You can subscribe to the ebook or print editions here. Or you can order individual ebook copies from your favorite e-bookstores and trade paper copies from your favorite brick-and-mortar store. The audio book, which we had a lot of fun putting together, will be out in about three weeks.

You always order trade paper or ebook copies of the first Fiction River, Unnatural Worlds. Unlike a regular magazine, this anthology series will remain in print. The audio book of the first volume has just come out and it was a pick of the week on Audiobookaneers!

Amazing Stories called the first volume “the top anthology of the year.” See if the second volume steals that title. Enjoy How To Save The World!

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“Stained Black,” by Hugo-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for free on this site for one week only. It’s also available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

Stained Black

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In a world stained black, he felt colors as objects: blue as an ice cube, red a burning coal. Simpson stepped out of the blind man’s body and into his own.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

***

The body arrived in a wooden sarcophagus, an ironic touch that sent shivers down Simpson’s back. He directed the delivery workers to his studio. They gaped at the ceramic tiles, the marble colonnades, and the large white walls where he had hung his paintings. Sunlight streamed into the eastern windows, illuminating the workers as they set the box down. Simpson memorized the moment. Maybe this time he would use the image, although he suspected he would not. His beautiful studio was sterile; anything he painted in it looked washed-out and dull. The problem was neither the light nor the studio. The problem was that he had conquered his art without understanding it.

He tipped the workers generously and told them to find their own way out. Then he watched from the studio windows as they headed, empty-handed, to their van. His wealth was still too new for him to be careless with it. Part of him suspected that one day he would wake up to find everything missing—the spectacular house, the wonderful furniture, and his paintings. Taken because he no longer deserved them.

The sunlight warmed his face, and he leaned into the heat. Perhaps yellow felt that soft and gentle. But he didn’t know. The feeling of yellow rested in a blind man’s body, hidden in a black box.

Simpson knelt beside the sarcophagus and ran his hand across the figure carved in the wood. The carving, with its widely-spaced eyes and high cheekbones, looked vaguely Egyptian. Near the foot of the cover was the name of the house he had purchased the body from. Perhaps the manufacturer had thought that black was somber. But black was poetry. Black absorbed all light, becoming and hiding all colors.

His fingers found the tiny depression, and the coffin clicked as it unlocked. He threw the cover back. The pungent odor of mothballs mixed with formaldehyde assaulted his nostrils and sent another shiver through him. The manufacturer played on his expectations of death. Simpson knew that the body couldn’t have been preserved in such an archaic way, but the smell brought out fears as old as time. Before him lay someone who was dead. And he would climb into that dead body and use it as if it were his own. Perhaps the mixture of repulsion and curiosity was what had made these Alter Egos so popular.

The blind man had bold features: a strong nose, high cheekbones, and eyebrows that slashed his face. His body was longer than Simpson’s which had caused Simpson some problems in the store. The blind man was wearing a linen suit that seemed to accentuate his pallor, made him look as if he had been dead for a long time.

Simpson reached down and touched the blind man’s cool hand. This body held secrets to color, secrets that could save Simpson’s art. Color. Maybe colors could be scents, too. If they were, mothballs mixed with formaldehyde were purple, bright purple. Too vivid to use any way except alone.

He had been cautioned not to lift the body out of the box, and he guessed that the main circuitry rested not in the body but in the coffin itself. He flicked a small switch at the base of the blind man’s left ear, rested himself against the edge of the coffin as he had been taught, grabbed both hands and closed his eyes. He wasn’t completely sure how the transfer worked, although he knew it had something to do with electronics that simulated nerve impulses. His consciousness followed a path laid out by the circuitry into the blind man’s body. Contact with the coffin kept Simpson’s own body functioning until his consciousness returned.

“The transfer,” the clerk had said, “is like changing clothes. You don’t think about the actual movements, for that will confuse you. You simply take off one skin and step into another.”

Simpson took off his body and stepped into the blind man’s. He had a brief sense of entering something that was no longer alive, that had resonances of animation. The new skin seemed to crawl around him, and then the feeling passed as the body accepted him. The odor of mothballs and formaldehyde grew stronger, and beneath it, he could smell the pine of the box. The house seemed to creak as it settled, and he thought he heard the whisper of synthetic blood as it started coursing through the veins. Then he opened the sightless eyes and saw lacquered darkness.

The world became textured. The wood-smooth side of the sarcophagus, the soft linen of the blind man’s jacket, the soothing warmth of his own abandoned hands—living but lifeless—resting in the blind man’s palms. Simpson sighed and sat the body up, afraid to do anything wrong.

They had offered him lessons, of course. Disabled was stylish this year, now that the strangeness of walking about  in someone else’s body had dulled. The manufacturers could easily have fixed the eyes, but there was more profit in marketing imperfect bodies. The lessons, which would have taught him how to read braille and operate the sonar shield around the blind man’s body, cost twice as much as the body itself.

He refused to take them, but not because of the price. He was afraid that the lessons, which would have taught him to see without eyes, would have destroyed the colors.

Slowly, he moved his own hands aside and grabbed the edge of the coffin. He knew that six meters to his left stood a small table with a house phone. If he moved carefully enough, he might be able to find it. He stood and lifted the blind man’s leg out of the box. The foot fell heavily on the hardwood floor, but no pain registered in Simpson’s mind. He marveled at the circuitry which could hook up some degrees of feeling, but not others. Placing the weight on the outside foot, he brought the other foot out and down.

“Well, Simpson,” he murmured to himself and stopped. The voice startled him. It was an octave too low. He added what he had originally intended as an admonition, but which suddenly became an experiment in sound: “To work.”

To work. He lurched forward, determined to find the phone. He couldn’t paint in a blind man’s body, but he could feel and remember. Suddenly the table banged against the thighs. Simpson reached down and grabbed the phone before the table fell over. He set the table upright and then touched the damaged area, wondering if reconstituted corpses bruised.

He picked up the receiver, placed the fingers on the buttons, and counted over until he found the correct one. In the brief moments between depressing the button and his secretary’s response, Simpson remembered that his voice would sound strange.

“Sir?” Piercy’s voice didn’t sound normal either. It was a shade too metallic as if the phone were processing the tones differently.

“I’m trying the new body. Send a model to me, would you? One I haven’t seen before.”

“Yes, sir.”

Simpson hung up the phone and stood in the silence of his studio. The sunlight falling on the blind man’s face felt no different than it had when it fell on his own, but he knew if he reached far enough into the blind man’s vision, he would discover what yellow felt like. Yellow. Yellow was smooth as a petal on a daffodil bathing in the sun. Poetic, but not the blind man’s image. More Simpson’s, like formaldehyde and mothballs. Yellow. He reached it. Yellow—

A knock echoed throughout the studio, and the glimmerings of a vision disappeared from his head.

“Come in!” The way Simpson used it, the blind man’s voice was rough. The doors clicked open. Too late he wondered what the model would think when she saw Simpson’s body lying half-in and half-out of a sarcophagus.

Heels tapped against the hard wood, growing closer.

“I’m sorry—? Simpson started, but she interrupted as if she hadn’t heard him speak.

“How ghoulish.” Her soft voice was filled with sarcasm, not disgust. “You’re the third artist I’ve seen with one of those things.”

“I should have warned you.”

“Warned nothing. But I can tell you it won’t do any good.” Her heels slid across the floor slightly. “What do you want, nude?”

He nodded, glad that she was professional. “Why won’t it do any good?”

“Because you see with your brain, not your eyes.” She paused. He heard fabric snap and rustle. “The last artist, Teague, did a before and after. Me through his eyes, me through the corpse’s eyes. He got halfway through the second one before he quit. Waste of three days for him, but I made good money.”

A zipper opened, and after a moment, her shoes clattered to the floor. He heard fabric rustle once again before her rich, feminine scent—soap mingled with skin oils and a light dusting of sweat—drifted over to him.

“Where do you want me?”

“Over here.” He held out the blind man’s hands.

“Lighting’s poor,” she said suspiciously. “And you aren’t set up.”

“I can’t paint in this body. It’s blind.”

“Then what do you want me for?”

He could feel rather than hear the slight change in her mood. “I want to paint what a blind man senses.” The silence grew as he realized he couldn’t explain what he was trying to do. “I want to touch you and listen to you, then paint you as I imagined you to be.”

“Weirdest job I ever had,” she muttered. “I’ll do it, but the minute you try something, I’m gone. And I’ll bill you for my full fee.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Private parts are private.”

“I know.”

Her bare feet whispered against the wood as she walked over to him. He turned toward the sound, and she grabbed the wrist (why couldn’t he think of it as his wrist?), placing the right hand against her shoulder. Simpson concentrated.

“Christ, your hands are cold.” A little shudder ran through her.

He slid the palm down her arm, over her elbow to her forearm. Nothing, just the smoothness of skin, the warmth of a woman mingling with her smell—

He suddenly realized he was getting aroused, but the body wasn’t. There was no physical change, no warm yearning in the groin. He noted the fact with interest, then reached for the color: brown, dark and smooth like soft, expensive chocolate. He could almost imagine how she would taste, bitter and sweet at the same time.

Suddenly, he felt another presence in the body, as if a hand had reached into his clothes. The blind man’s body stirred and began to swell. It had to be a belated response to Simpson’s arousal, but the body wasn’t supposed to work that way. Only Simpson’s consciousness had been transferred, not his brain. He controlled the body’s movements like a puppeteer controlled his marionette—only there were certain strings that weren’t hooked up. It cost more to get a body that functioned like a real human body, that allowed its wearer to eat, sleep, and make love.

The body’s arousal became more insistent. Simpson could feel the physical changes, throbbing with an urgency of their own. He took his hands off the model, hoping that she couldn’t see the erection straining against the pants. “Thank you.”

