The Business Rusch: The Book Trade

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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

Let me explain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did the books come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does your head hurt yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s that simple.

And that hard.

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

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

Click Here to Go To PayPal.

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

The reviews so far have been tremendous. Publisher’s Weekly says:

DeLake (Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s newest pseudonym) takes readers on a fast ride with this passionate futuristic tale, the first in a series. Idiosyncratic entrepreneur Rikki Bastogne and straitlaced Mikael “Misha” Yurinovich Orlinski are both assassins in a distant future where killing for cause is often legal. Responsible practitioners join the highly regulated Assassins Guild, which Misha venerates and Rikki despises. Misha hires Rikki to do a job in the hopes of recruiting the indie killer, and when they meet while Rikki is disposing of the target’s body, their chemistry is immediate and explosive. At first Rikki is unaware of Misha’s true identity, and when she learns it, she is shaken to the core: for years, Rikki has believed that Misha helped his mother kill Rikki’s father in cold blood. How he proves her wrong—and how the two eventually learn to work together to combat a threat which could destroy them both—makes for a compelling, hot, and believable tale. 

And RT Book Reviews gave it 4.5 stars, with this review: 

Set in a universe where murder can be legal, this is an exciting adventure with a hot romance between two fascinating characters. Their profession and the fact that no apologies are made for it make for an intriguing story. One hopes there will be a second story featuring the heroine’s friend.

And yes, there will be a second story featuring the heroine’s friend. My editor at Sourcebooks and I are just trying to figure out the title. 

I will be doing a signing for this book, Boneyards, and Anniversary Day at North by Northwest Books in Lincoln City, Oregon, on March 4th. So if you’re in the neighborhood, drop on by. 

“Bring Me The Head of Anne Boleyn” by USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for 99 cents on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and in other e-bookstores.

Bring Me the Head of Anne Boleyn

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The memory comes to her in fragments. Her mother’s hand, cold, oddly shaped, the long sleeve hiding the extra finger, grips Elizabeth’s tiny arm. Her mother tugs her into a corner, against the rough stone walls, in their wing of the palace. “Take this,” her mother says. Elizabeth looks up, but she cannot see her mother’s face.

Men are running down the corridor. Her mother stiffens. Elizabeth shivers in the castle’s chill. “Take this,” her mother repeats. Something heavy falls into her palm. Elizabeth grabs it. Her mother releases Elizabeth’s hands. The men have arrived. Her mother pushes her away. The men surround her mother.

“Go, Elizabeth,” her mother says, but Elizabeth stands in the corner and stares at her palm. Her mother has given her a golden ring that would fit over three of her fingers, with a flashing ruby in the shape of a falcon, her mother’s symbol. The ring is pretty.

Elizabeth looks up. Her mother cries out, but Elizabeth cannot see her. Her mother’s face is gone forever.

***

Twenty-two years later, Elizabeth stands in the same corridor. Now she notices details she missed. A suit of armor, as tall as she is, guards a corner. Long tapestries cover the sweating stones. The corridor smells damp, as if the chill never leaves this place. If she closes her eyes, she can see the men, their features as distinct as the lines between the stones, but she cannot see her mother.

The ring. Elizabeth has forgotten about the ring, until now. The last thing her mother said to her, the last thing her mother gave her, and she has not seen it since the day the guards hauled her mother away.

It doesn’t matter. Elizabeth is Queen now. All the years imprisoned in her own home, the years in the Tower walking daily by the scaffolding, all of the lies, don’t matter. She is Queen. She will remain Queen until she dies.

She tightens her fists, like the three-year-old child she was that afternoon in the corridor. No one will take her away. No one will imprison her again. No one will own her again.

No one will behead her.

“We are Queen,” she whispers. “We are Queen.”

But she does not believe it. In this corridor, she is Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of the adulterous Anne Boleyn. A bastard child, denied her right to the throne by an Act of her sister’s Parliament. A woman, unfit to rule.

This corridor has drawn her, two days after her coronation, like a siren singing in the waters. The last time she stood here, she lost something precious.

She is not sure what it is.

***

Elizabeth Regina is not a pretty woman. But at twenty-five, she is tall, and strong, and can outthink the men around her. She is ruthless. She knows, someday, she will order people to their death as easily as her father did.

