You asked for it, you got it--a lawsuit!

So, if somehow you couldn't hear my insane cackling, the U.S. Department of Justice is totally going to sue the tar out of five major publishers and Apple for fixing the prices of e-books. (If you can't read the Wall Street Journal, the Passive Voice has excerpts, but you're missing some funny bits.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, I'm sorry. But: HA. I mean, they collude on prices. Steve Jobs makes a public statement about how publishers colluded on prices. [ETA: And there was a whole story in the New Yorker about how they colluded, and how they knew they could get into trouble for it--amazing!] And somehow--this is a very mysterious process indeed--they got into trouble for price fixing!

Life is so unfair!

Now, if you've been reading the propaganda generated by traditional publishing, you're going, Wait a minute, isn't Amazon the one that exercises evil monopoly powers that would draw the ire of the DOJ?

Well, no, it is not. And indie bookstores are actually doing fine.

But of course, that's what traditional publishers have been claiming in the talking points they create for their dupes. (ETA: And oh my God, speaking of dupes.) And the really hilarious part is--that's what they claimed in their arguments to the Department of Justice! Note that, once again, large publishers and Barnes & Noble are working in...oh, what's the word...it starts with a c....

The publishers have denied acting jointly to raise prices. [Too bad Steve Jobs said they acted in collusion with Apple, huh? ETA: Not to mention that story in the friggin' New Yorker--how dumb are you people?] They have told investigators that the shift to agency pricing enhanced competition in the industry by allowing more electronic booksellers to thrive.

William Lynch, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, gave a deposition to the Justice Department in which he testified that abandoning the agency pricing model would effectively result in a single player gaining even more market share than it has today, according to people familiar with the testimony. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

Prior to agency pricing, Amazon often sold best-selling digital books for less than it paid for them, a marketing stance that some publishers worried would make the emerging digital-books marketplace less appealing for other potential retailers.

The punch line? "The publishers' argument that agency pricing increased competition hasn't persuaded the Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said. Government lawyers have questioned how competition could have increased when prices went up." [Emphasis added, because it's hilarious.]

I bet they have!

I also bet that when the DOJ lawyers talk about competition, they mean competition with publishers--you know, like if there was competition with publishers, they couldn't fix prices. But when publishers talk about competition, they mean competition with Amazon. They want to see a lot more of that, because they think it will make things easier on them.

But honestly, while I think there will be a lot more competition with Amazon to sell e-books, I don't think it's going to help publishers at all, because I don't think the competition will focus on books that come from traditional publishers. Why deal with their up-front costs?

So, yeah, it's all looking bad for publishers. For the record, it's looking much worse for publishers than it is for Apple. Apple has a ton of cash floating around--that's cash that could have been paid out as dividends to shareholders, but c'est la vie! More important, Apple entered into this pricing scheme to help out its iBookstore, but the iBookstore flopped anyway, and that still hasn't affected Apple's bottom line in any kind of serious way--they're a device company, and as long as people snap up iPhones and iPads, they're fine.

For publishers, well, their pockets are not as deep as Apple's (nobody's pockets are as deep as Apple's). And the pricing scheme was more important to them, because it pumped up margins on e-books, which have become a major product.

In addition: Hello, they pissed off Amazon! And what did Amazon do? Oh, it found a whole new slew of suppliers! It turns out that products from these suppliers sell like crazy! And--this is key--Amazon almost always makes money off these suppliers, even when they sell stuff for 99 cents! Oh, and look! Now the suppliers increasingly don't want to deal with traditional publishers!

The irony is delicious, is it not?

Funny and true

This is a hilarious article instructing bosses "How To Completely, Utterly Destroy an Employee's Work Life."

What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making progress in meaningful work.

People want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so. Knowing this progress principle is the first step to knowing how to destroy an employee’s work life.

The thing is, if you're wondering why so many authors seem really angry at traditional publishing, well, that's it. That's what's been happening to them.

Whoo!

OK, the Trust layout is corrected and on its way to the copy editor! Whoo!

