Working Towards the Betterment of Publishing

Some Unfinished Business

2007-01-31T09:10:00.000-05:00

It's the last day of January, which is why I thought today would be a fitting day to close up shop. I've said all that I've got to say about the publishing industry as a whole over the course of the last four months and other projects are starting to demand my attention.

I'd like to say that I am hopeful for the future of publishing, but the truth is that I can't even convince a GS-15 to send a four line email properly and he's just one person. In many ways, writers are worse than government employees - the phrase "herding cats" comes to mind.

I don't know that I have personally solved any of the many lingering problems that plague the industry, but I like to believe that there are a few more writers in the world who are putting some serious thought into what they are doing with their novels. Perhaps they are thinking differently, perhaps they are thinking constructively. Perhaps they are just thinking. In any case, I have a difficult time seeing new information as a bad thing and, in the end, that's all I have provided - new information. What the individual readers choose to do with that information is entirely up to them.

If you are looking for new bloggers to read in my absence, I would like to suggest Leo Stableford and the Grumpy Old Bookman, both of whom are far more prolific than I will ever be.

Attentive readers will note that there is still one thing left on my agenda that I have not quite completed: the reviews of the books that were submitted to me at the end of November. I have already emailed the various authors and explained the situation - at some point in the indeterminate future, I will be back to talk about these hopeful and patient men (and they are all men, curiously).

Until that happens, keep the faith and don't let the bastards get you down. But remember: if you want to be successful, you will have to do it yourself. That's the way the world has always worked. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.

The Greater Utility

2007-01-30T08:59:00.000-05:00

There is an old joke about a man who tries to fly a balloon around the world. At some point, the balloon crashes, leaving the man lying on his back in the middle of a field. Unwilling to move, he lies there until a woman walking her dog wanders past.

"Where am I?" he asks the woman.

"You're lying on your back in the middle of a field," she says.

"You must be an accountant," he says. (In some versions, she is an engineer.)

"How can you tell?"

"The information you provided was entirely accurate, but completely useless."

I mention this joke because it is the perfect metaphor for the kind of feedback that you can expect from the publishing industry, should you choose to submit your work. You will probably be told that your work is unmarketable, but that does not tell you if your work is good; the two terms are far from synonymous.

It is important to remember that submitting to the slush piles of the publishing world is an entirely voluntary process. There is no obligation to do so beyond basic tradition. But if you are going to follow tradition, it is important to think about the utility that is to be gained from obeisance.

In short, what does the individual writer gain from submission? The satisfaction of knowing that he has stoked the engines of the industry? A handful of lottery tickets? Honest feedback about how to make his work better?

A better question might be: What does the writer need? Followed closely by: How can that be achieved?

Without exception, every author needs a trusted feedback mechanism - someone to provide specific examples of where his work is not up to snuff and how that can be fixed. The kind of thinking that pretends that this kind of ongoing external critique is not needed leads directly to the likes of Anne Rice and George Lucas.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that many authors take criticism of their work far too personally. This makes a sort of perverse sense - writing a novel can take years of intense, solitary effort. For someone to step in at the end and point out that most of that effort was wasted can be a difficult blow to recoil from.

More, it is very common to use the creation to attack the creator, mostly because it is a very easy thing to do. Personally, I find this to be a lazy approach. It is far easier to wait until the author does something stupid and use that instead. Why attack David Eddings through his writing when you can just point out that the man burned down his office by lighting a pool of gasoline on fire to see if it would burn?

But just because I am able to separate the work from the worker does not mean that every critic is equally capable. That's why it is important to find a trusted source to provide feedback. Someone who knows your work, but is willing and able to tell you the truth.

Of course, this kind of active feedback requires the author's participation. All the criticism in the world means nothing if the writer is unwilling to accept it. It takes a determined man to ignore the opinions of everyone around him when he thinks he's right. It takes an even more determined man to listen carefully and do everything in his power to make his product the best it can be. I'll leave it to the reader to make the final decision about which is the wiser course of action.

(Not Quite) The Final Word

2007-01-25T10:34:00.000-05:00

When I started this blog, it was ostensibly for the purpose of making publishing better. Even the most optimistic individuals can see that publishing is in sad shape right now and it needs all the suggestions it can use, even half-assed ones from the likes of me. More importantly, like every other casually interested bystander, I had an opinion and I wanted to make sure it got heard.

Let me be the first to point out that my suggestions are heavily predicated on my viewpoint on the situation: I am a disgruntled writer, with my face pressed against the glass, looking in on a buyer’s market. As far as I’m concerned, there are rotting, diseased portions of the industry that are only surviving through sheer bloody-mindedness. Same as it ever was.

More pragmatically, it is increasingly obvious that there are major changes coming to the publishing industry and a large portion of the major players are completely unprepared – often to the point of denial. The source of change is not going to be the ongoing debate over self-publishing, nor is it going to be the creeping death of independent bookstores. The source of change is something far more insidious: indifference.

To illustrate my point, here's an article (one of many) about librarians and their increasing inability to convince young readers that books are worth reading. Think about that: librarians cannot give away their material for free. It is utterly depressing, but it is entirely believable; the internet has trained most readers to absorb their information in smaller, easier-to-digest doses. Books – sustained written narratives – are becoming an alien concept to all but a fringe group. If you read a book last year that wasn’t the Bible or the Koran, you are in the minority.

It is this inability to recognize the obvious that has hobbled the publishing industry as they continue to argue about how many science fiction movements can dance on the head of a ballpoint pen. In the meantime, a lot of the people producing the material that feeds the selective-but-continually-voracious engine are chasing the same dream that they’ve always chased: professional acceptance (which is really just a fancy way of saying “rich and famous”). Some are even so deluded as to believe that they can find it through other means: holes in the fence formed by cheap printing and even cheaper distribution.

Everyone’s chasing the same dream, but very few take the time to notice that the other people where they work don’t seem to be reading much. Readers tend to associate with other readers; more, readers tend to have a difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea of people who don’t read. It’s like a mental blind spot. But even as part of a fringe culture, it’s comforting to know that there are a lot of us. Walking into a Border’s is like walking into a safe place – a fragment of mainstream Western culture that still acknowledges the importance of books.

Even more comforting is the knowledge that books will never go away. It may be a fringe culture, but it’s a resilient one. Consider: the basic format of the book has endured for half a millennium. A bound tome is still the easiest way to read, store and transport written content above a certain size. Nobody reads books on the internet because it’s simply too difficult to read long passages of narrative on a monitor.

(Don’t believe me? Go to Project Gutenberg and resist the urge to hit print.)

At the same time, it will always be easier and more efficient to browse through books in person – which means that bookstores will always exist in one form or another. I’m waiting for the day that ten or twelve small publishers get together, buy an Espresso machine, rent a small storefront and print out their entire back catalogs. Any time someone buys a book, a new one gets printed and is put back on the shelf.

It’s a new twist on an old concept, but that’s what change brings. In fact, that’s the whole point of change: it does what it says on the tin. Of course, the worst part about change is that nobody really knows what happens after it arrives. That’s why people fear change – it is in our nature to fear that which we do not know. It’s a primal thing.

The people who fear change the most tend to be the ones with the most to lose. Institutions are usually right at the top of this list and, in our present purview, there is no institution within the industry larger than the massive publishing houses like Random House and Simon & Schuster. Intriguingly, those who should fear change the least are those with nothing to lose. In our idiom, these tend to be disenfranchised writers – those creative individuals who have been rejected, ignored or excised from the established order.

So the product will always exist and so will the marketplace. But will the market endure? Probably – as long as there are compulsive readers like me. It won’t look the way it does now, but that’s okay. As long as there are buyers and products, the internet will always find a way to bring them together. There will undoubtedly be relics of the current infrastructure scattered throughout the process, legacy structures that were too stubborn or valuable to disintegrate completely, but they may not have the same prominence they once held.

As with the current system, the most important part of the process will be the writer: the fuel that drives the rest of the supply chain. For all intents and purposes, the individual writer is the publishing industry. Lately, he has been conditioned to believe that he isn’t, but the facts are the facts. Publishing is simply the decision to bring a book to print. From that perspective, you can remove any individual from the publishing process and still get a book, except one. You cannot remove the writer and still have a book.

Someone will inevitably point out that the printer is pretty darned important, too, and I would agree. But publishing is not printing. Printing is printing. If publishing was printing, it would be called printing. That’s the way verbs work. More precisely, publishing is the decision to print. But you can very easily have a published work that is not printed, just as you can have works that are not marketed, edited or sold.

Publishers may offer marketing, editing and sales as benefits, but that does not make them integral parts of the decision to print. Ultimately, the decision to print comes from the individual writer, which is why I argue that writers are the publishing industry – or, at least, the only part that matters.

But as long as writers continue to follow the same well-worn path as the rest of the industry, they will always seek publication (or, failing consensus, publish themselves) for the same basic reasons. But fame and fortune are not merely a weak motivation for creating a final version of your work – they have become barely obtainable rewards.

And that’s where I came in. My goal was to offer the insights that I learned from my forays into publishing. The most important being the fact that I gave up on the dream of earning the same salary as a floor maintenance technician at Wal-Mart and now make over $50,000 a year as a government contractor. It was a largely pragmatic decision: I grew to enjoy having a roof over my head and the ability to eat when I got hungry.

But that doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped writing – far from it. In fact, one of the reasons I’m wrapping things up here is that I have other projects demanding my attention. My drive to produce new material has not diminished, but my motivations have undergone a major sea change. I simply write because I have no choice. The final product is variable (because I am a capricious man), but selling it is less important than making sure that I am happy with the result.
It’s a pie-in-the-sky message for the writers who are engaged in the arduous process of justifying their decision to self-publish their first novels, but I don’t really care. Something about my words were compelling enough to contain the prolonged attention of some of you, which means that I struck a nerve somewhere.

And, in the end, that’s all that matters. The writers among you have been provoked. You have been warned, threatened, ridiculed and dismissed. Now you should go forth and find your own path. Change is afoot and, if you are creative enough, you might be able to come out ahead. Just what that means depends on who you are – the age of cookie cutter solutions to writers is passing (if, indeed, it ever really existed in the first place).

Be a unique and delicate snowflake, even if that means you should be prepared to melt away at a moment’s notice. Just remember that lots of snowflakes together tend to effect change, whether they want to or not.

I Wish I'd Thought of That

2007-01-21T12:06:00.000-05:00

Here are some things that I have run across recently that really make me wish I'd said them first.

I disagree with much of what Zadie Smith says in this essay, but I believe that she makes a good point: chances are very good that you will fail at whatever literary endeavor you put your mind to. The important part about that failure is the admonition to fail better. Strive to overcome your limitations and do not be dismayed about your inevitable lack of success.

If you are not reading the Grumpy Old Bookman, then you are missing out on some choice commentary. He recently went through Lulu's publishing process with one of his mid-length works, just to see how it all worked. His conclusion is that self-publishing your novel in this way is not likely to set the world on fire. However, this is a good way to produce a calling-card book. Or even just a book that you can hold in your hands.

He also points out that it is possible to use the self-publishing model to get incrementally better at writing and promotion. Publish one book, see how it does, then refine your technique. After all, you have nothing to lose by doing so.

Finally, Simon & Schuster are using Gather.com to host a writing competition that uses the existing community to rate the quality of the books that have been submitted. It's not a new idea, by any stretch of the imagination. The Frontlist, for example, already does something similar. Still, as ideas go, it's time has definitely come.

Leaving the Dream

2007-01-16T15:45:00.000-05:00

Most of us have heard the Beatles single Paperback Writer, even if only as a Muzak cover while shopping for chinos in Target. The lyrics to this song are, in my opinion, the quintessential depiction of the myth of the paperback writer.

Paper back writer (paperback writer)
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

It's the dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn't understand.
His son is working for the Daily Mail,
It's a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

Paperback writer (paperback writer)

It's a thousand pages, give or take a few,
I'll be writing more in a week or two.
I can make it longer if you like the style,
I can change it round but I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

If you really like it you can have the rights,
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

Paperback writer (paperback writer)

Paperback writer - paperback writer
Paperback writer - paperback writer

Sounds like every query letter parody you’ve ever read, doesn’t it? It has all the elements: give me a break, I worked really hard on this, I can change it if you like, it could make you a million, let me please quit my job.

What I love about this is that it shows how widespread the myth of the paperback writer really is. It is so pervasive that a songwriter was able to write a pop song about the process that rose to number one and that was forty years ago. People still identify with it today. They can relate to this kind of dream.

And no wonder. If you think about it, this is a universal concept. At some point, everyone looks towards the horizon and thinks “just you wait.” We all want to believe that we have some secret (or not so secret) thing that makes us better than the people around us. We are all the secret god-kings of our own private universes and if you think I’m just talking about writers, then you have no idea how close to the surface absolute desperation lurks in the average man on the street.

But we are writers. We’ve read about quiet desperation and we know that we have the means to overcome it, not just in ourselves, but in those around us. That’s what the best kinds of art accomplish, after all – it transforms the mundane and mediocre and make them magically other. All we need is that chance, that opportunity, that lucky break.

You see how easy it is to buy into the myth? A couple of pretty sentences, the orchestra swells and suddenly you are the authorial equivalent of Luke Skywalker watching the twin suns of Tatooine set while life goes on somewhere else – someplace that you are not. It’s enough to make you sigh and want to move to Cozumel.

The truth is, however, that writing is just like every other job. If you are exceedingly lucky, you can find yourself in a decent situation that you (sort of) like, but doesn’t pay the rent. Or you can find yourself in a shitty situation that still doesn’t really pay the rent. Or you could find yourself in a position that doesn’t pay for much of anything at all.

Because you have chosen to follow the dream of the paperback writer, though, chances are that you will find yourself wrapped up in a newer, more adult, more neurotic version of the “get me out of here, I’m dying” dream that you had when you were in high school. The difference is that there is no graduation date built into life. You pretty much have to take things into your own hands and learn to stop complaining because you haven’t done anything but nobody has bothered to recognize your genius yet.

The important part about the myth of the paperback writer is recognizing it before it sets in. You are a writer. That means that you are expected to be self-conscious about your surroundings. You are practically instructed to be observant and to pay attention. And if you do not have the presence of mind to comprehend your situation as you lapse into an unintentionally ironic version of the mythic journey, there’s not a lot of hope for you.

But eventually, you will realize that following the myth of the paperback writer is the authorial equivalent of bukkake, with you as the victim. And you really have to ask: Why would you put yourself in that position?

So what is the alternative? The alternative is to work hard at your writing and get good. Don’t worry about the validation of the professionals. Put your work in the hands of the only people that matter – the readers. If you cannot do that directly, figure out a way to do that. Be creative and, if you cannot be sufficiently creative, then take the hint and pack it in.

If you cannot be part of the solution, then you are worse than just another part of the problem - you are a stereotype. And nobody wants to be a stereotype. More importantly, nobody wants to buy a book from someone who is indistinguishable from a poorly drawn version of a stereotype.

I Told You There Would Be a Quiz

2007-01-11T07:49:00.000-05:00

Pop quiz, hotshot. A literary agent calls you up and tells you that you have been offered an absurdly high advance of $11,000 for your first novel. What is your response? Yes or no?

Well, what is your alternative? Sleeping soundly at night, confident in the knowledge that you were once offered five figures for a work of your fiction? Going on to self-publish your own work on your terms, never earning quite that amount of money over the course of fifteen years? Something in between? None of the above?

The truth is that it could go in a lot of different directions. And, while it is important to look at the what-ifs for a negative response, it is just as important to look at what happens when you say “yes.”

So you are paid $11,000. First, your agent gets 15%. She’s the one that sealed the deal, she gets her cut. Standard business practice.

Second, hold on to the rest of that money. It’s going to have to last you for a while. Investing in something practical, like credit card debt, would probably be a good thing right about now.

You probably have no audience or prior sales figures, so the advance you earned was pretty much just a guess. It was based on some thumbnail comparisons – looking at which books yours is like and figuring out how many copies of those books sold. So it was an educated guess, but still… well, a guess.

The truth is that nobody in the publishing house or literary agency really knows for sure how many of your books will sell. The market is simply too idiosyncratic to gauge effectively. Marketing research is done, if you mean “checking to see which books sold last year and comparing the numbers of copies sold over time.”

(Yes, industry professionals are aware that this method of market research is akin to imputing Viet Cong casualties from complex formulas that include number of bombs dropped, time of day and estimated traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No, actual readers are rarely surveyed directly. That would be so… conventional.)

But anyway. Your novel. Someone guessed and figured that you would just about hit the over/under at 13,000 copies sold. And because the average return rate is about 40%, the initial print run of your novel will be say 20,000 copies. Maybe 18,000. No, 20,000 is a nicer, rounder number. 20,000 copies of your novel are printed.

Somebody didn’t do the math right. It’s okay – they’re still learning. Your agent assures you that you will be fine as long as you earn out your advance. You only need to sell 11,000 copies of your novel. To an audience that doesn’t know who you are. Your name may be on the cover of your book, but that doesn't save you from anonymity.

To be honest, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how to get out of that situation with your publishing career intact. But you can take consolation in two things: 1. you were a real writer – professionally published and everything 2. that guy who made the mathematical mistake? He’ll learn from that and go on to have a thriving career. Don’t worry about him because he certainly won’t be worried about you.

So it’s pop quiz time, hotshot. Do you take that $11,000 check and gamble that the industry professionals know what they’re doing?

What do you do?

What do you do?

The Unpublished Novel is Not Worth Reading

2007-01-07T16:11:00.000-05:00

In the past week and a half, the following things happened: I got a raise, I almost got a four day weekend, I had to deal with a security breach on my day off, I had an anniversary dinner with my wife and I was instructed to revamp a process that involves nine sub-contractors and an annual throughput of several million dollars. I’m not sure that you care about any of this, but it’s the only explanation that I have for my absence.

