Trust has arrived!

Trust is back from the copy editor! Huzzah!

I'm going to make the release date June--hopefully I'll get it out before then, but I figure it's better to have it out a little ahead of schedule than behind....

So, about Books-a-Million

Books-a-Million is probably going to go private. That, if you don't know, is Not A Good Sign. It doesn't necessarily mean impending bankruptcy, but it means that the company isn't of enough interest to the investing public to make it worthwhile to have it listed on a stock market.

I do think that independent bookstores can find a specialized niche (in fact, if they haven't already, they probably went under a long time ago). But the chains...not so much. Their pitch was always low prices and large selection, and Amazon just cleans their clock on that.

And does it matter? Well, watch this video about the Romantic Times conference to the very end. (I know, I'm making you look at scantily-clad male models. That is because I am a sadist!) They talk about one publisher that was making 30% of their sales from Borders when it went under. Everyone despaired, but they wound up making that money back in e-sales in one day.

I fixed it!

I don't know if you've noticed, but my domain name has never been quite properly mapped to this Web site. Everywhere you go, marysisson.com follows you, never actually changing as you move from page to page, or even when you leave the site altogether.

And I fixed it! I actually fixed a technical problem dealing with Web stuff. And in so doing, I appear to have fixed the issue of having content appear on a subdomain of the hosting company (which, as it turns out, just looks bad, it doesn't affect Google searches).

Speaking of domains and stuff, in addition to dropping prices, my Web host is now offering a free custom domain name, so yeah, things just keep getting cheaper. (I can't switch mine over and get a refund on what I paid, but if I want to use a pen name that leads here, that will be free.) I realize that, were I more Web-savvy, I could save even more money by moving to a different host (people seem to like site5), but Squarespace required zero expertise to get started, and zero expertise was what I had....

I got called wise!

Tom Simon, who wrote that hilarious history of publishing, quoted me in his blog. It's actually a comment I left at the Passive Voice (of course--well, it makes me feel better about the times I've quoted my own comments from PV).

Anyway, it's pithy, it's what I think, and it impressed Tom, so I'll quote myself again here. This was in response to someone saying that she was getting lots of contrary advice about self-publishing vs. traditional publishing and had no idea what to do.

My attitude is to look at what happens if you make the wrong choice.

If you self-publish and you do something wrong, you can fix it. If the entire self-publishing industry implodes, you still have the rights to your work, so you can still go sell it to a traditional publisher.

If you go traditional and something goes wrong, you are completely screwed. You’ve signed away your rights, you don’t have control over how your work is marketed, etc., etc. If your publisher goes under, it’s going to take a long time and a lot of legal work for you to be able to re-sell that work, assuming you ever can. Is it worth to you to take that kind of risk in return for some editing and cover art?

Barnes & Noble: Back in the game!

If you've been busy having a life or something: Microsoft has agreed to invest $300 million into Barnes & Noble's Nook unit in exchange for a 17.6 percent share. Getting a company with deep pockets as an investor will definitely help B&N with the whole running-out-of-cash problem.

And it's a deal with a lot of interesting strategy implications. It will give Microsoft a boost in its efforts to catch up in tablets. A recent investment in B&N by Jana Partners, which also has a stake in McGraw-Hill, could result in a big push into the college e-textbook market (via PV). Microsoft may focus more on generating a content platform that is device-agnostic.

You notice what's not getting talked about here? Traditional bookstores and traditional publishers. Of course the New York Times article features the CEO of B&N reassuring his good buddies in publishing that his company still really, really committed to brick-and-mortar bookstores (the closing of Borders now represents a big opportunity--funny that it didn't before) and that "Publishers are going to like this deal a lot" (because they'll have a lot of choice in the matter--HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA).

(Oh, and Mr. Prosecutor? "'These publishers are completely aligned with Barnes & Noble,' Mr. Lynch said." Clip 'n' save, clip 'n' save.....)

Anyway, my point is that he who pays the piper, calls the tunes, and the company paying the piper over at B&N is now Microsoft. It's not the publishing industry or "literary culture" or what have you--it's a tech company, one of the many tech companies that have looked at e-books and said, Oh! Digital media! I know how to do that!

