I don't know anything about this site, except that a few writers I know say they have made $ posting their books in a serial fashion here: Radish Fiction.
Check it out and see what you think:
https://radishfiction.com/writer.html
Can you write serially? I have in the past, and it was fun, but I've gotten so skittish about deadlines these days. I think I'd have to have a story that "wrote itself" the way some blessedly do. Or I suppose write the whole book first, and then just release it chapter by chapter.
Alicia
Showing posts with label direct publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label direct publishing. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Friday, October 18, 2013
New-old interactive storytelling
I am really interested in how we can change the "shape" of storytelling to take advantage of all the new media. Here's a good example of an update of Pride and Prejudice which uses Twitter and Facebook to develop the story and interactivity.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-new-old-way-to-tell-stories-with-input-from-the-audience/280682/
I once designed (on paper, how retro) a story-in-a-website. It was going to be set in a small town on Lake Michigan (I'm still planning on using this invented town somehow), and this was the town's website. So I'd planned that you could click on, say, the hardware store link and get the story of that family, and click on the pizza parlor link and get a conversation between a boyfriend and girlfriend who were breaking up, and the mayor would have blog, and there would be legal notices and of course the police reports, and...
Well, great idea, but all the story parts I came up with were boring! Now I'm thinking maybe I'll have short stories associated with each link, not sure what now, and they'll all be connected through the website and town. But they'll be pretty traditional short stories.
Anyway, is this something you've thought of? Any fun (and abandoned) ideas we could empathize with?
Alicia
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-new-old-way-to-tell-stories-with-input-from-the-audience/280682/
I once designed (on paper, how retro) a story-in-a-website. It was going to be set in a small town on Lake Michigan (I'm still planning on using this invented town somehow), and this was the town's website. So I'd planned that you could click on, say, the hardware store link and get the story of that family, and click on the pizza parlor link and get a conversation between a boyfriend and girlfriend who were breaking up, and the mayor would have blog, and there would be legal notices and of course the police reports, and...
Well, great idea, but all the story parts I came up with were boring! Now I'm thinking maybe I'll have short stories associated with each link, not sure what now, and they'll all be connected through the website and town. But they'll be pretty traditional short stories.
Anyway, is this something you've thought of? Any fun (and abandoned) ideas we could empathize with?
Alicia
Friday, January 4, 2013
Rights reversion
First: I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY. Theresa is, so she can smack me down if I'm wrong on all or some counts.
Second: This will be of limited interest if you don't have old publishing contracts. Then again, if you see a publishing contract in your future, you probably ought to research this: Reversion of Rights.
Third: Goodness, we writers sure are quick to kneel down and let the industry beat on us like a hard rain.
When I "sell" a book to a publisher, I'm not really usually selling it in the sense of giving them all rights to the book in perpetuity in exchange for some doubtlessly inadequate amount of money. (I have done that with a book or two, sold all rights forever. I don't advise it-- depends, however, on the $$. :) I am instead "licensing" the book, giving the publisher the right to publish, distribute, and sell the book for a certain period of time under certain conditions. The contract spells out the conditions (like usually the publisher must publish the book and have a certain number of copies for sale within a specified timeframe). Most contracts have some end -- they are not in perpetuity, and aren't supposed to be.
So as nasty as most publishing contracts are (and I've signed a lot of them, and usually they're so nasty attorneys consulted have to take antacids-- "there's an option required, but no consideration for it???"), they usually do have a "reversion clause". That means that if the publisher doesn't keep the book for sale in a certain quantity, the rights can revert to the author. The weird thing is-- this is part of the nastiness-- there is a specified time to the licensing period (seven years is common). But the publisher can often "retain rights" past that period by keeping the book in print and for sale.
Notice "in print" used to mean they had to go to the expense of printing and shipping physical books. Now "in print" can mean virtually no expense for the publisher, as it might mean just having an electronic version available for sale. Many contracts used to have specific requirements for this (like one of mine was that the publisher, to keep the rights, had to do a print run of 10K), but more and more, the clauses are pretty open, so that just having it for sale on Amazon might be enough to keep the rights. This is pretty pernicious, IMHO.
Another truly pernicious part of some of these clauses is that the rights claimed include "all rights including those not yet invented". In the 90s, electronic books hadn't been invented (not really), and so now many publishers are saying that, even for books 20 years old, they "own" not just the print rights (which have long since lapsed probably) but also have the right to put out an electronic edition whenever they want. And sometimes they do that, not to earn any real money or goodness knows to pay royalties to the author, but just to do a rights-grab-- you know, in case I turn out to be the next Stephen King or something. (Don't hold your breath!)
Many of us were puttering along, sadly giving up on old books. After all, we couldn't afford to get new versions printed, and anyway, the near-monopolistic control of bookselling until recently made it hard to get popular fiction self-pubbed books into the stores (not impossible, but hard). And even though we knew that our old publishers weren't likely ever to sell our books again, it wasn't like any other publisher was eager to reprint old romances or Westerns. So we just went on, assuming those books were lost forever. But then came, finally, the wonderful hardware that would present our wonderful books to new readers, and a host of new online booksellers to let us reach those readers. And all at virtually no cost! A miracle!
That's when many of us unearthed those old contracts and started trying to get our rights back to those old books, which could now reach a brand new audience.
The first mistake was thinking we needed to "request the rights back." In fact, usually we just need to "serve notice that the rights have reverted." That is, the publisher needs to do something affirmative (put out that new print edition, maybe) in order to keep the rights after a certain period where the book has been out of print.
What's been happening a lot is that an author will write to the old publisher and say, "I request that you return my rights to (title)," and the publisher JUST NEVER RESPONDS. I can't tell you how often I've heard authors moan about books lost because the publisher never signed off on this rights reversion. Cough. Of course, every contract is different, but really. A publisher can't just ignore the letter and retain rights. We authors need to remember, these are OUR books that we licensed to them, often for pennies, and the contract did not cede the books to the publisher forever. And if the publisher doesn't respond to the letter, that means they have refused or neglected to assert any claim. (And even if they do assert a claim, that doesn't mean they have one. We as the creators have a claim. They probably don't if the book has been out of print. Check the contract. Hire an attorney. These days, it's worth it.)
Our serving them notice of the intention to take back the rights does not need their approval (depending of course on the contract, etc.). We just need to be able to prove (maybe registered mail receipt) that we did in fact serve them the notice. Sometimes there's a waiting period after service-- mine was 60 days. If they didn't do whatever that affirmative action was (10K copies in print for mine) in those 60 days, then the book is mine all mine again. Forever.
In fact, I've sent rights reversion letters about ten times. Once the publisher responded promptly with a letter recognizing the reversion. Once the letter came back (publisher out of business). Four times the publisher waited many months before finally sending the letter of acceptance. Four times I never heard anything. Every single one of those books, I put up for sale as soon as the specified waiting period was up. I never waited for the publisher to get around to responding to the letter. And if the publisher had responded by refusing? I'd send another letter saying, "The contract period is up. I've served notice of reversion. Your rights are terminated." They're welcome to come to Indiana and sue me. (They won't. They'd lose, so why bother?) I don't mean to be cavalier, but we should not allow fear of litigation that probably will never happen get in the way of claiming our rights to our books.
Now there are all sorts of tricks publishers have used to get around our own ownership of our own books. I wish they'd put that much ingenuity into marketing books! And more recent contracts have been much more restrictive in the rights reversion clause. However, if you're signing a new contract, this is one clause it will pay to keep author-friendly. If you have an agent, talk through what you want and insist on getting that. And decide if you're willing to go to the mat to keep eventual control of your own work.
To tell you the truth, I'd advise giving up rights for a long time only if this is otherwise a great deal. It's one thing to license a book for $2500 advance when you can get the rights back in 10 years. It's entirely different to pretty much give the book away forever for a piddly advance, especially now when there are so many other options. There are many reasons for accepting a traditional publishing contract, and go for it if that's what you want. But I have to say I am very glad that my early contracts had what in retrospect was a pretty loose reversion clause so that now I'm making far, far more money selling the books on my own. Yeah, you know, when I was 32, I didn't look ahead and think that I might want the rights back 20 years later. But I did, and I'm really glad I asserted my rights and took the books back and offered them up for sale. I would not sign a contract now that pretty much took all rights unless the money was pretty darned good.
And I have to say this to publishers. Stop being obnoxious. This rights grab many of you are embarking on is alienating authors and driving us away. We have other options now! And often you're grabbing rights you have utterly no intention of exercising. Hey, you make money for us, you don't have to grab the rights! We'll rent them to you very politely. But if all you're going to do is hold on to rights to deprive us of benefitting from our own work? Well, how very Gordon Gecko of you. You need us more than we need you, and it really is about time publishers realized that.
I recently heard a publisher say, "These books are our intellectual property!" Arrgggh! No! They are the intellectual property of the person whose intellect created them. The author. Maybe instead of being nasty and asserting control over our own creations, publishers should try to be equitable and reasonable and offer us a reason to license our books to them. What a crazy idea. But you know, it just might work. Publishers can no longer rely on a near-monopoly to corral authors into the publishing paddock. If a book is good enough for a publisher to want it, it's probably good enough to be sold by the author herself. (Not that publishers are all that reliable in choosing books that will sell well. Many books that got rejected by the big publishers became bestsellers. I have one of those, as a matter of fact, published by a small press and rather lucratively. Not quite -- not near-- a seller like Harry Potter, of course, which was rejected by a dozen publishers.) And in that case, the publisher will need to make a good sales pitch about what the author will gain from this relationship when there really are other options.
And if worse comes to worst, after 35 years creators have the right to terminate anyone else's use of their work.
It's a limited period (five years, I think), so set your clock. Also this means all copyrights should be mentioned in your will and specifically left to one person (to reclaim the rights, the person has to have more than 50% ownership, it sounds like). You might not live to get your rights back under the termination law, but your heirs can.
Anyway, let's just stop talking about "requesting our rights back" or saying the publishers "gave us the rights back." These are our rights. We need to know how to contractually assert our ownership. But usually we still own them, and they are OUR intellectual property, and publishers will do well to recognize for perhaps the first time in decades that authors are not "fodder" but rather essential partners in the bookselling trade. And if not, well, now we can go it alone. The liberation of saying that! Ah. I'll say it again. Now we can go it alone.
Alicia
Second: This will be of limited interest if you don't have old publishing contracts. Then again, if you see a publishing contract in your future, you probably ought to research this: Reversion of Rights.
Third: Goodness, we writers sure are quick to kneel down and let the industry beat on us like a hard rain.
When I "sell" a book to a publisher, I'm not really usually selling it in the sense of giving them all rights to the book in perpetuity in exchange for some doubtlessly inadequate amount of money. (I have done that with a book or two, sold all rights forever. I don't advise it-- depends, however, on the $$. :) I am instead "licensing" the book, giving the publisher the right to publish, distribute, and sell the book for a certain period of time under certain conditions. The contract spells out the conditions (like usually the publisher must publish the book and have a certain number of copies for sale within a specified timeframe). Most contracts have some end -- they are not in perpetuity, and aren't supposed to be.
