Who's got your book?

Am I harping on this? Maybe so, but Kris Rusch had a post on contracts today that brought up something that I think some writers still may not be clear on, which is that publishing traditionally nowadays is actually a pretty risky thing to do.

Rusch notes that an anonymous editor wrote to her:

[R]ights sold to a publisher now could end up—anywhere. Most contracts have very broad language allowing the publisher to sell a book how they want to and at a price they want to. And with Amazon entering the publisher market (and I don’t think it’s impossible to think Google or Apple might as well), there’s no telling if five or ten years down the line an author’s book might wind up being sold, or offered for free, in a way they never anticipated or intended.

I think authors still think that if they sell a book to the publisher, the publisher will follow the traditional path publishing. And even if that is the acquiring editor’s intent, and the publisher’s intent, things are changing so fast now, there’s no guarantee of anything.

This is the thing about publishing that outsiders don't always understand: It is an extremely volatile industry. It was when I started working in it 20 years ago; it's even more chaotic now. Imprints and publishing houses change hands all the time--every single publishing house (every single one) I worked at either had been sold recently, attempted to negotiate a sale, or was sold during the time I worked there.

What that means is that Rock Solid Traditional House can suddenly become a division of New Technology Company, or Gordon Gekko can buy it and sell it for parts, or it can become Paris Hilton's new toy. Its entire mission and business strategy can change overnight, and any title that doesn't fit into the new strategy (proven winners!) can be effectively scrapped.

That rock solid house can also suddenly become a company you don't want to work for. Look at Penguin, for God's sake--it just became the nation's largest vanity press. (ETA: Oh, and look! Barnes & Noble has jumped onto the vanity press bandwagon!)

What can you do if you've signed over your rights to a company that suddenly turns into a very different kind of firm? What if they're no longer reputable? What if they want to do something with your book and your name that you think will harm your career? What if they decide that your kind of book isn't the kind of book they actually want to carry, but they don't want to return your rights to you or sell the contract to someone else, because that would be work?

Nothing, that's what you can do. I mean, sure, you can go to court and try to get out of the contract. You can kick and cry and scream. It's expensive, it takes a long time, and you might not like what you get, but you can feel like you've done something.

Or you can stay out of it. Hold on to your rights yourself. Be extremely judicious about signing any rights away, because you might not like what happens to them, and you might not get them back.

Smith on fear

Dean Wesley Smith has an excellent post on fear. I think it's really important for writers to get over the notion that publishing is some kind of magical black box that miraculously spits out perfect books via an arcane process that you're just too dumb to understand. If anything, I went the other way, thinking I knew more than I did when I started. But I learned, and now I have two professional-looking books out. If I had been too intimidated to start, I would now have exactly what I had two years ago--nothing.

Smith writes, "Let me be clear here. THE ONLY THING THAT WILL KILL A WRITING CAREER IS THE WRITER STOPPING WRITING." Of course, I could not agree more--although writing stuff and then locking it away so that no one else will ever see it is also an effective career-killing technique.

So, how am I doing with the writing? Not great--my sister is out of town, so family and child care obligations are pretty much nuking the week, but she should be back soon.

Lessons from a polar expedition where five people died

Yeah, I'm reading The Worst Journey in the World, a memoir written by Apsley Cherry-Garrad (God, British names crack me up sometimes) about the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, where Robert Falcon Scott died along with four other people after reaching the pole a month after Roald Amundsen did.

I want to say that I realize that Scott's reputation during the 20th century went from unrealistically high to unfairly low, and I'm not trying to pile on here. (Honestly, I feel like before people criticize explorers, mountain climbers, and the like for poor judgement, they should first give sleep deprivation, hypoxia, exhaustion, and malnutrition a shot for a month or two and see how their mental processes hold up.) I also feel like people who run down Scott tend to valorize Amundsen for contrast, and he was hardly a perfect person.

Still, Cherry-Garrad's book--which was not written to be critical of Scott at all--is a really frustrating read, and I think it does contain lessons for authors trying to navigate this new world of publishing. (Hey, if I'm willing to do it with the Transformers, clearly nothing is a bridge too far for me.)

Lesson 1: Admit what you don't know. Scott had visited Antarctica ten years before on an earlier expedition. You'd think that would have been helpful, right?