It's possible that a lot of publishing people are looking at this news and saying, Whew! B&N is saved! Everything will go back to the way it was! But that's not the least bit true--B&N is going to change a lot. Even if the name is the same, the company and its business strategies are going to change a great deal. Will it matter if traditional publishers get upset? No it will not. To Microsoft, traditional publishers are just suppliers of digital media, like movie companies and even app developers are--they don't have this long, exclusive history. And Microsoft has been through the antitrust grinder before, so I doubt they'll be falling all over themselves to make a bunch of special deals to help one particular segment of their supplier population.

Self-publishing when you're broke

One of the problems when people give you perfectly sage financial advice like "pay cash for your car" is that it doesn't take into account the fact that, hello, you can't always afford it. And I don't mean that you can't afford it because you're dropping hundreds of dollars at strip clubs every weekend--I mean, you are careful with your money, but you just don't have enough coming in.

Why wouldn't you have enough money coming in? Well, gee, if you're writing a novel, you've got to make time for that somehow. And more often than not, you make time for it by not working a full-time job.

So, in the long years before I joined America's best-known secret society, the Illuminati, I looked at that sort of sage financial advice as an ideal. In an ideal world, I would pay cash for my car. Unfortunately, I lived in this world, and when the day rolled around that I really needed to buy a car, I had no cash--instead, I had a newly minted master's degree in journalism and a bunch of debt to go with it.

I borrowed money for the car, which allowed me to work my first journalism job, which won me four awards in 18 months (that editor was great), which allowed to me switch to a much better-paying journalism job. At that point, I paid cash for my car--or rather, I paid the car off early, saving a pretty penny in interest.

I didn't live in an ideal world, but I lived as close to the ideal as I could.

The problem with a traditional publishing contracts, especially these days, is that you can't make this kind of compromise--or rather, it's very hard. Both Rusch and Smith have tried to put time limits on their traditional publishing contracts so that they don't lose their rights forever and ever; both have tried to structure contracts so that the publisher is held accountable for failing to promote (or retail, or even produce) the book; neither has had any success. You can't make publishers behave in an ideal fashion.

So that leaves self-publishing, with its up-front costs. What can you do if you can't afford to hire an editor, hire a copy editor, hire a cover artist, produce a paper copy, produce an audiobook, buy ISBNs, start your own publishing house, and sell books on your Web site?

You start small.

Look at that list: How much of it do you need to do right off the bat? NONE OF IT. NONE.

A lot of that stuff is stuff you probably will want to do in the future--you know, after you've got a few books out. I am convinced that it is beneficial to have your book available in as many outlets as possible. That means I will have to buy ISBNs, produce an audiobook, start my own publishing house, and sell books on my Web site.

Have I done any of that stuff now? Dear God, no. Hell, I've hardly done any marketing, because I have only one book out, and it's the first book of a series to boot. That stuff is long-term stuff. It will happen eventually, not right now.

All you need to do to start with is to put an e-book up on an online book store, and that costs nothing. Sure, there's a little formatting to do, but it's easy.

But what about the stuff you need to produce a really great e-book? Like good copy editing? Clearly, I think it's really important! But of course, Amanda Hocking did just dandy with terrible copy editing. So, maybe you can get away with amateur copy editing, at least at the outset. I'd be as careful as I could be with that--and of course with amateur editing as well; as I've said before, you're going to have to invest something, and if it can't be money, it's going to have to be care, time, and effort.

What about amazing cover art? Like Joe Konrath has--his cover artist is really, really good! And Konrath saw an immediate boost in sales once he switched to this guy! "Sales went up 30%"! Which, um, means that Konrath was actually making money before the switch.

The point here is not to encourage writers to lazily throw up any old piece of crap. The point here is to not allow your inability to live the self-publishing ideal--you know, where every aspect of your book is at maximum perfection--to paralyze you, or to panic you into signing your work away to someone who promises to take care of you.

Start small. Scale up. It's doable.

Funny me

You know, now that it looks like the copy editor is going to have Trust back for me May 1st...there goes my motivation to work on Trials. Oops. I dunno--today was mostly spent shopping, and while I know people who think that paradise would be day after day of shopping, lying in the sun, and consuming their preferred controlled substance, the reality is that it's boring and feels like a waste of time. I don't think that's just me--there are some way-past-their-prime beach bunnies around here, and they strike me as angry and unhappy.

I also revised the flyer to include the book description--I was thinking that it wouldn't be necessary because people would go to the link and see the description there, but of course, you need to motivate them to go to the link in the first place.

One of the reviewers (who isn't really actively reviewing right now) wants me to do a guest post, so tomorrow I'll probably work on that.

