Hugh Howey's Blog, page 36

The End of this Deal is Nigh

For one day only, the first entry of the Triptych Anthology, edited by John Joseph Adams and myself, has been reduced to $1.99! This price is a steal for any one of the stories, but you’re getting 22 awesome pre-apocalypse tales from the likes of Paolo Bacigalupi, Jamie Ford, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Scott Sigler, Annie Bellet, Matthew Mather, and so many more.

My first short story in the world of WOOL is in here. You may have seen the story in my progress bar; it’s called IN THE AIR. For the first time, you’ll see what the “event” looked like from someone who lived through it. And if you haven’t read WOOL, the story stands on its own.

There are so many stories in here that still haunt me. But hey, if you somehow read these and don’t like a single one, you’re only out a couple bucks. It’s not the end of the world.

Yet.

FBD

Every now and then, I would sneak into the walk-in freezer and take my head off.

It was Free Cone Day, a Ben & Jerry’s institution. I worked at a Ben & Jerry’s in Charlotte just out of high school, and one year I was elected to play the cow. Cone Days were hot days, and I melted in that suit worse than a glob of Wavy Gravy on the sidewalk (that’s a caramel cashew brazil nut ice cream with a chocolate hazelnut fudge swirl with roasted almonds, which I didn’t have to look up!)

Free Cone Day is only surpassed by Free Comic Book Day, the best day of the year for us geeks (a notch above April 4th). You line up and fill a bag with free comics from Marvel, DC, Image, and so on. Reprints of first issues get you hooked on a series you missed. And previews get you anxious for what’s new and next.

The best thing about both of these days for the shops is that they clue shoppers into where they are located. It’s a reminder that the shops exist for some and that we all love ice cream and comics for others. For those new in town or those just coming of comic-and-ice-cream age, it stamps these locations into our spatial memories with an endorphine aftersplash.

Why don’t publishers and bookstores do the same?

Publishers already give away mountains of books. Amber and I were getting around ten hardbacks a week back when I was a book reviewer. At the bookstore in Boone, we drowned in free copies of books. And at BEA, publishers give away tens of thousands of books, and that number is set to rise as BEA becomes more commercial and more about the readers next year.

Why don’t we spread the love and expand this idea? Let’s get people into bookstores once a year to remind communities that they have a bookstore and that they are awesome. I’d love to see this be an American Booksellers Association program. I would be tempted to leave the mega chains out altogether and just do this with the independent stores. If your community doesn’t have an indie shop, then do it through the local libraries, which could use a reminder too.

Readers could show up for FBD and grab two or three books apiece. Here’s a chance to launch new names and new careers. A debut author would be extremely fortunate to be selected by their publisher for FBD. It might even be part of their contract negotiations. Local authors could be on-hand to sign copies of their books. Maybe you have a tent and tables outside where authors can set up—indie and traditionally published alike. For those not selected as part of the publisher FBD, they can still bring their own copies, hand them out, and meet readers. It’s what me and a dozen other indies did at BEA this year. I gave away copies of SAND at my own expense, and I was happy to.

FBD could be an annual orgy of reading and celebration of literature. Time that puppy near the start of summer. Comic book shop owners will tell you that it isn’t just about free comics; they sell a ton these days as well. Placing a second Christmas in June would be great for everyone’s bottom lines, including readers. FBD would be a great way for publishers to give back to bookstores and libraries. And the thought of families lined up, kids running around squealing, books for all ages, gives me goosebumps. I could handle that once a year.

Resident Writers

A while back, I wrote a piece on the kind of bookstore I would open if I had my druthers. While that process creeps ever forward, I keep brainstorming about things I would do to make bookstores ever more relevant in our communities. One of these would be to have a Resident Writer at Bella’s Bookshop. I think every bookstore should have one.

Think of a golf pro mixed with a poet laureate. Chosen by the bookstore, the position would rotate every two or three years. I immediately think of James C. Humes, who sits at the same desk in the same coffee shop every single day in Pueblo, Colorado to get his writing done. A prolific author whose places of publication include the Moon (no, really), Humes is someone I and lots of other writers admire for his work ethic and how he gives back to not only his local community, but to the community of readers and writers. James is just the sort of Resident Writer every bookstore should have.

On a prominent plaque, their names would accumulate. And this display would be less about those writers’ egos and more about the dreams and aspirations of bookstore shoppers who would want to follow in their publishing footsteps. Bookstores should be more than warehouses for bound stories, because someone will always find a way to do that cheaper. Bookstores should be about reading groups and writing workshops. They should foster communication and be places of wonder for children. The Resident Writer would have a hand in shaping all of these. And of course, they would have an honorary desk near the cafe and as much coffee as they can drink.

