Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

If You Build It, They Won't Come

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This article originally appeared on the Publishing Trends website in December of 2008.

To be on the Web or not to be on the Web—sorry, technophobic authors, that’s no longer the question. Rather, what should be on your website and how can you draw traffic to it? There’s no universal key to success. But with help from a recent groundbreaking report and four web designers who specialize in author sites, we’ve come up with some guidelines.

The Codex Group is described by its President, Peter Hildick-Smith, as a “pollster for publishers.” Last summer, Codex undertook a massive author website impact study that surveyed nearly 21,000 book shoppers. Its objective was to understand the relative effectiveness of author sites among shoppers and to determine the elements that will keep them coming back to the site. We spoke with Hildick-Smith and four book-loving Web marketers and designers—John Burke, Vice President of FSB Associates; Carol Fitzgerald, Founder and President of the Book Report Network; Jason Chin; and Jefferson Rabb (who also consulted on the Codex study, along with Columbia University’s Charlotte Blumenfeld)—to find out what makes an author site not only good-looking, but also successful.

“From an author’s perspective, if you are going to invest the time and energy in writing and getting a book published, it’s a big drawback if you can’t then be found online,” says Burke. Furthermore, the Codex report found that visiting an author’s website is the leading way that book readers support and get to know their favorite authors better. And this is true regardless of age. While those under 35 visited websites more often than those over 35, over-35-year-olds still used author websites as their main method of learning about the author. “This isn’t a generational thing,” says Hildick-Smith. Fans are also much more likely to visit the author’s website than the author’s page on the publisher’s website.

The survey found that 7.5% of book shoppers had visited their favorite author’s website in the past week. As a point of comparison, 7% had visited the Wall Street Journal’s site.

And any remaining skeptics out there, take note: Website visits translate directly to the number of books bought. Book shoppers who had visited an author website in the past week bought 38% more books, from a wider range of retailers, than those who had not visited an author site. “Is putting up a website going to make a book a bestseller? No,” says Chin. “Is the website going to help the author build an audience? I believe it can. What you don’t want is for someone to hear about your book, search for it with Google, and find nothing. That’s a potential lost sale.”

Web presence is especially essential in today’s economy. “Websites have become even more important as people are not in stores discovering books,” Fitzgerald says. “We need to get them jazzed about a title and their favorite author and give them reason not just to buy the book, but also to have a relationship with the author and his or her work so they become evangelists for them with fellow readers. These next months, author websites and communications with readers are going to be critical for engendering excitement in readers online, since something as crucial as in-store browsing is not happening.”

The point, of course, is not just to get readers to visit an author site once, but to keep them coming back. How do you make a website sticky?“The saying ‘build it and they will come,’ well, they won’t,” says Burke. He and the other designers we spoke with agreed that flashy design is not a key to success, and the Codex Group research bears that out, with Stephenie Meyer’s website as a case in point. It receives more traffic than any other fiction author site, yet its design is extremely basic, “probably a generic template where you plug in your header graphic,” says Hildick-Smith. “She may only be paying $15 a month for this site on some server system. It’s not elaborately designed at all. But she’s got a daily blog, and more than any other site in our study, she has links to fan sites. Fan site links appear to contribute to loyal audience traffic.”

Read the rest of the article at Publishing Trends.

Bloggers, Ask The Right Question: What If I'm Sued Tomorrow?

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This post, by Joan Stewart, originally appeared on her The Publicity Hound’s Blog on 4/28/09.

If you blog, the worst of your worries shouldn’t be how many times to post, or what to write about, or whether to use WordPress or Typepad.

Your Number One concern—the question bloggers never think to ask—should be: “What if somebody sues me tomorrow for copyright infringement, defamation or invasion of privacy—what does that mean?”

Here’s what it means. It could cost you your house, your car and your future income stream.

Take it from me. Being named in a defamation suit that asks for a quarter million dollars in damages turns your world upside down, then drops the bottom out of your stomach.

That’s what happened last October. A reporter from People magazine had called, asking me to comment on a story they were writing about a lawsuit that had been filed by the former headmistress of Oprah Winfrey’s school for girls in South Africa. The plaintiff named me in the suit, along with Oprah and Huffington Post.

Nomvuyo Mzamane, the former headmistress of the Leadership Academy for Girls, cited comments to the media that Oprah made in October and November of 2007 after a dorm matron at the school was charged with assaulting and abusing students.

Mzamane named the Huffington Post and me for a blog item I wrote in November for this blog and for Huffington saying Mzamane was charged in connection with the scandal. She was not charged. I had erred. And the first I had learned about the lawsuit was when People called asking me to comment.

I responded quickly, and People used the entire statement:

“I’ve learned that in my November 7, 2007, blog post, ‘Oprah Scandal: A Lesson in Crisis Management,” and in a column I wrote for Huffington Post on November 19, 2007, I inadvertently erred by saying that the former head mistress of Oprah Winfrey’s Dream Academy was charged with a crime. I deeply regret that error and apologize to former head mistress Nomvuyo Mzamane.

“Journalists, including those on blogs, make mistakes, and if Ms. Mzamane had contacted me about that directly, I would have corrected it online — with an apology — immediately. I have not, in fact, been contacted by her or served with a lawsuit. I’m a firm believer in full compliance with the law, with the Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Ethics and with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, and know that I was in compliance with all three in this case.”

I also wrote a correction for my blog. That weekend, I started contacting business associates who might be able to tell me where I could turn for help defending the suit.

I tracked down an old college friend who had worked as a libel attorney in Philadelphia, where the suit was filed. She gave me two good leads:

Read the rest of the article on Joan Stewart’s The Publicity Hound’s Blog.

Twitter: What Is It, And Why Should Authors Use It?

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This article originally appeared on The Creative Penn on 1/20/09.

Twitter is a social networking tool based on regular updates of 140 characters only. This means you have to be succinct and creative in what you broadcast. I have been reading about Twitter for some time but have only recently joined up (@thecreativepenn).

So How Does It Work?

You “follow” people and can see what they post. People follow you and can see what you post. You can find people by searching for their names or Twitter handles (prefix @), or you can let Twitter suggest people you might be interested in (Find People -> Suggested Users)

You post on the web, by mobile phone or through an application like Tweetdeck which helps you organise your own and other people’s tweets.

Tweetdeck also has a useful URL shortening tool, so you can paste in a really long link and it shortens it for you. (You can also change the colours if you don’t like them).  

People post some very interesting things – news items, links to great sites, promotional info, personal information. You can respond directly to that person – yes, even if they are “famous” ! This can potentially get you noticed by them. You can “re-tweet” other people’s posts i.e. pass them on if it is something interesting. You can ask questions and respond immediately to other people you have connected with, even if they are across the world.

Why Should Authors Use Twitter?

·         Online knowledge and influence. 6 million people and counting belong to Twitter including some of the most influential people online today. If you want to be an author who makes money online, you need to be where the action is.

·         You can network with some great people you might never have met otherwise.

·         You can learn an awful lot by reading tweets from people who know more than you.

·         You can promote yourself. You shouldn’t promote all the time but you can add links to your blog posts, your website or notices of your appearances. You can gain significant traffic this way so it is worth a try.

Useful Twitter Links For Authors 

Directory of book trade people on Twitter – follow them for industry news

Top bloggers you can follow through Twitter – see how they use it for tips of what to do yourself

Authors on Twitter – some surprise entries include John Cleese and Stephen Fry

Some lessons learned from the first few weeks on Twitter – Don’t always promote yourself, Do engage people, Offer valuable content.

