Publishing – Page 22

Theme, Literature and Money

October 27, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Nathan Bransford put up a post today titled Themes Schmemes. Here’s the gist of it:

I think the drive to write Literature/art sometimes leads some very talented writers, especially young ones, to write books that as an agent I can’t sell because there’s too much attention paid to the themes and the subtext and the meaning and other English-class-type concerns, rather than the narrative and the plot and the craft and other sausage-making-type concerns.

In talking about theme over the course of this past week, I tried to stay focused on the difference between theme as a useful literary technique and theme as a toxic analytical tool. I tried to stay away from the relative merit of theme as a technique or personal literary objective because I consider that an artistic choice. Saying that theme is bad when used by a particular author to create a given story would be like saying that reference photographs are bad for any artist’s painting. It’s not for me to decide.

Bransford’s post, however, changes the axis of analysis. Instead of the utility or merit of theme, he is focused — rightly, for an agent — on sales. And from that point of view I have no doubt that he’s right: theme and other literary tools are often completely unnecessary when crafting marketable fiction. The problem, of course, is that this is a slippery slope, and once you shove off you can’t stop the slide without exposing yourself to your own market-driven arguments.

I’m confident Bransford believes there’s a minimal level of storytelling skill necessary to write a bestseller. Still, if you found a trendy, charismatic writer who could riff on pornographic sex, gruesome, sadistic violence and pop-culture references, and you hyped the resulting title with a cutting-edge social-media marketing tour, you might end up with a bestseller on your hands. At which point that writer’s agent would point out that Bransford’s concerns about plotting and character and story are totally overrated, and the only thing that matters is whether you really can increase sales by taking a bus load of orphans hostage and refusing to free them until every American buys five copies of Risotto: A Love Story.

Which is why I tend not to make market-driven arguments about craft-driven processes. If what sells is what matters, then nothing else matters.

— Mark Barrett

Start Me Up!

October 27, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

We all know there’s a cottage industry in making fun of Sarah Palin. Whatever your political bent, her appearance(s) on Saturday Night Live cemented that fact. Now that she’s written (cough) a book that’s due out shortly, people are trying to get more yuks out of the woman.

We also know that the whole self-publishing movement is saddled with a lot of baggage. If it isn’t the vanity-publishing industry ripping off customers, it’s the pervasive idea that self-publishing of any stripe is an admission of failure. Failure to succeed in publishing, failure to write good (sic!), failure to have been born into the right social circles, etc. I’ve even read snarky comments about use of the term independent author, although I can’t figure out how it’s anything but accurate.

Tonight, however, all that changed. Because of this:

Start-up publisher OR Books has announced plans to publish….

Start-up publisher…?

OMG!!! [Cue gender-neutral thrill-squeal.]

If perception is reality, then marketing speak is the plutonium that fuels cultural mushroom clouds. One day you’re a lowly self-publisher fighting industry scorn, the next you’re a start-up publisher driving technology and innovation to capture market share!

(See also micro-publishing for another marketing-friendly co-opting term.)

— Mark Barrett

May You Live in Interesting Times

October 26, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two months ago — two months! — I started digging into the issues facing publishers and authors. Now, eight weeks hence — eight weeks! — I feel like I’m living in another millennium. Or having a dissociative episode.

Back at the dawn of time the Kindle was all that, with Sony trying to chip away at market share. Now, today, the Barnes & Noble reader (called the Nook) seems to have materialized out of thin air and projected itself into the role of New Sensation!

Kindle development time = 197 years. Nook = 2 minutes on High.

Back at the dawn of time Google was getting ready to lock up all written and yet-to-be written knowledge by conspiring with a little-known, self-absorbed bureaucracy that could not pass up the chance to do something important, even if that something was completely and utterly wrong. Now, today, the Internet Archive is doing something just as interesting, without all the lawsuits — and without aspiring to own things they don’t own.

By the way, I found this really interesting:

Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of information the “dead zone” of publishing.

Polarized positions are becoming even more polarized. Analog publishers hate digital anything. Bookstore owners hate volume discounts. Agents hate writers. And everybody hates independent authors ecause they’re not waiting in line to be hand-picked and validated by somebody else: “You’re cutting in line! You suck! You have no talent! You’re only able to find readers because of the internet, not because you survived our rigged system!”

Trying to project the lay of the land on New Years Day only evokes images of supernovae. Oh, and that Yellowstone caldera blowing up.

More here from Kassia Kroszer/Booksquare. And here and here from Nathan Bransford.

— Mark Barrett

Control Your Copyrights

October 14, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

Regular readers know that I harp from time to time on the idea of authors retaining their copyrights. I’ve been doing this because there’s no clear metric other than raw dollars by which an author can calculate the value of a publishing deal compared with the value of retaining and exploiting copyright ownership themselves. And raw-dollar comparisons are hard to come by.

Which is why this post from Joe Konrath should be the first thing you read today, and tomorrow, and any day a publisher comes calling:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I’d be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I’m losing $15,762 per year.

It’s only one example. And this author is profiting indirectly from having had his books published by a publisher — including any editing, design work, previous marketing, etc., which helped attract attention to his name and stories. But he’s also being very clear: controlling his copyrights would be putting more money in his bank account. [ Read more ]

Finding Common Ground

October 10, 2009 By Mark 10 Comments

This post is in response to a recent series of Huffington Post editorials about the future of publishing. Each voice in these editorials, like each voice in the larger ongoing conversation, has a valid point of view. Ignoring how we got where we are, however, or the realities of this moment, fails to address the future that is hurtling toward us.

