crisis in publishing

Book Editors Really Do Edit Books. Really! They’ll Tell You So Themselves!

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This post by Chris Meadows originally appeared on Teleread on 3/30/14.

What does it say about what people think of you if you have to write a lengthy editorial insisting that, no, really, you actually do do your job?

That’s how a piece by book editor Barry Harbaugh in The New Yorker comes off. Entitled, “Yes, Book Editors Edit,” it insists that, despite Amazon claiming otherwise, book editors at major publishers actually do edit books. The fact that this piece had to be written in the first place possibly says more than does the entire piece itself.

Especially since there are just a few problems with it.

First of all, it’s hard to imagine where Mr. Harbaugh got the impression Amazon was claiming that editors don’t edit. The people who’ve been complaining about editors not editing have by and large been the authors of the works that were supposed to be coming in for editing—but weren’t. For example, look at some of the discussion from when the head of Kensington Publishing responded to writers’ complaints about their experience with the press. Many of those complaints involved the failure to receive any actual editing.

 

Click here to read the full post on Teleread.

 

Declarations and Forecasts of Great Change in the Book Business Need Specificity to be Useful and Often Do Not Provide It

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 3/4/14.

A recent post here that incited a long comment string and another on FutureBook that was quite unrelated from the estimable Brian O’Leary have helped me formulate some thinking which I hope can be helpful in evaluating any “Great Change” post that arises about publishing. And they do, indeed, arise often.

O’Leary’s post builds on a theme he is persistent about pursuing, which is that communication, which in his writing seems to conflate with publishing, is moving to a linked-and-continuous conversation rather than a set-content-package (like a book or a magazine). The post suggests that the “books”, such as they are, will emerge from the conversations.

This recalls for me a comment I heard a few years ago from the father of digital publishing, David Worlock. David told me, “surely, in time, the number of books created within the network must exceed the number of books created outside the network”. By “network”, David meant “Internet”.

I don’t know how long “in time” was intended to be in David’s mind, but I figured “decades”. And in that time frame, I agree.

The other long-ago wisdom I keep recalling as I read predictions about our digital reading future is what was always said by Mark Bide when we began our “Publishing in the 21st Century” conferences for VISTA (now Publishing Technology) in the 1990s. Mark always reminded the audience that “book publishing is many different businesses” so that everybody would keep in mind that what we said about trade might not apply to sci-tech and what we said about books for lawyers and accountants doesn’t apply to publishers of college textbooks. What brought everybody together was the form of the “book”, which was already then a weak unifying principle for what were really many very different businesses.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

The Self-Publishing Debate: A Social Scientist Separates Fact from Fiction (Part 2 of 3)

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This post by Dana Beth Weinberg originally appeared on Digital Book World on 12/4/13. Click here to begin with Part 1 in the same series, by the same author, also on Digital Book World (post will open in a new window or tab).

In the writers’ groups I attend, self-publishing is a touchy issue. I know a number of writers who served their time in the trenches, writing and submitting and rewriting and resubmitting their work over and over again to agents and publishers before that one magical “yes.” It’s not unusual to meet a writer who tried to get published for ten years or more before winning a publishing contract. These writers have overcome significant odds, and they are rightly proud of their achievements. In the same group, there are a number of writers who haven’t yet broken into traditional publishing or haven’t even tried but who have decided to self-publish. Some don’t have the war stories and battle scars from trying to break in, while others do. Despite not having the traditional publisher’s stamp of approval, all of them are also proud of their achievements and expect equal consideration as published authors. It might be easy for the traditionally published authors to maintain their sense of superiority over self-published authors (and, thus, their sense of comfort that they had done the right thing all those years that they waited and tried) were it not also for the token members of the group who have self-published and made a lot of money at it.

Is self-publishing an amateurish endeavor, a means of sharing stories, a strategic move in a writing career, or an entrepreneurial activity? In Part 1 of this blog, I examined the top priorities of the nearly 5,000 authors who responded to the 2013 Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Author Survey in relation to whether and how they have published their work. Now I turn my attention to the differences in writing productivity for the four different types of authors identified in the survey: aspiring authors, self-published authors, traditionally published authors, and hybrid authors with a combination of self-published and traditionally published works.

The necessary ingredient to success in a writing career is actually writing. So how do our various types of authors stack up in terms of manuscripts completed, whether published or unpublished?

 

Click here to read the full post on Digital Book World.

Click here to read part 3 in the same series, by the same author, also on Digital Book World. (post will open in a new window or tab).

 

Books, Just Like You Wanted

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This post by David Streitfeld originally appeared on The New York Times Bits blog on 1/3/14.