Oh, no. Scott felt like he knew exactly what Antarctica was supposed to be like. The ice was supposed to be this way, the blizzards were supposed to be that way, the temperatures were supposed to be another way. They were all supposed to be exactly the way they were when he had visited Antarctica before.

The Terra Nova expedition spent almost a year in Antarctica before making the disastrous run for the pole. In that time, it became painfully obvious that the weather in Antarctica is totally unpredictable. It was colder-than-expected inland. Blizzards could crop up at any time. Local weather conditions were fantastically specific, so it could be sunny and warm in one spot, and two miles away there could be a blizzard. Also, it was considerably colder than it had been at any time during the previous expedition.

Now, I am the first to admit that it's hard to plan for, This is totally unpredictable!!! But they didn't seem to try. Instead they assumed that the weather during the run for the pole would be the way Antarctic summer weather is "supposed" to be--clear and relatively warm. They left depos of food rations on the assumption that people would be able to walk about 10 miles a day, every day.

So what happened when the support parties headed back north and ran into unexpected storms that slowed them down? They went hungry. What happened when the party that actually reached the pole headed back north, were going more slowly than planned, and ran into more unexpected storms? They died--11 miles away from a huge food cache.

Let's hope no one actually starves to death here, but do you understand why it makes me nervous when people with absolutely no track record of sales make financial plans based on the expectation that they will sell X many copies of their book? This is not salaried work: You do not get a regular paycheck every two weeks. As a new writer, you don't want to set up your financial life so that if you don't sell X copies your book each and every month, you go hungry. And you really don't want to be that tragic author who perishes in the snow six months or six years before sales finally start to kick in.

Lesson 2: Leave room to fail. Cherry-Garrad makes a big deal out of the fact that Scott wasn't just making a "pole dash"--he was trying to figure out what would actually work in the Antarctic.

So, for the run to the pole, they had motor vehicles, ponies, and dogs. Before his death, Scott even arranged to have mules brought down on a relief ship so that people could try them out, too.

The problem with all this was that Scott didn't give himself any room to have an experiment fail. The motor vehicles and the ponies didn't do well, and in neither case was that some big surprise. Dogs did much better (that's what Amundsen used), but Scott didn't have many dogs because he had packed so many motor vehicles and ponies.

I feel like Scott's motivation were very noble: He was hoping that motor vehicles would provide an alternative to using and killing animals. But in 1910 the reliability of motor vehicles was just not something you could bet your life on, even if you weren't on a polar expedition--cars were still hand-cranked at that point, for God's sake.

Using ponies was also a new and untested idea. And it basically killed Scott. That huge cache of food he died 11 miles away from? It was supposed to be 30 miles further south, but the ponies couldn't make it.

So, give yourself room to fail. If you have a great new marketing idea, that's swell--don't mortgage your home. Don't set yourself up for disaster. Remember--these are experiments, not certainties.

Lesson 3: Be honest and realistic about your goals. Remember how Cherry-Garrad said that the expedition was no mere pole dash?

Unfortunately, that's not how Scott saw it: He felt like the entire worth of the expedition depended on reaching the South Pole.

The actual run to the pole was not just a disaster at the end: It was a disaster the entire way. Those unexpected storms didn't just unexpectedly turn up on the way back north, they unexpectedly showed up and unexpectedly slowed the party on the way to the pole as well. Of course rations earmarked for later in the trip unexpectedly got eaten early, because everything was unexpectedly taking so much longer.

Seeing how all their planning was proving inadequate, did they abort the run for the pole while they still could? No, they did not.

Did Amundsen? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, he did. His first shot at the pole was aborted because of bad weather. It's not that he wasn't competitive (he was), but he also seemed to understand that sheer force of will would not get him to the pole and back alive--good weather would.

Amundsen was just more realistic, and he made a ton of compromises to get himself to the pole that Scott did not. Scott put his base camp in a location that was further from the pole and actually cut off from it for part of the year (!) because it was a better location for the many scientists in his party. Amundsen, in contrast, had almost no scientists in his party. Amundsen was doing a pole dash, period.

Now obviously we can argue that Scott was a nobler person who was dedicated to the ideals of science and all that. We can argue that Scott's "failed" expedition actually accomplished more that was useful than Amundsen's "successful" one. But the problem was that Scott defined success in a certain way (reach the pole!), but he wasn't really willing to acknowledge that (this is no mere pole dash!). As a result, he was ill-situated to actually reach his goal, and then he got desperate.

