The Business Rusch: The Book Trade

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 It’s amazing how hindsight makes things clearer. Actually, the changes in publishing have brought a lot of things into focus for me. Then I think about those things, and remember conversations or moments when I felt simply astounded at something, but let it pass, not realizing its significance.

Let me explain.

On January 13, the chief executive at Faber, Stephen Page, had an essay in The Guardian. I noted in a blog a few weeks ago that Page’s clearheadedness startled me, particularly when so many in traditional publishing have done everything they can to obfuscate the changes in the publishing world—and their own culpability (and obligations) in that change.

In his essay, Faber listed several things he believes traditional publisher must do to stay in business. Among those things was this:

“[Publishers must have] a focus on the consumer, rather than the book trade. Expertise in consumer marketing that contends for attention in all digital spaces, alongside strength in working with both bricks and mortar and online booksellers, will be vital.”

I’ll analyze the whole paragraph in a minute. But it was his first sentence that made everything coalesce for me. Publishers must focus on the consumer (reader) rather than the book trade (bookstores, distributors, etc).

Sounds like a well, duh, right? Especially if you read my post from last week on the ways that both traditional publishers and indie writers are ignoring their readers.

But it stopped being a well, duh in traditional publishing about twenty years ago. Honestly, I don’t know the timing to all of these changes, but I have a gut sense. Indulge me for a minute here.

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, early 1970s, I never went in bookstores, yet I spent all of my allowance on books (all right—and candy too. I was a kid, okay?). I got five dollars per week, then my dad took one dollar back and put it in my savings account in an attempt to teach me good habits. The remaining four dollars and I traveled a few blocks to a nearby drugstore. It sold a little bit of everything, from cigarettes to comic books. Except for the obligatory Butterfinger candy bar that I got on the way out, I never looked at anything except the books.

Rows and rows and rows of books. In my memory, hundreds of thousands of books. In reality, probably four shelves worth. Every week, I bought three to four novels with my four dollars. (Most of the books were Gothic romances, and most of them were 75 cents.) Mostly, I didn’t even look at the author’s name. I looked for that cover with some poor woman in her nightgown, running away from the creepy house on the hill, and I was sold.

The first time I remember going into a bookstore, I was thirteen.  I was a member of the speech team that qualified for state tournaments in big ole Madison, Wisconsin. My friends and I walked down State Street, and discovered Paul’s Book Store, which was (and is) mostly collectibles and antiquarian books. No Gothics that I could find. I thought the store musty, expensive, and of no interest at all. (I appreciate it more now.)

I do not remember the first time I went into a bookstore of the more modern type, filled with all new books. It had to be college. And yet my parents’ house, my friends’ houses, my grandmother’s house, and every other house I went into were filled with books.

Where did the books come from?

The drugstore. The five-and-dime. The department store, with its lovely book section. The grocery store (where I first bought a paperback edition of Carrie with the silver cover—over my mother’s protests).  My dad got the latest bestsellers from the Book of the Month club, and my aunt got her Harlequins direct from Harlequin itself.

Books were everywhere, and we didn’t have to go to a special store to find them.

Fast forward a decade. I got a job working for William C. Brown Textbook Publishing Company as a lowly assistant. The guys in the sales force were not much older than me (twenty-something), and all of them were hotshots with cajones big as the moon. They all wanted this account or that account, and they were full of stories about browbeating some poor store owner in Nowheresville to take some of the non-text-booky nonfiction to put in the racks near the comic books.

Wim-C’s sales staff (yes, pronounced Whimsy) had a huge competition going with John Wiley’s sales staff, to see who could steal accounts from each other, sell more books to more unusual places, and who could make the most money in a month through sales.

Fast forward another decade. I met the sales rep for Roc Books—not for Penguin/Putnam, but for the imprint Roc. Back then (1990), each imprint shared a sales staff with only a handful of other imprints. This woman was interesting, but scared. She had just come to Eugene, Oregon, from Coer d’Alene, Idaho. At the time, Coer d’Alene was home to a number of white separatist groups, and this woman was of obvious mixed race. She had been chased out of several stores because of her skin color. (See why this sticks in my memory?) She was going to ask for a new territory, since that part of Idaho scared her so badly.

She and the other sales reps didn’t just go to bookstores. They went to each area’s book distributor. They also went into truck stops and other places that might carry books, and did a bit of hand-selling. These reps not only made more money if they made more sales, they got promoted as well. It was another way into the book business.

Five years later, the sales reps were gone. They stopped visiting long before the chain stores wiped out many independent booksellers, long before the entire distribution system collapsed in 1997 or so.  At this point, book editors stopped going to thrice-annual sales meetings, and instead sent a video presentation. Then the publishing companies stopped having off-site sales meetings altogether.

Budget cutbacks, I was told. Consolidation and shortsightedness, I suppose. I didn’t work for the big publishers in-house. I worked for a publishing company Dean and I started, and then for a mom-and-pop organization, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. We still contacted our distributors and bookstores directly.

By the  mid-1990s I was able to save my entire novel writing career with one letter. One of my publishers was going to publish a novel “dead” (under the radar, without even putting it in the catalog; she was trying to kill an editor’s career and to do that, she had to destroy every book he touched). I wrote to a friend of mine who just happened to be the sf buyer for Barnes & Noble. I enclosed the novel, explained the situation, and asked him to order a few copies of the book if he liked it after he read it. He not only did that, but he ordered my backlist as well. And then he ordered a lot of other books that editor edited, saving other careers.

It was great for me, and for those writers. But it wouldn’t have been possible just five years before. Five years before, no single buyer had that much power, no matter where he was.

When I started out, Romance Writers of America were starting out too, and one of their recommendations to the first-time romance writer was to bring coffee and donuts to the truckers who delivered books for the local regions. It worked: the truckers would go to grocery stores, drugstores, and all those mom-and-pop places, delivering books and placing them on the shelves. If the truckers liked a friendly romance writer, they’d put her book in a prominent position.

There were good things and bad things in this system, but it was dynamic. Excellent book editors who kept track of things could tell you where their authors sold best—the Midwest, the South, the Southwest. They made sure those authors went to those locations during book signings.

With the big distribution collapse of the late 1990s, all of that vanished. Instead of hundreds of regional book distributors who sold books to the drugstores and department stores, the number of book distributors went down to ten. (There are even fewer now. If you want to find out what happened, check out this blog post.)

Independent bookstores were strangled by the chain bookstores opening in their neighborhood (and often providing more choice and cheaper prices). Suddenly the number of places for a publisher to sell books declined.

Publishers had already given up large parts of their sales staff, so they had no idea how to react to this change. They decided to focus on bestselling books at the expense of everything else.  Yes, there was still a midlist, but it was small and the chances of building a series or building an author name became harder than ever.

Publishers tried to find a way to hedge their bets. They knew that John Grisham and Nora Roberts sold, so they pushed legal thrillers and romantic suspense novels that were “just like” Grisham and Roberts. Publishers started doing a lot of advance reading copies and fancy promotions targeting the remaining bookstores. Publishers also wined and dined the handful of remaining book buyers, trying to get them interested in the newest, latest, hottest book by an unknown.

The choices for the reader narrowed and narrowed some more. I don’t know about you guys, but I remember wandering bookstore aisles looking for something that wasn’t the latest Dan Brown clone or the latest fantasy set in a boarding school. Then the western section all but vanished, followed by any historical romance not set in England in the early 19^th century, and so on.

It became important for a publisher to convince five or ten or fifteen people that the book was brilliant. The publisher—in effect—sold to the book trade only.  If bookstore people didn’t like it, hell, if the book buyer at Borders or Barnes & Noble didn’t like it, well then, the sales force wouldn’t sign off on the book or the book (already purchased by the publishing company) tanked.

This became an insidious loop. In recent years, a friend of mine took two different projects to traditional publishers—one that had guaranteed sales to museums all over the country, and another that had guaranteed sales at rock concerts in sold-out arenas filled with tens of thousands of fans per venue. The publishers refused to take the books, because the publishers didn’t believe those books could sell to the bookstores.

Several similar things happened to other friends. Dean got hired to ghostwrite a book for a very famous person—a person whose name you’d all recognize—who not only had a wide following on television and in music, but also toured every year and owned two gigantic theaters (named after him) where he  performed. These books would have sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of bookstores—at each tour stop and every day in the theaters.

Bookstores, the sales forces, and New York book people believed this person uncool. One asked the agent handling the deal “if anyone even knows who [famous person] is any  more.” At that point, this famous person was on television every night, as well as performing live in Vegas.

The promised book deal had guaranteed numbers from the famous person’s theaters, guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), but no traditional publishing company would touch the project—thinking it “impossible to market”—and so the project died.

I suppose, if Dean and I were interested, we could start it up again. We’re not; we have too many other things to do.

The point here, though, is that these three projects—Dean’s with the famous person, and our friend’s two projects—had guaranteed sales built in, but those sales weren’t at bookstores. In both cases, the projects were turned down by traditional publishers as unmarketable.

Does your head hurt yet?

I couldn’t figure out why any of that happened until I read The Guardian piece. And then it all coalesced for me: For the past twenty years, publishers—and the people running the sales departments of publishing companies—have had no experience with actual sales at all.

Sales to them meant running to their standard accounts, asking the accounts what they thought of the project, and then if the accounts didn’t like it, turning the project down. If you want to know why traditional publishing has seemed stale for the most part, this is why. It formed an echo chamber—professional book people talking to professional book people—and not understanding that truck drivers, waitresses, construction workers, music fans, and other non-book people buy books.

And here’s the delicious irony: If you look at Stephen Page’s Guardian piece, at the very quote I highlighted, you’ll see that he doesn’t get it either. He writes:

“Expertise in consumer marketing that contends for attention in all digital spaces, alongside strength in working with both bricks and mortar and online booksellers, will be vital.”

What this means is simple: He thinks publishers should sell books directly off their websites in addition to selling in brick-and-mortar bookstores and in online bookstores. That’s all. And weirdly, that’s considered radical these days.

Fully 80% of readers still read paper books. I suspect it’s higher than that, since studies that just came out in January show that readers who have reading devices still read paper books as well. So how about this for a radical concept:

Traditional publishers, hire a sales force. A real sales force. The kind of folks who get in their cars, stop at a gas station/mini mart and hand-sell them a book. Sell books in casino and hotel shops. Sell regional titles in tourist shops.

In my little town, our wonderful local bakery, Captain Dan’s Pirate Pastry Shop, has books along one wall—all by local writers, all indie or published by regional presses.

