For almost a year now in the book chapters of Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing I’ve been pounding on some of the problems I see with traditional publishing and the myths that writers have to deal with. I still have a number of chapters to go in that series, but I felt it was time to start this new topic.
Over the last two years, publishing has been starting into a radical shift, a move that for the first few months I just ignored. Michael Stackpole, a friend of mine, had been shouting at a lot of us to wake up for years ahead of that, but I was slow to the alarm clock to be honest.
Now understand, I had a book hit #1 on the electronic bestseller list done by Peanut Press in 2000 and even have an award on my shelf proving it. I thought the entire thing stupid in 2000 and my feelings didn’t change in the slightest until 18 months ago. Remember that in the year 2000 I had been hearing and ignoring all the talk about electronic publishing being the next big thing for ten years. It was old news in 1995 let alone in 2000 and I thought of it as just people constantly shouting “The sky is falling.”
One editor said to me in 2000 about me being #1 on the electronic bestseller list was like being the best hockey player in Equador. He was right. Another editor in 1995 complained to me that she was spending 80% of her time in meetings talking about electronic publishing that only accounted for less than one tenth of one percent of all sales at that time.
And during those years up until 18 months ago, when someone asked what I thought of electronic publishing, my answer was always, “Some day electronic publishing will be a nice source of extra money for writers like audio books are.”
Oh, wow, was I wrong on that. And right at the same time. But like everyone else, I just didn’t know how I was wrong or right.
About 18 months ago I realized that maybe, just maybe, with introduction of the Kindle, the time had finally arrived that everyone had been shouting about for over twenty years. I decided to pull my old head out of the sand and look around, and what I saw scared hell out of me because, to be honest, I flat didn’t understand a great deal of it.
My first desire to was to go back and jam my head down into the sand. I know the traditional publishing system and I know it pretty well, having been a publisher, an editor, and a writer now for thirty years. The new world I didn’t even understand most of the terms and what all those letters meant. You know, HTML, DRAM, and so on and so on.
So 18 months ago my wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch and I met for dinner with two of the top young writers who know computers and this coming new world, Michael Totten, a freelance Mideast writer and blogger and Scott William Carter the short story writer and published young adult novelist. And after three hours I came away from that meeting even more frightened, but at the same time energized and hungry to learn.
Now, as all my friends will tell you, when I get focused on learning something, just get out of my way. I learn it, I question it, I test it, I don’t believe the test, I learn more, I test that, I try it a different way, I test it again, and again and then eventually I know more about something than most people around me.
I have been doing that now for 18 solid months with electronic publishing, with a daily focus at it and the new world of publishing and the impact it might have on traditional publishing. And I don’t plan on stopping that chase anytime soon. I am a long ways from knowing everything about what is happening with publishing, but I am now willing to talk here about different subjects concerning this brave new world of publishing and see if this group mind around here can help us all move forward.
Yes, I have been following Michael A Stackpole’s posts (Stormwolf.com), and yes I have been following J.A. Konrath’s posts, and a hundred other blogs and people working the different sides of publishing and the impact of the electronic or epub publishing and POD publishing on it. And I have been reading publishing financial reports and stock reports and sales figures and so much more. As I said, when I want to know something I am a vacuum cleaner for information with far too much suction.
At the moment, here is what I can say firmly.
1) No one knows where this is headed. If they claim they do, ignore them. They will be proven wrong in about three minutes.
2) Things are changing by the day. In all my years in publishing, there has never been a time when events that have a huge impact on publishing happen daily.
For example the big event in the last few days (as I write this in the first week of August 2010) for authors is Amazon opening up the Amazon UK Kindle store to all books with the correct rights that are being sold on Amazon US. One moment I have nothing but a few Star Trek books being sold in the UK, the next moment I have twenty-some of my short stories that have been recently put up by WMG Publishing. And more going up every day.
3) Major traditional publishing will not go away. But it will be changed and changed drastically. Those of you who have the ego to think that New York publishing is ignoring all this are being silly. New York is run by humans who know this business better than anyone, and they see what’s happening. But the problem for many of them is that they are captains on large ships, and large ships do not turn quickly. Right now things are changing quickly.
Also remember that for New York, this has been a case of “the sky is falling” for twenty years. It’s hard to suddenly believe that after that long something actually is now happening.
At lunch today with a group of professional writers, we were using examples of two major corporations who had to deal with massive changes. Kodak and NetFlix. Kodak saw the changes coming and in many ways were innovators of some new products, but couldn’t move their large company fast enough to save it. NetFlix knew it had a service that would be short lived and planned from the beginning for the coming change. Time will tell if they make it, but they seem to be out ahead just fine.
Some New York publishers will be able to change course fast enough, others won’t.
Changes and how to adapt as writers.
Honestly, at the moment I would say if you find yourself attached to a set way of doing something, almost in myth-like firmness, step back and take a deep breath. Again, right now in publishing, everything is changing. You need to be open to new ideas and not be like I was 18 months ago, with my head firmly planted deep in the sand and my focus only in one direction.
I honestly can’t believe how fast things are changing. For decades it seemed that in publishing change was slow. Then one moment everything went into fast forward.
Last fall Kris and I taught a workshop on marketing. That same titled workshop will be very, very different this fall. We’ve added in workshops called New Technologies and How to Be Your Own Literary Agent and Money Management and so on, because all of these new technologies that are impacting publishing are also opening up new cash streams to writers. Hundreds of new cash streams, actually.
And we will talk about these new cash streams in different posts in the future.
But for example, did you know that it is now easy for a writer to sell their own work overseas to overseas publishers in translation rights? What caused that change? E-mail and internet and author web sites.