The most followed people on Twitter – no. 1 is Barack Obama

6 tips for using your Twitter profile to get new followers – includes creating a custom profile page and using your bio to the best advantage

Feed your blog to Twitter using Twitter Feed

17 ways you can use Twitter including finding prospects, and getting feedback

For the more experienced – Twitter tips – lots and lots to implement on here!

This is an initial post on Twitter as I am just a beginner – I will do more posts later on with more interesting developments! But so far, it is not a waste of time which is the main comment people seem to have about it.

Follow me on Twitter!  

#PublisherFail: The ONE Thing Big Pub Must Change In Order To Survive

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Big, Commercial Publishers:

First, the bad news. Your revenues are in decline, your distribution model is unsustainable, you’re beset on all sides by technologies and cultural changes that seem to have just as much potential to harm your interests as to further them, and despite having been in the same business for over a century, your inability to predict your customers’ wants and needs makes you feel (and operate) more like professional gamblers than the capable captains of a respectable industry.

Now, the good news. All of these seemingly insurmountable challenges are really just the distracting side effects of a single, underlying issue. Better yet, it’s an issue you can resolve anytime you like, by yourselves, without the input of any high-priced consultants, the adoption of any expensive new technology, nor the invention of some as-yet-undiscovered business paradigm.

When I tell you what the underlying issue is, your initial reaction will most likely be to dismiss what I’m saying out of hand. All manner of rebuttals will immediately spring to mind, you will remind yourself that you are the publisher here after all, and there’s no way some nutjob on the internet could possibly understand your business as well as you do.

If only for the sake of being able to honestly say you’ve explored every possible option, please commit now to keeping an open mind for as long as it takes you to finish reading this article and giving it full consideration. At this point, can you really afford to ignore any new ideas?

The underlying issue is this: you have an image problem. More accurately, you have a self-image problem.

You don’t recognize the business you’re actually in, and as a result you believe your business is unique and ultimately unassailable on some level. This distorted self-image keeps you from fully aligning your business practices with your business goals and the desires of your customers.

You think you are curators of literature, and both authors and guardians of culture, but those functions cannot possibly be performed by any organization being run with a primary profit motive. You are no more curators of literature than Nike is a curator of shoes. If you wish to remain solvent, you can only be authors and guardians of culture to the extent that it helps (or at least, doesn’t harm) your bottom line.

You also believe your industry in its present form is a permanent fixture of modern culture, an institution venerated by the public it serves. You believe in the inevitable longevity of your industry, in its very right to exist regardless of profitability, with the same certainty and fervor the executives of print newspapers had about their own industry until very recently.

If you could see yourselves as outsiders do, you would realize you’re actually engaged in the most common (and possibly oldest) business there is: producing and selling consumer products. There is no shame in this; your products have the power to inform, entertain and inspire. However, bibliophiles notwithstanding, there is nothing inherently valuable or sacred about your products, and you will only remain in business as long as large numbers of people are willing to buy them. Yours are not the only products that can inform, entertain or inspire. If consumers find a competing product they like better, they will buy the competing product.

The fact that your product happens to be books doesn’t make it unique or special in any way, in a business sense. However, you believe books are special and unique products, and have built your entire industry around traditions and practices that support your false belief, often to the detriment of your business. In every other commercial industry, traditions and practices are only honored so long as they help (or at least, don’t harm) the bottom line.

Purveyors of computers, cell phones, clothing and even kitchen appliances wait to see how well consumers like a given product before investing the effort and money on releasing a premium edition of the product. If you intend to release both a premium (hardcover) and standard (paperback) edition of your product, you release the premium version first, and release of the standard version is often contingent on sales performance of the premium edition.

Many times I’ve wanted a book that I couldn’t afford in hardcover, or didn’t think was worth the hardcover price, but the book was never released in paperback. Apparently you aren’t aware of this, but cost-conscious consumers—and this group encompasses most consumers—will frequently "wait for the paperback" in the same way they will often opt to skip a movie at the theater and "wait for the DVD" or "wait for it to come out on cable". This business practice alone probably costs you millions of dollars a year in unsold hardcovers and lost paperback sales, yet you continue to do it because it’s traditional to your industry and you’ve attached a certain degree of status and internal fanfare to the idea of a hardcover release.

Movie studios allow their customers to access and use their products when ever, how ever, and in whatever format those customers want. Whether it’s in the theater, on DVD for sale or rent, Blu-Ray, via digital streaming online, on pay-per-view, or even on an iPod, the customer is completely empowered to control his experience of the product. As a result, many, many more copies of the product are sold and filmmakers earn much more money than if they limited their films to theatrical release alone.

(continued…comment area is on the next page)

 

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#PublisherFail: The ONE Thing Big Pub Must Change In Order To Survive, Pt. 2

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(cont’d from Part 1)

Meanwhile, your industry is investing its time and money in practices, devices and technologies intended to keep control of, and broad accessibility to, your products out of the hands of your customers. You don’t release every book in print, audio and ebook formats. You release very few titles in audiobook form, yet fight against Text To Speech (TTS) technology even on books you have no intention of ever releasing in audiobook form. You don’t show strong support for cross-platform ebook standards, yet you fully support the proprietary file formats used on the Kindle and Sony Reader. Having learned nothing from PR debacles in the music and film industries, you are moving to criminalize your customers with stringent DRM.

You believe your products are special and your role as their producer grants you both rights and responsibilities over and above the mere needs of your customers. 

With respect to TTS and DRM, Big Pub hides behind a shield of ‘protecting the interests of the artist’, just as music and film producers have done in the past. But it didn’t take long for those producers to realize motivated pirates and hackers will always exist, and withholding purchase and use options from your entire customer base in order to discourage the criminal acts of a few is a bad business decision. They also realized customers are willing to pay for digital media, and in fact will buy digital media just as often as hard copy media, so long as it’s convenient, affordable, and meets their needs. Free from your curator complex, they’ve embraced digital media to the fullest extent and are reaping the benefits.

The software, videogame and film industries take cross-platform support for their customers a step further by providing simplified or downsampled versions of their products for use on mobile devices. No one playing Guitar Hero on a Nintendo DS expects the same gaming experience as playing the full-featured console game, no one using MS Office Mobile expects to find the same feature set as regular MS Office, and no one watching a movie on an iPod expects the same audience experience as seeing the film in a theater. Makers of these products understand that on a portable device the customer’s priority is—surprise!—portability. Content and functionality matter to customers too, but customers are willing to trade bells and whistles for convenience and cost savings.

When you start down the road to release a book in electronic, portable form, you begin with the assumption that you must preserve the “integrity of the page” and “integrity of print branding”. If you can’t exactly duplicate the frames and shading employed in sidebars, or get the tiny graphic of the geek with his finger in the air to display in the exact location and size as they appear in the print book, you don’t want to release an electronic version at all. Even when working with a minimally-formatted book like a novel, you strive to preserve original fonts, typesetting and layout details in the ebook version. You set up task forces, invest in development of new devices, software and technologies, and generally make things much harder and more expensive than they need to be.

You appear to be completely oblivious to the fact that one of the major draws of the ebook is the flexibility users have in controlling how the text is displayed. Most e-reading software and devices allow the user to change the font, font size, line spacing, orientation of the page, and sometimes even the font and page colors. All your efforts to preserve the “integrity of the page” are wasted.

Nevertheless, you pass the expense of these efforts on to the ebook buyer, and as a result your customers think you’re ripping them off on ebooks. You repeatedly defend your pricing on the grounds that your overhead in producing an ebook is comparable to producing a print book, but you leave out the part where you could provide a simplified version of the ebook at a much lower cost—a cost consumers would find much more reasonable and appealing. You ignore the customer’s priorities (portability, convenience and cost savings) in favor of your own, self-imposed priorities. Once again, it’s because you believe your products are special and you answer to a higher calling than serving your customer base.

