exercise the rights in this book. I would suggest that the time limit is firm—three years, five years, ten years—and after that the contract terminates and must be renegotiated.

I used to say that there should be a “speed limit”— a certain number of books sold in a six-month period. But as an indie writer pointed out to me a few months back, all the publisher has to do is put the book up for free for a month, and that target will get hit.  A financial limit—the book must earn $200 in royalties paid to the author (not against the advance, which should be earned out) in a six month period—does not work either, because that simply becomes a fee for keeping the book.

Nope. Give the contract a firm end date, with a promise to renegotiate on the same terms. That will stop any publisher from keeping a book “in print” and holding onto the rights to that book, effectively, for the entire term of the copyright.

The more of us who make this clause non-negotiable, the more the publishers will have to eventually cave in. And you bestsellers—yeah, you guys, the ones with a lot of clout—do this. You’ll help the rest of us, and you’ll help yourselves. You will now have an escape route from a bad publishing company, one that disrespects you or has decided that your book is no longer worth their time and effort or one, like Yvonne Thorton’s above that might hang onto the book even though the book line and all publishing support has vanished.

One more thing: Do not sign a contract with a non-compete clause in it. That means anything masquerading as a non-compete clause. Those clauses do everything from tie you up, and prevent you from writing other books in your most profitable series, to preventing you from writing anything at all.

And if you think you avoided these non-compete clauses because you haven’t negotiated a contract in a few years, think again.  In the early 1990s, publishers tried to get me to sign non-compete clauses. I spoke to a writer last week who believed that non-compete clauses were boilerplate and couldn’t be negotiated away. (I wonder: Did the writer’s [truly incompetent] agent say that? Or did some editor way back as part of the negotiation? Either way, the poor writer believed it and has signed contracts with that clause for fifteen years.)

As you try to negotiate anything, you will hear your agents (in particular) and other authors telling you that negotiation is a bad idea. That you should be grateful to get a deal in this current publishing climate. If the person telling you this is your business advisor, this person should be fired.

A contract negotiation is a negotiation and should be treated as such. The writer has as much right to get terms important to her as the publisher does. Compromise where you can, but…

3. Walk away if the publisher refuses to budge on important matters.

I know, that’s a scary thought, especially for those of us who came of age in the bad old days when walking away from a deal meant that the book won’t get published. If you’re a bestseller, you will find someone else to take the property.

If no other traditional publisher is interested, consider self-publishing.

Here’s the truth of it, though: If you walk away, and the publisher really, really, really wants that book, the publisher will chase after you. The publisher may not offer what you want. The publisher might offer a compromise, which you should consider. But…

4. If you don’t like the terms, don’t sign the deal.

It’s that simple.  You have other options now. Make it clear to the publisher that you know you have other options, that you and this publisher are a team, and that they must behave as part of that team, not as the king of the publishing world. If they don’t respect you, then don’t work with them.

Period.

5. Once your contract is signed by both parties, it’s final.

These are the terms you’ve both agreed to. Both of you. Not just you, but the publisher as well. Until the publisher signs the contract, you do not have a valid contract. So if you change your mind between the time you sign the contract and the time you get the counter-signed contract in return from the publisher, you can back out of the deal.

Realize, however, that the publisher might simply sign that contract and send it to you at the moment you try to back out.  But always be conscious of the fact that you do not have a deal until both parties sign the agreement.

Both parties.

6. Final does not mean permanent.

A contract is a blueprint for your relationship. As such, it has clauses that allow the contract to be terminated. Right now, in most publishing contracts, those termination clauses only favor the publisher. I suggest you add some that favor you as well, whatever that might mean.

Oh, yeah, I already told you: Make sure the contract has a real end date, three to ten years from the date the contract is signed. Believe me, that’s an important one.

7. Keep your contract out until all of its terms are met, and refer to that contract constantly.

An editor friend, now a hell of a fiction writer, once told me that many of the writers in her stable at the traditional publishing house where she worked (some of you would mistakenly call this place one of the Big Six, mistakenly because there are more publishers than six) had the same refrain about contracts:

Those writers said that the only things they cared about in their contracts were the due dates for the manuscript and the payment dates for the advance. Nothing else.

