Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

How To Sell Your Book To Hollywood

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This interview of Walt Morton, conducted by JJ Marsh, originally appeared on Words With Jam on 3/31/14.

Walt Morton, Novelist & Screenwriter, shares tips with JJ Marsh

Tell us a bit about yourself, Walt. How did you get involved in the movie business?

In 1988, I had just moved across the country to Los Angeles. I knew nothing about Hollywood but I thought I could probably write and sell an original screenplay because many screenplays I paged through seemed dumb, wooden, or the work of a chimpanzee. How hard could it be? Over the next eight years I wrote seven screenplays. I even earned some money and had one script bought outright. I worked for a producer as a writer-for-hire like in the old Hollywood days.

Movies based on original screenplays have become rarer and rarer. To make this clear, an “original” screenplay is a screenplay that is not based on a novel or TV show or toy or comic book or anything else. It just starts as a writer’s idea for a movie.

Starting in the 1990s the average cost of making a Hollywood studio film skyrocketed with the associated costs of marketing and global distribution. Today, any big studio movie with star actors represents an investment by the studio of over $100 million dollars.

Scared studio executives almost never have the guts to make original material anymore, so seek ideas already vetted in the consumer marketplace. They’d rather bet on something already popular as a book, novel, TV show, comic, etc. This is not rocket science.

The realization almost nobody was buying original screenplays put me on the slow road to being a novelist. That, and a conversation I had with Michael Crichton, back in 1997. Crichton said:

 

Click here to read the full interview on Words With Jam.

 

Go Midwest, Young Writer: Why the Middle of the Country (Not Brooklyn) Is the Future of American Literature

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This post by Jason Diamond originally appeared on Flavorwire on 3/24/14.

For those who only look at the bigger picture, yes, New York is the publishing epicenter of the country, and a lot of people who write do live in Brooklyn. As someone who writes for a living and calls Brooklyn home, I can totally back up everything you’ve heard about thriving independent bookstores, nightly literary events, and writers crowding every coffee shop. Going out means routinely bumping into editors, agents, publicists, and other people who help get new books out into the world, and that gives you every reason to think that New York City is the only place to be if you’re a writer.

But it isn’t, and I don’t necessarily think there is one specific place that is responsible for creating literary culture, just as I don’t think there’s one where you should go to be a writer. Yet a closer look at the literary map of the 50 states reveals that even if the publishing industry writ large is situated in New York and Los Angeles, some of the most exciting things going on in American literature are taking place in the middle of the country.

“I have spent my whole life watching people leave,” writes David Giffels in his collection of essays, The Hard Way on Purpose. “This is a defining characteristic of the generation of postindustrial Midwesterners who have stayed in their hometowns.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

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.

 

Why Teens Love Dystopias

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This article by Dana Stevens originally appeared on Slate on 3/21/14.

It’s not a mystery why so many young-adult best-sellers (and the lucrative movie franchises based on them) would take place in post-apocalyptic societies governed by remote authoritarian entities and rigidly divided into warring factions. The word dystopia comes from a Greek root that roughly translates as “bad place,” and what place could be worse than high school? Adolescence is not for the faint of heart. The to-do list for the decade between ages 10 and 20 includes separating from your parents, finding your place among your peers at school, beginning to make decisions about your own future, and—oh yes—figuring out how to relate to the world, and yourself, as a suddenly and mystifyingly sexual being.

The strong link between YA and dystopia is no trendy post–Hunger Games phenomenon. Grim allegorical tales about dysfunctional futuristic societies have been staples in popular books for young people at least since Lois Lowry’s The Giver series in the early ’90s (a film adaptation of the first volume is set to come out this summer), if not as far back as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, published in 1954. But since the massive success of Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about a bleak futuristic society that pits teenagers against one another in a televised gladiatorial fight to the death, young readers—along with the many not-so-young readers who are now consuming YA lit in mass quantities—can’t seem to get enough of projecting themselves into the future. And that’s despite the fact that the future, as presented both in the real-life media and in the entertainment we consume, looks to be fairly awful: a bare-knuckles struggle for survival in the ruins of a civilization laid waste by war and/or environmental disaster.

 

Click here to read the full article on Slate.

Related, also from Slate: Everyone Knows Where They Belong – The Choosing Ceremony, the Sorting Hat, the Reaping: YA and the quest to know who you are

 

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).

 

Reading to Have Read

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This post by Ian Bogost originally appeared on The Atlantic on 3/14/13.

Spritz doesn’t strive to fix speed reading’s flaws, but to transcend reading entirely.

