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The Ditchwalk Agent Query Challenge

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The Issue
On October, 22nd, 2009, literary agent Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown, Ltd, posted the following on Twitter:

Jessica Faust’s great post re: editing/queries/synopses aren’t fun, but they’re your job: http://bit.ly/1aI0XF

Following the link I found another literary agent, Jessica Faust, of BookEnds, LLC, ranting about lazy writers:

Life and getting published is not about easy. It takes work and I’m willing to do the work to help you build a successful career. Since it’s your career I would think you’re willing to do the work too.

Now, I don’t know what you think about a literary agent dressing writers down in public, but I’m not sure Ms. Faust is exhibiting the kind of professionalism that lends credibility to her advice about professionalism. I say this because one of the things agents have to deal with is the fact that writers come in all shapes, sizes, neuroses, flavors, vintages and intellectual capacities. It’s baked into the business.

If they don’t know it in advance, all agents learn this during their first full business day. So when I see an agent go off the deep end about how writers make that agent’s life difficult, or about writers being inept, or about writers being vain, or whatever else an agent might appropriately bitch about over drinks with other agents, that rant sounds like someone telling the world to be different from the way the world is.

Even your average agent knows that a good part of their job is trying to take feral square-peg writers and hammer them into trained round-peg authors that fit the publishing pigeon holes of the day. That’s the whole game from an agent’s point of view: connect products with markets, and massage both until they fit. Unfortunately, writers themselves are notoriously uncertain about how all this works, so they either do the wrong things or write the wrong things or ask stupid repetitive questions until the agent goes mental.  [ Read more ]

The New Money Flow

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Recently, while reading a write-up of a self-publishing nightmare, I ran across mention of something called Yog’s Law, attributed to one James D. Macdonald. Having never heard of Yog’s Law before, I clicked through and learned the following:

Macdonald is well known for his work in educating aspiring authors, particularly for his advice on avoiding literary scams. Early in his career he was asked by such an author how much he had paid to have his books published, and in response began a campaign of educating other writers about the problems of vanity publishers. As part of this campaign, he coined Yog’s Law, which states “Money should flow toward the author,” which is often quoted by professional authors when giving advice on getting published.

Less than a day later, I read this in a blog post by Richard Curtis:

The line that once sharply separated traditional publishing (“We pay you”) and vanity publishing (“You pay us”) has all but dissolved in this corrosive environment of fabulous riches.

Mere hours later I found Yog’s Law quoted a third time, in a Jane Friedman blog post analyzing the Harlequin Horizons debacle:

People like to say (and I’ve said too) that money should flow TO the writer, not AWAY from the writer.

But I can see a business model emerging where publishers work with authors in more diverse ways. What we’ve held to be sacred—that a writer should NEVER pay to publish—may change.

To be clear: there are a lot of literary scams out there, and a lot of naive writers who get taken to the cleaners as a result. Whatever work James Macdonald has done to protect writers from predatory service providers who peddle false promises is a good thing.

Understanding Yog’s Law
As maxims go, Yog’s Law is not bad. In a moment I will speak to the fallacy of Yog’s Law, and to the convenience of revisiting the rule when the publishing industry decides it wants to get in on the writer-servicing business, but as a general guideline I think Yog’s Law does what it needs to do. It tells writers that anyone asking them for money should be viewed with suspicion, and that’s correct. That this core tenet could be expanded to cover most aspects of anyone’s life does not detract from its effectiveness as a general rule for aspiring writers.  [ Read more ]

Marketing Fatigue

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I’ve been a subscriber to Popular Photography for four or five years. I didn’t buy my first digital camera until two years ago (a point-and-shoot), but I’ve had a life-long interest in photography and I’ve been using Pop Photo to keep up with the evolution of digital tech.

I still have an analog SLR and three lenses that I love, but I wouldn’t go back to film if you offered me the choice. Between the per-image cost of processing, the film requirement of processing all images instead of tossing the mistakes, and the difficulty (impossibility) of getting good prints at anything less than custom prices, I’m completely sold on digital.

Still, I’m not an early adopter when it comes to tech. I tried that, and it’s just too expensive. I’d love nothing more than to own a DSLR today, but I wouldn’t have said that even two years ago. Why? Because two years ago camera manufacturers were still in a megapixel race, which, like the return of the horsepower race in cars, provides only limited end-user utility. It’s only in the last two years that the DSLR feature set has matured to the point where you can buy a camera now that won’t be obsolete in six months. (Not that there won’t be advances. But the question of image resolution in digital formats has been thoroughly asked and answered. If you want to take good pictures that can be printed to 8×10 or larger, that’s now a given in any DSLR, and true for many point-and-shoots as well.)

