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He Beats Me But He’s My Publisher

–By Sarah Hoyt

First let me point out no one beats me. Not literally. For those of you who’ve read Athena (Darkship Thieves) this should not be an incredible surprise.

The title is denoting of the relationship existing in traditional publishing between the writer and the publishing house. It is also the sort of thing I heard many women say about their husbands in the village where I grew up. Portugal, like most countries whose cultures were strongly influenced by Islam, had a streak of wife-abuse running through the poorer or more culturally backward classes. Since in the village where I lived my dad was one of the very few white collar workers, this meant my mother and my grandmother were forever saving women who ran away from home when they were two steps from landing in the emergency room… Only to see them go back to their husbands because “He beats me but he’s my man.” Or “He beats me because I’m not good enough.” Or “He beats me because he loves me so much.” Or even “Whom should he beat but his own.”

Needless to say, the one thing my family told me, from – I think – before I could toddle (I could talk before I could walk. No. Don’t ask.) was “If your husband ever so much as slaps you, you leave. That day. And you don’t go back.”

Unfortunately my family never knew about publishers and the status of the mid-list author.

I wasn’t going to talk about any of this. I wasn’t. I like at least one of my publishers immensely, and I do understand how their hands are tied. On the other hand the last few days have been very trying. First, is it my impression or are all the establishment’s blue eyed boys going out of their way to tell us how we’ll starve in the gutter without traditional publishing? They remind me of my first agent, who btw, ONLY made official the sale I had already made to the publisher, and who then told me I’d die in the gutter without her, when I fired her. (Yeah. That… didn’t work as she thought, curiously enough.)

But then yesterday, in the Baen bar, someone posted that he sent letters to WRITERS complaining about their publishers’ DRM policies and pricing for ebooks because, I don’t know, the Kool-Aid man is red? Oh, wait, no, it’s more nonsensical than that. Because and – clears throat – I am quoting: writers choose their publishers. I want them to choose publishers who don’t do these things.

And that pushed me over the top. Call it hormonal, all right? I’m getting to be the same age when my mom was more likely to take off with the cast iron frying pan to talk to one of the abusive husbands than she was to simply bandage the woman’s wounds.

So, to begin with, let me tell you right now that the chances of a midlist author dictating terms to his/her publisher are about the same as those of a village working class woman finding a man who doesn’t beat her. She might get lucky. She MIGHT. But she can’t count on it. In fact, a village woman once told me “If you think you’ll find a man who doesn’t beat you–” (And let me say, yes I have.)

Heck, as some of you know I have a lot of friends who are bestsellers. The way the market is right now, the chance of a bestseller dictating terms to his publisher are close to nill as well – unless he’s one of those blockbuster bestsellers that defy all classification. In our field you can probably count those in the fingers of both hands and have some fingers left over. And unfortunately none of them are close enough friends for me to ask if they, too, are worried.

Now, let me describe to you how much power the typical author has. Let me tell you how traditional publishing works for the unconnected, the non-fashionable and the doomed.

First of all, it’s a buyer’s market. Since the mega mergers of the eighties, there are five overarching houses. There might be more imprints, but, at least when submitting through an agent, you can’t submit twice to the same house. (Well, at least not using any agent I’ve had.)

Second, for each slot available on the publishing schedule there are thousands upon thousands of submissions. Even assuming the vast majority of those are either horrible or “don’t fit” the publisher’s “needs” there have to be at least ten books that would fit the slot at any given time.

So, let’s say YOUR book takes the editor’s fancy. Or maybe they owed your agent a favor. Or maybe they liked the title better than the other ten. Who knows?

You’re a brand new author, and they pick you out of slush. Oooh. Oooh. You’re in the money now, right?