Nice to know I'm not going to have to deal with that thing again for at least another two weeks! In the meantime I'm going to relax a little, read Proust (the problem with a harder writer like Proust is that you can't read it at the end of a long day working--it takes too much energy), work on some house stuff...and do book stuff. Since I have a page count now (375 pages), I can finish the cover, plus I really want to noodle with the description some more. I feel the description is kind of a conundrum, because of course Trust is about what happens after the climactic events in Trang, but right now the description is, "In the first book THIS HUGE SPOILER HAPPENED. HAVEN'T READ THE FIRST BOOK YET? OH WELL--SUCKS TO BE YOU" so I want to see if it's possible to finesse that a bit.

Progress report

Corrected the layout up to page 335--it's all proofread, so things are looking good for actually getting this done and in the mail tomorrow.

I have to say, pushing through like this really makes me think about hiring out the layout. But 1. I don't have to do this very often, 2. if I didn't have to make this big push, I'd be enjoying it more, and 3. I just don't know how that would work as far as making corrections is concerned. I also like having a copy editor proof the layout, because it's a twofer--you get typos and layout errors caught. Definitely, though, if you are new to self-publishing, be aware that laying out a paper book is easily the most time-consuming part of production.

How to not sell indie books

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to go blind, but God help me, the Passive Voice had a post today that got me all riled up. Somebody at Ebook Friendly felt obligated to post tips on how to find self-published books at Barnes & Noble.

You know something? When the civic-minded feel an obligation to post pointers to help people find things in your store, your store is badly organized. Honest to Pete, you think B&N could hide the books on its Web site any better?

And HOW can you find self-published books? By looking in the section for books published via PubIt or Smashwords, of course! (Quoth Bridget McKenna: "Wow! Our very own ghetto! I’m so proud…")

Seriously? Yeah, people don't search for books by genre or anything silly like that, they search for books that have been published a certain way, that's totally how they do it. It just amazes me how poorly B&N understands its own customers--you're not selling to school districts, who really do care who the publisher is, you're selling to the general public. Don't they even talk to the floor staff in their own stores? How many people come in looking for a book that was published a certain way versus people looking for a mystery or a book by a particular author or a book like those written by a particular author?

You know, people were snarking on the B&N CEO because he doesn't have much of a background in bookselling, and I thought that was kind of silly. But I may have been totally wrong....

Trust the process, not the publisher

Yeah, my eyes are about to permanently cross, but I have to spend some more time in front of the computer because I keep seeing people express the opinion that if one of the Amazon publishing imprints wants to sign you, well--whoo-hoo! You're in Fat City! Just sign right on--you'd be CRAZY not to!!!

Think back to two years ago, and people would have been responding that way to an offer by a big publisher or an agency. Think of what a mistake that would have been.

I say this as someone who has been screwed over by some of the finest names in the industry: Do not assume that a place with a good reputation and a fancy name is going to serve you well. They may. They may not. You don't know.

You have to develop a process you can trust to help you make a good decision, and then you trust that process. Do not trust names. Trust processes.

This is part of thinking like a businessperson. If I am thinking about investing money into a company, I need to know whether this company makes money or not. How do I know? I look at their books. How do I know their books are any good? Well, there are standard bookkeeping processes, and I would look for evidence that those processes have been followed.

If those processes have not been followed, I cannot trust the books. It doesn't matter if, on a personal level, I think the people who run that company are very honest. They can be perfectly honest and still have been making horrible mistakes!

People are fallible--they get sick, they get distracted, they discover cocaine. You can't depend on someone being a rock forever, because people are not made of stone. People also move on: Right now, the person in charge of Amazon's publishing contracts may be Bob Cratchit--kind, generous, honest, always looking out for the other guy. But Tiny Tim got sick, so Bob has to take some time off. Now Ebenezer Scrooge is in charge. Uh-oh!