Those writers are idiots.  Traditional publishing contracts have ten-to-twenty pages of legalese for a reason.  That reason is to define the relationship for both sides. And there is more to that relationship than payment dates and turn-in dates.

But let’s stick to payment dates, for a moment. As Sebastian Marshall said above, “Three months from agreement in principle to contract, followed by a six week breaching-of-contract delay? Not okay.”

I would say “Not okay” is an understatement. How many of you noticed his phrase “six week breaching-of-contract delay”? Hmmm? Any of you? Do you know what that referred to?

The on-signing payment. Which in his contract was due “immediately” upon the signing of the contract. Which happened in March.

The last two publishing contracts I signed with two different publishers both had this in the contract: the first third of the advance was due thirty days after the signing of the agreement.  Publisher #1 sent the money in less than thirty days (and has done so on all projects I’ve done with them). Publisher #2 missed that deadline every single time I’ve signed a contract with them. I have always given them an extra thirty days because I like working with the editor, and then I get tough.

In every instance with that publishing company, I have had to notify the company that they are in breach of contract, and I will cancel that contract if I do not receive payment within a week. The publisher scrambles to make the payment—and guess what? It always shows up after I threaten.

In the bad old days, it would have ended there. In today’s market—when that publisher offered me another contract—I said no. I don’t need the headache. Nor do I need to constantly chase payment in what is clearly a company policy of delay, delay, delay.

But breach of contract doesn’t just happen if the company refuses to pay on time. There are clauses throughout every contract that states the contract will be terminated if such-and-such doesn’t happen. Usually such-and-such reflects badly on the author—the book is late, the book isn’t up to the company standards (that’s what “acceptance” means—they have to accept the book to make the next payment, and there are times when publishers do not do that)—but there are other clauses inside the contract that the publisher might breach.

Like not sending royalty statements in a timely manner. Like not having open accounting practices.  And on and on and on.

If you have a question about your relationship with your publisher, go to your contract first. And if the publisher is in breach of that contract, then write a polite letter asking for whatever it is that they haven’t done. If they still refuse, then notify them that they are in breach of the contract and that you will terminate the contract if the publisher does not rectify the situation according to some timeline that you give them.

Once again, literary agents—who generally do not have a legal education—often refuse to do this stuff.  Agents are terrified of pissing off publishers.  So if your agent refuses to handle this, hire an attorney to handle this part of the negotiation.  And if your agent actively fights you on this, cancel your relationship with them, and use your attorney to cancel that 15% payment to the agent as well.

8. Contracts can be amended.

“Amended” as in changed.  Usually this happens in the form of an addendum that both parties on that contract sign. Again, that means a negotiation, usually a negotiation to change some term in the contract.

Although lately, publishers have been sending out amendments to their contracts like crazy—and I’ll wager most of you professional writers reading this signed those amendments without understanding them, probably on the advice of your agent.

Never do that again. Seriously.

Because what the publishers have been changing is the e-rights clause of your contract, usually to include more rights for a worse deal to the writer. Most writers haven’t even checked that addendum the publisher sent against the original contract (if the writer could find their copy of the original contract).  Most writers signed away rights and didn’t have to.

I got three such addendums in the last year, all amending different contracts I had signed—one on a contract that was signed in 1995. I refused to sign all but one of them—the one signed in 1995. And that was because the publisher’s dumbass lawyer didn’t understand a work-made-for-hire contract, and gave me more money than I was entitled to, granting me more rights in the contract, by using a boilerplate that had been designed for an original works contract, not for a work-made-for-hire contract.

(And if you didn’t understand any of that previous paragraph, then get yourself a copy of The Copyright Handbook because you need to understand this stuff. Writers don’t sell books or manuscripts or stories. They license copyright.)