Traditional publishers: send your staff to these places. Use the old-fashioned way of doing this. Have the staff get a small salary and pay the rest on commission. Bring back the young competitive hotshots with cajones of steel. Have them hand-sell books.

When did sales become about the book trade only? Traditional publishers have made their box so narrow that thinking inside it is squeezing their brains.

Remember the first rule of sales: Make the product available. No one can buy a book if it’s not for sale.

It’s that simple.

And that hard.

This blog is a prime example of using digital services to go directly to the consumer—um, I mean, interacting directly with the readers. Something like this really couldn’t exist anywhere except online.

So thank you for making it possible. I couldn’t do it without the comments, links, and e-mails, and I couldn’t afford the time to do it without the donations.  Thank you! I wouldn’t be able to do this at all without reader participation.

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“The Business Rusch: The Book Trade” copyright 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: Readers

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

As we came into the new year, I evaluated—as I always do—the things I do as part of my business. My business, for those of you who don’t know, is writing. I have been a published writer since I was sixteen years old. I have made a living at writing since I was in my early twenties, first with nonfiction and then with fiction.

Along the way, I’ve also owned two publishing companies, been an advisor to several more, and worked for half a dozen of them in some non-writing capacity. That doesn’t count the hundreds of publishing companies I have worked with as a writer.

My writing is my career. I have made the majority of my living in traditional publishing. But I have also seen the value of publishing non-traditionally, since I helped start my first publishing company back in 1988. (Hell, if you want honesty, I had my first publishing venture 20 years before that when little old grade school me published both the school newspaper (which I started from scratch, designed [ick!], edited and wrote 90% of), and a little newspaper for my neighborhood (which I did 99% of—and which told my neighbors waaaay more than they needed to know about my family’s politics and our dog.))

I have always seen writing as a career, a way to make a living.  Yes, I express myself. I work in an extremely creative profession, and because I’m good at both the creativity and the business side, I am free to write what I want, when I want, and where I want.

So I write this blog from the perspective of a professional writer, for other professional writers and/or people who want to be professional writers.  I define professional writer as someone who makes her living as a writer.  And by make a living, I mean someone who makes $50,000 to $100,000 per year or more at writing alone. Not writing combined with a high tech day job or writing combined with the salary from the university.

On the writing alone.

When I started, it wasn’t possible to make a living as a self-published writer. It is now. In fact, weirdly, you can make more money as a self-published writer than you ever could as a midlist writer—and in some cases, more than you could make as a bestselling writer.

Honestly, I find that astounding. This change has happened in just the past few years. A number of readers of this blog have commented on how fun it’s been to watch my attitudes change toward self- and indie-publishing. I’m still educating myself on all of this, and I’m still astonished by some things that I learn.

Of course, I’m still astounded by things I’ve seen in traditional publishing too. But I have come to expect illogic there. I’ve steeped myself in that side of the profession since I got my first issue of Writers Digest at the age of 12. Traditional publishing makes no sense on a number of levels.

And now, writers seemed determined to bring the same illogic to indie publishing.

I’ve focused on a lot of this illogic before from the use of agents in this modern world (makes no sense) to the use of a service to upload your book to ebookstores for a percentage of that book for the lifetime of the book (again, makes no sense). If you want to see what I have to say about that, look at some of the past blogs from the list here.

But here’s an aspect I’ve never talked about before, an aspect both sides—traditional publishing and indie writers alike—seem to ignore.

Readers.

Traditional publishing gave up on readers long ago. When traditional publishers take books in a series out of print before the next book comes out, those publishers aren’t thinking about readers. Those publishers are looking at books as widgets.

Look, they say to themselves, here’s a bunch of widgets in different colors. We released the yellow one first, and it’s doing all right. The green one, which we released second, isn’t doing as well. And the purple one, which we released third, is doing just a bit better. We’ll release the blue one—we think people will like blue widgets—but as we do, let’s remove the green one from the shelf. Green is a similar color to blue, right? And no one will know the difference.

Which might be true of widgets (if there were such a thing outside of website design).  I know it’s true of coats, because I looked at a rack of them today—brand new on the shelf, in many colors, and yes, while I preferred the blue and pink ones, the woman next to me liked the white and black ones. But coats are very different from books. Readers don’t get tired of books, and books don’t wear out.

If readers like an author’s work, they want to read everything that writer has done. If readers like a series, they want to read the entire series. And if it’s a series that has a continuing storyline (like a fantasy series), readers don’t want to skip an episode in that storyline.

It seems simple, it seems logical, and yet time after time after time, traditional publishing screws this one up.

I could list a million other things traditional publishing screws up, but that would take this entire post plus every post for the rest of the year. Honestly, most traditional publishers succeed in spite of their business practices.

What that tells me, a person who has written about business for more than thirty years, is that there is so much money to be made in publishing that even the most inept people on the planet can blunder their way into enough successes to keep the lights on in the office year after year.

We all know how traditional publishing ignores readers. But how do indie writers ignore readers?

By focusing on sales and “promotion” and “discoverability” and downloads and free to the exclusion of everything else.

Many indie writers have one book and they promote the hell of out that thing. They give it away for free, they join Kindle Select to “maximize discoverability” (ignoring Nook & IBook readers), and they sell it for 99 cents, thinking that will increase their sales.

So…let’s imagine that these writers are successful. Let’s imagine that they do get millions of people downloading their books. Out of those millions, at least half a million will read that book, and out of that half million, 250,000 will like it.

Then what?

Then nothing. That’s the problem. Nothing happens. Even if those successful indie writers eventually write another book, they have to start all over from scratch, because the readers who like what they did—those 250,000 readers—they will have forgotten the indie writer in six months.

How many of you folks can tell me without looking what you were reading in the last week of January 2011? How many of you can tell me the name of the author who wrote the book? How many of you can tell me the name of an author who wrote one book—and only one book—that you read and liked five years ago?

I’d be surprised if any of you can.

You indie writers treat your readers as badly as traditional publishers do. And you do it in the exact same way. You deny your readers the next book.

If you only have one book and you give it away for free, if you promote it heavily and it sells a lot of copies, and there is no follow-up book, then you have insulted your readers.

Here’s what readers expect: They expect writers to publish one book, then two books, then three books. They expect several books from their favorite writers.

Readers are kind, and they’re willing to wait. But they hate to be duped. Many readers won’t start reading a series with only one book out because they’ve been burned too many times. They don’t want to start something that the writer has no intention of finishing.

In the past, we writers sometimes had no choice about abandoning a series. As a reader pointed out to me last week, I have taken a 13-year hiatus on my Fey series. Which, I can say with all honesty, was not my fault. I wanted to publish the next three books in that series. I know what they will be. I also know about a few other books in that world, side books that I’ve discussed with no one.

But because Bantam Books took the fourth book of the original series out of print in the late 1990s during the distribution collapse, and (gosh, wow, whodathunkit) the series then died, I have been unable to sell rest of the Fey series to traditional publishers. (The same thing happened in Great Britain: that publishing company lost its entire editorial team, including the publisher himself, and the new regime didn’t want anything they did, so Book 4 never even appeared there. And in France, the exact same thing happened as in England, only it happened with Book 5. I feel particularly sad for the French because the French publisher divided the books in two. So Fey fans read eight books only to be told the remaining two would never come out. Burned—oh, yeah.)

Now that I can control when and where my books come out, I find myself in a lovely conundrum. I have several unfinished series that I can put back into print and then finish. However, I need actual physical time to write those books. I feel the pressure from the readers because I  know they’re waiting. And folks, I’m writing as fast as I can.

Unlike so many new writers, I know that I would not be here if it weren’t for the readers. The readers have stuck with me through publisher after publisher, pen name after pen name, all of the various attempts I’ve made to stay ahead of traditional publishers determined to undercut our joint product—the books. I have gotten more letters than I want to think about from readers asking why they couldn’t get a particular book or asking why I had taken that book out of print. (I hadn’t, of course; the publisher had.)

My frustration with traditional publishers ignoring readers is unbelievably high.

So when I see indie writers do the same thing, I get furious. I really do. Folks, when you heavily promote your first book and then don’t write anything else for a year or two or five, you’re insulting your readers. The people who have invested their hard-earned dollars and, more importantly, their time in your book.

I mentioned above that readers are used to writers building a career. Readers know that it might take a year after the first book to get their hands on the second book. But modern readers grew up in the traditional publishing environment like the rest of us—and readers have some important expectations.

1. They expect heavy promotion when a writer’s second book comes out. Or his fifth. Or his twelfth. Not his first.  If a writer gets heavy promotion on his first book, then that first book has to be not just brilliant, but one of the top books of the year.

Traditional publishers only spend a ton of money on first novelists when that book has the chance of winning the National Book Award or is being made into a movie or has five more books in the queue behind it, waiting to be published two months apart.

Readers expect that rhythm. So when you screw it up, when you promote something with no follow-up, no second or fifth or twelfth book, you risk making the reader mad.

Especially if your book is good.

You got that? If the reader likes your book, that reader will get mad when he can’t find another book of yours. Then he’ll move onto writers who have more than one book. Eventually, he will forget you.

2. Experience trains readers. So if readers find a lot of really good free ebooks that are essentially one-shot wonders—no other e-book or paper book to be found by the same author–eventually readers will stop trolling the free catalog and look elsewhere for books. Or the readers will be really cautious and only read a book after the author has published a second or fifth or twelfth book.

Readers might still download that free ebook, but they won’t read it until they know another book is on the way. So that download counts for exactly nothing. You have gotten someone to click a button with your free book, but you haven’t gained a reader.

3. Readers want to stick with their favorite writer(s) for the duration of the writer’s career. So the writer better dang-gum have a career.

In the past twenty years, traditional publishing made this almost impossible. Study after study has shown that it takes a reader several books before she will buy a book based on author-name recognition only. But traditional publishing made it hard for readers to find an author’s second or fifth or twelfth book. So many traditional publishers bailed on writers after a second book that didn’t do as well as the first (even if the failure of the second was the publisher’s fault [which it often was]), that writers didn’t stick around long enough for a reader to build any loyalty to that writer.

For the longest time, RT Book Reviews had a “whatever happened to?” column. If you read it, you’d discover that most writers who “vanished” hadn’t disappeared at all. They’d picked a new pen name and started over. Sometimes they were five names down the road by the time a reader wrote to that RT columnist. It took a dedicated reader to keep up.