“That’s it?” she asked. “Five minutes of touchy-feely, and we’re done?”

“That’s all.” He had to let her go. If he continued to touch her, he couldn’t be responsible for the body. He didn’t have enough control over it.

“I’ll get my full fee, won’t I? I mean, I’ve never been touched by a dead man before.”

“I’m not dead,” Simpson said as he clasped the blind man’s hands together. The body trembled with the strength of its desire.

“No, but that—thing—you’re in is.” Her voice moved from him as she walked back to her clothes.

“It’s like wearing a mink coat. Or alligator shoes.”

“I’ve heard that one before.” The zipper closed. “That’s the line they feed you when they sell it to you. Why else would someone pay so much money to own a corpse? It’s disgusting when you think about it. Twenty-five years ago, that thing would be rotting in the ground. Makes me wonder what kind of people sell their bodies for this.”

Slowly, the body’s arousal was going away and so was the sense of another presence. Simpson felt a small thread of relief. “I’m not paying you for your opinions.”

“Did you ask where they got that body?” she asked, ignoring him. “I heard that some funeral parlors are selling them and burying empty boxes. I was planning to get cremated, but now I don’t know. I just hope I die of some awful disease so they can’t make me into one of those things—?

“I’d like to get to work,” Simpson said. He didn’t want to hear any more. He needed this body. He didn’t care where it came from or how disgusting it was. The model started walking away, without putting on her shoes.

“You know,” she said. “The worst thing is the rumors. They say that sometimes reactivating the body brings the soul back, like the person was too strong to abandon his own body. Could you imagine what it would feel like to crawl into someone else’s body and then realize that you’re not alone?”

Simpson shivered, although the body did not. “We’re through now.”

“I want to see the painting when it’s done.”

“Fine,” Simpson said to get rid of her. He had to get the body back to the sarcophagus before he could start painting. He waited until the studio doors closed before starting across the room, arms extended before him. Perhaps it would have been better for him to crawl. Everything was on the floor, nothing above waist height. If he tripped, the body would fall and could get damaged. And he wouldn’t know, since it didn’t feel pain.

He shuffled forward until the toes hit something. Wood. The sarcophagus. Bending over, he felt the edge and then the interior of the box. He put the legs in first and then the torso. Before he laid the body down, he reached for his own hands. When they rested in the blind man’s hands, he tried to step out of the body. Suddenly, he was stuck like a child trying to take off a pullover. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Someone was pushing against him, other arms getting in the way of his. He tried to remember if he was supposed to flick the switch before getting out. But that made no sense: the circuitry had to stay on for him to survive. He tried again and stepped into nothingness as something grasped at him. An instant later, he was in his own body.

Light stabbed at his eyes, and his right leg ached. The blind man lay in his coffin, his skin turning a pasty white as the synthetic blood settled on his back side. It looked as if it were dying again. The model had been right; the body’s hands were cold. Simpson pulled his own hands away and flicked off the switch.

He was resting in a stream of light. Simpson imagined that it looked like a medieval religious painting. A man bent over a coffin, the corpse lying serenely, and the light, the blessing from God, bathing them in purity. Only this was no blessing from God. If God did exist, then the Alter Egos were manufactured by God’s competitor.

The idea startled him. He rarely thought in religious terms. As he stood up, he put the image out of his mind. His body was cramped from lying in one position so long. But he had no time to baby himself. He had a painting to complete.

***

Dierdre set the painting in the center of the gallery and stood back to admire it. “It’s nice to see you doing good work again, Robert,” she said.

Simpson walked over beside Dierdre to check the lighting. The painting was good, better than anything he had done in a long time. He had painted it in browns against a cream background. A woman’s narrow waist, high breasts, broad shoulders, and slender face rose from a vat of dark chocolate. Her stance was coy, seductive, and her eyes were sensual instead of innocent. He had titled the painting Dark Chocolate.

“Have you any more?” Dierdre asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve only just started to work again.”

Dierdre frowned. “I’ve always said artists should not have money. It ruins their work.”

Simpson ignored the remark. He knew where the money would go if it didn’t line his pockets. “Am I ruined? I thought you said this is good.”

“It is.” Dierdre tucked her hands in the pockets of her dress. The orange garment set off her deep tan and dark hair. “It looks like you’ll be one of the lucky ones. You can paint no matter how you’re living, but I’ve known artists who have had a choice: eating or painting. Look at Teague. He did his best work ten years ago.”

“I hear he’s bought an Alter Ego.”

Dierdre wrinkled her tiny nose. “One of those corpse things? Poor man. When an artist starts using a gimmick, you know he’s almost through.” She started down the watercolors aisle toward her office and then stopped. “You know, if you could do a color series, we might do a show. Title them Royal Purple or Majestic Magenta or something.” And then she smiled, apparently realizing how close to a gimmick her suggestion was. “Actually, give me a half-dozen of anything—good, that is—and we’ll put something together.”

Simpson watched her walk, her orange dress swaying with each step. He was halfway through another painting, mothballs exploding out of a jar of formaldehyde in a splash of purple. But watching the orange flare in the soft light of the gallery, he realized there were so many colors he hadn’t felt yet. And even yellow, which he had felt, still eluded him.

He looked again at his latest painting, standing alone in the center of the room. The browns were deep and sensual, but they lacked. He had not painted chocolate with its warm smell and bittersweet taste. What he had done was paint chocolate’s shell, the way it appeared to the untrained eye. He wanted something richer, something so real that the patron could touch the painting and be surprised that the liquid didn’t stain his fingers.

Simpson stared at the vat of chocolate, and the longer he stared, the closer he came to an understanding. Color was more than light reflecting a certain point on the spectrum. Color was too sensual for mere sight. The blind man had taken color to another level. And Simpson had gone with him.

***

Yellow: warm and sticky as a pan of boiled milk.

He painted a white cow, outlined in black, kicking over a pail. Yellow liquid spilled across the canvas, streaming upward, becoming daffodils, becoming sunlight.

***

The blind man’s body shivered. Simpson felt battered as if the shivers pummeled him inside of the skin. He had to escape while orange still eluded him.

***

Green: cool and scratchy as freshly mown grass.

He painted trees in twilight. Green ran like sap down their trunks, growing brighter until it exploded vividly on the bottom of the canvas.

***

The blind man’s breath came in irregular gasps. Simpson craved air. Something was suffocating him. He had to escape before reaching magenta.

***

Pink: the wet/dry kiss of a cat.

He painted a Persian against a black background, eyes closed, her tiny tongue a brushstroke of hot pink.

***

The blind man’s eyes dripped tears. Simpson felt overwhelmed by sadness, as if someone else’s melancholy were clawing at him. He had to escape without touching lavender.

***

Black: he had yet to experience black. But he wanted to. Black was all colors and no color. One morning, when sunlight filled the studio, he climbed into the blind man’s skin and reached for black, although the world was black. Putting on the blind man terrified him, for it seemed as if Simpson’s control of the body lessened each time he activated the body. Simpson suppressed the fear. The model had placed that suggestion in his head. And besides, artists had to take risks for their art. He opened himself up to black and color, light on the visible spectrum receded, red-shifting; however, he felt it instead of saw it—as if he dove into a flaming pyre. Then a blue shift, cooling him. And then the colors were sucked away and replaced by a presence, the blind man himself giving Simpson a tour of the blind man’s mind.

Simpson tried to scream, but he couldn’t. He no longer had control of the blind man’s body. The blind man held Simpson and taught him what color really was.

The blind man felt color because his world, stained black, contained all colors, stored them and hid them and paraded them out for Simpson one by one. In such darkness, in such blackness, color did not exist. Color was a guess based on description supplied by a friend. Color was a combination of scent, temperature, and sound that changed with each passing moment. Color was light reflected, but not seen. Simpson finally understood: in a world stained black, color was fiction.

The realization frightened him, and as his mind panicked, the body’s lack of response terrified him even more. He was trapped in the blackness, with feelings that were not his own. He tried to take off the blind man, but he got stuck in the limbs. They wrapped themselves around him, cutting at him, strangling his mind until colors exploded in his head, remembered colors—the blue of sunlight on a lake, the red of early morning dawn, the yellow of a single daffodil against the green of a meadow. He was an artist. Someone who dealt in light and color, who turned experience into drops of oil on a canvas, who made life more vivid than it had ever seemed.

An artist was useless to a blind man.

Unless their consciousness shared the same body.

Unless the blind man wanted to see.

Simpson scrambled, fought as he tried to untangle himself from a body that wasn’t his. The blind man was absorbing the images from Simpson’s mind, seeing, for the first time, what colors really were. Simpson could feel himself being sucked in by blackness, drowning along with the light.

And he could feel the blind man reaching for remembered life. They had given Simpson a body that malfunctioned. The blind man’s consciousness had returned with each activation. Simpson’s presence had given the blind man an incentive to start living again. And the blind man had the advantage—he knew how to use his own body. He had been hiding from Simpson the entire time.

Colors exploded. Light exploded. Simpson could feel the blind man’s greed as the blackness engulfed them.

***

The blind man posed beside his first painting.

“Mr. Simpson,” the photographer said, “please rest your arm on the frame.”

The blind man lifted Simpson’s arm and propped it against the metal corner. Fortunately, he was a quick study. Simpson’s body would have lost its skill if the blind man hadn’t had the foresight to probe the artistic side of Simpson’s consciousness as well. Poor Simpson. His consciousness was trapped in a corpse in a sarcophagus stored in the attic. The blind man had wondered if Simpson still existed after the circuitry had been shut off. The blind man certainly wasn’t going to turn the body back on in order to find out.

