Reporters and their conflicts of interests

David Gaughran has a great post up (via PV) about a recent Salon story about Amazon, in which the fact Amazon donates money to charities is taken as proof that it is "a rapacious, horrible company from top to bottom" and "evil." Gee, I though the fact that Amazon didn't give to charity was proof that it is evil!

(Gaughran also has a good post up about Jodi Picoult's ignorant remarks on self-publishing. I was thinking of posting about that and changed my mind, but the thing that impressed me was that I hadn't heard of Picoult before, and I guessed from her comments that she had first been published 20 years ago. I was exactly right. I'm getting a little too good at this.)

Anyway, the Salon story was written by Alexander Zaitchik. In addition to the terrible news that Amazon does, in fact, give back, Zaitchik notes that Amazon wants to charge traditional publishers more to market their e-books. The publishers are refusing. And then--and this is how you know that Amazon is really and truly evil--instead of providing marketing services for free, Amazon is not providing the services they are not getting paid for! I know--never before in the history of capitalism has a company refused to provide a service that they weren't paid to provide! This post should be rated R because it is just so shocking!!!

Zaitchik is a freelancer who, not at all shockingly, lives in New York City. I've noted a hometown bias with other NYC-based coverage of the publishing industry. And I'll note additionally that Zaitchik has a book out, published by Wiley.

How much do you want to bet that he'd love to get another book contract?

Is this a tit-for-tat thing? I hope not. I would not be at all surprised that Zaitchik has convinced himself that every word he writes is true, and that he honestly believes that Amazon is evil, and not only because they are damaging his prospects of getting another advance check.

But they are. And that's something I think readers need to keep in mind whenever they read anything about traditional publishing--many reporters either have written or would like to write a book. The same thing is true of their editors. If you get a book published, then your profile is higher, and then you can get a job at a fancier publication, sell stories to more lucrative outlets, and maybe even quit your full-time job to write what you want.

And it's still the case that when many people think of publishing a book, they assume that they're going to need a traditional publisher. They have a dog in this fight.

It's a problem in journalism, and I think it's worse because it's often not the sort of explicit conflict that an employer can easily ban. You'll see, say, somebody get elected governor, and then, wow, half the political reporters who covered his campaign go to work in his press office. I doubt that an actual deal was struck, but I think you'd have to be a robot not to have your perceptions and therefore your coverage affected by the fact that you view someone as a potential employer.

Who hit the rewind button?

I'm feeling better and the surprise guest went home, which left me in the same place I was a few weeks ago, with the layout due back from the copy editor soon but nothing much to do in the meantime. So I shot the copy editor an e-mail to see if she was on track to get it back to me mid-April, and the answer is no, the horrible life crap she's dealing with still has her buried, but she promises I will have it in my hot little hands May 1.

On to Trials, then!

Autobots, Decepticons, and publishing

Today I was driving and I saw someone with a Transformers sticker on the car. That struck me as being so much lamer than when people actually replace the logos on their car with Transformers duplicates.

Were I to do that to my car, I would use a Decepticon logo.

Why? Lemme tell you. I am old enough that I watched the Transformers show on television when I was a child (shut up). I never much cared for the show--it was boring and annoying and mostly about selling toys, something I recognized even as a wee lassie.

The thing that really annoyed me about it was how passive the good-guy Autobots were, and how they spun their passivity so that it was somehow virtuous. The evil Decepticons would come up with some awesome new technology (which they did all the time) and the Autobots would say, Oh my stars! The Decepticons have come up with new technology, like the evil creatures they are! This is a completely unexpected turn of events, even though it happens all the time! Gosh-darn those Decepticons! They are so bad! They are always up to something! And we never are!

And then they would go whine to Optimus Prime about it, instead of taking a blowtorch to him for allowing them to (once again!) face a new Decepticon technology completely unprepared. Eventually, Optimus Prime would slowly crank out some pathetic me-too response. And everyone would act like this was some form of real leadership, when in the real world all the Autobots would be constantly calling up Megatron with offers to defect.

