Guys, you might want to market that a little better

So, as I was noodling around with my (now delayed) Goodreads giveaway, I realized that...they sell e-books.

Like, they've been selling e-books for a year now--really explains the problems with Amazon, no?

I Googled it, because I was wondering if this was new. No. It's not. It's been around since before I joined Goodreads. I've been listing and rating the books I read there, and I had no idea they sold anything.

Most of the articles Googled turned up were people saying, "Did you know that Goodreads sells e-books? I had no idea!"

Brain no worky so good

Yeah, I didn't sleep well at all last night. I managed to lay out a couple of chapters, but...yeesh. I'm exhausted, I keep forgetting stuff, and I'm afraid if I keep at it I'm just going to have to redo it all later. I should be able to get everything done before I leave anyway, so I'm kicking it down the road to tomorrow.

I'll put together the large-print cover at least.

Hey, indie bookstores have options!

And since he's always a helpful fellow, Passive Guy also has a link to this neat article about indie bookstores actually (gasp!) working with self-published authors, instead of boycotting their books!

And by golly, it turns out that carrying books by local authors regardless of publisher helps distinguish the store from places like Amazon! The writers' friends and families love you, and you can get a lot of free publicity and even win awards.

Even better, according to Heather Lyon, who owns Lyon Books in Chico, California, "For self-published books, there isn’t the pressure to compete on price, so Amazon isn’t much of an issue."

Lyon goes on to say:

I’m on a soapbox about this, because I know a lot of bookstore owners and managers don’t like to work with self-published authors. I think they’re missing out on the big picture ... and profits. Once you embrace it, it’s really not difficult.

Where do the profits come in? Most of the time these books are sold on consignment, so there's no cost to the bookstore other than staff time. In addition, some of these bookstores are basically selling promotional services to authors--you pay to have an event at the store, or you pay to be included in a large newspaper ad.

There's just so many better ways of dealing with the changes in publishing than trying to slavishly copy Amazon or being some boycotting reactionary.

CreateSpace in Europe!

Passive Guy is being his usual helpful self today: He discovered that CreateSpace is now offering POD books for sale in Europe. This is a free service, not the Expanded Distribution you have to pay $25 for. You check a box and your paperbacks become available on Amazon's UK, German, French, Italian, and Spanish Web sites. Nice!

I did it for both editions of Trang--you can either set the price in pounds and euros or have CreateSpace calculate it from your price in dollars. You do have to price slightly higher in the European market, so with Trang I raised the price in dollars, calculated the pound/euro price from that, and while I was at it I put it back on Expanded Distribution--why not, dropping the price hasn't done anything for it. The large-print edition is already pretty expensive, though, and I would have had to price it above $20 to break even on a pound/euro basis. So with that one I just set the prices independent of each other.

Where's that line?

Naturally the Passive Voice blog has been keeping up on the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit (PG is a lawyer). There's been some new stuff coming out, and it's been interesting to me to see all that is being revealed about Barnes & Noble and its very tight relationship with the larger publishers.

Obviously, they've gotten into trouble for that before. They haven't been named as a defendant this time, but...very tight relationship.

For example, according to the new state lawsuit--PV has the whole document here; there's a summary here--during the whole Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle, the CEO of B&N told Macmillan he would "go to the mat" for them and moved Macmillan books up in the search result on B&N.com. (Because, you know, people typically buy based on publisher.)

And then when Random House wouldn't join in the little price-fixing conspiracy, B&N played enforcer! Yeah, the complaint states that the Penguin CEO went to B&N and asked them to stop featuring Random House books in their advertisements, and B&N eventually complied, thereby forcing Random House to get with the program!

While you could claim that B&N had to go along to keep publishers happy, apparently it's a two-way street. According to the judge's denial of the defendants' request that the class-action lawsuit be dismissed:

Prior to December 2009, the Publisher Defendants’ standard practice was to release eBook and hardcover versions of titles at the same time.  After a key meeting with an important industry executive, however, this practice changed abruptly.  In late November 2009, representatives from a number of publishing companies met with the Chairman of Barnes & Noble, a major chain of brick-and-mortar retail bookstores.  During the meeting, the Chairman of Barnes & Noble complained about the potential for Amazon’s low prices to hurt hardcover sales.   This meeting spurred a sudden and dramatic change in the business practices of most of the Publisher Defendants. 