Um… maybe. But first let’s talk about the important considerations: how powerful is your agent? How much does he/she believe in you? And do you know anyone in a publishing house? If all those are negative, you have one more chance at the big money – are you a “sexy package”? Part of this is literal. Are you cute and young? Can they count on displaying you and having people tumble over themselves? Part is metaphorical – do you have a hard luck story? Do you have something interesting about you? Do you perhaps have a well-followed blog? Or are you a politically correct refugee? (When my first series tanked the publisher told me she would buy me again and “make me a bestseller” if I wrote an autobiography. I was thirty eight. I’d done nothing but get married, have kids and write three failed books. So… she wanted me to write about my childhood in Portugal and make it “sexy.” No, I didn’t. What, am I stupid? No. I respect my family and friends there too much. I want to sell my books, not my unremarkable self. Also there are other reasons which are none of their business. Or anyone else’s.)

Let’s suppose you’re either white-bread American and unconnected to the publishing industry in any way. (Or you’re not white American but are stupid or honorable enough not to let them make a big deal of your life or treat you as an oppressed minority.) Let’s also suppose you wasted your twenties trying to break in, and in your thirties you’re blousy, somewhat overweight, with two small children.

Ah, my dear, welcome to hell. Here’s your accordion.

Having looked at this, your editor “forecasts” your numbers. I have it on good authority this doesn’t involve the bones of sacrificed animals. What they do is go “White, American, unremarkable and not sexy.” And you get the standard beginner’s advance. It used to be the princely sum of five thousand dollars (what, you can’t live on that for a year? Foolish you. Appliance boxes are free, and there are some nice underpasses. You can write at the library.) It is now three thousand.

Now the book and its advance pass on to the marketing department. Who… barely glance at it. To get back the money they invested in you, they don’t really need to do anything. No, look, I know what you’ve heard. They say that printing the average book costs 100k or some fantastical sum. But that’s because they’re charging to every book the same percentage of editor/publicist/secretary/etc salaries. (Many books at this level, if bought on proposal, never get READ in full. Except presumably by the copyeditor. That’s how much time you take of those salaries.)

Next, you get assigned to someone – probably someone’s secretary – who procures a cover for you. Usually you get a beginner artist (and some are darn good) but they might also use some form of out of copyright art – like my first three books. And then… and then you go to copyedit. And thence to the marketing department again.

I’ve been privileged to listen to a book reps spiel back before I was published, at my favorite independent bookstore, while I was waiting to ask the manager a question. Back then this was done with a huge catalogue with covers, and one or two books in actual advance printing. First these came up. They were either bestsellers or those the publisher had slated as bestsellers. They got handed to the bookstore manager and the manager was told “Well, we have strong confidence in these books. You’ll want to take…” twenty of each, I think, at a minimum. Might have been fifty. It’s been a long time. Then came the books in “second slot” for that quarter. For these the rep had the covers. He’d hand them over, do a little song and dance, and say “you want to take” – five or ten of these. He’d tell you how the publisher was promoting these books this way or that, or how interesting the life story of the author was, or what have you.

AND THEN, at the end, he’d say “You also can take these.” THAT, Mr. or Ms. Whitebread, is where you are. And if your cover is exceptionally pretty or the manager recently watched a movie that sounds somewhat like your book, they might take one or two.

At that point, you’re in the midlist zone. You’re also more than likely in the sales death spiral (no, I’m not going to explain that. This would run to ten pages. Google Books and Death Spiral.) After that, any book you sell, those numbers will be brought up. Can you escape the midlist, once you’ve been cast into it? I don’t know. One hears stories, but those are usually from before the computer number system. Perhaps, as with hell, you can swim out of it but I doubt it’s on a sea of tears of true repentance. More likely you’d have to marry a movie star, or perhaps run for president.

Note that SO FAR the writer has had exactly zero choice. Oh, he can chose NOT to sell his book and remain obscure forever. Does how good his book is influence anything? Well… it could. Supposing that word of mouth got going among readers. Except that, for all but one of my publishers (yes, you know which one) until very recently, it was one print run, one time, it sells out and the book is no longer available in any format. Too bad so sad. One of my publishers until the last two books made it a point of taking the books out of print at the year mark or when the book started earning royalties.

