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Publishing is for Professionals

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One problem with allowing people to publish their work without first taking the benevolent guiding hand of the publishing industry is that writers are left open to all sorts of potential exploitation. Just as it’s easy to take advantage of an elderly person who’s had a stroke and get them to sign all sorts of papers and statements and turn their lives over to virtual strangers, it’s easy to dupe young writers into making choices and deals that are not in their best interest.

That’s why I’m thrilled — thrilled — to see HarperCollins’ Jonathan Burnham taking such good care of Harper Lee and her recently discovered long-lost novel, Go Set A Watchman, which she apparently wrote prior to writing her rightly celebrated masterpiece, To Kill A Mockingbird. I get sick thinking how Lee might have been ill-served by a lesser white knight incapable of anticipating a jaded public’s dubious reaction and providing a preemptive and detailed forensic defense of such an important discovery:

“Everyone had believed it to been [sic] lost, including Harper Lee herself,” Burnham said. “You can see that it is written on a manual typewriter from the period. It has on the front of it the address where Harper Lee was living at the time in New York. But if you read the book, more importantly, only Harper Lee could have written this novel.”

Thank goodness! Because in the dark corners of the publishing world you can only imagine how easy it would have been for someone with fewer scruples to take an early draft of Mockingbird and pay a ghost writer to bash out a few new chapters on and old typewriter, using the resulting bastardized mishmash not only to exploit Harper Lee but rip off an adoring and trusting public. Fortunately, that has obviously not happened.  [ Read more ]

It’s Not About the Money

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Last week author Tony Horowitz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his tragicomic experience writing an e-book:

Last fall a new online publication called The Global Mail asked me to write about the Keystone XL pipeline, which may carry oil to the United States from the tar sands of Canada. The Global Mail promoted itself as a purveyor of independent long-form journalism, lavishly funded by a philanthropic entrepreneur in Australia. I was offered an initial fee of $15,000, plus $5,000 for expenses, to write at whatever length I felt the subject merited.

At the time I was researching a traditional print book, my seventh. But it was getting harder for me to feel optimistic about dead-tree publishing. Here was a chance to plant my flag in the online future and reach a younger and digitally savvy audience. The Global Mail would also be bankrolling the sort of long investigative journey I’d often taken as a reporter, before budgets and print space shrank.

Alas, things did not go well. If you’re eying the e-book boom Horowitz’s piece is a must-read because it comes from someone in the trenches, not someone selling you a shovel that you will eventually only use to dig your own grave. Based on the totality of his experience I don’t begrudge Horowitz his eventual retreat, but if you’re new to the writing game I think it’s important to understand what has and has not changed during the past few years of publishing upheaval.

Making money as a writer — to say nothing of making writing a career, even for a few years — has always been brutally hard. If you’re passionate and lucky and plucky and willing to do whatever it takes, and you meet the right people at the right time, and you have the chops, and you’re less trouble than you’re worth, you can, maybe, get a gig. If you do a decent job and meet your deadline you might get another gig, or even an actual job with regular hours and benefits and somebody else paying two thirds of your social security taxes. But it’s hard. Always.

While the e-book craze is in large part being driven by people who hope to profit from doing so, and it’s always nice to make a buck, the real value of e-books, and by extension, self-publishing, is the fact that you no longer have to ask someone for permission to write what you want to write. You may not make any money following your bliss, but when was that ever guaranteed? The best you could usually hope for was to write for hire, to get someone to pay you for services rendered, then use that income to cover the cost of personal projects. Even if you were a literary lion your high-dollar advance came with expectations and limits.

If you want to make money as a writer you’re looking at a hard life, but it was always thus. What’s changed — what the e-book revolution and self-publishing are really about — is that everyone now has access. So while you’re right to think about how much money you can squeeze out of the marketplace with your talent and guile, take a moment to ballpark the opportunity cost of the self-publishing and internet distribution options currently available. What would it take to replicate those opportunities if you had to pay for them yourself? A billion dollars? Ten billion? A trillion?

The e-book market will sort itself out in time, at which point it will become just another market you can sell your services to if you aspire to be a working writer. What you no longer have to do is wait for someone to say yes if you’re willing to bet on yourself, and I see that change as priceless.

— Mark Barrett

Where Were We?

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Two years ago, when the major publishing houses got together with Apple and conspired to fix e-book prices, they did so not because Apple was sexy and Steve Jobs was a benevolent god and the iPad was about to launch, but because Amazon was the devil.