She must be hard, or die.

This morning, she thinks of her father as she sits on his throne, her counselors around her, bobbing like whipped dogs. Sir William Cecil, fat Nicholas Bacon, and Sir William Parr, brother to the only other wife his father executed, still wear their coronation finest. They do not tell her everything, because she, as a woman, will not understand. She has spies who inform her of things the counselors will not. They will not outsmart her. They cannot.

The throne room is cold. The entire castle is cold. All of England is cold. Beyond these walls, the land is covered with blood. Her sister tried to make England Catholic again — returning property to its pre-Henry ownership, and making England bow to the pope. The landed gentry would not give up their rights to former church land. The countryside is scarred, ripe for the taking. France and Spain know this. They watch England like hawks watch a mouse. Their heads never turn, but their eyes are always moving, waiting for Elizabeth to make one mistake, waiting for the ax to fall.

***

In her dreams, the ring slides around her wrist. She wears it to the execution. She kneels on the pillow, and leans into the block. The wood is cold against her neck, pushing her Adam’s apple into her throat. Before her is a peasant’s basket, made of twigs. She looks up. The executioner wears a hood. He must have no head at all. He is a swordsman from France, like the one hired to kill her mother. Elizabeth wants to say something brave, but she cannot. Her mother’s hands close around her throat. You have such a very little neck! Elizabeth cringes. Her mother’s last words still reflected her vanity. Elizabeth does not want to seem vain. So she says nothing. The sword glistens as it falls. She feels a snap. Her head bounces into the basket — and then someone whisks it away.

***

The banquet hall is large. The tables form an open square. Jugglers stand in the middle. Their performance is mediocre at best. She saw better as a child. The mutton is warm, and the ale inviting. But she doesn’t touch it. Spirits will muddle her already confused mind.

She has not had the ring in over twenty years. She cannot remember having it after her mother died. But the ring does not concern her.

What she thinks of is her mother’s head.

By morning, they will have opened her mother’s grave. She and her trusted assistants will go down to the grave site, and examine the body. When she sees the head, severed from the neck, the nightmares will stop.

They must.

She has more important things to think of. She must control her courtiers. She has a meeting with the Bishops. Philip of Spain wants to see her. During the week, she must inspect the fleet.

She cannot lose sleep over events twenty years past. For if she does not think about now, she will step on the chopping block. Her head will tumble into a basket, and she will be whisked away.

Forever.

***

Elizabeth climbs the steps to her chambers. Her purple brocade is heavy, the stiff ruffled collar biting into her neck. Her mouth is sore from smiling for hours. The banquet was interminable. She will be happy to sleep.

As she steps into the narrow, tapestry filled corridor leading to her chambers, a man steps out of the candlelit gloom. He bows at the waist. He is slender; his tights fit well and his tunic is a rich velvet. Sir Robert Dudley, whom she has just made Master of the Horse.

“Milady,” he says as he rises.

She taps him with the small gold fan she clutches in her left hand. “I am your liege,” she says.

“Forgive me, Highness.” He captures her hand as he bows again, kissing it with a flourish. She resists the urge to pull her hand away. She remembers this as if it has happened before: a man bowing over her mother’s hand; her mother’s fluted laughter echoing through the corridor. “I wish to speak to you, alone.”

“We are alone.” She suppresses a sigh. She hates the stupidity of clandestine politics.

“Highness,” he says, his hand still imprisoning hers, “I wish to ask your hand in marriage. I —”

She tugs her hand from his. “Sir, you forget yourself — and your wife,” she says. Then she laughs, the sound an echo of her mother’s joy. “Besides, I entertain no proposals before bedtime.”

“Ah, but, lady,” Dudley says, “those are the best kind.”

***

The morning dawns gray and cold. Elizabeth wears a heavy cloak as she stands beside the open grave. Her mother’s grave was to have been secret, but they have had no trouble finding it. A light mist falls, bathing everything in a filmy light.

Her advisors stand around her, all men who have been loyal to her since her father died. They have had late night discussions about ways to get the country to accept another Tudor Queen. Already the Parliament is working on the Act of Supremacy, which will abolish papal power, and will bring that power home to England. She will cause no unnecessary deaths — her father’s downfall — and she will not be seen as a zealot, which was part of her sister’s.