Anyway, I realized (and I am fully aware that this probably means I'm spending too much time thinking about this) that something similar is happening in publishing. There has been a big technological change (e-books) and a company (Amazon) has positioned itself to take maximum advantage of it. And the response of the traditional companies has been to say, Gosh-darn that Amazon! They are so bad! They are always up to something!

The thing that irritated me about Transformers when I was a kid and stuff like this now is this assumption that doing something = being bad. Action = evil. Change = evil. Progress = evil. People who do things mess stuff up. They disrupt the status quo. They complicate life. Everything was nice and predictable until the Decepticons/Amazon came along and threw a wrench into the works!

And you see that attitude among writers as well. I just finished reading Darcie Chan's Mill River Recluse. It's fine if you like sentimental books (which are not really my thing), and I don't remember finding a single typo--the manuscript was obviously very clean. The e-book, however, is a hot mess: no table of contents, the chapter ornaments are all over the place, and it feels like no two paragraphs are formatted the same way.

The book has been up for almost a year. It sold 400,000 copies before Chan started getting national press coverage, and I'm sure it's sold many more since then. Even though it's still priced at 99 cents and she's still getting a crappy 35 cents per copy, she's made six figures on it. Yet she can't be bothered to format the damned thing, and of course there's no paper copy available.

I feel like, here is somebody who is really and truly committed to certain ideas about publishing. For starters, there's the notion that writers shouldn't concern themselves in the slightest with anything other than writing--they shouldn't even stoop to hire out work. There are also two other concepts in play, which are closely related to each other: e-books aren't real books, and self-publishing isn't real publishing. Since they aren't real, it doesn't matter if your product sucks--and even if they were real, having a product that sucks is OK, because your little piece of it (the writing) is fine!

It's like these people live in a world trapped in amber, where writers are under no obligation to learn, understand, and adapt to the realities of publishing. All the changes happening are just the Decepticons running around, like the pesky little critters they are, doing their evil nonsense because they just can't leave well enough alone. You can be like Optimus Prime and kick back, satisfied with yourself because you have done the bare minimum to adjust--or because you haven't.

To which I say: All hail Megatron!

E-book subscription sites

F+W Media and Sourcebooks are both starting e-book subscription sites. F+W is focusing on specialty titles--you get unlimited access in return for a hefty ($199 per year) fee, so it's basically like a paid research library. Sourcebooks is focusing on romance novels, and it's much cheaper ($9.99 for six months), but the number of titles you can access is quite limited--it's more like a book club, with a discount program thrown in.

Both services rely on curation to appeal to readers. F+W is appealing to a fairly thin slice of deep-pocked institutions and businesses that feel they must have access to these books. Sourcebooks is appealing to fans of its writers.

Whether these services are going to work or not, I don't know--that's going to depend on whether or not enough people think they provide a good value. But they are both examples of the experimentation going on with online e-book retail.

How to be edited

One reason I’ve seen people put forth to stay away from self-publishing is the need for editing. People believe that they must be edited before they can put something out. This ties into a question new writers often have—how do you know when something is ready? 

I used to be an editor, and I still wouldn’t put something out that hadn’t been edited (and I mean edited, not copy edited, although obviously I’ve seen the light on the latter as well). The question is not, Should I get edited? The question is, How can I find a good editor? 

An editor is not an accountant or a doctor—an editor goes through no specialized training and does not get licensed. New writers tend to think of an editor as “the person who makes your writing good,” but honestly, that’s not the editor’s job. The editor’s job is to make your writing consistent with their employer’s standards, whatever those standards might be. You might write a great mystery novel, but to the editors of both Highlights and Penthouse Forum, your work is unacceptable. And unfortunately writers and editors both can get into some very bad habits working for places with lousy or peculiar standards. 

Also, some editors just aren’t very good—they want changes that make your work less entertaining and harder to read. I had a particular animus against editors who were vague. They would ask, “Could you make this better?” which got them an instant, “Could you be more specific?” Vagueness to me indicated both laziness and a cover-your-ass attitude—an editor who expressed a vague dislike for whatever you turned in felt like they were insulated from failure (which they weren’t). 

