Whoo-hoo! I did the covers for both editions, noodled with the description/jacket copy, read over the parts that had a lot of changes last time, made some more changes, and input them.
I am ready to start laying this sucker out, baby! I won't have time to work tomorrow or Friday, but that's OK....
So, Joe Konrath posted a guest post by Lauren Baratz-Logsted in which she, and then he, note that they will be relying on their agent to help produce their books. Earlier, Courtney Milan (via PV) noted that she is doing the same. In exchange, the agent gets a percentage (usually 15%) of the book proceeds.
As Konrath notes, this is not an uncontroversial decision:
A notable opponent of this methodology is Dean Wesley Smith, whom I admire and greatly respect. He feels authors shouldn't share royalties when the tasks of bringing an ebook to market can be work-for-hire sunk costs.
My response to Dean is: I have to try it before I can judge if it works or not. I also believe (I may be wrong) that Dean and his equally smart and savvy wife Kristen Kathryn Rusch are incredibly prolific authors who have many pieces of writing that aren't yet available as ebooks even though they own the rights.
Well, come on Dean and Kris! These are all properties that could be earning money, and every day they aren't live is a day you missed making some dough. If you gave an estributor [his term for an electronic book distributor] a cut and they get these live sooner than you can, you'd be earning more.
If you read Smith and Rusch's blogs, you are snickering. If you don't: Smith and Rusch stopped using agents before they started e-publishing. They stopped using agents because their agents stole from them. A chirpy "come on Dean and Kris!" is not going to change their minds.
But for newer writers, all that is really just a diversion from the larger question: If all these writers are using agents to produce their books, then shouldn't you?
I'm going to point you again to Konrath's argument why Smith and Rusch should consider using an agent: Because Smith and Rusch have an unpublished backlist of something like 100 titles. That's a lot of books.
Hmmm, and have you noticed something about Konrath and Baratz-Logsted and Milan? They are all established authors. They all have unpublished works! They all have a fan base! They all have been in the business for years, if not decades!
Does that describe you?
You have to look at this from the perspective of the agent. Wouldn't you like to get 15% of Konrath's income? Hell, yeah! It's totally worth it to bring your A game to service somebody who could earn you $15,000 in a single month!
As a writer, are you worth that much to an agent?
Chances are, the answer is no. Chances are, an agent is going to treat you very differently from the way they treat Joe Konrath.
You see this in the financial-services industry. People look at certain things rich people do--for example, invest in hedge funds--and say, Gee, I'd like to be rich, why can't I invest in a hedge fund? But the fact is that nobody gets rich by investing in a hedge fund--you have to already be rich. The reason is because hedge funds are as risky as hell, so you have to be the kind of person who can comfortably lose every last dime you've invested in order to get into one. Rich people buy $4,000 watches, too--but buying a $4,000 watch won't make you rich. It's correlation, not causation.
Joe Konrath can get an agent who will throw her body across mud puddles so that he doesn't get his shoes dirty. Amanda Hocking can get a $2 million book advance. That's not how they became successful--they can do these things because they already are successful. They became successful by writing a lot of books and selling them at a reasonable price.
I know there's a mentality that if you want to be successful, you should mimic successful people. But that's too simplistic: You need to figure out what's appropriate for you where you are now, not where you'd like to be in 10 years. Aspirational thinking (I want to be rich, so I'll act like I'm already rich!) is a God-send to the flim-flam artists of the world. Nobody starts at the top--they work their way up. You need to imitate the "working their way up" part, not the "what they do once they're up there" part.
This is one of those Passive Voice posts where the original post--about producing paper edition--is definitely worth reading, but the information in the comments sections is just as valuable.
I finished inputting the edits--whew! That took longer than I thought, so I'm not doing the rest today, but that's all right.
I've mentioned that my first job out of college was with a children's publisher, and it was not an easy transition. One of the major shifts that had to happen in my mind-set was the question, Who carries the burden of understanding?
When I was an undergraduate, working toward my fancy honors degree in English literature, I knew the answer to that question: It was the reader's job to understand what the writer meant. I was quite dogmatic about it. Don't know what that word means? That's what a dictionary's for, idiot! Didn't understand the book the first time you read it? Read it again!
I got very frustrated with my classmates, who for the most part were not English majors. They read for entertainment--they didn't want to have to use the dictionary or read something three times to understand it. I had nothing but contempt for them: They were lazy bums.
Fast forward one year, and there I was, writing for kids. Wow. Yeah, kids. I read a lot as a kid, and it's not like I was going to good schools, so I could definitely relate to the fact that here was an audience that (through no fault of their own) knew absolutely nothing but that wasn't stupid.