So as nasty as most publishing contracts are (and I've signed a lot of them, and usually they're so nasty attorneys consulted have to take antacids-- "there's an option required, but no consideration for it???"), they usually do have a "reversion clause". That means that if the publisher doesn't keep the book for sale in a certain quantity, the rights can revert to the author. The weird thing is-- this is part of the nastiness-- there is a specified time to the licensing period (seven years is common). But the publisher can often "retain rights" past that period by keeping the book in print and for sale.
Notice "in print" used to mean they had to go to the expense of printing and shipping physical books. Now "in print" can mean virtually no expense for the publisher, as it might mean just having an electronic version available for sale. Many contracts used to have specific requirements for this (like one of mine was that the publisher, to keep the rights, had to do a print run of 10K), but more and more, the clauses are pretty open, so that just having it for sale on Amazon might be enough to keep the rights. This is pretty pernicious, IMHO.
Another truly pernicious part of some of these clauses is that the rights claimed include "all rights including those not yet invented". In the 90s, electronic books hadn't been invented (not really), and so now many publishers are saying that, even for books 20 years old, they "own" not just the print rights (which have long since lapsed probably) but also have the right to put out an electronic edition whenever they want. And sometimes they do that, not to earn any real money or goodness knows to pay royalties to the author, but just to do a rights-grab-- you know, in case I turn out to be the next Stephen King or something. (Don't hold your breath!)
Many of us were puttering along, sadly giving up on old books. After all, we couldn't afford to get new versions printed, and anyway, the near-monopolistic control of bookselling until recently made it hard to get popular fiction self-pubbed books into the stores (not impossible, but hard). And even though we knew that our old publishers weren't likely ever to sell our books again, it wasn't like any other publisher was eager to reprint old romances or Westerns. So we just went on, assuming those books were lost forever. But then came, finally, the wonderful hardware that would present our wonderful books to new readers, and a host of new online booksellers to let us reach those readers. And all at virtually no cost! A miracle!
That's when many of us unearthed those old contracts and started trying to get our rights back to those old books, which could now reach a brand new audience.
The first mistake was thinking we needed to "request the rights back." In fact, usually we just need to "serve notice that the rights have reverted." That is, the publisher needs to do something affirmative (put out that new print edition, maybe) in order to keep the rights after a certain period where the book has been out of print.
What's been happening a lot is that an author will write to the old publisher and say, "I request that you return my rights to (title)," and the publisher JUST NEVER RESPONDS. I can't tell you how often I've heard authors moan about books lost because the publisher never signed off on this rights reversion. Cough. Of course, every contract is different, but really. A publisher can't just ignore the letter and retain rights. We authors need to remember, these are OUR books that we licensed to them, often for pennies, and the contract did not cede the books to the publisher forever. And if the publisher doesn't respond to the letter, that means they have refused or neglected to assert any claim. (And even if they do assert a claim, that doesn't mean they have one. We as the creators have a claim. They probably don't if the book has been out of print. Check the contract. Hire an attorney. These days, it's worth it.)
Our serving them notice of the intention to take back the rights does not need their approval (depending of course on the contract, etc.). We just need to be able to prove (maybe registered mail receipt) that we did in fact serve them the notice. Sometimes there's a waiting period after service-- mine was 60 days. If they didn't do whatever that affirmative action was (10K copies in print for mine) in those 60 days, then the book is mine all mine again. Forever.
In fact, I've sent rights reversion letters about ten times. Once the publisher responded promptly with a letter recognizing the reversion. Once the letter came back (publisher out of business). Four times the publisher waited many months before finally sending the letter of acceptance. Four times I never heard anything. Every single one of those books, I put up for sale as soon as the specified waiting period was up. I never waited for the publisher to get around to responding to the letter. And if the publisher had responded by refusing? I'd send another letter saying, "The contract period is up. I've served notice of reversion. Your rights are terminated." They're welcome to come to Indiana and sue me. (They won't. They'd lose, so why bother?) I don't mean to be cavalier, but we should not allow fear of litigation that probably will never happen get in the way of claiming our rights to our books.
Now there are all sorts of tricks publishers have used to get around our own ownership of our own books. I wish they'd put that much ingenuity into marketing books! And more recent contracts have been much more restrictive in the rights reversion clause. However, if you're signing a new contract, this is one clause it will pay to keep author-friendly. If you have an agent, talk through what you want and insist on getting that. And decide if you're willing to go to the mat to keep eventual control of your own work.
To tell you the truth, I'd advise giving up rights for a long time only if this is otherwise a great deal. It's one thing to license a book for $2500 advance when you can get the rights back in 10 years. It's entirely different to pretty much give the book away forever for a piddly advance, especially now when there are so many other options. There are many reasons for accepting a traditional publishing contract, and go for it if that's what you want. But I have to say I am very glad that my early contracts had what in retrospect was a pretty loose reversion clause so that now I'm making far, far more money selling the books on my own. Yeah, you know, when I was 32, I didn't look ahead and think that I might want the rights back 20 years later. But I did, and I'm really glad I asserted my rights and took the books back and offered them up for sale. I would not sign a contract now that pretty much took all rights unless the money was pretty darned good.
And I have to say this to publishers. Stop being obnoxious. This rights grab many of you are embarking on is alienating authors and driving us away. We have other options now! And often you're grabbing rights you have utterly no intention of exercising. Hey, you make money for us, you don't have to grab the rights! We'll rent them to you very politely. But if all you're going to do is hold on to rights to deprive us of benefitting from our own work? Well, how very Gordon Gecko of you. You need us more than we need you, and it really is about time publishers realized that.
I recently heard a publisher say, "These books are our intellectual property!" Arrgggh! No! They are the intellectual property of the person whose intellect created them. The author. Maybe instead of being nasty and asserting control over our own creations, publishers should try to be equitable and reasonable and offer us a reason to license our books to them. What a crazy idea. But you know, it just might work. Publishers can no longer rely on a near-monopoly to corral authors into the publishing paddock. If a book is good enough for a publisher to want it, it's probably good enough to be sold by the author herself. (Not that publishers are all that reliable in choosing books that will sell well. Many books that got rejected by the big publishers became bestsellers. I have one of those, as a matter of fact, published by a small press and rather lucratively. Not quite -- not near-- a seller like Harry Potter, of course, which was rejected by a dozen publishers.) And in that case, the publisher will need to make a good sales pitch about what the author will gain from this relationship when there really are other options.
And if worse comes to worst, after 35 years creators have the right to terminate anyone else's use of their work.
It's a limited period (five years, I think), so set your clock. Also this means all copyrights should be mentioned in your will and specifically left to one person (to reclaim the rights, the person has to have more than 50% ownership, it sounds like). You might not live to get your rights back under the termination law, but your heirs can.
Anyway, let's just stop talking about "requesting our rights back" or saying the publishers "gave us the rights back." These are our rights. We need to know how to contractually assert our ownership. But usually we still own them, and they are OUR intellectual property, and publishers will do well to recognize for perhaps the first time in decades that authors are not "fodder" but rather essential partners in the bookselling trade. And if not, well, now we can go it alone. The liberation of saying that! Ah. I'll say it again. Now we can go it alone.
Alicia
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Back in the saddle-- Non-American spelling
Hi, it's only been a month! Who knows where the time goes. Nowhere productive, I'd say.
Anyway, back again. I'll try and post more. I really want to post about what I call the Tyrannosauruses, the powerful industry professionals who are still powerful as the industry changes. But that will come later. Now I'm thinking about something much more trivial-- non-American spelling and formatting.
An Australian author who has been "dinged" in writing contests for her Australian word choice and formatting asked if she should try to standardize everything for American readers, or trust that they really can read English that isn't American. Good question!
I think there are realities at issue here. First, of course Americans are perfectly capable of reading other forms of English, and publishers' worries about that are generally unfounded. Harry Potter, after all, managed to sell fairly well despite the terrible handicap of a British author using British terms. :)
American Publishers
However, those publishers will say, "We have a house style. We're not going to change that style (including spelling, punctuation, formatting) just for one author." And they're right too. Their editors and copyeditors and proofreaders and software are all geared to their own country's style. So if you sell a story to an American publisher and use "colour" instead of "color", expect it to be changed. No big deal. House style almost always rules. Even Harry Potter, after all, showed up in the US edition with double apostrophes for quotations! The publisher might be wrong about the ability of American readers to figure things out, but
there you have it. Those of us who have spent decades battling with "house style" tend to counsel choosing your battles when it comes to the copy edit. You know, "Okay, so they made Grandma into a friendly cocker spaniel. And they Americanized my spelling. Which should I go to the mat for?" :)
A couple thoughts-- will writing the story in your own style cause a publisher to reject you? Probably not, especially if the story is set in Australia. But don't be surprised if after buying the book, an American publisher sets the copy editor on all the URs. Probably they'll be gentle with your wordchoice (torch instead of flashlight), but monstrous on your punctuation. Just keep reminding yourself that JK Rowling had to put up with this too. (AS Byatt once wrote a funny article about having her British book Possession Americanized, with the pallid hero kind of Rambo-ized because the publisher assumed that American readers couldn't
abide a "slight" hero.)
Independent Publishing
And what if you're not going through a publisher but publishing it yourself? Well, then I'd say, go with what makes for a better experience for the reader, who is the only other person to consider then. Most readers who look for indie-pubbed books are very experienced readers who appreciate an author's voice, so don't worry that they'll be upset-- they're probably the least likely people to object to this. I would probably in the subtitle of the book or description make sure "Australian" is in there, like (title): An Australian Love Story, or in the description, this story, set in Australia.... the author, a native Aussie.... That is, give them a signal that this isn't Amy American's book. Then they have fair warning that if they are offended by non-American spelling, they should steer clear.
Contests
As far as contests, really-- ignore any comments that don't make sense to you. And I say this as a chronic judge. Sometimes judges comment on things just to have something to comment on, and they don't mean for it to be taken as holy writ. And sometimes they DO mean for it to be taken as holy writ, but they're wrong or this is some individual issue they care about and no one else does (I have a lot of those). If what they say sounds wrong to you, just ignore it.
And if you're being scored down for this, I'd complain to the coordinator of the contest.
I'm one of those who loves the slightly different "taste" of British books and those single quote marks, so go for it.
Alicia
Anyway, back again. I'll try and post more. I really want to post about what I call the Tyrannosauruses, the powerful industry professionals who are still powerful as the industry changes. But that will come later. Now I'm thinking about something much more trivial-- non-American spelling and formatting.
An Australian author who has been "dinged" in writing contests for her Australian word choice and formatting asked if she should try to standardize everything for American readers, or trust that they really can read English that isn't American. Good question!