In terms of knowledge and information about cameras, my subscription to Popular Photography has been well worth it. As an unexpected bonus, however, I’ve also learned a bit about what’s happening to the analog magazine business in the age of digital information, none of which would come as a surprise to regular readers. (See also my take on PC Magazine. Which, by the way, recently launched a new web site that is much improved in terms of clutter, but even less trustworthy than before in terms of mingling editorial content with advertisements posing as press releases posing as editorial content. Consider yourself warned. Again.)

I don’t remember what I paid for my first Pop Photo subscription, but it was cheap. Twelve issues for pretty much nothing. Or maybe it was two years (24 issues) for pretty much nothing. In any case, when I received my annual renewal reminder last year I was shocked to see that another twelve issues would cost me five dollars. As in $5. As in five hundred pennies. As in: are you kidding me?  [ Read more ]

PC Mag: 50 Fave Blogs

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Yeah, I know…it’s PC Mag. They can’t get out of their own way, and they refuse to walk the clarity-between-advertising-and-content walk that they (rightly) expect everybody else to walk. Such is publishing today.

Still, there’s some good tech content there, and the reviews are useful, and sometimes they still do that fun web thing of pointing people in new and interesting directions. If you’re in the mood to explore, take a look.

My fave for the upcoming holiday? Cake Wrecks.

Happy Thanksgiving.

— Mark Barrett

The Writer’s Prompt Copy

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Are you a writer? Are you planning to do a reading or a podcast? Will you be using your published or hopefully-to-be-published text as a part of your presentation?

If so, take a minute to consider what you’re going to be doing and how you’re going to do it. On the what front it’s tempting to take your text (fiction or non-fiction) and use that as your script. I mean, what else would you use, right? Right.

Except…that may not be the best choice in terms of how you connect with your audience. What you’re doing when you give a reading or put a podcast together is presenting your work, but it’s also a performance, and performances have their own requirements. Even if your audience is very nuts-and-bolts about the subject matter, and even if your text is very matter of fact, you still run the risk of presenting your information in a boring way. And boring is generally not good.  [ Read more ]

Richard Curtis Observes Hypocrisy

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Last Thursday, in a post about the Harlequin Horizons debacle, I wrote this:

The idea that all of these novice, amateur and un-published professional writers are suddenly going to take advantage of self-publishing tools has got to be making traditional publishers both mental and green with greed.

Today, Richard Curtis writes this:

With so much money being thrown at subsidy publishers, and with the blessing of mainstream publishing, the evolution of vanity from the margins to the center of the publishing universe is complete. The erosion of traditional gatekeepers like reviewers, critics, newspaper book editors, and other refined literary tastemakers makes it clear why even a conservative publisher might lose its head over the prospect of all that money – and be tempted to go into another racket.

Publishers go where the money is. For a long time the money was in gatekeeping, and particularly in gatekeeping the content-distribution process. The internet ended the ability of publishers to dominate distribution, so they are looking for new revenue sources, including partnering with (or getting in bed with, or joining in abusive practices with) the very vanity and subsidy publishers they used to decry.

The idea that publishers are victims of anything is now dead.

— Mark Barrett

Ken Rolston on Narrative Design

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Who is Ken Rolston? He’s the guiding light behind The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and IV: Oblivion. If you’re interested in interactivity, interactive storytelling (of any kind), and/or computer games as a career, you should play and understand Ken’s games.

What is narrative design? It’s a title that didn’t exist five years ago, back when I took a break from the interactive industry. At the time, the designer of a game was akin to the director of a movie, and that held true regardless of the type of interactive entertainment that was being produced. The problem was, some games were so heavily narrative — and some designers so completely unprepared to control and author a narrative experience — that game-centric designers started becoming a detriment to the final products they were producing.

Narrative designer as a title recognizes the fact that putting a story-centric game together demands particular skills — just as does game design and art design and architectural design (level building). A narrative designer handles the storytelling in an interactive work, either on their own, or by directing a team. If you’re interested in narrative design, you should be interested in what Ken Rolston has to say.