4. But readers often are dedicated. That’s what traditional publishing misses with its “velocity” and its focus on selling a thousand books this week instead of five thousand over the next year.

Readers have a relationship with books. Readers love the characters or the world the author built or the author’s voice and point of view.

Traditional publishers call readers “consumers,” and technically that’s true.  Consumers purchase goods. Readers buy books. But that’s where the analogy ends. Because the second definition of consumer is this:

Someone who consumes something by eating it, drinking it, or using it up.

Readers can’t eat or drink a book. Nor do they destroy the book when they read it. They haven’t “used it up,” even though traditional publishing seems to think so. Traditional publishers are based on the consumer model—using the second definition—thinking that readers are done with the book after a few months, because the book will spoil.

Anyone who has visited a library or a used bookstore will tell you that’s not true. Anyone who reads Jane Austen or William Shakespeare or Mark Twain knows that stories can last forever. Books can live much longer than their creators.

Books are not ephemeral. Books, and by extension, the writers of those books, can and should have a longterm relationship with the reader.

Whenever indie writers get all tied up in the number of downloads their only novel has in one day, whenever those writers do everything they can to sell their one book without having another book for the reader, those writers have forgotten what it’s like to be a reader. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to fall in love with a new writer, to read everything that writer has done, to wait breathlessly for the next book, hoping against hope that book will be as good or better than the last.

Indie writers who have only one book and who give it away, or only have two books and constantly promote them, have forgotten what got them into writing in the first place.

Almost every writer I’ve ever met started writing because they loved books. They loved reading books, they loved imaginary worlds, they loved the experience of being somewhere else without leaving the living room.

That experience came from a writer.

The relationship isn’t between a writer and her publisher. Nor is it between the writer and her sales figures.

The relationship is between the writer and her readers.

Does this mean that every writer must write with readers looking over her shoulder? No. I will be writing the next three books of the Fey, but not this week. This week another project has taken precedence.

I write stories because I love to tell stories, and I am grateful that readers want to read them. But the moment I only tell the story that the readers want, then I stop being the best writer I can be. Because I’ll stop stretching and growing and trying new things.

But I’m not going to give up on the things that got me here either, because I love them as much as the readers do. I want to write the next three Fey books, just like I want to write the next Smokey Dalton mystery, and the next Kristine Grayson romance. I want to write the next Diving book and the next Retrieval Artist novel, but that won’t stop me from writing more short stories about Winston and Ruby.

Recently, a number of bloggers have taken me to task for being anti-free books/stories. I’m not anti-free. If those bloggers were paying attention, they’d notice that I post a story for free every Monday on my blog. Without a donate button, like I have here. The story is free.

It’s there as a gift to my fans. It’s also there as a loss leader, to attract new readers.

But I’ve written over 700 short stories (at last count) and more than 100 novels. If the reader likes what I’ve written, she has a variety of other things to choose from. Right now, I’m doing my best to get my entire backlist into print. And it will take years, believe me. But there’s enough available that a reader who likes this week’s free story (and the story is only up for one week) will be able to find something else that might interest her.

I’m hoping that free story will start a new relationship.

But free has its limits. If you’re talking about a career—and on this blog, we are—then the free item must be a short-term thing, a loss leader, and there has to be other products that a reader can find.

This new indie publishing world can correct the mistakes that traditional publishing makes. The new indie world can make books available for a long time. (I’m not saying forever, because I have no idea what the world, let alone publishing, will look like in 2040).

The world of indie publishing is tailor-made for the long-term reader/writer relationship.

And here’s the simple truth of it, folks. The more readers a writer has on all of her books—all, not “both,” or “one,” but all—the more money that writer will make. Because readers are happy to pay for a book. Readers do it all the time.

Some readers will even pay a premium to get a new book right away, before its publication date, before anyone else sees it.

The reason so many writers, like S.M. Stirling or Mike Shepherd or Patricia Briggs, hit the bestseller list with a book from the middle of their series is because readers who have been reading previous books in the series want that next book the moment it comes out. If you look at last week’s post on bestsellers, you’ll see that bestsellers are tied to velocity (the rapidity of sales) in the week of release. Well, what’s better suited to that than the next book in a beloved series?

The writer has earned that velocity, that instant readership for the new book, by writing excellent books in the past and building reader loyalty.

Until two years ago, the writer needed luck as well—the luck that they were with a publisher who was willing to build the book, or a sales force that was willing to promote backlist, or an editor who fought to have earlier titles in the series re-released. The writer also had to gamble that something bad didn’t happen during the week of release. (For example, Sara Paretsky had to recover from her bad numbers on one of her series books, which was released on 9/11/01—yep, that September 11.)

Now the writer has time to build readership. If a traditional publisher has taken books out of print, the writer can get her rights back and issue the book herself (sometimes with a hefty fight, but she can do it). The writer can continue a series that traditional publishing determines isn’t worth their time.  The writer has time.

If she has the patience.

And what’s going on with so many indie writers is that they only look at the short term.

From the perspective of a long-term career, painstakingly built one reader at a time, I believe that the writers who are happy that they’ve had 10,000 downloads of a free book (and that’s their only book or their only mystery novel or their only romance novel) don’t understand what they’re doing.

Not only are they getting nothing for their years of hard work. They’re also pissing off the readers who think of a free book as a promise of more good things to come.

Save your promotions for your tenth book. Better yet, don’t promote at all. Write the eleventh book.

Those of you with backlist, scramble to get it all up for your readers. Do the best you can.

And folks like me, with half a dozen series that all need a new book right now, well, we just have to be patient. We have to write those books one word at a time. (And yes, I’m talking to myself here. I want to write the next book in each series all at once, while writing this really cool new book that I just thought of.)

The new books aren’t not just for me. And they’re not just for the money I’ll make this year.

Because money has never been important to me except as one measure. It measures readers who are willing to part with hard-earned dollars to read my work. I’m grateful for that. When readers ask about the next book, I’m honored.

It means I’m doing something right.

Remember, writers—traditional and indie—your writing career isn’t about kudos for your only book. It’s about building readers, about maintaining the relationship.

Sometimes you have to surprise the reader to keep the relationship fresh. And sometimes you have to write the next book in the series, because it is familiar and it’s what the reader signed on for.

Success isn’t 10,000 downloads in an afternoon. Success is attracting readers and having them come back for years.

Is it hard? Of course it’s hard. In the beginning, no writer has a fan base. Writers earn their fan base, one reader and one book at a time. Fans come back. Writers—and traditional publishers—need to remember that.

Now do you folks see why I say that I have other things I could be writing instead of this blog? I am buried in projects.

Yet I have thousands of readers who show up for the blog every week, and I value you all. I love the dialogue that we’re having.

But the reason I keep the donate button on this blog is that it has to pay its way or I will turn my attention to the stuff that readers will pay for.

So those of you who support the blog with your comments, your links, and your dollars, thank you. You keep this conversation going every week. I appreciate that more than you know.

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“The Business Rusch: Readers” copyright 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

On Tuesday, in my morning business reading, I came across a rather startling statistic: the claim that it only took 20,000 sales of paper books to hit the paper bestseller lists. I’m also assuming the statistic means paper; it might mean that it takes 20K to hit any bestseller list, which is still shockingly low, if you think about it.

Now, I have no way to verify this statistic. It comes from a deliberately anonymous source in the middle of a PandoDaily article on the future of publishing. However, reading the entire post makes me think that Anonymous here truly is in publishing and truly does know of what he/she speaks.

It also confirms a sense I’ve been having for a while, but have only a handful of statistics for.  My sense is this: because the book market has expanded so greatly, it takes fewer copies of one book to hit a bestseller list—any bestseller list.

Let’s talk mass market paperback first. When I sold my first novel into science fiction and fantasy, the novel shipped at 30,000 mass market copies—decent for a first novel in a genre that was considered the lowest of the low, but nowhere near what the bestsellers in the sf/f genre were selling. (Not the bestsellers period, but the names you’d recognize from the time—the folks at the top of the  sf/f list.)

I don’t know what their hardcover numbers were, but their mass market numbers (from now on, I’m going to call mass market by its industry acronym: mmpb) were anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 shipped. In sf/f, the lowest selling genre (at the time) besides Western.

When my first romance novel under the pen name Kristine Grayson came out in 2000, the publisher shipped 35,000 mmpb copies, which was a middling to low shipment of a romance novel at the time. Romance novels from standard midlisters—not the top of the line books—shipped at 50,000 or higher.

So when I saw mmpb books hitting the New York Times mass market list or the Publishers Weekly mass market list—and I knew for a fact those books have a print run of 20,000, I got nervous. I questioned my own knowledge of the books. I figured that particular book was a successful outlier and shrugged it off—until I saw Anonymous’s number.

Now let me say for the record that not all books that sell 20,000 copies will make a bestseller list, nor will all books that sell 50,000 copies.  It depends on the day and the time of year. It depends on the competition for that list. And it depends on who is reporting.

Hitting a bestseller list has more to do with velocity than it does total sales. Velocity is the number of books sold within a short period of time, which for paper books, is one week. (Amazon measures by the hour.) So if you sell 20,000 copies in one week and never sell another copy, you might make a bestseller list. But if you sell 20,000 copies slowly—1,000 copies every week for 20 weeks—you won’t make a list at all, even if the book continues to sell at that rate for the next twenty weeks. In other words, the second book will outsell the first by a factor of 2, but the first book’s author will be able to “bestseller” on the cover of her next book and you won’t.

Got that? Because it’s important to this discussion.

In about a month, Publishers Weekly will print its report of the bestselling titles of 2011, and it should include numbers. We’ll see how those numbers compare to, say, 2008 or some other year. Because I’m expecting the numbers in all formats except e-book to be down.

The numbers in mass market paperback will be dramatically down, because mmpb have lost most of their slots. (A slot is the place where a retailer put a book.) Borders is gone and Barnes & Noble has cut back shelf space. (I have no idea if the rush back into books at the end of the year has continued at B&N or abated.) The loss of independent bookstores is less important here because most indies didn’t carry a lot of mmpbs.

But Safeway, Albertsons, and other grocery stories did. As did WalMart, and other box retailers, truck stops, convenience stores, and airport bookstores. Most of those places have either cut back on mmpb dramatically or stopped carrying them altogether.

Some of this is price point. Traditional publishers realized a few years ago that mmpbs were becoming very costly. So publishers bumped up the price of a mmpb to nearly $10. With trade papers hovering around $15, it made more sense to publish more books in trade, which had a higher profit margin for the company. (Trade royalties are often lower, a remnant of the “odd” format thinking of the late 1990s. Plus many trades are sold non-returnable.)