Thinking more long term: I'm kind of hoping to have a draft of Trials done by the end of the summer. My summer is actually pretty truncated because half of August and part of September is spent looking after kids, and I have a big trip after that, so we'll see how that works. I'm kind of hoping I can fulfill the need to put Trials aside for a bit by immediately starting in on a draft of Tribulations. Of course, I may be completely burned out by that point, or if I finish the Trials draft right before the kids/trip marathon, I may come back raring to edit. But the thing is, I've got almost as many notes on Tribulations as I do on Trials, which makes me think I might be able to write them in tandem. We'll see.

Cussin' in the past

This is a neat article on dialog in historical novels--do you use terms that modern readers wouldn't understand because they're authentic? It's a balancing act. (Of course, you can go the other way. In my books, the Special Forces soldiers all have fairly rude nicknames, and one of them is called Ofay, which was a turn-of-the-century derogatory term for a white person (in the 1920s it was shortened to "fays")).

And at the end the authors notes that people in the past didn't curse the same way we do. It's true! I realize that "fuck" has been around forever, but if you read, say, Chaucer complaining about how much people swear, what he talks about is the horrible blaspheming--swearing on the wounds or various body parts of Christ. That's what people did.

And that was the problem I had with the cussing in Deadwood--they even called people "motherfuckers," which is an expression that did not come into common use until after World War II. I mentioned that to my dad, and he noted that when he was growing up, the older generation was remarkably fond of farm-related curse words--"jackass," "bullshit," "horseshit" (while bullshit implies nonsense, horseshit is more malicious--if you've paid for something and the store owner isn't delivering it like he's supposed to, that's horseshit, not bullshit), "chickenshit" (cowardice).

What's going on

Yesterday I had to get up at the crack of dawn and get shots for a trip I'm taking, so it was not a good day for writing, and today and tomorrow I have too much house & family stuff going on.

But the good news is: I heard from the copy editor, and she's chugging away on Trust and thinks that May 1st is totally doable. Huzzah!

No money down! Easy payments!

I realize that I am beginning to harp on this subject but: Please think long and hard before deciding against self-publishing because of up-front costs.

I'm seeing a lot of things like this:

I’ll be honest, the up-front costs of self-publishing scare me. . . . [With a publishing contract t]here isn’t an upfront cost, nor is there a payment of any kind of front. The royalties are lower. . . , but I’m not spending anything out of pocket.

Have you ever done one of those cost calculators where you plug in your credit card debt and your rate of interest, and you figure out how long it would take and how much you would pay to pay that debt back if you only ever made the easy-peasy minimum payments? And the answer is always something like "850 years" and "a kajillion dollars"? That's what's going on here.

When people don't see an upfront cost, they tend to assume there is no cost. Intellectually, they may know it exists--but it's just a lower royalty, right? It's not real money.

Except that it is. This is called "loss aversion," and it's a well-documented phenomenon--people would rather forgo future gains than give up money they already have. If I say to you, You have to cough up for an editor, a copy editor, and a cover artist, you look at that discrete dollar amount, and you say, I can't afford that. Emotionally, you are programmed to hold tightly onto what you have. You don't want to invest, and with self-publishing, you do have to invest.

But if I say to you, With a traditional publishing contract, the more successful your book becomes, the more money you will lose, that doesn't really mean anything on a gut level. It's too vague, it's an indeterminate amount of money, it's off in the future, and it's "just" lost revenue--you'll never see that money, so you'll never miss it. It will just slide painlessly away from you, just like the interest on those easy-peasy minimum credit-card payments does.

The irony is, the very things that make self-publishing painful and scary are what will save you money in the long run. You'll (hopefully) be more motivated to shop around and look to more inexpensive alternatives (do you really need custom cover art? could a stock photo do? can you recruit a good amateur editor?). And once that money is spent, that's it--if the job was done to your satisfaction, you never have to pay for it again.

Once people figure this out, that's when they start foaming at the mouth about how you should pay cash for your car and you should pay off your credit-card bills every month and you should save up for stuff before you buy it and you should never give anyone a share of your royalties. Those people are a pain, right? And one reason they're such a pain is that you know that they're right--they're the voice of experience and they used to do what you're doing until they figured out how absurdly expensive it was.

Here's one; he goes by the name Dean Wesley Smith. He writes:

If you pay for a task to be done, pay a set price. Period. There are lots of new start-up businesses that offer a menu of tasks for set prices.