On Thursday, October 7, Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, posted an editorial titled, Why We Need $4.00 Books. As the head of a company devoted to servicing the e-book market, it’s not surprising that Coker touted the functional and distribution advantages of e-books over published texts, or that he focused on the crushing costs associated with maintaining the traditional publishing model while ignoring e-book costs and the threat of digital piracy. Coker also took notice of the publishing industry’s recent decision to withhold e-book versions of frontlist titles as a defense against cannibalizing book sales:

Many publishers view ebooks with a skeptical eye. After all, won’t cheap ebooks cannibalize expensive print books?

This is the wrong way to examine the situation. Lower cost ebooks help publishers retain customers who might otherwise abandon books altogether in favor of lower cost alternative media options.

Ebooks also hold the promise to expand the worldwide market for books. Hundreds of millions of new middle class and literate consumers have come online outside the US, especially in developing countries.

In Coker’s view e-books equal a larger market share for an industry facing intense competition for eyeballs. This larger market share would in turn compensate authors and publishers for a lower per-copy price. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: April L. Hamilton

October 9, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

When you’re digging into a subject on the internet, there comes a point at which the site links you’re following become known paths, and those paths start doubling back on each other with increasing frequency. It’s at this stage that you confront two possibilities:

You’ve discovered all there is to discover on the subject.
You’ve discovered a self-contained network on the subject, and there are other undiscovered networks dedicated to the same subject.

It seems counterintuitive that this could happen in an information age defined by search-engine and browser arms races, but it happens to me all the time. I search on a given subject, I follow the links, I seem to run out of fresh links, then I sit there, wondering: is there another system of links out there just like this? Am I missing it? Am I not searching for the correct keyword, variable or wildcard?

Maddeningly, there is no way to verify either possibility without actually searching for something that may not be there, and even then the best you is call off the dogs when the sun goes down and tell everybody back at the camp that you did your best. I mean, in the spy business this is why CIA operatives go funny in the head looking for moles. You can’t prove a negative.

I say this as preamble to frame my experience of stumbling onto April L. Hamilton and her various online incarnations. It’s also a lesson in doing due diligence as a researcher, which means digging into web sites, following links, reading comments, following links in comments, and generally being exhaustive in the way that you would be if you thought a big pile of money was waiting for you to find it. [ Read more ]

GeoCities, Scribd and Your Content

October 8, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

I ran across a short note on Mashable yesterday announcing that Yahoo will be closing GeoCities this month. While the post rightly notes that GeoCities was one of the first social networking sites, that’s not what I first thought about when I read the news.

What I thought of was this:

In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28. The acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began to leave en masse in protest at the new terms of service put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The terms stated that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures.

Yes, you’re reading that right. Yahoo paid 3.5 billion dollars for an online community, then one of the first things they told every user in the GeoCities community was that Yahoo now owned all of the content on each and every GeoCities web site. In the business world this type of decision is known as the dumbest thing anyone has ever done. [ Read more ]

The Medium is the Model

October 7, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

I took a long ride yesterday on Metaphor (my imaginary horse), trying to clear my head. There are so many cross-currents in the issues facing publishing that it’s easy to become overwhelmed, confused and convinced that each new issue needs to be attacked or defended on the merits. Riding aimlessly under a blue sky filled with nothing but wispy clouds and narrative dreams tends to diminish the immediacies of any online debate. The names of individual plants, birds and butterflies fade into the landscape, becoming part of a vital evolving whole that can be observed and understood in no other way.

Take the theory of The Long Tail, as put forward by Chris Anderson. I’ve read about it before, and heard about it for years, but lately there have been studies published that question the validity of the theory. Being a conscientious sort I started reading up on the issue and thinking it through myself, and even started several posts on the subject — all of which derailed due to subsequent articles I ran across while trying to nail down my thoughts.

In the end I had more questions than answers. If history is any guide, that meant there was nothing in the Long Tail that was going to help me solve the issues I’m confronting as an independent author. So I officially have no opinion on the theory. I’m opting out, again. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Guy Gonzalez | Loud Poet

October 6, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

If I have a weakness for anything it’s simplicity. Where a lot of people like to dress things up or add detail, I like to strip things down and emphasize what’s essential. Neither approach is right, really, unless of course you’re trying to figure out how something works. In that case, ignoring the noise and focusing on the mechanics is not simply a subjective choice, it’s objectively necessary.

Guy Gonzalez at LoudPoet.com seems to have that same approach, and it’s one of the reasons I keep learning something every time I visit his site. In the hive-mind world of social networks Gonzalez often sounds like an old hand, and that’s not easy to do in a medium still in its infancy. [ Read more ]

Making Irony Pay

October 6, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Vanity Fair has an article out about Rupert Murdoch taking on the idea of free content on the internet. The upshot is that he’s not doing this because he cares about content, but because he’s hemorrhaging money.

When I got to this, however, I laughed myself out of my chair:

Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase—before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology—I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business.”

As the quote notes, Murdoch bought MySpace, and lustily so. What the quote leaves out is that MySpace was created by people who thieved, hacked and sold porn. In the entire MySpace story there are no heroes: only people purposefully walking the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral.

That Rupert Murdoch — Rupert Murdoch! — is now offended by these types, is riotously funny and richly ironic.

— Mark Barrett