You also have to be realistic about who you are. If Joe Konrath gets a great contract with an Amazon imprint, that's terrific--for him. It also has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the contract you get offered will be any good. Remember, Joe Konrath makes $100,000 a month these days, so he's getting treated very well--even a small percentage of his income is some serious coin.

Instead of assuming that Amazon or whoever is going to take care of you, you need to get some processes into place that will make sure they do. I would argue that you probably should have a qualified lawyer go over any contract. You also probably should take some time to figure out what you want from your career and how you think a publisher could help you achieve that. Try at least to form an opinion of what a good contract for you would look like. Decide now what you're not willing to give up to anyone, for any amount of money.

I find it almost frightening how quickly some people have moved from assuming that Big Daddy Traditional Publishing will take care of them to assuming that Big Daddy Amazon will take care of them. It reminds me of how some people skip from relationship to relationship to relationship without ever creating a better quality of relationship. Those people always assume that this time it's going to be different, but it never is, because they're always doing the same damned thing.

Read an e-book week!

Things are a little frantic here--I told the copy editor I'd get the layout to her March 9th, and I'm realizing once again just how long it takes to input corrections into a layout. It's not like a manuscript--every little change changes everything else.

But enough about my problems! It's Read an E-Book Week over at Smashwords, which means it's time to get Trang for free! Here's the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42407, the coupon code is RE100, and it will be on sale from March 4-10! Go get 'em!

Progress report, the finding-a-copy-editor edition

So I forgot to post a progress report yesterday, but I actually did make progress, proofreading the Trust layout. I proofed more today and will either proof still more after I write this or input the corrections, I'm not sure.

Another thing I did yesterday was line up a new proofreader! Yeah, the very good one I used before vanished. I don't know what's up with that (hopefully he's just swamped with work and it's nothing bad), but that's the drawback of using freelancers, they're not always available. (Aaaaand every editor I ever said no to just experienced a quiver of schadenfreude.)

So I reached out to another friend who works in publishing, and it turns out that she's the queen of copy editors these days, so she had a whole list of people. (And more on the back burner! Apparently they are all pretty busy pushing through the fall list, which I hope is what happened to my first proofreader.) I hooked up with one of them, so I'll mail her the layout in a few days, and if everything goes as planned, she should get it back to me by the end of March. I think she'll be good--she was highly recommended, and she's so hardcore book publishing that I confused her by asking for a proofread instead of a copy edit. Imagine what would have happened if I'd asked her for a technical edit!

I mentioned to my friend how hard it is for indie writers to find decent copy editors, and she was like, Yeah, I've been toying with the idea of starting some sort of cooperative for copy editors geared to indie writers. I hope she does--of course, she works full time, so she may not want the hassle. Still, the thing about copy editors is that there's a HUGE difference between the good ones and the others, and it's not really obvious until you pay one of them to copy edit your work and they either suck or are awesome. (Of course, if you're really new, you may not even realize they suck.) So I really hope she goes through with it--if she does, I will definitely tout it here. (One pointer I can give right now: Oftentimes the really good copy editors have full-time jobs and freelance on the side. So if you find one that works full time as a copy editor for a book publisher, they're probably good.)

I should note that this new copy editor also charges $25 an hour....

Corporate PR

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a nice post today about not getting all wound up by all the corporate news and controversies that either don't actually apply to you or is stuff you could manage if you weren't so busy freaking out. Her prescription, unsurprisingly, is: Get back to work!

Like me, she used to be a business reporter, and she mentions something that I think people sometimes don't understand: When news comes out about a company, it is almost always coming either from that company or from that company's business rivals.

Not always: Sometimes it's stuff like earnings reports, which are required and regulated by the SEC. Other times it's coming from the District Attorney's office or the FBI (those are always the good ones). But companies themselves generate a HUGE quantity of press releases, studies (Miracle Whip causes actual miracles!), surveys, announcements, anniversaries, awards, etc., etc.