With publishers moving a lot of the bestsellers to trade (when they normally would be mmpb), the retailers realized they needed trade shelves to accommodate the trade bestsellers. And book sales went down. Mass market readers want a cheap book, not a $15 book, so they either went to the library, or trolled the used bookstore for the same book. When retailers like Safeway looked at the book sections of the store, they saw a significant decline in overall revenue in the past few years. So the retailers did what any good retailer does—they reduced the size of the section commensurate with the interest in that section. No sense wasting space on something that doesn’t sell as well as it used to.

A book that would have shipped at 30,000 copies twelve years ago now ships for 5,000 copies today. Not because there’s less interest in that type of book, but because there are fewer places to buy the book. You can’t sell a book that isn’t on a rack, virtual or real. If the book isn’t on a real rack, then you miss the impulse buyers, the folks who stopped in for eggs and leave with a copy of the latest mmpb thriller by some writer they’ve never heard of, which they picked up because of its nifty cover.

If there are fewer books available, then it takes fewer copies to hit that magic velocity number which puts your book in the top ten or top fifteen sellers for the week. Books hit bestseller lists in comparison to other books published around the same time. So if mmpbs sell ¼ of what they sold ten years ago, then it will take ¼ of the copies than it took ten years ago to hit a bestseller list.

What does all this mean? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it. Bestseller lists have proliferated in the past two decades. When my first novel was published, there were four bestseller lists—hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback fiction and paperback nonfiction. Only a handful of places even published bestseller lists—The New York Times, of course, and Publisher’s Weekly (whose list, according to Michael Korda, is older than the Times’ list). The Wall Street Journal had a hardcover list, and USA Today’s list started around that point, combining every title into one—then considered a revolutionary concept, when really, it was an old-fashioned concept, the way things used to be.

Now, most (surviving) newspapers have bestseller lists. There are paid bestseller lists in chain bookstores. (I, as a publisher, can buy the number one slot for my favorite book for a certain amount of money. That puts my favorite book in the point-of-purchase part of the store; it’s advertising.) Amazon has bestseller lists galore, and so does B&N online.

A new list came into being a decade ago, courtesy of J.K. Rowling. The New York Times got irritated that the top slots on the hardcover, trade, and mass market bestseller lists were filled with that fantasy children’s junk, so they spun off the new “children’s” list, to take that nasty series out of their prestigious hardcover list to make room for “real” novels.

The Times tinkers all the time (pun intended) with the list. It added a trade bestseller list in 2007 to split trades out from other paperback books (those nasty mass market books that the Times didn’t want to review), and then the Times added an e-book bestseller list last year.

Amazon does the same thing. It delineates its list by genre, subgenre, and sub-subgenre. You can be an e-book bestseller for fiction or for romance fiction or for romance/contemporary fiction or for romance/contemporary/paranormal or for romance/contemporary/nosex/noswearwords/nokissing/catsanddogslivingtogether or whatever other combination the algorithm comes up with this week.

All of this makes for more and more bestselling book titles, and at the same time, it dilutes the value of having “bestseller” by your name. Not that the bestseller lists were ever a totally honest reflection of the state of sales within the book publishing world. The New York Times only uses “select” bookstores and keeps the names of those stores secret, with some “weighted” heavier than others, and they have done so from the beginning.

It was quite shocking, then, when USA Today started publishing their list based on raw sales data. When that happened, it became clear that the Times list didn’t reflect any sales reality.

But lists could always be goosed. Exorcist author William Peter Blatty sued the Times over inaccuracies in the list back in 1983. Authors tried to manipulate the list all the time by finding out what those Times stores were and buying 1,000 copies of their own books from each. Sometimes it actually worked.

Authors are doing the same thing now with the Kindle lists, trying to get their books up the list with a combination of free promotions and convincing their readers/fans to buy books at a certain time. For the sake of both Amazon’s list and the USA Today list, it’s better to have fans of a series preorder the next book so that the book ships on publication day, than it is to have them buy the book one week or five weeks after publication. The preorders goose the lists.

At a certain point, all of this list goosing and bestseller discussion becomes moot. It’s like grade inflation in school. If no one gets lower than a C, what’s an A worth? If everyone can be a bestseller, even if it’s just in one bookstore in the sub-sub-sub-subgenre list: romance/contemporary/nosex/noswearwords/nokissing/catsanddogslivingtogether, then what does the phrase “bestselling book” mean?

This is a question that Billboard is dealing with right now. For those of you who are musically challenged, the Billboard charts have been around since 1936. Back then, of course, there were fewer charts (country and my hit parade, I believe), and the charts were compiled by hand by member radio stations (who often got payola from record studios, and who would remove bestselling titles from their lists when the studios stopped paying). Anyway, the Billboard charts, like the bestseller list, only had a few subcategories way back when. I’m not even sure if the country charts differed from the pop charts back at the beginning.

Why am I telling you this? Remember that the music industry is ahead of the book industry on this change to digital. And the struggles the music industry has will come up in the struggles the print industry has.

So what’s happening with Billboard these days is this: Billboard is tweaking its list again because of—wait for it—free downloads and 99-cent album promotions. Billboard decided—as of last week—that any album sold for less than $3.49 does not count as an album sale. (The price point is not a random number; it’s about  half of a retail price of most albums.)

By that standard, Lady Gaga’s chart topper Born This Way did not sell 1.1 million copies after its release last June. It only sold 660,000 copies. That would have meant that she did not have a million-copy debut. It would have meant that no album had a million-copy debut in 2011.

This policy will only be in place in the first month of the album’s release. After that, the 99-cent sale will count.

What’s Billboard trying to do? Prevent a lower-priced (and, by implication, less worthy) album from goosing the list. In an editorial, Executive Editor Bill Werde, wrote “Billboard doesn’t want to control the marketplace. We just want to count it. But free or almost-free albums don’t represent a marketplace.”

(Note: I found this link in the LA Times. I was unable to find to find the original editorial on Billboard’s rather chaotic website without more digging than I was willing to do.)

He then adds that it’s probably “smart business” to get music to as many people as possible to “hook them on your songs,” which makes “the music a marketing tool. That’s fine, but let’s not call that an album sale.”

While Lady Gaga’s manager is angry about the shift, Jeremy DeVine of Temporary Residence Limited, a company that handles indie rock groups, said, “The sales are great for consumers and the artists, but from a chart perspective it treats a $10 album and a $1 album with equal legitimacy, which is dubious. You end up with albums by Animal Collective and Explosions in the Sky rubbing elbows with Katy Perry and Kanye West, if only for a couple of weeks before it swiftly slides off the charts. These kinds of quick sales paints unrealistic pictures of success for everyone involved.”

Or to put it Werde’s way, he has to make sure he’s “creating strong, credible charts.”

The Times has used similar arguments. When it decided to add the children’s list (just before the release of a Harry Potter book), Times editor Charles McGrath said, “We are also making room on the adult list for adult titles—not that what has replaced the Potter is exactly illustrious.”

What replaced the Potter title were romances by Danielle Steele and Catherine Coulter, which the Times clearly didn’t like either. Nor did the Times like it last year when it was forced to add Amanda Hocking’s indie-published titles to its new e-book bestseller list.

To the people who produce the lists, it’s all about the lists’s integrity. And I do understand that. Everyone who is managing a bestseller list right now—be it in publishing or the music industry or even in television—is about my age, fifty or so. We can all remember growing up with the book to read, the album at the top of the charts, the number one television show.  If you had the #1 television show, millions and millions of people watched. If you had the #1 album, you sold millions and millions of copies, not just 1.1 million or 660,000, depending on how you wanted to count it. If you had the #1 novel—well, first of all, it was hardcover, and secondly, it sold millions of copies too.  It was on every coffee table of every literate household in the nation, whether that household read the book or not.

We forty- and fifty-somethings remember when lists could have that kind of influence. We remember buying books because they were #1 on the Times, not because they were to our tastes.

The days of that kind of influence are gone.

Sure, some books will sell at astronomical numbers. This year, it’s George R.R. Martin (and personally, I love that, both as a fantasy fiction fan and someone who has known George for years). Last year, it was Stieg Larsson. Before that, it was J.K. Rowling, or maybe it was Dan Brown. I lose track.

But for the most part, the number of copies a bestselling title—and by that I mean a title that’s in the top ten of the Times list or the top 25 of the USA Today list—are way way down. You can see that reflected in the advances. Many, many bestsellers are being asked to take half or less when they sign a contract for a new book.

That’s what made me think Anonymous from PandoDaily is for real. In the middle of Anonymous’s anti-Amazon rant (which is what his (her?) post is really about) is this: “But in recent years, as book sales have declined, the advances for the biggest books have gone down proportionally, too. What used to be a $1 million book is now a $400,000 book. Publishers are thinking ‘OK, we’ll move less copies, but we’ll pay less for them so we’ll survive.’”

And that is how publishers are thinking. They’re running scared. Anonymous’s entire rant against Amazon is one big fearful shout into the darkness. Toward the end of his rant, he actually acknowledges something important. He writes that Amazon is trying to be “the only place where you buy books, but [also] the only place that publishes books too….Funny thing is that it’s actually better for authors.”

It’s actually better for authors to get rid of traditional publishing. He’s not alone in saying that.  A quite shocking article (to me) by Faber chief executive Stephen Page appeared in The Guardian last week.  (Read this essay. It’s a bit of sanity from traditional publishing, at a time when most traditional publishing execs aren’t sane.)

Page wrote, “In my view, while 2011 may have signaled the beginning of the end of the era of publishers-with-access-to-the-mass-market as the dominant model for book publishing, it did not signal an end to the opportunity presented by writing or publishing more generally.”

However, he says, in order to survive, traditional publishers have to start bringing value to the writer and to the consumer (the reader), rather than to “the book trade.”  And that’s at the heart of all this fear.

Traditional publishers and the auxiliary businesses that have formed around them, from agents to bestseller lists, have focused on the book trade—focused on selling to bookstores and to wholesalers. Now the consumer can go directly to the author if either wants and cut out “the book trade” altogether. (I can sell books off my blog, if I want to, bypassing everyone from a publisher to Amazon.)

This change is unbelievably huge, and it makes us all leery, especially those of us who’ve been around for a long time. We’re searching in the dark for a handhold because we’ve never ever looked at a world without “the book trade.” We don’t know how to proceed.