Speaking of which, here’s Ken on consistency, one of the most important aspects of interactive design:

Filling a game’s world with appropriate content that sets the tone — in-game books, artwork, maps, signs, languages, and so on — is paramount to crafting consistency and believability.

“The best thing you can do is find artifacts that feel in the mind like they’re touchable. They’re evidence of another world,” Rolston said. That extends to every corner of the design, even the fonts used in the game.

More from Ken here, including an awesome PDF of his recent talk at the Montreal International Games Summit.

— Mark Barrett

Self-Publishing: A Cautionary Tale

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Mick Rooney put a post up on his site today that details a long-running dispute between an author and self-publishing company in the UK. I think it’s worth a read because it draws attention to a number of ways authors can become enmeshed in processes that consume time and money, as well as stomach linings and sanity.

We don’t often end up in court, but most of the things we do each day have the potential to land us there, whether or not we’re the ones motivated to seek some sort of justice. We also tend to think of our online communications as social networking or community building, but our online personas also establish a permanent record and obligate us to conversations we might not otherwise want to have.

Self-publishing is an opportunity, and online methods of marketing our works and ourselves are a benefit in that regard. But there are still risks to be recognized and managed, and our individual conduct may matter more than we think.

As I noted in the comments on Mick’s site, you don’t have to choose sides to see his post as a series of cautionary tales. Given the explosion of author-service providers — including the already re-branded Harlequin Horizons, and other publishers and imprints working with Author Solutions — it only makes sense to be cautious.

The goal, it seems to me, is professionalism. From the people who provide us services, and from ourselves. In this case being a professional means arming yourself with knowledge gleaned from the experience of those who have gone before you. Because it might keep you from losing, time, money and sleep.

— Mark Barrett

Revealing Costs

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The ugly if not predatory mechanics and economics of the just-renamed Harlequin Horizons imprint bring to mind a question I’ve had about the book business for some time….

Over the past few months I’ve read post after post from apparently knowledgeable sources such as agents, editors and publishers — people who’ve been in the publishing business for years — speaking to the issue of publishing costs. Here’s a recent example:

Hardcover:
Editorial: $8,000
Packaging (cover design & production): $5,000
Typeset & Interior layouts: $3,000
Printing & binding: $18,000
Marketing: $15,000
Warehousing: $6,000
Sales: $10,000
Author royalty (a typical advance is calculated in this model): $25,000

Leaving out the royalty issue, all these numbers seem to jibe (loosely) with other numbers I’ve seen — as if this is pretty much the going rate. What I’ve yet to see, however, is how much profit there is built into these rates. What does it really cost the publishing industry to provide these services?  [ Read more ]

Updated: Sullivan’s Experiment in POD

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Andrew Sullivan’s print-on-demand (POD) experiment continues apace, with interesting results so far:

How did we get the price down by half? We did it the way publishing houses do it – with a twist. We didn’t guess the demand or market test it, we simply asked for pledges. We crowd-sourced the price. We got enough pledges to do a print run of 2,000 which brought the price down to $16.25. But unlike the publishing houses, we’re not pocketing the difference. We’re handing it over to you in a lower price.

The idea of pooling demand for a print-on-demand book, then using that aggregated demand to drive the per-book cost down, is interesting to me. Provided it doesn’t cut into the profits of the publisher (in this case, Blurb), there’s no reason not to do this, and particularly so for impending releases. (Pre-ordering of content is now quite common in the games biz, but there’s rarely a break on price for ordering early.) Here consumers win twice: they can elect to order prior to availability as a convenience, but can also drive the price down in the process.

In Sullivan’s case, however, the price drop seems to be a one-time event:

A catch: Once those 2000 copies are bought up, however, the price will return to $29.95, so secure one today.

I wonder if this is necessarily the case. It may be that there simply needs to be an additional mechanism added to the purchase of a POD book: one that offers to delay shipment until a certain number of offers are stockpiled, at which point the price drops accordingly. How much book-buying is spur-of-the-moment, and how much is for later gifting? Would consumers be willing to defer a purchase to save a few bucks? Or, once the purchase decision is made, will people see paying more (full retail) as the cost of getting it sooner? How can demand be pooled more than once? (For example, can I have the option to get a book now for the regular price, or choose to go into a pool of people waiting for a lower price?)

In the end, I think Sullivan’s example not only blazes trail, it indicates that self-publishing and POD are going to continue to evolve to meet market needs. The landscape we see today is not going to be the landscape we travel tomorrow.

— Mark Barrett