Oftentimes this stuff looks or sounds really important and worthwhile, but it's not--it's coming from the company's marketing department (or an "independent institution" that was founded, staffed, and housed by the company's marketing department), and it was developed to generate adventageous coverage for the company. Such coverage could help knock down a rival, or it could help a company sell an asset, or it could just goose sales.

A big part of a business reporter's job is ignoring all that crap. You look up the SEC filings instead of relying on press releases; you don't publish the dodgy studies. But it takes a lot more effort to generate stories from reliable sources than it does to be a shill for corporate America--companies will even send you story outlines to "make your job easier" (because your job is apparently doing their marketing department's work for them). And it's not like nobody falls for the bait: You'll get something like that, you'll toss it, and then you'll see that exact story appear in a respectable paper that should do better (yes, New York Times, I'm looking at you).

Nowadays with the Internet, this stuff is readily available to normal people. You can subscribe to Large Company's press releases, and you can spend your time reading Web sites and blogs that just cut and paste the text from those press releases into another format and call it news. So it's wise to be skeptical, both of the quickie Web news sites and of the respectable papers--if you don't think a story like this wasn't more than half written by a corporate PR department, you are very naive.

Writers bite back!

A bunch of reports on 2011 book sales have come out, and not shockingly, e-books are up and paper books are down.

Also not shockingly, profits are up at places like Penguin and Simon & Schuster. This is due in part to the fact that, yes, e-books are cheaper to manufacture, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar who has absolutely zero respect for your intelligence.

The other major contributing factor? Publishers have been screwing authors over! If you don't have to pay your suppliers for the product you sell, you make a lot more money!

And in the past, authors have been happy to get screwed. As Kristine Kathryn Rusch notes:

Either writers give the traditional publisher 15% of gross or 25% of net [of e-books], or there is no contract. Some publishers are getting even stingier: 15% of net, not gross, and if you don’t like it, writer person, walk away.

So many writers don’t walk. Hell, I have several contracts with those numbers in them, and back when I signed them—ten and five years ago—I too thought e-books would remain a subsidiary right.

In other words, these 2011 profits you're seeing are a result of decisions made in the past. Writers had no choice if they wanted to be published, and they were generally OK with getting the shaft on e-books because those things were never going to make money anyway.

But are authors going to continue to be compliant? Some say yes, because authors are stupid. I say no, because authors need money just like everybody else does.

And making me feel even more secure in my opinion is, of all people, Jackie Collins. Bless her leopard-print soul, but it even sounds like she's self-publishing because she feels hampered by traditional publishers--she wants to write short fiction, and they're telling her no, there's no money in it. (Tell that to Stephen "It took three days, and I've made about $80,000" King.)

(Man, I wish I wrote short fiction!)

Anyway, I realize there's a big debate over whether big publishers will go under or live forever thanks to the largess of their corporate parents. I feel that, like so many debates about publishing, if you are an author, it doesn't matter. Big publishers may well live on as imprint names or as companies that cherry pick bestselling indie writers or as companies that provide services to self-published writers or as companies that specialize in elaborate pop-up books.

In any case, I seriously doubt things are going to stay the way they are. The financial results you'll be seeing for publishers in the future will be the result of decisions authors are making now. And I think publishers who may be celebrating their 2011 results have a serious sustainability problem--authors feel like they've been screwed (because they have been!), and they are making different decisions today than they did just a couple of years ago. Even writers who would rather not change and love their publisher and don't want to learn new things--well, if their advances are getting smaller and smaller, and they can't sell additional rights because they signed them all away for a pittance of an advance, and they have a life set up on the expectation that they will be making X number of dollars a year...they'll change. They won't like it, but they won't have a choice.

Laying out paper books with cheap software

As you may know, I use Word (evil, evil Word) to lay out the paper editions of my books, because proper layout software is really expensive. Today, Passive Voice has a post about using OpenOffice, and he mentions that he also uses Word, and then down in the comments (always read those!) people talk about tricks to use with Word as well as something called LibreOffice, which is like OpenOffice but allegedly better. I use neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice, so I can't judge the worth of those tips, but they may help you. I also don't know if the Word tips will help me, since my version of Word is a decade old, but I'm definitely going to give them a shot.