Did you know that it is now frighteningly easy for a writer taking their own work out with their own publishing company to get into all the major bookstores? And library distributors. And so much more. In other words, an author with some knowledge can now get the same market penetration a major publisher can get. And get the publisher’s profit share as well. Will all authors want to do this? Of course not. We’ll talk about it in future chapters of this.
And so on and so on. Lots and lots of topics and I am open for suggestions for more.
In ending this first introduction chapter, let me talk for a moment about the real wonderful value of this new change. And I will talk about this much more later.
Writers can write what we want!!!!!
This new change now allows a writer to sit down and write the story they want to write, no matter the trends in New York, no matter the tightness of a market, no matter what some agent thinks will sell or won’t sell.
For decades I have been telling new writers to just write what they want to write, what makes them passionate, what makes them angry, what makes them happy. But often, in the real world of traditional publishing, those passionate books would not sell or be labeled “hard sells” and end up in drawers and the writer discouraged.
No more. Writers now have a lot of different ways for readers to find and discover their work beyond traditional publishing routes. And more opening up by the day.
So I stand by what I have told writers for decades now. Write what you love, what makes you passionate or angry. And when you are done, then we can talk about this new world and how to find readers for your work, either with traditional publishing or without.
Wow, is this stuff fun. Welcome to The New World of Publishing. Let’s talk.
“Writers can write what we want!!!!!”
This, plus writers can make what they write available to many readers.
And to go further, writers can write what they want and make it available to readers, without the traditional agent/editor/slush filter that has been in place forever.
I’m not advocating one direction over another, but as I’ve learned more about the publishing business, and the more I write and send stories to markets, the more I realize that there is a very small number of editors, publishers, and agents filtering what does and doesn’t get published.
Magazine and digest editors pick a tiny percentage of stories for inclusion in their magazines and digests. Some markets get thousands of submissions a month and accept a handful of stories.
On a larger scale, agents and editors receive thousands of novel queries or submission packages a month, and many accept a handful of new stories or clients. In one case, a blogging agent has received well over 7,000 queries so far this year and has asked for further submission packages on less than 1% of those queries.
Granted, a lot of the rejections are coming from writers who still need to learn craft. I’m part of that group. A lot of the rejections are probably just not good writing. But a lot of them are probably well written, good stories, but just not a good ‘fit’ for the agency or editor. Or whatever.
Point being, there is a lot of writing that readers simply are not seeing, because the filters built into the system block it from being seen. Electronic publishing can help fix that, I believe.
Maybe epublishing is like a new printing press being invented. Now, anyone who wants to can write something and get it in front of readers. Maybe make some money off it. It’s a fascinating time to be in publishing–all the traditional routes and rules are being questioned, and writers are discovering that maybe there’s more than one way to be read by readers than going through the traditional NYC route.
At the end of the day, our goal as writers is to be read, right? Fascinating times.
Jim, as a former editor of a number of different things, and one of those people who received over a thousand submissions per month, let me simply say that MOST of those submissions should never see the light of day, let alone published in any form.
Newer writers in this field think that when they hear an editor say they only found ten stories in a thousand, that it’s editor taste and nothing more that is blocking all the rest. Uhhh, no. Editor taste plays a roll in some selections, sure, but on those you get personal responses from editors.
When I started as editor of Strange New Worlds, a Star Trek anthology where my assignment was to find 23 professional level stories from writers who had never published more than three short stories (same as Writers of the Future contest), John at Pocket and I were deathly afraid we wouldn’t find enough quality fiction. We got upwards of 3,000 stories that first year and I found 17. We had to fill the first volume out with extra stuff. And trust me, I bought a few stories that were not to my liking. But they were high quality and a kick-ass story.
So as I get into this series, I’ll talk about that problem of all those writers who think they can write because they finished their first short story now able to publish it. It really isn’t a problem, but many people think it is, so we’ll talk about it in a future post I promise. I plan on doing one of these new ones every week as I slowly wind down Sacred Cows. That’s almost a book at 28 chapters and close to 90,000 words.
Thanks for the comments.
Awesome!! After reading J.A. Konrath’s latest post and then Jim C. Hines post about the same topic, I thought, “It sure would be cool if Dean did a post on ebooks, the changes in publishing, new technology, etc.”
Then I thought “You know what would be really cool is if Dean did a series on how publishing is changing. That’ll never happen,though, he’s too busy with the Sacred Cows. Oh, well, I’ll just have to wait until October.”
Then I checked to see if there were any new posts to your blog and just about fell out of my chair.
Seriously, I spilled iced tea on my Nook.
Anyway, I can’t wait to see how this series shapes up. I’m looking forward to the discussions on this topic and I’m sure there will also be some huge myths to be killed, cooked up and grilled as well.
Looking forward to this series, too.
I am so glad you’re doing this series! The Pitches & Blurbs workshop got me jazzed (to put it mildly) about e-pub and PoD, but when I left the coast to head back home, I felt like I was leaving this great round-table with the discussion only part way started.
I’ve taken the first steps in my own business plan (I have a business plan – who’d have thought! Kris would be so proud. *g*) and I’m chugging my way through my own learning curve. But man, there’s nothing like continuing the discussion and getting the kind of education you take the time to put on this blog. I hope everybody appreciates it. I know I sure do.
Looking forward to reading more, Dean, thanks for the insights and comments.
This is awesome, Dean. I’m the kind of person who likes to watch others blaze the trail ahead of me and assess their results before I take the plunge. But this is so exciting–the international accessibility, the technological innovation (I heart gadgets), and the opportunity to take more control of my writing career in virtually every aspect of it.