Why the Analysts are Wrong

When Buddha wanted to show his followers the danger of subjective experience, he told them the story of several blind men who each encounter an elephant for the first time. Only feeling one part of this multi-faceted creature, each had a very different account. To anyone listening, they would think it impossible to believe that all the men were describing the same creature. And I feel something like this is going on with publishing right now.

There are a lot of analysts out there whom I admire as people, even as they do a very poor job of covering the publishing world. There are dozens of stories that should be covered heavily right now that are going completely ignored. To name a few:

• The manipulation of bestseller lists, from the NYT list to the online B&N store. In both cases, readers are made to believe that these lists signify actual sales rank, when they do not. The B&N list features co-op spaces paid for by major publishers, and self-published romance authors are artificially shoved down to the #126 position and below. Readers might be interested in knowing this. Some may want to start browsing at position #126 to find some hidden (buried?) gems.

 

• The increased profit margins of e-books is not being passed along to readers and writers but is being kept in-house.

 

• An exploding number of self-published authors who are not household names are having their lives changed because of the ability to reach readers directly and on increasingly democratized platforms.

 

• Publishing contracts are becoming more draconian and harming writers’ careers. The most favored nation clause, the increasingly strict non-competes, the rise of high-discount sales and how this lower royalty rate buried in contracts is impacting writers, and the abusive term of copyright in an age when books no longer go out of print.

• Publishers offering lockstep royalties and refusing to compete on price. How was this email not front page news every day for a week?

 

• Any investigation into the reversal of publishers to do print-only deals. At least some digging into whether they regret these deals and why?

 

• A call for an end to DRM or a call to start bundling e-books or audiobooks with hardbacks.

 

• Any reporting on e-book prices that are double that of mass market paperbacks.

 

• And I haven’t seen a single analysts link the rise of independent bookstores the past three years with the decline of big-box discount bookstores to show how Amazon is putting the latter out of business and possibly helping save the former.

 

All of these omissions might seem odd at first, until we remember Buddha’s lesson on blind men. After an interview at a conference recently, I had a reporter confide in me about a top-name analysts she approached with some similar questions. The curt response from this analyst to one of her questions about self-publishing was: “I don’t know anything about self-publishing.” This is a pundit paid to know what’s going on in an industry, and that pundit has decided that roughly 10% of the industry (and the fastest growing sector) isn’t even worth looking at or understanding. We can assume that small and medium presses are also a distant concern. Which leaves these analysts with roughly half of the market to wax on about.

But it hit me the other day, and I finally saw where these analysts truly go wrong, and that’s this: They focus their reporting on the middlemen. Once you realize this, you’ll see it everywhere. They aren’t covering the book trade; they aren’t even covering the publishing industry (because that would include self-publishers and small presses); they are simply covering five companies and their distributors.

Most of the coverage, of course, revolves around Amazon. And most of it is negative. I even saw one pundit exclaim that he had a brilliant new idea, and that was for authors to publish their works exclusively with Barnes & Noble in exchange for co-op placement. Think about that. Give up distribution diversity for a month on a rack in a dwindling bookstore. The only way this makes sense is through the lens of anti-Amazon bias. There is no other way to make sense of it. It’s one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, and it was announced as if bread had finally met with knife.

Any news to do with publishing concentrates on five companies. That’s it. The numbers reported by those companies are passed on as though it encapsulates the entirety of the market. We hear about e-book growth while ignoring the fastest growing sector of that growth. We get info based on ISBNs, when the same explosive sector often avoids using them. And the small presses that are employing POD and e-book adoption are treated like non-entities, when they are the true underdogs with the most to gain (and deserve more coverage).

The worst of it is this, and here is what becomes readily apparent and why you won’t see coverage on any of the stories in my bulleted list: The analysts don’t care about readers, and they don’t care about writers. That’s what their coverage tells me, anyway. High prices are not a social injustice, they are a savvy grab for corporate profits. The authors’ share of earnings is never discussed, only the publishers’, even though we now know that self-published authors are out-earning traditionally published authors on the largest e-book platform in the world.

What we have are airline experts covering their industry by reporting exclusively on travel agents. Again, look at this e-mail that shows the CEO of Penguin asking the CEO of Barnes & Noble to punish Random House for daring to compete with them and not collude to raise prices on readers. These sorts of stories are reported with a shrug. Because the analysts don’t care about the only two parties who truly matter in this business, and that’s those who write the books and those who enjoy them.