That’s what’s behind the bifurcation of the bestseller lists. The lists are there to give legitimacy to certain titles among “the book trade,” but it’s getting harder and harder to do that. Billboard is acknowledging that when it tries to distinguish between an album bought for ten dollars and an album bought for a dollar (which has to be marketing, ignoring all of us who would have bought the album for $10 and were happy to discover it was $9 cheaper than we expected).

Some old systems don’t really work any more. Is it legitimate to call someone who was #1 on Amazon’s Kindle Free list for one hour a bestseller? I don’t know. And I write that as someone who was in the top ten of the Kindle free list for days last October. I’ve also had books on the Times extended list in the 1990s—before anyone thought to count the five below the top ten as important. I’ve had bestsellers in paper all over the world, and here in the States. But I’ve never had a #1 New York Times, and of course, like any writer, I would love one.

But, with the very important exceptions of the writers who are on the Times top ten for weeks and weeks, the folks who slid onto the list and then off aren’t making as much money as they used to. If Anonymous is right (and I think he is based on those royalty statements I saw from other bestsellers), then 20,000 copies does a bestseller make (in the right week, with the right competition). That means that the author is making significantly less than he would have as a bestseller fifteen years ago.

Of course, he wouldn’t have been a bestseller fifteen years ago. Or would he? Would that same book have sold 80,000 mass market copies in the first week of release back then?

The book certainly had a greater chance of doing so. There were thousands if not hundreds of thousands more slots to stick those mass market books into back then.

And even if the book didn’t hit the lists at 80,000 sales, the author would have made a lot more money on that mass market than he’ll make today.

So, here’s the rub, the real question that I found myself asking this morning after I read Anonymous’s rant.

If a writer is going into traditional publishing to have a shot at the New York Times bestseller list, is that shot worth the loss of income? Is it worth the risk of going out of print (paper) in a year or so with no ability to get those rights back because of a perpetual ebook publication?

If the bestseller list means millions of copies and millions of dollars, then the risk might be worthwhile. But if books are getting on respected lists like the Times with only 20,000 copies sold, then that changes the equation, in my opinion.

Because that same writer could sell 20,000 ebooks 500 copies at a time over 3.3 years (40 months), and continue to earn without hitting a list at all. And make more money—70% of the cover price instead of 8% of cover for the mass market edition.

Is that 20K number unrealistic? No. Look at this screen capture that Joe Konrath posted on his blog. Ignore that 11,000 sales of one title that he managed in one month and look at the sales of the other titles. There are writers and titles selling much better than his on a monthly basis. These numbers aren’t because Konrath is “famous” (see his argument about this). These numbers came about because people found the books and are reading them. These numbers are because the books are available.

Some would argue that bestseller lists on Amazon and in other  places have advertising value, and I would agree with that. Readers do look at the lists when they’re not certain what to buy.

But again, is that minimal and momentary advertising value worth the longterm loss of income and the longterm loss of use of the copyright? I don’t think so. There are other ways to bring your book to the attention of readers. (See my piece on promotion for that.)

This tradeoff, this loss of revenue, in order to become a bestseller might be a purchase of something with historical value, not current value.

Most of us—beginning and established writers, traditional publishers, agents, booksellers—are working off old models, the models we grew up with, and we’re not questioning if those models still have value.

Once upon a time, you had to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to hit a bestseller list. Now you don’t. So, in my opinion, the bestseller list has less value than it had ten years ago.

We’re operating in an old paradigm.  And it makes me sad, honestly. Because old goals die hard. I’ll still be ecstatic if something of mine hits the Times list. I’m going to be thrilled if something of mine is #1 on the Kindle paid e-book list.

But I’m not going to trade long-term revenue to achieve those goals.  When a traditional publisher tells me, like one did today, that he can get me on a bestseller list and that’s one reason to sell a book to his company, I will agree with him. He might be right. But he might only be selling 20,000 copies of my book to get me on that list.

And that’s very different from the way it was when I came into the business.

We all have to remember that as we choose how to publish our books. What was important when we started might not be important now—no matter how much we want it to be.

Fifteen years ago, if you told me I would blog every week, I would have laughed at you. If you told me I would do so with a donate-button on my site, asking readers to finance the essay, I would have rolled my eyes. Things have changed dramatically. I’ve been doing this blog in one form or another for nearly three years now, and you readers have funded it. I said then, like I’m saying now, I’ll continue doing this as long as you continue to support it.

Thanks for the support, the discussion, the links, and the funding. I appreciate it.

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“The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts” copyright 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: Why Not?

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

On TV’s most popular drama series, NCIS, the main character, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, walks through the office, and if he hears a stupid statement, he slaps the speaker on the back of the head. Now, this is fiction, mind you. In any real office, military or not, he’d probably be fired, brought up on charges, or forced to have sensitivity training.

But that’s not my point.

My point is: I can relate.

I walk past writer after writer after writer, and as I hear what comes out of their mouths, I want to slap some sense into them. Because words don’t seem to be working.

Which is odd, considering that writers use words as their stock in trade.

The biggest problem writers have as a class isn’t that they work too cheaply, which I wrote about last week, or even that they don’t understand business, which I write about almost every week, but that they think too small.

Huh? you think to yourself as you read this. My last novel clocked in at 140,000 words. I invented an entire world. I don’t think small.

Oh, yes, you do. Every damn day. It’s the rare writer who actually has ambitions—real ambitions—and stands up for them. It’s the rare writer who not only dreams of glory (bestseller lists, millions of dollars, fame, lasting acclaim, or whatever) but actually works toward those dreams.

In 1968, at the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Edward Kennedy quoted his brother: “As he said many times… ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.’”

That quote has stuck in my brain since I first heard it, in the background of Tom Clay’s medley version of a Dion song called “Abraham, Martin & John,” in 1971.  I was eleven. I ended up with a philosophy.

That philosophy is pretty simple: Why not? Why can’t we? Who says? Who the hell are they to tell me what to do?

(Okay, that last part has nothing to do with Bobby Kennedy, but still, you get the picture.)

I have often said, quite pointedly, to my students—most of whom are already established writers who, because of a downturn in their career, came to the a workshop Dean and I do—that I’m surprised at them. Most of these students remind me of German Shepherds. I tell them to stand in a corner, and they go stand in the corner, waiting until I tell them to leave. Then I show them this video, which is a commercial that EDS did a few years ago, which is a group of cowboys herding cats. (I love that image.) Writers should be the cats—difficult if not impossible to herd, heading to their destination in their own feisty way.

I urge these writers to become individuals and go on their own path, and if they don’t agree with something I say, then they should do it their way and prove me wrong. Most of the students are startled that I want them to question. I want them to think.

But that’s the only way you can have a long-term career as the person in charge of any business. You have to think, and be creative, and you can’t let roadblocks stop you.

You have to find a way around them.

But most of all, you have to question accepted wisdom. Last week, a lot of people came on my blog in the comments section spouting myths that teachers, editors, agents, and other writers have pounded into them, mostly telling these poor folks how impossible it is to do well in this business. By the end of the week, I was getting mad at these myth-spouters.

I have no idea why people want to hang onto the stories of failure, the impossibility of doing well without cheating or “getting lucky,” but they do. They want it all now and they don’t want to work for it. And when you tell them they must work for it, they get mad.

As I said yesterday in response to yet another of those comments (I got dozens of them by e-mail), I’m not writing these blog posts for those writers. I’m writing the posts for the rest of you, the ones who want to learn and figure out how to thrive in this new world of publishing. (Thanks to all of you who posted or e-mailed. Much appreciated.)

The first thing you have to do to survive in this world is think big.

Let me give you an example.

Last week, I sent y’all to Michael Cader’s excellent year-end analysis at Publisher’s Marketplace, and told you that if you’re serious about your business, you should subscribe. In the comments, J. Steven York pointed out—correctly—that PM is geared toward publishing professionals in the traditional publishing arena, and you have to read Cader’s blog with that in mind.

In other words, Cader does not write for writers. He rarely thinks about individual writers. Cader has a broad, international worldview of the huge industry that this is.

I write for writers. When I tell you to go to Publishers Marketplace, I do it because I want you to understand this industry—its vastness, its successes (yes, even now), and its struggles. I also want you to read everything with that writerly grain of salt.

As I read Cader’s piece, I got to a paragraph in the middle and had both a “what-the?” and a “why-not” moment. That paragraph comes under the heading, Disproportionate Attention-o-Meter:

“Self-published ebooks were a great story, but in the end roughly 20 different ebook authors made the bestseller lists during the year (we’re working on a full list). Plus 413,000 units is impressive (Darcy Chan’s numbers for Mill River Recluse), but at ninety-nine cents, that’s a gross of $413,000—while a book like Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson grossed more on the order $35 million to $40 million.”

Whoa. I’ll deconstruction this little paragraph in a moment, but let’s first look at that “full list, compiled later.” Under another post titled, “How Many Self-Published Authors were Bestsellers in 2011,” Cader explained what he meant by “20 different ebook authors.”

First of all, he defines “bestseller” by the industry gold standard, The New York Times. The Times list is purposefully murky, because publishers tried to manipulate it. Murkiness worked well in the old days of publishing, but in this era of easy computer numbers, murkiness actually hurts something like a bestseller list.

Anyway, I’ll save that soapbox for a later column. Let’s continue with Cader’s definition of bestselling author. He only counts self-published ebook authors who made the list with “an original work,” adding this parenthetically “thus we are not including reissues or short-form pieces.” Then he concludes: “Contrary to the popular impression, the total number is…11.”

Okay. Let’s take this bit by bit. Cader is comparing apples with cars. And then he’s throwing in some prejudice to make the picture even more confusing.

Bit The First: Realize we’re talking gross earnings here, without expenses deducted. If you look at what the author received, then the disparity remains great. But if you look at the cost of production only, you’ll find that Darcy Chan’s book cost millions less to produce than the Isaacson.  So the gulf between the titles isn’t quite as big as Cader leads you to believe—although I admit, it’s still big.

Bit The Second: That disparity in gross earnings isn’t as important as you think, because the books were published using different methodology. I’m not talking the fact that Chan is indie-published and Isaacson isn’t.

I’m talking about this: Chan’s book was sent out in the new indie fashion, which is a slow growth expected over years. Let’s call that the durable goods model.

Isaacson’s book went out in traditional publishing fashion, which maximizes earnings in the first six months of release, expecting the book sales to drop to nearly nothing after a few years.  Let’s call that the produce model.