Wow.

This is the thing for me: Given how laughably public these guys were with their price-fixing, an activity that is pretty much guaranteed to get you in trouble, I have suspected that there's been a hell of a lot of...shall we say...cooperation going on in the publishing business. You don't cross a line in public unless you've been flirting with it for a long, long time. You see this when shock-jocks like Don Imus finally step in it and genuinely, truly, really, sincerely, deep-down-in-their-hearts do not understand why people are so upset. So Imus insulted African Americans! He does that all the time! He does that and people love it! What's so different about this time? It's baffling!

And again, there's this notion that everybody who deals with books is in the same business. Not the same industry--the same business. Agents are authors and authors are publishing houses and publishing houses are, apparently, retailers. B&N complains about a rival retailer, and publishers jump to fix it! They don't say, Hey, you are in trouble--how can I benefit from that?

I'm guessing that Microsoft is going to bring a very different perspective.

And I'm guessing that there is a lesson here for indie writers. You are not anybody else in this business. Your interests may coincide with, say, Amazon, but they are not identical. Don't make someone else's problems your problems. In fact, if you're really smart, you'll figure out how to make their problems your opportunities.

Progress report

I laid out 14 of the 28 chapters today, as well as making the changes (like resetting the margins) that had to happen in all the chapters. It went well--I'm halfway through and the book is 16 pages shorter than it was, which bodes well for getting the large-print edition in under 820 pages.

I've noticed that if a change needs to happen in every chapter, it's easier and more reliable if I open them all up and make all the changes at once. In the past I've tried making a list for myself and then checking it off before I lay each chapter out, but if you skip something (and I have), then all your laying out is for naught and you have to do it again.

Ugh

You know how sometimes you know that something needs to be fixed, but you figure it doesn't matter, so you don't fix it--and then OOPS you should have fixed it back when you noticed it?

Goodreads has this cover for the paperback edition (and only the paperback edition) of Trang. I'd noticed that before, and thought about doing something about it, and hadn't. Of course I realized this after I set up the giveaway. Ghastly!

I've delayed the giveaway for a couple of days and am trying to get that fixed. If you were hoping for a paperback copy, it actually has this cover--the one without the art on the back and spine. A little more boring than the current cover, but you know, potentially a collector's item!

Plus, I'm signing them. You'll just have to take my word for that, because my handwriting is completely illegible.

Informative and annoying links about money

The informative:

Courtney Milan did a great post comparing the costs to her of self-publishing vs. being traditionally published (via PV, and she provided more financial detail in the comments).

So, what's the bottom line?

But for those who are looking for information, the bottom line is this: As an author, I spent 50% more on a traditionally-published novella. And I made half as much in twice the time.

That is something that people who are worried about the out-of-pocket costs of self-publishing need to think about. In theory there are no costs to you (other than that pesky lost revenue) when you publish traditionally, but in reality, if you want the book to succeed and you want publishers to think of you as someone who is willing to support your own work (i.e. someone it's worth signing a second contract with), you have to pony up.

And of course, that's after you get published. Remember, I spent more than $400 in postage alone trying to get published.

The annoying:

One of the things that really irritated me about yesterday's dumb agent post was that he said:

Needless to say, she is off to run and “self-publish” her books and be able to now essentially retire with the amount of money she will make on her own.

And then Konrath found another agent who decided to piss all over Ann Voss Peterson because she wants to be able to afford braces for her kid. This agent says:

Multiple clients sent me Peterson’s “Harlequin Fail” article and wanted my opinion. My first thought is that this was the typical “a publisher is ripping me off” fodder.

The sneering--that is what gets up my nose. A writer wants to be able to retire! Writers get upset when their publisher rips them off! What silly expectations they have!

I'm curious--does Scott Eagan hope to retire one day? (Actually, the way things are going he may have to do that a lot sooner than he thinks.) What kind of retirement does he hope to have? The kind where he eats dog food because he can't afford anything else?

Is Steve Laube OK with it when his mechanic rips him off? Does he enjoy it when the bank that owns his house pulls a fast one that costs him a bunch of money? Does it make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside when someone takes advantage of his ignorance and desperation to screw him to the wall?