To be of any use, an editor must have opinions—clear opinions about how to improve a piece of writing. They are just opinions, even when they are gatekeeper opinions, which is why so many bestselling books first went through endless rounds of rejection. But opinions are an editor’s stock-in-trade, and a good one has lots of them that they can express clearly to you. 

How do you find someone with opinions about your writing? Obviously, I am fond of critique groups (free!), but writing classes and workshops are also good places to go. But don’t just get the group read of your first chapter: Treat these places as editor auditions. 

You want to find people to edit your work who are not afraid to be brutally honest—no, it’s not fun at first, but you will come to value it. (Maybe it’s just me, but I think that my feeling vaguely insulted is a sign of a quality edit.) That said, you want to avoid sociopaths, abusive and insecure writers who will screw with you to make themselves feel better, and people who hate your genre. Look for someone who shows some enthusiasm for your work, even if they are critical of the specifics—if they love your kind of book, they’ll be more likely to help you create something that appeals to people who love your kind of book. 

And take feedback seriously. I think everyone has met the wanna-be writer whose work would be a thousand times better if they would just drop bad habit X and embrace good habit Y, and they never do. No matter how many people tell them the exact same thing, no matter how many times they hear it, they exist in an impermeable field of delusion—they would rather write badly than work at it. That’s them; it doesn’t need to be you. 

Other ways to find editors are to hire people or to sign away your rights and a chunk of your future earnings to a publisher who will hire people. That might be what you have to do, but remember, just because you’re paying for it doesn’t make it good. All the horrible, crappy editors I had over the years—all of them—were professionals. Respected professionals with years of experience (goldbricking). They all got paid to go, “Could you make this better? No, I can’t be more specific right now—I have to go get a manicure.” It was always a crapshoot with the professional editors because I was just a working stiff and I could not audition them. Nowadays, I just don’t tap the horrible amateur editors. 

Speaking of horrible amateur editors—try to make sure you’re not one. If you are able to find people who are willing to edit your work for free, guess what? You’re going to be paying them back by editing their work for free! (Nothing is really free, sorry.) 

But guess what else? You’re going to get paid back a second time. That’s because as you develop your editing skills on other people’s work, you become a better editor of your own. If I notice in three manuscripts that the opening drags because we don’t get to the main plot until chapter 15, I’m going to cut to the chase in my own book. If I read a bunch of repetitive descriptions that drive me crazy, the next time I look at my own prose, I’m going to be chopping excess adjectives. 

Eventually, if you edit enough, you may even reach the exalted state where there is no difference to you between something you write and something somebody else writes. That kind of distance from your own work is precisely what you want—it’s like writing Nirvana. (You’ve heard about how you should stick a manuscript in a drawer and forget about it for an eon or so? That’s an exercise to help you develop this distance.) If you can get there—or at least close to there—then of course you’ll know when your work is ready, because you’ll be judging it by the same standards as you do everyone else’s.

Google was going to save indie bookstores, but it changed its mind

Google is going to stop providing e-books to indie bookstores.

I'm not shocked, because they were going at this in a totally half-assed way. I mean, if you can't be bothered to set up your Web site so that an author can actually upload a book, how committed can you be?

And honestly, I think this is probably good for indie bookstores. The whole idea of making it so indie bookstores can compete more directly with Amazon is, in my mind, completely wrong-headed. If you are a bookstore, you don't want to compete directly with Amazon. Barnes & Noble is competing directly with Amazon, and it's not exactly working out for them. You want your own niche--let Amazon have theirs. Maybe you can sell e-book cards, if they fit in your niche.

Be aware of everything you can do

I like this post by Dean Wesley Smith--being Smith, he characterizes it as long-term thinking about self-publishing, which is GOOD, and short-term thinking, which is BAD.

That's his opinion--I feel like Smith sometimes doesn't recognize that people without a backlist of 200 books are going to have to do things a little differently than he does. But I think it's important to keep in mind that this is a long game and that there are many different outlets for your work. Even if you're not selling directly off your Web site or to bookstores or selling audiobooks or even paper books now, that's all stuff to keep in mind as a next step.

