“Listen carefully. I will say this only once…” (to quote ‘Allo ‘Allo)
Actually, I’ve said it over and over. But maybe this will be the time that someone listens. If you are a big 6 publisher running around your office shrieking “Amazon, GAH! AMAZON!!!,” stop. You’re disturbing the neighbors, and if you listened you might learn something of value. What is really really scary is that it would be of value to me _and_ to you. A new concept called ‘mutually beneficial’. I know this is different from the historical way of operating where I bent over and had to pay for the vaseline, but firstly, no matter how much you liked it, it wasn’t working for either of us, and secondly I’m not bending over again.
Now I hope you’re an initiate of the black brotherhood and have donned your creepy gown and hood… no not that niquab. You can only wear that if you accept you are a second class citizen or to show feminist solidarity with those who are oppressed by bad America. If those things make sense to you, you’re too dumb to grasp this. I mean the one you wear when someone is going to whisper arcane black magic of the kind you have striven (and failed) to grasp all your life, invoked with mysterious formulae you have never seen before (possibly as reflection on your education, which shall we say was skewed toward the arts rather than hard sciences.) Oh and I may as well warn you I am going to use that un-PC bad word. The M word, that’s worse than the C word. Brace yourself.
Ready? OK, listen carefully. I will say this only once… 100% (see, arcane symbol from dirty M word.)(100% means ALL of it. The whole thing, got it?) Of zero (which means 0, nothing, zip) = (another arcane symbol meaning absolutely the same as) zero. Or n x 0 = 0. Oh. I just said it again. And in filthy math too. Never mind. Understanding this and the implications of it, is the key to life, happiness, wealth, and publishing success. If you can grasp it, you can survive Amazon, and you can go to the bathroom, lock the door and whisper ‘mathematics’ to yourself for secret vile pleasure it brings you. Or if you fancy more dirty Un-PC words to perv with (the H one, which is nearly as bad as the M one) TANSTAAFL.
So what brought on this little dose of barely perceptible sarcasm? Three things. One was this excellent article by April Hamilton , the next was Charlie Stross’s one – in which he got that the SDI (stupid dumb ineffectual) of DRM was a bad idea, but missed the point that although living together isn’t legally marriage, it doesn’t feel all that different to the participants, it just doesn’t have the legal protection and honor and public commitment. Or in other words we’ve been living with a de facto monopoly and monopsony in the book world, because the controlling oligopoly and oligopsony have been worse than anything he fears Amazon could become. And while we do have some legal protection against the ‘mono’ it’s hard to touch the ‘oligo’ – unless, ta da! (a la DOJ) you can prove collusion. And the final thing was this
Which… pays me 6% of the purchase price if you follow this link to Amazon and buy from them. And it doesn’t matter if you then buy a sparkly vampire book or humans-are-horrible-and-men-especially curl into a corner and die book, and not mine. I got the customer there, into the store, the retailer pays me, because he got a sale which otherwise he would not have. Amazon understands n x 0 = 0… and the implications of it.