You’re right, not all writers will want to do this because for one thing: it’s really time consuming, both the learning of the process and the actual implementation. I happen to think the benefits outweigh the time consumption.
I’m glad you’re doing this topic on your blog and looking forward to seeing more of it!
I’ve written an upcoming column for NINK about this sme subject, saying many of the same things as Dean is saying here (but in my own pithily charming way, OBVIOUSLY).
Apart from that column, which got some stuff off my chest, I’ve become disinclined to discuss this subject. Because most of the discussion centers around “what the future holds.” People tend to be insistent and emphatic (as well as unreasonable and ferverntly religious) about it, and I’m a low energy person who’s already tired of exerting myself on this score. What will happen will happen, regardless of what of what I say future now–so I don’t feel much like investing any more of my energy ARGUING about it anymore.
I follow what’s going on, I read about it, I watch the market, I learn. But whatever I say about the future today won’t affect when it gets here or what it’ll be like, so–being a bear of very little stamina–I don’t feel very motivated to opine about it much myself. Che sera sera.
Oh, Laura, I’m with you on this. I don’t do well with pipe dreams and possible futures and arguing about them. I tend to like to stick to facts and figures and reality. So I’m not going to be talking at all about what might happen if…. I do enough of that in my fiction.
This column is going to be focused on what is happening now, the impact on writers, what it means for writers, and how writers can adapt and work smarter. I’m going to try to bring in thoughts from all sides of this new world, including thoughts on how it is impacting publishing and reading. In other words, I’m not going to be an advocate of anyone going electronic only, or an advocate of any writer ignoring electronic and staying traditional. I’m just going to try to present facts, trends, reality and let every writer decide for themselves.
Just as with the myths of agents and writing fast or slow or rewriting or not rewriting or any of the others I’ve talked about, every writer is different and should be able to chose their own path in their writing and their own methods. No right way, just your way. And that’s going to apply to this new world as well. But until you can chose a path, you have to know the options. That’s what this discussion will be about. The options that are quickly presenting themselves to writers.
Oh, which reminds me. Good post on this subject today by Jim Hines at:
http://www.jimchines.com/2010/08/death-of-print/
My own feeling about writer Joe Konrath’s experience is that the most relevant factor in his self-publishing success invariably goes unmentioned by writers who exhort following in his footsteps: He recently stated on his blog that he has always spent about 80% of his professional time on self-promotion.
In addition to his already being an established name when he started on this road, which is also a highly relevant (and often dismissed or discounted) factor in his self-publishing success, and his being a talented self-promoter, which factor is also typically dismissed or unmentioned, the sheer quantity of time and energy he has spent on self-promotion (80% of his professional time, according to him) is a hugely relevant factor that rarely gets mentioned.
Yeah, between you and Stackpole, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into this realm, and i’m not so sure that living here in the future is what I want; then again, when you see the asteroid coming, it might be time to hie yourself on down the road or else get squashed with the other dinosaurs …
I have one original novel in e-form only, and several back list reversions, plus a couple-three short stories, via Smashwords and Amazon.com. Income is tiny compared to even my little advances, but any money is better than no money in today’s rattled market.
Or as we like to say down home, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Keep your running shoes handy, folks, and keep watching the skies.
Definitely looking forward to reading this. I think it will be a must-read for writers of all stripes.
I suspect you will deal with it within the series, but this “New World of Publishing” also opens up the door for more pirating. I have seen several posts on Facebook (from successful writers) who are already seeing pirated copies of their work on the Internet.
I hope you will touch on this aspect in future posts.
Ed, I’ll touch on pirating, but not in a way you might like. My attitude is that is is not a problem. Things have always been taken, always will be. But not enough to make a difference on books in any real future.
Using and changing your stuff however to make a profit is another matter which I will talk about and how to stop it.
Speaking of pirating, I got a letter the other day from a writer who was all upset about some fan taking her story and posting it on a web site. I told her how to take care of that, then asked her if she had an agent where she was letting the agent get all the money and paperwork first. She said yes. I said she should be more concerned about theft of her own real money than the theft of posting a story without permission. She did not get back to me for some reason. (grin)
As a reader, I love that I will have a better chance of finding what I want to read as more is released in the smaller niches. The past few years finding what I like has been a problem, and I’ve been reading other genres I don’t care for as much just to keep reading (not a bad thing, as the other genres broaden my horizons). But, I want adventure SF that not only has a good sparkly idea, but also fantastic characters and a good plot. Oh, and a sense of wonder. Remember that? :sigh: Oh, and not depressing, please? Geez, the dystopia (and depressing plots with depressing endings) has been taking over the shelves.
I write what I have trouble finding. So, as a writer I love that I can get these kinds of stories out to the readers without one of the many gatekeepers/filters telling me it’s not ‘hot’ right now. Readers just like me who are having trouble finding things in their preferred reading niches. Will the books be successful? I don’t know yet, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity of finding out.
The changes in the last 18 months have thrilled me so much that I’m practically bouncing off the walls. Now, excuse me while I go back to revising one of the ‘not hot’ books…
RE pirating, I read an interesting article, maybe about a year ago, wherein a study done in France suggests that pirating of books is most prevalent with books that are not readily available, and least prevalent with books that -are- readily available, including in e-format.