Honestly, I see that most often with writers who really, really want to be popular--they want big sales! and their name in lights! and fame and fortune! But they also want to write whatever they want, whether or not that's something anybody wants to read.

You can't, OK? Even with self-publishing, we're still operating in a market. Certain types of literature are more popular than other types of literature.

If your goal is to tell Danielle Steele to suck it, your abstract poetry is not going to get you there. I would guess that most people who write bestsellers think long and hard about what most people want to read before they write--I've certainly read and heard memorable interviews with ones who did.

If you don't want to write within those sorts of constraints, that's great--neither do I. But I also never assumed the Trang books would be big commercial sellers. In fact, the whole point of writing Trang for me was to move away from making Big Macs. I'm not going to freak out and do something stupid because there isn't a McSisson's on every corner with a sign proclaiming how many billions I have served--if I wanted that, I would have written a very different book.

Beta-y thoughts

Yeah, everything's sort of gone off the rails, writing-wise--family obligations, random life stuff, cat in the hospital. (He's home now and doing fine--apparently he's just going to periodically get urinary-tract blockages whenever a thunderstorm freaks him out, nothing to be done about it, just try not to let him go into renal failure and die. Um, OK.) I've got some more child-care obligations coming up, but hopefully I'll be able to get work done tomorrow and later in the week.

I also ordered a new computer, so hopefully I won't be having to deal with all the freeze-ups and drama of my ancient machine failing to cope with change. Of course, I'll have to deal with the drama of putting everything I need onto a new computer, which is why I prefer not replacing them, but such is life.

Anyway, something I've been thinking about is doing decorative chapter ornaments for the Trang and Trust e-books. I've been seeing more and more of them in the books I've been reading. It's cute, it seems to work even on my phone, and it sounds pretty easy to do--just insert a little centered graphic instead of "* * *". Needless to say the graphic would be a tiny little black-and-white portal....

Risk management: Lessons from personal finance

Jim Self noted on my post about Kris Rusch's hybrid publishing approach that what works for an author with lots and lots of books may not work so well for someone with just a few titles.

That's very true, and it's definitely something to keep in mind as you try to figure out what's going to work for you.

The thing to be aware of is that signing over your rights to a traditional publisher is actually a fairly risky proposition these days. Formerly respectable publishing stalwarts are getting into trouble, making bad decisions, and getting into even more trouble as a result. This is going to get worse, not better, over the next few years--and remember, if your publisher goes bankrupt, you don't necessarily get your rights back.

So, giving your rights to a publisher is a gamble wherein you risk the rights to your book in return for the potential reward of a larger audience. It's a gamble that may pay off, like it did for Amanda Hocking, or it may not pay off, like it didn't for Joe Konrath, or it may pay off here but not there, like it did and it didn't for Rusch.

Are any of them really hurting as a result of their gambles? No. Why not? Because they still have plenty of self-published titles out there.

What this reminds me of is how people (you know, in a perfect world) are supposed to manage their personal finances: First, you figure out what your basic living expenses are. Then you take enough money to cover three to six months of living expenses, and you put it someplace where it is both VERY safe and readily accessible. This is your emergency fund.

Now, this is not a strategy without controversy, because there are people out there who say, That's a waste! You should plow every last dime into investments with a high rate of return! You can always use your credit cards to pay for stuff in an emergency!

Of course, that last assertion is making anyone who remembers 2008/2009 laugh and laugh. Personally, I feel that the emergency fund is a good idea. I also think it's a good idea to be very hesitant to, say, quit a well-paying stable job unless you are really, really sure you'll be able to still cover your rent and pay for groceries with whatever you're going to be doing instead.

You can take risks with money that's not in your emergency fund. You can pursue your financially-risky passion in your spare time.

And you can gamble on traditional publishing with your "extra" books, i.e. the books that aren't generating the revenue you need to pay for your basic living expenses. Say you're Lindsay Buroker, and you're making a living--not a fortune, but a living--off your self-published books. Sensibly enough, you don't want to risk that income by signing away the rights to the majority your books. But, later on, after you've got more books and a larger income, well, maybe then you'll gamble on a couple of titles--why not? If a publisher makes them implode, you'll still be able to make a living off your core of self-published titles.