Now, this may be news to everyone, but I write books by choice. I want to write. I want to be read. I need to make a living at it, because I’m not a bludger, and I have to make a living of a sort, somehow. God could try me at being rich, and I would still pass through the eye of the needle in a week, carrying two camels, even if the entire fortune of world’s top 100 descended on me. There’s a shedload of things I would do with the money (much better things in my opinion than any of those blokes, but I am biased), and not a lot that includes keeping more than it takes to live comfortably… which makes me the ideal guy to screw, because I’m just not that interested in business or money as a measure of happiness or status. Living well doesn’t really cost that much, and I don’t need money to keep score. Like most authors, I would have been content with a comfortable living and doing what I loved. I have no interest in marketing, or I’d have chosen marketing. I’ve no interest in editing or doing covers either. Only the oligosony got too greedy (the industry takes 92% of the income from that paperback) and too narrow, and like so many other authors, I decided I’d put up with doing a little of what I don’t like doing much… and make a living… and the publishing and bookselling industry could have 100%, let alone the 92%… they’re welcome to 100% of 0. I’ll settle for 70% of something. Oddly, having discovered money, I think I would be happier if readers gave it to me in small amounts, than to the publishing industry in huge amounts to dole out occasional crumbs to me. And if Amazon gets too greedy, I’ll settle for 100% of something, from my own site or another percentage from co-op sites. Now, as Charlie Stross correctly points out (and Baen proved, but mentioning this would have been, you know, admitting they exist, and nasty sort-of liberterians have been right (I mean correct) all along) ditching DRM means publishers can sell off their own platforms. The problem, as they have already repeatedly told us, is they can’t compete with Amazon. Amazon can afford to sell at a loss etc. Which is why they’ve ended up paying fines for collusion and price fixing… which would have done the job 3 times over. Personally, if I was on the board of those companies I’d be firing the folk that advised this. But if I was on the board i would have opposed it, because it was obviously not terribly bright. Anyway, it’s time to invoke the magic with the PC-porn M word. n x 0 = 0. And even if n x (a very small sum/percentage = Y), n x Y = something > than n x 0 = nothing. And where n x Y = something, and A = number of times you sell it…. (n x Y) x A >0. Could be a LOT bigger than 0. And if you’re going to do it all, something is better than nothing. The point where (n x Y) x A = a living or a profit+living may be another matter, but n x 0 = 0, which is where they are now.
Which brings me to the point I’ve been slowly circling in on. The reality is publishers have to compete with Amazon – both with their suppliers, and with the consumers. What’s more, they can. Yes, they would have to lose a lot of legacy overheads. The New York office, the interest bill for the advance on the latest dahling… but they’re actually in a BETTER position than Amazon. The tools are right there… if they remember magic formula n x 0 = 0. They have a large number of contacts in the author world, and in the artist world. There are skills in their offices which make better books, or could. Now, at the moment, these author-folk can earn 76% of their cover price, by selling direct, and by steering customers from their websites to Amazon. I can hear the publishers CEO’s fainting as they scream “76%! That’s extortionate! Which, oddly enough, I know exactly how feels. It’s what I feel when I look at the 96% the rest of the trade takes from my books on sale in Australia. I’ve had to cope with 4% of something being better than 100% of nothing, because that was my choice. They have a similar one. They can actually offer less than the 70%… provided I don’t have to do the marketing, the cover, the editing and proof reading and the e-book formatting… provided they do a better job than I do. If they can say to me ‘by being on our mailing list and featured on our website, your A(= no. of sales) will be for example, 20 000′ and I know on Amazon on my own, that figure will be 10 000… they can pay me 40%. I’ll be winning, they’ll be winning. And of course the one thing they will HAVE to do (stop whimpering, Mr CEO. It’s unwomanly) is to pay me 6% or more, for referrals. Because n x 0 = 0. Without that referral that’s what that customer would have spent. 0. Nothing. Niks. Zip. That referral is worth money. And they still want it for nothing. Sorry. TANSTAAFL. It’s worth MORE to me send it to Amazon and end up with 76% of a cheap book and have customers buy other bits and send me a piece of that. The potential for Authors to fill online retail stores, is VAST. But we’re not doing it for free. Forget it. n x 0 = 0.
To avoid the hassle of all the stuff I end up half or entirely doing for you anyway, I’ll part with SOME income. Either in cash to freelancers or as a share to a publisher. I’m not particularly greedy, but, and I will say this as many times as need be: the days of you living well, and me having to have a second job to subsidize you, are over.
n x o = 0
or
(n x Y) x A = something.
I pick the latter. And you?
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “n x 0 = 0.”
Dave . . . do you really think publishers can understand math that complex? I mean, most of them went to very fine and expensive universities.
Pam, I don’t there’s intelligent life in publishing (except for Baen).