This meant the chances of your being discovered in back inventory were… you’re right. Zero. (I know through my fanmail a lot of people are NOW discovering my Shakespeare series which came out eleven years ago. I get no money for those, because they’re out of print and either used or remaindered. I don’t even get statements for them anymore. And there weren’t enough of them printed, so even if they all sold twenty times, my name recognition would be limited.)

In fact, if your book had been completely blank, or a compilation of nursery rhymes, it would have got exactly the same distribution and sales as it got with your words in it. You didn’t choose the cover. You didn’t choose the price. You didn’t choose the push. You didn’t choose the distribution.

More importantly and more than likely, the person who chose these things chose them NOT based on the book – which they might or might not have read – but on YOU and their perceived marketability of YOU. (And let me tell you, as a reader, that’s many shades of wrong.)

Most people don’t know your book even exists, and therefore they can’t ask for it. And if they do, they might get told it can’t be ordered.

And then… and then the fun starts. When the numbers are in, you’re told your numbers are only “midlist” and barely good enough (if you’re lucky) for them to buy the next one. And the next. they all get the exact same treatment. You might grow your fans, but it will be very slow. And even if you sign with a publisher who wishes they could do more for you, at that point the publisher is hamstrung by the numbers in the computer about your previous distribution.

You might (or might not) be asked to change your name again and again and again (one of my publishers has a fetish for this.)

And all along you’ll be told the fault for your lackluster sales is … yours. Yep. You wrote the book, and if it doesn’t sell, it’s ALWAYS your fault. No matter how demonstrably it ISN’T.

And under the old model, you swallowed and took it. You did what the village women did when I was a kid. You bandaged your worse wounds, and you made up stories. “I fell down the stairs.” “I bumped into bad sales figures in the night.” “I am so clumsy.” “It’s all my fault.” “They beat me because they love me.” And you crawled back. Because the alternative was unthinkable. The alternative was to never publish again.

And if you complained – if you so much as opened your mouth and said something along the lines as perhaps the crash of the books wasn’t ENTIRELY your fault (I’m not a conspiracy theorist, for instance, but I’m100 % sure that the crash of my first book was exacerbated by coming out exactly one month after 9/11 and while I’ve done many weird things in my life I’m SURE I never committed any terrorist attacks. But those numbers were SOLELY my fault, as far as the industry was concerned.) you got told how grateful you should be to the house for continuing to publish your worthless self, how each of your no-good books cost them 100k to get to the printing stage, and how they only did it out of the goodness of their hearts. And you had to swallow it, no matter how nonsensical it was.

THIS model. THIS MODEL is what the bright eyed harbingers of the establishment, the blue eyed boys of privilege want me to get maudlin about. Both as a reader and as a writer, let me say RIGHT NOW that I’m not going to.

No, I don’t know where the buck will stop in digital publishing. No, I don’t know what will emerge or what shape it will take. I do know just being able to say “It wasn’t my fault. I’m not the world’s best writer, but there’s something mighty weird with the system.” Or “I will not be grateful for hind teat” is good enough for me.

A biography of Marlowe claims that among his last words were “Just to tell the truth once, would be worth dying for.” This, it turns out, is also true when the result is the metaphorical death of a career. Particularly when there are alternatives.

No, I will not eat what’s put before me. No, I’m not the world’s most wonderful writer – every year I look at what I wrote the year before and cringe, so I know there’s room for improvement – but I KNOW I’m not a million times worse than J. K. Rowling. Sorry, that’s not just impossible. That’s obscene. I also know that until Pratchett got a new agent and editor, he was lost in mid-list hell in the US while a bestseller in the UK. His writing did not change. His marketing did.

Will I continue selling to big houses? Only if I like them. I write for a house I like, and there’s one other house I wouldn’t mind writing for.