Anyone can publish a book these days, and just about everyone does. But if the supply of writers is increasing at a velocity unknown in literary history, the supply of readers is not. That is making competition for attention rather fierce. One result: ceaseless self-promotion by eager beginners.

Another consequence is writers’ thirst for more data on how they are being read, so they can shape their books to please their readers more. This is something novelists have always done, using sources like fan mail, personal appearances, reviews and sales. Technology is starting to give them data that is much more precise, and thus potentially more helpful.

“If you write as a business, you have to sell books,” said Quinn Loftis, a very successful self-published writer for teenagers. “To do that, you have to cater to the market. I don’t want to write a novel because I want to write it. I want to write it because people will enjoy it.”

But my article last week outlining how the digital book subscription services Oyster and Scribd plan to collect and share data with writers like Ms. Loftis resulted in little enthusiasm, at least among potential readers. Nearly all the comments on the article expressed dismay about where the trend could go.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Bits blog.

 

The Business Rusch: Addendums, Rights Grabs & Agents (Yet Again)

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This post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch originally appeared on her site on 9/25/13.

Recently, I got e-mail from another career writer, talking about a rights grab from a traditional publisher. I saw the document in question; it’s egregious. I do not have permission to talk about this particular document nor would I, since it’s proprietary, but it’s the kind of document I’ve seen at least six times in the last two years.

These documents are addendums to publishing contracts. Since the rise of e-books, publishers have issued the addendums frequently and often en masse.

Before I go further, let me remind you that I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV (or in internet videos, for that matter). I have opinions about legal matters as they pertain to publishing, based on thirty-some years in the business on almost all sides of the business, but I am not an authority on this topic nor does anything in this blog substitute for legal advice.

Got that?

Okay.

Once signed, addendums to contracts become part of the contract. All well-written addendums have language that explains the addendum’s relationship to the contract. For example, the addendum might say something like “nothing in this addendum will supersede the terms previously granted in the contract.”

Or, as I’m seeing in all these publishing addendums, they’ll have clauses that say things like “if there is a conflict between a term that is specifically defined in this addendum and a definition of the same term is in the contract, then the definition specified in the addendum governs.”

In other words, the addendum will not only become part of the contract; it will make parts of the contract null and void.

Some addendums I’m seeing are pretty straightforward. They grant e-rights to contracts so old that ebooks did not exist when the contract was signed. Those addendums generally add the ebook information, how the royalties will be calculated, how ebooks are defined—basically the same stuff that would be in a contract if it were signed in 2013 instead of 1983. I know a lot of you traditionally published career writers have signed addendums like these—and many of you have refused, keeping the e-rights for yourself.

That’s all well and good, and is typical business.

But the addendums I’m writing about today are rights grabs.

 

Click here to read the full article on Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s site.

 

From Bestseller To Bust: Is This The End Of An Author's Life?

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This article by Robert McCrum originally appeared on the Guardian UK Books section on 3/1/14.

The credit crunch and the internet are making writing as a career harder than it has been for a generation. Robert McCrum talks to award-winning authors who are struggling to make ends meet.

Rupert Thomson is the author of nine novels, including The Insult (1996), which David Bowie chose for one of his 100 must-read books of all time, and Death of a Murderer, shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year awards in 2007. His most recent novel, Secrecy, was hailed as “chillingly brilliant” (Financial Times) and “bewitching” (Daily Mail). According to the Independent, “No one else writes quite like this in Britain today.” Thomson has also been compared to JG Ballard, Elmore Leonard, Mervyn Peake and even Kafka. In short, he’s an established and successful writer with an impressive body of work to his name.

After working seven days a week without holidays, and now approaching 60, Thomson, you might think, must be looking forward to a measure of comfort and security as the shadows of old age crowd in. But no. For some years he has rented an office in Black Prince Road, on London’s South Bank, and commuted to work. Now this studio life, so essential to his work, is under threat. Lately, having done his sums and calculated his likely earnings for the coming year, he has commissioned a builder to create a tiny office (4ft 9in x 9ft 11in) at home in his attic, what he calls “my garret”.

The space is so cramped that Thomson, who is just over 6ft, will only be able to stand upright in the doorway, but he seems to derive a certain grim satisfaction from confronting his predicament. “All I want is enough money to carry on writing full time. And it’s not a huge amount of money. I suppose you could say that I’ve been lucky to survive as long as I have, to develop a certain way of working. Sadly, longevity is no longer a sign of staying power.”

Thomson is not yet broke, but he’s up against it.

 

Click here to read the full article on the Guardian UK Books section.