Yes, publishers can add value to manuscripts. Maybe they add 10% of that value, if I’m being generous. Manuscripts that need more than that never get to a publisher in the first place (or they are published as-is because of a celebrity’s profile). Does a 10% increase in value warrant a 100% share of media coverage?

The Authors’ Guild is no better. A mouthpiece for the top 1% of bestselling writers, their advocacy focuses on bookstores and on the largest publishers. Again, the middlemen and the distributors. There is no outrage over these pernicious contract clauses, no horror at the marriage of big publishing and Author Solutions rip-offs, no questioning the lockstep royalty rates or the slow payment processes. If the guild really was for authors, you would see them praising Amazon for changing the lives of so many writers and for growing the pool of readers. You get the exact opposite.

Middlemen should not be our concern, expect in how they facilitate the union between artists and the purveyors of that art. Those who work to bring these two parties together deserve all of our respect and praise. Those who stand between them deserve our condemnation until they improve. Until and even when that happens, they should only get a small percentage of the coverage. What we should be reporting on is the health of reading around the world and how to increase participation in this pastime that we love. We should be covering the job market for writers and all the new opportunities cropping up. Once you notice what they do cover, you’ll notice that almost no one is doing any of this reporting. And that’s a damn shame.

Interview with Cover Designer Jason Smith

Jason Smith is the design genius behind the covers of WOOL, SHIFT, and DUST that most of you have come to know. He also designed the UK cover of SAND, which is flipping gorgeous. Covers are such a crucial part of the book package, which is why I think these artists deserve more attention and praise. As a reader, I’m also curious about how these covers materialize. So I asked Jason a few questions. Here’s what he had to say:

Me: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into art and design? And why publishing?

Jason Smith: As far back as I can remember, design has always been a soundtrack to my life. Some of my earliest memories revolve around copying birthday or Christmas cards and seeing how close I could get to the original. I remember my dad teaching me how to portion an image into a grid system in order to copy it more effectively. I also remember being fascinated by the imagery in books and studying them for hours, encyclopaedias, fables, The National Geographic.

I went on to study design through education, from my early school years in Nottingham all the way to Saint Martins in London. I began my career designing covers for CDs and DVDs and this I loved. I got a real buzz from combining my passion for music with design. The move into publishing was quite a natural progression as there were a lot of similarities designing across both medias.

Me: How important is it to read the books you design covers for? Do you have time to read every book you work on?

Jason Smith: It’s great if you can read as much as possible, but it’s not essential. Sometimes all you need to read are the opening chapters to really get a feel for a book. Other times the editor can have a very clear brief of what they want to achieve and so a synopsis is enough. Alternatively there might not be any material available and so you use your knowledge of the market, experience and creativity to solve the problem.

Me: Walk us through the cover design for SAND. I understand you did some involved set construction for some of the design ideas?

Jason Smith: I really enjoyed designing Sand, like the characters in the book I felt I went on a journey of adventure.

Once we had settled on a route for the cover I set up a photo shoot with a trusted photographer. The concept was to actually bury a person in sand and shoot various parts of the body emerging from the dunes. As you can imagine this proved quite tricky and safety was paramount. We used a huge board, which we raised off the floor and covered with ten bags of children’s play sand. We cut a small hole from underneath and got a very brave volunteer (not me) to put his hand through the hole and up onto our artificial desert surface. It looked fantastic!

 

The photographer had also sourced some diving masks, which we then strapped to our model in order to bury his head. This proved one step too far, the logistics of actually getting someone to breathe under all the sand was a nightmare, blocking up the ears with cotton wool, cutting a hole for a snorkel etc etc. In the back of my mind I worried the headlines in the paper the next day would read : MAN DIES DROWNING IN SAND IN FULHAM. And so we just didn’t feel we could do it safely enough. We got the shot in the end by using a combination of a mannequins head and our model in a mask, and superimposing the two.

Me: What’s the process in settling on a final cover? How many people are involved, and what are those discussions like?

Jason Smith: There are actually quite a lot of people involved in the process. After I have done my visuals they are put in a weekly jackets meeting and discussed by a selected team of the divisions key figures, the Managing Director, Sales and marketing to name a few. The discussions are wide-ranging and deal with all aspects of the cover: is the design the right feel for the book; does it answer the brief; will it reach the appropriate target audience etc etc. Once we have a design that the meeting has agreed upon and are happy with, then we approach the author for their thoughts. It’s quite a collaborative and organic process that I feel works well for us.

Me: There is a lot going on with this hardback, with a reversible dust jacket and map, and a cover design on the board of the book itself. How involved were you in this production?