If you follow this strategy, would it ever make sense to sign away the rights to a title if that's the only book you've got? Perhaps surprisingly, I say yes. For example, you could do what John Locke did and keep the e-rights (along with that revenue stream) while signing away your paper rights (which perhaps a publisher could do more with). Or if you have a runaway hit and you're offered such a huge advance that you could invest that money and live forever off the interest, you might do that. (Just keep in mind that you could still be shortchanging yourself.)

But no matter what, you have to protect that core revenue. You have to make sure you can always get by.

Weepy Girl and the People Who Scream at Her

Do you know what's not a good way to create drama and excitement in your novel? Having a bunch of people scream and cry and curse and slap each other around for no particular reason.

I keep reading variations on the ur-text known to archaeologists as Weepy Girl and the People Who Scream at Her. (Weepy Girl was originally an ancient Sumerian drama, hence the play format.)

 

WEEPY GIRL: Good morning, Abe!

ABE USEUR: YOU FUCKING BITCH! (throws pot of boiling hot coffee on Weepy)

WEEPY GIRL: (weeping) What are you doing? Why don't you like me? I just want to be your friend, Abe!

ABE USEUR: FUCK YOU, YOU CUNT! (he beats Weepy with the glass coffee carafe until it shatters, cutting and bruising Weepy in the process)

WEEPY GIRL: (weeps harder) Why don't you like me? (runs away, finds an isolated corner, sits there to weep) I just want to be his friend!

VIV SCHUSS: Weepy! You've been beaten horribly! What happened?

WEEPY GIRL: (weeping) Abe beat me, and...and...why doesn't he like me, Viv? I just want to be his friend!

VIV SCHUSS: Why doesn't Abe like you? Because you're a worthless, evil, hideous piece of shit, that's why!

WEEPY GIRL: (weeps harder) Why don't you like me, Viv? I just want to be your friend!

This continues for, oh, 400, 500 pages....

 

OK. See the problem here? There's a lot of violence and screaming and crying and "drama," but guess what's missing? Sympathetic characters.

Unless you're a psychopath, you aren't going to sympathize with Abe and Viv. They are thoroughly evil and impossible to like. A reader can take them in small doses (think Harry Potter's adoptive family), but no one is going to want to spend lot of time with them. And if you're trying to present some kind of arc with those characters, that's going to be a lost cause--I don't think anyone with any life experience is going to be happy to see Weepy reconcile with Abe, because we all know it's just a matter of time before he beats the crap out of her again.

What about Weepy? You know the writer is trying so hard here to make her sympathetic--she suffers and suffers and weeps and weeps. And it just fails. Why? She has no spine. It's not just that she's weeping all the time (which, yes, she may have no other options), it's that she wants to be friends with her abusers. She doesn't resent them, she's not eager to leave the situation, she's not plotting her revenge, she doesn't even think that they are doing something bad. Unless Weepy is a child under the age of 10, and Viv and Abe are her parents (and maybe not even then), that's just not a realistic portrayal.

Oh, Penguin

Penguin is purchasing notorious vanity press Author Solutions, the umbrella company that runs AuthorHouse, DellArte, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, West Bow, and Xlibris. (Want some fun? Google each of those names, followed by the word "scam.") This is apparently to go with Penguin's Book Country. Apparently their new strategy is, If you can't beat self-published writers, rip 'em off!

(And honestly, I'm a little astounded that Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware is all, "Oh, this is fine, as long as Penguin does something about the fact that, with Author Services, you get nothing in return for your money, you don't get paid, they lie all the time, and they're trying to rip you off with overpriced, poor-quality services." But then again, it's not the first time Author Solutions seems to have confounded her. I think that to her, self-publishing is all kind of scammy, so why attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff?)

This I agree with:

It "constitutes tacit recognition that the legacy publishing model is severely challenged and may not work sometime in the foreseeable future," said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York-based publishing consultancy.

I bet Penguin has thought carefully about this new strategy. Let's see what the CEO said!

“It’s early days. We haven’t thought in detail about Book Country,” said Penguin CEO John Makinson on a press conference call.

Oh, yeah. This is going to go great.

Trad/indie

Today brings another fine post by Kristine Rusch. She's mainly talking about contracts. (And she makes a good case that even hard-core indies need to know about trends in book contracts and the larger publishing industry--of course I agree, but I would, wouldn't I? I just love this kind of thing.)

Anyway, she also has an insightful bit into her hybrid approach. Once again, you're not seeing slavish dedication to traditional publishing or insane fanaticism against it, you're seeing someone take a thoughtful approach to figure out what works for her.