If you’re a person who reads, you may have read about Spritz, a startup that hopes to “reimagine” reading. Like most tech startups, reimagining entails making more efficient. Spritz promises to speed up reading by flashing individual words in a fixed position on a digital display. Readers can alter the speed of presentation, ratcheting it up to 600 words per minute (about three times the speed the average reader scans traditional text).

This method, called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), isn’t new, but Spritz has added an “Optimal Recognition Point” or ORP to this display technique. They claim it helps readers recognize each word most effectively by focusing their attention on a red letter representing its optimal point of recognition. Public response to the technology has been tremendous. According to Spritz, over 10,000 developers have already signed up to develop “Spritzified” products.

Does Spritz work? Well, it depends on what you mean by “work.” As Olga Khazan wrote here at The Atlantic, speed reading has long been accused of sacrificing comprehension for convenience. University of South Carolina cognitive psychologist John M. Henderson further explains that Spritz’s ORP doesn’t improve matters:

 

Click here to read the full article on The Atlantic.

 

Identity and the Writer

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his blog on 3/10/14.

Who am I?

What do others think of me?

Identity is a very important, and terribly difficult, concept to grasp. What makes us who we are is fodder for philosophers, and perhaps biologists, not for this blog.

This blog is about publishing, and it is written for writers. But I’m going to take a stab at discussing identity anyway.

Lately I’ve seen a lot of stuff on the internet that falls under the umbrella of what I call “identity issues.” There are a lot of writers, and a lot of people in the publishing industry, who believe they have clearly defined identities, and who believe they have the ability to understand the identities of others. Identities that may be embraced and accepted, or dismissed and derided.

Let’s take a look at some of the things I’m referring to.

Years ago, Barry Eisler used the word legacy to describe traditional publishers. This word is apt because publishing fits the definition of a legacy system. Since Barry began using this, it has fallen into the common vernacular, but only in the shadow industry of self-publishing, used by self-published authors. Legacy publishers don’t like to be thought of as “previous” or “outdated”, even though they indeed are by any definition, so they reject the term because it conflicts with their personal identities. They believe they are relevant, forward-thinking, guardians of culture. They are wrong, but their identities are so entangled in these labels it may prevent them from doing things that could improve their bottom line, like treating authors better, innovating, and using new technology to reach more readers.

 

Click here to read the full post on J.A. Konrath’s blog.

 

Writing—So Easy a Caveman Can Do It

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her site on 3/7/14.

Recently a Facebook friend shared a post with me regarding Indie Musicians versus Indie Authors. It appears our culture has a fascination and reverence for the Indie Musician whereas Indie Authors face an immediate stigma. We authors have to continually prove ourselves, whereas musicians don’t (at least not in the same way). My friend seemed perplexed, but to me it’s very simple.

We’re not even going to address the flood of “bad” books. Many writers rush to publish before they’re ready, don’t secure proper editing, etc. But I feel the issue is deeper and it reflects one of the many challenges authors face and always will.

People give automatic respect to a musician because not everyone can play an instrument or sing. Simple. It’s clear that artist can do something many cannot.

As writers, we have an insidious enemy. People believe what we do is easy. If we are good writers, we make it look effortless. I recall being a kid watching the Olympics. The gymnasts made those handsprings look like nothing. Being four years old, I dove in…and broke my arm…twice (because I’m an overachiever that way).

The blunt truth is everyone has a story to tell. They do. Every life can be fascinating in the hands of a skilled author. Every idea can be masterful in the hands of a wordsmith. Ah, but the general public assumption is that the only thing standing between them and being J.K. Rowling is merely sitting down and finishing the story. Many believe that, because they’re literate and have command of their native language that they can do what we do.

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s site.

 

Scribd.com: Opt-in, Turn-on, Opt-out?

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This post by Rich Meyer originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 3/7/14.

For those of you who may have missed the news, Smashwords.com is now distributing their books to Scribd.com, an online e-book subscription service. If you’re not familiar with Scribd, think of them as the Spotify or Netflix Streaming of e-publishing: Subscribers pay a monthly fee and then can download and read as many books as they want. Authors will get a percentage of that, depending on how much of their book was read by the end consumer.

Here comes the first kick-in-the-pants for authors. If you compare things to, say, Spotify, the popular on-line music service, you’ll easily find references on the Internet to popular performers having their songs played millions of times and getting royalty checks in whole TENS of dollars. Supposedly, if Scribd is anything like the Oyster service, Smashwords authors will be getting 60% of the price of a book borrowed by a reader, as long as nearly 20% of the book is read. So unlike the great deal where an author using Amazon’s Kindle lending library through KDP might get $2 per lend for a 99-cent e-book, a Scribd book will net a writer 59 cents. And that’s only if the person reads 20% of it. Which is something I will come back to in a bit.