The advisors stare into the grave. Two men lean over the side, with winches braced against the marble. They have been struggling for an hour now to lift the heavy lid.

Perhaps her mother isn’t even buried there. Her father wanted to destroy her mother’s body when he discovered her adultery and incest, actions her mother denied. But his pain did not last long. He had married Jane Seymour before Elizabeth realized that her mother was dead.

The rain becomes a downpour. She raises her cloak, but the wind blows it off her head. An advisor steps across the open grave. “Highness, there is no need to stand in the rain. We will summon you when the coffin is opened.”

She wipes the water from her face. In her twenty-five years, she has never stood before a grave. She doesn’t like it; it makes her think of her own mortality, of the lord who spoke to her the night before.

If she dies without an heir, the crown will pass from the Tudors. Her father spent his own life — and many other lives — securing a rightful heir. Is she failing her duties as Queen if she does not do the same?

***

She enters the palace through the kitchen. Women, their brown robes dragging on the dirty floor, bend over large ovens. The kitchen smells of bread. A fire burns in the oversized hearth. Cooking pots hang above it. A large grate stands before it, so no one turns too quickly and sets her skirts on fire.

Elizabeth scans the faces — a habit she has had since childhood. She sees one that makes her start. It is an old face, with a wart on one cheek, and wrinkles that cascade down the skin like tear tracks. But she still recognizes it, like the edges of a dimly remembered dream.

“Nurse?”

The women all turn at the sound of her voice, and courtesy, remaining crouched with their heads down until she bids them to stand. She takes the hand of the woman who had been her nurse so many years ago.

“How long have you served in the kitchen?”

“It be since yer mum, milady, died, Highness.”

Elizabeth tucks the old woman’s hand under her arm. “Come with me,” she says.

She takes the old woman up the back stairs. They go through a hall of portraits — all Tudors. Her father never tolerated any other family portrayed in the hall — and stop in a small sitting room.

Elizabeth perches on a gilt-edged chair. She bids Nurse to sit in one too. Nurse sits gingerly on the edge.

“Do you remember my mother?” Elizabeth asks.

Nurse frowns. Elizabeth can see the fear.

“Please?” Elizabeth says. “It is all right to discuss her.”

Nurse nods and looks down at her red, chapped hands. “Yer mum, she was a lady, Highness. She treated us all good. She laughed a lot, she did, until the end, and she loved ye, sneaking into yer room at nights to give ye sweets.”

Elizabeth catches a memory only fleetingly — a tall woman, smelling of perfumes, standing over her bed, handing her candies.

“My mother had a gold ring with a ruby set in the center.”

“Her wedding band it was.”

“She gave it to me before she died, and I don’t have it. Do you know where it went?”

Nurse becomes still, as if she thinks Elizabeth is blaming her. “I got sent away soon as them guards came, mum. I did not take no ring.”

“I know,” Elizabeth repeats gently. “She gave it to me. But I no longer have it. I wonder if you — or anyone from that time — knows what happened to it.”

“You was wearing it last I saw,” the nurse says. “And your father, the King, throws a high holy fit. That was what sent me to the kitchens. But I’ll look, Highness, and I’ll ask. Maybe someone knows.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth says. She stands. Nurse stands too. “Now, come with me. You do not belong in the kitchens any more. You will wait on ladies again, as you did before.”

Nurse courtesies, but not before Elizabeth sees her eyes. Nurse is still frightened. Like Elizabeth, she does not believe any of this is true.

***

The rain has become a drizzle. It is almost twilight. Elizabeth wears her wet cloak. They have opened the coffin, and they sent for her.

Someone has built a tent over the grave’s open mouth. The rain seeps through the fabric, but does not fall as harshly as it does outside. Elizabeth steps into the shelter, her kid slippers sinking in mud. She does not look down until she is in line with the grave itself.

Her mother has no body, only a skeleton. The hands tell her she is staring at Anne Boleyn. The extra finger bones rest on her mother’s chest like a sign.

Her mother wears simple black, with no jewelry at all. Odd that the dress survives, but the skin does not. Elizabeth makes herself look to the head of the coffin. There, off to one side, sits the skull, staring at the body as if it cannot believe it is separate.