As for the rest of them, they can go to hell. I’m going Indie.

*Crossposted at According To Hoyt*

Run Away! We’re all doomed!

By Dave Freer

RUUUUUUN! The water main has burst under the instant mashed potato factory… or something of that sort.

Oddly several people seem to think that I am about to be overwhelmed by vast gurpling seas of fake mashed potato and that Ewan Morrison is just the fellow to tell me to run to high ground or at least the tender gentle clutches of the nurturing publishing industry.

It is quite possible I will drown in fake mashed potato. Or, as a worse fate, have to learn to eat it.  But I can’t say I have even begun lacing up my running trainers, let alone letting panic wipe out any semblance of common sense when I read his grim forecast for my livelihood and chosen profession. Maybe I’m just a sceptic  or just a nasty blockish brutal fellow who deserves extinction.  But go ahead, read the article and tell me what you think.

Here is my deconstruction:

Firstly before we panic let’s look at where this comes from. Hmm. The Edinburgh Arts Festival (a typical spot for your average unpretentious reader) as reported in the Guardian – the newspaper of the Champagne socialists of the UK. Now it takes all types to make a world, and that’s a good thing, but it is also true that this is pretty much (as in NY publishing) where the bulk of the publishing industry fit.  This is their mouthpiece and they are the establishment.  So: we can conclude this is pretty much their viewpoint, or at least written for them.

And then… Who is it coming from: According to Wikipedia, Ewan Morrison is an Arts graduate, who sometimes writes for the Guardian, who has written three books exploring alternatives to monogamy, and has been in line or won some some literary type prizes, and been a Unesco writer in residence.  In other words – an Arts establishment man, who, to quote him, feels writers deserve to be ‘paid a living wage.’

We differ slightly on this: I feel authors ought to be able to _earn_ enough to live on. But yes, I do think authors need to be able to work full time and not write on cardboard in their own blood while starving and freezing under bridges.

He goes on at length about the demise of the paper book. I don’t think it’ll be that fast, or that complete, but yes, I agree. E-books are the future.

His first point is the Retreat of the Advance and the reaction of writers to it.

Perhaps the world was very different for the Arts establishment man publishing literature: “The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.”

As someone with I suspect far more sales than the average literary writer, I can assure you the framework was pretty dead when I sold my first book in 1999, and it’s pretty close to moribund now.

Let’s just have a quick look at the entire concept of the advance. Why does it exist at all? Well, because back in the days of chipping out books on stone tablets (or about 3 years after) it of necessity took a very very very long time to produce a book and to pay for it.  It was written by hand, transported by horse or mail-coach, hand typeset, printed, and then distributed by wagon. Every six months they would hand count the number of books still in the warehouse, and then manually do the tallies, and write the author a check. And the process could drag on for a long time. Needless to say, the doing away with every one of these impediments has made the time taken to render payment… longer. I’ve had the process take 3 years from signing to first royalty (which only occurs after a full 6 months reporting period – which as they are always 3-5 months late in paying, and a book can have 5 months of the previous reporting period – up 16 months after a book comes out), and it took me two months to write the book.  I know several writers who can turn out a novel in a month – a good book too – deliver it electronically, and the editing and proofing and cover do not need to take as much as another month.  Returns on e-books are immediate, records are immediate… in other words there is no reason why the author should not be paid immediately (even by Amazon, who settle quarterly – much better than most, but still could improve), or at leas monthly.  So: the advance system is a legacy system which exists largely because the royalty system is so bad. Fixing it would go a long way to making life much better for authors. Far more than maintaining the old system. Trust me. Try paying your monthly bills when you get paid erratically in lumps. It’s not fun. Most authors would be much more productive if they could log into their account and see what they’d sold today, and what would be electronically debited into their account at month end. This is not hard, but no publisher has yet even inched towards it.