I had an entire essay written out, but I decided not to share it with you. One of the things that I pointed out was that promoting your own work by denigrating the work of others usually reveals your own insecurities far better than it highlights the weaknesses of your target.

Taking my own advice was an easy decision to make. After all, it is not necessary to publish everything.

Nobody ever listens to that advice when it’s given: don’t publish everything. It’s an easy mistake to make and a lot of writers (especially young ones) take what they consider to be the path of least resistance. They don’t know that friction is a good thing because it forces them to figure out solutions to problems that they didn’t consider.

The lack of shame can be liberating, but we are the harshest critics towards ourselves – especially in retrospect. The rule of thumb is that the first novel is always terrible. There is simply no way around this, so it’s best to simply accept the fait accompli and move on. Write another one, and another. If you are dedicated to your writing, you will continue to learn from your mistakes and get good.

Eventually, you will go back to your early novels and you will cringe. This is a good thing. As soon as you are embarrassed by your first novel, you are ready to start thinking about publishing one of your better ones.

If you are skilled enough to create an audience for your work, you may actually get requests for your early work. This is unlikely, but it could happen. Only then should you think about publishing it. You don’t have to, though – part of the fun of being a writer lies in having an apocrypha.

An Open Invitation

2006-12-27T14:29:00.000-05:00

There is one major question that everyone in publishing wants an answer to: who can spot the best stuff? Mind you, I’m not just talking about quality material – I’m talking about marketable material, which is far more important. Your latest work could be an artistic masterpiece but if it doesn’t earn out the advance, I wish you good luck in selling the next one.

The answer to the most prevalent question in publication is obvious, even if it is a little disconcerting: the readers. The audience is the only group of people with a perfect track record for picking which books will perform well. No agent, editor, publisher, marketer, publicist, critic or slushpile reader is even close to being that good.

But from the perspective of the industry, it is not the readers that are buying the material. The publishing houses are. Individual editors get to make the decisions about whether a given book is worth gambling on. In a lot of cases, these individuals get it wrong and the gamble does not pay off. There are any number of reasons for this, but the final answer depends on your point of view.

The usual reason that gets bandied about is poor quality work. If I had a nickel for every time someone cited “should have written a better book” as the excuse for why the book didn’t sell, I’d be a rich man. (This begs the question of why an industry professional would bother to publish a bad book – but that question never gets asked, let alone answered.)

Another possible explanation could also be that the industry regards market research as something that happens to other people. Nobody has ever asked me, “what kinds of books do you want to read?” I find this kind of strange, considering how many books are on my shelves at home.

I submit that if a book does not earn out its advance and the author does not ever see any money from the audience, then the publisher should have simply saved a step and released the book in-house. It would have come to the same end.

Even more, I submit that the current attention lottery system that is the slushpile is quaint and outmoded. The only function that it performs effectively is quality control. But weeding out the basic flaws – spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization – are tasks so easy that a computer could do it, which makes the task doubly tragic. On the one hand, some writers actually ignore the tools available to everyone. On the other hand, tens of thousands of people across the planet are employed to perform a task that a computer could do far faster and more efficiently. No matter how you cut it, that’s just plain sad.

So what? Who cares that some anonymous, disgruntled author with barely enough talent to rub two pixels together thinks this system doesn’t work? That means nothing and less than nothing.

Perhaps we should look at the numbers, instead. Readership is decreasing. More and more books are being self-published. More and more authors are not able to earn out their advances. More and more independent bookstores are closing shop because they cannot compete with high-volume superstores. Is this the fault of the slushpile? Maybe it’s just on overwhelming number of bad business decisions, perpetuated by over 80,000 publishers simultaneously. Or maybe there’s just a single bad business practice that they all seem to engage in.

I tend to lean towards the latter. It is idiotic that, in this day and age, that professionals would make a decision about which goods to produce without any form of market research whatsoever. It’s not as if publication is a cheap process. The average advance alone is worth several thousand dollars. Not every book gets a marketing budget, but those budgets that exist are easily in the four- or five-digit range. And then there are the costs associated with books that get returned because the bookstores got tired of trying to sell them to an uninterested public.

Is there a solution to this problem? Certainly. A surface reading of The Wisdom of Crowds suggests that replacing the slushpile would be a really good place to start. Don’t get rid of it – just update it. Stop hiring entry level employees to dig through a mountain of paper to determine whether any given work is worthy of publication. Instead, build a website that anyone can submit to (with a thousand-word limit) and start asking the audience for their opinion. This is somewhere between open source content management and collaborative filtering and if it sounds suspiciously Web 2.0, that’s because it is.

Now, the current thinking in the industry is that the readers shouldn't be forced to wade through the slush pile. In fact, the received wisdom is that the readers don't want to wade through the slush pile. This line of thinking has allowed professionals to crank the melodrama knob up to 11. They suffer for your reading pleasure, you see. You - the reader - do not want to know what was rejected. It's awful, awful stuff and its best if you don't see how the sausage is made. As sympathy ploys go, it's unrealistic enough to get tossed before the reader gets to page 2.

A more realistic alternative might be to admit that the current process isn’t all that old, effective or fair. Even more, inviting the readers to choose which books should be published gives them a stake in the final product. They can even follow the process and build buzz in anticipation of the release. That’s viral marketing in a nutshell and all you have to do is ask the readers for their opinion (this is also known as market research, for those industry professionals unfamiliar with the term). And if you are one of those people protesting that readers shouldn’t be forced to trudge through the slushpile, you might want to take a refresher in what consent actually means.

For the people who feel the need to point out that these kinds of things haven’t worked before, I can only point out that these kinds of things haven’t been tried by a major publisher or agent before. There is a huge difference in category between an unpublished nobody and a brand name publishing house.

In the end, all of business is a gamble. But there is a difference between an educated guess and an experienced guess. To this point, most of the guessing that drives publication is experienced, and we can all see how well that’s been working out. Some will dismiss my opinion out of hand, but the odds are good that someone will see the potential and make a process change before the competition can change their point of view. I know which ones I’d bet on.

Edit: Sean Lindsey has made a rebuttal to this post here. Check it out.

Learning the Wrong Lessons

2006-12-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

One of the things that distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful people is the ability (and willingness) to learn. Not just from mistakes (although that is important), but also from the success of others.

An excellent example of this is PublishAmerica. Despite the opinions of industry professionals, writers, reviewers, agents and just about anyone with a working knowledge of how publishing works, PublishAmerica remains the 800 pound self-publishing gorilla that will not be going away any time soon.

The reason that PublishAmerica is so successful (profitable - not popular, and certainly not good) is that they have taken a good, hard look at the current publishing business model and figured out where the money is: the okaysellers. The okaysellers are the vast majority of books published by the industry, the books that make a profit in aggregate. And, because first-time okaysellers may or may not earn out their advances, the authors themselves become a more or less disposable commodity.

PublishAmerica has clearly paid attention to this aspect of the industry and realized that if the market in marginal books is able to sustain thousands of publishers, then it might as well be tapped to maintain yet another. The twist that PublishAmerica has applied to this marketing model is exactly the same thing that produces their bad reputation: they will publish anyone.

From a business perspective, this is brilliant. PublishAmerica’s website indicates that they publish on the order of thirty thousand new authors a year. If each of those authors only sells 100 copies, that’s still almost three hundred thousand books. Even better, they have no marketing budget, no minimum print run, no co-op to pay out, no returns to worry about, minimal advances and low expectations, so publishing everything is not a gamble (yet another lesson learned from established publishers – gambling is not a reliable method of earning money).

Even better – PublishAmerica has tapped a previously untapped market: the disenfranchised writers of the world. Not only are they providing a service that these writers want, but they are doing it in a way that forces those writers to do the marketing themselves. These writers will probably only market to their friends and families (which is where those hundred copies tend to go), but if those friends are anything like mine, they are not unusually avid readers. In effect, PublishAmerica is getting people who usually don’t buy books to buy books. Mainstream publishers cannot figure out how to make this happen – not even governmental literacy campaigns can make this happen. It turns out that all you have to do is let people publish anything and their immediate networks will buy into the market.

Granted, most of those market buy-ins are extremely limited. Even worse, PublishAmerica doesn’t really emphasize the fact that their authors should educate themselves about what they can expect. Instead, they subtly play up the idea that someone is holding the authors back and if they just had access to bookstores or better marketing… Well, we all know the arguments by now. Suffice it to say that PublishAmerica’s business ethics are really what leaves that lingering bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

While there is a collective dismay towards these practices, almost no one has really cottoned to the fact that the PublishAmerica embraced the central mantra of publishing professionals everywhere - “It’s a business!” - and tailored their process accordingly. After all, sales are the only metric that matters; if quality was important, there would be a way to accurately measure it and, more importantly, reliably make money on it.

From the perspective of the Science Fiction Writers Association (among others), the fact that PublishAmerica will publish anyone is a terrible thing, especially because PublishAmerica still claims that it won't. From the lofty heights of the published authors who managed to strike it lucky in the slush pile lottery, having no quality control filter is the worst possible thing that could happen to a publishing house. For a start, it means that there are no minimum standards with regards to spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization or storytelling ability. More than that, it takes great steps towards easing the high school popularity contest pressure cooker that the publishing community has created (intentionally or not) over the past few decades.

In response, the SFWA took a look at PublishAmerica’s standards and equated “PublishAmerica authors" to “unpublished slush pile authors” in their mental hierarchy. They even went so far as to put together a book called Atlanta Nights, specifically to point out how low PublishAmerica’s standards actually are. The intention was to attack PublishAmerica’s credibility, but this coalition of authors have spent so much time in the echo chamber of traditional publishing that it didn’t really occur to them that credibility attacks don’t really work on bottom feeders. For people who make their money providing a gateway to the cat piss men of the world, Atlanta Nights is less of a gotcha and more of an endorsement.

Lesson learned? Probably not.

PublishAmerica still acts like it doesn't cater to people who don't understand the difference between "everyone should be able to publish" and "everyone should publish." The SFWA is still high-fiving itself over the way it put one over on PublishAmerica and the overall situation has not changed.

There is an easy explanation for this state of affairs. As long as access to publishing resources is a matter of winning an attention lottery, there will always be good writers with bad timing. These writers will always want to publish and probably should publish. There are enough of these kinds of writers out there working to get noticed that sooner or later there will be a breakthrough; there are already breakthroughs happening all the time. Small, but significant.

PublishAmerica doesn't understand that it's offering a stepladder over the slushpile. It is very likely that PublishAmerica doesn't care. The publishing industry didn't learn the valuable lesson that was offered, either: as long as there are alternatives, writers will take them. Even good writers. Frustration is not necessarily tied to talent.

As long is there is an ongoing and healthy debate about the subject at a rational and mature level, self-publishing will get stronger. The best ideas survive the harshest criticisms because they allow themselves to be shaped into something stronger, more resilient.

The lesson learned from this situation is that credibility is an easy way to attack anyway. Bruce Sterling calls them centipedes. But if credibility can be established, then where does that leave self-publishing? In need of credibility.

As professional gamblers, industry insiders should be very nervous. The odds are very good that some major breakthrough will occur in self publishing. The numbers of people talking about it are simply too high for that not to occur. And it only takes one solid breakthrough to change everything.

I have no idea what form the breakthrough will take, but it is very likely to happen. It is only a matter of time, really. When the current floodwaters of self-publication ebb, there will be a variety of new oxbows in the publishing stream. These will not be regulated and any illusion of central control that currently exists will be seriously eroded. This is the true lesson that PublishAmerica has to teach us all. We just have to be very careful about where we step as we navigate our individual paths- there is still a lot of potential to get washed away.

How Very Meta of Me

2006-12-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

The attentive readers in the audience (and I know that all of my readers are attentive) have probably started wondering why I haven’t been pinging the publishing industry much lately. After all, the ostensible point of this blog is to work towards the betterment of publishing, right?

Well, yes. I mean, I have a lot of things to say about what the industry could be doing – to improve itself, to improve its business practices, to improve its relationship with writers, to improve its profits. But before I can get to any of those things, I feel that it is more important to point out that writers (especially unpublished writers) have just as much room for improvement as the rest of the industry.

Self-improvement among the writing community serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates that writers are able to be professional, serious people who don’t throw temper tantrums because their unreasonable expectations were not met. Second, it offers writers a stable, easily-travelled, toned-down path towards reasonable credibility.

Exuberant claims that any author can be financially successful if he just sets his mind to it simply don’t help anyone. These kinds of pronouncements merely offer yet more false hope and set up yet another generation of disenfranchised writers. A more measured and reasonable message will, with any hope, produce a crop of writers who know what they want, know how to get it and are happy to eschew the pitfalls of the industry entirely.

And that’s the key to improving the industry: by creating a cost-effective alternative to the current standards and practices. There must be an incentive to change. Given that most of us are not part of the decision-making apparatus of a major publishing house, our only option is to start acting like we care about our collective futures. We are not disposable commodities. At the same time, we are not delicate and unique snowflakes. We are something far more robust and far weirder: we are writers.

But until we are willing to act like adults first and leave the temperamental artist persona on the page, we will remain disenfranchised.

Military officers have a saying: "Amateurs talk about strategy, dilettantes talk about tactics, and professionals talk about logistics." I hate to say it, but the paragraphs you have just read are strategy. There is almost nothing logistical in there at all. To correct that, I want to give you some homework: how publishing costs are calculated. There will be a quiz on this later.

As much as I hate to admit it, there is a tactic that industry professionals have taken up that works very effectively. The phrase vanity press is often used when people talk about self-publishing. In fact, this phrase is so ubiquitous that you can often tell what side of the debate a person is on by whether they use it.

While it’s true that most self-publishing firms are merely gateways that allow anyone to publish, I’m not sure that vanity press is the best phrase to describe them. The reason for that is that vanity press is a weasel word. We’re all writers here, so it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that language can be used to shape our perception of things; that’s the whole point of language. And, when it comes to an abstract concept that has forced the industry to acknowledge it, it’s hardly surprising that a pre-existing negative connotation got picked up and put back in place.

The truth is, though, that if self-publishing can be fairly described as vanity press, then traditional publishing could be fairly described as validation press. After all, all art is vanity and anything that has to be vetted is merely validating the author’s ego. I wouldn’t be so petty as to suggest that you start using this phrase when you’re out and about, but it is a clever bit of wordplay and serves as a nice transition.

Speaking of validation (see what I did there?), a post from this blog was recently mentioned in the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, which "is a partnership between thinkers and researchers from/affiliated with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and companies with a keen interest in deciphering convergence culture and the implications it can have for their business. Members of the consortium gain new insights and ideas about a very intractable and urgent set of questions that they are already grappling with in the current business environment. We aim to expand the role of industrial leaders by informing them of dynamic humanistic scholarship while providing them with early access to the cutting-edge ideas that emerge through the consortium."

Another set of articles for you to check out are The Myth of Publishing and The New Publishing Paradigm. Like post-modernism, I often feel that the word paradigm means absolutely nothing, but should be used as often as possible. Despite this, I am very impressed to find more and more people who are open to the idea of doing it yourself.

I’ll have more material over the next few weeks, so sit tight. If you feel the need to do something while you wait, feel free to let people know that I’m still reviewing science fiction. For some reason, the trickle of submissions has dried up.

Master of Your Domain

2006-12-18T15:04:00.000-05:00

One of the best things that you can do for yourself and your writing career is to create a website. Not just any website, though – you want to create an interesting, dynamic, creative, dazzling website that tells everyone who visits exactly how interesting, dynamic, creative and dazzling you (and/or your book) really are.

Sort of.

The truth is that web page design has been picked apart and analyzed by people much smarter than me, to the point where there are entire blogs dedicated to bad design. What does analyzing bad design tell you? It tells you what not to do.

As a writer, there is little chance that you actually have the design skills necessary to produce a good webpage, much less a great one. However, there are plenty of people out in the world who work as freelance web designers. These are the people that you should be talking to.

Why? Because your website is an easy and effective way to market yourself. You can quickly and easily lump all of the significant information about you and your book on the front page so it leaps out at people when they visit. In addition to the basic information (your name, your book’s name, publication date, genre), your site should have a link to where it can be bought and a free copy of the book for people to download. Cory Doctorow explains the concept better than I could, but remember the phrase “try before you buy.”

When you print up business cards and flyers for your book, be sure that you include the website. One of the most effective advertisements I have ever seen was for the webcomic xkcd. It was a simple business card with just those four letters on the front. On the back were the words “Just Google it already.”

Take responsibility for the presentation of your work. If your book was important enough to self-publish, then it should be important enough to market effectively. And if your website looks like it was put together by someone with not a lot of design skills, then you are not marketing your book effectively. It’s that simple.

The Oblivion Society – An apocalyptic comedy novel by Marcus Alexander Hart (Lulu)

2006-12-15T09:05:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of comedy novels (and novelists) out there, but there seems to be a dearth of comedy novels that are also genre novels. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of high-profile authors with the wherewithal to venture into that territory without hesitation. The reason might have something to do with the fact that writing that kind of novel requires an in-depth knowledge and absolute love of the genre, as well as an ability not to flinch when poking fun at those same genre elements.

Marcus Alexander Hart has all of that, in spades. The Oblivion Society is not strictly a laugh-a-minute kind of novel, but it does demonstrate a sly understanding of geek culture, which is just as funny. Basically, if you like Christopher Moore, you will like this novel.