Somehow, in the intervening era of Apple-mania, that narrative has been skewed. But that skewing is about to snap back with a vengeance:

The government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon in a powerful position: the nation’s largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.

This is, in fact, exactly what drove the publishing industry en-mass into Apple’s price-fixing arms two years ago. Because if Amazon can sell e-books at prices below what the publishing industry sets — as a loss leader for the Kindle, or simply as a way to stab the publishing industry in the heart until it begs for mercy — the publishing industry effectively loses control of its product. And that’s the last thing quarterly shareholders want to hear.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

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Despite public acceptance of self-publishing as a viable means of expression, the traditional publishing industry continues to claim that it is the final arbiter of what’s good and right and culturally relevant. Today the U.S. Justice Department agreed that self-publishing authors pale in comparison with their industrial counterparts:

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple and several book publishers Wednesday morning, claiming they worked together to artificially prop up prices for e-books. .

The publishers sued were Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. The suit was filed in a district court in New York.

“Apple facilitated the publisher defendants’ collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers,” according to the complaint.

Real publishers illegally conspire with giant, anti-competitive, ruthless, monopolistic media companies like Apple to fix prices and screw their own customers in pursuit of profits. Self-publishing authors don’t do any of that, and probably never will.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

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When we last checked in on the tattered integrity of the publishing industry, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Review of Books, was reminding us that good writers will never need to self-publish:

Our thinking, which may be old-fashioned, is that with so great a volume of books being published each year by traditional publishers, and with so many imprints available, every book of merit is almost certain to find a home at one or another of those presses.

It would be a fallacy to suggest that all books published by mainstream publishers are works of merit, and someone with Sam Tanenhaus’s privileged industry access would never suggest otherwise. Rather, he’s simply asserting that there are no self-published works of merit anywhere in the known universe, and never will be.

I was reminded of this bit of expert analysis recently while reading about the first novel written by the Kardashian sisters, apparently in tag-team fashion:

“As wild as our real lives may seem on TV, just wait to read what we’ve dreamed up to deliver between the covers of our first novel,” Kourtney, Kim and Khloé said in a statement last week, announcing that William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, would publish a novel they had written.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s unlikely anyone who wrote a train-wreck sentence like that is capable of writing an entire book. But you might also be thinking it’s a bit unfair that the Kardashian sisters have a book deal with HarperCollins, while Sam Tanenhaus is crapping all over your writing life by summarily defining you as a failure because your mother didn’t pimp you out for a TV series.  [ Read more ]

Evaluating Self-Publishing Expenses

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During Cover Design Week I said this about self-publishing costs:

Unfortunately, what we have to spend says nothing about how we should spend it, and what things cost now says little or nothing about their total cost over time. The only thing we can say for sure is that if we don’t have [enough money] we’re out of luck. Other than that, even knowing the cost of the service does little to help validate the expense.

As regular readers know, I think the most important thing an independent artist can do is control costs. At some point, however, authors interested in writing professionally will have to confront publishing expenses (site hosting, POD fees, etc.), as well as consider a number of author services (proofreading, cover design, etc.).

To my mind the only useful way an independent author can assess such costs is to compare each outlay to potential revenue. That’s obviously Business 101, but it’s a mindset many independent authors fail to adopt. Instead, self-published writers often see expenses as worthwhile or necessary because they fund the physical production of a book: money gets spent and a book — your book! — springs to life. The problem with this approach is that it omits any relationship to sales or revenue, which means each expense is not a business decision so much as a purchasing decision, like buying fruit at the grocery store or a new pair of jeans.

If you’re trying to be a professional writer, implicit in that goal is doing what you can to avoid going broke. You don’t have to aspire to wild profits, and there are good reasons for not doing so, but at the very least your minimal goal should be recovering direct costs, if not also compensating yourself for your time. Even the ultimate goal of writing full time and living on one’s earnings demands similar analysis, because the realization of that lofty dream is directly related to your cost of living. The cheaper you’re willing to live, the longer you’ll be able to stay in business for any amount of generated revenue.

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Judging the Quality of Your Writing

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In the previous post I said there’s no relationship between writing quality and publication. Book deals are made for economic reasons, not because great writing makes the world a better place. If a prospective but marketable writer stinks, the industry will hire a ghostwriter, treating content as just another part of the manufacturing process.

I said the same thing in a recent spat with Jane Smith. I said the same thing when Sarah Palin’s book was announced. I’ve pointed to, and will continue to point to, incidents where publishers have failed to meet the same standards they routinely accuse unpublished and independent authors of failing to meet.