Amazon needs a new media-relations department

Yeah, I'm on a blogging tear today. Mostly because 1. I am feeling better, and 2. an out-of-town relative has decided to execute one of her trademark no-warning week-long visits starting tomorrow, so I'm screwed as far as doing anything except looking after Her Highness for the next several days.

Anyway, the Seattle Times is doing an entire series on how Amazon is the Antichrist. Amazon doesn't pay taxes. Amazon doesn't give back. Amazon abuses workers. Amazon is destroying publishing.

The last one caught my eye, of course, and it was very interesting. I'm the first to acknowledge that Amazon (or really, e-book technology) is destroying publishing, or at least the traditional publishing industry. The question boils down to, is that a bad thing?

Now, if you're the New York Times, and you're based in New York City, where the traditional publishing industry is headquartered and where it employs many, many people, the answer is: Of course! On the face of it, it is clearly a very bad thing!

But the Seattle Times is based in (you guessed it!) Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered and where it employs many, many people. If Amazon eats traditional publishing, that's probably going to be a significant net benefit for the Seattle area--more jobs, more construction, more money.

And the Seattle Times article on publishing doesn't follow the talking points: There's no mention of Amazon destroying indie bookstores or literary culture. There's some talk of Amazon's potential to have a monopoly on e-books, but it's much more balanced than what the New York Times has been offering.

Yet the article is very negative. The focus is on Amazon's disputes with publishers and IPG. At least the article focuses on players who are in fact losing out as a result of the changes in publishing, which is more than one can say about the New York Times articles, but (and this is very strange) these losers aren't local. One company is in North Carolina, one is in Chicago, one is in Massachusetts, and the experts are all from NYC or New Jersey. No one is from Seattle. Seriously, when I was reading the article, I kept looking for the Associated Press byline, it was that non-specific as to locality.

And Amazon refused to comment for the article.

Sigh. OK, as a former reporter, I'm going to explain something to Amazon:

Dear Amazon,

When you don't talk to the local newspaper, the editors get mad. They get mad because they feel like you don't appreciate them--you could be pals (or as palsy as you can get with newspaper people), they could help you, but you treat them like dirt instead! It pisses them off! When they get mad enough, they decide to do things like run an entire series on how you are the worst thing ever. (Seriously, have they gotten your attention yet? The next step is mooning.)

And when you don't talk to the reporters on the local paper, you lose your chance to tell your side of the story.

Yes, Amazon, you are destroying publishing. The key to getting a positive spin in stories is to explain how you are replacing it with something much better!

There is one author and no consumers in that story--and the one author is, of course, enormously positive, because that's someone who is benefiting from the new order. You need to feed the Seattle Times more people who are benefiting from these changes--ideally people located in or near Seattle. If the members of your media-relations department weren't all too busy buffing their nails and drinking their lunches, they could have hooked that reporter up with quite a few more authors. Local authors. Local authors who have created self-supporting writing careers almost instantly because of e-publishing--I can think of one right off the bat, and I'm sure there are more.

I know your media-relations staff are right now telling you that they didn't have a chance, the Seattle Times is so mean and biased, boo-hoo-hoo. Seriously, fire those idiots. When I was a reporter, I covered a company that was convinced that the publication I worked for was out to get it (they had a very elaborate conspiracy theory going on--seriously, I was concerned). I covered a company that deliberately concealed good news about itself, and then they pitched a fit because my psychic powers did not enable me to see through their lies and write stories about it.

This was never constructive. It never resulted in positive coverage. What results in positive (or at least more balanced) coverage is talking to the fricking reporter. Make her life easier. Help the nice lady out. Give her access, and tell her your side of the story. She can't pass your story on if you don't tell it to her! (All those complaints in the story about how Amazon doesn't communicate? She found those plausible for a reason!)

Just can the whole department and start afresh. Let's put it this way: You can't possibly have worse media relations than you do now.

(You know, I was thinking when Amazon swanned Joe Konrath & Co. around like kings that they were very savvy public-relations players. But I guess they were just very savvy author-relations players.)

How much is Meyer worth?