The basic storyline is sound: a handful of twenty-something nobodies with retail jobs and no real ambition to speak of are the only survivors from their small Florida town when an accidental nuclear holocaust sweeps through. Despite the fact that they are losers with poor social skills who can barely tolerate each other, they are forced to acknowledge that there is strength in numbers and put aside their differences just to survive. The result is a character-driven road trip that takes them on a series of adventures.

If that sounds pat, that’s because the road trip is really secondary to the character interaction. Take this conversation between two of the main characters early on in the novel:

“Do you think that Obi-Wan Kenobi changed his name to Ben Kenobi just out of convenience?” Bobby asked.

“Convenience?” Erik replied.

“Yeah, like can you picture him on the phone trying to order a new droid from QVC or something? He’d be all ‘Send that to Obi-Wan Kenobi. No, I’m sorry, not Joey Kenobi, Obi. Obi-Wan Kenobi. No! Not Juan Kenobi! Do I sound Colombian to you? Look, just send it to Ben, okay? Ben Kenobi.’”

That conversation could have happened in any of a thousand living rooms between any of a thousand sci fi geeks drinking beer and waiting for something interesting to happen. The fact that these two are going to shortly find themselves struggling to survive makes it all the more entertaining. More importantly, it sets up these characters as the kind of people who stand around, trying to figure things out. These are not steely-eyed men of action. These are geeks, with an abundance of useless knowledge who find themselves in an increasingly bad situation.

As the novel progresses, you find yourself caring about these characters, wanting to know what happens next. From what I remember from Freshman composition, that's the way these things are supposed to work.

This is the kind of novel that could easily find a cult following, if the author was canny enough to market it properly. Given the fact that he had hot girls wearing skimpy Oblivion Society t-shirts at 2005’s San Diego Comic-con, I’d say that he had a pretty good start.

Patience is the Biggest Challenge of Them All

2006-12-12T13:46:00.000-05:00

To begin with, I have an admission to make: I have been lax in responding to everyone who has submitted a book for review. I am still working my way through the list of submitters and I really should have sent out some kind of formal response (ie "I got your submission, I'll let you know when I'm ready to read it, don't take this response as a no, etc.") right away, which I didn’t do. For that, I apologize.

Having said that, I noticed that one of the people who submitted to me showed up in the comments thread on an up-and-coming industry blog. When this submitter sent me an email, that email landed in my spam folder, which is never a good sign. When that submitter commented on the blog, others started tearing the submitter apart, for good reason. The comments were grammatically awkward and the pdf that was submitted was both poorly formatted and lacked simple things, like capital letters and punctuation. Worse, when this was pointed out, the submitter got argumentative, accusing people of not reading the entire work before passing judgment.

I’m not trying to shame this person in any way, shape or form. But they do make an excellent object lesson in what not to do.

First, posting in broken English is fine for Mahir, but not for native speakers. Make sure that every sentence you write is clear. If you are not sure if your sentences are clear, read them aloud to yourself. Even better, read them aloud to someone else. I really shouldn’t have to tell you this.

Second, by producing a book that does not contain the basic elements that most readers expect when a thought has started or ended, this person has staked out territory in the realm of difficult composition. Difficult composition means that the reader is automatically challenged to understand what information is being conveyed. The problem is that the reader has a multitude of choices when it comes to entertainment. By producing something that produces more frustration than hook, you are offering them the choice to simply put it down and move on to the next piece. (I’ll come back to this in a minute.)

Third, the submitter was argumentative when given honest feedback. “This book is difficult to read,” is a well-meant, honest critique and can be given after only a few paragraphs of reading. Arguing with that critique is an easy path to ridicule – a place that most readers will not hesitate to go, with or without provocation.

Remember, as you interface with the world around you, your words and actions will help determine your reputation. More importantly, arguing with the wrong person can get you banned from a potential market, which is never a good thing. (And, lest you think this is a problem that is confined merely to writers, look at these rules for artists and spot how many apply to writers.)

Now, I said that I’d come back to the point about challenging narratives, because it is important. One of the things that first-year art students are taught is that they must learn art history and composition before they are allowed to try anything difficult, abstract or conceptual. Take Picasso – do you really think that he started with Cubism? In fact, his early paintings are filled with realism, mostly because he was learning how to use things like color and composition properly. It was only after he got comfortable with these tools that he felt confident enough to step outside the boundaries and truly experiment.

I point this out because I sometimes feel like first-time authors take a look at something like the thirty six dramatic situations or the grand list of role playing game plots and think “I should be able to produce something better than this – something edgy, different, challenging!” While those authors are not necessarily wrong, in a greater sense, they are not always right, either.

It used to be that when an artist took his first steps along the path of creativity, he would find a master and apprentice himself. After a few years, he would graduate from apprentice to journeyman and, finally, to the rank of master. To cross from one stage to another, the artisan would produce a definitive work, which is where we get the term “masterpiece” from. To be honest, I’m not sure how easy it is to find an author who is willing to mentor a new talent anymore, although I’m sure it does happen from time to time. But the idea of a series of gradual steps is still an appealing one and should probably be reintroduced.

I read once that the first novel or two are usually autobiographical. It is only after the author has taken a look at someone else and wondered “what is their life like?” that he begins to get into a different mode. I’m really not sure how well that holds true for every author, but I do know that new authors could do a lot worse than to pick a plot that interests them and just knocked out a single novel that shows how well they can tell a story. It doesn’t have to be new or original or fancy or marketable at all.

In fact, I would argue that the first two or three novels should never be exposed to the light of day. Those are the apprentice works – a chance to work all of the bad narrative choices out of the system before getting around to the real job of writing a proper novel that breaks the rules the author has worked so hard to learn.

At this point, reader reaction will probably cut in one of two directions. Writers with a single novel (or less) under their belts are no doubt cringing and saying something to the effect of, “But what if I never get another novel-worthy idea?” Seasoned writers, with at least two novels under their belts, understand that it doesn’t work like that. Getting good at novel-writing takes time and effort and an inability to be dismayed by something as simple as an anonymous blog writer with delusions of grandeur.

But getting good at self-publishing can only work if you have a good novel to work with. And ignoring the basics of writing in a rush to get something published will not serve you as well as you might think. You might end up in the same boat as the individual who inspired this post and nobody wants that. It doesn’t make you look good and it doesn’t make the prospect of self-publishing look good. In the end, you aren’t just hurting yourself – you are hurting the rest of us as well.

So, for the good of your writing, the good of your self-publishing career and for the good of the community in general, take it slow. Be the best writer you can be and then write another novel where you strive to be even better. It’s the first step on an important journey and the rest of us would prefer that you not destroy the road we’re all walking on.

Do You Trust Me?

2006-12-11T11:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I noticed an entry on the Convergence Culture Consortium (one of my favorite blogs, right after BLDGBLOG). The post pointed towards an article on the by Joe Pareles in the New York Times about the sheer amount of user-produced content that hit the internet in 2006. Self-published books are not mentioned, but if you substitute the word “books” for “music” throughout, you can start to see the relevance.

What Pareles finds most interesting is that when you “toss out those old obstacles to creativity [hit-driven recording companies, hidebound movie studios, timid broadcast radio stations, trend-seeking media coverage] and, lo and behold, people begin to crave a new set of filters.” Why? Because there is just so damned much content out there for people to chose from. Once your run-of-the-mill internet punter discovers exactly how much information is available for perusal, something akin to agoraphobia sets in.

Which, quite naturally, leads Pareles to the question of filters.

The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace -- some played two million or three million times -- tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.

Unlike the old media roadblocks, however, their filtering can easily be ignored. The promise of all the self-expression online is that genius will reach the public with fewer obstacles, bypassing the entrenched media. The reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one that requires just as much hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution system.

This is exactly the problem facing the self-published writer. We know that it is not simply enough to write or publish a book. These, in and of themselves, do not hold any promise of exposure to the audience. What is necessary is a means of telling the audience that the book exists – that it is good and worthy of reading; perhaps even worthy of purchasing.

In the commercial publishing model, there are two filters. The first is the slush pile, which works really well for winnowing out those authors that are weak on grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence formation, storytelling or reality. As good as it is for filtering those things out, it is equally bad at filtering in the good stuff. Still, what gets stuck in the great publishing lint trap goes through the machine and is spit out the other side in the direction of the second filtration system: the reviewer.

(The word reviewer is, in my opinion, a deceiving word for what the individual inhabiting the role is intended to do. Really, the word should be recommender, because the individual is recommending good work to people who are, honestly, looking for recommendations. Ordinarily, I would throw this away as a digression, but words are important, not just to those of us who are writers, but to those who consider the English language as the primary means of communicating ideas and concepts to one another. If you do not periodically reexamine your labels, you run the risk of allowing those labels to grow stiff from disuse. Okay, now I’m done digressing.)

The review filter is a time-tested, honorable, well-intentioned, grass-roots model that faces exactly the same problem as the produced content that is pushed through it: exposure. It’s great that I am offering to review science fiction and Fantasy POD is offering to review fantasy. But if there are no readers who are looking in our dusty corner of the internet, then those reviews don’t mean a thing.

But where a writer (or other content producer) faces an uphill battle to get any kind of exposure, a reviewer has the ability to gain a much more distributed readership because he is able to produce a variety of different kinds of content. Not every book reviewed will be to the tastes of every reader, but the chances are good that some of the books reviewed will be to the tastes of some of the readers – enough so that the readers will learn to trust the tastes of the reviewers and come back to them for more reviews down the road. Eventually, some of those readers may end up recommending the reviewer to other people, allowing others (readers and writers alike) to tap into the ever-explanding nexus of exposure.

Basically, the key word here is trust. If you do not trust the reviewer in your role as a reader, there is no reason to trust the reviewer in your role as a writer. At the same time, your reading habits should include at least one trusted reviewer that is able to tell you where the new, good material is to be found. More than anything, that trust relationship will drive the new content filters (like myself and others that have chosen to take on this dirty job with me) and allow them to generate the readership that they need to be effective recommenders-at-large.

When Yog’s Law Meets Tax Law

2006-12-03T09:39:00.000-05:00

Yog’s Law states that money always flows towards the writer. Many have taken this to mean that the only place that an author should sign a check is on the back, when they endorse it. That’s fine and dandy, if you are the kind of person that likes to sit around and wait for checks to arrive in the mail. However, even those who have taken this skill to the next level will eventually find themselves in need of an accountant. But accountants cost money. If you follow Yog’s Law to the letter, then you will quickly find yourself in a conundrum.

All foolishness aside, one of the most consistent messages that I read on the internet is that publishing is a business. If you are going to self-publish, you need to remember that. You are going into business for yourself. Sooner or later, you will discover the need for bookkeeping – that is, keeping track of your money.

You see, business is all about the bottom line – how much money do you have? Money comes in and money goes out. Vendors have to be paid and sales have to be kept track of. Otherwise, how will you know if you made any profit?

The most important thing that every self-published author should have from day one is a spreadsheet that keeps track of your expenditures. Everything that you have spent money on in preparation for the publication of your book is fair game. Did you pay an editor to look at your manuscript? Did you hire a graphic designer to build a website, cover and fliers for you? Did you send out review copies? Did you pay a lawyer to look over your contract? Did you print business cards? Did you go to trade shows?

Everything that you paid out goes in the category of losses. Everything that you earned from the sales of your book goes in the category of gains. The difference between the two becomes your profit/loss statement. Chances are that you will be able to show a loss for the year. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

I have a friend who runs a small entertainment law practice out of his basement, in addition to his day job as General Counsel of a moderately sized IT firm. He told me once that his private practice has not made a profit once in seven years. These things happen.

The important thing to remember is that if you are keeping track of your profit and loss, you can report all of that on your taxes at the end of the year. A financial loss for your small business does not have to be catastrophic. In fact, it can be a good thing. For one, you are allowed to deduct the value of your loss from amount of money that you earned, which means you are paying less in taxes.*

The reduction in taxes means that Yog’s Law has been satisfied. The money flowed towards the author, even if it was from an unexpected source. And that bit about not spending money? We’ve all got choices to make.

*This is standard business practice, by the way. A number of years ago, I read a piece of commentary which pointed out that it’s good policy for Hollywood studios to put out crappy pieces of underperforming material because they serve as net losses that can be balanced against overperforming blockbusters. Less profit equals less taxes.

I’ve never seen anything to indicate that publishing houses do the same thing, but I am almost cynical enough to believe it.

Doing Your Research For You

2006-12-03T09:10:00.000-05:00

One of the problems of the internet as research tool is that it can be very difficult to get answers to specific questions. What is the best way to self-publish? (Don’t.) Who should I use? (Not Publish America.) What should I watch out for? (Scammers.) What should I be doing? (Waiting for traditional publishing to call you.)

Despite the volume of noise debating about whether self-publishing is a viable economic alternative to traditional publishing (ahem), there are actually people who are making an effort to produce guidebooks to this new approach to publication. Finding word of these resources can be difficult, which is why they should be pointed out as often as possible.

Read these texts. You will not regret it.

The first text on the list is called On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile by Michael Allen. If you follow that link, you will find it as a free PDF download. It’s 80 pages long, but it looks at the mechanics of the slush pile from a statistical and mathematical point of view. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that the selection process is governed by chance and offers some solutions to overcome that problem.

Second on the list is Jeremy Robinson, who wrote POD People: Beating the Print-on-Demand Stigma. This book was written in response to the many emails he was receiving on a daily basis after making a success of his first self-published novel The Didymus Contingency.

Third on the list is the Fine Print of Self-Publishing by Mark Levine. Drawing on his experience as a contract lawyer, Levine lays out the differences between the various Print on Demand publishers working in the industry today.

If anyone else has any suggestions about other books that could be considered must-reads for the aspiring self-published author, please feel free to let me know.

Fellow Travellers

2006-12-02T10:24:00.000-05:00

If you are paying attention, you might notice that the list of links on the sidebar has changed slightly. Instead of merely linking to interesting blogs about POD and self-publishing, it is now linking exclusively to people who are making a contribution to the community. How? These people are taking it on themselves to review self-published work. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Interestingly, I made the decision to collect these reviewers after I got yet another email from someone pointing out their new blog, Fantasy POD. This person was inspired by my mission to seek out the best self-published science fiction (a search that is well under way, by the way) to create a blog so that he could review the best in self-published fantasy.

This trend in niche reviewing is inevitable. The Girl on Demand cannot possibly read all books in all genres; in fact, she specifically restricts what she is willing to accept. It was that restriction that led me to offer my services as a science fiction reviewer. Fantasy POD is setting up shop to accept fantasy. iUniverse Book Reviews accepts anything by an iUniverse publisher. Pub Guy, like the Girl on Demand, reviews general fiction and local Midwestern products.

If you know of anyone else (or if you, yourself, are willing to chip in with a blog of your own), please let me know so that I can send the links around to the various people in the loop. The concept of the Long Tail economy is centered around micro-niches - places where individual authors can find their perfect audience and flourish. Independant, anonymous, credible reviewers that target a specific genre are important, but they are just the start. The readers have to know that the reviewers exist as well, otherwise the exposure is still somewhat obscured.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, please take the time to post about me on your blog. I believe that a healthy self-publishing environment will only benefit the publishing industry in the long run. But the only way to prove that is to ensure that the environment becomes healthy, which means creating a positive, presentable, credible community. I have Opinions about what it will take to get there. I am happy to get constructive criticism; if an idea can not stand up under critical examination, then it will probably not stand up to real world conditions.

Edited to add: There are four more review sites on the sidebar now. POD People, P.O.D.Lings, None May Say and Gloomwing Magazine.

Son of edited to add: Pub-ioneer has also agreed to throw his reviewing hat into the ring. Stay tuned for genre and submission guidelines from that quarter. If you know a self-published author that is looking for reviews, send them in our direction. I've been expecting a deluge of inquiries, but I haven't more than a slow trickle so far.

Standards and Practices

2006-11-30T21:40:00.000-05:00

So you're a writer. You've written a book and now you're wondering what to do with it. Is it worthy of publication? How would you know if it was?

Well, the easiest way to tell is to ask someone. A writer's group is always a good option. An amateur reviewer might be willing to let you know. Beta readers are also a possibility. Basically, you are looking for anyone who is able to give you solid, dependable feedback.

But wouldn't some kind of scale be helpful? Something you can use to measure your writing against? I propose that Teresa Nielsen Hayden's list of reasons that a book is usually rejected be pressed into service to cover this need. The full list is as follows:

Author is functionally illiterate.

Author has submitted some variety of literature we don’t publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.

Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.

Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, dire straights, nearly penultimate, incentiary, reeking havoc, hare’s breath escape, plaintiff melody, viscous/vicious, causal/casual, clamoured to her feet, a shutter went through her body, his body went ridged, empirical storm troopers, ex-patriot Englishmen, et cetera.

Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.

Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can’t tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.

Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.

(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)

It’s nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.

Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.

The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it’s not the author’s, and everybody’s already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.

(You have now eliminated 95-99% of the submissions.)

Someone could publish this book, but we don’t see why it should be us.

Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.

It’s a good book, but the house isn’t going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it’ll just get lost in the shuffle.

Buy this book.

Basically, you want to fall as high on the list as possible. The basic cutoff line should be at least above number 8 before you even think about self-publication. Ideally, though, you want to be somewhere above number 11. The publishing industry may not have a reason to publish you, but if you can somehow come up with a good marketing plan, doing it yourself would not necessarily be a bad idea.

The important part here is to adhere to some kind of standard. Spelling, grammar, punctuation and coherent storytelling are all good places to begin, no matter who you are. It is possible to break the rules successfully, but it is easier to do so after you have proven that you understand (and have mastered) the rules in the first place.

If you are unwilling to do something as simple as write coherently, then you should probably ask yourself why your readers would want to do something complex, like trying to decipher what you have written.