One thing that gets mentioned is the value of templates. I have to agree that templates (whatever kind works for you) are awesome. Laying out Trust went so much quicker this time because I essentially had a template (i.e. the Trang layout with a few tweaks), so I just replaced the text and changed chapter and page numbers. In the past I've been a little dumb about it and opened up brand-new files for each chapter, which meant I had to input and format the headers, format the chapter numbers, etc., etc. It cuts the amount of time you spend laying things out probably by at least a third if you just save the last chapter under a new name and use it as a template.

Finishing

Although I am all, "Whoo!" about finishing the layout, coming to the end of a project actually dredges up all kinds of anxiety for me. Part of it is just anxiety over actually putting the book out there To Be Judged. Part of it I think is a relic from my freelancing days--as long as I was working, I knew I was getting paid, but when a project ended, I had no guarantee that another one would come along. Part of it is workaholism--when this is over, whatever will I do with my days? (Hint: Start the next book!)

I know I'm not the only one who sees the end of a project coming and goes, AIIIIIGGGHHH! Matt Groening has a great cartoon on being a graduate student that says in part, "The Simple Way To Avoid the Stomach-Churning Agony of Having To Finish Your Thesis: Read Another Book. Repeat When Necessary." The Perfectionism-Procrastination-Paralysis trifecta rears its ugly head about now. Especially if you're unaware of what's going on, it's really easy to get caught up in getting just one more read from that cool person you met in writers' group...and then just one more read from your old professor...and then just one more read from your Aunt Edna...and then just one more read from that guy behind the counter at the gas station who seems pretty articulate.

You just have to soldier through and GET THE BOOK OUT. It's especially tough when you aren't in a traditional work environment with a boss and explicit deadlines--even (or especially) your friends will enable you by saying things like, "Hey, you sound unsure about this. Do you want me to read it over again? I'm pretty busy, but I'll have some time off next Christmas, so I could read it then." Beat them away with love.

There is no such thing as a perfect (or even just an empirically good) book, so let that go. What traditional publishers do is they have a process. For example, at my first job, the manuscript was proofread three times, and then it was laid out, and then it was proofread two more times. And there were still errors in the final book, but it was pretty darned clean. So I would suggest that if you're having problems with eternal re-reads, you should set some limits--you'll have it read X number of times by X many beta readers, and then it goes to a proofreader. And that's that. You set up a process you can trust, and then you do indeed trust it to get you a not-perfect-but-reasonably-good end result.

Progress report

I'm currently in the midst of laying out the ninth chapter today--yeah, I'm way more productive today than I have been, which is what happens when I actually sleep.

I was going to do more than nine chapters, but I'm going to stop after I finish this one because--you guessed it!--Word has started to go insane. Right now I'm running the maintenance tools; when that's done I'll restart and hopefully I'll be able to finish Chapter 19 without Word taking the entire computer down.

The perils of comma placement

So, I know I've been rattling on about how you need to assume your reader reads quite literally and should watch your grammar. Well, today I went grocery shopping, and I bought something that made my pedantic little heart go pitter-pat!

What I bought was a package of spicy nori strips (which were made by Sound Sea Vegetables and quite tasty). I was reading the back of the package as I was noshing down the nori (Noshing the Nori is the title of my food-themed erotic novel), and I saw my favorite kind of grammatical error--the kind that screws up a warning!

Here's the text:

Please note that this selected nori requires care to keep its crisp texture and flavor at its peak. It has been packed with a moisture absorbent, which is not to be eaten, and is best kept away from children.

The first sentence is a bit of a puzzler ("selected nori"? and I'd give the latter half some parallel construction) but not too bad for marketing copy, which often throws in fancy-sounding words like "selected" and "artisinal" whether or not they make any sense. The second sentence, however, really suffers from that extra comma.