The blind man turned his attention to the painting. Titled The Users, it had sold first at the opening and for the highest price. A simple portrait, reminiscent of medieval religious painting, of a man leaning over a sarcophagus, sucking the darkness from the corpse as the corpse sucked light. And all around them, sunlight separated into a halo of color, winking like stars along the spectrum, in blues, reds, yellows, and greens.

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Asimov’s Science Fiction

The reminder mentioned in the title of this post is for Spree, the novel of mine that WMG Publishing is serializing for free. The first review has come in, and it’s a good one from Genre Go Round Reviews:

“Spree is an exciting crime thriller that purposely starts slowly, but accelerates as readers realize talented Kristine Kathryn Rusch sets us up with a super spin. Moira is a terrific protagonist who makes Spree a winner…”

So if you haven’t started Spree or if you forgot to go to the site in recent weeks, head there now.

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If e-books or e-readers are just beginning to gain acceptance in a country, that country’s publishing industry responds like the US industry did in 2009/10. The similarities continue as the e-books and e-readers become more accepted. In fact, you can watch the debates about the death of the book and the benefits of digital media progress exactly the way they did on this side of the pond.

The United States, for better or worse, was the first country to go through this massive shift, but we’re certainly not the last. And we are still going through the shift.

The smaller pattern, though, happens within the writers themselves. It takes a while for a writer, raised in traditional publishing, to move to indie publishing. (I am using indie publishing here to describe writers who have taken complete creative and business control of their work.) Shifting from traditional to indie takes a mind-set shift that many—even unpublished writers—are finding difficult.

I’m currently reading a nonfiction book called The Entertainer by Margaret Talbot. (I mentioned an excerpt from it in my Recommended Reading list a while back). Talbot’s father, Lyle Talbot, had a career in the entertainment industry that spanned tent performances to Vaudeville to movies to television. Early on, Talbot notes that the world in which her father began his career is a lost world. No remnants of that entertainment world exist at all; the country has changed, and so has its entertainment needs.

The publishing industry that I learned in the 1980s is becoming a lost world. Not as dramatic as the showboat and traveling performers of Lyle Talbot’s era, but certainly as lost as the movie industry of the 1930s. Parts of the industry remain, but much of the industry would be completely unrecognizable to my 1980s self.

Lost worlds are like lost loved ones: some of us never get past the grief. That realization made me understand one other thing—my own emotional landscape over the past four years. I watch the changes I’ve gone through, the reactions I’ve had to the new world of publishing, and realize that friends, colleagues, and acquaintances are going through similar emotions.

The emotions are actually predictable, although we all go through these stages at our own speed, and in our own ways. Some people get stuck in one of the stages and might never emerge from it. Others blow through a few of the stages and wonder why friends can’t do the same. We all find something that stops us for a while, though, and we all have to find our own way through them.

The stages I see are:

1. Denial (Traditional Publishing Version)

The writer refuses to acknowledge that traditional publishing has changed. She refuses to act any differently than she did five or ten years ago, whenever she came into the business. She trusts her agent implicitly (while acknowledging that there are scam agents out there), believes she wouldn’t have a career without the agent’s support, and never reviews her financial statements (often doesn’t even review contracts). She lets her agent market her work, believing there is no other way.

She also believes her work would be weaker without the backing of the traditional publisher. She needs her editor, her copy editor, and the sales team. She believes they work to improve her book (which would be unreadable without them) and she thinks her work cannot reach a wide audience without a traditional publishing house.

She believes anyone who indie publishes is delusional and is ruining his career.

2. Anger (Traditional Publishing Version):

Something goes terribly, horribly wrong. The writer’s latest book doesn’t get any marketing support. Her contract gets canceled. Her agent leaves the business. The writer gets offered a lower advance for the same work. She gets dropped by her publishing house. She’s told she can’t write the book of her heart because her fans won’t like it. She’s told that her publisher won’t let her publish a short story because she signed a non-compete clause. She gets no royalties on a book that has already earned out. She wins a major industry award…after her publisher has refused the option book, and no other publisher will look at her next work, despite the acclaim and good sales.

Something happens, and it’s devastating. It’s something that would have happened twenty years ago, but honestly, these somethings are happening quicker because traditional publishing is in such disarray at the moment.

She gets furious and that fury leads to…

3. Feeling Trapped (Traditional Publishing Version):

She has written many novels and/or proposals. Publishers pass on them. Her sales figures are too low, so no one wants her work. The critical acclaim doesn’t matter. The New York Times bestseller listing under her name doesn’t matter because her book sales have gone down over the past three titles. Her agent won’t return her phone calls or worse, dumps her. New agents won’t take her on.

Our imaginary writer might go with a smaller press or a specialty press, but no one can live on the advances they offer. She faces a choice: quit writing or find a day job to support the writing.

That’s how it used to be ten years ago when something bad happened. But these days, if she’s smart, she dips a toe into indie publishing. Some friends who’ve been in her shoes are actually making a living. In fact, those friends are proselytizing about how great indie publishing is. She thought they were fools (see #1 above) but her circumstances have changed. Maybe she’ll investigate. It’s better than going back to that day job she quit so happily five years ago.

4. Fear (Traditional Publishing Version):

She knows nothing about indie publishing. She investigates and finds a big, chaotic, and confusing world. She wants rules. She wants order. She wants someone to take her hand and lead her through it. She wants to earn a living at writing, yes, but this business stuff—this computer stuff—this design stuff—it’s beyond her.

Here’s where so many traditionally published writers get stuck. They want help, any kind of help, and too many unscrupulous agents  and unscrupulous self-publishing services like those offered through Simon & Schuster, Harlequin, Penguin/Putnam are willing to provide that help for a hefty price. These people/companies prey on fear and ignorance.

Right here is where so many writers quit. Or get scammed and lose their life savings to pursue a dream. Or give up because this is all too overwhelming.

Several other emotions go with the fear including….

5. Depression (Traditional Publishing Version)

Writers who get here truly believe their career is over. They’re mourning a loss. They believe that if they can’t get a traditional career, they won’t have a career. They don’t see opportunities ahead, only failure.

And if this were ten years ago, they would be right. It’s hard to struggle through this part. It’s hard to hang on. I’ve seen a lot of writers lack compassion for writers who hit the depression part of this cycle. Judith Tarr has a great post on how it feels to be stuck here. Again, writers stuck here are susceptible to scams. Many simply give up and leave.

The other emotion that goes hand in hand with the depression and fear is…

6. Loneliness

It feels as if the writer is the only one going through this. If the writer has been in the business a long time, then she knows lots of other writers who are still succeeding in traditional publishing. They’re bestsellers, they have book contracts, their books are selling well.

Are their advances as good? No way to know, because writers often don’t share that information. Are their royalties down? Again, no way to know.

But the more a writer feels depressed and frightened, the lonelier she gets. That’s one reason I write this blog: we all go through ups and downs. I want other writers to know that even the most successful writers have had bad patches.

It doesn’t matter that you got knocked down, or how long you stayed on the floor. All that matters is that you get up again.

The loneliness can be overwhelming (and again, writers get stuck here), but every other long-term writer has been here, whether he talks about it or not.

And in our little example, the writer finds herself…

7. Bargaining (Traditional Publishing Version)

Okay, the writer says to herself. I’ll try this indie-publishing thing. If it fails, if it’s too hard, then I’ll give up. I’ll quit.

Some writers at this stage self-sabotage. They don’t put covers on their books. They don’t write cover copy. They give the book away for free, even if they don’t have other books up to benefit from the promotion. They hire those scam services and get hurt all over again.

But many writers give it the old college try. They realize they have choices. They realize they can pick their own covers, and write the book they want, or put out the backlist book that readers have been asking for.

They feel…

8. Fear (Indie Publishing Version 1)

They don’t know how to indie publish anything. Designing a book is hard, finding a cover is hard, uploading to e-book services is hard. Or, at least, it all looks hard.

Then the writer tries a few things. Yeah, there’s a learning curve, but she has had learning curves in the past. That’s what she did with her writing. She learned. She’s done this before. She can do it again.

She decides to try. She gets a book up and then…

9. Anger (Indie Publishing Version 1)

She put up her first indie-book and it did not sell. At all. The rush of readers never came. No one cares. Not even her family cares.

Everyone who said this works lied.

Of course, she doesn’t remember that she failed to sell the first short story she ever wrote, and she’s not willing to consider that her cover is badly designed or she didn’t write good cover copy or, maybe, she’s not counting the ten sales she did have this month as anything meaningful at all.

She feels…

10. Trapped (Indie Publishing Version 1)

She’s tried indie, she’s tried traditional, she’s still stuck. What’s wrong with her? Is she a worse writer than she thought?

She can’t go back to traditional or if she does, they want non-competes, more work, and to pay her less. But she can’t stay indie, because it doesn’t work. What should she do?

This is where a bunch of writers leave again. They just give up.

The rest…well, some go back completely to traditional and risk never getting published again. They get a day job (if they didn’t already have one). They get a new agent, they write in a new genre, they try a pen name.

Others try indie again. They publish a few more things. Maybe learn how to design covers, or save money so that they can hire a flat-fee service to design covers for them. They might join an organization of writers who trade services, like Book View Café.

They learn there’s more to this indie thing than slapping up a book. And they find themselves in…

11. Denial (Indie Publishing Version)

This indie thing can’t be working. It isn’t working, not by traditional standards. Ten sales per month on Kindle? No one can make money doing that. The fact that the book is only on Kindle and not anywhere else, the fact that readers are asking for the next, means nothing.

Because if this book had been traditionally published, it would have sold thousands of copies by now, wouldn’t it?

Maybe. In the old world.