Remember: self-publishing has a very bad reputation right at the moment, mostly because of people who couldn't be bothered to listen to (or even seek out) criticism. If you want to change that perception, it is in your best interests to present a product that shows your commitment to your craft. You can tell everyone who will listen that not all self-published books are inherently crappy, but you should also be willing to practice what you preach.

Flexing My Muscles

2006-11-30T14:17:00.000-05:00

So I’m back from vacation, rested and relaxed from a week and a half of seeing friends, visiting foreign places and abusing the hell out of my credit card. More importantly, I’m still working through my list of submissions. I have identified a few good prospects and at least one person who is very obviously missing a comma in the first sentence of his novel.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who used to review for a site that has since been shut down and he agreed (in principle) that it is better to simply review the good stuff than to waste time reviewing the bad stuff. True, it is worthwhile to tell readers not to bother, but when the author’s only true enemy is obscurity, it is easier to simply focus on what should be read than to distract yourself with everything else.

Which brings me to my next point. One of the links that I have collected to pass along came from someone that I tend to regard as having nothing good to say about self-publishing. Accordingly, I was going to use it as an example of that one viewpoint and then tear it to shreds. Having just reread it, I actually think that she has a lot of good points to make. Authors do tend to be delusional and often have no idea what exactly the publication (and subsequent marketing) process is really like. Read it for yourself and, as you do, check your reaction. Does it make you angry? Upset? Resigned? Then self-publication is probably not for you.

However, she does make one point that bears rebuttal. Readers are not interested in becoming slushpile readers. I would agree with this, except that standing in a bookstore without recourse to some kind of book review resource is not really any different than sorting through the slushpile. As a reader, you have no idea what you’re going to pick up and whether it will be any good. You have no idea whether it will really entertain you or whether it will simply make you regret your purchase. For all intents and purposes, you are buying on faith.

Still, our poster is talking about the readability of self-published books – the fact that they should conform to certain basic standards. I agree with this completely. If, as a writer, you find this somehow unfair or unreasonable, then you might as well stop reading this blog right now. The only way that self-publishing will ever gain any degree of respectability is if those people who choose to self-publish start being professional about the process.

Don’t believe me? Even those industries with a healthy attitude towards self-publishing are saying the same thing.

Finally, I give you a self-publishing manifesto of sorts. Again, I agree with this completely, with the caveat that if you are going to support the community, then you should be willing to start by representing yourself as a mature, capable, creator. That means learning from your mistakes and not whining when they are pointed out. That means acting like a businessman. That means treating the fact that your book will probably not be carried in bookstores as a challenge, not a conspiracy.

“If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don’t want it badly enough, you make excuses.”

- Hanif Kureishi

Don't make excuses.

Famous Last Words

2006-11-15T15:00:00.000-05:00

Obviously, I can’t keep my big mouth shut, even for a week. Yes, I’m still going on vacation, but I had something else to say before I go.

Here’s the deal: I’m a science fiction fan. I’ve always been a science fiction fan and I probably will probably always be a science fiction fan. I’m also a believer in the power of the small press. It’s probably about time that I did something besides simply arguing my points; proving at least one of them would probably be a good place to start.

To that end, I’m looking to profile some good, solid, self-published science fiction here on this blog. New stuff. Original stuff. Who knows? Maybe even stuff that is outside the current mainstream of science fiction. It’s probably a long shot, but it would be great to profile authors who have taken advantage of the self-publishing opportunity and actually done something truly innovative.

Send me your elevator pitch. Pretend you’re in an elevator with me for five minutes and you have to explain what your story is about. If I like the concept, I’ll ask for the full manuscript. If I like what I read, I’ll profile you here. In addition to the books themselves, I’m also interested in when you published, how much effort you put into your marketing, and how many sales you’ve made. (Demographics make the world go 'round.)

Like I said, I’m going on vacation until the first of December, so don’t expect an immediate response. But I promise to get back to everyone, even if it’s just a simple, “You should really learn to use spell check.”

Go ahead and tell everyone you know: I’m a glutton for punishment. But at least I’m making an effort. What have you done for your fellow authors lately?

Hiatus

2006-11-11T10:36:00.000-05:00

I'm going on vacation next week and won't be back until the beginning of December.

However, I will leave you with a task - something to do while I'm gone.

I recently saw the following quote by John L. Schumacher and almost immediately disagreed with it.

I have no wish to impart to, or plant within, the younger generation any of my philosophical or psychotic teachings, for they speak the truth, and the truth being what it is, they are perforce seemingly bitter and cynical, and not meant for the young and tender soul.

Those few subjected to wise counsel and given to profound thinking will learn in due time, and the remaining soiled, sordid, sundry masses will have no need or gift for philosophy - for their minds are impenetrable.

I believe that this is entirely the wrong approach to take, especially with regards to those who are about to enter the publishing industry. Individual authorial success lies in making sure that the lessons are spread around as much as possible. It is important to dispel myths and crush nascent dreams. For a writer to achieve his financial goals, the fiction must stop at the page. Brutal reality must be imposed willingly or it will be imposed by fiat. There are many reasons to explain why you don't have any money, but they don't change the fact that you don't have any money. Either you come to terms with that or you starve.

Which leads me to my task for you. Go out and educate other writers. Explain three basic points:

Constructive criticism is better than unrelenting ridicule.
If you are willing to work your ass off, success will probably take up to ten years, regardless of publishing route.
Blaming someone else for your marketing inadequacies does not make you look like a mature, credible businessperson.

The self-publishing revolution will only succeed if the individual authors are willing to accept realities of the business world. Interestingly, many successful businessmen live by the motto of "you make your own reality."Authors should be confortable with that - it's what they'd love to do on a full-time basis.

Denial is Not Just a River in Egypt

2006-11-10T11:42:00.000-05:00

I was reading an interview with Geoff Manaugh about architecture and JG Ballard the other day. Buried in the middle of the interview, the question was asked, “Much of the discourse on Ballard springs from English critics. As an American, do you see him as an especially British writer?”

Manaugh’s response gave me pause. (Emphasis mine)

Actually, no. I think, aside from vocabulary and punctuation and spelling — and Ballard’s settings, of course — it’s not at all obvious that Ballard is English. You can make points about sense of humour and so on, but Ballard doesn’t strike me as a British writer in the same way that Ian McEwan does, or Iain Sinclair. Or even Iain Banks. Ballard’s book don’t sell well in the U.S., but that’s entirely a top-down problem. I think the American publishing industry is in a state of free-fall, marketing all the wrong books in all the wrong ways. Trying to market Ballard would never occur to them. They want to sell people John Updike novels in hardcover — despite the fact that no one wants John Updike novels, and hardcover books are completely obsolete as a format. So they ‘experiment’ by publishing 900-page hardcover epics about farm life in 1920s Nebraska — and then still seem surprised that no one’s reading fiction in this country.

Short, good, fairly priced, intellectually progressive paperback books — that’s all you need.

While I agree with Manaugh about what the industry should be publishing, I agree with him more about the state of the industry. The publishing industry is in serious trouble. The sales numbers from 2004 bear this out. The fact that most professionally published authors cannot sell enough books to earn out their advances bears this out. The fact that writing a good book does not automatically mean that you have a best-seller bears this out.

But somehow, despite the fact the industry is in serious trouble, there is still no significant reduction in the number of authors who are willing to bend over backwards to get published. It does not seem to matter to them that the final judgment of their career will be how many books they sold in the first four months of publication. It does not seem to matter to them that they will probably never make more than $20,000 in the course of their (short) publishing career. It does not seem to matter to them that in five years, their books will be no longer available. It does not seem to matter that in twenty years, nobody will remember who they are or what they wrote. It is almost as if the simple act of being published is enough of a reward to overcome the other indignities that are inevitably associated with the process.

Despite the fact that the end result has changed dramatically, the publication process has not. If anything, the publishing industry has become more conservative than ever in their selection process. Up to 15% of new books being published every year are new authors, we are told. Up to 15%! Is that supposed to give the prospective new author a lot of hope? 85% of books being published every year are from proven industry performers. That means more of the same. But if overall sales are going down, then it probably stands to reason that perhaps the book-buying public (you remember them) is getting tired of “more of the same.”

In her response to me, Karen Syed made the following point:

The publisher and the author do create the demand with every effort they make, from the cover to the text to the promo materials. It is like any other product on the market. You have to be clever enough to convince the consumer that they MUST have your product and that is superior to the other similar products.

Manaugh clearly disagrees and I’m right there with him. The point of selling books is not to tell the reader what he should be reading. The point of selling books is to find out what the reader wants to read and to sell him books that fit the criteria. Certainly, raising interest in other books that may have been outside the reader’s point of view is a good thing. But without a clear idea of what the reading public wants to read, it’s downright impossible to get a good grip on what should be published. Anything short of that is just guesswork. (Educated guesswork is still guesswork.)

Go back to that Nicholas Sparks essay I linked to earlier. There’s an important paragraph that you should keep in mind if you actually think that professional publication is the only way to go:

With that in mind, as a writer, you have to understand business factors that are important to the editors making the decision on whether or not to buy your novel: What's the genre? What successful books are similar to the one you've written? Why is yours better? What's the market for your novel? How can we get the word out to that market? And most importantly, will this book be recommended to others?

Note that the the publishing industry isn’t interested in doing their own market research — that has somehow become the job of the author. As far as the industry is concerned, current book sales are as much market research as they need. What is selling now is what will be selling next year. It works now and it will work tomorrow. To accept this at face value is asking everyone to ignore the facts about book sales. And to ignore the facts about authors not earning out their advances. Oh, and the fact that an author has to spend quite a lot of time and energy and money in order to be successful, self-published or not? You might as well ignore that as well.

As far as the publishing industry is concerned, the Pope is not sick until he is dead and there is nothing at all wrong with the current state of the industry. More importantly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the current business practices of the industry. Any noise to the contrary just indicates that those of us who have been paying attention (as we have been instructed to do) have no idea what we’re talking about.

Remember that when you prepare your manuscript for submission: these are professionals and they know what they are doing. Just pray that you don't get told that you should have written a better book when your book fails to sell. Because that's not really their fault; after all, they took a chance on what was clearly a bad book. That's really your fault for not putting enough effort into your own sales and marketing. Any argument to the contrary merely underscores the fact that you have no business in professional publishing anyway.

It sounds very much like an argument that a scared fourth grader would make. But let's be honest — change is scary. And if the industry is experiencing negative growth, that means that it's changing. There is no real way to predict where this change will take the industry as a whole, but change can also equal opportunity for those that are bold enough to take advantage of the flux.

For example, self-publication may not automatically equal profitability, but perhaps it's time to let the myth of the self-supporting author die. For the most part, the author that makes a living on his novels alone is the exception rather than the rule. Everyone should be allowed to publish — the first amendment of the Constitution hasn't been eroded that much (yet). But not everyone should automatically expect sales. Sales are a reward for hard work and until every author realizes that, self-publication will remain a small, comic-opera movement without a shred of credibility.

But clearly, that's just me beating the drum for my personal agenda. A potentially healthy alternative to an unhealthy system will never work because it is different. And new. And fraught with challenges and unknowns. There is no promise of a reward at the end of a lifetime of work — monetary or otherwise. The current system should be all that you need. Ask anyone. You can trust their answers. After all, why would a professional lie to you?

What Quality Control?

2006-11-09T14:31:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest accusations leveled at the majority of self-published books currently on the market is the lack of quality control. And the more you look at that charge, the easier it is to prove. Astonishingly, there seems to be no end to the number of people who believe that spellcheck is entirely optional. But don’t take my word for it – take a look at this poor specimen for yourself.

Now, many people would be quick to blame Publish America for this travesty. Personally, I feel that the blame should start with the author. She obviously made no attempt to seek external criticism of her work before she rushed to publication. A fair use case could probably be made for the copyrighted image on the cover, but the fact of the matter is that Publish America should have known better than to allow something like that to go through.

(And that pretty much sums up my feelings about PA – every time you try to give them the benefit of the doubt, they do something else to shoot themselves in the foot. But I digress.)

Still and all, my basic point about quality control stands: it is the sole responsibility of the writer to make sure that every published product is of the highest possible quality. Not every publisher will take the time to check for you. Not every agent will take the time to check for you, either.

And if you actually believe that this is somehow unfair or discriminatory against the spelling-impaired, can I just point out that the alternative is unrelenting ridicule? Personally, if my options are a solid, well-meant critique that is intended to make me a better writer and merciless laughter that does nothing for my self-esteem or my writing abilities, I’d prefer to go with the one that makes me look like I know what I’m doing.

This set of choices is not limited to self-publishers, either. Even the professional writing advisors are starting to recommend hiring an editor/writing coach to make sure that your submission is up to par. If the industry best practices are starting to lean in the same direction as self-publishing best practices, you might want to take note.

Or you could just do what everyone else is doing and forsake the quality control process entirely. True, you could sell some books, but it’s far more likely that you’ll end up as an object lesson, proving the thesis that self-publishing simply isn't worth anyone's effort. Trust me, taking the time to make sure that everything is spelled correctly (for a start) is worth the investment. The same goes for grammar and sentence structure.

You never know – if enough people start doing it, it might actually become a trend.

Discussion is a Good Thing

2006-11-02T13:52:00.000-05:00

Recently, Karen Syed of Echelon Publishing ran across the most recent post in this blog and felt the need to produce a rebuttal of sorts. I enjoyed reading her response, enough so that I felt the need to rebut back. With any luck, this might actually transform into a conversation of sorts. Without these kinds of discussions, the industry will not change.

Karen points out that there is still an investment involved in printing “a couple thousand copies of one title.” Perhaps there is. But in a world where a couple thousand copies represents both an enormous investment and extremely optimistic thinking, wouldn’t a Print on Demand option make more sense? Lulu’s prices are very reasonable and there is no reason to believe that other small publishers couldn’t make the same kinds of deals with Lightning Source.

For the individual author, however, the price of publication is still essentially free. Not free, but close enough. With the right self-publishing company, the author does not have to pay a set-up fee for the book. Next to the marketing budget, this is often the largest expense.

Still, Karen is adamant about the fact that publication is not cheap. Unfortunately, some of the examples that she uses (editing, marketing) are not what I define as publication. In order to clarify my point, I made sure to define publication very early on – in the first sentence of my original post, in fact. Karen even reprinted that line: Publishing is the printing and distribution of bound books.

Karen disagrees with this definition and actually points out that I am “confusing the issues of production and publication.” To which I ask: How can editing, proofreading and graphic design be considered “only mildly important” to production? In my world, these are not just central to production. They are production.

It takes no especial skill or effort to turn a Microsoft Word document into a printed book. This is the lesson that Publish America has taught us and is a lesson that we should pay attention to. Publication is easy. The difficult part is publishing a quality product – hence the differentiation between publication and production. All of the important parts of the job fall under the heading of production, which is still technically pre-publication. (Marketing, not so much.)

Karen also takes issue (rightly so, I might add) with my suggestion that editors could be paid a bonus percentage of sales. True, the work of an editor is entirely behind the scenes. However, my experience with photography has taught me that if someone does good work that he can be proud of, he is more likely to promote that work independently of the main marketing push. If there is an incentive for the editor to do this extra marketing (a percentage of sales, for example), more editors might be willing to promote their work. In a world where self-published material often suffers from the perception of no editorial oversight, having an editor prominently bragging about his involvement might actually be a good thing.

In the same vein, every other professional in the production chain might benefit from a similar deal. It cannot possibly hurt the author to get additional marketing exposure. This is exactly the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that the publishing industry should be exposed to and that self-publishing excels in.

When I was reading Karen’s point about authors not earning out their advances, I thought for a moment that I had made a typo. On a reread, however, I remembered that I was trying to give authors the benefit of the doubt. I want to believe that there is a good chance that an author can earn out his advance. Unfortunately, that is probably over-optimistic and Karen pointed this out, making my case for me in the process.

She makes my points for me quite a bit more often as her rebuttal goes on, whether she knows it or not. It just makes me wonder if she had bothered to read the rest of my blog or just stuck with the single post. If she had, she would have probably run across my Nine Step Guide to Artistic Credibility, which makes some of the same points that she does.

What Scarcity?

2006-10-31T14:50:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, publishing – the printing and distribution of bound books – was expensive. It was necessary to outlay large amounts of money in order to publish enough copies of a book to make a profit. Because of this, those people who had the money and the desire to publish books made the not-entirely-stupid decision to be extremely discriminating when choosing who to publish. Because these decision-makers were the gateway for distribution, they were able to play the music and make the authors who wanted to be distributed dance to their tune.

There have been many reactions to this situation, mostly hovering around the unfair mark. It may be unfair, but it's also simple economics. There is a limited supply of publication slots due to the prohibitive price and there is a massive demand from writers who want their work to make the cut. Limited production capacity created a market based on scarcity.

Or, at least, that's how it used to be.

Publication has now become so cheap that it is now cost-effective for smaller companies to subsidize anyone's publication – to the point where publication for the individual author is effectively free. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, this has largely removed the monopoly that the publishing industry held due to the scarcity inherent in the market.

The industry has reacted to the loss of their monopoly by ignoring the loss and/or pretending that the scarcity has not disappeared. On those occasions when they deign to notice that publication is cheap, it is pointed out (at length) that the industry maintains a large collection of professionals who will work hard to turn a manuscript into a polished product. This is intended to be an incentive to maintain the illusion of the scarcity market.

What's interesting is that these features do not really fall under the category of publication. In the most accurate sense, editing and marketing and proofreading and graphic design all fall under the category of pre-publishing; more, any and all of those jobs can be outsourced or freelanced. The fact that they have become an integral part of the publishing infrastructure owes more to the human need for stability than anything else. But there is no reason why a freelance editor should not be given a bonus 5% of an author's sales for doing a good job. Chances are their work is more important to the overall success than an agent's is and look how much agents get.