And that's when I realized where the burden actually lay: It lay on the writer. I had to make my writing very clear. I could not throw out some half-coherent mumbo-jumbo and say, "Well, stupid, figure it out!!!" to an 8-year-old at a school where the teachers are all high and the students are all reading two levels below their grade.
It also meant that I needed to write like a person who was very literal-minded, because that's what kids are. (I remember being horrified by a Soup book in which the kids throw rocks at a guy's house and he runs out "with blood in his eye." I thought they had put his eye out with a rock, and I was totally shocked that neither the kids nor their parents felt particularly bad about it.) That's why I worry about little things, like where I put the word "only" in a sentence--I don't take for granted that the reader can figure out what I mean if my words are in the wrong place.
This concept that the burden of communication lies on the writer, not the reader, is a very controversial one outside professional writing circles. (Inside professional writing circles, it is a given, because if you cut yourself off from the majority of readers, your stuff will never sell.)
One group that does not accept this notion is academic writers. If you want to get promoted in academia, you have to make everyone feel like you are smart and they are stupid (or perhaps they can smugly feel like they are in the same elite circle as you). The result is that a premium is put on obtuse writing. As a result, nobody reads academic writing unless they have to. People read it because they are forced to, by their professors or because of their line of work.
Would-be writers often have gone to college and been told, Hey, you reader, you must work very hard to understand these books, otherwise you're a failure. And they think they can turn around and do this to their readers. But guess what? Readers don't have to read you. You're not in that position where you can assign your book to a reader, and they have to buy it and read it and regurgitate it on an exam, or you give them an F. You don't have that kind of power (which is probably a good thing).
Another group that struggles with this idea is what you might call the talented amateurs. They write for people they know, who love them. That's great--I do that too. When I write my loved ones I use shorthand and don't worry so much about grammar and put the word "only" in wherever, confident that the person reading it can and will do the work to understand what I'm saying. And they do--it works great!
But readers are another matter entirely. Readers don't love you--they don't even know you. Even if they say they love you, they mean that they love your writing. Because readers do not love you on a personal level, they are not going to do the work to compensate for your shortcomings. They'll just put your book down and not pick it up again.
Now, I will agree that poetic language often isn't that clear on a literal level (although it can be). But I'll argue that the good stuff makes plenty of sense on a thematic and emotional level.
And people use the, "It's poetic!" argument to justify murky writing about subjects that really shouldn't be unclear. If you're describing how a building that is about to be robbed is laid out, or you're trying to communicate some background information that will be important later, that kind of thing needs to crystal clear. You're not talking about some ineffable emotional state or something like that. You're just delivering information the reader needs to understand your story. The harder you make it to understand this information, the harder it is for the reader to become emotionally engaged in your story. And a reader who isn't emotionally engaged is a reader who will cut you no slack at all.
Done with this read! Whoo! Tomorrow I will input the changes, print out the few bits that had more-significant edits, and work on the cover and the description. After that, I start laying things out!
Eight more chapters down--I am now up to chapter 20!
The Passive Voice has a post by author Tony Jones on getting his traditional publishers to offer his books for 99 cents. He notes:
Explain Amazon. Remind publishers that when someone buys one of your books for $.99, Amazon gets smarter about that consumer. Chances are, Amazon is going to start recommending other books by that publisher — full-price books — to that reader. Sales are sticky on Amazon, so even a $.99-sale that nets only pennies for the publisher will develop a connection between that reader’s Amazon account and that publisher’s other titles.
What's true for publishers with multiple titles is also true for authors with multiple titles. Earlier, there was a looong discussion about Amazon in the comments that went off on several different tangents. One I think is well worth reading--dig down through the comments here until you find Passive Guy's 4:00 p.m. comment (his are red), and read through the rest of that thread.
It's people talking about the KDP Select program on Amazon, and how apparently if you do a freebie through that channel, Amazon counts those as sales and starts using that data to recommend your title to other people who bought similar books.
Good to know if you are hoping to make an informed and rational decision about KDP Select....
I just read over four chapters today--I had to finish off a home-improvement project (an old project, not a new one), so time was limited.
I read over eight chapters today--for the most part, I'm very happy with it. There's one part I want to condense, but other than that it was just minor corrections. The early chapters bothered me much less this pass.
Notice how as I return my attention to the book, the impulse to write long blog posts returns? I was feeling like they were kind of a waste of time, and I'm not really arguing that they aren't, but I guess they're a symptom that my brain is back in Book Mode.
I mentioned that one of the fun things about the retail business is that you can see for yourself how it works. But that is not entirely true.