She writes:

With advances declining, it’s less and less likely that a midlist writer can receive a good advance in exchange for the rights she’s licensing.

Yet I continue to sell into traditional publishing. Why?

Because I’m using traditional publishing to advertise my indie-published titles under the same name. When Wickedly Charming, my Kristine Grayson novel, appeared from Sourcebooks, the sales of all of my indie-published Kristine Grayson novels jumped dramatically.  They hit a higher plateau and have stayed on that plateau.

Sourcebooks is promoting Kristine Grayson in venues that I have yet to reach. Instead of me spending advertising dollars to get the word out on my book, I’m getting paid to advertise.

In the advertising business, they call what I’m doing a loss leader.  I am losing some upfront money to bring someone to my product. Is it worthwhile? It was on the first Grayson book. Since I wrote this piece last year, I’ve published two more Grayson books with Sourcebooks. The increase in sales has not been as dramatic.

I suspect that the loss leader theory only works for a few books, rather than an entire series of them.

Look at that! Data -> theory. New data -> modification of theory. This isn't magic or luck or genius. It's something everybody can do. The only role Rusch's years of publishing experience plays in her logic is that she's calm enough to actually think.

Blurbly McDescription

This is an excellent post by Livia Blackburne (via the PV comments--read 'em!) about writing a book description. I especially like this part:

To make up an example [of a straightforward story summary]: "Stacy loses her favorite puppy, but thankfully tracks it down after several days. Then she realizes that a dog-napping ring was behind it all. She works out an arrangement with the neighborhood dogwalkers, and together they disrupt the ring."

When writing a pitch, it can be tempting to summarize both the conflicts and the resolutions equally. But instead, try emphasizing the problems more than the resolutions.

"Stacy loses her favorite puppy, and her investigations lead her to a horrible dognapping ring. Now, her only hope is to work with the annoying and unfriendly neighborhood dogwalkers, and if she doesn’t succeed, all the dogs in her city will die."

Remember, the point of any description or summary is to make the person think, "I want to read that book!" They're not going to think that if you tell them that everything works out in the end.

Bigotry and writing

This is an interesting (albeit old--come on guys, it's a romance blog, you can't expect me to keep up) post by Isobel Carr on presenting villains who are members of minority groups in historical fiction. She notes that Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy, the villain is a Jewish moneylender. Although Heyer was apparently pretty anti-Semitic, Carr doesn't think the mere existence of the character is objectionable, since at that time and place most moneylenders were in fact Jewish, and successful moneylenders tend not to be soft and generous people.

But, writes Carr:

Where Heyer runs into problems in my opinion is in her actual on-the-page stereotypical depiction of [the moneylender] Goldhanger as a greedy, oily, and ultimately cowardly, Jew. Had he been an elegant, cool, hard-nosed businessman, I wouldn't have had the same negative reaction.

(Full disclosure: I was friends with Carr in high school, and yes, it's true, she has been doing historical reenactments her entire life.)

It's an interesting question for me because when I worked in educational publishing, I did a lot of books on Black history. So when I read or watch fiction (or fictionalized history) set in those eras, it's usually pretty annoying: Either you have stuff that's straight-up racist (Birth of a Nation); or you have a whole lot of whitewashing going on, where all the good guys are marvelously enlightened about discrimination (news flash--even abolitionists were, on the whole, incredibly racist); or you have works like Uncle Tom's Cabin where the victims of discrimination respond in an unrealistic saint-like fashion. (Like the Olaudah Equiano character in the movie Amazing Grace. This was an actual guy whose response to oppression was to, whenever possible, punch sombody out, and they turned him into this passive, weepy martyr.)

In some cases, I think people decide that it's simply too difficult to convey to a modern audience just how bad it was. For example, in the movie Amistad a woman commits suicide on a slave ship by jumping overboard. Totally unrealistic, because that kind of thing happened all the time, so the slave ships were set up so that you couldn't jump overboard. The grim truth is that slavers who weren't masters of forcible suicide prevention didn't stay in business long.

Amistad also features what was clearly the best-fed load of slaves ever to complete the Middle Passage. There's this impulse to be prescriptive to modern viewers--in that movie there was obviously a desire to portray Africans as beautiful, so they cast a bunch of underwear models as slaves. I've known many beautiful Africans, but I'm guessing they'd be a hell of a lot less beautiful after being chained to a shelf, starved, and abused for a few months--I know I would be.