I'm curious--how long did it take? Most agents at least pretend that they started agenting for a living because they wanted to help writers. How long did it take before these guys became completely desensitized to the fact that these writers are being ruined? At what point in their careers did they decide that it was OK for writers to be miserably poor and constantly taken advantage of? How do you get to the point where the biggest problem with all the thieving is that writers whine about it?

Doing a large-print edition

There was a comment by ABE in response to my last post asking for more information about doing a large-print edition. I was just going to reply, but then I realized that, if people are curious, I might as well make a new post that has basically everything I know about doing them in it.

So, ABE asked:

Just out of curiosity - as you should have it quite clear right now - how many pages did your regular edition have, and how much of a multiplier is it to go to the large print edition? You got close to the edge, so that helps pin it down.

The problem is that the multiplier changed because I changed fonts. Trang was set in 10-pt Palatino Linotype, it is a 373-page book, and it made a 794-page large-print edition (set in 18-pt Arial with 22-pt line spacing). Trust is 375 pages (oh, so it's not actually shorter, duh), but it's set in 10-pt Book Antiqua, so it makes an 846-page large-print edition--too long for CreateSpace, which limits you to 820 pages.

What I should have done--and what I did with Trang--was to stick all the text into a file, set the page size, font, margins, and line spacing, and have a quick look at how many pages resulted. That gave me a fairly accurate idea of what the page count was going to be--and that's why my line spacing is a half-point more narrow than it's supposed to be.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily have thought of putting out the large print edition - and that's another good idea.

I haven't actually sold any of my large-print editions. This is sort of a quixotic thing for me that I do when I'm not hugging trees and weaving clothing out of organic hemp. A large-print edition is a lot easier than a regular layout because the ragged right means that you don't have to worry about tight or loose lines, and you don't break words, so you don't have to worry about bad breaks. Buuuuut it does take some time and effort (or money, if you don't do your own layouts), and the payoff may never come, because people with serious visual disabilities these days probably get e-readers and set the font to something they find readable.* For me, it's easy enough and I'm fanatical enough about accessibility (can people read e-ink as easily as paper? I dunno) that it's worth it, but I could definitely see someone going the other way.

Lastly, has it ever occurred to you to sell your templates? After all this work on your part to get them right - maybe that would have some extra value.

I don't know that templates would actually be helpful to other people, because I'm already cheating slightly on the American Printing House for the Blind standards (which, in my defense, are by far the most stringent), and I'm going to have to cheat more. With the regular layout, since I use Word, I do a lot of odd hacks to make it work that you can't put in a template.

 

*ETA: I've read about authors wanting to fiddle with their e-books so that readers can't modify the fonts. Please, please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE do NOT do this. You may think that san-serif fonts are ugly, but for some people, they are the only fonts they can read.

Aigh!

Ugh, I'm on chapter 27, and the large-print edition of Trust is over the page-count limit at CreateSpace! Damn it! I didn't think this would be a problem because the regular edition of Trust is shorter than the regular edition of Trang, but I used a different font for Trust and that must have made a difference. Should have checked before I started laying it out, no?

Hm...the question is, how to get more text on a page without impairing readability. I'm already a little small on the spacing between lines, so I think I'll squeeze the margins a tad.

I just wish I hadn't wasted all that toner printing each chapter out! Ah, c'est la vie, this round of production has been going so smoothly, it's about time a wrench was thrown into the works....

Who's driving the bus?

One belief I keep hearing from newer writers is that they don't have to bother with all the "technical" stuff (like proofreading or formatting or grammar or actually having a plot) because they hope that the reader will be "swept away" by their marvelous story.

Let's put aside the fact that I think that's much more likely to happen if you have the "technical" stuff down. I actually have an issue with the "swept away" imagery itself.

I mean, of course I've been swept up in a story--I got a lot of exercise when I read the His Dark Materials series because I kept missing my bus stops. (Like, seriously, every day--it got really annoying.)

But when people talk about being "swept away" in real life, it's usually when they're talking about some horrible mistake that they made. People who get "swept away" a lot tend have multiple divorces, children who won't talk to them, criminal records, and no money.