Jason Smith: I am always heavily involved in the evolution of the design, from initial roughs and concepts, through to art working the rest of the package and suggesting possible finishes. In this instance I was very fortunate to work closely with the editor of the book, Jack, and he had a very clear vision from the start. He wanted to create something for the fans, a physical object that they could treasure. He had already commissioned an illustrator to work on the map which features on the reverse of the dust jacket and it was my job to bring all the elements together and embellish further.

 

Me: Do you see publishers doing more involved designs like this to help books stand out? And what does it feel like to see readers gushing over your covers for the WOOL series and now for SAND?

Jason Smith: To be fair, going that extra mile now and then is something we’ve done here for some time. That extra little push can really help breakout a debut author or it can help draw attention to an already established brand author. Much like a bespoke suit, it’s the little hidden details, the way it has been lovingly put together, that can help give a book it’s character.

I loved working on the WOOL series and I’m very pleased with the way they turned out. I felt it was only fitting to put as much passion into the covers as there was in the writing. I guess if people feel I managed to achieve this with the covers then that makes me a happy designer:)

Me: Finally, what are you reading now, and what can we expect to see from you next?

Jason Smith: At the moment I’m reading the next book from Tony Parsons, The Slaughter Man, and I’m looking forward to designing it. We’ve just published his first crime novel in the series called The Murder Bag, and it went straight to number one, which we were all very happy about.

Me: Thanks, Jason! And thank you so much for all of the amazing covers you’ve graced my words with.

The People Aren’t the Problem

It is far too easy to blame people for what are really problems with systems. You see this fallacy everywhere, and it leads to unnecessary heartache and divisions. We like to think that if we take out one enemy leader, we’ll win a war and prevent some future one. We like to think that if we fire one corrupt CEO, we’ll right a ship. Or if we elect a new leader, everything will change.

It’s true that very powerful people can sometimes influence the systems they rule, but it’s far more often that systems rule the people within them. The Stanford prison experiments are a great example. Research volunteers were chosen to play either prisoner or guard. The guards were immediately abusive to their prisoners, and the prisoners acted helpless and meek, even though the participants were assigned at random. The power differential and the lack of checks and balances were the problem, not who was placed where.

This is why the people in major publishing houses can be awesome, even as their system operates poorly. I have mad respect for the people I’ve worked with at major publishing houses. Most of them are fighting internally for the same things I complain about. I know editors who want to get rid of DRM on all their books right now and offer free e-books with hardbacks, but the system they operate in won’t let them. I’ve had situations where editorial and sales wanted to go forward with a project, but the legal department squashed it. I’ve even had an editor at one of the Big 5 come up and apologize to me for the way the system handled one of my deals. And every publishing house I’ve worked with grumbles about their bean counters getting in the way of innovation.

We have to remember that parent companies own many of the largest publishers. My agent and I have had incredible offers pulled once the details of those offers trickled up one more level, much to the consternation of the editors involved. I have had conversations with my overseas publishers about all they would love to do, but price laws in their countries and relationships with bookstores prevent them from trying. Despite these obstacles, many publishers are pushing boundaries and trying new things. Two New York publishers have announced moves to less expensive real estate, though I would argue that New Jersey and Lower Manhattan aren’t nearly far enough.

The economic reality for publishers isn’t pretty. They have thin margins, and many of the things they need to do will cost money in the short term. The solutions to these problems require drastic actions, but the systems currently in place make those actions extremely difficult. There is a camaraderie among publishers that harms them all. Social pressure prevents them from taking the steps necessary to truly compete. In this culture, daring to compete is considered “selfish.” But I would argue that persisting in a system that is easy for its practitioners but does not provide the best service to customers, contributors, and culture is far more selfish.

The only way to finance the changes needed is to drastically cut costs. The best way to do this is to move out of Manhattan, but no publisher wants to take that hit in its perceived respectability (or give up the awesomeness of living in New York). Well imagine what would happen if a major publisher announced a move that increased their reputation while dramatically slashing the cost of doing business. This is what might happen if a publisher moved to Iowa City, Iowa:

1) By setting up near one of the top (most agree it is the top) MFA programs in the country, this publisher could tap into a rich vein of editorial and authorial talent. Over time, they could establish deep ties with the program, with scholarships, guest lectures from staff, and an integrated and paying internship program.

2) This publisher could renovate an industrial space into a swank startup-type culture for far less than they are currently paying in Manhattan rent. They would actually own the building they improve, reversing a recent trend of having to sell off property and lease it back in order to stay put. And property value would shoot up the moment they opened their doors.