Two commas around the phrase "which is not to be eaten" means it's a parenthetical phrase. So, let's replace those commas with parentheses:

Please note that this selected nori requires care to keep its crisp texture and flavor at its peak. It has been packed with a moisture absorbent (which is not to be eaten) and is best kept away from children.

Oh-ho! So the phrase "is best kept away from children" does not apply to the moisture absorbent. Instead, it refers to the pronoun that begins the sentence, "It," which in turn refers to...the nori itself!

A bit shocking to be selling a snack food that should be kept away from children, no? Especially since the package also describes the nori as "a very popular snack food with children"!

Progress report

I laid out five more chapters today, yay. I also figured out how to create block quotes on this blog, which is something that sounds like it should be easy but hasn't been. The trick is to just do the post with normal formatting, and then after that's all done, tag the relevant paragraphs as block quotes. In the past, I was trying to do it by creating block quotes as I pasted in the text, and trust me, that does not work.

Progress report

I laid out five chapters of Trust, plus the front matter--whoo! It was easier to do this time because I just stuck the text into the Trang layout (there are some minor tweaks, but in general I want the series to have a consistent look). I did forget to justify the text in three chapters (oops), so I had to throw those away and re-print them.

Amazon vs. IPG--what does it mean?

If you haven't heard, Amazon has pulled 4,000 e-books from its site after it could not reach an agreement with Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that mostly focuses on smaller publishers.

However this shakes out, it should make you as an author more wary of the notion that it's better to have a publisher than it is to self-publish. Judging from the responses I got to Trang, I probably could have gotten it published by a small press eventually. I chose not to for a number of reasons, not the least that I was sick and tired of waiting two years for replies. Other reasons were that I knew a small press wouldn't pay me any kind of money for it, and (here we are, getting back on topic) I didn't see an advantage with distribution.

Small presses are generally pretty limited in their distribution (with some, all they do is list you in a catalog), in no small part because the big chains just want the big books. I could get myself distributed on the Web just as easily, so they offered no advantage there. Once I get some more books published, I can produce my own little catalog and sell to indie bookstores on my own.

All this is why I've predicted that small presses won't do well. (At least not the traditional ones. Writers can and do start one-person "small presses"--go here and look at Pen Name's comments to see how that can work.) To survive, existing small presses will have to adapt to changing circumstances--including a world where Amazon is a lot more powerful than their distributor.

Amazon, as that story notes, wants to make more money, and so they are interested in squeezing out middlemen. If you are a small press, you're already a middleman, and if you're a small press going through a distributor, that's two middlemen right there.

Regardless of what happens with IPG, if I owned a small press I'd be looking very hard at the decision to pay a second middleman to distribute my e-books. It's not like warehousing and shipping paper books--uploading book files to retailers is pretty simple. The fact that my distributor now can't distribute my e-books on Amazon, a major e-book market, would make me look at that decision even harder: If you're going to pay a middleman, he should be making life easier for you, not harder.

I don't own a small press (not even a pretend one, although that may change). I'm an author. And as an author, I take note of the article's comment, "The only two essential parties in the reading experience, Amazon executives are fond of saying, are the reader and the author."

Stuff like that sounds really exciting and empowering and like Amazon wants foster this glorious indie-book revolution. But did you notice who's not in there? Amazon!

Oooh, I bet Amazon executives actually want Amazon to stay in that equation, don't you? Sounds like they're being a little disingenuous. Remember that Amazon is a business, and like any other business, their job is to maximize profits. Right now, they're focusing on doing that by squeezing out middlemen, which also entails treating their suppliers (i.e. authors) well.

Will they always? Well, Wal-Mart is where it is today because it squeezes suppliers. Big publishers are squeezing suppliers. Squeezing suppliers is a long and cherished method in corporate America to cut costs and maximize profits.

So writers who distribute on Amazon may well find themselves in the position of IPG one day. That's why it's a good thing for Amazon to have competition. That's also why I think authors should reach out to their fan base directly. Amazon isn't the devil, but it is a business--it's run by people who want to make money, not run by people who have any especial love for you.