IN a simlar vein, I’m reading FREE by Chris Anderson (author of THE LONG TAIL, which was about the effect on content providers and on consumers of the new distribution systems made possible by new technologies; Anderson was the keynote speaker at the Novelists, Inc. conference in 2007). FREE is about the history, current status, and possible future of a profitable $0.00 price point. Very interesting book–and valuable (as was THE LONG TAIL) from the perspective of a professional writer trying to understand changing business models in writing and publishing, in an era of rapidly evolving technology.
Anyhow, where I closed the book just yesterday, Anderson was talking about a gaming company that was pricing its games at about $20, at which price point the game was the target of a lot of illegal file-sharing and pirating. So the head of the company paid attention to a survey wherein gamers responded to questions about this practice, saying that they did it because they thought the price of the retail/legal version of games were too high. This particular company pres paid attentio to that and decided to lower the price of his games, to $10 or less. And subsequently saw a reduction in pirating, which had previously been rampant viz this game.
There will always be some people who steal, cheat, pirate, etc. But there are certainly studies and events which suggest that =most= people will pay for a thing if it’s easy to attain legally and available for what they consider a fair price.
I agree, Laura, and that will be a topic of a coming chapter in this series. That’s a great book, by the way, folks. I agree with Laura on that as well.
Make a good cheap and easy to get, and most people will pay for it, because they know TANNSTAAFL and because most readers are by and large good folks who want to support the creators of the stuff they like. (It doesn’t hurt to point that out, either, heh.)
Then, too, there’s always an advertising possibility for if/when you post “free” content on the web, or even, I’d imagine, ads you can embed in the DRM-free e-book and then offer the option to go ad-free, for a donation, as many good-quality free software coders do. Lots of models for monetization we writers can learn from web comics like xkcd (sell content-printed goods such as posters/t-shirts/mugs/mousepads etc), free/shareware programs and donations, and so forth.
I think we’ll see a rise in good freelance editors, as well; I don’t like the idea of editors sharing a percentage of book income, as is practice in many e-pubs, but the best editors will probably be able to have a fee schedule for a) storyline edits, b) copyediting c) line editing and so forth that writers will be able to pick and choose from, and some writers who are good at editing may even choose to do a mix of writing and editing until their writing income (or inclination) changes to support full-time writing, should that be their goal.
I think ebooks have the possibility to be cross-sold over many types of portals as your next reader could be a few clicks away, as well–author websites cross-linking/featuring for a fee, for example, review sites or individual readers serving as content filters, and even placing ebook ads on sites by content. That may be a bit of a ways off, though, at this point.
Sam, I agree and I’m going to talk about the rise of brand new jobs with this new world. There will be numbers. I already know three very good, top and reputable freelance editors to help me and Kris with our books, editors who have worked with New York.
Now understand, there is a difference between a good book editor and a copy editor. A copy editor fixed all your missed words and spelling misses and small issues. Beginning writers think that is an editor, but no, that’s a copy editor. A good book editor can see structure and how to help you form a book better to become more of what you (the writer) are trying to get to. Very different job. I’m a decent book editor. I suck at copy editing. And most copy editors (not all, but most) suck at larger structure things because their focus is down in the words. New freelance jobs there and many more I’ll talk about.
Oh, and freelance cover designers, of course. Authors with good design skills could do up their own, but for many, they would farm that out, much as many do with their websites and other non-writing parts of the business.
Really looking forward to this new series.
Question: Dean, are you concerned for this series with the current lightning speed of changes in the technology and printing business? Meaning, do you think you’ll be able to keep up?
Not trying to be a smart aleck. Seriously curious as to your viewpoint on this.
Ty, a good question, and one I’m going to use the column to update everyone else as I learn something new, and I hope all the readers who learn something new will put it here, so that this will end up being a sort of sharing of new things. But keeping up with all the changes is one of the main reasons I am starting this. All of us, me included, need help keeping up and keeping sane on this stuff.
The “Writers can write what they want!!!” makes me happy. With ePub, readers can search by recommend lists or tags, which means the hard lines of genres aren’t so hard anymore.
I wonder how this will affect imprints and physical bookstores. Will they add new wrinkes to the genre system to help readers find their books? Even now I hate having to go to different sections of the store to find a book. Then again, I don’t have a different system in mind, so I’m not sure how else they would do it (unless the Expresso Book Machine becomes popular and then, who needs book shelves?)
Thomas, I’ve got an entire focus of at least one post on bookstores coming and how authors can use the coming changes in bookstores. Stay tuned.
May you live in interesting times.
This series will be excellent, I can tell already.
One thing we have to realize is that in this changing publishing environment, is that we as fiction writers have to be better than ever before. With the “traditional” publishing of pbooks, the agents/editors/publishing houses have been the gatekeepers. Many current bestsellers (pbooks) get dissed for not-very-good writing. I’m sure the authors worry about that all the way to the bank.
Larry Brooks (storyfix.com) points out that our Craft (the what we do as concept, structure, characterization) needs to be even better than ever before just to have a chance to be commercially viable. With the current and increasing ease of getting oneself published in any form (traditional, self or whatever), the “competition” is intense.
We need to get our own Craft out the top just to stand much of a chance. I’ve written 4 novels in a series starting in 2005. When I started, I wasn’t even aware of such a thing as structure. Yet, I’ve gotten only 2 somewhat-negative feedbacks out of a hundred.
In keeping with the changing publishing environment, I’ll be doing major re-writes and revisions of all of them before I put them out as available on Kindle and investing in my own ISBNs.
Whatever the times may bring, we as fiction writers need to be better than ever thought needed before. “Good enough” Craft isn’t going to cut the mustard. “Great” Craft is the new normal.
Get the Craft up to the new normal just as a minimum requirement. Then, we can use our artistic creativities to get it up to being competitive.