Even your unsustainable policies concerning bookseller returns are the direct result of placing your flawed self-image and industry traditions above the needs of your customers. Chain bookstores are no longer the only game in town for bookselling and consumers already know the chains can’t compete with online vendors for selection or price, with ‘big box’ stores for convenience or price, nor with indie booksellers for service. None of your customers’ priorities are being served by chain booksellers (which is why they’re suffering a slow economic death), yet you continue to remain in voluntary bondage to the chains and even grant them preferential terms.

When chain record stores like Musicland and Tower Records began to falter, record labels didn’t engage in efforts to prop them up or prolong the inevitable. Instead, the labels followed their customers into new markets and new distribution models. If you didn’t feel beholden to the ‘old ways’ of bookselling, you would do the same.

If you want to take the high road and place artistic integrity and tradition above profit, that’s fine. Independent imprints do it all the time. The only problem is, preservation of artistic integrity and tradition often exists at cross-purposes to mass-market economic demands. You want all the big profits that come from serving the mass market, yet believe you are entitled to deny the wants of that market whenever you choose, with no impact on your bottom line. You feel justified in forcing your customers to subsidize the costs and suffer the inconveniences of your misguided efforts in curatorship.
 

Let libraries, museums, academics and critics decide which of your products are worthy of preservation, just as they do in art, film and music. Drop your curator complex, and suddenly all the ancillary challenges and crises that eat up most of your days and resources fall away. Of course you will always have the challenge of trying to forecast which products will be most popular to your customers, but so does every other business that produces consumer products.

Letting go of costly, needless business practices reduces your risk on each individual product, and enables you to open up new revenue streams that can help balance the overall profitability scales when an individual product fails. Focus on making your customers’ priorities your own, and the way forward becomes obvious.

And lest you think your industry can never fail completely, since people will always need sources of information, inspiration and entertainment…there’s an app for that. Lots of them, actually.
 

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April L. Hamilton is the author of The IndieAuthor Guide and the founder of Publetariat. Her latest book is From Concept to Community.

Rightly Reconsidering (Book) Reviews

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This piece, by Marty Halpern, originally appeared on his More Red Ink blog on 4/24/09.

Are book reviews (and by default, book reviewers) so sacrosanct as to be above reproach?

Authors — and yes, editors and publishers as well — are taught at a very young age in their professional careers to ignore reviews, to not take them personally, to turn the other cheek, so to speak. And why is that? Why can’t we respond to reviews?

Because we will give the impression that we are unprofessional, that we are whiners. At least that’s what our peers — and possibly readers of the review — may think. But from our own perspective, we also have to worry that we’ll piss off the reviewer by our response, and then that reviewer will take it out on us a hundredfold in the next review, if in fact there even is a next review. And then others may not want to review our work for fear of receiving such a response as well. And as Cheryl Morgan (a book reviewer and critic) just pointed out to me: "…if an author challenges a review, his fans will go after the reviewer, whether he wants them to or not."

Reviews/reviewers and authors are sort of like the separation between Church and State. Yet the incoming president takes the oath of office with his hand upon a Bible; and the coin of the realm all proclaim "In God We Trust."

So where does that leave us?

Some authors I know truly don’t care about reviews, reviewers, or what others think of their stories. Once they’ve completed a work of fiction and it’s been accepted by the editor, they then move on to the next project and never look back. While other authors are deeply concerned — and affected — by reviews and what others think of their fiction.

I worked with an author on her short fiction collection, and after the book was published we stayed in contact with one another for a bit. The following year her next novel was published, and it was reviewed in Locus magazine — a mediocre review at best, but at least it wasn’t blatantly negative. (Locus, though, doesn’t typically publish blatantly negative reviews; I assume if the book is that bad, they simply choose not to review it, so a mediocre review in Locus, when all is said and done, is definitely not a good review.)

What upset the author the most, however, was that the reviewer missed a key element of the story — and that key element would have explained the reviewer’s primary issue with the novel (and maybe then the review wouldn’t have been mediocre). Locus, at the time, was considered a highly influential publication (though not so much anymore, now that we are solidly in the digital age, and readers, book buyers, and book collectors get the majority of their information and reviews online), so even a mediocre review could have a strong, negative sales effect on a book. But we’ll never know, will we: missed opportunities — aka sales — cannot be measured.

But the question(s) remains: Did the reviewer blow it big time by missing that key element of the story? Or, did the author — and, let’s be honest, the book’s editor shares responsibility in this as well — blow it big time by not communicating that key element more effectively to the reader/reviewer? If every review of the novel contained this same "omission," then yes, we could agree that the fault lies with the author, and the author’s editor.

But if only one review were guilty of this oversight, then the finger would indeed point to the reviewer. If the review was on Joe’s Friendly Neighborhood blog, then I don’t think the author (and editor and publisher) would be particularly concerned; but when that mediocre review shows up in the Washington Post Book World or Publishers Weekly (before Reed Business Information tried to sell the publication, and, to reduce costs, began paying freelance reviewers $25.00 per review; read more about PW’s freelance fees), then we know sales will most likely be affected.

Unfortunately, given the Church and State dichotomy, the author has no recourse but to grin and bear it — or to hit his [the generic use of "his," implying both male and female authors] head against the wall and scream, if he tends to not be the silent type.

And yet, I’m encountering more and more reviews of late where the reviewer just doesn’t seem to get it! Why is that? [Notice I keep asking this same question a lot.] Is it the reviewer’s lack of experience and knowledge in the genre? It’s difficult to say, unless one knows the reviewer personally, or the reviewer provides a professional bio alongside the review. And all of this places even more pressure on the author who cares about what others say of his work.

Here’s my take on the three main issues with genre reviews; they are like the plague, and they are spreading…

Read the rest of the article on Marty Halpern’s More Red Ink blog.

The Future of Book Publishing: Risk Shifts To Author

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This is a cross-posting of an article that originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 4/21/09.

In my last post, I wrote an allegory on why book publishing is like venture capital. Publishers, in exchange for investing their cash, talent and connections, become part owners of the author’s book project. Authors agree to share ownership in exchange for the privilege of publication and the opportunity for commercial success.

In part two of my post, I’ll explore how the risk of publishing is now shifting to the author, with dramatic consequences for the future of publishing. Just as Silicon Valley tech startups no longer need venture capitalists to launch their companies, authors no longer need publishers to publish.

First, I’ll start by stating the obvious. Publishing is a tough business. It’s difficult to predict the fickle whims of the marketplace. You never know which book will be the next breakout hit, and which will be the next bomb.

Publishing is expensive, what with the rent on those New York skyscraper headquarters of the top publishers, and all the expensive tree killing, tree pulping and carbon-based fuel it takes to move around the glossy bits of paper. And then you’ve got the bookstores which somehow hoodwinked publishers into allowing bookselling to become a consignment business. Retailers order more books than they know they can sell, only to ship the unsold inventory back to the publisher for a full refund.

The challenges faced by publishers often obscure the contributions of many super-wonderful smart people in publishing who are truly committed to helping authors and their books succeed (more on the future for these folks later in the post).

In recent years, publishing, like all media business, has struggled to compete against an explosion of alternate (and often free) media product vying for their customer’s ever-shrinking mind share and wallet. If you examine the sales figures from the AAP (click here to view the PDF) from the last six years, book publishing has actually shrunk here in the U.S. if you adjust for inflation.