I think there are realities at issue here. First, of course Americans are perfectly capable of reading other forms of English, and publishers' worries about that are generally unfounded. Harry Potter, after all, managed to sell fairly well despite the terrible handicap of a British author using British terms. :)
American Publishers
However, those publishers will say, "We have a house style. We're not going to change that style (including spelling, punctuation, formatting) just for one author." And they're right too. Their editors and copyeditors and proofreaders and software are all geared to their own country's style. So if you sell a story to an American publisher and use "colour" instead of "color", expect it to be changed. No big deal. House style almost always rules. Even Harry Potter, after all, showed up in the US edition with double apostrophes for quotations! The publisher might be wrong about the ability of American readers to figure things out, but
there you have it. Those of us who have spent decades battling with "house style" tend to counsel choosing your battles when it comes to the copy edit. You know, "Okay, so they made Grandma into a friendly cocker spaniel. And they Americanized my spelling. Which should I go to the mat for?" :)
A couple thoughts-- will writing the story in your own style cause a publisher to reject you? Probably not, especially if the story is set in Australia. But don't be surprised if after buying the book, an American publisher sets the copy editor on all the URs. Probably they'll be gentle with your wordchoice (torch instead of flashlight), but monstrous on your punctuation. Just keep reminding yourself that JK Rowling had to put up with this too. (AS Byatt once wrote a funny article about having her British book Possession Americanized, with the pallid hero kind of Rambo-ized because the publisher assumed that American readers couldn't
abide a "slight" hero.)
Independent Publishing
And what if you're not going through a publisher but publishing it yourself? Well, then I'd say, go with what makes for a better experience for the reader, who is the only other person to consider then. Most readers who look for indie-pubbed books are very experienced readers who appreciate an author's voice, so don't worry that they'll be upset-- they're probably the least likely people to object to this. I would probably in the subtitle of the book or description make sure "Australian" is in there, like (title): An Australian Love Story, or in the description, this story, set in Australia.... the author, a native Aussie.... That is, give them a signal that this isn't Amy American's book. Then they have fair warning that if they are offended by non-American spelling, they should steer clear.
Contests
As far as contests, really-- ignore any comments that don't make sense to you. And I say this as a chronic judge. Sometimes judges comment on things just to have something to comment on, and they don't mean for it to be taken as holy writ. And sometimes they DO mean for it to be taken as holy writ, but they're wrong or this is some individual issue they care about and no one else does (I have a lot of those
And if you're being scored down for this, I'd complain to the coordinator of the contest.
I'm one of those who loves the slightly different "taste" of British books and those single quote marks, so go for it.
Alicia
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Reporting back on "Freebies"
I promised a report back on putting a book up for free on Kindle. Now my publisher has done this successfully for my standard-published book-- seriously. Coming off the few free days last Xmas and this, the book sailed into the top 100 paid in Kindle (the first year into the top 5), and into the top 10 for the genre. But I am not sure it works that well for individual direct publishing.
Still, I gave it a try for one book. To do this as a direct publisher on Kindle (other platforms work differently), you have to join the "Select" program which means Kindle has the book exclusively for 90 days. I did it with a book I'd just put up without much history attached, figuring I don't yet have much of a sales record with the other platforms, so I wouldn't be losing much. This program lets you put the book as free for up to 5 days. I put it free for 2 days, then returned it to the standard price.
Results: Still coming. I sold -- actually sold, not free-- about 50 copies (a lot so far for me) of the book in the week after it went free. Also I sold 20 copies of the "prequel" to the book and about 50 copies of other books of the same genre I had for sale. Not the sort of revenue to fund my next trip to England, but better than I had been doing before. So it was worthwhile.
There were about 2500 free downloads (in contrast to last year, when my free book got 100K downloads-- but there weren't so many free books then). I think Kindle owners (esp ones who got the Kindle for Xmas) were trying to get books for free while they could, and saved them to read later. (That's what I do, anyway.) So far, I have almost no new reviews on the book site, which is disspiriting. But maybe those will come.
So here are my thoughts, what I did right and wrong. Understand, YMMV, and all that, also I think this should have a long tail and could be months before all the benefits are realized (so I hope).
1. I chose the book pretty wisely. It's a good book, well-written, representative of the genre (Regency) but not confined to it. (There's Shakespeare and adventure for those non-genre fans who dl'ed it.)
2. The book is a sequel to another book already up for sale, so I put a note in the end that if they want to find out how two secondary characters met, they should buy (title). I think that led to a sudden spurt in sales of the second book.
3. I have several books for sale. If someone reads the free book and wants to read more of my work, they can quickly (immediately) buy the others. I had a list of the other books there at the end of the book and a link to my Kindle bibliography page. Some authors put their first book up for free to "build name recognition," but I think we're all into instant gratification these days, and will be disappointed if there are no more books available, and might not remember the name a few months later.
4. I wish I would have put a short (1 page maybe) excerpt from another book in the end of the free one. Not the first page, maybe, but an exciting later moment.
5. I did put a pleasant "author's note" in the end, asking them to review the book on Amazon if they liked it because that really helps an author. Clearly, so far, this has had no effect. :) But I do think we might need to work on helping readers to want to review!
6. I also included a bio with my website, blog, and email info. Again, I'm hoping to make readers feel benevolent towards me!
7. I am going to work more on the blurbs/descriptions. The great thing about direct e-publishing is that for almost no cost (the book isn't available for sale for a few hours), you can fix or change almost anything. The Indie Romance list I'm on has been discussing how many "buyers" of the free books are annoyed at the bad writing and editing of many of them and are coming to assume that free books are lousy. Well, maybe if I put in my blurb that the book is by a "RITA-award winner and bestseller," they will have more confidence that at least it will be a literate read.
8. Two days was a good amount of time. However, the downloads really tapered off the second day, so I can imagine that one day free won't have that different a result. We shall see-- will investigate.
So... worth trying anyway, at least if you have several books up for sale.
Next time I'm going to try putting out a short story on "permanent free," as a loss leader to attract the sort of readers who will like my other books. Some said that readers don't like short stories (even free?), so I'm trying to get together a Regency anthology, free, that each of us would place on our sites to promote all our works.
Anyway, we'll see. I know it CAN work because it worked with my standard publication. So let's see how well it helps get my name out there to my targeted reader.
Anyone else trying this method?
Alicia
Still, I gave it a try for one book. To do this as a direct publisher on Kindle (other platforms work differently), you have to join the "Select" program which means Kindle has the book exclusively for 90 days. I did it with a book I'd just put up without much history attached, figuring I don't yet have much of a sales record with the other platforms, so I wouldn't be losing much. This program lets you put the book as free for up to 5 days. I put it free for 2 days, then returned it to the standard price.
Results: Still coming. I sold -- actually sold, not free-- about 50 copies (a lot so far for me) of the book in the week after it went free. Also I sold 20 copies of the "prequel" to the book and about 50 copies of other books of the same genre I had for sale. Not the sort of revenue to fund my next trip to England, but better than I had been doing before. So it was worthwhile.
There were about 2500 free downloads (in contrast to last year, when my free book got 100K downloads-- but there weren't so many free books then). I think Kindle owners (esp ones who got the Kindle for Xmas) were trying to get books for free while they could, and saved them to read later. (That's what I do, anyway.) So far, I have almost no new reviews on the book site, which is disspiriting. But maybe those will come.
So here are my thoughts, what I did right and wrong. Understand, YMMV, and all that, also I think this should have a long tail and could be months before all the benefits are realized (so I hope).
1. I chose the book pretty wisely. It's a good book, well-written, representative of the genre (Regency) but not confined to it. (There's Shakespeare and adventure for those non-genre fans who dl'ed it.)
2. The book is a sequel to another book already up for sale, so I put a note in the end that if they want to find out how two secondary characters met, they should buy (title). I think that led to a sudden spurt in sales of the second book.
3. I have several books for sale. If someone reads the free book and wants to read more of my work, they can quickly (immediately) buy the others. I had a list of the other books there at the end of the book and a link to my Kindle bibliography page. Some authors put their first book up for free to "build name recognition," but I think we're all into instant gratification these days, and will be disappointed if there are no more books available, and might not remember the name a few months later.
4. I wish I would have put a short (1 page maybe) excerpt from another book in the end of the free one. Not the first page, maybe, but an exciting later moment.
5. I did put a pleasant "author's note" in the end, asking them to review the book on Amazon if they liked it because that really helps an author. Clearly, so far, this has had no effect. :) But I do think we might need to work on helping readers to want to review!
6. I also included a bio with my website, blog, and email info. Again, I'm hoping to make readers feel benevolent towards me!
7. I am going to work more on the blurbs/descriptions. The great thing about direct e-publishing is that for almost no cost (the book isn't available for sale for a few hours), you can fix or change almost anything. The Indie Romance list I'm on has been discussing how many "buyers" of the free books are annoyed at the bad writing and editing of many of them and are coming to assume that free books are lousy. Well, maybe if I put in my blurb that the book is by a "RITA-award winner and bestseller," they will have more confidence that at least it will be a literate read.
8. Two days was a good amount of time. However, the downloads really tapered off the second day, so I can imagine that one day free won't have that different a result. We shall see-- will investigate.
So... worth trying anyway, at least if you have several books up for sale.
Next time I'm going to try putting out a short story on "permanent free," as a loss leader to attract the sort of readers who will like my other books. Some said that readers don't like short stories (even free?), so I'm trying to get together a Regency anthology, free, that each of us would place on our sites to promote all our works.
Anyway, we'll see. I know it CAN work because it worked with my standard publication. So let's see how well it helps get my name out there to my targeted reader.
Anyone else trying this method?
Alicia
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Defining a Few Terms
We've been talking pros and cons of direct publishing a little here lately. So when Matt Zandstra (@inflatableink) tweeted a link to this Guardian article, it caught my attention immediately. But maybe not for the reasons you might think.
The article is about an author, Polly Courtney, who successfully self-published two books. That landed her a 3-book deal with Avon HarperCollins, a reputable big publisher with one of the best PR machines in the industry. Their publicists are ace. Their marketing is top shelf. So this is why I sat up straight and paid attention when this author announced she was dropping her publisher and going back to self-publishing because of their marketing approach to her titles. How can this be? Is the best in the business no longer good enough? I mean, we all hear about the tailspin every day. Marketing and PR efforts are dwindling, authors don't get good support, etc., etc.
So I read the article. And this is what I read:
"[T]he real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women's fiction. … Yes it is page turning, no it's not War and Peace. But it shouldn't be portrayed as chick lit.... The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams."
That sound you hear is my mental brakes squealing as my ability to empathize with this author crashes. I say that in full awareness that the article might have been slanted to create this reaction. Perhaps those are not exact quotes. Perhaps the author got it right during the interview, but it was transcribed incorrectly. So I don't blame the author, and I certainly don't hold it against her.* Lots of people would read this article and not have my reaction to it. But those people? Probably aren't all that aware of the way books are marketed in this industry.