But let me also say this clearly right now. If you are worried about money, spend the time to learn how to do this yourself and have no real costs. This is not rocket science.

And what did I do today?

I sent out offers for advance review copies of Trust to various reviewers. I used this list this time. I believe you have to register to access it, but I have to say, the sites looked much more professional than the ones I found last time--no odd and pathetic requests for love, affection, and [redacted] in the submission guidelines. And he won't list anyone who asks for money! Yay!

I wound up mainly just going for the places that focus on science fiction and fantasy (although with some of them it's more like science fiction and FANTASY). Not only does this mean I spend less time sending out queries, which is good because I am lazy, but I feel like science fiction is a specialized genre, so it's not actually very helpful to market to a general audience.

It took longer than I thought it would. That happens whenever I send out queries--it's amazing how long it takes, especially if you want to take care and not send out a bunch of robo-queries to people who clearly wouldn't be interested. I was kind of beating myself up about it because it meant that I didn't write more on Trials, but then I thought about it and was like, duh, Trust is coming out fairly soon (hopefully), it's totally OK to work on the launch. I don't have to be in angsty artist mode all the time....

For the person who Googled Mary Sisson + sexual harassment

I have kept the e-mails and would be happy to provide them to anyone from the EEOC or your lawyer. Don't believe anything you are promised--I was promised many things, many times, and it was all hot air. They will never change anything unless they are forced to, and it just wasn't worth it to me. Some good guidance for you is here: http://www.equalrights.org/publications/kyr/shwork.asp 

Two hours of sleep and a sick kid...

...left me with some free time but no ability to concentrate. So, I noodled with the flyer (I think I'm going to slap a big ole portal on there) and tried to set things up so that I can waste time on-line more efficiently by plugging most of the blogs I look at into the RSS feeder. I also had to fix Twitter: TweetDeck stopped working for me, only God knows why, and I really hate the regular Twitter interface (honestly, it's slow, it's clunky--when multiple companies exist selling new interfaces to your Web site, that means yours sucks). So I went to HootSuite, which seems to work fine.

I also am trying to get it together to query reviewers, but that above-mentioned problem with concentration is making it hard to...what was I talking about?

The hardening of a position

It's been interesting for me to read the recent posts by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katheryn Rusch and Lawrence Block, because they're all basically saying that, at this point, they wouldn't bother to traditionally publish a novel. This is definitely a shift--before they were of the "Why not keep a foot in both camps?" mentality, but now they're saying, gee, the contracts are really bad and the money really sucks and there aren't actually any advantages to being traditionally published.

And I've had a similar shift: Obviously, on a personal level I had already decided against trying to be traditionally published by a small press in favor of self-publishing, but when someone like Amanda Hocking got a traditional publishing contract, I said rah-rah! There were people whose reactions were more like, OH NO, but I thought they were being unduly negative.

But now, I've realized, my reaction would also be OH NO. And I was wondering why that is--is it just the echo-chamber effect? Is it a reaction to all the stupid anti-Amazon stories out there?

I think, though, that it's more a reaction to recent events, and their implications.

Event #1: The DOJ's agency-pricing lawsuit. What bothered me about this was just how stupid the publishers were. They did something that was quite obviously illegal, and they did it very publicly. And now, predictably enough, they're going to have federal prosecutors climbing all over them for years to come, which is not going to be good for business.

And why did they do it? Well, the world was changing, and they couldn't cope with the changes.

Do you how bad that is for a business? What this means is that they looked at the future, and they saw no room for themselves. They looked at industry trends, and they looked at their own particular business model, and they said, "Holy crap, we're going to go under."

That is their take on the situation. They are expecting disaster. And what they did in their panic can conceivably only make that disaster worse.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather not sign a long-term contract with a company that believes it is going to go under, especially since, if they do, I may never get my book back. They may be wrong about their prospects, but it's never a good sign when a business is expecting the world to end.

Event #2: The IPG/Amazon debacle. Seriously--your publisher's choice of distributor could cause you to lose half your income? How the hell can you protect yourself against something like that? You could do background checks until the cows come home and it's not going to help you. "Hey, Ted, don't worry, we've been in business for 40 years, we're very respectable, and our distributor is a totally above-board industry leader. Oh, sorry about those Kindle sales--sucks to be you! Good luck with the foreclosure!"