Hey! Some of us are trying 🙂
Sorry Amanda, I should have said “big publishing”. [Wink]
I despair sometimes, I do. Most of what I am saying is so self-evident, so logical I can’t get how anyone could not get it. It’s simple. The game has changed, you’re no longer operating in an oligopsony where you dictate prices and conditions. Now you have to compete, and pay for services.
Hamilton’s commentary is worthwhile. But Stross gets in wrong in one by uncritically mouthing the stupid “social Darwinism” shibboleth and, as far as I am concerned, invalidates ANYthing he has to say on ANY subject whatsoever.
But that’s just me.
M
Hamilton’s systematic destruction of the myths was good. Stross suffers from being one of the dahlings and therefore not realizing there was anything wrong with the existing system. I am reminded of many of the apparachniks of communism in East Germany, who bitterly lament the passing of the system they nurtured and that caressed them, and say how much better it all was then.
I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Kate at RavenCon this weekend. She was programmed as moderator for the panel “Amazon Isn’t Evil”. She also sat on a couple other panels I attended that devolved into plowing essentially that same field. I had the chnce to chat with her after the last of them, and we found that we had both reached a couple of significant tentative conclusions from the experience.
1) Two years ago, when I first started attending Cons with the mindset of “aspiring author”, panelists who were “only” published through small-press (or staffers/editors of such), and those “only” published electronically, always introduced themselves with a hint of apology. And the “legitimately” published panelists tended to be suitably “gracious” toward their “lesser” brethren and sistren. That is no longer the case. From 2010 to last year, I saw a change in how other fen treated the small- and self- pubbed folks, and this year I saw a substantial change in how those worthies are introducing/presenting themselves. I still saw some of the more traditionally-careered folks clinging to their old habits of condescension, but not many. And the fen seemed unreceptive to those who tried.
2) The fen don’t hate Amazon. And only a handful of them fear it. I’d estimate that the crowds in those panels broke down somewhere around 80% – 20%, with the majority split roughly evenly between those (including myself) who felt that Amazon is no different from any other “for-profit” corporation in this or any other business, and those who expressed concern that competition may be decresing too quickly because no one else is emerging to compete, but that isn’t precisely Amazon’s fault.
3) I perceived an unsurprising trend among the panelists. On the panel that was *intended* to discuss Amazon, one of Kate’s fellows behind the desk was a guy who has published “thirty or so books, and a number of shorter works”. He fears Amazon, but none of his reservations were expressed in statements of things Amazon has DONE. Instead, he talked about what it *might* do. Those who didn’t have that long tail firmly enmeshed in the Establishment, on the other hand, generally agreed with me that Amazon can only continue to be what they are by continuing to be what they are … and that the minute they try to be something else, someone else will egin the process of becoming what they *were*, and Amazon will be exactly where the Establishment are now.
The most disconcerting observation I madeall weekend was the number of pros who didn’t have a working knowledge of the facts surrounding the agency-pricing lawsuit, and the ones (largely the same people) who were blissfully unaware of the lynch-mobs of established authors beating the drums against Amazon. Kate’s other peer on the “Amazon Isn’t Evil” opened her remarks by saying she didn’t really understand the reason for the panel, because she didn’t know anyone had been saying the opposite … and her day job is military liaison to Congress.
My other conclusion from those panels is that the big 6 model of publishing is deader than week-old fish in a tropical summer. Entities bearing the same names as the big six publishers may survive, but they won’t be anything like they have been.
First up, people generally are reading MORE books than was the case as few as 2 years ago. The books they’re reading and recommending to their friends are ebooks, disproportionately published by small to micro presses and self-published. This says two things: first, the big six aren’t publishing what people want to read, and second that people have found out how to find what they do want.
In the face of that, the big NYC publishers are doomed. Not only have they lost their near-absolute lock on the market, they’ve lost what had been an absolute lock on public perception of their worth.
“This says two things: first, the big six aren’t publishing what people want to read,”
Do you know how long I have been beating that drum? 🙂 They have no metric to measure it, and they’re an echo chamber that reflects their tastes, which aren’t the US tastes, let alone the world.