 

Is #Indie Publishing Worth It? Would I Do It Again? A Tell-All.

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This post by Toby Neal originally appeared on her site on 2/13/14.

Perhaps because of the recent brouhaha in the blogosphere due to my hero Hugh Howey’s continued pioneering, this time in bringing full disclosure numbers via AuthorEarnings.com that paint a very different picture than traditional publishing would have us know, yesterday I heard from a talented writer who used to work in my former agent’s office. This person knew my writing from the get-go. She knew how hard the agency worked to sell my book series, and she had to find another job when my agent retired in frustration in 2011. She has continued to write herself, and watch my career as someone who has seen it from that very first version of Blood Orchids, that, while needing a complete rewrite, had enough promise to attract her boss. Spurred by the Authorearnings disclosure, and “on the fence” herself about which way to go with agent interest in her work, she wrote me a series of questions to help her decide whether to persist with the traditional route or make the leap to “author-publisher.”

The discussion was so good I thought I’d share it with other writers struggling with the same dilemma.

Writer-on-the-fence: Would you self-publish again?

As you know more than anyone, I was devastated when our agent retired in 2011 and I was left without representation. It had taken me two years to get an agent and 179 query letters! Then, we hadn’t sold the series in 9 months (well, we did get an offer, but it was too low and digital rights only.) Read more about my complex emotions here: http://tobyneal.net/2011/08/14/complex-emotions/

I felt after that much “lost time” I had to try self-publishing, and our agent’s comments on the market had been very discouraging, so I thought at least it couldn’t hurt to try. I did, however, go “high end” from the beginning, with a top-tier cover artist (Julie Metz) a publicist, and two rounds of professional structural editing… That first book cost me $12,000 to produce and market its first month. (Now I have my book development expenses whittled down to a mere $4-6,000.) However, Blood Orchids paid for itself within two months after debuting in December 2011, and last year alone I netted close to a hundred thousand in sales.

I think of my books as a start-up business, so I spent at least half of that on new book development and advertising. This has made my take-home income just replacing the middle-class amount I made as a school counselor, a job I was able to leave because my writing income had replaced the need for a 9-to-5. I choose to keep re-investing in new books because, as others have said, every title is a worker bee out there earning for me, and the model that works in indie publishing is capturing your readers and keeping them reading and engaged with a flow of new titles.

 

Click here to read the full post on Toby Neal’s site.

 

It's All Just Dumb Luck

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This post by Mitch Joel originally appeared on his Six Pixels of Separation blog on 2/5/14.

It’s a story that I will never forget. Back in 2008, I was prepping the release of my first business book (Six Pixels of Separation). I was very excited because the book was going to be the lead business title for Grand Central Publishing – which is a part of the largest book publishing company in the world (Hachette Book Group) – and the senior-most executive at the publishing house wanted to meet with me. I was excited. I was nervous. If you could close your eyes and imagine what the head editor of the largest book publisher in the world might look like, you would have the right visual of this powerful, smart and compelling individual. A beautiful corner office with a view, that is decorated with awards, celebrity author paraphernalia, photos of this individual with Presidents, royalty and more. As we sat down on the couch for a coffee, they leaned in and quietly said, “Mitch… I love your book. We all love your book. It’s a fascinating space and you have captured it perfectly. We are thrilled that we’re publishing it and look forward to its success…” and then there was a long pause. They finished the sentence with: “now, all we need is lightning in a bottle.”

 

Wait. What?

Write a book that one of the world’s most esteemed editors loves, get signed to a global deal by one of the largest book publishers in the world, get to be the lead title for their back to school season, and it’s all going to be dependent on how lucky we get?

 

Click here to read the full post on Six Pixels of Separation.

 

Cheap Words: Amazon Is Good For Customers, But Is It Good For Books?

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This article by George Packer originally appeared on The New Yorker site for its 2/17/14 print issue.

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer. After Apple launched the iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t sign up pop stars for recording contracts. A.T. & T. doesn’t build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A.). Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

Bezos originally thought of calling his company Relentless.com—that U.R.L. still takes you to Amazon’s site—before adopting the name of the world’s largest river by volume. (If Bezos were a reader of classic American fiction, he might have hit upon Octopus.com.) Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing quality, its tentacles extending in all directions, makes it unusual even in the tech industry, where rapid growth, not profitability, is the measure of success. Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore. In 1994, at the age of thirty, Bezos, a Princeton graduate, quit his job at a Manhattan hedge fund and moved to Seattle to found a company that could ride the exponential growth of the early commercial Internet. (Bezos calculated that, in 1993, usage climbed by two hundred and thirty thousand per cent.) His wife, MacKenzie, is a novelist who studied under Toni Morrison at Princeton; according to Stone, Bezos’s favorite novel is Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” which is on the suggested reading list for Amazon executives. All the other titles, including “Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story,” are business books, and even Ishiguro’s novel—about a self-erasing English butler who realizes that he has missed his chance at happiness in love—offers what Bezos calls a “regret-minimization framework”: how not to end up like the butler. Bezos is, above all things, pragmatic. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

 

Click here to read the full article on The New Yorker site.