The addendum to my last post got me thinking about comparing Meyer's paycheck to what she's earning her publisher. As I said, Forbes estimates that Meyer made $21 million between May 2010 and May 2011. That would be from all sources--movie money and what have you.

That sounds like a lot, but Lagardere estimates that the Twilight books made the company $160 million in 2010.

Oh, I'm sorry--they're not saying that, in total, the Twilight books made the company $160 million. No. They're saying that when the Twilight books were selling exceptionally well, they were bringing in $160 million per year more than they brought in in 2011, a year when Twilight sales fell to more normal levels, whatever those may be.

We don't know the baseline of Twilight sales here. They could still be bringing in $160 million, and in 2010 they brought in $320 million. Maybe they're just bringing in a paltry $21 million, and in 2010 they brought in $181 million. We have no idea.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there was only (or "only") $181 million of Twilight money sloshing around in 2010 (and we'll pretend the Forbes figures run from January to January, not May to May). $21 million went to Meyer; $160 million went to her publisher.

She made less than 12% of what her publisher did. Probably much less, because we're pretending that Twilight didn't sell a single copy in 2011, and Largardere doesn't claim that. And of course, Meyer's take from the books was presumably less than $21 million, since that number includes movie money.

Something to think about, eh?

How much does that cost?

When I was a business reporter, I spent a lot of time covering health care. From a business perspective, health care is fascinating, because just about everyone is uncomfortable with the fact that it costs money.

In fact, people are so uncomfortable with the fact that health care costs money that we Americans have invented a little myth for ourselves: In other countries (far, far away in Foreignia--and especially Europe) health care is free.

It's free! Just like that! It's magical and free and provided by elves or hobbits or maybe those guys who ride around the French countryside on bicycles wearing berets and carrying loaves of bread in their basket.

Amazing, isn't it? And completely untrue. Of course health care costs money, in Europe and everywhere else. People in other countries just pay for it in different ways than Americans do--they primarily pay for it through taxes instead of through employer-sponsored insurance.

Now, we can certainly question whether or not employer-sponsored insurance is the best way to pay for health care, and we can talk about other ways to pay for health care, but the fact remains: Health care has to be paid for.

Ditto grocery bags. (Did I just confuse you? Hang on, this all ties together.) Around here people have been considering laws to add a fee to or to altogether ban plastic grocery bags. And the opponents of these measures say, Hey, poor people can't afford to pay for grocery bags!

But of course poor people are already paying for grocery bags--your grocery store pays for the plastic bags and passes the cost along to customers (including poor customers) in the form of higher prices for groceries. In fact, the companies that sell plastic bags to grocery stores make so much money that they can afford to spend quite a lot of it funding opposition to fees and bans on their product!

Ditto publishing services. Yeah, I've spent money to self-publish. You do. And while I think there are ways to make your start-up costs way lower than mine (do you really need a Website right off the bat? a paper book?), the fact is, this is a business that requires an initial investment. Publishing always has--it takes a lot of time (and time is money) to write a book in the first place.

But I know what I've spent. I spent $280 to copy edit Trang. He did a great job. So, guess what? I never have to spend another penny on that.

Compare that to the traditional publishing model, where even if your sales are being accounted for accurately (and there's no guarantee of that), your costs are potentially infinite. The more books you sell, the higher your total costs, because you are paying a percentage of your sales.

When you read how someone like J.K. Rowlings or Stephenie Meyer is worth a bazillion dollars* to their publishing house, that means that, in exchange for those publishing services--line editing, copy editing, layout, proofreading, cover art, printing, formatting, distribution, marketing--they have paid their publishing houses a bazillion dollars. (And we laugh at the people wanting $100,000.)

Was it up-front costs? No. Did it work out for them? Sure! Was it free? Oh, hell no.

Ack, gag, barf, die

Yeah, that sinus infection is coming along nicely. I was at least able to finish off The Captive last night, but I think I'll be sticking with lighter fare until I feel better. I'm at that really gross stage where [SQUEAMISH PEOPLE: SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!] I'm finding snot on all kinds of random object. Pick up a mug: snot. Roll over on the pillow: snot. Another reason to stop reading Proust for a bit: It's a library book, and although I've tried my best, I'm not entirely sure I've managed to keep it pristine.