And the article's implication is that neither is the author. The implication is that an author who is complaining about her marketing is so unaware of marketing terms that she can't distinguish between them. Knowledgeable people read that and think, "She's cutting herself loose from one of the best teams in the industry because of how they slotted her, and she doesn't even know that these slots she mentions are not interchangeable."
So, I responded to the original tweet from Matt to suggest that there might be a credibility issue here, and we had a nice chat about it, and Matt asked me to define some terms. I attempted to do so in 140 characters, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew this should be blogged. Ergo:
Women's fiction = an umbrella term to define a broad segment of books targeted at women readers. For marketing purposes, this includes chick lit, romance, family sagas, old-fashioned glitz novels, what some call "weepies," and some mainstream and upmarket stuff. It's an important market segment because women tend to buy and read more books than men. (Note: Romance writers tend to use the term "women's fiction" to describe all stories for women which are neither romance nor chick lit. I disagree with that usage, as do some of other publishing pros I've talked to over the years. But it's not a problem as long as you're aware of who you're talking to.)
Romance = a type of women's fiction in which the central plot involves the formation of a romantic bond between characters. These stories are folkloric in both origin and structure (as we've repeatedly blogged about -- just click the structure link in the tag list on the sidebar for a sampling). They are close cousins of fairy tales or wonder tales, which are also forms of folklore. It's an important market segment because romance readers tend to buy and read lots of books, and they tend to buy only (or mostly) romance, so they're good customers. Consequently, before the arrival of chick lit, the overwhelming majority of books for women were romance novels. (And some family sagas and glitz novels, but mostly romance.)
Chick lit = a type of women's fiction about a young woman reaching maturity or coping with adult issues for the first time. These stories are akin to coming-of-age tales given that in our modern world, adolescence typically ends in a person's mid-20s. First real job, first real relationship, first steps toward financial independence, what it all means, a girl's place in the world -- these are the themes of chick lit. Romance can form a part of that, but doesn't have to. These books caught fire in the 90s and sold as fast as they could be printed, proving that women readers were interested in things other than the classic romance. In some circles, they were heralded as a feminist success because they portrayed women's full lives, not just their romantic lives. (That statement misunderstands the nature of romance novels, so please, romance novelists, no need to chide me.)
So maybe you can see why saying, "They defined my books as women's fiction," doesn't state a problem if, in fact, the books are aimed at a female readership. And maybe you can see why defining chick lit as "about a girl meeting the man of her dreams" muddies the distinction between chick lit and romance. Again, this is not meant to be a knock on this particular author, who may have had legitimate concerns about her cover art and other aspects of the marketing, and who for all we know never said these exact things*. But perhaps it should serve as a warning sign. Know the industry. Use terms precisely. If you're going to burn a bridge, be able to explain clearly why you lit that match.
Theresa
*I suspect that the Guardian misrepresented the author's words, in fact, because they tend to toss around the term "chick lit" as a pejorative to stir up controversy. And their disrespect of romance writers has led to worldwide protests. So I think they probably either screwed up or misquoted her on purpose. And I do still think that the Avon team is crackerjack, despite whatever may have happened here.
The article is about an author, Polly Courtney, who successfully self-published two books. That landed her a 3-book deal with Avon HarperCollins, a reputable big publisher with one of the best PR machines in the industry. Their publicists are ace. Their marketing is top shelf. So this is why I sat up straight and paid attention when this author announced she was dropping her publisher and going back to self-publishing because of their marketing approach to her titles. How can this be? Is the best in the business no longer good enough? I mean, we all hear about the tailspin every day. Marketing and PR efforts are dwindling, authors don't get good support, etc., etc.
So I read the article. And this is what I read:
"[T]he real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women's fiction. … Yes it is page turning, no it's not War and Peace. But it shouldn't be portrayed as chick lit.... The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams."
That sound you hear is my mental brakes squealing as my ability to empathize with this author crashes. I say that in full awareness that the article might have been slanted to create this reaction. Perhaps those are not exact quotes. Perhaps the author got it right during the interview, but it was transcribed incorrectly. So I don't blame the author, and I certainly don't hold it against her.* Lots of people would read this article and not have my reaction to it. But those people? Probably aren't all that aware of the way books are marketed in this industry.
And the article's implication is that neither is the author. The implication is that an author who is complaining about her marketing is so unaware of marketing terms that she can't distinguish between them. Knowledgeable people read that and think, "She's cutting herself loose from one of the best teams in the industry because of how they slotted her, and she doesn't even know that these slots she mentions are not interchangeable."
So, I responded to the original tweet from Matt to suggest that there might be a credibility issue here, and we had a nice chat about it, and Matt asked me to define some terms. I attempted to do so in 140 characters, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew this should be blogged. Ergo:
Women's fiction = an umbrella term to define a broad segment of books targeted at women readers. For marketing purposes, this includes chick lit, romance, family sagas, old-fashioned glitz novels, what some call "weepies," and some mainstream and upmarket stuff. It's an important market segment because women tend to buy and read more books than men. (Note: Romance writers tend to use the term "women's fiction" to describe all stories for women which are neither romance nor chick lit. I disagree with that usage, as do some of other publishing pros I've talked to over the years. But it's not a problem as long as you're aware of who you're talking to.)
Romance = a type of women's fiction in which the central plot involves the formation of a romantic bond between characters. These stories are folkloric in both origin and structure (as we've repeatedly blogged about -- just click the structure link in the tag list on the sidebar for a sampling). They are close cousins of fairy tales or wonder tales, which are also forms of folklore. It's an important market segment because romance readers tend to buy and read lots of books, and they tend to buy only (or mostly) romance, so they're good customers. Consequently, before the arrival of chick lit, the overwhelming majority of books for women were romance novels. (And some family sagas and glitz novels, but mostly romance.)
Chick lit = a type of women's fiction about a young woman reaching maturity or coping with adult issues for the first time. These stories are akin to coming-of-age tales given that in our modern world, adolescence typically ends in a person's mid-20s. First real job, first real relationship, first steps toward financial independence, what it all means, a girl's place in the world -- these are the themes of chick lit. Romance can form a part of that, but doesn't have to. These books caught fire in the 90s and sold as fast as they could be printed, proving that women readers were interested in things other than the classic romance. In some circles, they were heralded as a feminist success because they portrayed women's full lives, not just their romantic lives. (That statement misunderstands the nature of romance novels, so please, romance novelists, no need to chide me.)
So maybe you can see why saying, "They defined my books as women's fiction," doesn't state a problem if, in fact, the books are aimed at a female readership. And maybe you can see why defining chick lit as "about a girl meeting the man of her dreams" muddies the distinction between chick lit and romance. Again, this is not meant to be a knock on this particular author, who may have had legitimate concerns about her cover art and other aspects of the marketing, and who for all we know never said these exact things*. But perhaps it should serve as a warning sign. Know the industry. Use terms precisely. If you're going to burn a bridge, be able to explain clearly why you lit that match.
Theresa
*I suspect that the Guardian misrepresented the author's words, in fact, because they tend to toss around the term "chick lit" as a pejorative to stir up controversy. And their disrespect of romance writers has led to worldwide protests. So I think they probably either screwed up or misquoted her on purpose. And I do still think that the Avon team is crackerjack, despite whatever may have happened here.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Why Direct Publishing Will Prevail
Those of you who've been around publishing for any stretch of time are familiar with the whining about traditional distribution. The same thing happens every six months, right after royalties come out. "OMG, returns! Hate! Hiss!" And yes, returns suck. You'll never hear me say otherwise.
But the thing about that system, the one that let a retailer return books to the distributor and publisher for full credit, is that it allowed widespread distribution of lesser-known authors. Retailers could take a chance on stocking a book that they might not otherwise stock. Small presses couldn't have flourished without this guarantee. The midlist existed in large part because of the safety net provided by returns.
Yes, it was an antiquated system, conceived in the depression era as a way to prevent the collapse of the book trade. Yes, it ate into profits and turned publishing accounting into a funhouse illusion where 80% of books fail to break even. Yes, returns could kill an author's earnings and career. No doubt about any of that.
But it also allowed retailers to have diverse stock in their stores. It allowed publishers to go to contract with new authors with no following or platforms. It allowed new authors to break in and have a shot at readership. And it allowed avid readers to have a steady stream of reading material, and casual readers instant access to the book of their whim.
Which is just to say, that system wasn't going to budge until we found a way to preserve those advantages in a new system. And that's exactly what direct publishing (that is, publishing done directly by the author through the retailer, whether POD or digital) does -- it still allows for wide proliferation of high-risk books, while minimizing the risk to retailers. Now the risk is borne by the authors instead of by the publishers, but the author also reaps much higher benefits -- as much as 70% of the cover price on digital downloads, and a variable amount on POD texts.
And this is why direct publishing will ultimately overtake other distribution models. Now, there is still some advantage to authors to being traditionally published, though those advantages are smaller than they were and continue to shrink. Let's break this down by function, and you'll see what I mean.
Editorial
This is the function authors probably think of first when they think of working with a publishing house. Which editor will acquire their work, and what kind of editing will she provide? Used to be that an author was pretty much guaranteed good attention from her editor. But then, as a result of the corporatization of publishing, editors began taking on extra tasks, and editing time became compromised. Editors might still have strong editing skills (though there are notorious exceptions), but that doesn't mean that they'll have the time to dedicate those skills to your book.
By contrast, with direct publishing, the author hires an editor and the editor is accountable to the author rather than to the house. The editor isn't saddled with endless meetings or interdepartmental supervision, so she provides editing, and only editing, rather than project management. Trust me -- former acquisitions editor, currently working freelance, so I have worked both sides of this process -- I have more time per project for editing now as a freelancer than I did when I was in-house. (Though I do frequently fall into the role of providing project management advice and other career guidance to my self-publishing clients -- but that's just because I can't help myself.)
Marketing/PR/Sales
In traditional publishing, these roles are sometimes lumped together in one department and sometimes handled separately. Sales is responsible for placing titles with retailers. PR and marketing handle ad buys, interviews, giveaways, and the like. The simple truth is that in most traditional houses, power is firmly seated with the sales team. They tell the editors what to acquire, and the editors have to win approval from sales for their buys. Ever hear an editor at a conference say, "In order to buy a book, I have to show X, Y, and Z to my sales team"? Now you know why. Ever hear publishing insiders talk about whether their house is or is not sales-driven or sales-led? Now you know why. The sales team talks to the retailers. The retailers say that customers are asking for this or that, and that some other thing isn't selling well. The sales team takes this information back to one of the endless staff meetings, and they use it to make acquisition decisions.