Yes, “writing what we want” is fine. We need to ensure, though, we have our Craft way up there so readers will get the results we want.
If we’re willing to have only a couple of interested (willing to buy) readers, we don’t have to worry about Craft too much. However, to gain a decent readership (and perhaps ending up making a living at fiction writing), that’s not enough.
You (Dean) have been successful not only because you’ve promoted well but also that your Craft has been polished so well over the years. We’ve got to learn that too so that no matter the mediums our work goes out in (pbook, ebook or what ever comes) both the quality of our Craft AND the power of our creativity deliver a quality product.
We “artistes” need to get off our high horses and learn that “deathless prose” doesn’t cut it any more. We need to learn and apply target audiences, typography and design, publishing (many forms) and marketing/promotion.
The Interesting Times are here. Go write a bestseller.
Bruce, you said, “You (Dean) have been successful not only because you’ve promoted well but also that your Craft has been polished so well over the years.”
Thanks, but that got me laughing out loud, and I’m sure it got many of my friends laughing as well. You see, I have been the person who believed in writing the next book and just let the publisher handle promotion. I never promoted anything. I didn’t do hardly any signings, and until I started this to help newer writers a few years back, I didn’t care about any of this kind of thing either. I have been firmly and forcefully in the “promotion is a waste of time” camp with traditional publishing. So saying I have promoted well is pretty funny. However, I am known because I just flat published a lot of books, because I teach and help new writers a great deal, and now because of the last few years of this blog. However, that said, I will be doing more promotion for stuff.
Why now vs. with traditional publishing? A topic of an entire post as well, but just do the math. I had a $5.99 paperback out from New York. I was making about 36 cents per book sold. And thirty to one hundred thousand would sell. Not much difference I could make selling ten at a signing. My time was better spent writing the next book. But now a $14.99 trade paper I can make an average of $6.00 on, or a $5.99 electronic book I can make an average of $4.00 per book and the money goes directly to me without anyone taking a cut along the way. Now selling extra copies is worth the effort, so some promotion is now worth the effort. A lot more on this topic coming.
Thanks again for the nice comments, Bruce, and I agree with craft, just not the rewrite and polish part. (grin)
I’ve found the Sacred Cows series to be very educational and I’m looking forward to this new series as well.
Add the “Donate” button, and I’ll contribute to the new series like I did the old series. I’m learning tons of invaluable stuff and my education in the business is growing by leaps and bounds!
With an electronic market opening up, my immediate frustrations are for a universal format ereader and more reasonable pricing for the new release ebooks. Those things, however, will resolve themselves as the market grows.
The thing that is going to be truly interesting to watch is the the quality control and marketing issues. How to separate the wheat from the chaff in a method that is intuitive and easy for readers without distilling all the gatekeeping power in a few hands is going to be a challenge. I’m starting to think about ways to do that, how it could be effective. Should be interesting.
Another interesting paradigm shift for the writer will be changes to the adage, “money flows to the writer.” In traditional publishing, reputable publishers handle the up front expenses and recoup their expenses through sales; the writer is largely an “upfront” expense to the publisher, and that makes it easy to tell new writers to avoid fees for services.
However, if I as a writer want to avoid traditional publishing but still put out a quality product, I may well need to think about hiring a variety of freelance editors. In that case, I will need to pay my editor just like I pay an attorney for his/her services, and a graphic designer for the cover design, etc. As freelancers, those folks aren’t going to be interested in accepting payment in royalty based increments. Writers will have to pay fees at the time of service.
That will be an interesting dynamic. Writers are going to have to be very cognizant of the danger of scams. They’re also going to have to think harder about their business plans and figure out how best to afford those upfront expenses.
Lots of thoughts whirling in my brain. Time to get back to the day job. Grin.
Shawn, money still always flows to the writer (except for continuing education such as workshops and writer’s conferences or genre conventions and office and mailing costs). When the writer is just a writer.
However, when the writer puts on the publisher hat, then there are costs. Some of the same costs that any traditional publisher pays out and writers over the years have ignored. I’m going to talk about that difference between just being a writer and being a writer and a publisher. If you want the extra money a publisher gets, you have to do the publisher’s work to get your product into the distribution system. And sometimes that costs both time and money.
The upside is that if you combine the writer money and the publisher profits, you can really get some large numbers from less sales and have control of your own work. Downside is costs and time and having control of your own work. Writers love blaming others. If they take the chance and take control, no one to blame if something doesn’t work or if their cover sucks. This is going to be an interesting world in just forcing some writers to take responsibility. And those who complain about sucky covers, well are they in for a lesson in how hard doing a good cover really is. (grin)
Lots of topics in this new series, huh? (grin)
One thing, folks. I’m going to try my best to stay very, very clear on terms here. I will slip at times, but I will try.
Writers do not hire editors. Publishers hire editors. If you take a story you wrote and want to sell it yourself, but think it needs either editing or copy editing, then you have become a publisher. If you hire an editor, it is the publisher side of you who hires the editor.
My next Sacred Cows blog is about the term “self publishing” because the term is just not understood well.
For example: When a writer writes a book then joins in partnership with a traditional New York publisher to put the book out, the writer is self-publishing his book because he basically has hired the publisher to put out his book in a partnership. The writer decides who to send the book to, who to work with and under what terms set out by the contract which the writer can always turn down before signing.
When you put a book up on Kindle or through Lulu, you have decided to take on the publisher duties instead of signing a contract with another. You have chosen to do the cover, the book layout, and the work of putting it into the distribution channel (Kindle). You are a publisher. You have decided to take on those duties instead of hiring them out. Selling to New York or doing it yourself are self-publishing in the true sense of the word.