So to return Ewan Morrison’s bemoaning the shrinking advance on royalty (which as I said, shouldn’t need to exist, and not having it would free books to earn what they earn, not to prove the editor guessed sales right (getting it right is most unlikely. Statistically improbable in the extreme.  Getting it wrong could get you fired. So oddly… it is so often just… Goldilocks! Why do these editors not just pick lotto numbers? They’d be able to publish exactly what they liked and we’d just have no choice… oh, wait…) “In reaction to the removal of their living wage, many writers have decided to abandon the mainstream entirely: they’ve come to believe that publishers and their distribution systems are out of date; that too many middle-men (distributors, booksellers) have been living off their work.”

Come to believe? Hang on. I’ve looked at my Bookscan figures per State.  I KNOW my distribution sucks rocks.  I earn on average 10% (and as little as 6%)  of the cover price of books sold in the US.  My books sold in Australia get me around 2% of the cover price.  Do I perhaps feel that others taking 90-98% of the income generated by my work for seconds per book of often shoddy effort is providing too many middle-men with a living instead of me? What an ODD idea!!!

And now the long tail, which our Arts Establishment writer believes is just so bad for writers…  Well, if you were one of the cool kids, the darlings of the publishing establishment, who got you books into every bookstore, on the every shelf, and who lavished money on promoting you in an environment they controlled… it must be pretty awful. You see the long tail is wagged by word of mouth, which, yes, they can influence. But it’s a lot harder than their command economy model. “Ve vil decide vot you vil read, Ja. Unt how many copies ve  vil print Ja. Und take it or leave it!” (which, of course has resulted in many readers leaving it, to the detriment of authors, the industry, society and even the human race).  For the rest of us… well, it means we get a small chance at succeeding on merit. And yes, word of mouth can still spread to a lot of people.  Also, if I don’t get 2% but say 70% of the income, I don’t need to sell as many copies to earn a living without sharing it with people who add little value to my work.

But of course according to Morrison we must live in fear of the demon ‘free content’. He starts by quoting examples of various legacy industries where the primary producers have carried a vast weight of other beneficiaries, who very often added little value for their cost, and who are now in trouble – largely, in my opinion, as a result of this.

Firstly the standard pirate bogey. Quoting: “The Motion Picture Association of America lost 6.1 billion (75% higher than they expected).” Really? How _do_ they arrive at these figures? I’m only a statistician,  I’m sure these geniuses would never assume that 1)they could actually predict sales without cheating. 2)that piracy represents lost sales. As we OUGHT to know piracy is a bunch of Somalis taking over your ship at gunpoint, but petty data theft is only a loss if the thief would have bought the product. And that, considering the price and often quality and nature of the product, is a lot less than likely.

Then the music bogey-man. I had to laugh at these.

“shows that for a musician to earn the minimum wage in the US, per month, he or she would have to sell either 143 self-pressed CDs, 1,161 retail album CDs or 4,053,110 plays on Spotify (with a 0.0016 percent royalty.”

So – after costs – the muso would have to sell 10% to make the same money? I’d heard they were often lucky to see 2%. Doesn’t prove his point well does it?

Martin Hodkinson states that “Hundreds of people have ‘downed their tools’ in the music business, through no choice of their own. The total income of the industry dropped by 25% between 1999 and 2008 and is expected to fall by 75% by 2013.”

So… run this one past the maths department. The industry, which at best paid the muso 10% is supposed to drop to 25% of it’s 1999 position.  I suppose it would be naive to say to the middlemen well, as you were taking 90% + of the income, and without the musos you get a nice zero… and they can make a living on their own, maybe you need to face taking 15% instead of 90%? Or even 10%.

and so on.

Then we go a Google-bashing (because that’s what the cool kids do.) It’s not about quality content it’s about advertising – this has to be one of the stupidest misinterpretations yet made.  Duh. If the content is good the readers will… you know, do this weird intolerable thing. Tell others they liked it.  And then you know… that bit of content will attract readers and that in turn… will never get noticed by advertisers. Give me a break!