Produce spoils and  must be replaced quickly with something fresher. Durable goods need to be replaced once every decade or two—or in the case of those current bestsellers on the Kindle lists, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens—once every century or two.

When you structure an earnings statement for produce, you receive the bulk of your income in the first six months.

When you structure an earnings statement for durable goods, you receive your income in a steady stream over years.

So comparing Chan’s gross to Isaacson’s gross ignores that.

Bit The Third: The Walter Isaacson book was published in all formats, from hardcover to audio to ebook, simultaneously, with media attention and a lightning strike to boot. The book was available everywhere, not just in a few ebookstores, and it came out just as Jobs died. Every single newspaper, every single obituary, every single media outlet either interviewed Isaacson and/or mentioned his books simultaneously with the death of Jobs.

If Cader wanted to make a good comparison to the Chan book, he should have taken a book released at the same time in the same genre in the same number of formats. Maybe a Carina Press book through Harlequin.  I’d even take another fiction book here, say John Grisham’s The Litigators, which got no extra press that I found. No lightning strike—no death, no movie, no nothing to goose promotion except what traditional publishers do for their bestsellers. Even if you do take The Litigators over the Steve Jobs book, Grisham’s gross earnings on that one title out earned  Darcy Chan’s by at least ten to one

Readers can’t get Darcy Chan’s book in audio or hardcover or in foreign translations. It’s not sitting in stacks at the Barnes & Noble. Nor did it get all the advertising and airplay—not because it was self published, but because the subject of the book isn’t newsworthy.

Let’s delve farther into Cader’s “Disproportionate Attention-o-Meter”  point. He arbitrarily decided to ignore the first sanctioned bestseller list to count ebooks, the USA Today list. Most traditional publishers I know pay a lot more attention to the USA Today list. Readers still believe the New York Times list is the most impressive, which leads advertise the Times list on covers, but the USA Today list tracks actual sales around the country.

(The Times uses only select (approved) bookstores, which remain secret. That goes for ebooks as well; the Times only counts the big guns like Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble, ignoring Smashwords, and other smaller sources. That’s the opposite of what the Times  does with their prestigious paper book list, which is geared toward smaller bookstores, and not the chains.)

Publishers are ecstatic when their book hits the Times list, but they also know that a book that gets in the top ten on the USA Today list will often sell a boatload more copies than a book on the top ten of the Times list. But they also get annoyed by the USA Today list because it doesn’t separate fiction from nonfiction, children’s from adult. To the USA Today list, a book is a book is a book. And when USA Today  brought in ebooks, they brought them in as books, not as part of a separate ebook list, like the Times did.

When Cader chose the Times list over the USA Today list he either intentionally or subconsciously skewed his data. For example, on January 4, in a piece titled “eBooks Fill the USA Today Bestseller list,” he notes that one year ago (in 2011), 19 of the top 50 titles sold better in ebook than in print. This year, 42 of the top 50 titles sold better in ebook than in print.

Now, most (if not all—I haven’t checked) of these 42 titles are traditionally published. But that’s irrelevant to my point. Because if the ebook editions of the top 50 books outsell the print editions, then self-published writers who do ebooks only are finally on a level playing field with writers like John Grisham.  The same article noted that James Patterson sold over 5 million ebooks. Why can’t an indie writer do that?

Well, for all I know, someone might have.

But here’s the other assumption in Cader’s first piece, the assumption that permeates all of traditional publishing about ebooks. Cader assumes that Darcy Chan’s book sold well only because it was 99 cents and it wouldn’t have sold well at a higher price.

That’s a guess, y’all. There’s no proof of that anywhere—except, perhaps, that Chan recently signed a traditional book deal for that very title. Which means that a traditional publisher believes that the book will sell a boatload of copies at a higher price—more than enough to make back all of those produce expenses. In other words, some traditional publishers’ sales department believes that Chan will sell at least 413,000 copies at a much higher price point, which means that Cader’s assumption that it’s the price point that makes the sale is wrong.

(Of course we won’t know for sure until the traditionally published book comes out, and even then we might not know, because the traditional publisher has to do the book right. Which doesn’t happen all the time.)

The other problem with Cader’s bestseller assumptions? He limits self-published writers to “original” titles only, new books—produce, in his mind—while the mainstream bestseller lists often have books on them that are backlist, sparked by a movie, say, or by one of a writer’s new books hitting the list.

A few years ago, Patricia Briggs hit the extended New York Times list with one of her new novels. (I’m hedging on the dates because, like a doofus, I’m writing this the night before I have to post the column, and don’t have time to e-mail her, so I’m relying on memory. Judging from the book covers I’m seeing on Amazon, it was sometime around 2007, but I’m not sure.)

Patty’s been publishing steadily since the mid-1990s, and gaining readers with each book. They were waiting for the latest in one of her series (I believe it was the Mercy Thompson series, but again, not sure), and bought the book the week it got released.

Patty’s traditional publisher, smart folks that they are, reissued all of her backlist with new covers. They promoted her heavily. And suddenly, Patty’s backlist was on the New York Times list. She gained new readers, and became a #1 bestselling author.

The point here is that backlist titles belong on any count of authors who get on a bestseller list. I was watching Patty’s rise; she’s someone I’ve known and rooted for for a very long time. Early on in this rise up the bestseller lists, Patty’s backlist titles were the only books of hers on the bestseller lists. I don’t know if that was over the change of a year (an arbitrary measure, but one that counts), but if so, then she should have been—and probably was—counted as an author who made the bestseller list that year even though she only had backlist on the bestseller list.

That Cader didn’t count backlist—like Barbara Freethy’s bestselling ebooks, most of which were initially released in the 1990s—is, again, skewing the numbers to make his point.

However, his statistic will probably stand among traditional publishing professionals because what he says—with actual numbers!—is what they want to believe. They want to believe that it is impossible for self-published or indie published book to ever gross $35 to $40 million.

I would wager most self- or indie-published writers would agree. Because why else would these folks sign on with traditional publishers for a smaller percentage than they would ever get on their own? In other words, these writers are exchanging a large initial advance for a lot less money in the long run.

If the writers actually believed their self-published titles could sell as well as a traditionally published title, they would never ever ever have made those deals.

Me, I read a comment like Cader’s comparing Chan to Isaacson, and after mentally upbraiding him for comparing apples to cars, I then ask, “Why not?”

Why can’t an indie-published writer sell as many copies as Isaacson? Why can’t an indie-published title earn the same gross amount? If it did, the indie writer would make a heck of a lot more money as net income than Isaacson ever will.

Let’s go back, shall we, to the USA Today list, and my mention of James Patterson’s 5 million ebooks sold. Here’s how it got reported in Lunch: “Hachette Book Group has sold over 2 million ebook units of James Patterson’s works over the past six months, and now has sold 5.072 million ebooks in all by the author as of December 2011 across all retailers.”

Assuming, like Cader does, that indie or self-published writers only publish ebooks (which is incorrect, but I’ll deal with that in a minute), a comparably priced indie author could sell 5 million ebooks as well on her own because she has easy access to the same distribution system that Patterson’s publisher does.

Will any indie writer do that this year? Probably not. Patterson has built his readership since the 1990s, and those readers wait for each book. But on a title-by-title basis, I’ll wager that indie writers can compete with the big guns. I know that for a while John Locke outsold John Grisham—and I don’t think that had anything to do with price.

But let’s go back to my question: why can’t an indie writer’s book earn the same amount of money (gross) that the Isaacson earned? It can.  In print and in ebook.

If we’re going to skew numbers, let’s skew in the indie direction.  Let’s compare the gross income over five years, rather than over six months. The Steve Jobs book will stop earning those huge numbers after 2014 (after the promotion for the paperback), but our imaginary self-published title will continue growing its readership, particularly if the writer publishes more books like Patterson did or Patty Briggs did.

If the self-published writer is smart, she can do her own audio version through Audible, add a print version through CreateSpace or Lightning Source, market those books to outlets that take them (from bookstores to truck stops), sell translation rights or hire her own translators, make sure the book is available in as many countries as possible, and, if she wants, she can advertise the damn thing (although I would argue against it).

Mark my words. Sometime in the next few years, an indie author will retain her rights—not sell the books to traditional publishers—and will have a book title that sells for more than 99 cents that grosses around 35 million dollars.

Measured in durable goods time, not produce time.

However, if that successful writer wants to do her next book in the produce model, then she could probably have that book sell about 10 million dollars gross in six months to a year. She’ll have the readership from the first book, and she can dump the book on stores and in foreign countries just like Simon & Schuster did with the Steve Jobs/Isaacson book. (Why is my number lower than theirs? Because I’m making a discount for the lightning strike factor—Jobs’ death and the attendant promotion.)

If she wants to. I have no idea why she’d want to, but that’s my prejudice.

Why can’t an indie writer do as well with a book title as a traditionally published writer? Who says she can’t?

Why the heck are so many writers believing that it’s impossible?

Because writers think small.

You work in an international business, folks. You have millions upon millions upon millions of possible readers. That’ll scare most of you. You’ll immediately think, “How can I  compete there? How will they notice me?”

Here’s the harsh truth: most of them won’t notice you. Most of them never will notice any of us. As Michael Kingswood pointed out in the comments last week, writer celebrities aren’t very famous in the big bad world. Even in the United States, the bestselling writer of 2011, James Patterson, is mostly unknown to the average person on the street.

So what? You don’t need everyone. Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs book didn’t sell to everyone. It sold to a fraction of all of the possible readers out there.

I’m a voracious reader: I didn’t buy that book nor do I plan to. It’s a matter of taste.

What you want to do is build. Build, build, build. This is why I tell writers to write a lot. My bestselling title under the Rusch name in the UK right now is a short story called “The Secret Lives of Cats.”  It’s not even close to my bestselling Rusch title here in the U.S. And my bestselling Rusch title in Australia as I write this blog? “How To Negotiate Anything,” one of the Freelancer’s Guide short books.

Would I have predicted either of those books as top-selling titles? Hell, no. Why are they selling? Because they’re available. And people notice my work. Because they’ve heard of me? Nope.

Think of it this way: when you walk into a bookstore and browse the romance aisles, you see row after row after row of Nora Roberts books. You see a handful of books by other writers like Lisa Kleypas or Eloisa James. But do you notice one title by a brand new author? Especially if that title is spine out?

Only if you’ve stopped on that shelf for something else and the title catches you. That’s the only reason you’ll notice.