The Big Squeeze
With the tough business conditions, made worse by those freeloading big box consignment bookstores (who themselves are now getting their lunches eaten by Amazon), publishers have been forced to cut back on some investments. This means fewer signings of new and unproven authors; fewer signings of authors whose books are perceived to have limited “commercial” potential (even if the author is otherwise brilliant); and fewer post-publication promotional dollars to lavish on anyone but the most commercially promising authors.

Sure, a commercial publisher has an obligation to their shareholders, employees and customers to run their business for profitability. The flip side of this, however, is that authors can find themselves holding the short end of the stick.

Many commercially published authors must now assume personal responsibility for post-publication book promotion efforts that were once the sole domain of the publisher. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, except that most authors are already poorly compensated to begin with.

I’ve read that most commercially published authors maintain day jobs to support their writing. If true, it would mean the bulk of book authorship is done on a volunteer basis.

While few of us authors would turn down a six figure advance for our book, author Walter Kern, profiled in this interesting New York Times Sunday Book Review feature, determined that even with a six figure advance on his book, it meant he had worked for less than minimum wage given the time it took to produce and publish his book.

The Tools of Liberation
As I alluded in my venture capital post, at one time it was virtually impossible to publish without a publisher. Today, the game has changed. New tools for publishing, marketing, distribution and selling are available to indie authors and indie publishers, and many of these tools are available at little to no cost.

With free do-it-yourself publishing tools like Smashwords for ebooks and Wordclay for print on demand books, anyone can become a published author in minutes (at Smashwords) or days (at Wordclay).

Of course, just because you’re a published author doesn’t mean you’ve written a quality book. With the decision to publish shifting to the author, it’s now the author’s responsibility to invest the money and effort necessary to produce a quality work that satisfies readers.

The Future of Publishing: Risk, Reward and Power Shift to Authors
Increasingly, authors who aspire toward commercial publication will need to prove a market exists for their product before a traditional publisher will consider them. As authors assume more of the risk of publishing, they may also reap a greater share of the rewards upon commercial success.

Some authors, by choice or necessity, will publish without the benefit of professional editing, cover design, marketing, distribution and sales support. Others will opt to invest the funds necessary to purchase these important services, often supplied by experienced professionals who previously worked for the commercial book publishers.

Self-publishing will become a vast farm league for commercial publishers. Commercial publishers, including many new indie publishers, will compete against one another to identify, recruit and publish the most promising authors. Some authors who achieve commercial success on their own may choose to remain indie.

Under this new model, the power center shifts from publisher to author, and the traditional lines between the two blur. Authors become their own publishers. Commercial publishers remain publishers, but also become service providers.

It’s only a matter of time before large media companies and book publishers start partnering more closely with the self-publishing companies, because they aggregate the farm league authors. Not only do the farm league authors provide publishers a rich pool of talent, they also provide the opportunity for publishers to supply paid services to those authors willing to invest to improve the quality of their books.

Some of the more successful self publishing services are already operating under this model. They may go on to become the next big publishers if they remain independent. Author Solutions or Lulu IPO anyone?

Mark Coker is an author, the founder of Dovetail Public Relations and the founder of Smashwords.

The Future of Book Coverage

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This piece, by C. Max Magee, originally appeared on The Millions on 4/22/09.

This week at The Millions, we’re attempting to gather some of our thoughts about the ongoing transformation of literary journalism. Today, Garth looks at the death of the newspaper book section. Tomorrow, Max considers revenue options for literary websites, including affiliation with online booksellers. And on Friday, Max will hazard some early guesses about the next possible upheaval in the economy of literary journalism: the e-book.

I.
The spring of 2007 now seems like a lifetime ago. A promising U.S. senator named Clinton was a prohibitive favorite in the Democratic presidential primaries. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average stood just over 13,000 points. And, in light of this last number, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s decision to stop publishing its weekly book review supplement seemed like some kind of weird aberration. In the best little-"d" democratic tradition, the National Book Critics Circle decided to protest the AJC’s move via a "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing." The weapons it selected for this campaign – a petition and a series of panel discussions – may have appeared quixotic, but during a weeklong symposium in the fall, its basic premises became clear:

  • 1) The stand-alone newspaper book review is vital to the health of literacy, and thus democracy.
  • 2) The corporate overlords of the newspaper industry undervalue all three.
  • 3) Newspaper book coverage is in imminent danger.
  • 4) Therefore, so are literacy and democracy.

It should be added that, by the time of the symposium, obsequies over the loss of column-inches for book coverage had shaded into alarm about proliferating book coverage on the Internet. We at The Millions, who attended several of these panels, bit our tongues. Despite our lowly station as bloggers, we looked upon the participants as colleagues. And we didn’t want to prove media pundits right by rushing to judgment; after all, our material interest in the print vs. online debate may have colored our thinking. Now, though, we can say with some confidence (and some disappointment) that, by its own lights, the "Campaign to Save Book Reviewing" was a failure.

In the last two years, stand-alone book review supplements including several of the country’s most prominent (The Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review) have ceased publication. The parent newspapers insist that the lost review space has been offset by increases in coverage in other sections, but frankly, we don’t believe them. If the health of book reviewing is to be judged by what happens in the print editions of newspapers, the patient is doomed.

One need not detail at this late date the basic economic mechanisms that have led us to this pass. We may merely condense them to an easily graspable equation: growing number of books + dwindling time to read – advertising revenue + market meltdown = flawed business model. And yet, the Death of Book Reviewing narrative – a boom-era tale in which the high priests of print defend literature against both corporate bad guys and the vulgarians of the Internet – elides several contentious, and important, questions. To wit:

  • How good were the newspaper book review sections, anyway?
  • How inevitable was their demise?
  • How did those in power respond to the digital revolution – surely the biggest upheaval in the distribution of the written word since Gutenberg?
  • Does the Internet really spell doom for literary discourse?

By way of investigating these questions, we might consider the evolution – and fate – of book coverage at the nation’s most widely read print reviewing organ: The New York Times. For book reviewers, as for the larger (and equally endangered) world of newspaper journalism, the Paper of Record already serves as a sort of metonym. To paraphrase E.B. White, If The New York Times were to go, all would go. And so an analysis of the Times’ assets and liabilities, and of its response to upheavals in technology and the economy, will likely have something to tell us about the future of book coverage – and perhaps media – as a whole.

Read the rest of this article, and parts two and three, on The Millions.

Starting Your Own Indie Publishing Company

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This piece, the first in a three-part series by Amy Rogers, originally appeared on the Publishing Renaissance site—an excellent resource for indie authors and small imprints—on 4/21/09.

or How I Learned to Stop Grousing and Make Something Happen in My Own Backyard – Part 1 of 3

If you’re a writer, you probably spend a fair amount of time complaining how hard it is to get published. (It’s in our job description, right?)

So over the years, conversations in my lunch-bunch of writer friends eventually progressed from whining to full-on fantasizing. “Someone should start a really cool indie publishing house,” somebody said.

“Yeah, we’d publish all the good stuff that New York ignores because we live in the South and we’re not hip or famous,” someone else added.

“Yeah!” everyone agreed.

“But we’re writers. We don’t have any, you know, money.”

This conversation repeated itself many times, starting back in 1999, when I was part of a small-but-feisty band of writers who set out to empower and raise the profile of our literary community in Charlotte, N.C., despite our lack of resources, benefactors or any expertise whatsoever.

Three of us researched small presses around the country, networked like crazy (difficult for us introverted writers, so we told ourselves it was investigative journalism), and scribbled on yellow legal pads in an attempt to come up with something that might one day resemble a business plan. It was hard to get our minds around such a large, complex and changing industry. But we worked at it for a year while doing our freelance jobs.