In other words, I feel like saying, "I want the reader to get swept away" is somewhat akin to saying, "I want to take advantage of the reader" or "I want the reader to make a really bad choice by reading my book." It suggests to me that you aren't actually interested in pleasing the reader in any kind of meaningful way. You're being a little sleazy.

I'd rather go with the imagery of taking the reader someplace...on your bus. You are the bus driver, and you want to take the reader on a wonderful tour, where they'll see all kinds of marvelous things and love it and recommend you to their friends and take all the other bus tours you have on offer.

(Yes, I ride the bus a lot. You can read on the bus; if you read while you drive everybody gets all upset.)

Now, in order for your passengers to relax and enjoy the trip, they need to believe that their bus driver can drive a bus.

I cannot express how important this is. This is Step #1, without which no other steps can follow. No one is going to relax and enjoy the ride when they are doubting the bus driver's ability to, you know, drive.

I've ridden a few buses where the drivers were having fairly spectacular mental breakdowns. I responded one of two ways.

Way #1: White knuckle it through the ride, and then call the bus company and report the driver. The reader equivalent is me death-marching my way through The Fountainhead and then telling everyone what an awful, awful book it is.

Way #2: Get off the bus as soon as I can and take one with a different driver. This is probably what most readers do--they bail. Fast. You know the saying, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression"? That's very true with books because when people hit something that makes them question the ability of the writer, they just stop reading. You never get any sort of second chance. It's all over.

Obviously, I try not to have mistakes in my work. I also try not to have things that look like mistakes. I try to avoid the appearance of error, as well as actual error.

It's especially tricky for me because in the Trang series, there are characters who do not know or use proper English grammar, and all the aliens' speech is run through these translation devices that hatchet up everything. So I have to make very sure that people realize that I am doing this on purpose--I'm not doing it because I'm ignorant or because I can't write well. I'm doing it because it serves the story. I can drive a bus.

If you must go with the "swept away" concept, please bear in mind that successful seducers are very detail oriented. They put a ton of effort into the trappings of romance, hoping to distract you from the lack of any actual love. Indeed, 90% of the time it works because the seducee thinks, Gee, if they're doing this much work, they must really care! (No, they don't--at least not about you.) Successful seducers aren't sloppy and they don't leave things to chance--getting someone to the point of being "swept away" takes a lot of planning.

Ownership

Right now, there's a fairly amusing thing going on at Passive Voice: This agent posted a (dumb) critique of this post, and then claimed, "No, it wasn't a critique of that post! It was some other Harlequin author writing on some other self-publishing blog!" and then took down the post, and then took down another post because people were leaving criticism there, etc.

Forget Bad Agent Sydney. This is the guy you want to hire.

Aside from the general hilarity (he says you can make a living writing for Harlequin! That's news to Harlequin!) the post demonstrates Mayer's point that there's this mentality in traditional publishing that writers don't create content, agents/publishers/bookstores do.

But there's a twist: According to this guy, the publisher is responsible for a writer's successes. The writer alone is responsible for their failures. (The business model itself of course has nothing to do with how much money an author makes. Just put that thought out of your silly little head.)

Here it is:

When an author is not making money, it is NOT always the fault of the publisher. Maybe their writing has gone flat. Maybe they aren’t promoting enough. Maybe it is simply a matter of bad timing for when the book comes out. The point is, be careful blaming others for your lack of success in the business.

I for one am a firm believer in Harlequin. The editors work AMAZINGLY hard with the authors out there dedicated to their craft. The promotion departments do an amazing amount of work to get those books out to their readers. I would also add that all of the editors work amazingly well with me personally when I want to negotiate contracts. They are in it for the long haul with their writers and they don’t want to lose a great thing when they see it.

Interesting, no? If your writing "goes flat" (whatever that means), the editor had nothing to do with it. If your writing doesn't go flat, it's because the editor worked "AMAZINGLY hard." The promotion departments are also "amazing," but of course if the promotions don't come off it's because the writer isn't promoting enough.

And if the book fails because of "bad timing," which the writer has absolutely no control over and is completely the responsibility of the publisher? Hey, clearly also not the fault of the publisher. The publisher is "in it for the long haul" and "don't want to lose a great thing." They don't screw up, ever. If your book fails because of bad timing, it must be your fault somehow--you're cursed or something.