Other frequently cited points in favor of the industry include the advances that published authors can expect to receive, as well as the fact that bookstores will only stock books from publishers that participate in the remainders process. Nowhere in that incentive package does the word "sales" appear. Which makes sense, because the publishing industry cannot promise sales. There is a good chance that a published author will sell enough books to earn out the publisher's advance, but most books tend to hover right around the slightly profitable mark, not really going over on a regular basis. This is either a cause for some concern or standard business practice, depending on who you listen to.

Personally, I view this very thin profit margin as evidence that the publishing industry has spent far too long focusing on the wrong end of the market. It's a natural thing to do – when you control one end of a supply and demand relationship, it makes sense to focus on the best way to wrench a profit out of it. It is obvious that a writer will endure almost anything to get published, despite the astronomical odds against him being chosen or turning a long-term profit. The reason? Prestige. Being chosen transforms a writer from being just anyone with a book into a Published Author.

Authors are routinely told to research the industry before getting involved in it, but this is counter-intuitive. If an author did actual research about the business of publishing, he would see that it is increasingly obvious that the publishing industry does not have any control over the supply and demand relationship on the other end of the market. As long as industry professionals continue to believe that bookstores are the main point of distribution, the bookstores will continue to control the market. As long as there are far too many books to fit on the limited shelf space available, someone will be willing to pay additional money to be stocked on those shelves.

But now the scarcity is gone from the end of the market where the publishing industry previously held an advantage. Basic economic theory says that this will catch up with the industry eventually. Publishing is a gateway industry and when the gateway is no longer essential, it must make itself important or it will not survive. Self-publishing will not bring the publishing industry to its knees – the industry is doing that to itself by refusing to acknowledge its biggest blind spot: the fact that there is no compelling reason for a compentent author to necessarily pursue professional publication.

Once an author has beaten the odds and made it to the promised land of publication, he can expect to turn a profit (sort of), but that profit is nowhere consistent enough to promise a full-time job to the vast majority of writers. If anything, publication merely serves as supplemental income – a healthy supplement to be sure, but still not the primary source of support. More to the point, the supplement has every chance of drying up quickly if the writer’s sales end up on the wrong side of the profit margin. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the reason publication advances are so high is because a writer should not expect to remain in the industry for very long – a few years, at most.

From the point of view of the gatekeepers, this short-term supply of supplemental income seems to be regarded as an attractive incentive for writers – after all, there are vast numbers of them salivating over the opportunity to earn it. From the point of view of a man in the crowd who is looking at how difficult it is to get through the gate, however, mere publication seems like a pipe dream at best; supplemental income merely makes the dream flawed and imperfect. Nobody in the industry seems to ask the question “How, exactly, is a flawed pipe dream meant to be an incentive?” much less the follow up question “If professional publication is so great, why is an incentive necessary?”

An incentive for getting through the crowd only works if that's the only way in – it highlights the rewards and tells people why they should struggle against astronomical odds. But professional publication isn't the only gateway anymore. Right now, any author can publish anything for next to nothing. Which is exactly as it should be. (Of course, the implied correlative to this is that any author who does not take the proper steps to ensure that he is putting out a quality product deserves the reputation he has earned. Which is also exactly as it should be.) Now that there are other alternatives to professional publication, demand has to be artificially maintained somehow. Otherwise, someone is going to realize that maybe doing it yourself is a viable alternative, if only because the writer doesn’t have to subsidize the living of every other person in the publication chain.

It should be clear by now that I am not writing to convince the publishing industry of anything. They have their standards and practices, which work for them. Instead, writers are my intended audience. The publishing industry cannot promise you sales, but more importantly, they cannot promise you publication. Self-publication will not change the fate of the entire industry, but it will give you an opportunity to take your fate into your own hands.

But please, act responsibly and remember to document your expenses.

Experimentation

2006-10-29T10:06:00.000-05:00

From time to time, people in the science fiction community start to navel gaze about the state of the genre. I’m probably picking on science fiction when I say this, but the fact is that it happens fairly frequently. And why not? The genre itself is predicated on speculation. If an author is qualified to speculate about the future of technology or society, why can’t that same author be qualified to speculate about the state of the industry that he earns his living in?

The number of manifestos about the future of science fiction can approach infinity, but if the people who control the means of production do not feel that excessive experimentation is warranted (or, even worse – not marketable), nothing significant will ever come of them. For this reason, there is now and will always be an upper limit on the amount of experimentation that science fiction can tolerate.

It is all very well and good for Charlie Stross to advocate that writers pioneer a new field of science fiction, but without the support of the industry (which is not necessarily the same thing as the support of the market, mind you) this suggestion might as well be so many tears in the rain.

Despite assurances to the contrary, the publishing industry is concerned with profits first and new ideas – in so much as they do not interfere with those profits – second. From an economic viewpoint, this makes sense. However, this attitude does not tend to create the kind of environment that lends itself to experimentation.

To some extent, the comics industry has the same kinds of problems. However, the comics industry has created a healthy environment for experimentation: self-publishing. In the world of self-published comic books, experimentation is encouraged. The audience wants to read new and different things and they show their support for this process through the buying of new and different things. On the whole, it’s a win-win situation.

After all, this is the reason why healthy self-publishing environments exist. And, with the death of so many science fiction magazines, there is an even greater need for a safe place to try new things. Of necessity, most of these new things will fail (and fail spectacularly), but someone will always be willing to try stranger and stranger things until something clicks. This is generally referred to as “progress.”

The Ten Year Plan

2006-10-27T11:39:00.000-04:00

Fortune magazine recently pointed out a study about greatness – how people achieve it and whether the lessons from those people can be applied to society at large. The good news is that achieving greatness does not require any especial talents. The bad news is that it takes about ten years of hard work in a given field to achieve greatness. More specifically, the kind of hard work that advances a person’s abilities the most is something called “deliberate practice.”

In online roleplaying games like EverQuest, it is possible to do the same task for hours on end with an eye towards increasing one’s score in that ability. Among gamers, this is known as grinding. Unfortunately, deliberate practice is not the same as mere grinding. It is not enough to merely perform a repetitive task ad infinitum. Instead, you must aim for the next higher level of competence, always seeking to gain feedback on your work so that you can improve.

Given these criteria, is it possible to apply this methodology to becoming a great writer? Perhaps. As we have seen, there are three steps for a writer within the traditional publishing industry model: 1. write novel 2. get agent 3. sell books.

The first step is the most obvious. The only way to become a great writer is to write a lot. But it is not enough to merely write. You must get feedback as well. Because it takes so long to read, critique and rewrite a novel, the iteration process can be lengthy. But if you want to become a good writer, those steps are absolutely necessary. Eventually (ten years or so down the road), you will have achieved greatness in your craft.

The second step is nowhere near as straightforward. You could spend ten years going to conventions, meeting people and developing networking contacts. In theory, this will work. It will not make you a better writer, nor will it ensure that your book will sell, but chances are that it will allow you access to an agent. To be honest, though, it will not obligate that agent to represent you, either. But if you expend the effort, you can become great at gathering industry contacts – something which is actually more suited to becoming an agent yourself.

You could also spend ten years contributing to the slush pile. However, this is not really a scenario that lends itself to deliberate practice. On the contrary, submissions are a black box process – you put something in and perhaps you will get a yes/no response. If you are exceedingly lucky, you get more. In practical terms, you may spend ten years working on the submissions process, but it is doubtful that you will ever get enough feedback to actually achieve greatness at it.

The third step brings us back to a place where practice can, indeed, make perfect. Sales and marketing are a feedback-intensive process. It is extremely easy to get discouraged over the long haul with a marketing career, but the rewards are worth it. Unfortunately, for industry writers, this skillset is encouraged, but not heavily so – the theory is that the marketing professionals from the publisher will take care of most of this work. Even more discouraging, a significant subset of all published writers will not have the luxury of working in the industry for a full ten years.

The self-published writer only has two of the three steps to get good at (obviously, agents are something that happen to people who want to sidestep the hard work). Getting good at writing is the same process, regardless of publishing path. Getting good at marketing, however, is far more intensive for a self-published author. It requires a lot more hands-on experience and a willingness to get out and talk to the people involved in the buying and selling of books. Admittedly, a vast number of artists are not very good at business or self-promotion. But that is like pointing out that a vast number of birds aren’t very good at running.

Remember: if you are willing to devote ten years of your time to the business of learning how to promote yourself and promote your book, there is every reason to believe that you will become very good at it. There is no such thing as instant greatness – regardless of which publishing model you choose to go with. You have to work hard for it, just like everyone else. But if you have written a novel, you probably already know the value of hard work. The only remaining question is, “to whom would you rather entrust the product of that hard work to – yourself or someone else?"

Writer Beware

2006-10-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

I want to alert writers to a scam. It’s particularly insidious and so prevalent as to be almost universal. It’s called the slush pile and unpublished writers should avoid it at all costs. The common belief is that submitting manuscripts and query letters to agents and publishers will expose new work to those portions of the industry, but I’m probably not alone in telling you that most professionals regard unsolicited materials as something marginally above junk mail.

The received wisdom is that these portions of the industry are absolutely inundated by the sheer volume of unsolicited work, which means that they will actually thank you for not contributing to their burden. Logically, they don’t even want to have to sort through the quantity of material they already have on hand.

I can understand the temptation to contribute, however. For most writers, it is the only way to ensure that their work gets seen by someone in the industry. For a desperate writer, any doorway will work, no matter how slim the chances of entry actually are. Instead of appealing to emotional or intellectual arguments, though, I’m going to take an old school approach towards making my case against the slush pile. I’m going to run the numbers.

Industry best practices tell us that submissions should contain the following: 1 cover letter, 1 manuscript excerpt of ~30 pages, and 1 self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE). For best results, 30 of these submissions should be sent out every 90 days.

Now for the important question: what does all of that cost?

Current rates for photocopies run somewhere between four and ten cents per page. I’m going to split the difference and use six cents as a thumbnail. At this rate, making 30 copies of a 30 page manuscript will cost you $54. If you do that four times a year, then you can expect to outlay $216 for copies, on an annual basis.

Believe it or not, but that’s the cheap part of the equation. 30 pages of paper weigh slightly more than one pound. The United States Postal Service website helpfully tells that the media rate for anything under two pounds will run you $2.07. Sending 30 of these will cost you $62. Sending 120 of them will cost you $248 for the year.

Simple math points out that the process of preparing and mailing your 120 submissions will cost you $460 on an annual basis. That’s without adding in the cost of regular envelopes ($19 for a box of 500), document envelopes ($27 for a box of 250) or return postage ($46.80 for 20 stamps) – all costs provided by Staples. And that also does not take into account the time spent doing the research for which agents/publishers to send submissions to.

If you did the same thing for twenty years (assuming no change in postage rates), you could expect to lose $9,000. And I do mean lose. The money spent in the submissions process is not tax deductible. After all, you are not actually in business for yourself when you do this. That’s the whole point.

The rough ballpark figure for the number of publishers currently in business stands at about 80,000. At the rate of 120 submissions a year, you could expect to spend almost seven hundred years submitting your work. I’m going to guess and say that there are 20,000 agents currently in business. If you just limited your submissions to that group, you could submit 120 queries a year for the next 126 years before you go through the entire list.

But do these numbers make the slush pile a scam? Well, the really important questions about scams are “who benefits?” and “who loses?” After all, in traditional scam operations, someone profits from the gullibility of the desperate writer. And here, the writer definitely loses. In this case, however, the only real monetary gainer is the United States Postal Service. But there are other beneficiaries, as well.

For example, if most agencies and publishing houses allow a slush pile to form, then it stands to reason that these companies would hire someone to sort through that pile. That means that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 people whose jobs depend on the slush pile. And, while the odds are not good that you will be rescued from the slush pile, the odds are very good that one slush pile sorter in that 100,000 will find something worthy of further examination at least once a year.

From a financial viewpoint, this is spectacular. It saves the agents from actually having to go out and bird-dog new clients – that actually takes hard work and research. It is much easier to allow prospective material to come knocking of its own accord. That means that an agent can merely sit down and sort through all submissions until they find something they’re looking for. It may take a while to do, but for 15% of an advance for a successfully placed author, the search ends up paying for itself in the long run. And all that has to happen is that prospective authors have to be convinced that submitting to the slush pile is better for their careers than self-publishing.

The truth is, however, that contributing to the slush pile is not good for the careers of most writers – for the simple fact that most people who contribute will not actually get careers out of the process. For the vast majority of these people, contributing to the slush pile is nothing more than a long-term money sink. There is not even the prospect of actual feedback as a tangible result for participation. Most authors will never know if they were rejected because their work was bad or because it simply wasn’t what that particular professional was looking for – or even if it was rejected because the reader got to it at 4:30 on the Friday before a holiday weekend.

Self-publishing, on the other hand, asks the very basic question: “If you can afford to spend $460 a year on your writing, why not make enough money to enable you to write off your expenses?” Submitting to the slush pile does not offer that compromise in any way, shape or form. For the vast majority of submitters, the slush pile offers nothing – no reward and no feedback; just the satisfaction of knowing that you are supporting the system.

Self-publishing – a process that has recently achieved an effective start-up cost of nothing – has become a viable economic alternative. It may not provide great rewards, but compared to absolutely nothing, a four dollar royalty check from PublishAmerica at least provides the basis for a tax break. One scam may not necessarily be better than another, but the cost/benefit analysis tends to favor the one that actually pays out if you are willing to apply serious hard work.

Of course, the slush pile will never really die for the same reason that people will always play the lottery. There will always be someone stupid enough to believe that a long shot is a better bet than actual effort.

Good Writing vs. Marketable Writing

2006-10-24T13:12:00.000-04:00

The most common piece of advice I see on writing blogs and commentary from industry professionals is the exhortation to “write well.” The received wisdom is that good writing will get you noticed. Eventually, I mean. If you give it time. Because the advice is so prolific, it would stand to reason that the contrary is true as well; bad writing will get you rejected. And this is true.

But bad writing does not mean that a book is not marketable. I can give you two examples of this: Christopher Paolini and Dan Brown. Self-published and of admittedly pulp quality, works by both authors have become best-sellers that have been turned into movies.

The converse is also true – good writing does not mean that a book is marketable. This is kind of amusing, because the phrase “marketable” no longer really means that a book will not perform well on the marketplace. Instead, it means that an agent will not be able to place it with a publisher.

(To be honest, from the point of view of most writers – the so-called “okaysellers” – the publisher is the only market that matters. Anecdotal evidence tells us that most authors do not earn out their advance. For all intents and purposes, this means that the advance is the only source of income that these authors will receive for their work. Therefore, the agent and the publisher are the only audience that matters. Lawrence Watt-Evans recently tackled this point from the perspective of poetry and short stories.)

My point is that the concepts of marketable writing and good writing have gotten so intertwined with one another that they are perceived as nearly identical. The phrases can almost be used interchangeably – although industry insiders will always assure you that they know what they are talking about when they use the individual terms. After all, industry professionals know good writing when they see it. And they will tell you that they know marketable material when they see it.

Except that they really can’t. Granted, they can recognize material that is similar to the material that sold well the last time around. But, like most economics professors, marketing types like to think that they can predict the market. Unfortunately, they tend to forget one significant thing: markets react. And so they are consistently behind the curve, mapping their book purchases to trends that may not be there by the time the book goes to print.

But hey – it works well enough. Industry professionals are happy with the fact that the majority of their books are only slightly profitable. Because it is the larger books that make the real money. And nobody really knows when one of those books will turn up. Only the audience reaction will tell. Just ask J. K. Rowling.

Reclaiming Self-Publishing

2006-10-23T08:45:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia tells us that “The key distinguishing characteristic of self-publishing is the absence of a traditional publisher.” Despite claims to the contrary, PublishAmerica is not a traditional publisher. However, PublishAmerica is probably one of the best resources for authors who want to self-publish but do not have the cash to take all of the steps for themselves.

Unfortunately, PublishAmerica’s business practices leave a lot to be desired and they are easy prey for industry professionals who call them a vanity press (mostly because they are). But a vanity press just means that the publisher will publish anyone. In a healthy self-publishing environment, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

At the present moment, the self-publishing environment for books is dramatically unhealthy. How do I know this? Because there are other, semi-related publishing environments where self-publishing is not only accepted, it is actively considered to be a good thing. Awards are enthusiastically given out and celebrated. Trade shows abound.

Take a good look at independent comic books. Most of them are self-published with little or no overhead. A majority of the retailers at the annual Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD have day jobs. They do the work that they do for the love of the medium. New material is happily received. A community spirit exists that stems from a network of like-minded people.

Part of the reason for this healthy independent comics community may be due to the fact that mainstream comic books are almost universally wrapped around a single genre: super-heroes. There are professional, full-time comics writers who make an effort to work outside this genre, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. And so there is a casual acceptance of anyone who self-publishes because if you want to create anything but superhero comics, you almost have to self-publish. There is no real editorial oversight for quality control, just the market. (It should not come as a shock that print-on-demand technology has been regarded as no less than a godsend to this community.)

Role Playing Games (RPGs) fall into the same category. A large number of small, one or two man operations make extensive use of print-on-demand technologies. There are even awards given out to independent game designers, most of whom use print-on-demand publishers like RPGNow. This is a relatively small community, but there is no stigma associated with self-publishing.

In both environments, the writers and creative types take responsibility for the business aspects of their work. They overcome the hurdles and take steps to ensure that they are producing the best product they can. In a word, they are credible.