One day everything fell into place when we realized that most traditional trade publishing entities (non-self-publishing) can fit into one of just a few categories.

1. Mainstream Commercial Publishing: Think Random House, HarperCollins, all the giant power players with global influence and products. Through acquisitions and mergers, many of the former household names have been consolidated in recent years. Big ambitions, big sellers, big dollars at stake.

2. University Presses: These books are often ambitious and expensive but must be viable commercially; they also fulfill the institution’s educational mission. Example: the University of Chicago publishes books about art and architecture.

3. Specialty Presses: Targeted products for specific audiences (can be religious, how-to, business-related, journals, etc.).

4. Indie Presses: Visionaries or devoted lovers of literature who often put their own money into the company and rarely garner fame or fortune. Widely seen as doing “God’s work” since they publish the books large companies won’t touch: poetry, untested writers, regional and non-mainstream works.

Suddenly, publishing started to make sense. Almost everything from international bestsellers to local, grassroots books could be pegged somewhere in this model. We could really see the proverbial forest – and the trees. It was exhilarating. And it allowed us to focus.

We knew right away we could never attempt to become a large, mainstream publisher. We weren’t academics, so that was out. And we couldn’t open a specialty press because we didn’t have a specialty.

Cha-ching! We were indies! Yes! We’d be like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his beat-poet friends who founded City Lights Publishers and their legendary bookstore in San Francisco, back in the ’50s.

We’d discover and nurture new literary talent in our own region, we’d launch emerging writers, and we’d put our city on the national literary map.

But there was still one problem, and it was a big one. We had absolutely no resources and we had no idea how to find them – if they even existed.

Read the part two, and follow the link to part three, on the Publishing Renaissance site, where you can find many more articles and resources of interest to indie authors and small imprints.

Amy Rogers is the author of Hungry for Home: Stories of Food from Across the Carolinas. She is a founder and the Publisher of the award-winning Novello Festival Press. NFP is the nation’s only library-sponsored literary publisher, part of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C.

How to Start (or Start-over) Building Your Personal Brand

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This article originally appeared on the Skelliewag site on 3/31/09. The article is about personal branding, which is a key component in building your author platform. 

A ‘personal brand’ is in many ways synonymous with your reputation. It refers to the way other people see you. Are you a genius? An expert? Are you trustworthy? What do you represent? What do you stand for? What ideas and notions pop up as soon as someone hears your name?

If you’ve been around for a while you’ve probably already developed a personal brand. People recognize your name, what you’re working on, what you offer and what you’re about. That being said, your personal brand might be a little weak and disjointed. If you’d like to make it stronger, I’m going to help give you the tools by outlining what I believe to be the components of a strong personal brand.

If you don’t feel like you have a personal brand yet, this post will show you how to go about building one. But first, it might be worth talking a little about the value of your personal brand and why we might want to create one in the first place. 

A smart investment

Your personal brand has the potential to last longer than your own lifespan. While the projects you’re working on might get sold onwards or shut down, your personal brand will persist and (hopefully) add value to each new project you create. If you consider yourself to be in this particular game for the long-haul, whether it’s online business or just online creativity, a good personal brand is the single most valuable investment you can make. People will follow your brand from project to project if they feel connected to it.

One example from my own experience that highlights the long-term importance of a personal brand occurred when I launched my second blog. I announced it on this one, hoping to give it a little head start but expecting to build up an audience mainly from scratch. Instead I found the second blog had accumulated over 1,100 subscribers in under five days.

When launching new projects, your personal brand has the potential to guarantee you never have to start from scratch again.

Your personal brand is not just you

Because your personal brand is built from the thoughts and words and reactions of other people, it’s shaped by how you present yourself publicly. This is something that you have control over. You can decide how you would like people to see you and then work on publicly being that image.

You should plan your personal brand based on your aims. If you want to sell an expensive course in watercolor painting you’ll need to be seen as someone with the authority to teach others on the topic. If you want to get work for high-end design clients you’ll need to be seen as a runaway talent with a professional attitude. Two useful springboard questions are:

  • How would you like potential customers/clients to think of you?
  • How can you publicly ‘be’ that brand?

The second question is an important one, but a tricky one. Your personal brand is composed of your public actions and output in three main areas:

1. What you’re ‘about’. Seth Godin is about telling stories, being remarkable. Leo Babauta is about simplicity and habit forming. Jonathan Fields is about finding ways to build a career out of what you love doing. Think about the key ideas you would want people to associate with you.

2. Expertise. Every good brand involves the notion of expertise. Nike brand themselves as experts in creating quality and fashionable sportswear. Jeremy Clarkson (host of Top Gear) is an expert on cars. Even if you’re not interested in marketing your advice you need to create the perception that you are very good at what you do.

3. Your style. This is not so much what you communicate about yourself, but rather, how you do it. Are you kind and unusually enthusiastic, like Collis Taeed? Are you witty and raw, like Naomi Dunford? Are you confident and crusading, like Michael Arrington? Hopefully you’re none of these, or at least, not in the same way. Your style of delivery should be as unique as any other aspect of your personal brand. This doesn’t mean you need to sit down and brainstorm how to be different. If you don’t actively imitate anyone else, it will happen naturally.

Read the rest of the article on Skelliewag.

Win Book Contests – Make Your Book a Winner!

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Most of the 2009 book contests are closed. The books are and supporting materials are in. The judging is on. The contestants hyperventilate as the countdown continues. Will they be finalists? Actually win?

A nice thing about book contests is that you are an award winner even if you’re “just” a finalist. In the same way that Academy Award nominees get to say, “Academy Award nominee Snelda Grottie” forever, you can say Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist. Being a finalist counts as an award!

I’ve got my book, Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money, in five contests. I’m about to freak out. Should I have entered it in different categories than the ones I entered? Where’s the receipt from that very prestigious competition I took a chance on? I did enter it, didn’t I?

The anxiety will continue for the contestants until the finalists are notified. And longer, until the winner is announced––often at Book Expo America, the largest  book publishing event in North America. This year, BEA is May 28 to 31 in NYC.

It’s a little late for an article about setting your book up to win in 2009 book contests, but I’ve got to do something to fill the time.

I’M SANDY NATHAN. So far, I’ve won eight national awards for my two books. I’ll post a list of my wins at the end of this article.

Less well known is the fact that I also have experience as a book contest judge. My writerly credentials, contest wins, and the fact that I graded papers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business for 18 spring quarters make me an ideal candidate for judging.

I love it, truly. Brings back memories. I used to work for a top rated Stanford professor along with a jaded team of other smart people. Every year, he gave each of us a FOUR FOOT TALL stack of academic papers to grade OVER THE WEEKEND. Brutal.

I got really good at separating fluff from substance. Fast.  The books presented to me to judge remind me of those wonderful days of the nonstop pursuit of achievement, which I have not left behind.

HOW CAN YOU WIN A BOOK CONTEST?

If you win a book contest, chances are you already know how to win it. Here’s a story: When the Publisher’s Marketing Association (now the Independent Book Publishers’ Association) notified me that my book, Stepping Off the Edge, was a finalist in the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Awards in the New Age/Spirituality category, I boo-hooed. They choose only 3 finalists per category nationwide, one of which would be the winner. This was the first contest I’d entered. My first book.

“Oh, I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. Oh, my God. I’m so grateful. One out of three finalists! I can’t believe it. This is so wonderful!” I walked around our ranch emoting tearfully. Then something happened.