Think about it. This means that the current market is driving what will be on the shelves in a year. This means excellent books that don't fit the current market needs might get overlooked, because excellence is not the only criteria for acquisition. Editorial judgment and taste can be trumped by market concerns which will be outdated before the book goes to press. Direct publishing circumvents this issue in two ways -- first, it gets the product to market faster, so that lag between retailer desire and product placement shrinks. Second, it puts the sales decisions in the hands of the end customer -- or, I should say, it's more effective at letting the reader make the decision.
And you know how authors are complaining about how much PR they have to do on their own these days? That's the other side of the PR/marketing/sales department. Used to be that you could count on an in-house publicist to make at least some effort to promote a book. Every title got at least minimal attention, with bigger titles getting more attention. But little by little, these tasks are being pushed onto the authors. Some have to write their own jacket copy. Some have to design and buy their own bookmarks, postcards, and other promotional material. Some have to arrange their own interviews with the press. Some have to coordinate and pay for their own book tours. Book signings, ad buys, promotional packets for booksellers, gifts for warehouse distributors -- all these things used to be routine parts of the book business, and they're falling to the wayside because houses don't do them and authors can't afford to pick up all the slack. (Not at 8% royalties, anyway. At 70%, with steady sales, things become more possible.)
Subrights
This is one place where traditional publishing still has a big advantage over direct publishing. The houses have established methods for moving titles into audio, translation, large print, film, and so on. And there just aren't equivalent channels available in direct publishing. But I think that will change over time. Not soon, but eventually.
Accounting
We'll call this one a draw. Accounting is going to be a headache no matter who assumes most of the responsibility for it. With traditional print distribution, the distributor handled a lot of the accounting function, and there were good records kept for each title. (Note: good records. Not perfectly problem-free records.) Now record-keeping is a little shakier in some ways and a little more streamlined in others. This is probably going to continue to evolve as direct publishing grows. But for now, from the author's perspective, it's probably much the same no matter who provides the sales records.
Art and Design
With this aspect -- cover art and book design -- the advantage can go either way. Traditional print processes give a lot more leeway in book design than do POD or digital books. However, there are workarounds on the direct publishing side, for those who have the time, money, and technical skills to make it happen. So a direct-published book can be as good or better than a traditionally published book, but in most cases, a sharp eye will spot deficiencies in the POD product. And a digital book provides very limited design options. The bottom line is that direct-published authors tend to put a little money into cover, little or none into design, and that usually seems to work out okay. But a book produced in the traditional way is probably going to look and feel like a better book in some ways.
So that's how I see this shaking out right now. This is hugely different from any post I would have written as recently as two years ago, when direct publishing was similar to a vanity process. But now, with changes in distribution and retailing, the game is changing, and I expect that any post I write two years from now will also be very, very different from this current post.
Theresa
But the thing about that system, the one that let a retailer return books to the distributor and publisher for full credit, is that it allowed widespread distribution of lesser-known authors. Retailers could take a chance on stocking a book that they might not otherwise stock. Small presses couldn't have flourished without this guarantee. The midlist existed in large part because of the safety net provided by returns.
Yes, it was an antiquated system, conceived in the depression era as a way to prevent the collapse of the book trade. Yes, it ate into profits and turned publishing accounting into a funhouse illusion where 80% of books fail to break even. Yes, returns could kill an author's earnings and career. No doubt about any of that.
But it also allowed retailers to have diverse stock in their stores. It allowed publishers to go to contract with new authors with no following or platforms. It allowed new authors to break in and have a shot at readership. And it allowed avid readers to have a steady stream of reading material, and casual readers instant access to the book of their whim.
Which is just to say, that system wasn't going to budge until we found a way to preserve those advantages in a new system. And that's exactly what direct publishing (that is, publishing done directly by the author through the retailer, whether POD or digital) does -- it still allows for wide proliferation of high-risk books, while minimizing the risk to retailers. Now the risk is borne by the authors instead of by the publishers, but the author also reaps much higher benefits -- as much as 70% of the cover price on digital downloads, and a variable amount on POD texts.
And this is why direct publishing will ultimately overtake other distribution models. Now, there is still some advantage to authors to being traditionally published, though those advantages are smaller than they were and continue to shrink. Let's break this down by function, and you'll see what I mean.
Editorial
This is the function authors probably think of first when they think of working with a publishing house. Which editor will acquire their work, and what kind of editing will she provide? Used to be that an author was pretty much guaranteed good attention from her editor. But then, as a result of the corporatization of publishing, editors began taking on extra tasks, and editing time became compromised. Editors might still have strong editing skills (though there are notorious exceptions), but that doesn't mean that they'll have the time to dedicate those skills to your book.
By contrast, with direct publishing, the author hires an editor and the editor is accountable to the author rather than to the house. The editor isn't saddled with endless meetings or interdepartmental supervision, so she provides editing, and only editing, rather than project management. Trust me -- former acquisitions editor, currently working freelance, so I have worked both sides of this process -- I have more time per project for editing now as a freelancer than I did when I was in-house. (Though I do frequently fall into the role of providing project management advice and other career guidance to my self-publishing clients -- but that's just because I can't help myself.)
Marketing/PR/Sales
In traditional publishing, these roles are sometimes lumped together in one department and sometimes handled separately. Sales is responsible for placing titles with retailers. PR and marketing handle ad buys, interviews, giveaways, and the like. The simple truth is that in most traditional houses, power is firmly seated with the sales team. They tell the editors what to acquire, and the editors have to win approval from sales for their buys. Ever hear an editor at a conference say, "In order to buy a book, I have to show X, Y, and Z to my sales team"? Now you know why. Ever hear publishing insiders talk about whether their house is or is not sales-driven or sales-led? Now you know why. The sales team talks to the retailers. The retailers say that customers are asking for this or that, and that some other thing isn't selling well. The sales team takes this information back to one of the endless staff meetings, and they use it to make acquisition decisions.
Think about it. This means that the current market is driving what will be on the shelves in a year. This means excellent books that don't fit the current market needs might get overlooked, because excellence is not the only criteria for acquisition. Editorial judgment and taste can be trumped by market concerns which will be outdated before the book goes to press. Direct publishing circumvents this issue in two ways -- first, it gets the product to market faster, so that lag between retailer desire and product placement shrinks. Second, it puts the sales decisions in the hands of the end customer -- or, I should say, it's more effective at letting the reader make the decision.
And you know how authors are complaining about how much PR they have to do on their own these days? That's the other side of the PR/marketing/sales department. Used to be that you could count on an in-house publicist to make at least some effort to promote a book. Every title got at least minimal attention, with bigger titles getting more attention. But little by little, these tasks are being pushed onto the authors. Some have to write their own jacket copy. Some have to design and buy their own bookmarks, postcards, and other promotional material. Some have to arrange their own interviews with the press. Some have to coordinate and pay for their own book tours. Book signings, ad buys, promotional packets for booksellers, gifts for warehouse distributors -- all these things used to be routine parts of the book business, and they're falling to the wayside because houses don't do them and authors can't afford to pick up all the slack. (Not at 8% royalties, anyway. At 70%, with steady sales, things become more possible.)
Subrights
This is one place where traditional publishing still has a big advantage over direct publishing. The houses have established methods for moving titles into audio, translation, large print, film, and so on. And there just aren't equivalent channels available in direct publishing. But I think that will change over time. Not soon, but eventually.
Accounting
We'll call this one a draw. Accounting is going to be a headache no matter who assumes most of the responsibility for it. With traditional print distribution, the distributor handled a lot of the accounting function, and there were good records kept for each title. (Note: good records. Not perfectly problem-free records.) Now record-keeping is a little shakier in some ways and a little more streamlined in others. This is probably going to continue to evolve as direct publishing grows. But for now, from the author's perspective, it's probably much the same no matter who provides the sales records.
Art and Design
With this aspect -- cover art and book design -- the advantage can go either way. Traditional print processes give a lot more leeway in book design than do POD or digital books. However, there are workarounds on the direct publishing side, for those who have the time, money, and technical skills to make it happen. So a direct-published book can be as good or better than a traditionally published book, but in most cases, a sharp eye will spot deficiencies in the POD product. And a digital book provides very limited design options. The bottom line is that direct-published authors tend to put a little money into cover, little or none into design, and that usually seems to work out okay. But a book produced in the traditional way is probably going to look and feel like a better book in some ways.
So that's how I see this shaking out right now. This is hugely different from any post I would have written as recently as two years ago, when direct publishing was similar to a vanity process. But now, with changes in distribution and retailing, the game is changing, and I expect that any post I write two years from now will also be very, very different from this current post.
Theresa
Monday, September 5, 2011
The case for saying the same thing twice, thrice, frice
I was trying to explain why the reality of fairly simple and successful "direct-to-reader" publishing has unlocked something exciting in my psyche, and I realized that one liberating factor is that I get to say the same thing as many times as I want.
Now I have always believed in traditional publication and have been gratified to have the minimal success at it that I have had over the years. When I was coming up, this was the only credential that counted, and I was glad to have gotten it early in my career. As impossible as it all got for awhile there, I always felt that I'd passed some test, that I'd "graduated." I knew that better writers than I had been ignored by the often-arbitrary marketplace that was traditional publishing, so I could never, like so many trad-pubbed authors, feel superior-- I know very well how much luck is involved-- and I never made enough money at it to feel the least bit smug. I assumed that everyone who was in the know was probably laughing at me and my paltry advances and my ever-necessary day job. However, trad-pubbing allowed me to know that I wasn't just being a narcissist when I thought maybe my writing was better than average. And, in an odd way, trad-pubbing made me more humble that all those who, rejected by the traditional publishers, felt the need to constantly extol their own brilliance. I could hardly entertain the notion that I was "too good" for NYC publishers, since I'd had three of them at that point. Or "too good" for NYC agents-- I've had seven of them, all of them discerning of brilliance (witness their sporadic, temporary, apparently unconvincing yet still extant recommendation of mine :).
Anyway, I cherished the minor prestige and the generally recognized credential, even if, as the years went by, I became more impatient with all the hassles that came along with that. Eventually I realized that, heck, I'd already gotten about all the cheap benefits (prestige, access to certain contests, etc.) and didn't need to keep storming the balustrades if I didn't want to, and I didn't. At the same time, though, I didn't altogether "trust" the alternative market of a decade or so ago. I suspected that, for good and human reasons, a whole lot of epubbers weren't being candid about their experience, or epublishers their sales figures, and wiser than most in the ways publishers can screw writers (taking all rights forever for $20 royalties, say; or getting writers to pay for things the publisher usually paid for), I didn't see the reason to go that route. I didn't need the validation of saying I was published-- I already had that.