Not that many years ago, self-publishing could be considered a good thing. Now, the fact that it is so cheap to do so has made it a bad thing. The fact is, though, that anyone can produce a novel (graphic or otherwise) with enough hard work and persistence. Doing so should not be automatically considered a bad thing. To automatically do so is to prejudge the quality of a book without reading it first. Very much like judging a book by its cover. Or judging a person by the color of their skin.

The writer should be able to approach self-publication (yes, even through PublishAmerica) with pride. It is bad enough that the companies available act stupidly. Every child is embarrassed of her parents. Calling attention to that fact is just rude.

But it is equally incumbent upon the writer to produce good material. If you are not sure about how good your work is, ask someone. If you ask enough people enough times, someone will eventually tell you the truth. Sometimes the truth hurts. But one of the things that our society has groomed out of us is the ability to take criticism. Being a writer should mean being an adult, even if the other people in the relationship are incapable of following suit.

Class Consciousness

2006-10-22T12:47:00.000-04:00

One of the things that could be said about the content of this blog is that it is persistently negative. This is probably true. However, I like to think of it as persistently realistic. The publishing industry is a business, first and foremost. It is not obligated to be generous or charitable. It is not even obligated to make sure that everyone involved in the industry turns a consistent profit. It is also probably not going to change anytime soon.

I read an article the other day about how the publishing industry should switch from offset printing to print-on-demand as their primary printing method. The rallying cry was that the industry would then be freed from the perils of the returns process and having to worry about overprinting. With this innovation in place, the author enthused, the power of the industry will shift away from the chain superstores – which are supposedly throttling sales – and back to the publishing houses, where it belongs.

My question is this: why does the power belong with the publishing houses? What exclusive service do they provide, exactly? Marketing? Editorial oversight? Graphic design skills? Distribution? I can’t get any of those through my own hard work and desire to excel?

Why is it that writers – the heartbeat of the industry, the muscle that keeps the industry moving forward – should be considered to be second-class citizens? Why can’t the writers call the shots?

When the costs of publication were expensive, it made sense for publishing houses to be conservative and selective. But the cost of publication is dirt cheap – so much so that anyone can do it. Absolutely anyone. That is the curse and that is the blessing of the publish-on-demand revolution.

And it is already a revolution. Not an overwhelming one, by any means. But there are enough people profitably storming the walls of the industry on a regular basis that the illusion of exclusivity cannot be maintained. But the publishing industry will not change on its own. As long as there are people who still believe that the only true means of validation is for an editor from a publishing company to give them a green light, the writers will never have power in the industry.

My call is to abolish the slush pile. Stop contributing to it. They do not want your contribution to it and you can spend that money in more productive ways. Hire an editor. Talk to a marketing firm. Do it yourself.

9. Setting the Terms of Your Success

2006-10-20T08:07:00.000-04:00

So if fame and fortune are not what you should be aiming for, what’s left? How do you know when you’ve “made it”? First of all, there is no such destination. You work as hard as you can for as long as you can and then you die. When you go, you hope that you can look back and be proud of what you achieved: a full life, a happy family, a peaceful home and a long list of artistic accomplishments.

It sounds sappy (and a bit maudlin), but that’s all there is to it. You do not always get to a certain point and then automatically receive a lifetime achievement award for participation. At some point, you have to sit down and make some decisions about what your goals are in life. At some point, you have to ask yourself a very difficult question: How do you measure success?

Money is an easy answer, as is an arbitrary number of awards. Personally, my criteria for success is very simple: the day that I see someone on the subway reading one of my books, I will count myself a success. It’s very simplistic, but it serves my humble purposes, which is exactly the point.

And when I have reached that milestone, what next? Well, I’ll set another one, equally ambitious and outré. But that’s me. I have a wife, a home, a job I love, family, friends and I’m almost debt free. I’m actually idealistic enough to believe that the best rewards in life are those that cannot be put in a suitcase and moved from home to home. Besides, I’ve always been a sucker for a good story and I still believe that the best stories are more valuable than gold.

But I also recognize that what motivates me is not what motivates everyone else. So you have to make a decision about what will make you happy. Chances are you’ve never actually thought very closely about that question, even though it is the most important question that you can ask yourself. What do you want? What will make you happy?

Up until now, everything I’ve written has been predicated on the idea that art was the most important thing in your universe; the thing that kept you awake at night and kept you occupied during boring meetings at work. But there comes a time when art for art’s sake is not enough. You will want to know that what you made touched someone, made a difference in someone’s life – that what you did meant as much to someone else as the artist you most admire did to you.

So start there. Find out how to get in touch with that artist (or series of artists) who influenced you and start sending them copies of your work. Don’t ask them to promote you, just tell them that they meant a lot to you and this is what you’ve done on your own. If you are sincere in your approach, you might actually get a good response. (You might not. If you haven’t learned by now to plan for the worst, you haven’t been paying attention.)

At any rate, you are responsible for your own peace of mind and setting the terms for your own success. Don’t let anyone else tell you what makes you successful – it is always possible that they are projecting their own goals onto your career (such as it is) and one size does not fit all. Especially not among writers.

8. Networking is Essential

2006-10-19T09:15:00.000-04:00

Before you get to the point where you have submitted anything for perusal, you should really take a step back and ask yourself if you are the right person to be doing the graphic design for your cover and/or marketing materials. Unless you have a talent for artwork, chances are that you should probably let a professional do some of that work for you.

Granted, you probably don’t have the money to pay a high-end professional, but that’s okay. You probably know a professional (or a talented amateur) who would be willing to work at a discount. But how do you know if you have this skill set among your friends?

There’s a really easy way to find out. Ask them.

Among my immediate circle of friends (that is, the people whom I associate with on a more-or-less monthly basis), there are DJs, writers, actors, musicians, illustrators, photographers, models, web designers, lighting designers, cooks and marketing professionals. I know because I talk to them about their lives and interests.

And when the time came to design my book cover, I asked my friend the photographer to give me a hand. She came back with a series of photos, one of which I felt was the best image possible for the cover. Her husband took the head shot that became my author photo on the back cover. My friend the writing professor did the final polish on my novel and wrote the introduction. My wife the marketing professional helped me write my back cover blurb and press release. My friend the web designer built my website and marketing fliers.

I wrote the book, but in some ways, that’s all I did. Everything else was a collaborative process, one where I relied on the skills and abilities of the people around me to help me release the best product I could release. You can do it alone, but if you are surrounded with other talented people, why bother?

Your friends may or may not expect money from you (I only paid the web designer, but even then, she cut me a really good deal), but if they are really your friends, they will be happy to help you out. And when the work is released, they will help you promote it, because it shows off the work that they did as well.

Networking is essential and is something you should have been doing all along. In fact, there is every chance that you have been doing it all along, but just didn’t realize that’s what you were doing. Those peers who give you constructive criticism in your writer’s circle? Those are people in your network. Turn your perspective around and look at everyone else in your life from that direction. Chances are that you will discover some unlooked-for talent that might help you produce a finished product.

Important safety tip: your friends are not infinite resources. They are your friends, first and foremost. If you start treating them like employees, they will stop being your friends, very very quickly. Always ask for their help in a polite and respectful manner, which means that you do not ask a second time when they tell you no. Remember: you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar (although dead squirrels work the best).

7. Going Corporate or Going Solo

2006-10-18T09:17:00.000-04:00

So you’ve put together a product that you’re confident will sell. You believe in yourself and your work. Your peers think you have a shot. That level of belief that you have just spent critical months and/or years building up means almost nothing in the wide world of capitalism, if you approach it from the wrong direction. In fact, if you are not careful, all of your enthusiasm for your art will be squashed flat in no time, leaving you to sit alone in your room, bitter and disillusioned.

With that in mind, it’s time to make some cold, calculated business choices, the biggest of which is “How do you want to mass produce and/or sell your material?” The most important thing you can do is a large amount of research into your publication options. (You have no excuse for not doing this, by the way. Unless someone handed you a hard copy of this guide, you probably have access to Google, so use it.)

The big decision is whether to go corporate or to go solo. Both of these choices are ambitious, but each offers a different reward. If you are hell-bent on getting paid the big money, going corporate is probably your best choice. Another reason for going corporate is the deep-seated desire for professional validation. Before you head down that path, though, it’s good to know what the pitfalls are. The companies that produce and distribute most entertainment in the world tend to be highly risk-averse, conservative organizations. There are large rewards associated with letting someone else sell your work, but there are more failures than successes, in general.

On the other hand, going solo allows you to have complete creative freedom over your work. Large publishers are looking for work that fits within a narrow, “marketable” mold and if your writing does not, then you are likely to be stuck out in the cold, no matter how good the writing may actually be. However, going solo provides you with an opportunity to take a chance on yourself. The biggest pitfall here, however, is the fact that you will be stuck building a reputation, a brand and a market from scratch. You will not have the organization’s extensive experience or network of contacts to fall back on.

In either situation, it is important to remember that your chances of financial success are extremely slim. However, if you are ambitious and willing to work very hard at selling yourself and selling your product, it is possible to achieve your goals. Becoming a self-made (wo)man is the American dream, after all. There is no reason why you cannot make that dream come true, if you are willing to make the supreme effort.

In the end, I can’t tell you which path to take. Most of everything I’ve written to date leans towards self-publication because it requires that you sell yourself once – directly to the public. Anything corporate requires that you sell yourself to talent scouts first, then to the people who greenlight your production, then again to the public. If you are stubborn/determined enough to spend several years working through this process with little or no promise of an eventual reward, then knock yourself out. The rest of us are going to go out back and learn about setting the terms of our success.

6. Managing Your Expectations

2006-10-13T08:51:00.000-04:00

So you think you’ve gotten good. You have a body of work and peers who are pushing you to “go to the next level.” But do you even know what that means?

Chances are that you’re thinking in terms of monetary rewards, because you are a capitalist and we live in a capitalist society. And you’re probably not wrong, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re right, either.

Remember when we were discussing your motivation and I pointed out that the odds of you being able to make a living selling your work were astronomically against you? Well, unless something momentous has happened in the past four essays, that probably hasn’t changed.

That shouldn’t stop you from wanting to release something for sale, but you do need to understand exactly what you can expect if you do. In professional environments, this is called “managing expectations” and it is basically the exact opposite of sales. A quick and dirty version might be, “Will you sell a million copies? No. Will you sell a hundred copies? Maybe.”

More than anything else, a firm grasp of reality is essential at this stage. Feel free to dream, but don’t bother to dream big, because no matter how high you set your sights the first time, you will probably fall short. Anyone who tells you differently is lying to you and you should not trust him.

Unfortunately, the really painful lesson of “taking your work to the next level” is that you are going to lose money in the short term. Like a band that goes on tour to college towns, playing for a fifteen person audience in a two hundred person venue or a print-maker who paid to get two hundred posters printed that could sell for three dollars apiece, there will be an initial investment that you will have to make.

So really, what you really have to ask yourself is not “how much can I expect to make?” but rather “how much can I afford to lose?” Some people will disagree and tell you that professionals do not spend money to make money, which begs the question of why the Small Business Administration offers loans to new businesses.

Right now, though, you are an amateur. You do not support yourself with your art, nor are you expecting to. What you’re looking for is exposure; an audience and some unbiased critical response. No matter who you are and what you do, that means marketing, and unless you own your own marketing agency, you should be prepared to spend some money on marketing materials. A good rule of thumb is to spend far less than 10% of your annual salary.

The critical thing at this juncture is to the make sure that whatever you prepare for release is good and interesting by the standards of your peer review group. Not okay, certainly not the first thing you’ve made – something solid. Something you can be proud of. Nothing sounds worse than an artist apologizing for the poor quality of the product on sale. Don’t put yourself in that position.

Once you have grounded yourself, it’s time to start making some level-headed business decisions.

5. Learn to Love Criticism

2006-10-13T08:48:00.000-04:00

Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of everything is crap. And it’s true. Chances are that the first time you did anything, you were terrible at it. This even applies to that magnum opus I just encouraged you to finish. In fact, it probably applies more to that magnum opus. But if you’re going to get good at anything (you want to be good, don’t you?), then you’re going to have to learn to deal with criticism.

Here’s your first lesson: don’t ask anyone you are having sex with to look at your work. Nor should you ask your parents. In fact, anyone who is emotionally involved with you in any way should be out of the question and here’s why: you will not get a fair critique. And chances are that if you do, you will not enjoy getting it.

Instead, you should find a peer review community (a writer’s circle being the best example I can think of) and start showing up for it. Submit your material and don’t be surprised if you’re told that it’s not very good. This is normal.

At this point, you have two options. One is to get pissy and stomp off, vowing never to return to that bunch of losers ever again. The other is to listen to the constructive criticism that’s on offer and figure out what you did wrong. I’m going to leave it up to you to figure out which response will come off as mature, adult and credible.

It is soul-crushing enough to realize that you will probably not make money with your art. It is even more soul-crushing to realize that you’re probably not very good at what you are compelled to do. Get over it. Everyone who matters gets criticized and you are not going to magically avoid that process, no matter how much you want to.

In fact, if you are serious about your work, you will learn to welcome criticism. It’s good to know what you did right, but more than that, it’s good to know what you did wrong so you can fix it the next time. Remember that talent grows. More than that, it can be taught and trained. But it takes patience, effort and a lot of hard work. (Sometimes, even more hard work than finishing your first project.)

Learning to deal with criticism is very important. But what can be even more important is the need to find reviewers whom you can trust and whose opinions you respect. With any luck, they will be willing to help you become the best artist you can be by giving you honest, unfiltered feedback. These are your peers and they will be more valuable to you than an audience ten times their size.

Why? Because they will know how much work and struggle went into your project; they do the same kind of thing, after all. And when you get to the end, they will be there to congratulate you and offer you the praise that you’ve earned. They will have seen you grow as an artist and get good.

But it is critical to remember that creativity is an ongoing process. You will not get good overnight. You will not earn the respect of your peers overnight. You will not learn from your mistakes overnight. You will fall down. And you should fall down, because anything that is worth doing involves a degree of risk. You have to be willing to fall flat on your face if you think something is worth doing, because if you do not take that chance, you will not run the risk of actually succeeding.

Take chances. Get bloody, bruised and beat up. And whatever you do, learn to admit when you’re wrong. It’s probably the best thing you can do as a mature, adult human being. I promise.

4. Is It Done Yet?

2006-10-13T08:46:00.000-04:00

I know a guy who makes music. He has performed live on more than one occasion. However, he still hasn’t finished an album. Not because he can’t find a label to distribute it, but just because. Is he an artist? Absolutely. After all, he is compelled to make music.

However, his seeming inability to actually finish what he started makes him a wannabe. He wants to be a musician, he just can’t get focused enough to finish something. Don’t do that.

I have another friend who is in the process of writing a novel. He told me that someone made a cover for it already. “That’s great,” I said. “Have you finished writing it yet?” That was six months ago and the answer is still no. Don’t do that, either.

This is the critical juncture – finishing things. Nothing robs you of your credibility faster than your inability to actually get to the end of the project you’ve started. I can’t tell you how to finish whatever it is you started; everyone works differently.

I will tell you, however, that your friends and family are probably pretty tired of listening to you talk about this thing you’re going to finish any day now. In fact, if you told them when you started it, they’ve probably kept track, just to see how long it took you to get to where you are right now.

Once you get a few projects done, people are more willing to cut you some slack with your completion dates, but that first one is always a killer. One piece of advice that I can give you, though: pay attention to how long it took you to finish your first piece. Unless there were extenuating circumstances (you spent a month in a diabetic coma, for example), you can count on a lot of your subsequent work taking at least that long to complete.

And once you’ve finished whatever it is you’ve been working on, give yourself a month or so to relax, then start another one. The best thing you can do is to start to produce a body of work. Starting the second one will not be as scary as the first one was, I promise. The knowledge that you were able to get to the end becomes incredibly empowering and it actually gets easier to finish the next one.

Remember, laziness isn’t your worst enemy, inertia is. Writing takes hard work and a lot of it. But once you get used to working hard, it gets easier to do. The human being is an adaptable beast – make the best of this and put your nose to the grindstone early. By the time your life gets busy, you should be able to keep up.

It’s like walking: there’s really no trick to it. You just do it. And you keep doing it until you get good at it.

3. You Do Not Want to be Famous

2006-10-13T08:43:00.000-04:00

There is no easy way to put this, so I’ll just throw it out there early: you do not want to be famous. You may think you do, but only because you are comfortably anonymous right now and you think that nobody actually cares about you. Not only is this wrong (more people care about you that you probably think), but it also comes across as desperately needy and, as a consequence, very ugly.

Despite appearances to the contrary, everyone has self-esteem issues. Everybody thinks that they don’t get enough attention for the things they do. It may not be fair, but life doesn’t come with an owner’s manual and that’s not fair, either. That’s just the way things are and the sooner you get a grip on reality, the sooner you can start to figure out what parts of it are eligible for change.

Fame will not pay your bills. Fame will not enable you to escape your life, your location, your past, your marriage, your job or your family. Famous people still eat, sleep, defecate and have bad hair days. The only thing that fame will bring you is headaches.

Women: do you enjoy going to the grocery store wearing sweatpants and no makeup? Men: do you enjoy getting drunk on Saturday nights and puking outside the bar? Now imagine trying either of those things with a posse of paparazzi, desperate for a single photograph that they can sell for $400 to the National Enquirer.

That is fame. You do not want that.

You do not want to have to look perfect every day. You do not want to have to deal with seeing your personal life at point of purchase racks in the supermarket. You do not want to have deal with the crazy people on the internet who forget that you are a human being. You do not want to have to deal with fanfiction.