Let's travel back in time to the year 2000 (remember when that was in the future? You don't? Oh, shut up), when I was a business reporter working for a newspaper in New Jersey. There was a bagel chain called Einstein Bros. Bagels, and everyone loved them. They executed marvellously: beautiful shops, yummy products, reasonable prices, pleasant customer service. Every Einstein Bros. Bagels in the region had a line out the door and halfway around the block every morning.
And they went into bankruptcy.
WHAT HAPPENED!?! people shrieked.
The answer was something that no retail customer could see: They were paying too much rent. Competition for high-traffic retail spaces is fierce, and Einstein Bros. had decided it was worth paying an arm and a leg for desirable spaces.
It wasn't, but that's not the point. The point is, from a customer perspective, Einstein Bros. did everything right--everything. To the customer, they looked like a thriving business. And they went into bankruptcy anyway (although they did come out of it eventually, so there are some benefits to having customers who love you).
Another vitally-important aspect of retail is inventory management. It's one of those things that customers notice only if it isn't happening: You go to the store for milk, and there's no friggin' milk. God damn it, the kids are screaming for milk, and you just wasted a trip--do these people realize how much gas costs nowadays? Screw it, you're never going back there--you'll go to Other Supermarket instead. Sure, they [cost more, are further away, are less child friendly, have surly staff, don't look as nice], but at least they have milk when you need it!
Inventory management isn't just about getting goods into a customer's hot little hands (although that's vitally important: If your business is exchanging goods for money, you'd better have some goods to exchange). It's about doing so cheaply.
Really super-duper, state-of-the-art inventory management makes it cheaper to get your goods to your customers. Wal-Mart is what it is today because they decided, hey, let's have our suppliers deliver goods to our stores. That way, we don't have to pay for gas or hire drivers! (You think I'm kidding, but I am perfectly serious.)
Do you know who else has fabulous, super-duper, state-of-the-art inventory management? AMAZON.
Why? Because Amazon started out selling books. Can you think of a class of goods that's a bigger pain in the ass from an inventory perspective than books? There's millions of titles! Even a single title can have multiple editions! People get really upset when you give them the wrong book! No one knows what books are going to become best-sellers!
Amazon is what it is today because it was able to leverage that inventory expertise into other goods. They're spending $90 million on a single warehouse, for Christ's sake, and it's not because they're building it out of gold--it's because their inventory systems are automated and computerized and very, very fancy. They are so good at getting random goods to the random people who want them that other retailers let Amazon fill their orders, knowing that Amazon does it better.
If you are trying to open up an on-line store that ships physical goods to people, you are going to have to compete with a company that has spent years learning how to ship goods to people, as well as gazillions of dollars on computer systems to help them manage inventory. You have to compete with a company that builds $90 million warehouses. This is no small task.
If you are trying to open an on-line store that sells e-books to people, that $90 million warehouse that Amazon is building does not matter. Their long years of experience in inventory management does not matter. When it comes to e-books, there is no inventory to manage.
This is why I hold the apparently shocking opinion that e-books do not really play to Amazon's strengths. They play to some of Amazon's strengths: Amazon is the dominant on-line retailer of physical books, so when people think "books" they think "Amazon." In addition, Amazon enables book discovery. If you are an author, uploading your book to Amazon is easy, and they offer a good royalty.
All good things. Amazon is executing its e-book strategy very well. Yay them.
But if they fail to keep executing well? Other brands (like, yes, Barnes & Noble, or let's pretend that some Web entrepreneur buys the Borders name) are associated with books, so if they executed their e-book businesses more-competently, they could be more-serious competition. Web sites like Goodreads and Library Thing exist for no other reason but to enable book discovery--that is all they do at the moment, but that could change. Making it easy for authors to upload books to a Web site does not cost $90 million, even if Google can't do it with $19 billion.
It's all about barriers to entry--is it hard for new players to enter a business, or is it easy? If you are talking about selling physical goods on-line, I would say that Amazon has some great barriers to entry--it would be very hard and very expensive to match their ability to manage inventory. If you're talking about selling digital goods...not so much. Amazon isn't without advantages, to be sure, but it's going to be a constant struggle for them--they can't just throw down $90 million and say, "Beat this."
(By the way, if you're wondering why Goodreads and Amazon can't seem to get along any more, I hope that makes more sense to you now.)
I keep reading things that seem to fall into one of two categories: Either it's the smug expectation that authors will surely continue to overpay massively for publishing services, because authors are entirely incapable of making good decisions, or it's hand-wringing that self-publishing will lead authors to their destruction, because authors are entirely incapable of making good decisions.
Notice a trend there?