Well, so then we arrive at the teens, or almost, and wow. The hardware has finally caught up with the software, and we have both dedicated readers (the Kindle, the Nook) which are not just plausible substitutes for print books, but in some ways better. (I stopped being nostalgic about "the feel of a real book" when I got a Kindle and found it was lighter and thinner than the littlest paperback... great on the wrists.) Most of the hassles of "publishing" which the publisher used to do can now be done by the author ("publishing" might take an hour of my time, and the cover I can hire out for not too much, and it's not like most NYC publishers ever did the slightest amount of promo for a silt-sucker like me). And far from boasting about a probably mythical financial windfall, writers who have chosen this "direct publishing" tend to downplay what turn out often to be (to me) impressive royalties, most of which they get to keep to themselves and not share with publishers and agents who take on ownership in a weird way not only of the work but the career.
Okay, so I'm going to do it, but I'm doing it with a far greater understanding of what it all means, and a confidence that comes from succeeding, however minimally when it comes to the moolah part, the old-fashioned way. That old credential liberates me to feel that I really don't have to prove myself, you know? And that feels good.
But now I'm thinking of other, intangible and perhaps inchoate benefits to going directly to the reader and bypassing those gatekeepers (editors and agents) who frequently responded to me with gratifying recognitions of my skill but disappointing (and perhaps, for the time, actually realistic) reads of the reading market. I don't need to worry about them anymore. Sure, if someone wants to offer me a $100K advance-- but you know what? They don't. Traditional publishing has gone in a new direction, one I think of as misguided, but presumably they have reasons they don't need to share with me.
So some benefits:
1) The medium actually doesn't have to be the message so much anymore. That is, when we decided we wanted to be traditionally published, there were two major possible "media"-- hardcover and softcover. Benefits to each, but limitations too. I remember being told that a book of mine which to me just screamed "hardcover" would probably never be published because it actually was hard-coverish, but few publishers would waste a hardcover slot on someone no one had ever heard of, especially someone writing a conventional (if good) story. And it just wasn't a mass-market paperback story, and the fact that I knew that, that I'd absorbed the difference, made it clear... to some extent, my understanding of the media, the forms of delivery and what stories were best delivered that way, and the publishers' reluctance to break that "contract", limited how I wrote, or at least how I published. Now, really, there's a lot more flexibility, partly because the electronic medium is as flexible as the Web itself (I don't actually see a lot of reason to do print in direct publishing, btw, unless it isn't the focus and can be done very cheaply, which it sort of can now). I don't have to mold my books to 'hardcover" or "paperback" expectations, or limit publication because of that.
2) The medium isn't a straitjacket either. Back in the old days, they'd print a few hundred thousand copies (well, never close for me-- tens of thousands, however, yes) in one printing, and if somehow "Napoleon" was misspelled 210 times, or you (or, uh, me) didn't do sufficient ornithology research (back then, children, even Eric Schmidt hadn't imagined Google-- we had to go to the library -- the actual physical library! -- and look these things up in books! And you know what? You don't know what you don't know, and maybe some of us didn't know even what to look up about birds!) to know that certain birds are native only to certain continents. Who knew, huh? Anyway, if you happened to put hummingbirds in England and nightingales in Louisiana, you were sure to locate a few dozen birdwatchers who could overlook the depth of your characterization and the suppleness of your prose and focus on the all-important "native" issue. (Ha, ha, before the internet, they were reduced to bitching about you in their birdwatching groups and writing you heated letters with painstakingly copied encyclopedia entries. Now they'd give you a 1-star review on Amazon and you'd feel lousy THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, not that I'm speaking of any particular author's experience, you know.)
Contrast that with what can happen with direct publication. So there you are, Innocent Author, absurdly assuming that no one is perfect, except you when it comes to your mysterious alchemy with sexual tension and delicacy of subtext. And you get this email from a birdwatcher, who points out that-- who knew? Well, apparently every birdwatcher in the known world-- that there were no hummingbirds in the old world nor nightingales in the new (I love the designations "new and old world," btw, though I suspect they will and probably pass from the earth soon, since probably all the continents qualify as "old" these days). NOW you don't have to die a little death every time you see the cover of your Sussex-set romp with that merry bitty pretty little hummingbird! Because there aren't 200K (I wish) copies of your book on shelves everywhere, testifying forever to your ornithological idiocy! There's only one file, or maybe a couple (you know, Kindle, Smashwords, wherever you're doing your POD printing...), and you can grab them back and FIX them, changing that hummingbird to a bumble bee. (Smilar sizes, hey, wait, let me make sure there were bumble bees in the old world.....YES!! You know, some people are happy that there are so many cancer cures now, but I smile, knowing there's Google. I love Google. I know, Borg, infodump McDonalds, all that. But... but... it works JUST the way my mind works, and it's good to me in ways no one has ever been. It loves me, and I love it. We're soulmates.) You can even instead of sullenly thanking the birdwatcher, enthusiastically thank the birdwatcher, and tell her that you've changed the acknowledgments page to acknowledge her help, and maybe she can tell everyone in her birdwatching group. Everything is eternal on the web, but everything can be easily fixed too.
3) I think the wheat is usually (not always) separated from the chaff. There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but the quality stuff generally has a way of being recognized and promoted, and with the almost eternal publication period (compared with maybe a month, if that, on the shelves even now with the old model), there's plenty of time for word of mouth to build you an audience, and for one book to lead your readers to other books of yours. I remember that no publisher of mine ever (I think?) went to a second printing of any book of mine-- there was the bare month on the shelves, and then the dread and soul-destroying grabbing and stripping. No matter what happened to the book, how well-received it was, how well-reviewed, that was it, the one chance. A couple of my books won major awards, and I couldn't capitalize on them because the publisher had little interest in re-issuing the books, and I write so slow that it wasn't worth it to them to use the award to push another book. NOW, well. There's a long, long, long tail. A book that sells virtually nothing for months after publication can be there (because I'm in charge, and I'll keep it there, damnit) for a long time, long enough for readers of my other books to mosey on over and decide they have to-- have to or they'll just DIE -- read every book I wrote.... and every book will sell every other book, if I'm good enough and wait long enough. (I hope.)
My model here is fan-fiction, about which I wrote a long academic paper that no one ever has said anything nice about, so it's probably really boring and stupid, but I totally loved. (I always totally love every word I write until I get a single bad review on Amazon, and then I hate myself, all my work, my stupid mismatched ears and my relentlessly mediocre mind and my life too, and my parents because they brought me into this world, and my friends because they should have warned me that I'm an idiot and should work at some anonymous job and never go out into public and I'm scum, scum, and those NYC publishers were RIGHT never to re-issue my books because the books were really stupid and so am I... okay, really, if after that, you can post a bad review of any book of mine on Amazon, all I can say is, you are really, really, really sadistic, and might want to rejigger your moral compass, you sociopath.)
Where was I? Oh! Fanfiction. There's a whole lot of fanfiction, and there's no commercial market for it so no "vetting" from any "gatekeeper". Instead, there's evolved all sorts of ways -- niche websites like "All about Spike," contests, award sites, recommendations, targeted forums-- where you can find out where the best "Spike/Xander amnesia baby fic" stories are, and the writers generally accepted as the best in any "niche". You go on livejournal (where a lot of Buffy readers hang out) and ask, "I love fics where Buffy learns that Spike's still alive and that Andrew knew it and she wants to kill him and Spike too, but Spike not until she's kissed him a few dozen times... any recs?" and you'll get considered and thoughtful recommendations, usually with live links.
The same is going to happen with, say, Kindle, plus there are all the Amazon tools, the reviews (the negative ones of which are sometimes entirely soul-destroying and besides will come back to haunt the bad reviewers some day if they have even the slightest vestige of conscience, which, to be sure, they probably don't, being ruthless, heartless sociopaths... oh. Sorry. Back to our regularly scheduled perfectly calm and reasoned analysis) (I actually think bad reviews are important in establishing the credibility of reviews as a decision-aider, but .. well. Soul-destroying nonetheless), the "Customers who bought X also bought Y" algorithm, the keywords, all that stuff I don't yet know about except for reviews. Instead of one person-- some editor or agent-- deciding whether your book is worthy of sharing with the world, there is a true democracy of access... and an actual means for readers to make plausible judgments of whether they might like your book.
4) Niche is all, and you as an author can have more than one niche. Finally, and at long last, this is what I was really thinking about. Because the ease is high and the expense is low, the writer can write whatever she wants to write. And that's amazingly liberating. Yeah, maybe no one will want to read it. But this is the internet. There are probably a few thousand readers who have been longing for a romantic thriller about a medieval knifemaker (hi, Jenny's Peter, not that you're medieval or anything). In fact, there might be some readers who will read ANY novel that's about knifemakers, and they will like some more than others, especially ours, which is not just meticulously researched (or quickly fixed if not) but also uproariously funny, beautifully written, and subtly insightful in its understanding of the psychology of the knifemaker (now see, THAT'S how you write an Amazon review! And click that 5 stars while you're at it). You can actually write what you want, and trust that you can find a market, rather than write to a generic market ("historical romance readers," you know, like they all want the same thing). Maybe there's no market for it, or maybe you can't reach it, or maybe you'll offend some influential member of the knifemaking community by, I don't know, what is a controversy in knifemaking? By presenting oak as a better hilt material than teak? I don't know. Something controversial. In Buffy fanfiction terms (that I know more about), it might be in suggesting that Faith, not Buffy, was the better fighter. I'm sure there's a similar controversy in knifemaker fics. You really never what effect, negative or positive, will come of your many choices as you write.
But now, with direct publishing, no one is going to be able to keep you from trying to find/create/reach the market of potential readers, as for so long the whole system of publication did. The entire aim has changed, in fact, from "we're going to tell you what you can read" to "you have to find what you want, but what you want is out there." To tell you the truth, while I think the editors and agents often have really good taste and can recognize high-quality stories, they often have little similar confidence about readers, and frequently used to say things like, "I love this, but it will never sell," or "This is exactly what I like best, but readers are now looking for werewolves, not angels, and quality doesn't matter." Quality actually matters to a certain group of readers. Jenny Brown and I were talking about historical romances, and a certain Very High Quality writer (okay, it's Judy Cuevas/Ivory) who is recognized by most "readers for quality" in romance as one of the best romance writers ever. (She's really good... I remember once realizing I was weeping helplessly because some dumb lamb had died, and it was just page 10, and then thinking, Oh, right, this is Judy Cuevas.... surprised it took so long for her to RIP MY HEART OUT this time.) And we know that both of us "read for quality" -- meaning (for us, not necessarily all "readers for quality" want the same qualities) high-level subtextual prose, a particular delicacy in handling emotion, and more historical detail than in most books. And a theme. Theme=important to us.Well, we're in contact, and if we happen to discover a book we know the other will like? We share the recommendation. Duh. And there are some influential readers (not us, so don't bother to woo us with free books and chocolates-- wait! On second thought, we're totally woo-able, woo away). Point is, we do not regard each other as "generic historical romance readers," as might those editors as they decide to send one of those soul-destroying (you think I have only one soul to destroy?) rejection letters about how they love this book but that 'readers' just want Scottish settings these days.