The absolute worst thing about fame is that it never really goes away. Not in this day and age. If you are one of those poor people unfortunate enough to share a name with a famous person, you know the hassle that comes with name recognition. If you’ve never met someone in this position, imagine that every time people read/hear your name, they say “oh, any relation to [famous person]?” If your answer is “Yes, that’s me,” then you will be treated to a quick rundown of your past, whether you wanted it or not.

The real downside to fame is that you lose your anonymity. You cannot walk down the street without worrying that you will be accosted at random. You cannot walk into a situation and create a first impression with people you’ve never met, because it’s already been done for you. Fame did that for you.

As far as I can tell, there is really no upside to being famous. You will still have to work. You will still have to deal with your relationships. You will still have to deal with your family. These things will not go away.

And woe unto you if you are an unsuccessful famous person.

My advice to you is to aim for something you can handle. Well-known is good. Well-known is manageable. Well-known will give you an audience, but allow you to avoid some of the hassles that come with being further up the food chain. But be careful, because it’s a short walk from well-known to outright famous and once you take that walk, you can’t disappear into the crowd anymore. And it’s brutal out there in the spotlight.

2. What is Your Motivation?

2006-10-13T08:41:00.000-04:00

I have a friend who doodles and sketches all the time. Now, it just so happens that he has a job as an illustrator, but that’s really beside the point. I believe that if he was paid to answer phones in a call center, he would still be sketching while he watched Battlestar Galactica reruns on Tivo.

And that is, in a nutshell, my definition of an artist. Someone who does what he loves regardless of whether he is paid to do it or not. So now should be that time in the program where you get to answer the magical question: are you an artist?

But it’s not as simple as that.

The real question is why. Why do you do what you do? Why do you write? Those who answered with something along the lines of “because I want to be rich and/or famous” should go get a job as a stockbroker. Seriously.

First the bad news: you might as well come to terms with the fact that the odds are against you being able to make a living selling your art. The Society of Authors estimates that between 2 and 6 percent of all writers make a living by only selling their books, and that estimate is probably a bit high. The point being that your dreams of being a rich and famous author are flat out unrealistic. You probably have better odds playing the lottery.

So why bother?

Well, remember when I asked you why you write? If you are a real writer, your response was probably something along the lines of “because I have no choice.” You are compelled to produce something – whatever it is that your mind needs to do to keep from going insane. Because that’s what art is, a compulsion.

It is not merely a means to an end. It is the end result. It is what you do when you are not doing your day job (or when your day job is slow, if you’ve got a job like that).

Now, if you have read this far and not gotten entirely discouraged by reality, then I’ve got good news for you. It is entirely possible to be a good, moderately well-known writer and still have a day job. In fact, the day job can actually be a good thing, if you let it be (it removes the need for the art to be entirely financially successful, for a start).

The best thing you can do is face facts, get a sense of what the odds against you are and then ignore them. That’s right: ignore them. It is not a sensible, rational or logical thing to do, but then again, neither is making art. And once you have understood that essential paradox, you’re on your way to credibility.

1. Why Credibility?

2006-10-12T15:54:00.000-04:00

Years ago, I was at a tattoo convention selling framed prints of the artwork I’d made in Photoshop. One of the tattoo artists at the convention expressed an interest in one of my pieces. Naïve young man that I was, I tried to trade him two of my pieces for a tattoo.

“Son,” he said to me. “Three things. First, I only want the one piece. Second, the tattoo you want is worth more than the two pieces you just offered me. Third, you should always have a business card to give to people like me who express an interest in your work.”

There have been any number of object lessons in my life, but I specifically remember that one because it could have been a lot worse. The man was a professional and he was just trying to help. He could have easily laughed at me and, for all I know, he laughs when he tells that story to his friends who hang out in his shop.

The point is that while my art might have been good, I was not credible in my presentation of it. Since then, I have gone on to self-publish a novel with PublishAmerica. There are those who say that my decision was a bad one and I don’t entirely disagree.

But while I may admit the choice of publisher was not the best, I do not regret my decision, nor am I ashamed of it, which is important. Self-deprecation is fine, as is the learning experience, but to be actively ashamed of the work you produce? What’s the point? There’s no benefit in that.

Unfortunately, I have seen any number of young writers making all manner of elementary mistakes when taking their first, tentative steps into the busy realm of commerce. As far as I’m concerned, the real challenge is not to be successful, but rather to avoid the embarrassment of looking like a complete idiot.

My aim with this series of essays is to provide you, the hopeful young writer, with a thumbnail guide to being credible. Not successful, not respectable, nor even good. I cannot promise you popularity, fame, fortune or profit. I can only point you in the right direction so that (most) people won’t laugh in your face when you talk to them about what you’ve made.

Consider this to be a disclaimer: you are responsible for your own reputation. If you are unwilling to accept that responsibility and actually think that blaming me (or anyone else) for your failure to achieve [insert goal here] could potentially be a good idea, please stop reading now.

Still here? Good.

(Not everybody is going to agree with me on every point I make, which is fair – I never said I was right. In fact, you should take every piece of information and advice that you can find with a grain of salt and always draw your own conclusions. Remember that everyone has a bias and not everyone is always willing to tell you the whole truth.)

The Nine Step Guide to Artistic Credibility (An Explanation)

2006-10-12T13:39:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year, I got frustrated by the number of publish-on-demand authors who acted like they had never heard about the difference between negative attention and positive attention. These authors had made the choice to publish their work through a limited gateway that would make their marketing difficult before they got started. Instead of being careful about marshalling their resources and presenting the best possible image to the market, they seemed bound and determined to act like idiots.

True, they attracted attention to their work, but probably not the attention that they really wanted. Ridicule and laughter are hardly effective marketing strategies and it can be difficult (if not outright impossible) to recover from something like that. The gap between what they wanted and what they got was, in large part, directly attributable to their inability to present themselves credibly.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that every new writer should probably be given a guide to how to present themselves – how not to act like a fucking idiot. Perhaps that was not the best title, though. I sat down and wrote a series of one-page essays with a more positive slant and called it the Nine Step Guide to Artistic Credibility, which I will be publishing incrementally over the next several days. Like all good writers, I wrote it with myself as the ideal audience.

You see, when I was 16, I would have killed for something like this. At the time, I thought I knew everything, but somewhere deep inside, I also knew that I knew nothing. Half my life later, I’ve learned quite a lot about life and the artistic process. Most importantly, I learned the hard way about the attitudes necessary to keep from crumbling under the pressure of knowing that I don’t stand a chance of actually achieving the commonly held artistic measure of “success.” Not because the quality of my work is bad, per se, but because “success” is simply statistically unlikely.

There are a lot of writers in the world and most of them are jostling for the same thing: a share of the audience’s attention, which they think will bring them fame and fortune. I’m not entirely convinced that that’s all there is to it. In fact, I tend to think that it’s perfectly respectable to simply be an amateur writer who periodically releases his own material - generating an honest body of work in the process - and doesn’t make every product into a “Hail Mary” attempt at reaching the pinnacle of success.

This may come as somewhat of a shock to some people. We live in a capitalist society where excess is subtly encouraged and moderation is actually derided. But if you stop and think about it, you will realize that not everyone measures success by the same yardstick.

Personally, I believe that it is enough to be a credible writer – that is, someone who does his best to refine his craft and possibly release finished products every now and then without having to worry that people are going to laugh in his face.

There are a lot of people who will disagree with me, which will make me very happy because discussion is healthy. Even better, I am happy about the fact that I live in a country where my right to express my beliefs is (for the time being) Constitutionally protected.

My aim with these essays was to crush dreams and force people to rethink very stubbornly held received wisdom. Not because I am a sadist, but because I think that sometimes people need to expose their belief systems to the cold reality of the way things are. This is especially true if you actually plan to make a living selling your writing. It is not enough to merely want something. In most cases, you actually have to work hard to achieve it. And even then, hard work is no guarantee of success.

Like I said, when I was 16, I would have been happy to know all of this. I doubt that it would have kept me from making the series of mistakes that led to me to where I am in, but that’s okay, really: I like who I am and where I am. And that’s been my key to success: knowing how to aim for satisfaction.

1. Why Credibility?
2. What is Your Motivation?
3. You Do Not Want to be Famous
4. Is It Done Yet?
5. Learn to Love Criticism
6. Managing Your Expectations
7. Going Corporate or Going Solo
8. Networking is Essential
9. Setting the Terms of Your Success

Maybe, Maybe Not

2006-10-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

I would like to thank Samuel Tinianow for taking the time to read what I have had to say and for taking the time to sit down and write an honest and thought-out rebuttal. To be honest, his reaction is exactly what I wanted and exactly what I was expecting.

Having said that, Mr. Tinianow’s suggestion that “the flaws in the system aren't worth complaining about” but are “worth working with” is ludicrous. Of course they are worth complaining about, but more importantly, they are worth analyzing, discussing and fixing. Any system that doesn’t work perfectly – a point that Mr. Tinianow has no problem accepting about the publishing industry as a whole – should be open to criticism and suggestion.

By the same token, my commentary should be equally open to criticism and I welcome all feedback, if only because it shows that someone is paying attention. I will admit that my suggestions about possible solutions to the publishing system are theoretical at best; but at least I am offering suggestions. The Hegelian dialectic starts with a thesis, which generates an antithesis and leads to synthesis. But it has to start somewhere.

For the most part, Mr. Tinianow brings up logistical issues about why the proposed farm team system won’t work, which is actually good news. After all, professionals talk about logistics – and then usually during the process of deciding whether those issues are worth the time and energy of overcoming. I’ll save the point by point rebuttal of his critiques for individual readers to work through on their own. As we have seen, raising issues is easy. Solving those issues is difficult and I would prefer to focus my problem solving skills on the writers who are the point of the entire process.

Which brings me to the single point that I would like to address in Mr. Tinianow’s commentary. Halfway through the essay, he cites a 1999 survey by Jerold Jenkins (thanks for the resource, by the way – solid numbers are always helpful) which estimates that there are upwards of six million manuscripts circulating in slush piles around the industry. Towards the end of the essay, he thinks “there are a lot fewer "disenfranchised writers" out there” than I seem to believe. This seems counter-intuitive. Six million is a very big number. And, as Mr. Tinianow points out, children’s books have a success rate of .0003%, which would indicate that there are a lot of failures who might very well want a seat at the disenfranchised table as well.

The sheer number of people who have chosen the self-publishing route via print-on-demand would tend to bear this out. Despite the fact that they have no real hope of national distribution, high-end marketing budgets or access to professional editorial services, these arguably disenfranchised writers have made the decision that limited self-publication is better than no publication at all. It is a difficult and controversial decision to make on an individual basis, but the fact is that it is happening now and will probably continue to happen no matter how many disapproving frowns are leveled in their direction by industry professionals.

A large part of the disapproval seems to come from the fact that some of these print-on-demand publishers seem reluctant to admit that they are a limited gateway to the marketplace, which creates an air of disrepute about them. This reputation tends to cling to their authors, because the assumption is that anyone who used them must not have been intelligent enough to understand what the limitations were. Personally, I think that’s a fallacy.

I used PublishAmerica to publish my book because I had already spent nearly $1000 on agent submissions and I figured that I could easily spend the same amount of money on marketing and at least I would have a product to show for it (not to mention something I could write off on my taxes at the end of the year, if it came to that). What I got from the process was complete creative control over the cover of my book and a free ISBN (which got me access to Amazon, gratis). The reputation of the publisher really didn’t mean much to me because I’m used to laboring under the reputation of my employer; I work for the Federal Government, after all.

A Tale of Two Blogs

2006-10-11T09:57:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite things to do in literature class was compare and contrast. It's such a simple little exercise, but it does a great deal for sharpening your observation skills. Today, we are going to compare and contrast a pair of anonymous industry blogs that were recently brought to my attention.

One is called iUniverse Book Reviews and the other is called The Rejecter. One works for a literary agent in the capacity of sorting unsolicited manuscripts into "no" and "maybe" piles based on cover letters. The other one is an amateur blog dedicated to reviewing the best iUniverse books submitted to her notice. Guess which is which.

In theory, both of these blogs are dedicated to improving the quality of the content available in the publishing industry. And, in theory, both blogs reflect the respective viewpoints of their ends of the industry. On the one hand, the mainstream publishing industry operates as a model of exclusivity where the entry-level employees are taught how to say no as forcefully as possible – which is very similar to how drug dealers work, as I understand it. On the other hand, the self-publishing industry operates on an inclusionary model, where most everyone is encouraged to contribute.

The message of the exclusionary model is, from the name of the blog on down, negative. You will probably not succeed. Your submission is considered to be one step above junk mail. Most submissions will not generate any interest whatsoever. Most submissions will not make it past the cover letter and those that do will rarely make it past the first few pages of the manuscript. These are the stark and brutal facts and if you do not have the ability to deal with them, then you are shit out of luck.

The message of the inclusionary model is more mixed. The iUniverse Reviewer assumes that anyone who submits a book to her attention will have already published something and are now looking for wider exposure. True, there are limitations to the kinds of things that the reviewer is looking for, but that’s just plain honesty – what kind of realistic author would want someone who isn’t a fan of historical romance to review that kind of work? The most important portion of this site is that it can actually do something for the people that submit – unlike The Rejecter, who just says no.

In truth, I feel sorry for The Rejecter. It must be difficult to have an entry-level career as a junk mail sorter. There are some that probably feel sorry for the iUniverse Reviewer (imagine having to read all of those terrible books and then getting to feature the best ones!), but anyone who has ever done a good deed for a stranger out of the goodness of their heart knows that the benefits are often intangible. And the best part is that the books that get reviewed are selected on merit, not rejected on whim.

It’s very difficult not to see these two as the past and future of the publishing industry. As long as the self-publishing industry remains open-ended, with no real content filter to speak of, there will always be a need for people who are willing to review the best books and bring them to the attention of a willing audience – the farm team I spoke of earlier. And as long as the slush pile exists, there will always be a need for someone whose job is to sit and sort through it, throwing away vast piles of other people's hard work with a jaundiced, callous eye. But how much longer will the slush pile endure once writers realize that contributing to it does little more than give people an entry-level job in waste disposal?

Down on the Farm

2006-10-09T14:12:00.000-04:00

Most publishing industry professionals would prefer that books not be compared to music. After all, only the broadest comparisons really apply (both are in the business of providing entertainment, etc) and, when you get right down to it, even those comparisons have to be manipulated in one way or another to get them to fit. Fair enough.

But the music industry does have one thing going for it right now that the publishing industry really should be paying attention to: mp3 blogs. Technically speaking, mp3 blogs are not really an aspect of the music industry, though. Instead, they are amateur sites were enthusiasts have set themselves up as authoritative tastemakers. These people take the time to seek out new music, review it and repost for other people to enjoy for themselves. An industrious dancefloor DJ can spend two or three nights a week, visiting any number of these blogs and come away with hours of new, good material.

The best part about these bloggers is that they are label agnostic. They are just as likely to post something from a mainstream artist with huge name recognition as they are to post something from a garage band they found on Myspace. The only criteria is quality.

At the present time, the publishing industry (or, rather, the self-publishing industry) has something similar to mp3 blogs as well: Pod Girl, the girl on demand herself. She has made it her goal to seek out good quality books from among the chaff of the publish-on-demand marketplace. Interestingly, most of the books that she has reviewed since she began have received intense scrutiny from the industry. One could argue that this is an early example of how a farm team might work.

As with any reviewer, all that is necessary is that the audience trust in the taste of the critic making the recommendation. Once that credibility has been established, a savvy reader could spend the rest of his life never having to pay for books again. Granted, they might not all be good books (most will probably be very, very bad), but that’s a small price to pay for seeing a deserving book get its just desserts.

This is not even something that the publishing industry should have to pay for. In fact, it’s probably better if they didn’t involve something as materialistic as money in the equation. Let the bird-dogs find the good stuff and take the credit for being on the cutting edge of new fiction. It’s a prestige industry, after all.

(Gawker Media, email me.)

The Selection Process

2006-10-09T13:08:00.000-04:00

One of the most notorious things about publishing is how difficult it is to get published. There may be over 150,000 titles published every year, but there are easily ten times that number of prospective authors who are clamoring to get in the door. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is an industry where the primary content providers are regarded with some small derision until they manage to cross the threshold, at which point the attitude towards them morphs into something approaching cautious adoration.

To be fair, it’s an easy set of attitudes to take. A lot of people want to be published – so much so that an unpublished author nothing but an anonymous face in the crowd. Not by choice, but by necessity. There are simply not enough publishing slots available to publish every manuscript that comes along. Supply overwhelms demand and demand gets to call the shots. This is basic economic theory at work.

However, the mechanism that has evolved from this basic premise is now past the point of efficiency. There is a famous aphorism that any writer who can use spellcheck and show a basic grasp of grammar and punctuation is automatically better off than 90% of all submitted manuscripts. Basic math tells us, however, that if there are 2 million distinct manuscripts submitted every year, something like 200,000 of those are potentially usable (note: this number is probably appallingly low). With only 150,000 slots available (note: this number is probably appallingly high), someone has to make a decision about selection criteria.

Enter the agent. The agent sells prospective authors to publishers. In theory, they are the bird-dogs that seek new talent. In reality, agents have the same luxury of sitting on the correct side of a demand economy that publishers do. One of the most common questions that writers are asked is how they got in touch with their agents. An extraordinary number of them point out that they acquired their agent through some permutation of networking and luck. For those that do not have this exact combination of factors working in their favor, they are stuck submitting their manuscripts to agents along with everyone else.

The broad term for this pile of blind manuscripts (in both the offices of independent agents and publishing houses) is the slush pile. To most of them, this is regarded as junk mail. In fact, the slush pile is such an onerous part of being in the business that publishers and agents hold an annual burning of the slush pile, which has turned into quite a party. The message to authors is clear: "Don’t call us, we’ll call you. No, seriously. But buy our books, please."