Book Publishing May Not Remain A Stand-Alone Industry And Book Retailing Will Demonstrate That First

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 1/29/14.

You are missing some good fun if you don’t know those AT&T commercials where the grown-up sits around a table with a bunch of really little kids and asks them questions like “what’s better: faster or slower?” There always seems to be an obvious “correct” answer. Those kids could answer some important questions about ebook retailing in the future like these:

“What’s better? Selling just ebooks or selling ebooks and print books?”

“What’s better? Selling in just one country or in all countries?”

“What’s better? Selling just books or selling books and lots of other things too?”

“What’s better? Having one way to get revenue, like selling books with or without other stuff, or having lots of ways to get revenue so that books are only a part of the opportunity?”

And the answers to those simple questions, so obvious that a 5-year old would get them right, explain a lot about the evolving ebook marketplace and, ultimately, about the entire world of book publishing.

Book retailing on the Internet, let alone an offer that is ebooks only, hardly cuts it as a stand-alone business anymore. The three companies most likely to be in the game and selling ebooks ten years from now are Amazon, Apple, and Google. The ebook business will not be material to any of them — it is only really close to material for Amazon now — which is why we can be sure they will see no need to abandon it. It is a strategic component of a larger ecosystem, not dependent on the margin or profit it itself produces. And the rest of their substantial businesses assure they’ll still be around as a company to run that ebook business.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version)

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This post by Jeff Jordan originally appeared on his site on 1/15/14.

The news around shopping during the holiday season was dominated by two separate stories. One talked about how traffic to brick-and-mortar stores was well below expectations, and that these retailers were forced to discount tremendously to drive sales. The other talked about how an enormous late surge in packages coming from e-commerce companies overwhelmed the capacity of UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEx, and caused many of these packages to arrive after Christmas.

But, to me, these two stories are not at all separate, they simply reflect different sides of the same narrative: We’re in the midst of a profound structural shift from physical to digital retail.

The drivers of this shift are simple:

• Online retail has strong cost advantages over its offline counterparts and is rapidly taking share in many retail categories through better pricing, selection and, increasingly, service.

• These offline players have high operational leverage and many cannot withstand declining top-line revenue growth for long.

• The resulting bankruptcies of physical retailers remove competition for online players, further boosting their share gains.

So, how has this shift been playing out? Recent data suggests that it’s happening faster than I could have imagined.

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes what I consider to be the most accurate figure on e-commerce penetration in the U.S. It reports that e-commerce penetration of total retail sales in the U.S. was around eight percent in 2012. But, as I’ve blogged previously, this aggregate figure seriously underestimates the impact of e-commerce in large sectors of the retail landscape. Let’s unpeel the onion and look at the next level of reporting from the Census Bureau, where it segments the retail landscape into six large categories of goods. It’s at this level that things start getting more interesting:

 

Click here to read the full post (which includes charts) on Jeff Jordan’s site.

 

Does Digital Publishing Mean The Death Of The Author?

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This article by Richard Lea originally appeared on The Guardian UK’s Books Blog on 1/23/14.

We used to know what it took to be a writer – you had to publish a book. But electronic publishing is piling pressure on myths of the author’s life.

What’s the difference between making money out of books and writing books that people want to buy? Turns out it’s about 40% – if, that is, you believe this year’s Digital Book World (DBW) survey.

Only 20% of the 1,600 self-published authors surveyed, and just a quarter of the almost 800 writers with a traditional book deal, judged it “extremely important” to “make money writing books”. Shift the issue to publishing “a book that people will buy” and the figures leap to 56% and 60% respectively.

But of course, you say – this is literature we’re talking about. These authors have loftier concerns than the grubby business of making money. Art is their province. If they must consort with the commercial world to find an audience, then so be it. But heaven forfend they should be interested in something so base as raking in the cash.