The overarching category of my writing is spiritually––which is based on spiritual or religious experience. That’s because I have spiritual experiences and have had them all my life. In the cacophony of my inner dialogue, one voice stands out. It’s calm, clear, unaffected, and never wrong. I think of it as God. This voice spoke:

“What’s the big deal, Sandy? You’ve been a straight A student most of your life. Why shouldn’t you win? You know what went into that book.” There was a pause and more communication. “Don’t you trust Me to reward you? To notice that you’ve done a good job? Don’t you think I care about you?”

Oops. My tearful gratitude had the smell of a contestant on a TV quiz show flipping out over winning a new refrigerator. It was an unnecessary display of ego and self importance, which also pointed to my lack of faith.

So let’s leave that behind and talk about how to win.

The key is: If you win a book contest, you already know how to set up a winner. It’s a job of work, like mucking out stalls at our ranch.

Just like winning a horse show class.  You win the instant you ride into the arena on a winning horse. Similarly, you win in a book contest the instant the judge looks at the array of books he or she has to judge. Your book has to leap out of the stack of ho-hum contenders and SING. Also tap dance.

HOW DO YOU DO THIS? WITH YOUR BOOK!

1.  HARDBACKS SHOW UP BETTER. You’re a judge.  Thirty or forty books are sitting on a table. You won’t read all of them. You see well-designed hardback with a killer cover. Your eyes and hands gravitate to it. Wow. It’s beautiful. Paper even feels classy. You put the book in the “keeper” pile. Hardbacks have more weight in competition.

Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money

Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money. Your cover should hook the viewers’ archetypes: The symbol in the middle of my cover is based on the photo of a Shiva Nataraj I own. Not only is the circle an archetype of wholeness, Shiva is revered all over the world. Including by me. Note the high contrast and predominately black cover. This design will dominate pretty near anything.

2. YOUR TITLE AND COVER will make you win or sink you. Do you know how to judge a cover? Lewis Agrell of The Agrell Group, will be a guest blogger with his terrific article on what makes a winning book cover. I’ll post it soon.

For now, let’s rely on phone book ads. Open the yellow page ads in any phone book. Scan the page quickly. Where do your eyes land? Note the ad. Do it again on another page, and another.

In all probability, the ad that draws your attention is SIMPLE. UNCLUTTERED. EITHER BLACK, WHITE, OR MOSTLY EMPTY. The ads that grab your eyeballs and hold them have attained PAGE  DOMINANCE. People hire consultants to create dominant ads for them.

Now go to a book store sale table and look at the books. Which books grab your eyes? Which do you pick up? Buy? A book contest is like that table. Clear, bold, design that dominates the competition will win.

YOUR COVER MUST HAVE AN EMOTIONAL HOOK. THINK ARCHETYPES. Primal images. Something that grabs the inner psychology of your reader/judge.

To win and much more importantly, to be purchased, your book cover AND SPINE must dominate any table and any bookshelf.

3. YOUR TITLE IS REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT. First off, your title embodies your book’s essence. It is the first word or words the reader sees. It should be engaging, easy to read, evocative, and compelling––it should set the emotional tone for your book. As should the SUBTITLE or TAG LINE (THE ONE LINE DESCRIPTION BELOW THE TITLE.) Also, most of the big catalogs of books will list your book by its TITLE ONLY. Better be memorable. Like Twilight.

4. THE WORDS ON YOUR COVER, FLAPS, AND FIRST FEW PAGES OF YOUR BOOK, YOUR BOOK’S COPY, SHOULD BE UNFORGETTABLE. These words are your prime real estate and are what will make your book succeed. The book contest judge, book store owner, and your buyer will make a decision about your book based on these words––in seconds. You want emotional hooks, ease of reading, and enchantment in these places.

Writing copy is a skill. You can write text like an angel and not be able to pump out a winning tag line. I’ve got an Emmy-nominated screenwriter Laren Bright, the best copy writer I know, preparing an article for this blog. He’ll tell you how to do it.

I say: Hire it done if you can possibly afford it. Copy writing is like writing poetry: You need to be able to produce succinct messages packed with meaning and emotional associations in a tight space.

5. BOOK DESIGN, INTERIOR & EXTERIOR: YOUR BOOK SHOULD LOOK LIKE RANDOM HOUSE PRODUCED IT. NO LESS. We’ve talked about the cover, title, and copy. Every page and every word should be as well designed as your cover. Go to a book store and look at best selling books. Get a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and memorize the order of pages in a book.

A very important thing to note: NEVER HAVE YOUR TITLE PAGE ON THE LEFT. DO NOT DO THAT. Do your homework. Know the proper order of pages in a book. Know what a half title page is and where it goes. The contest judge will know all about this.

6. SELF PUBLISHING, SMALL PRESSES, THE MAJORS: Some contests are specifically for self published books, by that I mean books put out by the big POD printers like lulu.com, iUniverse, Outskirts Press, BookSurge and the rest. If this is your competition, let your lulu imprint show.

If you’re in open competition, hide it. Some people have real prejudices against self-published books. There’s not as much of a prejudice against author-owned small presses––after all, Benjamin Franklin did it. So did Mark Twain, DH Lawrence and tons of big literary names. If you own and operate a small press, that puts you in a different category, even if your book was printed by CreateSpace or Outskirts Press. Just make sure that nothing about the mass producers shows.

If you take this approach, create a killer logo and press name, and have the book professionally designed and produced, you’ll be in good shape to compete in contests.

I have no prejudice against self-published books. I have a real bone to pick with poorly produced self-published books whose authors don’t respect me––the buying customer and reader––enough to get the thing professionally edited and proofed before offering it for sale. Or stick it in my face and expect me to judge it.

DO NOT PUT YOUR BOOK UP FOR SALE UNTIL IT IS TOP QUALITY IN EVERY WAY. YOU ARE CHEATING YOUR READERS WHEN YOU OFFER SLOPPY WORK.

7. PROFESSIONAL PRODUCTION: The book contest judge may not have time to read all of your book, but he or she will sure sample pages and text. Typos, lousy interior and exterior design, cheap paper, all of it pops out. Hire an editor, copy editor and proofreader. Hire a book designer. Believe it or not, they’re not all super expensive. Look at my blog roll. Some great professionals are listed there.

TEMPLATES: Many of the big POD publishers offer templates for book interiors. These don’t show up well in contests. The text is set too tight, and the margins too small. There’s not enough variety in the overall design. In contests, judges see many books with very similar, standard interiors. If your book is one of thirty in a category, or one of THREE HUNDRED, it has to stand out. Templates won’t do it.

8. PERIPHERALS: YOUR WEB SITE, STATIONERY, & PRESS KIT. You did include those with your entry, didn’t you? I assure you, the winners did. The book contest judges are very likely to check your website, especially if you make it through enough of the hoops to stay in “the good pile” to the end. The “ad-ons” are breakers.

Two books might be ranked about the same, but if one author has an amazing web site and hosts a blog with a bazillion visitors a day providing a vital services to the world––who do you think will win? Ditto if on author provides copies of his book’s terrific reviews, testimonials, and advertising materials in a lovely custom folder. Which book will win?

Oh, yeah. What about the VIDEO FOR YOUR BOOK? Is that linked prominently on your site? Mentioned in your press kit?

9. THE BOOK, AS IN––WHAT’S BETWEEN THE COVERS? In your writing group, you concentrate on the writers’ skills and arts. Word by word, you construct and deconstruct and reconstruct your masterpiece. Ditto working with your editor. Your write, rewrite, have it slashed and burned, and make it rise again. You struggle to express exactly what you want, worry about pacing and plot and characters.