The part that frustrates me, angers me, is that they’re behaving like a drowning man, trying to pull the rescuers under, grabbing the anchor off the deck of the boat that could save them, and clinging onto that, and the rescuers as it goes down. They’re a spoiled child whose always had his own way, throwing gasoline around the house and refusing to part with the matches… They’ll get hurt, and do loads of collateral damage, and it’s all unnecessary. But they can’t seem to accept they cannot go back to the way things were.
Caveat to what I said above: Raven is traditionally a notably Baen-heavy Con, both in terms of pros and of fen. So, there may be a disproportionate pre-existing libertarian skew to the observable data …
Stephen,
No. I’ve seen this in local cons, too.
🙂 I wish I could have been there too. As I just said above, the curious thing about all the squalling about Amazon is that Amazon has actually done the precise opposite of what they claim to fear. It’s been near-infinitely better for broadening access to literature, and it has made it more accessible. Most of the dire consequences… are in fact precisely what authors (bar the dahlings) have had to live with for 30 years. The indy bookstores got more hammered by chain bookstores than they ever have by Amazon. I am forcibly reminded of the old GDR communist officials – in GDR life parasites reveling in their power, and now moaning bitterly about how much better thing were back then. Well, yes, for them.
You’d have liked it, Dave. I did pimp Sarah as a possible future GOH, but – alas – I’m not sure their budget runs to international guests of honor.
I will say that I hope the two who are saying they’ll fight the antitrust suit come to their senses and settle, because not only could none of them survive the result of forensic accountants and lawyers examining their books, the collateral damage would make a nuclear strike look like child’s play.
One of them is Penguin. I keep thinking of that Asterix panel (On Asterix in Rome) when they make the soup designed to be revolted and the slave supervisor tastes it and says “Forget being returned. You’re going to be crucified.”
While there would be blood on the tracks, and authors careers ruined or in hiatus for years, the one side effect might be to make the survivors and observers clean up their acts. I suspect they try to bury things as best as possible, instead of sending out checks, but it might – as the scare Jim had (where Spinrad gave away the fact that the company he then worked for was due an audit) back before Baen help shape their behavior into the future.
If I had a lot of $$$ I’d find a way to leverage that and buy one of the “big 6”. I’d probably fire most of the people and there’d be some kind of clause that said that I was not liable for any accounting errors prior to my purchase. And no doubt a few other legal/managerial tricks would need to be done so that I could start off with a reasonably clean sheet.
But once I had that reasonably clean sheet I’m pretty sure I could – via a combination of carrots and sticks – get a reasonable non-exclusive deal with Amazon that wasn’t agency pricing. With that I’m sure I could make money while paying my authors 40% ish royalties (possibly more, need to think the sums through). I expect all right thinking people in New York woudl hate me (if nothing else all their friends who were workign form me would have been fired and probably I wouldn’t renew the contracts with a bunch of their favorite authors) but I bet I’d end up with lots of very happy genre authors and readers in places outside New York and other similar bastions of the current orthodoxy.
The reason why I want to buy an existing big 6 publisher rather than start out is the branding they have with authors and the existing deals they have with amazon and co. Those are key incumbent advantages and while the publishers are busy pissing those advantages away they aren’t yet valueless.
Yes, I’d agree there is quite a lot of value there. And yes i suspect the accounting might be… interesting. But I’d say day-by-day they’re peeing the value away. The scary part is the authors (and some editors and proof readers) who will go go down with the ship, as their contracts are assets. I worked the sums – the easy answer is not only do you sell via amazon, but you sell via your own site. The same price… only via your site, as you’re making 30% more… you pay the authors say 2/3 – if they steer customers there (tracked links) and 1/3 if they just benefit from it. You obviously have to pay way more than the 17.5 (before agent fees) but less than 70%… because services cost. The common sense attitude would be to price those services (from free-lancers but quality) and knock that off before you start paying. I’d guess you could fairly claim the first 5K and then go to something like 60% or more if through your site. And Amazon would play ball.