Well, I’m selling a lot of ebooks right now because I have a lot of titles out there. I’m sure if I break the sales down by region, like Kobo does, I could tell you that certain titles sell better in Georgia than they do in Illinois. I’m not into that sort of numbering.

Here’s the difference between me and most other writers. I’m aware that I’m in an international business. I put in the effort to be a success on a huge stage—even if most people walking by that stage don’t notice me right now.

Most writers publish one book—traditionally or indie—and expect accolades. They expect to be famous—Angelina Jolie kinda famous—and they expect it right away. They feel they deserve it.  I have no idea why. Jolie didn’t become famous overnight, even though her father and her mother were famous (Mom was an internationally known model; Dad was actor Jon Voight). Jolie worked hard at her profession for decades, and her profession is high-profile.

Ours isn’t.

A lot of people have heard of Harry Potter, but many of them don’t know that he was a character in a book first.  They only know him from the films. Even fewer people know that a woman named J.K. Rowling wrote those books. And even fewer people have read the books—even though for nearly a decade, J.K. Rowling was the bestselling author in the world.

Did that stop her from writing her books? No. Did she dream of that kind of success when she wrote them? I have no idea. Did she even know it was possible? Probably not deep down.

Most of us will never achieve Rowling’s level of success. Most of us will write for decades and have a lot of readers, but never become household names (in literate households). So what?

I’m sure someone out there, with some courage and the ability to write a lot over a long period of time, will be the first big indie success story without ever going to traditional publishing. And I mean the kind of success that will have traditional publishing people like Michael Cader notice.

Is it possible for an indie (or to use Cader’s term self-published) writer to publish a book that grosses 35 million dollars? Hell, yes. That it hasn’t been done yet reflects on the youth of the new world of publishing, not on the quality the books being written by indie writers.

If you look around and see a small world, filled with a few friends, professors, and local bookstores, you’ll never make the kind of decisions that you need to survive in an international business. If you believe you have to chase sales with low price points or blog tours or book signings at area bookstores, you’ll never make the kind of decisions that you need to survive in an international business.

If you strive to do the best you can, write a lot of books, and make sure your books are in as many bookstores as possible—ebookstores, audio bookstores, foreign bookstores, as well as US bookstores, in English as well as dozens if not hundreds of languages (over time)—then you will succeed in this international business. You’re looking at the big picture.

You’re running toward it catlike, on your path, not mine. You’re not standing in a corner, awaiting instruction from someone “in charge.” You’re not mouthing the kind of sentences that I heard off and on all last week on my blog about how impossible it is or how established writers like me don’t understand. You’re not making me want to channel Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

You’re working hard at your writing, doing your best to succeed in this great big world available to us.

Maybe you’re the person who’ll sell a book that will gross 35 million dollars. Why not?

Or at least, why not try?

Last week’s blog went viral which brought a lot of folks to my site mostly to argue with me. It also brought a lot of new folks who haven’t encountered my point of view before, some of whom appreciated it, and some who didn’t. I don’t mind disagreements, if they’re based in fact (not myth). I like learning. That’s one of the reasons I do this blog. But I dislike argument for argument’s sake.

A lot of you posted to tell me how much you get out of this blog. Thank you! As I said in a comment last week, I’m writing this blog for folks who want to succeed at this international business. And that seems to be quite a lot of you. I appreciate you guys more than you know.

Even though you can read this blog for free, I need to get paid for writing it, and I do that through direct contact with the blog readers. (When the payments dry up over the long term, I’ll cease doing the blog. I have a lot of other projects I could spend 4000 words on.)

So, as always, if you got something out of the blog, please leave a tip on the way out. I appreciate it.

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“The Business Rusch: Why Not?” copyright 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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What a weird year. I’m glad it’s done. I ended up with a lot of time to read this month—and please note that I’m not recommending everything I read here. I never do. But I did notice something. Unless the book/article/story is in paper, I’m having to read past some errors. This isn’t just an indie problem. In fact, most traditionally published e-books are worse. I’m just finding some fascinating errors.

If the book is indie published, it generally has two mistakes—whatever the author doesn’t know (for example, hyphens get misused) or typos that spellcheck won’t catch such as (in one rather hiliarious instance) “groan” for “groin” You get maybe three of those per book. The indie-published formatting and structure is often superior to a traditionally published book. I know some of my short stories have these issues, particularly from the early days of WMG when I had to do my own copyediting. So you indie-writers—spend the money. Hire a copy editor. It’ll make all the difference.

Traditionally published books have terrible formatting errors—still!  And often have OCR errors, particularly in older titles that are being reissued. The publisher isn’t springing for a copy edit on the previously published book. Then they scan that book, and every page is riddled with gobbledygook or wrong words such as (in another hilarious instance) “farting” instead of “flirting.” (That has got to be my favorite error of all time. Our heroine is surprised that the hero is farting with her. Yep. I guess that means they were compatible.)

Traditionally published books with OCR errors have them every page or two, and are annoying to read. The indie published books with copyediting issues have a pattern that can be ignored. Once you realize that Author A doesn’t understand hyphens, you can read right over them. Otherwise the  book is pristine.

I suspect all of this will change as everything shakes out. But we’ll still end up with a lot of books that remain in print riddled with errors—particularly from traditional publishers. Be forwarned when you get your e-editions.

As for the actual reading itself, it was a mixed bag. Some things were wonderful, and some awful, but a lot was entertaining while I read it, and annoying by the time I got to the end. For example, I read a series book by a favorite author and I think his main character is getting careworn. Or maybe I got struck by a bit of morality. Because by the end our “hero” had killed his ranking officer while in the Pentagon (and our “hero”’s law enforcement friends covered it up) as well as a top-ranking senator & his son (and again our “hero”’s law enforcement friends [a different group]  covered it up), and you know, I just didn’t believe it. I really didn’t. My sense of disbelief got strained to the breaking point.

I also read a lot of Christmas stories this month. I started an annual holiday recommended reading list in November which I’ll put up every holiday season, adding titles. So what you see recommended below will be added there next year.

But wow, did I read some holiday dogs. Including an anthology from a major traditional publisher that was awful. The first story was so!full!of!exclamation!points! as to be unreadable, and the third story was one gigantic romance novel cliché (two people who don’t know each other trapped in a snowy mountain cabin, lots of sex, no relationship, and no story). The second story had possibilities, and I did read it all the way through, hoping for the best. Great setting, fascinating set-up…and then the author decided to have these two characters not talk to each other for the entire novella. (sigh) It would have been so much nicer if she had actually used the set-up…

Every now and then I do read something that makes me grumpy, and that anthology qualifies. Yuck….

I also dipped into a lot of Tomes for research on a topic I really don’t understand and must understand before I write about it. (Dang that story brain.) So I’m reading bits and pieces of lots of fascinating things, none of which I can recommend because I’m not finishing them.

Fortunately I was able to read every word of the pieces below. They’re wonderful and they made my reading  month. I hope you find something that’ll interest you here.

December, 2011

Allen, John, On Wisconsin, Fall, 2011. Maybe only a former editor would appreciate this, but the best magazines have themes. The issues have a flow and a message, if read in order. (Of course, you must ignore the columnists [who never get the memo], and the regular features.)  The articles in this issue of the University of Wisconsin’s alumni magazine are all about reinvention, of lives, of science, of futures.

I read three different alumni magazines—Dean’s, and the two from my college career—and the only one I ever recommend articles from is Wisconsin’s. They’re not puff pieces. They’re good journalism with a UW slant. This is a particularly top-notch issue.

Berg, A. Scott, “The Hunt For Hemingway,” Vanity Fair, October, 2011. Years and years ago, I read Berg’s book on the editor Maxwell Perkins. It’s fascinating stuff]. Apparently Berg is working on a book about Hemingway, and managed in the past decade, to get to Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s home in Cuba. There  he and Perkins’ granddaughter, who started the ball rolling on all of this, found a treasure trove of never-before-seen material by and about Hemingway. Never-before-seen, of course, since Hemingway left Finca Vigia fifty years ago. There’s a huge gap in Hemingway scholarship, and the answers are all in Cuba.

The article is fascinating, about the arrival, the hunt, everything. The letters are not as interesting for me, because I’m a Hemingway fan not a Hemingway scholar. But this piece is worth the read, just for the look into a writer’s life—and the strange circumstances that occurred after his death.

Block, Lawrence, “Murders in Memory Lane: Scott Meredith, Part 1,” Mystery Scene Magazine, Fall, 2011. Lawrence Block is writing a nifty column for Mystery Scene about the folks he’s known in the field. He’s known some interesting ones. As a writer who got her start in the 1980s, I heard a lot about Scott Meredith the “super agent.” In fact, most of the agents I knew when I started out had been Scott Meredith trained. Once, when I was searching for a new agent, Ralph Vicinanza and I had a meeting. He asked if I wanted him to represent me. I almost did, until he made a comment. We were discussing my previous agent, who had gotten his start at the Scott Meredith agency, and Ralph said, “I guess you just have to figure out what kind of Scott Meredith agent you want.” Because Ralph had also been trained by Scott.

Well, the previous agent had burned me, and so that cooled me down on Ralph as well. (He probably didn’t realize what he had said wrong at the time.) I had heard stories about Scott Meredith from everyone. Nothing surprises me about Meredith any  more, but I’m still fascinated by him.

Block’s column this time deals with the beginnings of his job at the agency—how he got there, and how he ended up with them as his agent. Good writer that he is, he ends on an ominous note. But it’s only ominous if you’ve already heard Scott Meredith stories.  That ending does what any cliffhanger should—it makes me want to read the next column right now.  I love these columns. I hope he collects them into a book at some point.

Connelly, Michael, The Drop, Little Brown, 2011.  A new Harry Bosch book. I love Connelly’s work and usually buy it the day it’s released.  I get most of my mystery hardcovers through our local independent bookseller, and this time, his shipment of signed Connellys was late. Like a month-plus late. Ack! I didn’t read reviews, I tried not to drool at the book that Amazon kept offering me, I waited—and got it two days before Christmas. And managed to read it—despite everything that was going on—in two days.

Part of that rapid read is because this book is short—maybe 70,000 words when the average novel these days is 100,000. Maybe. Little Brown did a lot of tap dancing with wide margins, increased font size and lots of white space to stretch this thing to its 388 pages—which made it easier for my tired eyes to read in the print version, but probably caused the production people nightmares.

But I can’t attribute my rapid read only to the shortness of the book. This thing moves. Once you start it, you won’t be able to put it down.