This desire to be prescriptive is where you're getting this tit-for-tat, if-you-have-minority-bad-guys-you-must-have-an-equal-number-of-minority-good-guys thinking, which as Carr points out, is hard to do realistically in a historical romance (somehow your upper-class heroine is supposed have lots of friends from a group that is specifically excluded from her world).

I also think it can backfire. If beautiful underwear models can survive the Middle Passage with their looks intact, then slavery must not have been that bad, right? In a similar vein, you sometimes find the Embittered Minority Villain, who would be a good person were it not for all the discrimination they face. The problem I have with that is while it can be interpreted as Discrimination Is Bad, it can just as easily be interpreted as Members of This Group Are Dangerous and Should Probably Just Be Shipped Back to Wherever They Came From.

Maybe the problem is simply the two-dimensionality of it all. People are complicated, and their response to bigotry is equally complicated--especially if they're being isolated from another group. People like Benjamin Franklin and Lincoln Steffens who were publicly, openly, and horribly bigoted changed their minds later in life. Granville Sharp fought long and hard to end the enslavement of Africans, but he thought that Catholics should all be shot. Likewise, there were as many different responses to being enslaved as there were people enslaved: Frederick Douglass was infuriated by fellow slaves who so identified with their owners that they would argue and even fight with other slaves over who had the better one--and he took the opposite path.

Taking the bait

Thinking about yesterday's post, I decided that instead of just making a priori statements about the viability of self-publishing, I should probably try to work out why I, personally, think self-publishing is going to be a significant (if not the dominant) form of publishing in the future.

Readers like it.

If you are a reader, self-published books are two very important things: Cheap and easy! I mean, $2.99 for a book! Excellent! And you don't have to scrounge around a used-book store--you don't even have to wait for someone to ship it to you. You just push a button and it's yours.

Now, I have read things by people saying, "Oh my God--self-published books are so awful! I read one and it was so awful! I swore never to read another! Readers are going to get tired of self-published books and the entire industry is going to collapse because they are so awful!"

I have also read that Tracy Garvis Graves recently sold 360,000 copies of, yes, a self-published book.

I am on record as not much caring for Stephen King or the entire romance genre. That is my opinion. I am but one person. The opinion of one person (or of me and the several of my friends who also do not much care for either Stephen King or the entire romance genre) doesn't matter. There are millions of people who love Stephen King and the romance genre. Both are fantastically successful. Neither is in any danger of collapsing because The Great and Powerful Me doesn't like them. The audience is clearly there.

Writers like it.

No, it ain't easy being a self-published writer. You gots to work and work and work, a-slavin' away at production and marketing and a-writin' the next book.

But you see a book at the end of it, which is a major improvement over most people's experience with traditional publishing.

You have control. If something doesn't work, you can fix it. You can write what you want. You own your work, and nobody can deep-six it because they want to fire your editor.

And the 70% royalty is awfully nice, too.

Traditional publishers are afraid of it, and investors think it is the future.

I've said this before, but you should be deeply wary of any company that looks to the future and sees no place for itself. And all the investor money is going into e-reading, while chain bookstores languish and go under. That's a real problem if your publishing business is utterly dependent on the chain bookstores.

No form of media has managed to un-digitize.

The record industry fought digital music tooth and nail, and what happened? iTunes. (And Weird Al Yankovic's "Don't Download This Song," which is pretty much priceless.)

As for video, people are producing their own shows that they broadcast on YouTube or sell on their Web sites, and even big-budget television is undergoing serious change as people get used to streaming.

Who is going to stop it?

Maybe--maybe--the television companies will get really aggressive, yank all their offerings off streaming services, and sue the crap out of anyone who pirates. And then television might be able to un-digitize. Maybe.

How could that happen with books? The gazillions of producers aren't going to stop writing, and they're not going to stop self-publishing (unless something better than a 70% royalty comes along).

Call me crazy, but I don't think that's going to happen. I also don't think that readers are suddenly going to start clamoring to pay $10-$15 more for a less-convenient book format. (Yeah, I don't care if you beautifully hand-craft your beautiful books out of beauty. Cheaper is better, and believe me, there are plenty of pretty self-published books out there.)

That leaves the retailers to destroy the industry, and what is their motivation again? Are they tired of hitting six-figure jackpots whenever there's a runaway hit? Are they tired of a 20%-65% profit off each sale? Since more companies keep moving into this space, I'm thinking the answer is no. No they are not.