But the new world is different, and our writer friend is judging the new world by the old. In the old world, this book is a failure. In the new world, this book has just gotten started. It has years to grow. And if she adds more books and puts them for sale in more markets, if she writes more and learns more about indie publishing, those ten sales will turn into 50 per month on Kindle alone, and then there will be another 50 around the world, and then she’ll publish more books and eventually, she’ll be selling 100 copies of each of her titles around the world in all formats every month. The more titles, the more money, and she’ll realize that she’s actually starting to succeed.

Because she’s…

12. Reconstructing her expectations

She’s not lowering them. She’s accepting that she’s in a new world, with different rules. You can’t judge the new world by the old. In the old, books had to sell fast because they’d be off the shelf in three months (or less). In the new, the book is just starting to get noticed a year after publication. It might have its best sales month 29 months after publication.

Plus, she’s learning this new business. She’s learning how to find good copy editors who charge not-New York prices. (The local newspaper has a copy editor who is really good, and fast.) Our imaginary writer is learning how to find spectacular first readers who actually have comments about her books, instead of her traditional editor who might edit the book (months after it is turned in) or might simply put it into production without giving the book more than a brief skim, leaving all the mistakes for the copy editor and proofer to find (if they’re good enough to find it).

Our writer’s not stuck with a bad cover because “there’s no money to fix it” (which has happened to me traditionally more than I can say). If she gets a bad cover from the designer she hired, she doesn’t have to use that cover. She can hire a different designer and get a better cover. Or, she can learn to do it herself.

She’s…

13. Working Through The Changes

…becoming someone else. A different writer. One who can write what she wants, not what her agent says will sell. She can write a sequel—or not. She can write a mainstream novel—or not. She can write that romance she’s always dreamed of—or not.

She has…

14. Freedom

…an amazing amount of freedom. But she has learned, to paraphrase Peter Parker (Spider-man), with great freedom comes great responsibility. She’s the one in charge. If there’s a bad cover, bad cover copy, bad copy edits, it’s because she hired the wrong people or didn’t understand genre branding or thought such things didn’t matter. She didn’t make it easy for her readers to find her.

But she’s learning, and the really, really cool thing she’s discovering is that she has time. If she learns something important three years after her first book was indie published, she can go back, redesign the book and add the things she’s learned, and it has no bad repercussions at all. Only good ones.

She can improve and grow and change, and no one says, You’re only as good as your last book. They ask, When’s your next book coming out? She loves that freedom.

She thinks, How did I ever survive in traditional publishing? and she feels…

15. Anger (Indie Publishing Version 2)

…at all the unwritten books, all the opportunities lost. She remembers the paralysis of those years, and how long it took one project to get from drawing board to publication, and she wonders how she ever survived it.

A few writers, hybrid writers, might feel…

16. Trapped (Indie Publishing Version 2)

…because they still have some traditional contracts to fulfill, with bad terms and advances so low that they know within a year, they could earn that money if they indie published—even with their low numbers. But they fulfill the contracts, and turn down the offer with for the next book—or accept it, but only if the traditional publisher meets certain terms.

Some hybrid writers turn this trapped feeling into something positive, using both their new books and their old in a synergy. Others…

17. Bargain (Indie Publishing Version)

…to get out of their contracts or agree not to turn in an option book or pay back advances to escape. Some end up with print-only contracts so that they don’t have to learn yet another skill set (how to do a paper book). And still others divide their career down the middle. This book, that series will go to my traditional publisher, while that book and this series will be mine only.

Writers find their own path and as they do, they realize they’ve…

18. Accepted

…this new world of publishing and they’re learning how to make it work for them. For the first time in years they feel…

19. Hope

…for the future. They know that they will have a career—one they’ve chosen, and they know that they will continue to write and they’re lucky now, lucky that they can choose what kind of writer they want to be rather than scramble to be the kind of writer traditional publishing wants.

But behind it all there’s still…

20. Fear (Indie Publishing Version 2)

…because they worry about everything. Can they keep up? Can they write all the books they hope to write before they die? Can they stay ahead of their fans? Can they find enough time?

Time becomes the critical thing. Rather than wait for others to get back to them, now they worry about finishing Novel 1 so that they can get to Novel 2. They worry that they’re writing too fast. They worry that they’re not writing fast enough. They worry that they’re not spending enough time with their families. They worry that they’re not spending enough time writing. They worry that they’re not spending enough time promoting. They worry that they’re not spending enough time learning book design. They worry…

Well, they’re writers. Of course they worry.

That’s what writers do.

It’s normal. It’s healthy. It’s part of being a writer.

Then one day they realize they have indie-published their entire backlist, and right now, they have more indie books in print than traditional books. These writers look at their finances and realize that they’re making 5 times as much (or more!) on their indie books than they are on their traditional books, with a lot more benefits, like monthly payments.

Or the fact that indie books stay in print. They’re in every format around the world. Fans can find those books.

The traditional books are out of print (paper) but the crummy e-book edition remains in print. Fans in Australia can’t read the US book. Fans in Germany can’t find a paper copy. The royalty statements are a mess if they don’t show up at all, and oh, yeah, the agent forgot to send a check, but would really, really, really love to take over the backlist in e-book format.

One day, in conversation, our imaginary writer calls herself an indie writer and she thinks about it. Is she? Or is she hybrid? She’s certainly no longer stuck in traditional publishing any more. She can leave any time she wants. She can stay if she wants.

And she also realizes that, for the first time in years (maybe decades), she’s…

21. Happy

…with her writing career. Because she has choices now. And control.

She can go 100% indie if she wants. If she hates that or it doesn’t work for her, she can go back to traditional.

She’s learned how to handle business, so she can negotiate the contract she wants.

She can tell traditional publishers to take a flying leap if she wants to.

She can work in partnership with them if she wants to.

She can publish some books herself and let a traditional publisher do others.

She can fire her editor because she hired that editor.

She can say no to revisions that change the heart of the novel because she’s in charge. She doesn’t have to worry that her publisher won’t publish the book without the changes.

She doesn’t need an agent to tell her what’s saleable. Readers do that—with their dollars and word of mouth.

If she wants to write a difficult novel, one that might disturb people, she can, and she can let it find its audience.

She has…

22. Complete Freedom

…to be the writer she wants to be, for the rest of her career.

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“The Business Rusch: The Stages of An Indie Writer” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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Also did a lot of Fiction River reading this month. All of it wonderful. I write this in May, and in June, a few days after I post this, Fiction River: How To Save The World will appear, so you can see what I was reading and liking in March. We also have some great new editors and topics planned for year 2 (I know, I know, you haven’t seen anything but the first book in year one), so we’re really excited.

As for the non-FR reading, I had a blast this month. In addition to the middle-grade, which I’m not recommending, I read a lot of magazines, short stories (most not recommended just because they didn’t seem memorable), novels, and nonfiction. Here’s the best of the best:

May, 2013

Baxter, John, We Will Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Harper Perennial, 2006. I wasn’t sure I’d like this book because the history of the sex business in all its forms in Paris doesn’t intrigue me. But I had enjoyed the other Baxter books that I had read, and I decided to give this a try. I’m glad I did.

We Will Always Have Paris is a really sweet nonfiction book about all aspects of sex and love. Threaded throughout is Baxter’s romance with his wife. Like any good romance novel, the book ends with ceremonies. And unlike most romance novels, the pregnancy becomes an important plot point.

Baxter was fifty when he moved to Paris from Los Angeles. He had quite a career as a film journalist, one he couldn’t replicate in Paris, so he started writing books. Generally, he did analysis or biographies, but he’s also written several of these whimsical nonfiction books that more memoir than anything else. I mentioned the Christmas book earlier this year. I have two others that I’ll read eventually.

This book is charming. It’s less about Paris’s sex trade than Baxter learning about his city through the eyes of an outsider. He also explores the history of the “romance of the city” which is fascinating, as are the various cultural differences.

Nothing like the cover suggests, this book is warm and fun and fascinating. If you like reading unusual memoirs, you’ll like We Will Always Have Paris very much.

Cabot, Tyler, “Whatever Happened To Stem Cells?” Esquire, April 2013. An enlightening and intriguing article on what happens when politics meets science. Particularly interesting to me is the way that all sides of the political debate use the same scientist—who is apolitical—to prove their points. Read this, think about how many friends or family members you’ve lost to disease since 1998, and imagine a different future.

Engel, Richard, “The Hostage,” Vanity Fair, April, 2013. You want to know how hard it is to report the news in some parts of the world? Richard Engel deals with that just a bit in his report on his own kidnapping in December. He and his crew survived due to cunning and luck. I’m not sure I could have been as clear-headed as he was, nor do I think I would return to dangerous foreign assignments after this incident. He was and he has. Fascinating stuff here.

Remnick, David, “Danse Macabre: A Scandal at the Bolshoi,” The New Yorker, March 18, 2013. I’m weirdly interested in the attack on the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. The combination of art, politics, attempted murder, ballet reminds me of a novel, except several people are living and suffering through it. Remnick lived in Russia for years, so he got interviews I haven’t seen anywhere else. Fascinating stuff for the prurient among us.

Rock, Phillip, The Passing Bells, William Morrow edition 2012. I first read this novel in 1981, in its first paperback incarnation (which had a much better cover). Someone at William Morrow (or maybe Rock’s estate/agent) remembered the book and tied it to the Downton Abbey craze. The book is Downtonesque in very uncanny ways, which makes me wonder if Julian Fellows read it.

I had loved this book when I read it all those years ago, so much so that I looked for the remaining books in the series and never saw them. I didn’t frequent places that sold hardcovers at the time, and apparently my library didn’t have the next book, Circles of Time, which I’ll deal with below. (Yes, I know, out of order, but hey, if you’re scrolling down, this makes more sense.) I searched and searched for the rest of Rock’s books for maybe 15 years before giving up.