The skull wobbles in her vision. Then it fades, and she sees her mother for the first time in twenty years. Long black hair cascading down her back. Dark red lips and snapping brown eyes. Her mother is smiling, laughing, head tilted toward another man’s, looking to be kissed.

Elizabeth takes a step backwards. She recognizes the face more than she remembers it. She sees it in the mirror every morning.

Her mother’s face is her own.

***

She places the skull next to the mirror in her chambers. The wavery glass catches the edge of the skull, so that when Elizabeth applies her own makeup, she will see and remember.

A knock echoes in the stillness. Elizabeth frowns. She has asked not to be disturbed. She glances at her dressing room door, wondering if she should disturb her ladies. But something tells her not to.

The knock echoes again. She goes to the door, and opens it herself. Nurse stands there. She averts her gaze and courtesies when she sees Elizabeth.

“Highness, ye might want to come with me. I have found yer ring.”

***

Elizabeth brings two ladies in waiting in case this is a trap. They go down a dusty back staircase. The stones are chipped and crumbling. Dirt falls from the railing. Elizabeth suppresses a sneeze. Nurse leads, a hand above her head to push away cobwebs, the other holding a torch.

The staircase opens in a large basement room. Nurse lights the torches near the door. Elizabeth steps inside. The ladies wait by the stairs. Five dust-covered glass cases line the walls. She goes to the first and stops when she sees a crown twinkling in the firelight. Other jewels lie beside it.

“The second case, Highness,” Nurse says.

The second case holds another crown, this one made of light silver with diamonds adorning its face. Elizabeth remembers it on her mother’s head during those nights when she brought sweets to Elizabeth’s room. Emerald necklaces encircle the crown. Ruby bracelets lie beside it. And, in the center of one of the bracelets, Elizabeth’s ring.

Two memories collide: She is hiding in her father’s chamber, listening to him speak, something she loved to do. He and his advisors are talking about her mother, using words she doesn’t understand. Finally, her father laughs. “She has made it easy then,” he says. “Leave me. And don’t come back until you bring me the head of Anne Boleyn.”

A fear starts in Elizabeth’s belly, a fear that comes back after her mother dies, when her father sees the ring. He snatches it from her fingers. “Did you give this to her, Nurse?” Nurse says nothing. “Mummy did,” Elizabeth says. “Mummy?” Her father mocks. “Mummy is dead.” His hand closes around the ring. “And this is mine.”

He took it from her. He stole it from her as he had stolen her mother, as he had stolen her life. It is her revenge to stand here, among the jewels owned by his dead wives, and rule the country he hoped to give to a son.

She does not need to fear him any more. He is dead. He shall never hurt her again.

She opens the case and snatches the ring. She slips it on the third finger of her left hand. She is her mother’s daughter, flirtatious and bright. She is her father’s daughter, ruthless and cold. She is the marriage of the best of them, and she will outdo them all.

“These are not safe here,” she says. The wealth of the Kingdom lives in these glass boxes. “You will stay until I send someone down here to move them.”

Nurse nods. Elizabeth reaches out a hand, adorned by her mother’s gold wedding band. “We are grateful,” she says.

Nurse courtesies. Elizabeth whirls, and goes back up the steps. Her ladies follow. She twists the ring. She has come full circle. She is Queen of England now — her mother’s dream, her father’s fear.

She is Queen, and Queen she shall remain.

Forever.

“Bring Me The Head of Anne Boleyn” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Royal Crimes, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Martin H. Greenberg, Signet Books, August 1994.

And I missed announcing a few other things. You can preorder Thoroughly Kissed, which will be out in June. I’ll have a longer piece on that shortly. Thoroughly Kissed is Emma’s story. (Sleeping Beauty, for those of you who missed Utterly Charming.) If a woman really deserves a happily ever after, it’s Emma.

And I have a Christmas novella  in case you want to get in the mood for Christmas 2012 early. It’s called Up On The Rooftop. I’ll make a proper announcement about that one in the fall, maybe with a few more Christmas stories…

The Business Rusch: Readers

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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

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

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

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

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

On the writing alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then what?

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

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

I’d be surprised if any of you can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My frustration with traditional publishers ignoring readers is unbelievably high.

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

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

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

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

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

Especially if your book is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That experience came from a writer.

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

The relationship is between the writer and her readers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If she has the patience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It means I’m doing something right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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