Except, in the digital age this kind of logic just doesn’t wash. If all you’re interested in is finding an audience for your work, then electronic distribution allows you to find it without any connection to the marketplace at all. Write your masterpiece, stick it on your website, and sound the trumpets for the victory of Pallas Athene. Or, if what you’re really looking for is the grateful adulation of your adoring fans, stick it on Scribophile or WritersCafe and get ready to feel the love. These days the only reason for worrying about publishing “a book that people will buy” is to “make money writing books”.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Guardian UK’s Books Blog.

 

The Illusions of Traditional/Self Publishing & The Reality of Hybrid Publishing

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on Write It Forward on 1/23/14.

There’s a lot of heated rhetoric regarding publishing being bandied about on-line lately. Some of it was generated by the CEO of Kensington putting himself out there with some posts that had a large backlash, but overall, people seem to be digging in and drawing lines.

These lines are more blurred than most acknowledge if we examine them carefully.

It would seem to break down with traditional publishing “vs” self-publishing. I’d like to point out where this isn’t the reality and also how Cool Gus deals with these issues as a ‘hybrid’ publisher with a focus on being agile and working as a unified team.

“We treat our authors so well. You need us!” This is the message that Kensington’s CEO recently stated on-line. I also just read an interview from the CEO of Random House/Penguin saying essentially the same thing. This should be amended to: “We treat our top 5% of authors so well.” I don’t know if these CEOs are simply out of touch, being BSed or what, but the vast majority of authors are treated as interchangeable parts at trad houses and even most agencies. Because the top authors are pretty much the only authors these CEOs interact with, they make the illogical leap that all their authors are treated exactly the same way. I’ve seen many current and former Kensington authors come out on various on-line mediums describing a less than great publishing experience, yet not a single author defend the CEO’s statements. I was published by Random House and sold over one million books under the Dell imprint. During my years there I received almost no marketing support and was essentially dumped as the market coalesced. It wasn’t personal. It was business. Reminds me of Denzel Washington’s character in Man on Fire: “It’s just business.”

“We own Author Solutions.” It would appear that RHP’s CEO does not understand the pure hatred for this company among authors. You want to make money off authors? You think that equals KDP? This goes to a deep misunderstanding about authors, especially those with experience.

The Death of the Midlist.

 

Click here to read the full post on Write It Forward.

 

Print as the Future of Barnes & Noble

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on her Dear Author site on 1/19/14.

Barnes & Noble is a venerable brand in US consumer circles. It touts itself as the world’s largest bookseller and is composed of three segments: the main retail segment, B&N College. and Nook Media.

In 2009, B&N launched the Nook, a product aimed at the upper middle class mother with two children. Overpriced and underfeatured, the Nook tablets have faltered despite the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Nook segment of the business.

After poor holiday sales in 2012, it was acknowledged that BN would need to move away [from] developing hardware devices and look toward licensing its product on existing platforms. After the disappointing 2013 holiday sales, BN’s CEO was fired and the Nook Media head moved into the position leaving Nook Media without an internal leader.

Everyone in the business of publishing is holding its collective breath about the health of BN. On the plus side, the largest portion publishing revenues come from the sale of educational books (textbooks and other educational products) but that market is headed for a disruption soon. On the negative side, overall consumer dollars spent on books is contracting. One think tank believes that it will continue to contract over the next five years as consumers shift dollars from higher paid books to self published and free books.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dear Author.

 

Astroturfing: The Source of Zombie Memes in Publishing?

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This post by David Gaughran originally appeared on his Let’s Get Visible site on 1/8/14.

Why are there so many zombie memes in publishing? Why is there so much groupthink? It might be because the industry isn’t particularly diverse. Or it could be that book-lovers are nostalgic types who are automatically wary of change.

But I suspect it’s astroturfing by the publishing establishment, a practice admitted to last month by YS Chi, chairman of Elsevier and president of the International Publishers Association, in paragraph six of this article.

For the click-lazy, here’s the money quote (emphasis mine):

“We gathered all the communications people together to discuss the issues and create an action plan. We have a multi-faceted audience to address, and in the next 12 months you will see key messages delivered, compelling stories of our impact on society for culture and education. We’ll ask you to personalize that message. I’m very excited that there is a meeting of minds on this.”

Yey, talking points! I don’t know if I’m more excited about the centrally approved messaging that’s going to flood the blogosphere, or the mental image of YS Chi doing a mind-meld with everyone in publishing.

But I digress. This post attempts to dispel multiple industry myths in one fell swoop. Perhaps then we can start having meaningful conversations, instead of batting around boardroom memos.

 

Self-publishing is a bubble

Remember Ewan Morrison’s prediction in The Guardian? “Epublishing is another tech bubble, and it will burst in the next 18 months.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Let’s Get Visible.