The niches can get both more narrow and more overlapping-- for example, Jenny might know that I prefer a Gloucestershire setting, but that I'll read anything deemed by someone I know to be sensitive to voice in fiction as having a really good voice, yes, even if it's set in WALES!!! (The sacrifices we make, I tell you.) And she might have picked up that I really like (this is SO embarrassing) dumb heroes. Okay, clueless heroes. Naive heroes. The guys who are great and all and handsome (note to all, I might be really accepting of clue-challenged heroes, as long as they have abs of steel and faces like those of fallen angels, okay?), but who ruefully admit that the minds of women are terra incognita. Now that's the sort of niche ("clueless heroes") that historical romance readers will chuckle at but allow is a recognizable category. Let's just say, traditional publishing didn't have any imprints for 'clueless romantic heroes", but those of you who read historical romances? You know what I mean, and I'm soliciting recs.And I could start a niche list for "clueless hero" books.
5) Direct-to-reader publishing allows for ever more focused niching, as long as the quality of the writing is worthy of recommending to those outside the niche. Start with the assumption that every reader might have a different set of niches, and that these sets are ever-shifting, and that a member of the "locked door murder mystery niche" might also, who knows why, be a member of the "arranged marriage romance" (though you know, notice what's the commonality-- being trapped?) and simultaneously a member of the "any book at all that has recipes in it" and also dabbles (only in secret!) with "books with main characters who own cats." You think I'm kidding? Wait till you hear just a few of my niches (and yes, recs are appreciated, but remember, prose style and meticulous grammar really matter to me)--
Point is, I intersect with others in one niche or another. And each of the members of each niche intersects with other niches. Just sayin'. If I read and love your mystery about the clueless punkrock drummer on the Bruce (Ontario) Peninsula who is trying to win back his secretary wife who finally gave up on him, well, who knows how many readers might eventually hear about your book? But I will be much, much more likely to recommend it to other niches, like the one for books with recipes in them even if you mysteriously neglect to put a recipe in there, if the book is well-crafted and well-written, so that other readers get not only to be impressed by your lovely prose but also maybe experience the new thrill of the rockstar hero who fakes his own death (yes, I think that's the only way he can win Miss Moneypenny back-- she's too sensible otherwise) (and will join my faked-death novel niche).
So I was thinking, one of the really liberating things about direct publishing is, what the hell, why not keep coming back to that weird thing that who knows why, I keep coming back to. Like I keep coming up with great ideas -- different genres, time periods-- that feature a main character faking his/her own death. Why? I don't know! Do I really have to know? I think it's like the wimp's form of suicide, maybe. But-- no kidding. I have three MIPs where the heroine fakes her own death, and another where the hero, who thought he was a widower, finds out that his despised trailer trash wife who ran off with that damned Greek general-- to save him from arrest and maybe execution, had sacrificed her own future for him (just like PRIMAFLORA!!!! See, Primaflora, I love you even if Lady Dunnett didn't), and is maybe still alive somewhere, having perhaps survived that supposed fall from Greek general's yacht.
It's kind of like live theater, this continued circling back to an oft-told tale or constant theme. There's probably a reason for this, some deep psychological issue. You know how it is in live theater, how they perform the same play night after night, and they think that's interesting? Why? Well, it could be because every time, they're getting closer to understanding something, or they're trying out some alternative interpretation (did Hamlet know during his soliloquy that Claudius and Polonius were listening? Maybe tonight I'll play it like he did know, and tomorrow I'll play it like he didn't know! I got that distinction, btw, from Slings and Arrows Season 1-- a great TV show, watch it). Direct publishing might actually reward authors who care so deeply and understand so deeply and explore so deeply about particular themes, they can cover and dis-cover them in several different versions, each differently intriguing.
Granted, it might take a while before faked-death fetishists find each other and start recommending books and even found online book clubs, but if my book features not just a good faked death but also excellent prose and maybe a big sub-genre theme (murder mystery) and some other fetish motif (rock stars?), the faked-death fetishist reader might be emboldened to rec the book to some other reader circle. All this can take some time from publication to taking offdom, and the greatest advantage direct publishing offers over traditional publication may be time. While my old Regency print books had one count 'em one month on the shelves, the re-edited "Author's Edition" offered (whenever I get around to doing the author edit!) will have perhaps years to draw an audience.
So. Point is. Know your niches. Love your niches. Try not to call them, as I just did, "fetishes," especially if you're going to do a Google search and are easily put to the blush. Start a website devoted not to your wonderfulness as a writer, but to the niche, you know, www.novelswithfakeddeaths.com. Start a Facebook group not of your "fans" but "fans of faked-death novels."
That's what I'm going to do. We can be on each other's blogrolls!
Thoughts? Suggestions? And, oh, never forget that what's important about direct publishing, really important, comes to those who figure out what they want, how they define success for themselves in publication, why not to settle for some default definition of success but rather one that will, in fulfillment, truly fulfill the inner writer.
Alicia
Now I have always believed in traditional publication and have been gratified to have the minimal success at it that I have had over the years. When I was coming up, this was the only credential that counted, and I was glad to have gotten it early in my career. As impossible as it all got for awhile there, I always felt that I'd passed some test, that I'd "graduated." I knew that better writers than I had been ignored by the often-arbitrary marketplace that was traditional publishing, so I could never, like so many trad-pubbed authors, feel superior-- I know very well how much luck is involved-- and I never made enough money at it to feel the least bit smug. I assumed that everyone who was in the know was probably laughing at me and my paltry advances and my ever-necessary day job. However, trad-pubbing allowed me to know that I wasn't just being a narcissist when I thought maybe my writing was better than average. And, in an odd way, trad-pubbing made me more humble that all those who, rejected by the traditional publishers, felt the need to constantly extol their own brilliance. I could hardly entertain the notion that I was "too good" for NYC publishers, since I'd had three of them at that point. Or "too good" for NYC agents-- I've had seven of them, all of them discerning of brilliance (witness their sporadic, temporary, apparently unconvincing yet still extant recommendation of mine :).
Anyway, I cherished the minor prestige and the generally recognized credential, even if, as the years went by, I became more impatient with all the hassles that came along with that. Eventually I realized that, heck, I'd already gotten about all the cheap benefits (prestige, access to certain contests, etc.) and didn't need to keep storming the balustrades if I didn't want to, and I didn't. At the same time, though, I didn't altogether "trust" the alternative market of a decade or so ago. I suspected that, for good and human reasons, a whole lot of epubbers weren't being candid about their experience, or epublishers their sales figures, and wiser than most in the ways publishers can screw writers (taking all rights forever for $20 royalties, say; or getting writers to pay for things the publisher usually paid for), I didn't see the reason to go that route. I didn't need the validation of saying I was published-- I already had that.
Well, so then we arrive at the teens, or almost, and wow. The hardware has finally caught up with the software, and we have both dedicated readers (the Kindle, the Nook) which are not just plausible substitutes for print books, but in some ways better. (I stopped being nostalgic about "the feel of a real book" when I got a Kindle and found it was lighter and thinner than the littlest paperback... great on the wrists.) Most of the hassles of "publishing" which the publisher used to do can now be done by the author ("publishing" might take an hour of my time, and the cover I can hire out for not too much, and it's not like most NYC publishers ever did the slightest amount of promo for a silt-sucker like me). And far from boasting about a probably mythical financial windfall, writers who have chosen this "direct publishing" tend to downplay what turn out often to be (to me) impressive royalties, most of which they get to keep to themselves and not share with publishers and agents who take on ownership in a weird way not only of the work but the career.
Okay, so I'm going to do it, but I'm doing it with a far greater understanding of what it all means, and a confidence that comes from succeeding, however minimally when it comes to the moolah part, the old-fashioned way. That old credential liberates me to feel that I really don't have to prove myself, you know? And that feels good.
But now I'm thinking of other, intangible and perhaps inchoate benefits to going directly to the reader and bypassing those gatekeepers (editors and agents) who frequently responded to me with gratifying recognitions of my skill but disappointing (and perhaps, for the time, actually realistic) reads of the reading market. I don't need to worry about them anymore. Sure, if someone wants to offer me a $100K advance-- but you know what? They don't. Traditional publishing has gone in a new direction, one I think of as misguided, but presumably they have reasons they don't need to share with me.
So some benefits:
1) The medium actually doesn't have to be the message so much anymore. That is, when we decided we wanted to be traditionally published, there were two major possible "media"-- hardcover and softcover. Benefits to each, but limitations too. I remember being told that a book of mine which to me just screamed "hardcover" would probably never be published because it actually was hard-coverish, but few publishers would waste a hardcover slot on someone no one had ever heard of, especially someone writing a conventional (if good) story. And it just wasn't a mass-market paperback story, and the fact that I knew that, that I'd absorbed the difference, made it clear... to some extent, my understanding of the media, the forms of delivery and what stories were best delivered that way, and the publishers' reluctance to break that "contract", limited how I wrote, or at least how I published. Now, really, there's a lot more flexibility, partly because the electronic medium is as flexible as the Web itself (I don't actually see a lot of reason to do print in direct publishing, btw, unless it isn't the focus and can be done very cheaply, which it sort of can now). I don't have to mold my books to 'hardcover" or "paperback" expectations, or limit publication because of that.
Contrast that with what can happen with direct publication. So there you are, Innocent Author, absurdly assuming that no one is perfect, except you when it comes to your mysterious alchemy with sexual tension and delicacy of subtext. And you get this email from a birdwatcher, who points out that-- who knew? Well, apparently every birdwatcher in the known world-- that there were no hummingbirds in the old world nor nightingales in the new (I love the designations "new and old world," btw, though I suspect they will and probably pass from the earth soon, since probably all the continents qualify as "old" these days). NOW you don't have to die a little death every time you see the cover of your Sussex-set romp with that merry bitty pretty little hummingbird! Because there aren't 200K (I wish) copies of your book on shelves everywhere, testifying forever to your ornithological idiocy! There's only one file, or maybe a couple (you know, Kindle, Smashwords, wherever you're doing your POD printing...), and you can grab them back and FIX them, changing that hummingbird to a bumble bee. (Smilar sizes, hey, wait, let me make sure there were bumble bees in the old world.....YES!! You know, some people are happy that there are so many cancer cures now, but I smile, knowing there's Google. I love Google. I know, Borg, infodump McDonalds, all that. But... but... it works JUST the way my mind works, and it's good to me in ways no one has ever been. It loves me, and I love it. We're soulmates.) You can even instead of sullenly thanking the birdwatcher, enthusiastically thank the birdwatcher, and tell her that you've changed the acknowledgments page to acknowledge her help, and maybe she can tell everyone in her birdwatching group. Everything is eternal on the web, but everything can be easily fixed too.