The slush pile has a mystical significance to young authors with no hope of contacting an agent. After all, famous books have been rescued from the slush pile – The Diary of Anne Frank, for example. Frank Herbert’s Dune is also held up as example to young authors as why they should not give up. I don’t see the fact that Dune was rejected by twenty different publishers before finally being picked up as a success, story, though. To any rational person, it is obvious that Dune is a serious failure of a system that turns out false negatives on a regular basis without apology or regret.

Consider this fact: most writing websites emphasize the fact that the first page of any submitted manuscript has to be polished to a high degree. The reason? Because most people who read any kind of submission (solicited or not) rarely read past the first page. Not because they don’t want to, but because they have so many submissions to get through – it’s a time thing.

And that’s how a book gets selected for publication: either the author networks his way next to an agent at a party or he writes the best opening page in the history of literature and hope that the person reading it isn’t waiting for a phone call or otherwise distracted. Most of all, that author hopes that the reader can recognize where and when a book is marketable – the catch-phrase for “this book might sell as many books as these others in the same general category.”

The irony, of course, is that marketing decisions in the publishing industry are based on guesses. Educated guesses, to be sure, but still guesses. Thumbnail approximations and comparisons are made, but solid numbers for first-time authors are non-existent. After all, these authors have no prior sales experience. There is no way to know for certain how many of their books are going to sell and which marketing tactics might work best for which works. These kinds of blind spots are endemic to an industry that keeps the gateways to distribution locked down.

Somewhere between four and five paragraphs ago, the cynicism meter of most industry professionals kicked in and helped them leap to the obvious conclusion that I was venting my personal sour grapes. After all, I am a disenfranchised writer and my opinions are questionable at best. However, any accountant will tell you that solid numbers are better than fuzzy numbers. It just so happens that solid sales numbers are now obtainable for young authors. How? Self-publishing, of course.

Self-publishing is a booming business, mostly because there are so many disenfranchised writers out there. The overwhelming amount of original content feeds the self-publishing (print on demand, usually) companies just as fast as it feeds the mainstream publishing houses. Faster, even. Sturgeon’s Law has not magically faded away, but yet these self-published authors no longer feel entirely disenfranchised; after all, they have been granted their own, personal supply of special crack: they have their name on a book.

It does not take a lot to translate this teeming mass of former slush-pile residents into ready profit for the major publishers, either. All that is required is the same strong stomach for reading through books until something jumps out. A quick check of the sales records later and a decision can be made with ease and a clean conscience.

Professional sports franchises refer to these arrangements as a farm team and the publishing industry would do well to pay attention to this model. After all, implementation is two easy steps away.

1. Abolish the slush pile. Accept no unsolicited manuscripts. They are regarded as junk mail anyway, so this should not be that difficult a directive to follow through on. Unless publishers actually believe that the slush pile actually contains real treasure…?

2. Publish no author that does not have a prior sales record. Right now, the industry would prefer an author who does not believe enough in the strength of his material to self-publish despite overwhelming pressure to the contrary. This is counter-intuitive. The most effective authors that the industry can recruit are those that have proven themselves able to formulate an effective marketing strategy without a publicist, a marketing budget or co-op on his side.

Neither of these steps take any additional effort on the part of the publishing industry. In fact, both of these steps strengthen the industry significantly. They address the fuzzy math that dead-ends in the remainders policy, they address the diffuse marketing issues that surround the industry and they eliminate disenfranchised writers (who might actually become more enthusiastic customers than they are now – you never know). Most importantly, a farm team provides an environment where writers are encouraged to experiment – not just in text, but in business as well.

Of course, this is just pie-in-the-sky thinking. It suits the industry professionals to have young authors act like ravenous dogs, ready to bite at the first offer that comes there way. Without that instinctive reaction to the “better act now” scenario, authors may actually try to shop around and get a better deal. And that would be disastrous.

Marketing

2006-10-09T11:01:00.000-04:00

Once, in the not-too-distant past, there were three national television networks and there were a handful of magazines that most American households could be assured of having in their home: Life, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Playboy, Forbes, National Geographic and/or Good Housekeeping. A savvy marketer could place an ad on most networks and in three to five of those magazines and be assured of something close to market saturation.

Today, that sounds like science fiction. Magazine sales are in decline, television channels have multiplied like bacteria and websites have undermined the entire notion of a unified culture, much less a unified audience. Still, large corporations want to promote themselves and their goods by any means necessary. High-end advertising spots on popular television shows (now that they seem to have come back into vogue) are always available to the Pepsis, Fords, Krafts, Exxons, Lockheed Martins and Random Houses of the world.

Fortunately, some of these companies have an advertising budget larger than the Gross National Product of small African nations. And some of these companies don’t. For those that don’t, smaller spots on more remote magazines and cable channels are sort of effective. Well, effective enough, especially if you are promoting a niche product aimed at a subculture of people who spend a lot of money on entertainment media. But woe unto you if you are producing a product whose target demographic doesn’t congregate in easily located online enclaves and seek out new information for the sake of bragging rights.

If you were a publisher, for example, you might be forced to rely on other means of promotion. One of the most popular is something called co-op. Basically, it is an amount of money that publishing companies pay to bookstores every month for preferential treatment with in-store advertising. For the most part, this treatment comes in the form of turning selected books cover-out to increase their exposure to customers walking in through the front of the store.

There is also some minor product placement near the cash-registers, which is called a point-of-purchase display. Point-of-purchase displays are really common, especially in supermarkets, who have made paid a lot of money to independent companies to help them study, understand and optimize their effectiveness. Unfortunately, point-of-purchase displays are not really that effective in bookstores – if bookstore checkouts were designed like supermarket checkouts, they might be. But they aren’t, so they aren’t.

But it is probably difficult for publishing companies to demand more for their co-op. After all, it’s not like this money is helping the chain superstores stay in business. But publishers have paid the Danegeld, which is a damned shame.

Lest you think I am being unnecessarily mean to chain bookstores, allow me to point out that in the last decade, they have been forced to evolve in response to a direct threat on their role as primary distributor of books. Survival is a mean, dirty process and it spawned large companies with the muscle to compete. An essential part of that process was the ability – the need – to hold onto whatever tools were at hand. Co-op and the remainders process are here to stay.

To be honest, the evolution of chain bookstores ought to be an object lesson to the publishing industry. Bookstores were faced with a challenger and they made choices. The publishing industry is (to it’s knowledge) faced with no serious challengers and they do not have to make choices. Sometimes choices are made for them, however, and these publishers howl and gnash their teeth. And then they discover that using Google to index the contents of their books will actually sell more books. Institutions breed inertia. Change often means a different perspective and people get used to the perspectives they currently have.

But isn’t that what marketing is all about? In my understanding, it's about altering perceptions and introducing new information to the audience with an aim towards capturing their attention (and, eventually, their wallets). That’s one of the reasons why corporate marketing is such a funny concept.

One of the truly interesting things about the internet is that it is extremely easy to become a blogger that people want to read – all it takes is the ability to consistently present coherent, interesting information to another blogger that people already read. Most of these pre-established content providers are always on the lookout for new information to pass along to their audience. This is part and parcel of the symbiotic relationship. In this day and age of constant change and novelty, people want to know what’s going on and they have certain trusted sources that they go to for their information.

People like this used to be called critics. They still are, even though they tend to spend the majority of their time these days staring at their navels, deep in debate about the nature of slipstream in science fiction. But from time to time, they do occasionally talk about the books they are reading. And, if you pay attention, you will discover the most amazing books that nobody else is talking about.

And that is exactly what book marketing is trying to do: reach out to the people who pay attention to these kinds of things and tell them about the best of the new in the hopes that it will become word of mouth. The formalized process involves passing a list of titles to the established reviewing apparat and letting them take their pick. It is possible to guide their hands towards the right titles, ouija board style, but a good review is not always assured. Like everything else, investing in a well-placed review carries a heavy potential for diminishing returns.

The truth of the matter is that publishing companies cannot devote all of their advertising budget to effectively promoting every title that they produce. Choices have to be made and, when those choices are made, they are made with the full knowledge that those books that are underpromoted have a fair chance of outright failure. But those choices are also made with the full knowledge that a corporation is allowed to write off losses at the end of the year. So it balances out, really. As long as you are not the poor writer who ended up outside of the profit margin.

The other major source of revenue (and promotion) for publishers is the motion picture industry and newer transmedia alternatives. Books are always being turned into movies and the purchase of an option can be worth more to the author than the initial advance from the publisher. Even that isn’t a sure thing for the writer, though, and (again) the publishers can probably only expect to make a major profit in aggregate. Of course, for all I know, the translation of books to other media is the major money-maker for the publishing industry as a whole. But what does that say about the industry itself?

Distribution

2006-10-06T13:54:00.000-04:00

In the 1930’s, Albert Knopf reacted to the Depression-fueled decline in the number of American bookstores by proposing a radical new business model: he would allow bookstores to return unsold books for credit towards other titles from his company. Now, 70 plus years later, that business model is still going strong. In fact, it has become the industry standard – so much so that bookstores can afford to refuse to stock books from publishers who will not allow remaining books to be returned.

This remainders process is not the only concession that publishers have made. At present, it is not uncommon for a publisher to give a bookstore a 90 day grace period before paying invoices for shipments of new books. Combined with co-op – the term for the money paid by a publisher to bookstores in return for favorable placement of high-profile books, something I will discuss when I come to marketing – these business practices mean that the publishing industry has taken on the role of more-or-less subsidizing bookstores.

At one time, all of this made sense. Without a market to sell the product in, a publisher is just a guy surrounded by a lot of paper. The irony of the present situation is that bookstores are no longer the primary source of distribution; instead, they share an uneasy second place with online retailers like Amazon. (Just to be clear, it is not even an either/or situation. Hardcore book readers use both distribution methods as their moods suit them. For every book specifically recommended, located and bought online, there is another that was purchased after long, satisfying hours browsing the stacks.)

But publishers cannot really complain about the situation. After all, they have very carefully, lovingly and specifically placed their testicles in a vice and even given the handle a few twists before handing it over. With the amount of money spent out in the process of getting books to market, it is a wonder that publishers make any real profit – in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that the profit margin is largely aggregate, spread thinly across the entire catalog.

The boot to the head is that bookstores have started a policy of only ordering as many books as the author’s last title sold. So if an author had a single bad title, the orders on his next book will be just as dismal – regardless of how many copies he has sold over his lifetime. On the surface, this looks like an honest attempt by the bookstores to reduce the environmental waste caused by the inefficient remainders process. However, what this means for the poor authors who are subject to the whims of market forces is a relentless publish-well-or-perish mentality that will probably force a fair number of authors out of the industry forever (or until they can convince someone else to publish them under a new name).

Is there an easy solution to this situation? Probably not, otherwise someone would have suggested or implemented it by now. However, it is important to point out that even something as trivial as smaller print runs for first time authors would alleviate some of the waste and uncertainty. But how do you decide how many books to print for an author with no track record? To be honest, that’s mostly a marketing decision. Still, there are always options. Print on demand, for example.

For those that do not know, there are two predominant methods of book printing. The industry standard is offset printing, which is cheaper (on the front end) because it involves large print runs. However, because there are only educated guesses for the initial number of books to print, the remainders process can cut into the money saved by using a cheaper process. On the other hand, print on demand is slightly more expensive. The benefit with this process is that it allows the publisher to order more exact print runs, in accordance with real time orders and pre-sales. It also allows books to remain in print pretty much forever. And more books in print for longer periods mean that publishers will always have a steady trickle of revenue, even from books that were considered long past their profit-by date.

Of course, if it was that easy, publishers would have made the change already. Unfortunately, the printing companies who work for the book publishers have a vested interest in making sure that offset printing remains the industry standard. It doesn’t matter much to them if the remainders process is wasteful – either way, the publishers pay for the books to be printed.

In any case, it is surprisingly difficult to be both sympathetic and callous towards these three links in the supply chain. They are just trying to do business and protect their own interests. They are, after all, institutions and would like to continue in those roles for some time to come. In the end, inefficiencies do not matter as long as operations are profitable enough. And, right at the moment, they are.

The Nature of the Beast

2006-10-05T13:11:00.000-04:00

The most important thing to remember about the publishing industry is that it exists to make money. There are artistic concerns involved at some point as well, but when those concerns conflict with the profit margin, business will more often than not win out over art. Having said that, it is also important to remember that the publishing industry is an institution and the primary point of an institution is to resist change unless it is absolutely necessary. As we have already established that this institution is financial in nature, it is safe to say that unless there is an overwhelming economic reason to do so, the industry as a whole will probably not see the point of change for the sake of change.

While that is the nature of the industry, it is also important to determine whether every aspect of it makes sense from a process standpoint. The modern business aspects of publishing has grown and evolved over the course of the last century into something that is more or less profitable. From the viewpoint of that end-goal, it works – but is it efficient in reaching that goal?

In short, no. The industry is hampered by an outmoded distribution system that relies on consignment sales and a returns process that was developed during the Depression as an incentive to keep bookstores in business. The marketing process is hampered by the scattershot diversification of mainstream avenues for direct advertisement of new materials. And the selection process has devolved into an exercise in luck, networking and fine-tuning the first page of the manuscript into the perfect hook – none of which truly reflect the quality (or marketability) of the work in question.

Somewhat more ominously, the industry is no longer able to pay a living wage to the majority of its authors – the primary content providers that the rest of the process runs on. Somewhere between 2% and 4% of all published authors are able to make a full-time living on their work. Turned around, that means that the vast majority of published authors probably have a day job in addition to the monies coming in from their writing contracts.

Contrast that figure with the vast numbers of industry professionals – editors, publicists, proofreaders, agents, publishers, printers, etc – who are able to make a comfortable full-time living on other people’s work. Granted, even the best authors cannot produce more than one or two novels per year; but either the publishing business model needs to be fine-tuned or someone needs to mount a major publicity campaign to combat the societal archetype of authors immediately launching to fame and fortune upon publication. Perhaps if the perception of a solid economic incentive was removed from the equation, the only authors writing (and submitting) manuscripts will be those who have no other choice but to write.

Even more importantly, the publishing industry would be wise to work towards erasing the reputation that published authors are somehow better – more talented, even – than unpublished authors. In truth, there is nothing special that a lot of these gods-who-walk-as-men have really done except manage to gain the attention of someone who was in a position to publish them – there is a reason why these kinds of events are called “lucky breaks,” after all.

An Open Letter to Publish America

2006-10-05T08:17:00.000-04:00

Dear PublishAmerica –

You don’t know me, but I published my first book through your company in April of 2005. I ignored the advice of a lot of people who make their living through the publishing industry (and quite a few who wish they did) in doing so, but it was my choice and I made it after a lot of careful thought and deliberation. My reasons for doing so are my own and they are not the point of this letter.

One of the things I discovered when my book was published was exactly how ubiquitous the cultural stereotype of book publishing as a path to fame and fortune actually was. Personally, I believe that your company is unfairly singled out for this particular bit of hyperbole. All publishers use this mashed up carrot to solicit new content – deliberately or accidentally, consciously or unconsciously, overtly or implicit. After all, without new content, a publisher has nothing to publish. However, there is such a surfeit of available content that all publishers, great and small, can afford to treat their content providers however they wish. In this respect, PublishAmerica deserves the same level of contempt as the rest of the industry.

I’m going to pause to introduce my brother here and, by the end of this paragraph, you will understand why. My brother is mildly retarded, with petit mal epilepsy and a severe learning disability; in clinical terminology, he is referred to as “high functioning,” with occasional psychotic episodes. The list of medications that he has been prescribed over the years reads like the roadmap of an Eastern European town. Still, he has been able to hold the same job for longer than either of my marriages. And, like everyone else, my brother feels the need to express himself from time to time; somewhere in the past half-dozen years, he wrote a novel.

Over the years, I have developed a discriminating taste for the precise bullshit to truth ratio inherent in advertising copy. This skillset allows me to parse out the hyperbole and focus on what a particular company can actually sell me (which is, as we all know, very different from what they say they can sell me). However, my brother has consistently proven that he is not capable of making this determination on his own, which is probably why he wanted to become a novelist in the first place (instead of something his artistic talents are more suited to, like painting).

Whereas I have come to terms with the fact that I have a better chance of winning the lottery than of actually earning a living from my writing, I do not know if my brother has that same understanding. I comprehend that a large part of the publishing process is dealing with disappointment. At the same time, I feel that my brother has had more than his fair share of disappointment in life and does not need to seek it out.

To be absolutely honest, my issue with you, PublishAmerica, is not financial. My issue is that you would have gladly published my brother’s novel had he submitted it. To a large extent, this is a hypocritical stance for me to take – after all, I believe that all first-time authors should self-publish, if only because a farm team system works in baseball and should work in publishing as well. But while I feel that every author should have the opportunity to publish, I do not believe that every author necessarily should publish.

And that is really the crux of the issue. Given the opportunity, my brother would publish his novel with absolutely no hesitation. And he would be held up for ridicule by those individuals who like to point out that companies like PublishAmerica have no content filter. It would not be fair and it would not be pretty, but that’s part of life.

I don’t know that there is an easy solution to this dilemma. Perhaps you might like to introduce the concept of “managing expectations” into your book selection process. Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to act like a respectable company and treat your authors like something other than a commodity – it would certainly set you apart from other publishers.

Or maybe you could just do exactly what you’re doing now and let the market forces crush the spirits of your authors, while blaming the publishing industry for the fact that you have created a bad reputation that taints every book you produce. It certainly wouldn’t require a lot of effort on your part. And that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

Sincerely,
An author