Scribd has actually said things will work out fine “if most readers read in moderation.” Umm … a reader who would consider a subscription service for books is more than likely not one that would read in normal “moderation,” whatever the hell that is. I consider myself to be a slightly-above average reader, and I’ve already read over sixty books since the first of the year. Imagine how many some of the power readers could do? Of course, if they read the whole book, then at least the author gets a bit o’ dosh for it. Unless … well, again, more later.

 

Click here to read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

Then, to get Smashwords’ side of the situation, please also see this post from Smashwords founder Mark Coker announcing the Scribd distribution deal and explaining the particulars.

 

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.

 

L.A. Times Festival of Books Partners With Amazon

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This article by Wendy Werris originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 3/5/14.

When the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books unveiled its list of participating authors on Tuesday, the event caused a stir among local booksellers who immediately noticed the list featured buy links to Amazon. That the festival would partner with Amazon instead of the IndieBound affiliate program is not sitting well with the bookselling community that has long supported the literary event.

“Exhibitors at the Festival put an enormous amount of time and money into making this event a success for their stores,” said Mary Williams, events manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, “and for the authors who appear, while serving the hundreds of thousands of people that attend. Having sales siphoned away from that effort is disheartening, to say the least.” Williams hopes that the Festival staff will consider adding the IndieBound program, which allows customers to order through independent bookstores’ websites in advance of the Festival’s author events.

The Festival of Books launched in 1996 on the campus of UCLA and has grown considerably over time; for many Los Angeles bookstores it is the biggest event of the year. The L.A. Times successfully moved the location of the Festival to the University of Southern California in 2010, and it will be held there April 12 and 13.

 

Click here to read the full article on Publishers Weekly.

 

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.

 

The New World of Publishing: Can’t Get Books Into Bookstore Myth

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This post by Dean Wesley Smith originally appeared on his site on 2/14/14.

It Has Officially Hit Myth Status

When some of the biggest supporters of indie publishing and indie writers start going on about how they are giving up paper books to New York, I finally just shook my head and assigned all the silliness to myth status.

So, since I have the book Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing now out in both paper and electronic and available, I suppose it’s time I start into the next book: Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing.

And Sacred Cow (myth) #1 is that indie writers, with their own press, CAN’T GET THEIR BOOKS INTO BOOKSTORES.

A complete myth.

Of course indie writers can get their books into bookstores. It’s not magic, it’s not hard, and it’s not even expensive.

Yet it gets repeated over and over like “You need an agent” phrase by traditional publishers. And indie writers buy right into it without question, the same writers who fight against all the crap that traditional publishers toss out.

That shows a flat, head-shaking lack-of-knowledge of how this system of paper book distribution works. Kris just banged her head on the same wall a couple weeks ago in her blog, and had all kinds of readers surprised that their books were already in bookstores when they went and looked.

Duh.

So this quick post is just a warning shot across the bow, folks. I recorded an entire detailed lecture on this topic tonight that will be ready next week, and I will be back here shortly (or after the Anthology Workshop that we are holding here at the coast is finished) with the first of the new indie sacred cows to be led to slaughter.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dean Wesley Smith’s site.

 

Common Ground in the Debate of Self v. Traditional Publishing

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This post by Jack W. Perry originally appeared on Digital Book World on 2/21/14.

A storm was created last week in response to Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings post. It was widely criticized by many but also praised. It started a lot of discussion.

Having read most of the back and forth, I did notice a few commonalities.

Some issues all sides generally agree upon:

1) Digital has demolished the distribution barriers to entry for self-publishing. Before digital a self-published author would have to pay to print and distribute books. That was an outlay of cash and inefficient. The author then went to indie bookstores to get distribution one book at a time. Hoping to eventually break through and signed a major deal. Today an author can upload their book and get instant distribution to the entire country. Sales can happen immediately. The goal may be to remain independent or to gain negotiating leverage with traditional publishers.

2) The data is incomplete and there is a definite need for more transparency. Amazon, B&N, Apple and Google don’t publically release sales data. There is no “Bookscan for ebooks” although Nielsen is working on it with PubTrack Digital. Self-published and the Amazon proprietary titles are generally felt to be under-reported if at all. This feeds into the debate of the size of self-published ebooks. By withholding the Kindle data, Amazon has created a massive hole in any analysis. Perhaps a company like App Annie could fill that void and be a resource of data and analytics.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes four additional points of discussion, on Digital Book World.