Now, we all know people who are idiots about money. We all, at various points in time, have been idiots about money. Behavioral economics seeks to answer the question, Why are people such idiots about money?
In the face of all that idiocy, it's easy to loose sight of the fact that certain concepts from classical economics, such as the supply and demand curves, actually have held up quite well over the ages. There are definitely individuals who buck that trend (RANDOM JOKE SEGUE: Two New Russians who haven't seen each other in a while are catching up. One says, "That's a nice shirt!" The other says, "Do you like it? It cost $400!" The first says, "Sergei, you fool! I know where you can get that shirt for $600!"), but when you are talking about most people in most situations, the supply curve and the demand curve do hold up. That is why price and wage controls went out with Richard Nixon.
People are economically irrational. People are more often economically rational.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about: Mercedes resurrected the Maybach line nine years ago. In that time, 3,000 people bought Maybachs, which I think we can take as evidence that people are economically irrational--we're talking about a $450,000 car that apparently wasn't even as good as the other $450,000 car out there. But in the month of July 2010 alone, Toyota sold 27,345 Corollas, an economy car generally lauded for its value. In a single month, Toyota found nine times as many people willing to buy a Corolla than Mercedes found willing to buy a Maybach in nine years.
Bear in mind that despite the fact that the Maybach sold far below expectations, it kept going as a business for nine years. I have seen any number of companies with business plans that are positively offensive in their disregard for the intelligence of consumers. And they creep along. What they don't do is flourish--they don't fulfill early expectations, they just sort of eke it out quarter after quarter.
Modern self-publishing is a very new industry--just a little over two years old. There are scams, of course, but there is also a lot of learning and communication happening among writers. Writers, even traditionally-published writers, are getting more experienced and more knowledgeable about self-publishing every day.
That's a problem if your business is run on the expectation that everyone is going to fork money over to you forever, for no particular reason. Eventually, as people learn more about what they're doing, they're have a better notion of what constitutes value in this new industry. If you don't provide value, some people will certainly pay you anyway, at least for a little while, but before long you're going to start having problems with customer retention and a lack of recommendations. You may eke along, living off old contracts or whatnot, but flourish you will not.
As for the expectation that writers will destroy the market for books with freebies or whatever, I feel like some people have taken too much to heart the idea that writers are really bad at business. I mean, sure, some are and always will be, but remember the choice used to be, get published and get screwed, or don't get published. So of course authors lined up and clamored for a good reaming. That was actually writers being Homo economicus--if you wanted a career as a writer, being published, however horrible the terms, was better than not being published.
Now there's been a sudden transition in the industry, and writers who made their bones decades ago have been slow to catch up. That's to be expected. It doesn't mean they're necessarily stupid (although it is frustrating to watch), and it certainly doesn't mean that, as far as looking after their own financial self-interest is concerned, all authors are dangerous lunatics armed with a straight razor and an itchy throat.
If free doesn't work for people, I'm telling you, the vast majority will stop doing it. If KDP Select doesn't work for people, I'm telling you, the vast majority will stop doing it. If the 99-cent price point doesn't work for people, I'm telling you, the vast majority will stop doing it.
If they're still doing it five years from now, I'm telling you, it probably worked for them.
Maybe this is my humanist side coming through, but I really marvel at the assumption that everyone must be stupid--bone stupid, dumb as dirt. One of the things I like about economics is that it doesn't assume everyone--everyone!--is just an idiot. Here's a lesson from journalism: If someone is doing something you don't understand, it means you don't understand. You need more information; you need to talk to people. Assuming instead that you are the only intelligent person in all the land just reveals how limited you truly are.
...but apparently I did. I've got a kid today, and thanks to President's Day, I've got multiple kids and larger family members with days off who will require my attention coming up. So I guess I better get back in action tomorrow, no?
Part of the problem with me is that I have that whole one-thing-at-time focus. So I say, I'll take a couple of days off and work on the house! But the house is a HUGE freakin' mess (I am always simultaneously happy and distraught that I bought a fixer-upper), so one project leads very naturally to the next. I found myself yesterday starting a brand new project, and that's when I got very severe with myself and decided that I must switch gears back and finish Trust before I start anything new. The timing is a little unfortunate because in my brain spring = big garden plans, but I'll just have the garden on maintenance until Trust is out.
This is an instructive post (via PV) about why foreign books don't sell well in Japan. Have a look at the pictures--basically the books are shelved so that they are impossible to find. It's a real-world example of the importance of floor placement, and it's had this huge, longstanding impact on the Japanese book market--foreign books are not easy to buy, so voila, no one buys them.
This one from Dean Wesley Smith is worth a read. It's about not getting ripped off, which obviously is a topic close to my heart.