Which leads of course to the big pet zombie always fished out as the final get out of jail free card by the various middlemen in every industry.

“Piracy and competitive discounting – the race to the bottom

Back again to books. In all of the cases above, digital industries have been pushed towards zero price by two factors: (1) mass piracy and (2) the consumer demand for massive discounts. Book piracy has only just begun but it is now very simple to break through the DRM protection systems set up by publishers and to illegally download books in less than 60 seconds.”

Sigh. 1)Piracy is work. Almost no one knocks off a cheap, easy to get legally, well-supported product. See Baen webscriptions for proof.  Yes, there is a bottom limit to what people are prepared to work at and hassle for.  And no, no matter how discounted your prices are… when you reach those thresh-holds, it’s too much like hard work.  Anyway, a vast amount of the cracking is done to ‘take the challenge’.  If there is no challenge, and the book is available in good order, easily, and at a reasonable price – say under $5 for a novel, and you’ve done your homework as the publisher — made sure that the reader knows what share goes to the author, and made sure that readers know ‘no money-no writing happens’, and each reader feels like a patron. And they feel good about it too. But you can’t do this if everyone but the creator — the only person valued by by the consumer — is taking 90% of the income.

2) If DRM can be cracked in 60 seconds (and costs a fortune and stuffs up the product) why bother?

Which brings our friend Ewan to conclude that there are no simple answers…

Which not my conclusion at all. I can see a number of ways, even in his Arts Establishment world, to make the system work.  Of course it would have to change (oh the horror!). Publishers would have to compete with Amazon et al. Authors could do serial books again. Publishers could start working on finding out what readers really wanted and trying the weird… actually nurturing it in partnerships that were worthwhile to stay in for authors. And those are just a few possible ideas.

And the awful future: “it will contain millions of would-be-writers who will labour under the delusion that they can be successful in the way writers were before, in the age of the mainstream and the paper book.”

Iffen  Ah don’ laff, I’s sure as hail gonna cry. No. The cool kids were, Ewen. The rest of us did a thankless job, largely for the benefit of others, who treated us like replaceable widgets.

Clocking Out

by Chris McMahon

After a furious period of activity finishing off and revising the draft of my new SF novel, Foreign Elements, I have taken a week off writing. I feel nervous just writing that!

The main reason is I have been experiencing a variety of unpleasant symptoms ranging from vertigo and nausea to missed heartbeats. So far the best the doctor can come up with is ‘they appear to be a range of symptoms associated with stress and anxiety’. In any case I have let myself off the hook for this week, which means not doing anything on job#3 – managing the business my wife and I run, or job#2 – writing in the morning before work (or in any other crack I can find). Job#1 of course grinds on regardless.

The break from writing feels inordinately strange. I have been experiencing some very serious internal thumb twiddling, which has become more frantic as the week has progressed. I never realised what a damn word junkie I was.

Of course the writing is still going on, but more at the ideas level. I have also been thinking a lot more ‘big picture’ in terms of overall approach and strategy. All in all I think it will be one Hell of a relief to get back into it next week. Not that I really want to start cutting my sleep again.

The break has got me thinking about what is ‘normal’ or ‘reasonable’ in terms of having a break from writing. People approach this very differently depending on their writing method. Some people tend to write in intense blocks, and are happy taking big chunks of time off. I get unsettled by this. I tend to be a ‘slogger’. Mind you, big blocks of time worked great for finishing the first draft of Foreign Elements.

I think there is something to be said for letting the field go ‘fallow’ and renew its fertility. To get enough space to rejuvenate and get inspired. Not everyone agrees with this – some writers and writing teachers are fanatical about writing every day.

How do you approach your downtime? Do you structure it? i.e. give yourself a day off a week? Work in blocks with big blocks off? Or are you ad-hoc, with both up and downtimes coming at the behest of the muses?