I understand why publishing wants to promote itself as the sole judge of quality and merit. Such status equates to power, and power in the marketplace equals money. But publishing’s credibility is so completely corrupted by its own actions that nobody in their right mind would take the sole word of a publisher, agent or editor when it comes to judging writing on the basis of quality, any more than one would try a case if the presiding judge had a vested interest in the outcome.  [ Read more ]

Joe Konrath on Cover Design Costs (and more)

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

Over at his blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Konrath puts an axe to industry-determined royalties and costs, including the cost of designing a book cover. It’s a must-read for any independent author trying to make sense of the current pricing/cost landscape.

Joe’s post is also an important reminder that valuing a book’s viability or merit based on the perpetuation of publishing’s own overhead is invalid on its face, if not fraudulent. In fact, I think the idea that authors should take advice and accept criticism from people whose steady paychecks and health care plans are paid for by exploiting author’s works has run its course. If the only defense of the publishing industry you can muster is also a defense of how you yourself directly profit from the status quo, then you have no defense. What you have is self interest, bias and creeping fear disguised as experience.

For my money, the first person in the publishing industry who figures out how to value any author’s work apart from protecting industry overhead will be the person to watch.

On a related tangent, careful readers will note that Cover Design Week is now in its second week here on Ditchwalk. Because no good deed ever goes unpunished, I fell behind last week when I tried to correct a small problem with my computer using my original WinXP Pro disc — which promptly rendered my main computer completely inoperable. (Amazing, but true. The hardware I’m now running was unrecognizable to the original disc, but that didn’t keep Microsoft’s install routine from rewriting critical sections of my MBR, turning what had been a perfectly functioning machine into a brick.) The irony in this case is that while a wealth of computer experience (and support from others) helped me diagnose the problem, it’s a problem I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t been mucking around with my machine.

— Mark Barrett

Cover Design and Authorial Control

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see the other posts click the CDW tag below.

As mentioned in several previous posts, I took a hard, considered look at the publishing industry several times over the past two decades. I considered and tested both the intake process and the opportunities open to me, but found the gatekeeping pervasive and the timelines absurd. The idea of sending a manuscript to an agent or publisher who demanded an exclusive look, yet promised a vague response time measured in months, was untenable to me. In each case, after earning a few rejections and calculating the mathematical odds of success, I moved on to mediums that offered me more access, if not also more money for my storytelling efforts.

I want to stress that I have nothing but respect for writers who have endured and persevered against years of rejection, whether or not they achieved the level of success they desired. I don’t consider that a mistake. I consider it something I couldn’t do, in part because I’ve always been as interested in the process of storytelling as I have been in producing works authored solely by me. It hasn’t mattered whether I was writing screenplays, interactive scripts or novels, but I understand that many writers feel differently. What mattered to me was doing it and getting paid to do it so I could do it again. If what had mattered most was producing a book with my name on it, I readily concede that until recently I would have had no recourse but to appease the denizens of traditional publishing.

As also noted in previous posts, there is a direct correlation between my renewed interest in writing fiction and the fact that I no longer have to jump through publishing hoops in order to reach readers. Whether I can make any money writing fiction is the obvious question, but for now that concern stands apart from the authorial reality and opportunity defined by the internet as a distribution pipeline. Whatever new risks the internet presents (piracy, obscurity), the ability to reach readers without first appeasing intermediaries and gatekeepers feels like freedom.  [ Read more ]

Why Print Publishing Will Never Die

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Turn on your TV on Saturday or Sunday during the day and you’ll discover that the great majority of shows are infomercials. That is, they are program-length commercials paid for by the companies presenting products and services in those shows.

In the evening you’ll see this is no longer the case. Instead of infomercials you’ll find actual programs — either original or syndicated — presented by the network or channel you happen to be watching. These shows are interrupted by short blocks of ads that have been sold to advertisers in the same way that the larger blocks of time earlier in the day were sold to infomercial creators.

The only difference between the day and evening hours is that at night the station believes it can entice an audience to watch its own programs — and by extension the ads that run during those programs, which in turn allows the network to charge for those ads based on the size of audience they capture. More audience at any given time equals more advertising revenue.

Running infomercials during the day is an open admission that a network or channel has thrown in the towel not simply on creating their own programming for that block of time, but even on the idea that they might present syndicated content (sitcom reruns, for example) as a means of attracting an audience. For that time slot on that particular day, taking money up-front from an infomercial provider produces more revenue than would trying to attract an audience by traditional means, And because the station is getting paid in advance it doesn’t care whether anyone watches or not. (Think about that.)  [ Read more ]