So I'll be lazy and link, like Crabby McSlacker does!

This is a cool interview with Lee Child (via PV), in which he notes that patience pays and that there is no such thing as an overnight success. Not a new idea, but still a true one, and one worth reinforcing and remembering. [ETA: I also really liked Barbara Morgenroth's comment, " The hardest thing to be and the easiest, is to be yourself. If you don’t want to go inward to find out who you are, to find your own path, being a writer is probably going to be one of the worst career moves you can make."] It's also interesting that Child's approach is not that different from Dean Wesley Smith's--just keep crankin' those titles out!

And this Passive Voice post resulted in a comments section that so impressed PG he made it into it's own post (which now has comments...oh my God). Basically if, you feel dismal when you read marketing advice, rest assured that you are not alone. My attitude is, if you like to market, that's great--go for it. If you really don't, remember that plenty of people think that the best way to market a book is to write the next one. If you want to straddle a middle ground, I recommend Lindsay Buroker's advice--she does market, but one of her main priorities is to not let marketing eat up all her writing time. (Of course, I'm neither marketing nor writing at the moment--but I am producing very impressive quantities of nasal mucus!)

I also updated my last post to note that, even if you think you don't notice typos and other small mistakes, you do.

If you're wondering why you should bother with a copy edit....

I got a very nice review of Trang on Futures Past and Present--it makes me happy on a day that has mostly been spent drinking hot fluids and blowing my nose.

Now, after you go and read it and marvel at what nice things the nice man has to say (he's so nice!), I want to draw your attention to the paragraph that reads:

Now, production values.  Once again, an indie author has put together a book that is essentially error free.  I only noticed one typo (although I don't remember what page now).  There was an interactive table of contents.  The formatting was good, and the cover told you this was a novel set in space.  Somehow New York can't seem to figure this out.

Isn't that just so much, well, nicer than:

As for the technicals, there are plenty of typos and typesetting errors. A second set of eyes would've cleared these up.

That was from the review in the New Podler Review of Books, which was written before I had Trang copy edited. Now that review was also mostly positive, and I had and still have absolutely no problem with it--the criticism was perfectly fair, and indeed, a second set of eyes did clear those errors up.

Which is my point. No matter how much a reviewer likes your book, there are going to be complaints--their job is to be critical, and there is no such thing as a perfect book. The idea is to minimize those complaints to things like, "I wanted more about the characters, because they were just so wonderful!" or "I can't wait for the next book to come out!" or "I never wanted the book to end!" not, "For God's sake, get it copy edited!"

Think about the difference in implications between those two excerpts from a marketing perspective. The first excerpt tells readers, hey, this lady's stuff is top quality--even better than what New York turns out. Yeah, he's just talking about the copy editing and the formatting and the choice of cover, but the implication is that the book is just as good if not better than something you'd pay $10 more for. The second tells you that, meh, it's sloppy, and she didn't put enough effort into it.

When I say things like, it's impossible to really enjoy a story that has a lot of errors in it, because your attention is constantly being interrupted--well, you are seeing the proof of that right here in those review excerpts. While I certainly think that changing the cover and description resulted in Trang getting much better reader reviews, I also believe strongly that having the book copy edited--getting rid of all the crap that was cluttering up the book and blocking people from becoming truly immersed in the story--was equally important.

The future of publishing vs. the future of writers

Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, has a new CEO. And apparently he's promised to shake things up there, in a manner that Richard Alan Dickson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch think bodes ill for the whole publishing-actual-books thing that has traditionally been Random House's business.

Of course, the businesspeople who run publishing houses are none too crazy about this whole book and literature thing in the first place. Bertelsmann's CEO specifically mentions "further consolidating and strengthening our portfolio."

Dickson translates the CEO's statements as: RIGHTS GRAB!!! and indeed, he's probably correct. But what I think that's going to be a part of is an even greater focus on properties that Bertelsmann owns that are already popular.

Think about it: If you are a media company, and you own many, many different properties, then "consolidating and strengthening" means putting even more attention into the proven winners. More Transformers! More re-makes, and re-makes of those re-makes, and then they get re-made some more! More boring crap we've already seen 1,000,000,000,000 times!