People are still debating this?

Interestingly enough, both Joe Konrath and M. Louisa Locke have similar posts (apparently inspired by completely different events) basically saying, hey, self-publishing has a future.

My initial reaction was, Duh! Did you also know that the Internet's not just a fad?

I mean, obviously, you have to be ignoring an awful lot of evidence that self-publishing works. There are the successful newbies, and the traditionally-published authors who are selling their backlists themselves. There is even increasing evidence that if you want a traditional contract, the best way to get one may very well be to self-publish.

But I think a larger part of the problem is that this is all anecdotal evidence. There's no good data, and what data there is, will likely get worse as self-publishing accounts for an ever-bigger piece of the pie.

For example, Bowker, the company that issues ISBN numbers, found a sizeable uptick in paper book titles attributable to self-publishing. But it's actually a fairly major undertaking to produce a paper book--it's easier and cheaper to just do an e-book. I would guess that a fair percentage of self-published titles have never been released as paper books.

I would guess, because I have to. Why don't I know for sure? Because there's no data. What percentage of self-published books are released only as e-books? I don't know! And neither does anyone else!

Think about what that means: The number of paper titles could level off or even shrink as more and more self-published writers decide it's not worth their while. Bowker could release report after report noting the decline in paper titles. And that might mean absolutely nothing about either self-publishing or e-books.

But what about e-books? Well, I keep making fun of Barnes & Noble's claims to be controlling X percentage of the e-book market for the simple reason that no one--no one--knows how large the e-book market actually is. Amazon does not share that information. Perhaps they could be made to, but what about the new retail sites that keep cropping up? What about authors who sell books on their own Web sites?

Whenever someone says, The e-book market is exactly THIS big! It has grown precisely THIS much since THIS date! they are leaving indie authors out. What they are doing is counting only those e-books released by certain (larger) publishers.

Think about what that means: The more e-books are self-published, the fewer e-books will be counted. If Random House and Simon & Schuster lose e-book sales because all their writers have gone indie, the data will indicate that e-book sales have fallen, even if those newly-indie writers are selling e-books like gangbusters on their own.

There have been some efforts to generate decent data on self-publishing, including a survey that used some pretty questionable methodology, but they haven't been great. Some places, like Smashwords, like to share data, but plenty of places either don't (Amazon) or can't really be expected to in a meaningful way (author Web sites). I don't see this changing any time soon.

What does this mean for writers? Well, unfortunately it means that you really can't trust any data-based generalizations about the industry. Not even the ones from fancy-sounding analysts and consultants--they're all getting their data from the same source, which is the larger publishers. It's annoying, but there you have it--it's better to acknowledge that you don't know something than to swallow someone's snake oil because it has a bunch of impressive-looking numbers attached to it.

I would also try to avoid getting hung up on questions like, How many e-books are being sold? In addition to being impossible to know, it's kind of irrelevant. After all, the exciting thing about self-publishing e-books is that writers can make good money off sales that traditional publishers would consider laughably small.

Progress report

Yes! I made progress! Try not to die of shock! (I did have family obligations this weekend, so it wasn't ALL shameless procrastination.)

Anyway, I mostly revised what I had written before and figured out what's coming next, which was bothering me. So I only added 300-odd words, but I still accomplished quite a bit.

Telenovelas

This is an article in the Wall Street Journal about how streaming video is changing viewing habits. Turns out, if you make a television show more like a novel, people treat it like a novel!

The urge to sustain that inner experience leads you to press "play" on the next episode, and the one after that—the equivalent of the book you can't put down.

But that's not the only similarity--there's a lot of parallels on an industry level. As we're seeing with e-books, people are rediscovering old titles. 24, Lost, and Prison Break are all popular on Netflix, and of course they're bringing back Arrested Development.

This is a big change for television. The way you used to watch old shows was in syndicated reruns, which worked better with stand-alone shows. (Law & Order was developed specifically so that it could be broken into two 30-minute shows for syndication.) Streaming, however, turns all that on its head.

As with the company's other original series, all 10 new "Arrested Development" episodes will go up for streaming at the same time. [Show creator Mitch] Hurwitz is sure some fans will devour the entire five hours in one sitting. "It's throwing me," he says.