I was in two writing groups for a total of eleven years. I’ve worked with maybe six or seven good, tough editors. The content of your book matters, especially if you want it to sell. If you want word of mouth to propel it. If you want to read it yourself in future years and not be embarrassed by it.

The contest judge or panel of judges isn’t going to read all of your book. They’ll sample it and look at different aspects of it.

Does that mean you can skip the 11 years of writing groups and all those creative writing classes? No. Whatever random page a judge’s eyes fall upon will produce an impression. All the pages have to be good, since you don’t know which one will be read. Know what terms relating to race, ethnicity, or sexual preference are OK to use in modern literary and cultural circles. Get it right.

The curious thing is: Most people writing in academic settings concentrate solely on the quality of their manuscripts. They don’t look at any of the other points noted here, any of which can destroy their chances of winning a book contest or selling. That’s because in the major creative writing and MFA programs, people assume that they will be published by the major publishers.

They haven’t had direct experience of the realities of the publishing industry. Such students often have no idea that to succeed, they may have to set up a small press and learn to do things they never were taught in school. Academic programs may not talk about the recession and cut-backs and literary agents being laid off, either.

The real world can be a big surprise, even if you got your MFA from Iowa.

Producing a book that wins contests is a big job requiring a commitment of time and money. It doesn’t have to be a HUGE commitment of money, but its going to cost something. Before you enter a contest, you should know what you’re up against.

What do you win at the end of the day?
Some of the awards won by Rancho Vilasa. A few of these are my wins. The real victory that comes from athletic competition is a winning of soul, which is transferable to other endeavors. If you can show a horse and win, you can do anything.

To win in a horse show, you need a horse that grabs the judge’s eye the instant he enters the arena. He needs the stamina to look good at the end of a grueling class. For book contest, you need a book that’s set up to win from one end of the judging process to the other. And then into the marketing arena.

That’s it, folks! Happy competing!

Sandy Nathan, award winning author of Numenon & Stepping Off the Edge. I’m a bit burnt out writing about winning. Here are some links to what I’ve won in book contests:

You win the minute you walk into the arena.

With horses, you win the minute you walk into the arena. This is a Matched Pairs Class at the La Bahia Peruvian Horse Show in Watsonville, CA. My husband and I are riding horses that are full brothers––same mom & pop. Except for the extra chrome (white markings) on Azteca, these horses pass for identical. The judge told us after the class, "You won that class the minute you walked into the arena." Your book will win or lose the same way.

Hack Your Way Out Of Writer's Block

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This piece, by Merlin Mann, originally appeared on his 43 Folders website on 11/18/04, and it’s just as useful today as it was then.

I recently had occasion to do some…errr…research on writer’s block. Yeah, research. That’s what I was doing. Like a scientist.

I found lots of great ideas to get unstuck and wrote the best ones on index cards to create an Oblique Strategies-like deck. Swipe, share, and add your own in comments.

  • Talk to a monkey – Explain what you’re really trying to say to a stuffed animal or cardboard cutout.
  • Do something important that’s very easy – Is there a small part of your project you could finish quickly that would move things forward?
  • Try freewriting – Sit down and write anything for an arbitrary period of time—say, 10 minutes to start. Don’t stop, no matter what. Cover the monitor with a manila folder if you have to. Keep writing, even if you know what you’re typing is gibberish, full of misspellings, and grammatically psychopathic. Get your hand moving and your brain will think it’s writing. Which it is. See?
  • Take a walk – Get out of your writing brain for 10 minutes. Think about bunnies. Breathe.
  • Take a shower; change clothes – Give yourself a truly clean start.
  • Write from a persona – Lend your voice to a writing personality who isn’t you. Doesn’t have to be a pirate or anything—just try seeing your topic from someone else’s perspective, style, and interest.
  • Get away from the computer; Write someplace new – If you’ve been staring at the screen and nothing is happening, walk away. Shut down the computer. Take one pen and one notebook, and go somewhere new.
  • Quit beating yourself up – You can’t create when you feel ass-whipped. Stop visualizing catastrophes, and focus on positive outcomes.
  • Add one ritual behavior – Get a glass of water exactly every 20 minutes. Do pushups. Eat a Tootsie Roll every paragraph. Add physical structure.

Read the rest of the article on the 43 Folders website, where you can also find many more informative and insightful articles on both the process and business of being creative.

The Bookish Community Is A Passionate Place And Other Lessons From The Twittersphere

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This piece, by Kat Meyer, originally appeared on the Follow The Reader blog on 4/13/09. In it, Kat discusses what authors and publishers can learn from the #amazonfail debacle—specifically, how Amazon could have avoided the PR nightmare that ensued by actively engaging with authors, readers and publishers via social media .

Hello Dear Readers:

Happy belated chocolate bunny day. Hope you are all recovering nicely.

And with the pleasantries out of the way, I will now begin my lecture on the importance of understanding and participating in social media. This is a lesson that Amazon learned–or at least, we hope they learned–yesterday via the lovely bookish community on Twitter.

If you missed it, and in a nutshell (for details do a quick Twitter search on the term #AmazonFail and/or check out this post on Storm Grant’s blog or Leah Braemel’s timeline of the event):

  1. Many GBLT and erotic themed titles at Amazon.com recently mysteriously stopped displaying their sales rankings (which are a key factor customers consider in making their buying decisions).
  2. The Bookish Twitterverse POUNCED on this — even though the issue itself started a few months back – Sunday it snowballed — and …
  3. Amazon said NOTHING. Amazon was completely absent in droves.

I am not out to demonize or make a scapegoat of Amazon. Amazon may be completely innocent of causing this “glitch,” and there are plenty of theories (conspiracy/technical glitch-based/and otherwise) being bandied about regarding what actually caused the great de-ranking of Easter Sunday, but Amazon definitely is guilty of one thing:  Ignoring the collective online outrage of their customers and content providers during a critical time — which is just sad when you’re talking about a major player in web commerce.

“So, Kat” (you may be asking yourself — which is a funny thing to ask yourself unless your name is Kat — i so crack myself up): “Monday morning quarterback, much Missy?”

And to this I reply, “No. Absolutely not.” And here’s why: while Amazon was noticeably offline and seemingly unaware of this situation, a whole heckuvalot of their indie competitors were savvy enough to be right there on Twitter’s front lines and engaging with the publishers, authors, readers, and other players who were leading this conversation.

Those indies, and their supporters were helpfully (and quite cleverly) offering a suggestion to the angry and frustrated Amazon customers: “Not happy with Amazon? Try us instead!” (The American Booksellers Association even received a nice nod when their acronym was appropriated for the cause –ABA, “anywhere but Amazon.”

The lesson, my bookish buddies, is this — Amazon can’t afford to ignore social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc.) and neither can you.

Read the rest of the story at the Follow the Reader blog.

Kat Meyer is the founder of The Bookish Dilettante and a regular contributor on the Follow the Reader blog.

The Talent Killers: How Literary Agents Are Killing Literature, And What Publishers Can Do To Stop Them

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This post, by Mary W. Walters, originally appeared on her The Militant Writer blog on 4/14/09 and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Dear Senior Editor, Any Major Publishing House, Anywhere:

I am a member of a growing company of writers of literary fiction whose works you have never seen and probably never will.

It’s not that we are lacking in the talent and credentials that might attract your interest: indeed, we have already published one or two or three books with respectable literary presses, attracting not only critical acclaim but even awards for writing excellence. Our work has been hailed as distinctive, thoughtful, darkly comic. As fresh. Even as important! Reviewers have compared us to Atwood, Boyle and Seth. To Tyler, Winton, Le Carre.

