Michael Stackpole did a great post a short time ago about electronic publishing. Go read this because in many ways he sounds like me in his disgust for writers who want to be taken care of.
Great post Michael. Folks, read it here.
Dean’s Short Bio
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.
Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.
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WMG Publishing Inc. is now my major publisher of all my coming novels, collections, and short stories.
Fiction River Volume #1 Is Available!
Fiction River, an original fiction anthology magazine edited by me and Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available for subscriptions. Unnatural Worlds, the first volume, shiped on April 23rd.
$6.99 electronic and $15.99 trade paper editions of Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds are available at your favorite bookseller..
Or subscribe to future issues now.
Lots of good stuff there. As usual, considering the source.
But at the very end where he’s saying stuff like “the canary is dead” and “publishers have a month–two at most–to figure this out”, that sounds like sky-is-falling talk.
He also talks about authors writing directly for (and to) the readers since online contact is ubiquitous and instantaneous. That would seem to be in direct contrast to what you and Kris have said about first, a writer should most of all write for herself *then* worry about marketing and second, it’ll be quite a while before the internet replaces the publicity apparatus the big houses have in place.
D.
Deborah, Mike is of the opinion that if New York doesn’t start moving and moving quickly, the point of no return will be passed. I tend to agree, and trust me, nothing about New York publishing can move fast. Not in their nature in any way.
But that said, there are some very, very smart business people at the tops of these big publishing companies, and they are not dumb, they know what’s happening. And they mostly understand the forces that have them trapped in certain patterns. They are moving quickly now that electronic publishing is finally real (it’s been talked about for almost 20 years now as the next big thing, just that no one knew when) to make income streams on the electronic side. But quickly with long term union contracts, long term warehouse rental, increasing shipping costs, the destructive nature of having the returns system, and huge, leased overhead just isn’t quickly by any means. That’s why the price wars this last year were so critical to publishers. And they lost them.
For example, Pocket Books wanted to hold onto Kris’s novel Fantasy Life and not return rights, so they put out a $27.00 POD trade paperback that is discounted down to $19 on Amazon at times. If I went to CreateSpace, for a $39.00 fee, I could get the same distribution as Pocket and do a Trade Paperback of the same size and look exactly for a retail of $17.99 with the same discounts along the way that Pocket Books has to give. Why the difference between $18.00 and $27.00? New York overhead. Their profit and loss statement won’t allow a price under that for a POD, while I have no overhead and thus can give the same product at $17.99 and make Kris more money than she will make per book through Pocket.
And thus is the big problem New York faces. With price wars on the electronic side and price point problems on the paper side, they are being shaken. The corporations that can move and adjust fast enough, or carry through a transition phase will survive, the ones that don’t will leave a hole that active young publishers will climb into the gap to fill. That’s the nature of publishing. That’s not changing.
Thanks for elaborating!
Dean,
Given the massive overhead involved with traditional publishers, do you see a shift out of NY in the future?
I always thought the whole ‘books are expensive because paper is’ was bunk and recent history has proven this when e-books (prior to the price wars) were just as expensive as paper.
The problem was obviously the high cost of publishing. So do you see the companies moving off the most expensive real estate in the world to remain in the game?
Laura, I agree. The big companies will be around. I tend to think it’s like television. We went from 3 channels to a thousand, but the big three are still around.
And Laura, thanks for the complement on the tone here. I sure work to keep it on topic and under control, so thanks, your comments mean a lot to me.
JoeMontana, honestly my opinion is that they won’t move. The structure is just too ingrained. Some new companies will start up away from the city and no new company will move into the city, but the big ones will figure out a way to maintain in the high overhead. But they will have a rough adjustment. But just my opinion. Profit and loss calculations are going to mess with them over the next few years and cause changes that newer writers will scream about and shout that the sky is falling. Stand back from all of those and just look at it with logical business sense to see what is really happening in the flash news cycles.
Again, just my opinion, and at this point, no one knows and anyone who claims to know is just full of it. (grin)
I agree there will be a lot of changes, and that some current companies and corporations in publishing may disappear or be acquired by better adapted companies. But since major corporations haven’t disappeared from television, film, or music, I don’t imagine they’ll disappear from publishing. The distribution and audience ratio has changed drastically in those other industries in the past 20 years, and it will change drastically in publishing–indeed, it already has. When I broke in, the major houses of New York were the only place to sell commercial fiction novels; for all practical purposes, there was no other market and no other way to get published. That has changed SUBSTANTIALLY in the past 22 years, and will conitnue to change. But I don’t picture big companies with fiscal resources, specialized packaging and marketing departments, sales forces, technology budgets, and expertise simply disappearing from the field; I believe they will continue sharing it with other production and distribution models, and that the market as a whole will keep changing and evolving.
JoeMontana, a good question. My guess is that publishers won’t move out of New York (though some may; Baen did), but rather that influence will become more widely distributed. In North America, we haven’t really seen Hollywood diminish (and certainly not disappear) as a film capital, for example, but we have seen Toronto, New York, and Vancouver (and perhaps Orlando?) arise as important film-cities IN ADDITION to Hollywood. Rather than seeing the major established houses leave New York, what we might see instead is that a number of houses will grow to a similar level of importance which are NOT founded in or based in New York–and which may not originate from traditional publishing roots. (Ex. Technology companies may get more active in commercial publishing.)
Harlequin Enterprises entered North American publishing decades ago with an unsual and untraditional business model for publishing (namely, to publish books like dishwashing liquid; get readers invested in the publisher brand rather than in individual authors and titles, so that readers will be every “Harlequin Temptation” or “Silhouette Intimatine Moments” novel published every month, because they can counton the brand (the particular Harlequin imprint). As a business model, it survives today, though severely diminshed; but for about 20 years, it was INCREDIBLY successful–and in multiple ways.
So I think one thing we may well see are innovative publishing ideas springboarding off the possibilities created by new technology. SOme of those innovations may come from established publishers; or from companies that buy divisions of established publishers which start breaking up and collapsing; or from new publishing companies that arise outside of and in addition to the established New York houses.
Like Dean, I also think that publishers are indeed focused on the challenges at hand, and the real question will be pace–because he’s right, these are big companies, things that size don’t usually move/change fast, and publishing in particular does indeed have a very entrenched pattern of slow behavior.
There seems to be a lot of flailing general racket on the internet that publishers aren’t “doing” anything, aren’t “thinking” about this, “aren’t talking” about this, etc. Since publishers are thinking and talking constantly about this, and (slowly) doing things, I thikn that racket must be coming from people who either don’t HAVE publishers, or who have publishers but don’t bother to talk to them, or who can’t get their publishers to talk to them (uncommunicative publishers is a not-uncommon phenomenon).
I currently have a publisher who’s very communicatrive with me, thank goodness, and we’ve talked at length about the current changes and future challenges of publishing, and what the publishers goals and plans and possibilities are, on several occasions this year. I have a friend whose publisher is also communicative with her about these subjects. And, like me, she feels pretty calm, rather than haunted by the spectre of her publishing dancing on the deck of the TITANIC.
Sure, things will be hard. They’ve always been hard. This is publishing and MOST PEOPLE DON’T READ BOOKS. So it always -will- be hard. (shrug)
Pardon if this is old hat and I just didn’t notice until now, but this is the first time I’ve recognized another name as that of a senior editor.
Regarding Mike’s post, there is now a most interesting dialog going on between him and another, but in this case editorial, big name from NYC. Just thought some people might be interested in jumping back over for a look.