The rerelease provided an opportunity to read this again, which might have been a bad thing, considering how much I had enjoyed the book the first time I read it. It’s always dangerous to revisit, particularly when you’re older and wiser and more jaded about literature.

I’m happy to report that I loved the book all over again. I did note that Rock broke all those rules of writing that workshops and writing teachers waste their time with: main characters die off stage; the book has no true POV character; it’s about a place and time, not about people. And yet the book works so marvelously, that I closed it with tears in my eyes.

The Passing Bells begins in June of 1914 and goes to 1919. World War 1, which is something we don’t see much in fiction these days, was a truly devastating war, in ways that are almost unfathomable. I think I probably enjoyed this book more now than I did in 1981 because I know more about the history. So when one of Rock’s characters heads off to Gallipoli, I feel a horrible chill before he ever arrives.

This novel is still one of my favorites, even after decades. I’ll probably reread it again at another point. It is a true classic.

Rock, Phillip, Circles of Time, William Morrow edition 2013. Circles of Time was published in 1981 and I missed it somehow. I came at this book with trepidation; after all, I had been searching for it for thirty years, with the expectation that it will be as good if not better than The Passing Bells. It isn’t as good, but that’s a function of the topic, not the writer’s skill. Without the devastation of World War 1, the method that Rock uses to explore a generation is fascinating, but not quite as compelling. There isn’t as much drama here.

Still, it’s a fantastic read. The novel deals with the way that survivors of the Great War deal with the loss of friends, the loss of family, and the loss of their world. It’s not a downer, though, because others have found opportunity in the loss—not just opportunity in business, but the chance to love someone completely unsuitable in old world terms.

I highly recommend this book. The third, A Future Arrived, waits on my nightstand, but I need a break from historicals before I delve into it.

Shapiro, B.A., The Art Forger, Algonquin Paperbacks, 2013. In a review of this novel, a critic called it “a debut novel.” As I read The Art Forger, I found myself doubting this was a debut. The author had too many skills, knew too well how to make a narrative work, and knew too much about a career as an artist (writer, musician) to be a first-timer, even a brilliant first-timer. As I started writing this up, I decided to look up B.A. Shapiro, and found that she’s been publishing novels since 1993. I suspect, if I look, I’ll find short stories in the mystery digests as well. She also writes as Barbara Shapiro, and I seem to recall seeing manuscripts from her in the 1990s, whether at Pulphouse or F&SF I’m not certain.

Anyway, all of that would be neither here nor there if The Art Forger were a bad book. It’s fantastic book. One of the pull quotes at the front of the book warns that you shouldn’t start this book if you have something you need to do, and boy, oh, boy is that right. Who would have thought that a book about a woman painting would be impossible to put down? I found myself talking to it like I would a movie, warning the heroine not to do something, or exclaiming aloud about what was really going on.

For a moment—a brief moment—I thought I had this book figured out. I congratulated myself on being brilliant, turned the page, and the author acknowledged my solution, then told me why it was impossible. Dang it! The book led me back and forth and forth and back until I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

Beautifully written, great characters, marvelous setting and a gripping read. I couldn’t want anything else. Now I need to order those backlist titles that the publisher deliberately hid from me when it tried to convince me that B.A. Shapiro had never written for anyone other than Algonquin. (How does that serve readers well, I ask you. [Okay. We all know it doesn’t.])

Buy this one. You won’t regret it.

Steele, Allen, “Ticking,” Solaris Rising 2, edited by Ian Whates, Solaris 2013. Wonderful story that almost feels like a Stephen King nightmare about a group of people trapped in an airport hotel after all technology shut down or went insane. There is a literal ticking clock, or so it seems. The story is fast, tense, and exciting, with a kicker ending. I’ll say only this: It felt like this story could have been in our second issue of Fiction River without any stretch at all. Marvelous stuff here.

Toobin, Jeffrey, “Heavyweight,” The New Yorker, March 11, 2013. Fantastic essay on Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Toobin gives a lot of her personal and work history. He also focuses on how hard it was for a female law student to get work in a law firm when Ginsberg graduated from law school. She’s had an amazing distinguished career that had a huge impact on gender issues, dating long before her arrival on the court. Read this and learn what kind of woman sits on our nation’s highest court.

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Emily Trencheon lives life as a prodigy—and a successful experiment. She provides a shining example for the Academy of Universal Languages to continue its program with the Miaslan. But she alone knows the truth. And she fears her final act of communication—a piano composition meant to be played in total darkness—will be forever lost in the shadows of misinterpretation.

“Solo For Concert Grand” by Hugo-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for free on this website for one week only. It’s also available for $2.99 in all e-bookstores, including Amazon and Smashwords.

The free story will be available for one week only. If you missed this one, click on the links above. There’s another free story lurking somewhere around the site. Track the story down, read, and enjoy!

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First, let me share the cover for the fourth Diving novel, Skirmishes. I love this cover. The art is by Philcold, design by Allyson Longueira of WMG Publishing. And here’s the cover copy:

The answers Captain Jonathan “Coop” Cooper and the crew of the Ivoire seek lie in the Boneyards. But they must wait for Boss and her team to dive it, explore the wrecks, and piece together what happened in that faraway place. 

Boss loves the challenge. Thousands of ships, centuries of history, all play to her strengths. In her absence, she trusts Coop to defend the Nine Planets Alliance against the Enterran Empire.

But an encounter from Coop’s recent past shows up to haunt him, an encounter he never told Boss about, an encounter that could threaten her future, his life, and the fragile peace between the Alliance and the Empire.

Skirmishes will go on sale in September. I’ll let you know when preorders are available.

In August, Asimov’s will publish another standalone Diving novella called The Application of Hope. I’ll share the cover and the links for orders as soon as they’re available. (Probably next week.)

Finally, WMG Publishing has released all of the Diving novellas. I’m putting the covers here, in chronological order. Some of these novellas are parts of the novels, and a few, like Becalmed, never got bundled into the novels (or haven’t yet). Philcold did the art for all of these, and Allyson designed them. Lovely, eh?

Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls is a new novella. It is the companion novella to a novella, Encounter on Starbase Kappa,  that will appear in Asimov’s later this year.  Both Strangers and Encounter will appear in different form in Skirmishes. Lots of Diving to read! Enjoy!

Note: Becalmed and Spires are also available on audio as are the first three Diving novels, Diving into the Wreck, City of Ruins, and Boneyards. Skirmishes will be released on audio in September, along with the paper and ebook versions of the book.

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All because of one person’s stupidity and ignorance of the law.

First, let me tell you that I’m writing this on the day that the most unbelievable stupidity occurred, the day that I am now turning everything over to my lawyer to handle from this moment forward. I am not publishing this blog for weeks, maybe months, maybe a year or more.

In other words, while I am writing this as if it happened this week (and for me, it did happen this week), you are reading this blog at a completely different time. I’m doing this so that the ignorant idiot I’ve been dealing with doesn’t know I’m talking about it (yes, I’m going to call the idiot “it” and its associates Frick and Frack will also be “it” or maybe “they”), because I think what happened here is a prime example of a teachable moment.

If I can divorce the moment from the details of what happened to me, and get to the core that applies to all working writers.

Here goes.

First, the personal experience—in vague terms.

There are many times in a writer’s career that she works with other creative artists—actual visual artists, screenwriters, comic book writers, translators, musicians, game developers and more—who develop derivative work based on the original property. These derivative works are governed by copyright law.

If someone wants to create a derivative work, that someone needs permission from the rights-holder for that work. The permission must be granted legally. There are different forms for the permission—a paper contract, an e-mail between the two parties, a user agreement on a website (fan fiction sites licensed by the copyright holder, like the ones for the Star Trek properties use this method) and so on.

Most sub rights sales are for derivative works. A translation of a novel into another language is a sub right sale, and it is also a derivative work because the words are different, but the story is the same. The work is a translation of an existing work; it is not the existing work. It was derived from it.

In the definition of derivative work under the copyright law, the statute says in part:

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.

Once the derivative work exists, then the maker of that work needs the original copyright holder’s permission to do anything with the derivative work. If the Derivative Work Maker does not get the copyright holder’s permission, then the work of the Derivative Work Maker is dead.

Got that?

Long ago and far away, I worked with a creative artist’s representative who was also (briefly) my representative. I gave permission for a derivative work based on one of my works, to be used for six months only. My agreement was with the representative, not with the derivative work’s maker (DWM). I presumed that the representative had a separate agreement with the DWM, which also lasted for six months.

Nothing came of this, except that I made a great deal of money. Like so many things in the sub rights category, someone had a good idea, put some money into it, realized the project would not get off the ground, and went on to other things.

Fast forward several years. I get contacted by DWM’s new representative, who wants to send DWM’s old derivative work into the same marketplace again. I state that I will not permit this, unless we have a written agreement and money has changed hands.

The representative is shocked! Shocked! that I would demand funds and a legal agreement. Then I tell the representative that I have years of experience in all of the businesses this representative (whom we shall now call Frick) deals in, and if Frick wants any cooperation from me on this property, I need a legal agreement and money.

Frick makes an insulting offer. I say no. Frick promises to have a new offer shortly.

I hear nothing. Then I get a weird e-mail from Frick saying that someone else in the industry “is close” to paying me. I realize that Frick has been shopping this property without my permission and without an agreement in place. I demand that Frick come up with a legal agreement and money right now.

I hear from a person who identifies itself as a lawyer. At that moment, I assume said lawyer is attached to Frick and Frack, the representatives of DWM. Instead, I learned—today—that said lawyer represents DWM and doesn’t represent Frick and Frack at all.

Let me simply say that DWM should fire this idiot immediately.