But because of the past negative feelings about writers who “do the publishing duties themselves” many writers think that they must sell to a traditional publisher. But the key is that you don’t “sell” anything. You join in a partnership with a publisher with a contract and license the publisher some rights to use under certain terms. You publish the work, you just chose who to publish it through.
Call yourself a publisher or hire a person down the street to be your publisher, or call your spouse your publisher, or set up your own publishing company and be the top stock holder. What is the difference with hiring a New York publisher to put out your work? The lines they are a blurring….
But keep in mind the difference between being a writer and being a publisher. Money flows to the writer. Publishers pay the bills and take a share. If you put on a publisher hat, expect to pay the bills.
Pirates, Har!
My first experience with this involved finding out from somebody that several of my older novels — all published in paperback and not offered as e-books — had been scanned and put out in a free torrent as PDFs. The e-versions weren’t perfect and the italics and such weren’t preserved, but the results were readable.
There was always a possibility that somebody could mechanically copy a novel — but not really feasible given what it cost to run a Xerox machine compared to just buying a paperback. But with high speed scanners going directly into a computer file and the ability to post copies for little cost past the time spent scanning, piracy has gotten a lot easier.
I’m not sure how this is going to affect sales. Free is a very good price, and while some folks will pay for stuff because they are honest, one needs look no farther than the music industry to see what P2P file sharing did for CD sales.
There have always been thieves; it is no less a crime than ever it was, but it’s easier to get away nowadays, at least when it comes to music, movies, and now books.
So far, I haven’t bothered with DRM — I’m not sure it will help, and there’s always some computer geek who can get around it and will do so just because he can.
It’s a brave new world. But then — it always is …
Just when I thought you couldn’t top yourself…
Any writer who isn’t paying attention to your blog is dumb as rocks.
Dean,
This came right on time. I’m am very much looking forward to this series, wondering myself how to navigate through all these exciting changes.
I’ll definitely be following this and sharing it with my other writer friends.
Thanks again!
Dean said: “But keep in mind the difference between being a writer and being a publisher. Money flows to the writer. Publishers pay the bills and take a share. If you put on a publisher hat, expect to pay the bills.”
That is a wonderfully susinct way of putting it! I also like the reminder that we as writers are entering into a partnership with the publisher, not “selling” our work to them.
I’m really looking forward to this series. The writing world is changing daily in exciting and sometimes confusing ways. We all have to keep learning and sharing to stay on top of it.
And I second Shawn’s request for a “Donate” button!
Really great to see this one, Dean!
We’ve got my first news feature at the newly expanded Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing going live probably either today or tomorrow, and I mentioned this post in my first edition (I’m the news manager over there), so hopefully you’ll get some more traffic coming in.
Btw, if ANYONE reading this ever has any interesting stories, tips, links, posts, etc. that you think would be newsworthy to the SF/F community, please let me know. Here’s the press release I wrote about it, with contact info.
It’s also a huge day for me personally, because my first work of fiction is now on sale at Amazon and Smashwords! It’s a 99 cent novella that introduces my work.
I’ll probably be back to chat about this post later.
Thanks, Moses, and congrats.
And thanks everyone for the welcoming push on this introduction. Great fun and next post coming soon.
Cheers
Dean
Great new topic, Dean!
One thing I hope you write on is what editors can do in this brave new world.
As a writer, I want someone who’s not personally invested in me to take a look at what I write, because (assuming they are competent and professional), their comments are golden. I’m hoping editors have a place in whatever the new order turns out to be.
A related issue (that admittedly I don’t know much about) is whether there is any formal organization for freelance editors.
Given the massive issues with agents, it looks like this is a great time to found a “Professional Society of Fiction Editors” (if it doesn’t exist already) with a code of ethics, and code of conduct, and some system for quality assurance. The nice thing with self-policing organizations (at least until the ossify into self-perpetuating power structures), is that they help members make money by guaranteeing quality service.
Anyway, great post, and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next.
Heteromeles, there has never been a need for freelance editors organization before now. Again, all good editors worked for publishers and people who called themselves editors or book doctors were scams for the most part. It has only been with this current new wave that there might be a need for quality freelance editors outside of a publishing house.
Yes, editors will have a place in a number of ways in this new world. Topics of coming posts.
I came up to this post to ask this question instead of putting it back on the “don’t believe the no unsolicited queries” post (which is pretty much quiescent by now).
The new Mulholland Drive suspense line that Little, Brown has just launched would be a perfect market for my MURDER BY THE MARFA LIGHTS (that has finaled twice in the St. Martin’s contests, but hasn’t won.) But agents don’t like it, so I can’t submit to the line. They referred me to this submission info on their site: “Little, Brown and Company is unable to consider for publication any unsolicited manuscripts or proposals. Any unsolicited materials sent to us will not be read nor returned. We encourage all authors who wish to have their work considered by Little, Brown to seek representation by a literary agent.” So agents are their chosen gatekeepers.
I think they’re missing out on some good prospects, but they can pick and choose among the cream of the published, so they probably don’t care.
Shalanna, I delt with this off and on for about twenty sacred cows posts. You have lots of options, some I will talk about here on the new side of things, others will be back in all the comments on the Sacred Cows.
Go back and read the sacred cows. The answer for you is in those posts and in the comments after them. Honest. But a couple things quickly as a refresher to everyone.
—Mail the submission package (never the full manuscript) to editors, not agents.
—Meet editors at conferences or workshops and have them ask for it.