I understand the impulse to take ownership of a writer's successful work. I went to college with Joel Derfner, who wrote the excellent Swish. We've reconnected via Facebook, and a few months ago he was working on an essay that was giving him a hard time, so he asked for feedback. Being a former editor, I sharped my trusty axe (oh, who are we kidding? I sharpen it every night before I take it to bed with me; I call it Vera) and took a few whacks at it.

He published a really marvelous essay, and I was so proud--of myself.

And then I got a grip. I mean, he'd written several drafts well before I got to it, and it's not like the draft I saw sucked or anything. It's also not like I would have ever, in a million years, written that essay--it's Joel's life experience, and more important, Joel's talent that takes that experience and converts it so delightfully into written words.

Fine-tuning is important. Fine-tuning helps. I am all in favor of fine-tuning.

But fine-tuning is also roughly a gazillion times easier than creating something good from scratch.

As John F. Kennedy once said, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." In the course of my career, I've had editor after editor take credit for "teaching" me how to write--of course the worse the editor, the more likely it was that those words came out of their mouth. Don't believe it when other people lay claim to your talent--if they were so damned talented, they'd be writing themselves.

A damning defense of agents

You  know what's always interesting? To read someone defend behavior you think is largely indefensible. Sometimes you come out of it with a fresh understanding of why a decent person would act that way.

Other times you don't.

PV linked to Dean Wesley Smith's post on that letter by the Association of Large Publishers' and Chain Bookstores'--oops! I mean Authors'--Representatives.

And someone critical of Smith's attitude responded, "Since when was an agent a trade union official?"

WOW. Wow wow wow wow wow.

Let's break that down, because that's a very insightful way to look at agents.

Say you were in a trade union. When would you go to a trade union official?

1. When you're not getting paid.

2. When your work conditions are not acceptable for some other reason.

3. When the company you're working for is not living up to the terms of its contract.

Now, for most people, that's more or less what they want their agent to do. Not getting paid? Onerous work conditions? Publisher not honoring your contract? The thought is, you go to your agent.

The thought is, the agent is in your corner.

NOT TRUE. Someone who is defending agents thinks it's totally stupid to think that's true. Someone who is defending agents thinks that is a silly and pathetic expectation.

Why go to an agent? The person continues, "one reason only – because it was the best way to get the attention of a senior editor at a publishing house and get our work seriously considered."

This person is completely in agreement with Smith, whether they like it or not. Both think agents do not--even remotely--represent authors in any kind of meaningful way.

It's just that Smith thinks they ought to. Stupid, stupid Smith.

And stupid, stupid you if you have the same expectation.

Remember, just because you pay them doesn't mean they work for you.

When traditional publishers act like self-publishers, guess who gets the shaft?

The New York Times has a story about how traditional publishers now want their authors to crank out a ton of titles, title after title, including short fiction and novellas that the traditional publisher can sell as 99-cent e-books.

Isn't that swell? That's exactly the business strategy many self-published writers use, and it works great! Once again, it turns out that all the Very Special Services a large publisher provides don't work nearly as well as offering a lot of titles at a low price!

Fantastic! Traditional publishers are saved!!!

There's just one problem: How much are the writers making in this scenario? You know, those writers who are now being forced to crank out title after title, regardless of whether or not this is something that helps the quality of their output?

Oh, yes--almost nothing!

Let me quote me again, because I can never get enough of that:

OK, so on a 99-cent book, [traditionally-published author George Pelecanos is] making 17 cents--which is half of what he'd make putting that sucker onto Amazon himself at that price, but that's not the scary bit.

The scary bit is that he gets $2.27 on a $13 e-book! !! !!!! !!!!! He could get that kind of money for a book he self-published on Amazon and priced at...wait for it...$3.25.

That's almost a TEN DOLLAR DIFFERENCE to the buyer! And a ZERO DOLLAR DIFFERENCE in profits to the author!

This is why you read all this hand-wringing about how low book prices are going to bankrupt authors. They certainly will--if authors stay with their publishers. As traditional publishers act more and more like self-publishers, authors will in all likelihood get less and less money.