Idiot lawyer is argumentative and nasty, refuses to deal with me by e-mail “because that’s not how it’s done in our industry” and demands to talk with my representative who, idiot lawyer believes, “will understand what I have to say.”

Well, I am now good and pissed, insulted, and on top of that, have three representatives are actively trying to sell a derivative work from my work without my permission. I tell them to stop marketing the work immediately. I tell them the negotiations have broken down and remind them that they do not have any rights in this work whatsoever without me. Since they are unwilling to pay for the privilege, they cannot market the work any longer.

Meanwhile, I’ve been consulting with my attorney all along. My attorney, appalled at these idiots, tells me to be firm with these people and make them go away.

I was, I am, and I get an astonishing letter in return.

The first letter, from the idiot lawyer, says that the representatives and DWM will remove all references to me or the title of my work on the derivative work, and will continue to market the derivative work.

My lawyer, appalled, tells me to remind them that this work is registered with the Copyright Office, and we will sue.

I do tell them this.

Frack contacts me, tells me that name removal is done all the time in their industry, and I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about it.

I again in e-mail tell them they do not have the rights to this.

Why am I doing all this, and not my lawyer? Because my lawyer costs hundreds of dollars per hour, and I am already losing money on this. All I am doing is reiterating that I do not  agree to anything and that these people do not have rights or permission to this work in anyway. I am doing so in e-mail, which is getting forwarded to my lawyer. We have a paper trail. I am doing nothing more complicated than that. I am saying this: No. No. No. No.

Then I get today’s astonishing e-mail, in which the lawyer—the lawyer—for this DWM says that they will continue to market this derivative work without my permission. I can let them do it or “prove that there are damages.”

Ack! Ack! Ack!

The idiot lawyer doesn’t know copyright law. I don’t have to prove damages. The damages are statutory, provided that the original work is registered with the Copyright Office, which my work is. I have actually informed these people of that fact. And to make it worse, copyright law states that if I can show willful infringement—which means that they knew the work did not belong to them and they infringed on it anyway—I’m entitled to even more damages.

Idiot Lawyer put on the fact that they were going to steal this property from me in his reply to my latest cease and desist e-mail. Which proves right there that they plan to willfully infringe on the copyright.

My lawyer is actually salivating. Should the derivative work receive any money at all for any reason, we have grounds to go after Frick, Frack, and Idiot Lawyer.

Unfortunately, we will also have to go after the DWM as well.

I am convinced that all DWM knows about me is that I am an unreasonable bitch. I am sure that DWM’s representatives have informed the poor schmuck that I won’t cooperate, but they have resolved the problem anyway.

For DWM’s sake, this derivative work had better not make any money. Because even if DWM gets a payout in very large figures, DWM’s representatives have guaranteed in writing that I will get a large portion of that payout ( if not all of it). They  have done so with their stupidity.

Okay, I’ve gone on here much too long because I’m mad. But here’s the thing: for the last year or so, I’ve been dealing with other people’s representatives in one way or another. Sometimes it’s on my sub rights and derivative works. Sometimes it’s connected to other projects I’m doing that aren’t writing-related.

In most cases, when I have dealt with a representative of another creative person, that representative has cost the creative person money or has jeopardized a good deal. Or—and this is the most common—has negotiated worse terms for their client than the terms being offered.

Back when Dean and I were doing Pulphouse, kind little writer that I was, I would tell the representative not to ask for that or I would personally contact the creative artist and put a bug in their ear about their representation.

Part of the reason that Pulphouse had no assets to sell when we got in financial trouble was that we bent over backwards to be fair to other creative types. We had nothing to sell. I learned that lesson. Now I bite my lip and write posts like this.

People hire bad representation all the time. Let’s take this out of the realm of the creative for a moment. Every week, it seems, you see an article about some movie star or athlete who is suing their financial advisors for bad advice. Or you read in the paper about legal cases being appealed because of “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Yes, that’s a legal term based the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution. It means what it says—the case is being appealed because the lawyer for the defendant (usually) was stunningly, appallingly, provably bad.

Ignorance of the law, by the way, isn’t part of ineffective counsel or DWM could go after idiot lawyer for that. DWM just hired a lawyer who had the wrong area of expertise or is so arrogant that it never bothered to learn its job. (I vote for never bothering to learn.)

I have been in the same position as DWM almost every single time I’ve hired an agent (one exception only). I discovered only after firing some of them just how bad my representation was, and how much those people interfered with my career. None of them, to my knowledge, invited someone to make me party to a lawsuit like Idiot Lawyer just did, but note that I say “to my knowledge.” I’m pretty sure DWM doesn’t know that my lawyer and I now have a file on DWM that we are prepared to use when/if idiot lawyer actually makes good on its threat.

I was planning to write a blog on this during the month the events were going on, before things escalated, because this incident also marked the first time I’d ever experienced a reaction that Randy Tatano, who works as a freelance broadcast news reporter, mostly for NBC, described in my Freelancer’s Survival Guide . I’m going to reproduce it here (and note, Randy gave me permission to use this in the Guide and on this site):

Well, on the topic of hiring someone to negotiate, a news anchor I know hired an agent to negotiate her next contract. Her agent took such a hard line that management called her bluff and she ended up out of work. She had absolutely no desire to leave but apparently didn’t convey that well enough to her agent.

On the other side I was trying to hire an anchor once and the agent was so incredibly obnoxious I moved on to someone else. I was trying to negotiate and meet the guy in the middle but he wanted to play hardball.

What surprised me about these instances is that both anchors were extremely likable people, yet hired agents who were so difficult to deal with. And, as you pointed out so well Kris, anyone who negotiates for you needs to know exactly how you feel.

I am pretty creative-artist friendly. I like working with others, and I am willing to make a lot more concessions than I probably should. But Frick, Frack, and Idiot Lawyer so angered me that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about DWM. DWM could have called me and tried to talk to me about this problem, and all I would have said was, “Hire new representation, dude.”

That’s it.

I had never before been on the receiving end of a representative who was so slimy, so smarmy, so unlikeable, that I refused to do business with that person, no matter how much I wanted to work with the client. And that was before the Idiot Lawyer told me it would steal from me.

Well, I’ve been there now, and believe me, now I get it.

In the past, I had been the client of the bad representative. One of my agents caused similar problems for me. Several editors kindly told me that no one liked my agent. I figured good: that means my agent is tough. (sigh) Another writer (who I later learned had fired the same agent) pointed out that the agent had a new assistant every year.

As a person who has owned several small businesses, that should have been a red flag for me. The agent couldn’t keep assistants. But it wasn’t. I was lost in the myths that a writer needed an agent. And I believed this agent was a good one. Nope.

Well, not true. That agent still has a reputation for being a good agent. I don’t know where it comes from because those of us who have gotten rid of said agent know it is not true.

I am now making a lot more money on foreign rights than I did with any agent. I am making 100% more money for my Hollywood rights than I did with any agent, because the agents screwed up the deals. I am making 100% more money in audio and in a dozen other sub rights because I’m actually negotiating and making those deals as well.

Just this last week, I spoke to a writer friend, a New York Times  bestseller, whose agent just sold audio rights to a company I’ve worked with. The agent got this writer the exact same deal that I got without an agent (and without a New York Times bestselling series), and will now take 15% of that same deal in perpetuity.

In other words, I’m getting paid more for doing the work myself. How much work was it? Three e-mails. Three. That’s it.

Is doing the negotiations myself worth moments like today? After all, an agent would have dealt with these idiots from day one. The problem is that almost every single agent I had (with one exception) would have given Frick and Frack the rights to this property for free, without consulting me.

That’s why Idiot Lawyer wanted to talk to my representation. Because I was a harder negotiator than any of the agents I had hired. What Idiot Lawyer didn’t understand was that had my lawyer been on the phone, the conversation wouldn’t have gone Idiot Lawyer’s way. At all. Because my lawyer works for me, and unlike all of those agents, my lawyer knows it.

Some people believe that if a writer has a six-figure or more deal on the table, then it’s okay to hire an agent for that one project to shepherd things from here to there, to use contacts to talk with the sales force, to manage.

I disagree. If a writer feels she needs someone to step in and do those things, then she might want to hire someone. But I see no problem with the writer doing that herself. It’s better to do so.

Why do I hold that opinion? Because of today’s experience?

No. Because of an experience I had with three different high powered agents. One had just gotten a Big Name client. I was in the agent’s office as the agent was consulting on Big Name Author’s new book title. The agent looked at me, grinned, and said, “Big Name always writes smut, so we want a smutty title for the book.”

“Smut” was not being used nicely here. The agent told me this to impress me with the fact that she had better literary taste than this, but the “smut” made money. Besides, Big Name did not write smut. Big Name wrote urban fantasy with some sex in it.

I figured that agent was being chummy with me, a client, but the moment rankled. And then got worse as another person came into the office. “What do you think of this title?” the agent asked the other person. “Is it trashy enough to appeal to Big Name’s readers?”

Breathtaking. I left that office wondering what nasty things the agent said about my work behind my back.

Here’s the second incident: I met with the president of a boutique agency. That president only had two clients, neither of whom were me. I was with a different agent in that agency. The president was exceptionally rude to me, essentially telling me that I wasn’t a client worthy of her time, and then told me to leave.

At the time, my 15% paid for two of the in-house employees at that agency, plus benefits.

I left all right. I left the agency entirely.

Finally, a (not-so-dumb) assistant of an agent I hired mailed me the cover letters that had gone out to editors with my latest novel. The agent said point-blank in those letters that my work wasn’t up to snuff, but I had forced said agent to mail the work anyway. Agent was sorry for bothering the editor with it all. Implied in the letters? Please reject so that I can get my client off my back.