His solution was to build each new episode around one character. The stories in all 10 episodes unfold simultaneously, overlapping here and there. Unlike writing a traditional sitcom, Mr. Hurwitz says, "we're sort of driving into the next episode rather than wrapping things up."

It also means that people aren't necessarily watching the ads, which is seen more as a problem in the industry. But just like with e-books, the fact that television shows don't "expire" any more allows an audience to build in a powerful way.

In a speech [Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted] Sarandos made in April to the National Association of Broadcasters, whose members worry that services like Netflix are cannibalizing the audience for ad-supported TV, he joked about looking for a trap door under his podium. He then cited the 800,000 subscribers who watched "every minute" of "Mad Men" season four on Netflix, arguing that those viewers likely flocked to the season-five premiere on AMC, whose audience grew by 21% over the year before.

AMC President Charlie Collier says, "With 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad,' each year has been better [in the ratings] than the year prior, and that's not the norm in historic TV-watching trends."

In addition, weird shows are building audiences. Two notably "sticky" shows (i.e. shows where people tend to watch all the episodes) on Netflix are an Australian drama (McLeod's Daughters) and a South Korean soap opera (Shining Inheritance).

(And the fact that Netflix knows all that about viewing habits reminds me of how your e-book knows how you read it....)

You keep churning stuff out, even as I procrastinate

I'm having my habitual Trouble Getting Started; yesterday I shamelessly focused on beta tasks, today I may be reduced to cleaning the linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom.

To further heap opprobrium upon my own irresponsible head, I shall link to Kristine Rusch's excellent post on why perfectionism is a bad business strategy (because it leads you to not write books. You know, like how I'm not writing books right now).

The notion that a truly talented writer should be able to turn out a perfect book without actually working on their craft reminds me of the research on raising intelligent kids so that they will actually be successful (that's a PDF): If you tell them that school should be easy for them because they're smart, you are basically denigrating the value of hard work. As a result, when they come across something they don't understand right away, they 1. don't know what to do, and 2. are too embarrassed to apply themselves.

From the article:

Mistakes crack [these children's] self confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so.... [S]uch children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

 

Rusch writes that this kind of belief, when applied to writing, is pernicious both professionally (less books = less readers) and personally. The damage on a personal level comes from believing that talent, like intelligence, is an unchanging attribute:

 

A talent is, by its very definition, something you’re born with. Either you have it or you don’t. As the précises for the University of Iowa states, it can’t be learned. It can only be “encouraged.”

Of course, if that were the case, then writers couldn’t improve. They would have the same ability at the beginning of their careers as at the end of their careers. Study, classrooms, research, practice, none of it has any meaning whatsoever in the face of Great Talent.

 

I am also going to argue that this belief is bad for literature. As I've noted before, authors tend to be judged on their highs, not their lows. Most people don't realize this, because they read, say, Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities, Catch-22, and Go Down, Moses.

And then they stop there. They think, "What amazing genius!" and feel very small.

Don't stop--take your favorite books and read everything by those authors. Mansfield Park. Hard Times. Anything Joseph Heller wrote that wasn't Catch-22.

Yes, even Sanctuary, but don't say I didn't warn you.

You want two-dimensional characters? Books devoid of story lines? Characters and story lines brazenly and badly recycled from other books? Novels that manage to be boring and offensive at the same time?

Do it. Knock those writers off the pedestals you've put them on in your mind. Be bored and miserable as a reader--that will help you as a writer. You'll realize there's a whole slew of legendary writers who probably wouldn't have ever amounted to much had Max Perkins not been around to lend a hand.

If you produce a less-than-perfect book, so what? You're in good company! On to the next one--hopefully it will be better!

The main problem with tinkering and retinkering with a flawed book is that it almost never helps. Most of the time the problem is fundamental to the conception of the book: You really don't have a story there that's going to work. You thought you did, but you don't. Tightening up the prose in chapter 23 is not going to make a difference.

You either have to scrap the whole thing completely, like I did with my first novel, or you "scrap" it by publishing it, which at least gives you a chance to see if maybe there's some value there. Either way, you have to get it out of your head, be done with it, and start anew.

Let's put it this way: If I had a chance to speak confidentially to the person who wrote that mismatched novel, what do you think I would tell them?

1. "You never should have published that! It's damaged your reputation forever and ever! Your career is finished!"

2. "You should go back and revise it."

3. "You're so funny; your next book should probably be about something lighter. You could even do a lighter apocalypse book--have you read Good Omens?"