But the problem there is not the cheap books. The problem is the fact that you're working for someone who wants you to produce more and more product while paying you less and less for it.

I mean, I guess you can become the literary equivalent of a sweatshop worker if you want, but I personally object to that sort of thing and don't see the point of doing it unless the alternative is subsistence farming. Which it isn't. The alternative is keeping 35% to 70% of the revenues generated by your titles, and deciding yourself when you want to produce them.

Or, as Passive Guy put it, "Just wait until authors under contract learn indie authors are making serious money from $0.99 or $1.99 short fiction. That only works if you don’t give the publisher 75% of net revenues* from ebooks."

 

*An accounting aside: What is meant by "net revenues"? Well, the problem is that typically this term isn't very well-defined in contracts, which is bad, because "net revenues" can be whatever your publisher says it is.

If we took a common-sense approach, "net revenues" for an e-book would mean "revenues after the retailer has taken their cut." It's something to look out for, because sometimes publishers say things like, "You get to keep 50% of net revenues" and it sounds really good, because if you self-publish you're keeping 70% of total revenues, and isn't it worth a small discount to have the publisher take care of everything for you?

Buuut...the best-case scenario is that they mean 50% after Amazon has taken its 30%. So it's really 35% of total revenues, which is a much more significant chop to your income.

Progress report

I'm taking the regular layout and turning into a large-print layout--this is very different from the way I did things last time, which was basically to take the text, format e-books, and then start laying stuff out. The problem with doing things that way is that you catch a lot of mistakes when you're making layouts--reading something printed out in a completely different font seems to refresh the eye--so I had to revise the e-books over and over and over again. (Indeed, I caught a couple of minor things today.)

APH-style large-print layouts aren't justified--you use a ragged right, so you don't break words at the end of the line. You also don't indent paragraphs, instead using two lines of white space. That means that a lot of the hyphens come out, as does all of the kerning and all of the tab characters, which is also what you want if you're going to format something into an e-book.

You do, however, have to throw in extra line spaces between paragraphs and to get those bottom lines to even up. So what I did was I stripped down the text and saved that. If I don't find mistakes in the printout, I'll just use that clean text--if I do, I'll have to clean it again, but it should be less complex.

I stripped out the entire book, and I threw it all into templates. Only one chapter is truly and properly laid out, with everything lined up the way it should be, but they're all in the rough-and-ready stage--correct font, correct paragraph style, correct headers and chapter numbers, etc.

I'm not going to have a hell of a lot of time to work this weekend, but hopefully this won't take too long and I can get it done and off to CreateSpace before I leave town.

Thinky thoughts on marketing

Remember how I was going to do a giveaway on Goodreads, but then I saw that the book had to come out within the past six months, so I didn't? Well, Lindsay Buroker did a post on Goodreads giveaways, and it turns out that they don't actually care about that. Definitely go read through the comments on Buroker's post--a lot of good advice for maximizing those giveaways.

It's a little annoying (sometimes I'm overly fond of rules), but I guess it's good that I could coordinate a Trang giveaway with the release of Trust. (And hey! I already have the books!) The only problem for me is that I'm going to be out of town for a week in May (yeah, right in the middle of my big push to get Trust out, life is very convenient sometimes), so I'll have to schedule around that.

The other thing that I'm thinking hard about is advertising. You have to be really thoughtful with it, in my opinion. The people I reach on Twitter and with this blog (and I do reach more now, the ho'ing has paid off) are other writers. Which is great, and definitely something I want to do, but of course I don't expect them to be big fans of my kind of book (that would be incredibly hypocritical of me).

But when it comes to advertising, I want to reach readers, not writers (and science-fiction readers, who are rare birds indeed). That's part of the thinking with marketing at sci-fi cons, and I need to do something similar with on-line advertising. It's about finding the audience: Lawrence Block mentioned a self-published book that sold well at feed stores, and there's a guy who did very well marketing his self-published book on gun forums--in both cases these were books that came out before self-publishing really took off, which gives you an idea of how effective that tactic can be. I think Amazon's marketing power makes people get a little lazy sometimes--they just focus on that system and ignore everything else--but especially with a niche market like science fiction, you have to reach out.