The focus is going to be on the old, on the predictable sellers. The focus is not going to be on the new and unproven, like new voices and new writers who are writing their own stuff. No way. New writers were already too risky, and now they're going to be freakin' radioactive.

Literature? Oh, Lord no! Creativity? DO NOT WANT.

That's going to be the easy way to do it--a lot easier than building a brand around a publisher, which seems to be the big idea in some quarters.

I do kind of wonder who they will get to write this stuff. I did ghost myself and everything I ever wrote professionally was a work for hire, so I suppose the answer should be clear to me: People who want full-time work, who need health insurance, and who want to learn the ropes without shelling out for an MFA degree.

Buuuuut it does seem like nowadays the tradeoff is worse--you're giving up a 70% royalty for...whatever you get. More marketing behind that book, yeah, but 1. it's not like you get a percentage--work-for-hire typically means you get a lump sum and that's it--and 2. they'll be marketing the property to its fanbase, not you to yours (and your name might not even be on it). Unless your dream in life is to crank out Herbie Goes to Burkina Faso from a ready-made outline, to a specific page length, following a strict style sheet, and featuring the required product placements, I just don't think getting published by Random House is going to have much appeal.

You might think it unlikely that a company like Random House would just stop generating new properties, but you know, why the hell not? I write science fiction, so I've had a front seat to the willingness of large publishers to simply retreat from producing new works.

Nowadays the majority of bestselling Amazon e-books in the sci-fi genre are indie. You might look at that and think, "Those fools!" but it actually makes sense to leave unprofitable markets to those who can make money in them. Those who can nowadays are the self-published writers. And I think more and more of the market will be left to us.

And it keeps on getting cheaper

So, just as I was denigrating the benefits of being in the Illuminati, I received an e-mail from my Web hosting service saying that they are lowering their rates from $256 for two years to $180 for two years. (I am getting less storage, but I'm using only a tiny fraction of what was available before, so that's not a problem.) I've amended my posts about costs to reflect the partial rebate I received, and of course I'll be paying less in the future, which is nice.

If you're trying to estimate your own costs, you can also knock off the $40 per book charge for CreateSpace's ProPlan, since they now offer their books more cheaply as part of their free package, which was half the reason to join ProPlan. The other half, Expanded Distribution, is now just $25, assuming you want it.

One of the things I like to emphasize to people about self-publishing--especially if you just want to do an e-book--is how ridiculously cheap it is. And it seems like it's just getting cheaper....

Bleeeaaagghh....

This is how it always is, right? First I procrastinate, and then I get slammed.

Anyway, I had some car drama yesterday--there's apparently quite a bit wrong with it. It's expensive enough to fix and the car is old enough that I'm definitely going to be looking at replacing it in a year or two (too much needs to be done on the house for me to replace it right away--even membership in the Illuminati has its limits).

Anyway, I wound up taking a long walk in the rain, and now the mild sinus-y feeling I was having is clearly in sinus infection territory. Hopefully I can keep it from getting too bad.

And next week the kids are off from school! Luckily their mom also has the week off, so it's not a guaranteed 24/7 time suck, but obviously I want to spend some time with the things....

Proustian snark

Yesterday I had the kid, and today I wound up making a lot of progress on Proust instead of starting Trials. (Is this just me being slow to get started and treating everything on my to-do list as if it were all of equal priority? Probably.)

Anyway, Proust is bad with continuity. That makes it difficult to remember who Smith, the red-headed lawyer from Lyons is when the last time he came up (three volumes and 1,350 pages ago), he was Jones, the blond accountant from Calais. The footnotes are both helpful and necessary, and today I came across a pretty funny one.

At a party in The Captive, it is mentioned that a character named Cottard has died. According to the footnote, "Cottard will nevertheless reappear--indeed at this same soirée (see p. 371)--to die during the Great War, in Time Regained."

Ghostwriting and the vanity press

This is a fairly hysterical link on the Passive Voice about a company that is offering self-publishing services for...drumroll please...$100,000! Wow! That totally beats the previous record!