My favorite quote?
...electronic publishing is scary simple.
Does it take a learning curve? Yes. But so does Angry Birds. Actually, I think Angry Birds is harder to learn than electronic publishing.
I think he's probably right.
There's also a good comparison of the costs of e-publishing and traditional publishing. I know some people believe it when publishers tell them that e-books cost just as much to make as paper books. I assume they also believe it when guys tell them that ejaculate prevents wrinkles and is really good for the skin of the face.
So, there was this post on Passive Voice about how Amazon's exclusivity program might not work for everybody. Because if it's not 100% guaranteed to work for everybody, forever, well, then there's no point in even trying, is there?
And it kind of got on my nerves, because (neurosis alert!) it sounded like something my mother would say. My mother's one of these women who make a virtue out of never being an adult--"If you can't be it, marry it" is the kind of advice she used to give me. Of course she can't possibly be anything, what with her having two X chromosomes and all. So when people actually start doing things, she's first in line to pour on the cold water, because if you manage to accomplish something, and if she has to admit that that something was in fact worth accomplishing, then that implies that she could accomplish things were she willing to try, and she can't have that.
So I posted a comment there (there are, of course, many other comments there that are highly informative), and I'm going to repost it here, with links:
I think the thing that troubles me about this is the extreme tentativeness about trying something that, in the worst case scenario, won't work for you so you pull your book after three months.
I mean, no one is asking you to sign away rights, and we're not talking about playing Russian roulette. The risks of something like KDP Select aren't big, crazy risks; they are small, manageable risks.
Certainly you can make a rational decision that KDP Select is not for you, and I don't advocate replacing blind faith in tradpub with blind faith in Amazon. But there's so much out there about what might happen 10 or 20 years from now if events line up in a very particular way. And I think it makes people more afraid to experiment.
The opportunity cost of not trying stuff can be very high--think where Joe Konrath would be today if he hadn't been willing to experiment and throw some titles up on-line. You don't know what's going to pay off unless you try different things--some of those things most definitely will not work out, but that's how you learn and gain experience.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a great post on the importance of containing costs, especially early on. Remember, you are an entrepreneur running a business. If you want to pretend you're not, that won't change reality, it will just make it more likely you'll get ripped off.
And Lindsay Buroker has a great post on pricing. She takes a very useful perspective on it, which is to look at the possibilities of revenue-per-customer. So, if you only have one book out, and it's 99 cents, you can only possibly make 35 cents off each customer no matter what, whereas if you have a freebie followed by three books that are $5 a piece, you can make up to $10.50 off each customer. It's a very worthwhile way of evaluating your potential market, and of course it underscores the need to keep writing!
I finished this pass! Yay! Now it's printed out, and I'm going to let it sit for a few days while I work on really fun stuff, like taxes. Then I'll read over the hard copy, input corrections, and start the layout.
It's not the blog's fault: Saturday was a lost cause because I had mild food poisoning the night before, yesterday was crazy with appointments, and today I have the kid. Tomorrow I should be back on track.
I was thinking about potential rivals to Amazon and what they might look like.
If you are a reader, Amazon does two things very well: It enables book discovery, and it sells books.
But Amazon isn't the only Web site that does a good job enabling book discovery: Goodreads and Library Thing are also good at that. They don't sell books, though--instead, they link to where you can buy books.
Another way to enable book discovery is to specialize in a particular niche. And whaddya know, there's a site out there called All Romance that specializes in romance e-books (yes, of course, romance). It allows authors to upload books and set prices themselves, giving you 60% of the revenues.
Unlike Smashwords, All Romance doesn't do your file conversion for you--you upload what you have, and that's what's for sale. From a technical standpoint, it's simpler, because the authors are doing the file conversion--all All Romance needs to worry about is having a reliable Web host. Like Smashwords, All Romance doesn't appear to have a big corporate backer.
I think that as server space gets cheaper, more sites like this will crop up, specializing in particular genres. They'll offer fewer titles than Amazon, and probably won't have as powerful recommendation software--but they won't need that because they'll be offering fewer, more-specialized products.
In addition, if server space gets really cheap, I could see a site like Goodreads or LibraryThing offering titles themselves--instead users clicking over to Amazon to buy a recommendation, they click a button to buy from the site itself.
The thing about e-books is, they don't really play to Amazon's strengths other than their ability to make stuff easy to find. Amazon is very, very good about getting what you ordered into a package and to your door. But what does that matter with electronic goods? Look at other e-things--movies, music--and Amazon isn't the dominant player. That's why they're offering freebies to Prime members and soliciting exclusive offers--they know they have to sweeten the pot to keep people buying from them.