So, who are you representing, again?

The other thing that's happening is that the Association of Authors’ Representatives has sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking them to please let publishers break the law whenever they feel like it. This follows an earlier, similar letter by a board member of the AAR who also heads the agency Writer's House.

(Anyone else remember when Writer's House was a really prestigious agency? I would have given my left arm to be repped by them back in the day. On the other hand, I got screwed by people who were every bit as prestigious, so I guess it all worked out. This just goes to show that the line between respectable agency and dirtbag agency has basically become nonexistent.)

Of course my first thought was, Hey, these guys are Authors' Representatives the same way Scott Turow is president of the Author's Guild! But then Joe Konrath made that point many times, and it's very entertaining, so you should go read all that. And you should re-read how one agency dealt with problems reporting e-book revenues, just to hammer home who these people are actually working for.

And then you should read Bob Mayer's takedown (via PV). Mayer is both a writer and a publisher, and he makes a good (if painfully obvious to those outside the industry) point:

For too long some agents and many publishers mistakenly believed they actually created the PRODUCT that readers consumed:  i.e. the book.  Even with print, that’s not true.  The PRODUCT is the story, the words.  The printed book was the medium by which those words reached the reader.  Thus agents and publishers and bookstores were, and still are, facilitators.  Not creators.

I think this mentality that agents/publishers/bookstores create the product is at the core of why writers get treated so badly by traditional publishing. I mean, it makes sense for you to get 90% of the money if you create the product, right? If you're just a facilitator, taking such a big cut would suggest that you are somehow abusing your position, but if you created it--if Stephanie Meyer wouldn't be anything if it weren't for you!--then all's right with the world. So, yeah, the agents are lining up to back price-fixing publishers and Barnes & Noble rather than writers, because writers bring nothing to the party other than a whole lot of whining.

The main thing to understand is that agents are fighting to defend a system. Traditional publishing is a system that they understand, it's the system that allowed them to profit, and perhaps most important, it's a system in which they were important. They created books. They created literary culture.

If things change, they'll be just another service provider. What do agents do if they're not gatekeepers anymore? They help negotiate contracts. That's it.

And once you put things in those terms--once agents are off that gatekeeper pedestal and people are no longer forced to use them--people are going to look at what agents are providing and start asking questions. Pesky questions. Demeaning questions. Questions like, is this service worth paying for? Is this the best person to hire? Are they offering a good value?

That's going to be a considerable step down. That's going to be the end of the days of telling writers what kind of paper they should use for their queries.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt files for bankruptcy

It's a busy day out there in Webland! For starters, the New York Times reports that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is filing for bankruptcy--the Chapter 11 kind, not the "Th-th-th-that's all folks!" kind, so course the CEO is saying it's "positive news" and that employees certainly shouldn't start mailing out their resumes RIGHT NOW.

Everything's fine! It's just bankruptcy! I'm sure when the private-equity firm took on an unbelievable ton of debt, employees were told that that was nothing to worry about! And when Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt were combined, employees were told that consolidation is certainly NOT the mark of a shrinking industry, and that it was nothing to worry about! And when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stopped taking on new books--nothing to worry about! At all! Everything's going great! The future is ours!

Ah, yes, it brings back memories.... The first publisher I worked for stopped contracting new books, too. I started looking for another job. (Doesn't that make me sound like I am immune to denial? I didn't actually realize what was going on until after I had a conversation with someone I was encouraging to move elsewhere. That person was not convinced to jump ship, but I sure was!) I found one, turned in my letter of resignation, and got REAMED OUT for my treachery and stupidity. Why was I leaving? I was so dumb! NOTHING WAS WRONG!!! Ten days after I left, they shuttered the New York office. (I don't resent the person who reamed me out--it was just another example of denial at work.)

What am I trying to say? If you work in traditional publishing, no matter what soft soap your boss is selling you, you need to get ready. Actually, you should already be ready--publishing has never been anything but a volatile industry--but you need to start thinking about a world without a traditional publishing industry in it. No matter what they tell you, publishers are NOT optimistic--they would not have attempted price-fixing if they were.

Will publishing services still be needed? Oh, yes. It's just that the way you do your work--who hires you, how you find work--is going to change immensely.