But they do include ghostwriting. Yes. Whereas I'll take a little extra time and fiddle with Word so as not to spend $800 on a layout program, you can go a different direction and spend six figures so that you don't have to write at all. Now, that's convenience!

Of course, you might be wondering, If I don't want to write a book, why would I bother with any of this? And this brings me to the wonderful world of ghostwriting.

I ghosted. A lot. I think that's what they have you do in publishing when you really are a writer, but you're working as an editor to get health insurance.

There's a lot of reasons to have people ghost. For one thing, it can be a slippery slope from a line edit to full-on ghosting--line edits can just be tweaking, but they can easily become a complete rewriting. Deadlines are also a factor: If you turn in something to me that supposed to be coming out in three months, and it's totally unacceptable, giving it back to you for a rewrite probably isn't going to work, and finding somebody else is going to take too much time. I'm fast, I'm accurate, and I know what the publishing house wants, so I ghost it.

Another reason is that Person A may be a big name (like Notable Academic was), while Person B may be a nobody (like meeeee!) with the time and expertise to complete the project. Person A is getting paid basically to license their name.

This is really common in publishing, and not just with non-writing celebrities (who usually at least credit their ghostwriter). People get up in arms because James Patterson doesn't really write his own stuff. Well, guess what? There are plenty of writers who appear to crank out book after book after book in the exact same genre who don't really write their own stuff. Carolyn Keene, the writer of the Nancy Drew books, was not even a person. An authorial name is a brand name: Stephen King = horror. It's up to Stephen King if he wants the trouble of writing his own books. To the best of my knowledge, he does, but if he changed his mind, his publisher would be more than ready to accommodate him.

(This blows the minds of journalists, by the way. Putting your name on someone else's work can get you fired in that field. It's a different culture--to them, it's lying, and lying is a huge taboo.)

So, that's the normal ghostwriting that happens within the industry. Now, you also have another, less-respectable kind of ghostwriting, which you might call Narcissistic Personality Disorder ghostwriting. This is where you ghost a book for some NPD-addled idiot with too much money who wants to be able to tell his friends he wrote a book. I never did it, because I was never that desperate, but my thinking is that it's got to be somewhat similar to a guy who pays $1,000 for a call girl--he doesn't think, "Gee, I have to pay for sex, how pathetic," he thinks, "I have so much money that I can get whatever I want. I'm awesome!" (But ego comes into play even with regular ghosting: At one place I worked, the writer had the right to take their name off the project if they didn't like the "editing." They never did. Never.)

NPD is of course why self-publishing was called the vanity press. Even in the old days, self-publishing did have legitimate purposes--your high-school yearbook is an example of perfectly worthwhile self-publishing. In addition to that kind of custom book printing, there were some self-published writers who were good enough and dedicated enough to sell lots of books and break into traditional publishing.

Buuuut...there were also a lot of scams, which were geared toward the NPD crowd. You had a book you thought was genius! The problem is, no one agreed with you--you'd take it to a critique group, and not a soul there would understand your genius! Well, they were idiots--you'd send it out to agents and publishers, and not a soul would understand your genius!

Clearly, your genius was way too rarified for these cretins to understand! At least, that's what you were told by No, We're Not Sleazy Self-Publishing Services, and you agreed! "You are used to working with the very best"! And you deserve it!

So, you fork over a gazillion dollars and wind up with a garage full of books. And you're perfectly happy with that! Given your NPD, you weren't actually expecting to sell your books to all those cretins out there who don't understand your genius.

It's a great racket, you know. People with NPD don't care about results. They can't acknowledge mistakes, which means they're never going to be critical of either a flattering pitch or the outcome.

Someone without NPD might lower their sights. They might notice that they themselves are not a big name. They might wonder how in God's name they, without any track record or celebrity, could possibly make enough money to turn a profit on $100,000 of expenses. They might wonder why a writer who is an "extraordinary talent" and can apparently crank out a best-seller at will wouldn't just self-publish under their own name and start raking in $100,000 a month.

But no, don't think about that. It's not a racket! It's the best! And you deserve it!