This was not some random small-time agent. This was another big name agent at another big name firm.

The damage done to my career by the people who theoretically “managed” or “handled” my career was astonishing. Even more so when you figure they had an economic interest in doing well.

But I’ve only seen more of this kind of thing since I started the blog. So many writers have sent me agency agreements or told me stories of things they discovered that their agents had done wrong.

I recommend attorneys to handle negotiations or at least review legal agreements. But the person I had the most trouble with today was a lawyer—and it was awful.

How do you make sure you have a good one?

First, realize you’re hiring your lawyer for a single job only. Some lawyers are good negotiators. Some are good litigators. Some are good at reading certain kinds of contracts. Some are good at estates.

Hire the lawyer for the job that you need, and make sure that lawyer has an expertise in that area.

Clearly Idiot Lawyer didn’t know copyright law or Idiot Lawyer wouldn’t have written half the things it did in e-mail. Idiot Lawyer also did not copy its client on those e-mails, another no-no in my book.

Second, learn as much about this stuff as you can so that you can make an informed decision when you hire a representative. If you don’t think you’re good at working with people, if you don’t want to liaison with your traditional publishing house on your six-figure deal, then make sure you hire a good person for that job only for a flat fee, and fire that person if they don’t do a good job. Trust, but verify. Make sure they’re doing the job you want by checking with the people they’re supposed to be working with. You’ll hear if things are going badly.

Third, you license copyright. If you don’t know what that means, if you don’t understand why my lawyer is so happy about the paper trail above, then get a copy of the current Copyright Handbook right now. Now! Don’t delay.

Finally, if you end up having success in this business, you will have to hire lawyers, accountants, managers, and all other manner of people to work for you. Hire them when you absolutely need them on an hourly or flat-fee basis. Do not hire them when you start out. If you haven’t made a dime as a writer, why are you hiring an agent for a percentage? Don’t bring your best friend from college in on any deal because he went to law school. He might have studied to become a real estate attorney and he knows nothing about publishing or copyright or anything else. Lawyers, accountants, managers and all other manner of professional service people specialize. Hire the right person for the right specialty.

DWM clearly did not. I’ll wager DWM got Frick and Frack and celebrated because they took him on. I’ll also wager that DWM never researched Idiot Lawyer either. If DWM knew what Idiot Lawyer was writing in DWM’s name, well, I would hope that DWM knows enough to realize that Idiot Lawyer just threatened to steal my work and dared me to stop him.

But I wouldn’t bank on that. I can almost guarantee you that DWM knows nothing about business or copyright or anything else associated with the freelance work DWM  has started to do. There are too many signs that DWM knows nothing—the same signs that twenty-something me was giving off before I realized that I had to monitor my representatives, before naïve me realized that representatives could do bad things or not even try.

Once again, I’ve been confronted by the school of hard knocks. Only today, it’s the potential hard knock that will go to DWM and I will not hesitate to deliver that knock if need be.

It’s sad.

But DWM hired bad representation, doesn’t monitor said representation, and has no idea what said representation is doing in DWM’s name.

I’ve been there. I escaped.

I doubt DWM will.

I hope you all will be more sensible than both of us. And realize that you’re not playing a game here. You’re not just trying to be published or trying to get the best deal or trying to get noticed.

You’re also dealing with contracts and copyrights and courts and things that could have a lifelong impact on you and your family.

Keep that in mind whenever you bring anyone new into your business. Particularly if you ask them to represent you.

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“The Business Rusch: “Good Help” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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Peter enjoys his solitary life in the Montana countryside. Higher mathematics, greater thought, sustain him more than companionship. But after a solitary walk along his isolated property’s borders results in a potentially deadly fall, he fights like hell to survive, knowing no one will come to rescue him. So, when he starts seeing things—seeing a creature he knows can’t exist—he grasps at his one chance for survival: believing in the impossible.

“After the Fall,” by World Fantasy award winner, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is available for free on this website for one week only. The story is available for $3.99 on Amazon, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

The free story will be available for one week only. If you missed this one, click on the links above. There’s another free story lurking somewhere around the site. Track the story down, read, and enjoy!

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In the first quarter of 2013, brick-and-mortar bookstores saw a 27% increase in foot traffic over the same period in 2012. Combine that with the number of independent brick-and-mortar booksellers increasing for the past four years, and you see an actual trend. People are going back to bookstores, including a return to Barnes & Noble brick-and-mortar stores, which moved 8 spots up the list of most visited stores in the U.S. In Q1 of 2012, Barnes & Noble was the 25^th most visited retail store. In Q1 of 2013, it’s the 17^th most visited retail store. Note, people, that a bookseller is in the top twenty of all stores that received foot traffic in the United States. Pretty damn neat-o, huh?

Maybe, just maybe, some of the massive decline we saw in brick-and-mortar retail book sales had nothing to do with e-books. Maybe it had to do with the closing of Borders locations (and contrary to what you believe, Borders closed because it was mismanaged, not because of the growth of digital) and with the recession. As the recession is easing in various parts of the country, consumers have returned to actual stores, including the bookstore.

Great news for all of us who write and read, in my opinion. The print book, which still remains anywhere from 70-90% of the market for book sales (depending on which statistic you’re looking at this week), is alive and well and its death has been greatly exaggerated.

The second really cool statistic isn’t nearly as reliable because it’s based on e-book sales. The two of the biggest e-book vendors, Amazon and Apple, will  not release actual information on their sales figures, calling that information proprietary. (And they don’t have to release that stuff, y’all. So go fight with them about this, not me.) Here’s that second statistic:

In the past five years, e-book sales in the United States have gone from zero to (conservatively) 706 million, with no sign of slowing down.

And, here’s the third really cool statistic, from the same article:

About 30% of those e-book sales come from independent (self-published) authors. That’s about 210 million ebook sales that did not come out of traditional publishing.  The bulk of those sales, as we all know, came in the last few years, not in the early years.

Here’s the conclusion from that article which gave us our second and third really cool statistics. The article, by the way, comes from The Bookseller’s blog Futurebook, and was written by Sam Missingham. Missingham writes:

The expanding use of the phrases “ebook plateauing” or “ebook slowdown” are signs of a negative narrative that many in the industry seem to be pursuing – a narrative that is simply not backed up by the data. Show me any other area of publishing that has seen 43% revenue growth year on year. In fact, show me any area of any industry that has. Growth is good. We are in a booming market. Exciting? Positive? I’d say unequivocally YES.

Our industry is growing. We are getting new bookstores, new readers, new writers, and we haven’t hit the peak of the market yet. Why not? Because traditional publishers dropped the ball decades ago. Traditional publishers forgot that they sell books to consumers. Instead, they changed their business model to sell books to bookstores. When the independent bookstores declined at the turn of this century, traditional publishers started marketing to the big distributors and to the chain bookstores, which was why you heard such industry-wide panic when Borders went down. It wasn’t because the readers went away; it was because traditional publishers had no idea how to sell their books to people other than the ten to twenty buyers for national distributors and chain bookstores.

In the early 2000s, I had books rejected by big publishers with these comments. We love it, but we know we can’t sell this title to Walmart. We love it, but we checked with the buyer for Borders, and he doesn’t think the book will sell so we must decline. I’m not the only writer who experienced such things. When your business model is based on selling to ten or twenty people who act as the only gateway to millions of consumers, then those ten or twenty people wield a disproportionate amount of power.

That power is dissipating because of the rise in online book sales. As we discussed two weeks ago, by online book sales, I don’t just mean e-books or books sold on the big chain store sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Small booksellers are also putting their inventories online, and they’re using online catalogues from the big distributors to introduce flexibility into the brick-and-mortar stores.

Let me give you an example.

Pretend you own a small bookstore that rents 500 square feet of space in the local strip mall. You cram as many bookshelves in that space as possible and maybe, like one of our local used bookstores, you use floor space as well.

Five years ago, when you ordered books, you ordered them in groups. If you thought John Q. Writer’s relatively thin Newthriller would sell well, you’d order five copies, and put them all on the shelf. If you thought Susie Fantasist’s fat fantasy Seriesbook12 would sell well, you’d order three copies because that would be all that could fit in the slot you had designated for new fat fantasy novels.

If you gambled wrong on Newthriller, you could return four copies of that book for full price at the end of the month or six weeks. But for that month, Newthriller wasted shelf space you could have used for other books.

Now, you would put one copy of Newthriller on the shelf. You might order two copies of Seriesbook 12 because, the previous year, Seriesbook 11 sold fifteen copies from your store over the space of two months. If you sell one copy of Seriesbook 12, you can order two more and get those books with a day or two from your favorite distributor.

This way, you have room for Karl Kid’s Debut, and Megan Unknown’s Attempt. You only have one copy of those books and you have no idea how they’ll sell, but  you figure you can devote a little shelf space to writers whose work has never appeared in your store before.

Unfortunately for John Q. Writer and Susie Fantasist, you have just ordered fewer copies of their books. It doesn’t matter that you would have returned four copies of the five you’d ordered for John Q. Writer. Those books would have appeared in a different portion of John Q. Writer’s royalty statement nearly a year away.

Right now, what John Q. Writer and Susie Fantasist see is that the initial print orders for their books have declined precipitously. It doesn’t matter that they are probably selling the same number of actual copies. Because John Q. Writer and Susie Fantasist are bestsellers, they publish at least one book per year, and have been trained to look at initial print orders instead of actual sales.

Why? Because actual sales can’t be determined for years. Some high-volume bookstores can return books after six months and receive full credit. In the old system, no one knew how well a book actually sold for at least three years after publication. By then, the hardcover was off the shelf, the mass market was doing its thing, and bestselling writer was looking at initial print orders for the mass market, if she was even looking at initial print sales for a book that was three books back. Most bestsellers don’t look back that far.