The Drop finds Harry Bosch in the Open-Unsolved Unit of the LAPD, with a case that looks like it might be police misconduct. He doesn’t want to investigate, but of course he does. And as he does, he gets another case—a current case—because an influential political party asked him to investigate. The cases aren’t really related except by something that Bosch calls “high jingo”—stuff that’s done for political reasons, not because it’s important or sensible.

The book is impossible to put down, and the last line is a killer. (Don’t peek.)  I loved it and immediately searched for any unread Connelly books around the house. Of course, there are none. [sigh] So I must wait until next year for the next Connelly. Proof yet again that readers can go through books faster than the fastest writer can write them. Buy this one: it’s good.

Dittrich, Luke, “Two Dozen Strangers in a Cooler,” Esquire, October, 2011. This is an incredibly riveting article that reads like a piece of fiction. It’s about the Joplin tornado and the 24 people who hid in the cooler at a minimart. It’s not about what happened to them afterward, nor is it about how their lives changed. It’s a survival piece about the tornado itself, a minute-by-minute account of what happened, how it felt, and how they barely managed to get out of a totalled building with their lives. Extremely tense, extremely dramatic, extremely well done.

Howe, Barton, “One Small Step–For Everyone Else,” The News Guard, December 14, 2011. I’ve mentioned Barton’s humor column before. He writes for the local paper, and sometimes his pieces are too local to make sense to anyone outside of our 7,000-person community, but sometimes he writes a piece that I think everyone will appreciate. This one was “written” by his 18-month old daughter. Which sounds really twee. But it isn’t. It’s a fun perspective on being…18 months old. Somehow he nailed it.  (I do wonder what his daughter will think of all this in 18 years, but hey, not my problem.) Take a look. All of Barton’s columns are on his website, and are worth your time to check out. [link]

Johnson, Simon, and Kwak, James, “Debt and Dumb” Vanity Fair, November, 2011. Fantastic article that puts the financial history of the United States in perspective. How the system got set up, what it compares to, why it works, and what could screw with it. Yes, this is political, but it’s more of a history lesson which, it seems, we badly need in this country.

Kelly, Christen Anne, Home Run, Blue Cedar Publishing, Kindle Edition, 2011. Anyone who read The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction when I edited knows I’m a sucker for a baseball story. I love baseball stories, much more than I like watching baseball on TV. So when I saw the proposal for this book at one of our workshops, I begged Chrissy to write it. I knew this would be a book I would like. I just knew it.

When the book came out, she sent me a copy and I confess: I felt nervous. I always worry when I read the proposal and then the book arrives. I already have expectations. I expected this to be good.  Fortunately, it is.

Technically, Home Run isn’t a baseball story, although it features a former professional baseball player. It’s a softball story—girls’ softball. Laurie coaches a softball team for 12-year-old girls, and she fiercely protects them, because her father ruined the game for her by turning it into work when she was their age. Her father’s plan succeeded: Laurie went to college on a softball scholarship and was one of the best players ever, but she quit because she hated playing.

Although she still loves the game. And she loves her girls. She worries about them when Jack shows up with his daughter, Elizabeth. Parents are enough trouble when they aren’t former Rookies of the Year, when they don’t have a reputation for being difficult, and when they aren’t so handsome that a girl can’t think straight.

The book could go along the lines of a contemporary romance—and it does—but not on rails. The novel is really about dreams: how important they are, how easy they are to crush, and how they must be nurtured. Parents play a huge role in this novel, and so does the entire team. Elizabeth is a great—believable—kid, and the situations here (her father’s divorce, the love of the game, the conflict the adults around her feel) makes the story even more powerful.

This is one of those unclassifiable books that drive traditional publishers nuts. If you like sports novels, you’ll like this—even if you don’t like romance. If you like romance, you’ll like this—even if you don’t like sports novels. If I were marketing it, I’d market it as romance, but cringe a little, because I know I’d miss half the audience. Now, with the indie revolution, we don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. Books like this one can find their audience.

Wonderful book, chockful of unexpected surprises. There’s a bonus short story at the end of the Kindle edition, which I haven’t read yet, and more short stories in this world of girls’ softball. Chrissy is a former star softball player herself, so the book’s got authenticity in spades. It’s also the first in “The Home Run series” of novels. You can bet I’ll be first in line for the second novel—and I’m off to get some short stories now.

Liu, Ken, “The People of Pele,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, February, 2012.  A wonderful traditional science fiction story about exploration, about leaving family and friends behind to do something spectacular. Without FTL, this ship must use cold sleep, and the inhabitants wake up decades after they’ve left everyone. This is a multi-cultural mission, one that is to bring the world closer together, but run by the Americans. And you can guess: the first message they get from Earth, sent shortly after they left, hints at tensions. Then they’re told to claim Pele for Earth. This is the subtext that is happening while they’re trying to learn about Pele, discover other life forms, and oh—it sounds like something you read fifty years ago (if you could read fifty years ago, which I couldn’t)—but it’s really modern and really relevant and quite wonderful. The sf snobs who believe that sf should never repeat old ideas will not notice this one, but you should. Read it.

Lubrano, Alfred, “Tracking the Ties That Bind,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2011. An essay from Lubrano’s book called Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams. I learned when I taught—and through my husband and two of my friends—that folks with blue collar upbringings (especially from forty, fifty, sixty years ago) had different training than little ole white collar me.  The training and expectation mean that I have to teach differently when I start folks with a blue collar background on a path, or we don’t communicate. It took years to realize that.

Lubrano illustrates it in this article about Fred Gardaphé, who graduated from the UW in 1976. He came from a particularly tough (read: mob-infested) neighborhood of Chicago, and went on to be a professor. This is a look at his life, the things he overcame, and the things he now appreciates about his friends from the neighborhood and his home. Fascinating stuff. There’s also an essay in here by Gardaphé, which you should read after you’ve read the Lubrano piece.

McAllister, Bruce & Malzberg, Barry, “Going Home,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, February, 2012. A powerful, powerful story about…well, read it. It touches on the Golden Age of sf, on writing, on editors, on the way things change, but it’s…well, if I tell you, I’ll spoil it because it’s only about 2,000 words long. But they’re marvelous words. Read this one too.

Price, Jenny, “Prison Breaks,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2011. A short piece about JD Stier who went to prison in 1998, and is now working in the White House. This is about the efforts of one teacher who showed Stier a way out—and Stier himself, who took that opportunity and ran with it.

Reed, Annie, “Essy and The Christmas Kitten,” Kindle edition, Thunder Valley Press, 2011.  This story is not as sweet as the title implies. Instead, it is a bit dark and moody, so much so that I read with one eye half closed, worried that something would go wrong. But it is a Christmas story in the best way, and quite memorable.  One of my best Christmas reads this year.

Reed, Annie, “Roger’s Christmas Wish,” Kindle Edition, Thunder Valley Press, 2010. Somehow I missed this in last year’s Christmas reading. Young Roger’s grandmother moved in with him, taking his room. His parents are unhappy, and so is Roger. All he wants for Santa to do is make his grandmother leave. The story is sweet, with unexpected twists. It’s also a nicely done e-book. I read it in the Kindle app on my iPad and it felt like I was reading a real book. Nicely done.

Reed, Robert, “Murder Born,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, February, 2012. What’s wrong with traditional book publishing today? Pretty easy to show you rather than tell you: Every major sf editor rejected Robert Reed’s proposal for a novel based on this idea. Bob writes, “This is the same essential story, chiseled down to the bone. There is one plot element added to the original tale, and everything that the editors wanted taken out has been shoved forward and made obvious.”

Honestly, truthfully, this story just might win Bob a Hugo. It’s that powerful, that original, and that well written. I  know what happened in the book houses: they were afraid of this.

The story was inspired by the way that Bob’s home state carries out the death penalty. He wanted to write a story about a way that would make the execution of some heinous human worthwhile—and without spoiling what that is, let me tell you he accomplished it. It’s a powerful story about futures, about life and love, about death, about man’s inhumanity to man, about all that great stuff that the best sf does. It’s a spectacular story, and we Asimov’s readers benefit from the book editors’ cowardice. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. Keep it in mind at Hugo voting time.  I know I will.

Williams, Sheila, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February, 2012. Because 2011 has been so awful for me in terms of reading and life and all of that fun stuff, I missed my goal. My goal was to read all of the digest magazines, or at least give it the good old college try. Well, I revived the goal for 2012, which means I have to start now. February’s issue arrived in my mailbox early because I have a story in the issue as well. I did not reread my own story, and am not counting it as part of the recommendation for this issue. (I’m self-serving, but not that self-serving.)

I grabbed the magazine when it arrived yesterday, read Sheila’s take on winning her Hugo, and mentally upbraded myself for not doing the same thing at F&SF when I won for editing years and years ago. (I’m still honored by that Hugo. It means more than I can say.)

Her essay is marvelous. The cover caught me as well—I love Bob Reed’s work, and the title sounded great—but I promised myself I’d read all the way through before I got to his issue-closing novella, which I did.

A few of the stories I liked, but not quite enough to recommend on their own. But the ones that I have recommended, I love.  I devoured the entire issue in an evening, then made sure I put January’s on the top of my TBR pile.

There’s a reason Sheila—who does not campaign like some editors—won the Hugo in 2011 on merit alone. She’s a spectacular short fiction editor. Her work is top of the line. Asimov’s is my favorite sf magazine—and probably my favorite fiction magazine.  She’s doing a hell of a job. Support her by buying issues, either on your e-reader or in paper. And since I mentioned Hugo voting above, keep her in mind as you fill out your 2012 ballot. She’s doing a great job.

Wolcott, James, “Norman Mailer Sent Me,” Vanity Fair, November, 2011.  Wolcott has a memoir coming out (or maybe it’s out by now—I’m really behind in my reading), and this is an excerpt. It’s about the beginning of his career. He quit college and moved to New York on the thinnest of opportunities.

Wolcott’s essay shows why some writers (and artists) survive, and why others fall by the wayside. Reading between the lines here, you see a man who has incredible drive, who tried and tried and tried, and finally ran out of resources before he gave up. And even then, he gave his given career one last try—and that try worked. (Who knows how many other times he would have “given up” before the final try worked? Those of us with incredible drive say we’re giving up when really, we don’t see how to keep trying—and even then, we’re looking for a way not to give up.)

This excellent essay also captures early 1970s New York, and the literary scene there. Highly recommended.