—A form rejection these days will tell you to get an agent. It means your book didn’t catch them. Editors often write a letter to a writer on a “get an agent” form rejection because their company policy is to only use agents.
—A very, very large portion of all books bought today are not sold by agents. That is a fact.
Shalana,
In addition to what Dean advises above, I’d also say about this the same thing that I’d say about a post you wrote elsewhere RE agents who say that you “write too much.” If a “publishing professional” is that clueless, is that someone you really WANT to work with anyhow?
Bad experiences have taught me that rather than working with someone who is lazy, apathetic, mentally ill, abusive, rigid to the point of being dysfunctional, clueless, incompetent, etc… it’s better to just keep looking for someone competent to work with.
The “no unagented submissions” policy is indeed just a beard in many cases. But when you encounter an editor who rigidly adheres to that policy… Well, why waste time on someone =demanding= you surrender =15% of your income= to the sort of deeply flawed business model we’ve been discussing on the blog for months before she’ll even =look= at your work? That’s crazy and clueless (and experience has taught me that working with crazy or clueless people is a bad idea), so perhaps it’s just better to move on and look for a sane, clued-in editor elsewhere.
Much like when an agent objects to your having a work ethic, perhaps it’s just better to cross that person off your list and move on to agents, if you want one, who recognize that a professional writing career is about writing book after book after book after book.
I agree with Laura completely and have always found it head-shaking and funny and somewhat sad when agents tell writers to slow down. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the creative process, of how writers make their living, and a dozen other common sense things.
By the way, I want to clear something up. People seem to think I write very fast on an hourly rate. I don’t. I tend to do between 500 words and 1,000 words an hour, usually closer to the 500 number and rarely to the upper end of that range. So how do I write so much more than many writers? Hmmmm….let me think…..oh, yeah, I work more hours. Duh.
Doesn’t mean I write faster, I just write more hours. But in this world of myths, that gets translated into writing faster.
Well, from my perspective, that -is- fast. 500 words/hour would be a very good rate for me, and one I can only sustain for a whole day’s work if I’m toward the end of a book and really cooking. In the first 2/3 or 3/4 of a book, I work slowly and do a lot of rewriting.
For most of my career, by the way, I’ve heard the exact opposite, i.e. I’ve long been urged and exhorted (and, indeed, am still being urged and exhorted) to speed up, increase my pace, and produce faster (while maintaining the same quality).
But I assume that “you write to fast” or “slow down” comments are another case of inarticulate or carless (or simply not-very-smart) agents (or editors?) confabulating two totally separate issues, in much the way that, a month or two ago, we saw some agents confabulating the separate problems of time management (they spend too much time on slush) and the difficulty of making a living in this tough market (which is about selling enough books at good enough rates for 15% of clients’ earnings to be a viable income–something, be it noted, that’s achieved by agents who don’t read slush at all, for example).
IOW, agents who say “you write to fast” or “slow down” are assuming the reason they don’t like a writer’s work or don’t know how to market it (or are unwilling to figure out how to market it) is the writer’s -pace-… rather than just that they, the agent, don’t like the writer’s work and/or aren’t willing to work on a marketing strategy for it.
Nora Roberts is famously fast, steadily producing 3-6 books year, ever year, for over 25 years now. Kevin Anderson, another NYT bestseller, is also a fast writer, with multiple releases (some of them dauntingly long) virtually every year. Although I don’t know her release schedule, a multiple NYT hardcover bestseller told me last year she was taking the summer off after having delivered four novels in one year (which is double the pace I’m -trying- to work up to).
Certainly there’s such a thing as not writing well, or writing too carelessly… but that can be done at ANY speed. Just as writing well can be done at whatever a good writer’s natural pace is. (As Nora Roberts has said many times when questioned about her famous speed, “My pace is my pace.” OTOH, she also constantly emphasizes working long, hard hours, too, and seldom taking a day off.)
So “you write to fast” or “slow down” is the sort of comment that says to me either that agent/editor doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or is too careless and disengaged to articulate himself with any sort of relevant or accurate meaning.
I’m really looking forward to this series. I got another personal rejection from an editor on Alien Blue today – great book, no market for it. I’ve been thinking of posting it free with a link to a tip jar – when I hit a certain point in donations, I’ll write the sequel kind of thing.
Blackmail…
Anyway, I think I need to get an editor, and I’m looking forward to your advice there.
Deanna,
Not that I’m an expert or anything, but why not sell the book as an ebook? You could put up the first few chapters as a teaser or a few short stories to give people an idea of what your writing is like.
It sounds like you’ve done a good job on the book since you’ve gotten a good deal of personalized rejections. I think that anyone who likes that kind of book would gladly pay for an ebook. Though I would exhaust all the possiblities with traditional publishers before I went that route.
Again, I’m not an expert by any means, but it sounds like you have a great book and just need to figure out how to get it to the people who will love it.
“Not that I’m an expert or anything, but why not sell the book as an ebook? ”
Steve, you say this like it’s an even trade. It’s not.
Although this may well change, as of this year, the vast majority of book readers are still reading print; an e-published-only book currently eliminates the bulk of an author’s potential audience.
E-book companies and self-published authors have far more limited resources for packaging, promotion, and distribution than major houses do. You MAY not get a top cover artist, good marketing plan, strong sales push, and respectable print run at a major house, but you DEFINITELY won’t via an e-book company or self-publishing.
E-Books companies don’t pay an advance. Nor does self-publishing. (And to reiterate, it’s a MYTH that an author has to pay backed the unearned portion of an advance. We keep it.)