That you have never heard of us nor read a single paragraph we’ve written is not—as you might think—a side effect of the cutbacks, mergers and downsizings that have devastated the book-publishing industry in recent months. Nor is it yet more evidence of the impact of electronic media on the printed word.

No.

The substantial and nearly unassailable wall that separates you from us has been under construction for decades. You can find the names of its architects and gatekeepers on your telephone-callers list, and in your email in-box. They are the literary agents—that league of intellectual-property purveyors who bring you every new manuscript you ever see, those men and women who are so anxious to gain access to the caverns of treasure they believe you sit upon like some great golden goose that they would likely hack one another’s heads off were they not united by one self-serving mission: to ensure that quality fiction never hits your desk.

*

I am sure that this news comes as a surprise to you, Dear Editor. I am certain that you were drawn to your career—and by “career” I mean “vocation,” including the spectrum of responsibilities that ranges from new-book acquisition to the kind of excellent substantive editing that makes great novels outstanding—because of your love of literature. You probably started with an education in the literary classics which you have since enriched by reading the very best writing being published in the world today. In your few spare moments, you may wonder why it is that aside from an occasional new voice that may become great in another twenty years, the only authors of literary value have been around for decades.

I can answer that question for you. I can tell you why your desk is piling up with flimsy bits of vampire literature, fantasy, romance, detective stories and the kind of first-draft bubble gum that used to be called chick-lit but is now shuffled in with other women’s writing in order to give it heft—although as far as you can see, neither the quality nor the subject matter has improved—which you are required to somehow turn into publishable books. It is because the vast majority of literary agents do not, in fact, have any interest in literature. They are only interested in jackpots.

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As you know—better than anyone, perhaps, since you are the one who needs to negotiate with them—agents’ incomes come off the top of royalties that publishers pay their writers. The agent’s cut is generally 10 percent of the writer’s portion, which is in turn about 10 percent of the book’s cover price. Ten percent of 10 percent is not a lot. In order to create a decent cash flow, literary agents can only afford to represent writers who are going to sell truckloads of books (or millions of megabytes in the case of e-books) and therefore merit significant advances. The bigger the better: a substantial advance is money in the bank.

As you also know, publishing is a business, which means that publishing houses can only afford to offer advances they are likely to recoup—which means that advances only go to established writers with massive followings, and to particularly brilliant (or particularly sleazy) first-time novelists. They are generally reserved for what’s known as “commercial” fiction. (Of course, an advance is no guarantee that a book will sell. But that doesn’t matter to the agents. By the time the book’s not selling, they already have their cuts. They simply abandon writers whose books did not hit their projected sales numbers and move on to the newest shiny thing—indifferent to the fact that they’ve turned those abandoned authors into the pariahs of the slush pile.)

Clearly it is not in the best interests of literary agents to represent writers whose book sales are likely to build only gradually—perhaps after a well-thought, positive review appears in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail or on a high-quality books blog, inspiring a few people to buy the book, read it, and then recommend it to other readers who will also recommend it. It can be years before a literary agent can start sucking a living out of a writer with a book like that. Frankly, who has time?

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There is no room for gourmet tastes or discerning palates in this system. Agents’ websites may trumpet their dedication to literary fiction, but what they really want is books that sell. These purveyors of literary costume jewelry seek out the kind of quirky but unsubstantial mental junk food that is as similar as possible to last season’s bestsellers—fiction that will sell quickly and widely by association with the almost-identical books that have preceded it. See last week’s best-seller list for an eloquent guide to this fad-based publishing system.

Since they know what they are looking for, literary agents are able to post tips and pointers on their websites and blog posts for the benefit of would-be clients: they want books that are going to get their immediate attention, impress them within the first five pages—books that are going to sell.

(If you click through the links I have provided here, Dear Editor, you will become aware of a certain tone of disdain toward the target audience. This tone is very common among literary agents, who are doing their best to undermine the confidence of writers as a group. Please also note the fawning tone of the comments by the authors responding to these blogs. We have lost our self respect, I am afraid. We have learned to see ourselves as unworthy, stupid, and probably unclean. We’ve forgotten we’re the talent.)

Having set out what they do and do not want from writers, the agents then demand that we, their would-be clients, condense our novels into 300-word “pitches” that will convince them of the marketability of our books. (One might think that this would be the agent’s job—to develop pitches for the manuscripts by the writers they represent which they will then present to publishers. But no. That is not the way this system works.)

Next the agents engage “interns”—usually selected from among the wannabe writers enrolled in one of the creative-writing courses that proliferate at our universities and colleges—to read the queries that we, the writers, have written about our books. The interns measure our pitches against the criteria the agents have devised, find the disconnects, then write us our rejection letters. These interns don’t get paid, of course: they get credit for “work experience.”

The upshot is that fine fiction writers who are crappy copy-writers attempt to write fast-paced pitches about their own serious novels that will make those novels sound as much as possible like commercial drivel. Most of us aren’t very good at that (how do you describe The Road in 300 words and make it sound like a piquant coming-of-age story? Or A Confederacy of Dunces a sweet novel of redemption?) but we have no choice but to try. We submit our pitches in good faith by email or snail mail (depending on the dictates of the individual agent-god. They tell us how they want us to submit right on their websites!) where they are read by interns with little experience of literature or life, and are rejected.

Some of us have had our query letters rejected more than 50 times.

No one has asked to see our manuscripts.

Read any good Kafka lately?

Read the rest of the article on The Militant Writer blog.

Mary W. Walters is a writer and editor whose fourth book will be published in the fall of 2009.

Five Reasons Good Writers Fail

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This article, by Jennie Nash, originally appeared on the Topic Turtle website on 4/7/09.

Let’s assume you are a good writer. You have learned the mechanics of language, you understand the structure of your chosen genre, and you have the ability to write a sentence, a phrase and a paragraph that has rhythm, resonance and meaning.

Let’s also assume that you have the desire for your work to be read by someone other than your cat. And let’s go way out on a limb and assume that by the time I finish writing this piece, there will still be book publishers in business, booksellers who have kept the faith, and book buyers with disposable income. For the majority of writers, these assumptions hold true.

So why do some writers succeed (which is to say that they finish their work, they get it into they marketplace, they continue to find inspiration and joy, they keep putting words on the page) and other fail (which is to say that their work languishes, they never send it out, they become someone who used to love words, who used to see the world through story, who used to have a dream of being a writer)?

There are, of course, as many answers as there are writers, but in my years as a writer, a writing instructor and a writing coach, I have seen some of the same ones occur again and again. Here are five:

1. Delusions of Grandeur.

A lot of first-time writers believe that they’re going to sell their book for several million dollars, lure Julia Roberts into taking an option on film rights, and land a spot on Oprah — all within a few hours of finishing their manuscript. It happens like that every once and awhile, but if you count on it, chances are you’re just setting yourself up for failure. Successful writers set goals that are much more attainable – like writing three good pages or getting one sentence to sing.

2. A Warped Sense of Reality.

Most would-be writers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the job actually entails. You know all the drama, camaraderie and excitement you see on TV sitcoms about ad agencies and law firms and police departments and emergency rooms? None of that shoulder-slapping fun happens for writers, ever, because we’re always sitting alone in rooms.

Every so often, you may see a famous, bestselling writer under the bright lights, making witty comments and wearing great shoes, but when the show is over, that writer is going back to her quiet room and she’s sitting there, alone, for several more years until her next book is done. It’s exceedingly lonely work – and most people simply aren’t comfortable being alone with themselves and their thoughts for that long. They fail simply because they like the idea of being a writer, but not the reality.

Read the rest of the article on the Topic Turtle site to learn about reasons 3-5.