This change, which favors the newer writer, the midlist writer, and the bookstore itself, is why you will hear so many long-time bestselling writers complain about the decline in book sales. It’s also why you’ll hear traditional book editors, who don’t see the long-range sales figures, make that same claim. They base all of their decisions on initial print orders, not on actual sales.

The fact that other writers are now going to have brick-and-mortar shelf space also means that readers will discover writers they’ve never heard of. As we discussed in the comments of the last three blogs, readers now have the option of picking the exact book they want to read when they want to read it. Instead of buying the latest James Patterson in the airport bookstore while running to catch a plane because you finished the book you’d brought with you and he was the only author there who you marginally liked, you can download a dozen books on your e-reader. Or, you might find someone new on the shelves, because this new ordering system means that a lot of writers who are new to you will share physical shelf space with the bestsellers.

I know you’re all familiar with this, because I’ve been discussing it for the past few weeks. But here’s a chart (scroll down to the bottom of the page) that shows you exactly how this change will impact the major bestsellers, and through them, traditional publishers.

Those of you who clicked on the link were probably surprised to see that I just gave you a Wikipedia chart of Top-rated TV programs throughout the history of Nielsen ratings. But the parallels are instructive.

Back in the 1950s, there were only three television channels, which meant that only three programs competed with each other in the prime time slots. From 1952 to 1955, I Love Lucy cornered anywhere from 49.3% of available viewers to 67.3% of available viewers.

As you calculate available viewers, remember this statistic (from livinghistoryfarm.org):

Between 1949 and 1969, the number of households in the U.S. with at least one TV set rose from less than a million to 44 million…. Between 1959 and 1970, the percentage of households in the U.S. with at least one TV went from 88 percent to 96 percent.

This is actually important, because if you think about it, most non-urban areas within the United States do not have a bookstore of any stripe within 1 hour driving distance. The book suppliers to those places were grocery stores or places like Walmart, which in the last decade, cut back the number of books they carried. Many readers went without new books at all. Some used local libraries. Others found different forms of entertainment.

The brilliant thing about Amazon and other online print booksellers is that they started to tap that unseen book market.  Metaphorically, they’re increasing the number of book buyers across the U.S. just like the drop in TV prices (and rise in local stations) increased the number of television viewers in the 1960s.

As viewership increases, as deregulation happened, and cable channels proliferated, allowing such a rise in programming that in prime time, a television viewer now has hundreds of choices, you’ll note that the top-rated program for 2013, NCIS, got 21.3% of total television viewers. Let’s compare that to All in The Family, the top-rated show in the early 1970s when there were still three main channels and 96% of homes had a TV. All in the Family never got less than a 30% viewership in its time slot. An average episode drew 21 million people. A recent NCIS episode brought about 17 million viewers to CBS. Add to this the fact that the United States has about 100 million more potential viewers than it did in 1970.

I know, I’m throwing a lot of numbers at you. And if I knew how to draw, I would give you a chart that shows how—with increased choices and viewership reaching all markets—the “bestselling” or most popular shows have fewer viewers than they did in television’s heyday.

This is because of choice. When you only have a choice of three programs, and you want to watch television, you watch the best of the three. When you have a choice of 200 programs, and you want to watch television, you watch the show you want to watch. And this doesn’t even count recording an episode for later or live-streaming or all those other things that are changing viewership patterns as I write this.

What happened to the big TV networks and the major producers of TV programs over the last 35 years is what’s happening to the big traditional publishers and their major bestselling writers right now.

Readers used to have a choice of the books on a brick-and-mortar store shelf or, if they were lucky, the thousands of titles (some old) in their local library. Now, readers can choose from millions of books at touch of a button, and receive those books in any format they want, from audio to e-book to print. (And those of you who are new to this blog who now want to ask me how to get discovered, please look at last week’s post.)

Traditionally published writers–whether they are bestsellers or not–are watching their initial print orders shrink. Bestsellers will see their actual sales decline, while midlist writers might see an increase in actual sales. Why? Because of that brick-and-mortar shelf space thing. Now shelf space that used to house ten Nora Roberts novels now holds only five, and the remaining five slots go to one copy each of a new writer (or new-to-you) writer that the bookstore deems worthy of inclusion in its small store.

Readers don’t care what business published a writer. Readers want a good story. Readers want easy access to the writer’s entire backlist. Readers now want books at their fingertips.

If you’re a traditionally published writer, you have already heard about smaller print runs and how that’s “worrisome” for the business. Publishers are asking their writers to take pay cuts, smaller royalties, tiny advances, and draconian contract terms because “the readers just aren’t there.”

Most traditional publishers do not understand how the change in ordering from brick-and-mortar store has impacted their bottom line. They don’t understand why readers have turned fickle and aren’t buying the Big Names in as big numbers as before. Traditional publishers think they need to advertise more or push harder, when in fact, they’re seeing that same leveling that the TV networks started to see in the 1980s.

With the exception of one or two cultural phenomenon books per year (think the last episode of M*A*S*H), few books will sell at the numbers they commanded at the beginning of the century.  Yes, the number of readers is growing, and yes, the numbers of books being bought (in all formats) is increasing dramatically, but not all sales will go to traditional publishers.

Remember, 30% of ebook sales are, conservatively, going to indie writers. When those writers get their print publishing programs going, with this new change among the big distributors, the print sales for non-traditional publishers will also rise.

So if you’re traditionally published, your royalty statements for the next few years will look dismal, especially if you’re publishing a series. You’ll see that initial print order will have gone way down and it’ll look like you’re selling fewer books. The ebooks on your royalty statements won’t cover the difference between that initial print order from a few years ago and the one you’re seeing now.

Wait, you say. My royalty statement doesn’t have an initial print order.

Yes, it does. It lists books shipped. Then it has a place for returns. Those returns happen long after the book has been published. Once all the returns are in, you will see what your book actually sold.

The difference now is that your initial print order and your actual sales will be relatively close. In the past, the initial print order was usually double (and sometimes triple) the actual sales number.

The problem here for the traditionally published writer is this: All of traditional publishing’s systems, from deciding an advance to how many copies of a book to print, are based on the initial print order of the author’s previous book.

With initial print orders going way down due to increased efficiency in bookstores, advances will go down and some writers will get bumped from their publisher because their sales fell “dramatically.” No one ever looked at the returns.

In fact, traditional publishers seem to gloss over the news that returns are down to about 27%, due to, as Publisher’s Marketplace said, “greater efficiency” in the market. 

So yes, traditionally published writers, it looks like you’re selling fewer copies of your book when you see  your initial royalty statements. In truth, you might be selling more actual copies than you ever did, because your returns have been cut in half (or more. In some genres, returns were as high as 70% at one point.)

Traditional writers are going to have to survive a very ugly transition as traditional publishing companies change their systems from working off initial print orders and ignoring returns to working from actual sales.

I don’t expect this transition to happen any time soon.  Traditional publishers are wedded to ancient ways of conducting business, as Kevin J. Anderson pointed out in a funny and sad post on his blog this week.

I have no idea how to tell you traditionally published writers how to survive this change except to understand that it’s happening. You should also police your contracts well so that you can get out of your traditional publisher quickly. Even if you move to another traditional publisher, you need to make sure that your options are open.

The next two or three years in traditional publishing will see a lot of casualties. Writers will have to take smaller advances. (This is already happening.) Writers will also find themselves without a publisher much quicker than before. Traditional publishers won’t change their accounting practices quickly, and that too will hurt writers. It’s hard to negotiate from a position of strength when you have no idea if your actual book sales this year compare well or poorly to the book sales for your previous titles. Right now, royalty statements aren’t giving you (or the publisher) that information.

Hang on. Explore your options.  Remember that indie publishing is getting easier and might be a good stop-gap between traditional publishers. Or it might be where you end up. Because other numbers are trickling in, numbers that are very startling (rather like that 30% figure above) which show that indie (self-published) writers are actually getting traction in the marketplace.

This next week, as the news comes out of traditional publishing’s biggest annual party, you’ll hear a lot of negativity about the state of publishing. Remember, for many in traditional publishing, the sales decline is very real. If you’re traditionally published, brace yourself for a bumpy few years.

If you’re indie-published, ignore the negativity. It doesn’t concern you. Your business is very different from that of traditional publishing. Facts and figures support the case that publishing is dying and the case that publishing is thriving.

It all depends on where you stand, how you define publishing, and what kind of business you’re actually in.

But do remember this: for readers, we’re heading into a new golden age. We have more choices than ever before. Have you asked yourself why television has had so many excellent programs these last ten years? It’s because of competition. And the best programs usually aren’t on the networks. The groundbreaking shows, the beloved shows, the scripted shows that are still water-cooler topics, have migrated to cable and premium channels.

Yeah, those shows might not have the initial viewership that All in the Family did. But many of them have the same cultural impact that All in the Family had.

Personally, I think choice is a good thing. Readers can now choose between a small subgenre novel that will never sell in the tens of millions of copies and the latest blockbuster. I don’t know about you, but I have both on my to-be-read pile. And that’s different from ten years ago. Ten years ago, I could only choose the blockbuster. Now I can read what I want to read when I want to read it.

It’s a new world.

I love it.

One part of this new world is this blog. I can write it at my desk, hit “publish” on my website, and within seconds, people from all over the world can read it. Right now, the blog has more readers than major magazines that I edited in the 1990s. That astonishes me and makes me very grateful.

Thank you for coming. I put this blog up for free so that you can have the information, but I do need to have these words pay at least a little bit toward my writing income.

So, if you’ve learned something or are getting something from this blog, please leave a tip on the way out. Thanks!

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“The Business Rusch: The Changing Playing Field” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

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