Anyway, by refusing to sign the other two, I caused the legal department of those publishers no end of headache. They wrote me letter after letter. One even threatened me. Another said they would cancel my contract if I didn’t sign. I smiled—because I wanted that contract canceled—and said, “Okay.” And dammit, they didn’t cancel. They just moved on, and I still have the excellent rights deal I’d had for more than a decade.

Because I read and understand my contracts.

Now, please note that I do not have a law degree. I am not a lawyer and I do not play one on TV.

But I follow one simple rule in business: I do not sign anything that I do not understand. And by understand, I don’t mean that someone explained it to me in general. I have to understand every word as it relates to every other word.  Believe me, in contracts, that’s important. Because every word is important.

Going back to amendments and addendums. Publishers aren’t the only ones who can amend a contract. You can too.  You can send an amendment as an addendum to your contract to your publisher. If your publisher signs that, then you have changed a term of the contract. (Of course, you would work with a lawyer to draft the proper language.)

If you don’t like something in an old contract, folks, and you can’t find a way to cancel that contract, see if you can find a way to amend that contract.  If you’re willing to do the work and to be a squeaky wheel, you can always find a way.

9. Stop being grateful and stop being a victim.

You no longer have to be grateful that some publisher condescended to buy your book. You have other options. You might never use those options, but they should remain on the table in a negotiation at all time.

Under no circumstances should you ever, ever, tell your publisher that you would never self-publish. Even if it’s true.

Never ever ever.

Because they need to think you’ll take your golden goose and run at any point in a negotiation. They need to know that you know that traditional publishing is not the only game in town.

And don’t ever accept terrible contract terms because you have to get published.  Those days are over.  Most self-respecting writers never acted like that, but too many did.

It’s time for all writers to stop being victims of their publisher and to start acting like the powerful people that they are.

Finally,

10. Be businesslike in all things.

Business is not personal. It’s not about friendship and “marriages” and trying to avoid making the other party mad.  It’s about making an alliance to do something.

In the case of publishing, you—the content creator—are making an alliance with a traditional publishing company to publish—and distribute—your book to readers.

That’s all.

Nothing more. It doesn’t matter if you like the people at the publishing company or if they flatter you a lot.

You should always act in business as if the people you like will be fired tomorrow and replaced by some draconian person with no soul who is out to crush you. If your contract protects you from the draconian person with no soul, then you have a good contract.

If your contract is contingent on the nice people whom you like keeping their jobs, then you have a bad contract.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You can’t think like that about people you work with. Fine. Then hire a lawyer. Because too many agents become too cozy with the publishers in New York, and have that same bad attitude. (“Don’t worry. Those nice people at Traditional Publishing House A will take very good care of you.” Not.)

In this new world of publishing, writers finally have options. We don’t have to settle for the 20^th century ways of doing things.

Sebastian Marshall is right: traditional publishing treats its writers badly and is badly run. But sometimes, we writers want to do business with traditional publishers.

So we have to approach them like the dysfunctional companies that they are. We have to protect ourselves, and we have to be willing to walk away when the deal is harmful to us and our careers.

That’s a sea change, folks. That’s an attitude only a few of us had in the past. Now all of us should have it. All the time.

If we all negotiate our contracts from a position of strength, then the publishers will move toward us. They’ll give us better contract terms, and treat us better.

They’ll have no choice. They’ll need to accommodate the writers in order to have product.

You don’t have to self-publish to be part of this new world of publishing.

You just have to stand up for yourself.

These blogs have given me the freedom to say things that, in the past, I only told students face-to-face. Can you imagine me getting this chapter into a book on traditional publishing—published by a traditional publisher? Of course not.

So if you find these blogs helpful, if you’ve gained something useful out of what you’ve read, please leave a tip on the way out. The blogs take a lot of time from my full-time gig, which is fiction writing, and I need to justify the time spent. Your comments go a long way toward that, and so do the donations.

Thanks in advance.

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 “The Business Rusch: How To Evaluate A Traditional Publisher” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.