3) I think the wheat is usually (not always) separated from the chaff. There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but the quality stuff generally has a way of being recognized and promoted, and with the almost eternal publication period (compared with maybe a month, if that, on the shelves even now with the old model), there's plenty of time for word of mouth to build you an audience, and for one book to lead your readers to other books of yours. I remember that no publisher of mine ever (I think?) went to a second printing of any book of mine-- there was the bare month on the shelves, and then the dread and soul-destroying grabbing and stripping. No matter what happened to the book, how well-received it was, how well-reviewed, that was it, the one chance. A couple of my books won major awards, and I couldn't capitalize on them because the publisher had little interest in re-issuing the books, and I write so slow that it wasn't worth it to them to use the award to push another book. NOW, well. There's a long, long, long tail. A book that sells virtually nothing for months after publication can be there (because I'm in charge, and I'll keep it there, damnit) for a long time, long enough for readers of my other books to mosey on over and decide they have to-- have to or they'll just DIE -- read every book I wrote.... and every book will sell every other book, if I'm good enough and wait long enough. (I hope.)
My model here is fan-fiction, about which I wrote a long academic paper that no one ever has said anything nice about, so it's probably really boring and stupid, but I totally loved. (I always totally love every word I write until I get a single bad review on Amazon, and then I hate myself, all my work, my stupid mismatched ears and my relentlessly mediocre mind and my life too, and my parents because they brought me into this world, and my friends because they should have warned me that I'm an idiot and should work at some anonymous job and never go out into public and I'm scum, scum, and those NYC publishers were RIGHT never to re-issue my books because the books were really stupid and so am I... okay, really, if after that, you can post a bad review of any book of mine on Amazon, all I can say is, you are really, really, really sadistic, and might want to rejigger your moral compass, you sociopath.)
Where was I? Oh! Fanfiction. There's a whole lot of fanfiction, and there's no commercial market for it so no "vetting" from any "gatekeeper". Instead, there's evolved all sorts of ways -- niche websites like "All about Spike," contests, award sites, recommendations, targeted forums-- where you can find out where the best "Spike/Xander amnesia baby fic" stories are, and the writers generally accepted as the best in any "niche". You go on livejournal (where a lot of Buffy readers hang out) and ask, "I love fics where Buffy learns that Spike's still alive and that Andrew knew it and she wants to kill him and Spike too, but Spike not until she's kissed him a few dozen times... any recs?" and you'll get considered and thoughtful recommendations, usually with live links.
The same is going to happen with, say, Kindle, plus there are all the Amazon tools, the reviews (the negative ones of which are sometimes entirely soul-destroying and besides will come back to haunt the bad reviewers some day if they have even the slightest vestige of conscience, which, to be sure, they probably don't, being ruthless, heartless sociopaths... oh. Sorry. Back to our regularly scheduled perfectly calm and reasoned analysis) (I actually think bad reviews are important in establishing the credibility of reviews as a decision-aider, but .. well. Soul-destroying nonetheless), the "Customers who bought X also bought Y" algorithm, the keywords, all that stuff I don't yet know about except for reviews. Instead of one person-- some editor or agent-- deciding whether your book is worthy of sharing with the world, there is a true democracy of access... and an actual means for readers to make plausible judgments of whether they might like your book.
But now, with direct publishing, no one is going to be able to keep you from trying to find/create/reach the market of potential readers, as for so long the whole system of publication did. The entire aim has changed, in fact, from "we're going to tell you what you can read" to "you have to find what you want, but what you want is out there." To tell you the truth, while I think the editors and agents often have really good taste and can recognize high-quality stories, they often have little similar confidence about readers, and frequently used to say things like, "I love this, but it will never sell," or "This is exactly what I like best, but readers are now looking for werewolves, not angels, and quality doesn't matter." Quality actually matters to a certain group of readers. Jenny Brown and I were talking about historical romances, and a certain Very High Quality writer (okay, it's Judy Cuevas/Ivory) who is recognized by most "readers for quality" in romance as one of the best romance writers ever. (She's really good... I remember once realizing I was weeping helplessly because some dumb lamb had died, and it was just page 10, and then thinking, Oh, right, this is Judy Cuevas.... surprised it took so long for her to RIP MY HEART OUT this time.) And we know that both of us "read for quality" -- meaning (for us, not necessarily all "readers for quality" want the same qualities) high-level subtextual prose, a particular delicacy in handling emotion, and more historical detail than in most books. And a theme. Theme=important to us.Well, we're in contact, and if we happen to discover a book we know the other will like? We share the recommendation. Duh. And there are some influential readers (not us, so don't bother to woo us with free books and chocolates-- wait! On second thought, we're totally woo-able, woo away). Point is, we do not regard each other as "generic historical romance readers," as might those editors as they decide to send one of those soul-destroying (you think I have only one soul to destroy?) rejection letters about how they love this book but that 'readers' just want Scottish settings these days.
The niches can get both more narrow and more overlapping-- for example, Jenny might know that I prefer a Gloucestershire setting, but that I'll read anything deemed by someone I know to be sensitive to voice in fiction as having a really good voice, yes, even if it's set in WALES!!! (The sacrifices we make, I tell you.) And she might have picked up that I really like (this is SO embarrassing) dumb heroes. Okay, clueless heroes. Naive heroes. The guys who are great and all and handsome (note to all, I might be really accepting of clue-challenged heroes, as long as they have abs of steel and faces like those of fallen angels, okay?), but who ruefully admit that the minds of women are terra incognita. Now that's the sort of niche ("clueless heroes") that historical romance readers will chuckle at but allow is a recognizable category. Let's just say, traditional publishing didn't have any imprints for 'clueless romantic heroes", but those of you who read historical romances? You know what I mean, and I'm soliciting recs.
5) Direct-to-reader publishing allows for ever more focused niching, as long as the quality of the writing is worthy of recommending to those outside the niche. Start with the assumption that every reader might have a different set of niches, and that these sets are ever-shifting, and that a member of the "locked door murder mystery niche" might also, who knows why, be a member of the "arranged marriage romance" (though you know, notice what's the commonality-- being trapped?) and simultaneously a member of the "any book at all that has recipes in it" and also dabbles (only in secret!) with "books with main characters who own cats." You think I'm kidding? Wait till you hear just a few of my niches (and yes, recs are appreciated, but remember, prose style and meticulous grammar really matter to me)--
- Amnesia stories
- Books that are set in theaters, I mean, live theaters where there are actors
- Mysteries with old lady sleuths (Miss Jane Marple types)
- Romances about couples that have been married for a long time
- Novels set in the Midwest and/or Great Lakes-area Canada, particularly the Lake Huron region, any genre
- Novels about people who work in restaurants
- Legal thrillers but with protagonists who aren't top lawyers, in fact, I'd love to read one with a paralegal or legal secretary protagonists, in fact, any book with a protagonist who is a really smart secretary- I love really smart secretaries, all those class and gender issues. Miss Moneypenny has long been one of my favorite secondary characters, and I think it's time she got to star in her very own story!
- Complicated emotions, depth of interaction stories-- I know it when I see it-- all about how people seldom act in their own best interest
- Art thieves. Really. Any book where art -- only the good art-- is stolen. White Collar is like my dream show.
- I also love heroines who are trying to make it as artists in a man's world.
- Rock star heroes. I attribute this to childhood Beatlemania (and still extant; please don't tell my husband, but if Paul McCartney needed a shoulder to cry on, well, you know, that's why God gave me TWO shoulders, and Paul, if you're reading this, I'm also a pretty good cook. Do you like bread pudding? Trust me. You will. Just in case, I'll put the recipe in my book with a rock star hero and the heroine caterer who cooks for the band).
- Books with recipes in them. I mean, novels. I also like cookbooks, but novels with recipes more.
Point is, I intersect with others in one niche or another. And each of the members of each niche intersects with other niches. Just sayin'. If I read and love your mystery about the clueless punkrock drummer on the Bruce (Ontario) Peninsula who is trying to win back his secretary wife who finally gave up on him, well, who knows how many readers might eventually hear about your book? But I will be much, much more likely to recommend it to other niches, like the one for books with recipes in them even if you mysteriously neglect to put a recipe in there, if the book is well-crafted and well-written, so that other readers get not only to be impressed by your lovely prose but also maybe experience the new thrill of the rockstar hero who fakes his own death (yes, I think that's the only way he can win Miss Moneypenny back-- she's too sensible otherwise) (and will join my faked-death novel niche).
So I was thinking, one of the really liberating things about direct publishing is, what the hell, why not keep coming back to that weird thing that who knows why, I keep coming back to. Like I keep coming up with great ideas -- different genres, time periods-- that feature a main character faking his/her own death. Why? I don't know! Do I really have to know? I think it's like the wimp's form of suicide, maybe. But-- no kidding. I have three MIPs where the heroine fakes her own death, and another where the hero, who thought he was a widower, finds out that his despised trailer trash wife who ran off with that damned Greek general-- to save him from arrest and maybe execution, had sacrificed her own future for him (just like PRIMAFLORA!!!! See, Primaflora, I love you even if Lady Dunnett didn't), and is maybe still alive somewhere, having perhaps survived that supposed fall from Greek general's yacht.
It's kind of like live theater, this continued circling back to an oft-told tale or constant theme. There's probably a reason for this, some deep psychological issue. You know how it is in live theater, how they perform the same play night after night, and they think that's interesting? Why? Well, it could be because every time, they're getting closer to understanding something, or they're trying out some alternative interpretation (did Hamlet know during his soliloquy that Claudius and Polonius were listening? Maybe tonight I'll play it like he did know, and tomorrow I'll play it like he didn't know! I got that distinction, btw, from Slings and Arrows Season 1-- a great TV show, watch it). Direct publishing might actually reward authors who care so deeply and understand so deeply and explore so deeply about particular themes, they can cover and dis-cover them in several different versions, each differently intriguing.
Granted, it might take a while before faked-death fetishists find each other and start recommending books and even found online book clubs, but if my book features not just a good faked death but also excellent prose and maybe a big sub-genre theme (murder mystery) and some other fetish motif (rock stars?), the faked-death fetishist reader might be emboldened to rec the book to some other reader circle. All this can take some time from publication to taking offdom, and the greatest advantage direct publishing offers over traditional publication may be time. While my old Regency print books had one count 'em one month on the shelves, the re-edited "Author's Edition" offered (whenever I get around to doing the author edit!) will have perhaps years to draw an audience.
So. Point is. Know your niches. Love your niches. Try not to call them, as I just did, "fetishes," especially if you're going to do a Google search and are easily put to the blush. Start a website devoted not to your wonderfulness as a writer, but to the niche, you know, www.novelswithfakeddeaths.com. Start a Facebook group not of your "fans" but "fans of faked-death novels."
That's what I'm going to do. We can be on each other's blogrolls!
Thoughts? Suggestions? And, oh, never forget that what's important about direct publishing, really important, comes to those who figure out what they want, how they define success for themselves in publication, why not to settle for some default definition of success but rather one that will, in fulfillment, truly fulfill the inner writer.
Alicia
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