I agree again with part of that, Laura. I agree that the vast majority of readers are still only reading print. Math shows that. So a small published author (or self-published) author needs to take his work out also through POD to catch that market as well.
Kris has a book caught now in a mess with Simon and Schuster. The contract was back in the early days of electronic contracts and we didn’t get the reversion clause worked out exactly, leaving S&S with a slight loophole. So when Kris asked for the reversion, they tossed the book called Fantasy Life back into print in a $26.00 Trade Paper POD version. Same cover that had been on the mass market, pages just photo copied over from the mass market edition. Why? Do they expect to make any money on the book? Of course not. But they wanted to hold it for some reason and it was the only way they could do so under the contract.
If the reversion would have happened, Kris could have had WMG Publishing put out a nice looking trade paper for about $15.99 and done the electronic. But instead she’s stuck with a really ugly, poorly done and expensive version from S&S that no one will make a dime on. Laura, you want to explain to me how that’s helping her?
So carefully, both ways, is a good plan as New York publishing makes this shift.
But back to my point of this post. If you think you need the sales quickly, go to New York, because quickly is what you will get and then likely not get your rights reverted for ten years or much longer if you have a bad reversion clause. But if you don’t care about quickly, but instead don’t mind slow build of readership, maybe electronic and POD publishing is for you.
Or maybe, just maybe, a combination of both.
P.S. “a great book and just need to figure out how to get it to the people who will love it.”
Right. Figuring out how to get a book to the people who love will love it. That’s sales, marketing, promotion, and distribution.
I’d rather focus most of my professional time on writing and be paid well to do so by a large company that’s got a major resources devoted full-time (and with years of experience) to figuring out how to get a book to the people who’ll love it, rather than divide my professional time between writing -and- being in charge or figuring out how to get my book into the hands of people who’ll love it.
One of the reasons the professional publishing market is so competitive for writers and it’s so hard to find a publisher is because getting a book into such a situation is a =very= desirable position for a book. Much more desirable than selling your self-financed 5,000 print copies out of the back of a your car ever was (using the generic “you” here). It’s also, IMO, much more desirable than self-publishing an e-book (despite the obvious improvements of cost and distribution that e-publication makes available to the self-published person, compared to the prevous print/physical format). Those advantages are a big part of what makes it worthwhile to keep submitting to publishers and trying to get a book into such a position.
The benefits of e-publishing are that it makes possible release and distribution in an affordable–and even wholly independent, self-generated way–for books that aren’t suited to professional publishers, for one reason or another (usually because the potential audience is too small for a book to be profitable if published professionall, or because publishers–perhaps quite misktakenly–think so and behave accordingly).
That’s a specific benefit, not a universal and boundless one wherein every book (such as a book with substantial commercial potential) would be better off as a homemade release rather than a commercially published one. Because if a novel has the potential to appeal to 50,000 readers, the author is usually better off being paid well to write the next book while an established professional team at a publishing house does the extensive work of figuring out how to get 50,000 people to -decide- to buy this book they’ve never heard of by this writer they’ve never heard of.
Laura said, “Because if a novel has the potential to appeal to 50,000 readers, the author is usually better off being paid well to write the next book while an established professional team at a publishing house does the extensive work of figuring out how to get 50,000 people to -decide- to buy this book they’ve never heard of by this writer they’ve never heard of.”
Well, on that I agree more than I disagree, for at least the first book in a series. Going back to Scott Carter’s post about using both, how about sell the first one to a New York publisher who will ramp the push while you write the next one, then electronic and POD the second shortly after the New York first book in a series has gone out of the stores to keep your readers happy with a second book and to ride what New York has done to build.
That seems like using the best of both world and would be a very smart thing for a writer to do.
(And don’t be saying something like “That’s not fair.” Snort, just shows no lack of real business sense. Fair is in August. And in publishing, oh trust me, New York traditional publishing does not play by any rules of “fair.” They are all business and numbers.)
Laura,
Okay, so I guess I wasn’t clear on what I meant. I didn’t mean in anyway to say that epubbing a novel and getting it traditionally published are an even trade. Not even close.
What I meant was, if Deanna was going to serialize it on her website, why not sell it as an ebook instead? That’s all I meant. Also, with sampling people could get a feel for her writing. I’m definitley NOT in the camp that believes its easy to sell a lot of copies with ebooks. There is no magic wand for success. I also mentioned that I would exhaust all available avenues with traditional publishers before I went with epubbing.
Essentially, I was just saying: If Deanna can’t find a home with a traditional publisher for her book, she could serialize it on her website, or another option could be to sell an ebook version. Just sort of spit balling ideas, that’s all.
And Steve, a point I’m going to do an entire post on. They do not have to be mutually exclusive. Many authors have sold books to New York after self-publishing it and getting a track record. One does not exclude the other. New York excludes you publishing in any area you sold to them, but self-publishing does not exclude selling to New York with the same book. Just to be clear on that. More later.
“If Deanna can’t find a home with a traditional publisher for her book, she could serialize it on her website, or another option could be to sell an ebook version.”
I’m sorry. I completely misunderstood what you were saying! (I blame it on the heat. I’m blaming everything on the heat this week.)
Dean – looking forward to this new series!
Point of information: at Book View Cafe, we’re selling ebooks and tracking the formats people request when we do giveaways. By far the most requested format is .pdf – the format anyone can read on their computer, without an ereader device.
So that goes along with the fact that the majority of readers are still into print – or at least not yet into dedicated ereader devices.
Much as I love my Kindle, I still think in a few years the dominant ereading device will be the cell phone.
I agree, Pati, especially for shorter work. Short stories are perfect for smart phone reading.