Event #3: Gee, we can't sell your book after all! Yeah, Boyd Morrison--he may not actually have to pay back that advance, but it's hardly a happily-ever-after ending here, is it? More importantly, it points to the serious limitations of traditional publishers--with their high costs, they can't afford moderate successes, and they can't reliably create major ones.

Event #4: Math is your friend. Oh my God, the post I did guesstimating Stephanie Meyer's share of the Twilight money in 2010. Holy crap. What's the upside supposed to be, again? Against all odds, you write a huge blockbuster and your publisher keeps 90% of the money, if not more? Isn't this the reason pimping is frowned upon?

And don't say, "Well, she got $21 million, she should be happy!" ("Yeah, bitch, you got your 10%!" Slap!) There is a pot of money there. It exists. The question is simply, how should it be divided? The $160 million Meyer's publisher took did not vaporize or go to charity or anything--it went into the pockets of publishing company executives and shareholders, who have no greater moral or ethical claim on that money than the woman who created those books out of thin air.

Writers' incomes

The other night I was hanging out with a group of writers and would-be writers. One of them was a self-published novelist who is making a living that way. And she was talking about how it's pretty amazing to see these "self-published midlisters, who are making $10,000 a month, while a traditionally-published midlister...."

"Would be making $10,000 a year," I finished. (I wasn't interrupting, I swear. She had trailed off.)

Anyway, the majority of the other people there had little to no experience in publishing, and they were all shocked by what I said. A published author! Making $10,000 a year! A pittance!

And it is, of course, but that's not an unrealistically low number. Between my work background and the fact that I have befriended a lot of literary types over the years, I know quite a number of people who have had books traditionally published, in many different genre. Romances, memoirs, journalism, fiction, nonfiction--you name it. Good books, too!

None of those people have been able to quit their day job and write books for a living. None of them.

Which is why, when self-published writers are able to go from "no books" to "quit the day job" within about a year, it astounds me.

It's one thing for someone with a huge backlist and an established fan base to become successful. It's one thing for someone to get lucky and hit the jackpot with a runaway bestseller. But for people who have no big hits, and who aren't coming into this business with a big infrastructure behind them, to be able to make a living, oh, a year or so after publishing their very first book--that is amazing.

No-progress report

Yeah, sorry--it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so I had to go leak-hunting (this is one of the things with the house that is going to require an expensive permanent fix--yes, there are others) and I took care of some stuff in the yard while I was at it. In the process I got to deal with a lovely lady at Home Depot who wanted to make sure I had "someone at home" to help me carry all those bulky things I purchased, because, of course, one can't carry things and ovulate at the same time.

After adding that blog archive, I looked at it and thought, Jesus, I blog a lot! Imagine if I put all that effort into writing books instead! But the thing is, if you look at the months when I wasn't blogging much, I wasn't writing, either. Again, I think lots of blogging is just a sign that I am in Book Mode....

If you're looking for a little background....

The Wall Street Journal has a great article on U.S. antitrust law and how Apple & Co. really, really violated it very badly with their agency-pricing agreement. If you can't read it, Passive Voice has an excerpt. It's really worth reading, because one of the basic premises of U.S. antitrust law is that it's geared toward protecting consumers, not businesses--"competition, not competitors" in the words of the article. If you don't understand that basic concept, nothing that antitrust regulators do will make any sense.

And the article notes that books are not really all that special:

Even if publishers did seek an exemption [from antitrust law], it isn't clear that lawmakers would agree that consumers should pay more for e-books in order to save publishers or physical bookstores. The list of companies that have vanished at least in part because of digital distribution grows longer each year: Tower Records, Borders, Circuit City, local travel agents. How would Congress decide which ones should be protected from online competition?

"Why this guy and not that guy?" asks Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy group. "You'd end up saving everybody."

I would add only that, if you are going to commit a red-flag, must-prosecute sort of offense, have the sense to do so quietly--law enforcement does read the paper.

And this (via PV) is a great history of book publishing and book retail. It manages to be both very informative and very, very, VERY funny. Rusch has a less-funny but equally informative history of what she calls the book trade--how book publishing and book retail affect each other.

I think the larger lesson from this is that the publishing industry has always changed--it's changing very rapidly right now, but change has been constant. What we call traditional publishing has only been the tradition for the past few decades, and in the form it is in now, really only the past 10-15 years. That's why I could peg the publication date of Jodi Picoult's first novel so accurately: She was obviously published when publishing looked more or less the same as it does today but was somewhat easier to enter; ergo, she was published 20 years ago.