3) Existing salaries would become enormous raises due to the lower cost of living. Including rent, the COL index for New York, NY is nearly double that of Iowa City. $6,562.27 in New York equals $3,400 in Iowa City. Every employee in this publishing house would be twice as wealthy on the same pay. They would own houses instead of renting closets.

4) The business culture would improve rather than stagnate. All of the innovation I’ve seen in the book trade has come from those as far removed as possible from the monoculture of New York publishing. The most innovative agent in the business is based in Denver. The best bookstore chain is based in Portland. The best online retailers are based on the west coast or in Canada. The best contracts come from overseas. The future of publishing would soon be based in the heart of Iowa.

5) Concurrent with the announcement of the move, this publisher could announce a doubling of author royalties on e-books, higher advances, and lower prices to consumers. That is, they could take a page from Amazon’s handbook and pass along every ounce of savings to their customers and their contributors. Why give up all those potential extra profits? To gain market share and prestige. Every agent in the country would scramble to place their work with this publishing house. The quality of the house’s catalog would skyrocket. The goal would be to create a reputation and a lead that could never be surpassed by another publishing house, even as others scrambled to set up offices in Iowa.

6) A new culture could be fostered. The house could scratch every single imprint and create real brands that are recognizable and useful. To use HarperCollins as an example, you could have HarperCollins Literary. HarperCollins Romance. HarperCollins Mystery. Simple and clear, so that the brand you build is the parent brand, not some obscure name that only insiders recognize. Readers would quickly notice something: HarperCollins books cost less, are more enjoyable, don’t employ DRM, and a free e-book comes with every hardback. “You got anything new from HarperCollins Fantasy?” a store shopper might ask.

7) This publisher could also learn to deal with Amazon rationally. That is, they would see Amazon Publishing as a competitor, and hope to put them out of business, while seeing Amazon.com as their best retail outlet, looking to partner with them in every way possible, and they could view the Amazon parent company not as an end to bookstores, but an end to discount mega-bookstores and the rescuer of indie shops.

8) They could set up their own testbed bookstore in Iowa, where they carried works from every publisher, in order to understand what works and what doesn’t. It would be worth it just for the sales and customer data. Likewise, the store’s online shop could grow into a real resource for reaching readers directly. This would be the launch store for debuting works.

9) This publisher could also realize that price tiers do not compete as much as they think by offering a mix of free titles, low-priced backlist, and fiction e-books that never cost more than $8.99. Non-fiction e-books never cost more than $12.99. None of their competitors in New York can hope to compete. They gobble market share; their authors are paid more; their customers love them; their employees are enjoying a better (if less hip) lifestyle.

10) The best part is that the advantages are immediate. The day the move is announced, stock prices shoot up. The quality of submissions changes overnight. The level of talent they can afford to hire improves just due to cost of living. And all the employees that don’t want to move and don’t embrace the new cultural identity would quit, allowing themselves to be replaced.

The first publisher who did this would trounce their competition. The problem is, this has never been a goal for the current publishing system. As much as the great people within publishing would love to make these moves, they aren’t free to do so. But it’s fun to think about what would be possible. A handful of passionate people can launch a brilliant startup these days because of the size of the system they create and the lack of institutional baggage. Flexibility and creativity are rewarded. Publishing is full of similarly passionate people, and the first company that unleashes this energy will truly contribute to our literary heritage. Rather than fight the progress being made on the other coast, some publishing house should move halfway there and emulate them.

Toronto Events

A few events this week while I’m in Toronto:

On Monday, I’ll be at the Lillian H. Smith Library on College St. at 7pm. You might want to call first to see if space is available.

On Tuesday at 10am, I’ll be doing a live Facebook chat all about Sand. The link is here.

Wednesday at 8am, The Guardian is doing a live Q&A about self-publishing. Should be interesting. Waiting on the link for that.

Thursday is the start of Toronto’s Book Summit. I’ll be on a panel at 2pm, I believe, called Non-Traditional Publishing Communities.

If you want to catch me today, I’ll be milling about Toronto Island!

Big Publishing is the Problem

A few weeks ago, I speculated that Hachette might be fighting Amazon for the power to price e-books where they saw fit, or what is known as Agency pricing. That speculation was confirmed this week in a slide from Hachette’s presentation to investors:

So, no more need to speculate over what this kerfuffle is about. Hachette is strong-arming Amazon and harming its authors because they want to dictate price to a retailer, something not done practically anywhere else in the goods market. It’s something US publishers don’t even do to brick and mortar booksellers. It’s just something they want to be able to do to Amazon.

The biggest problem with Hachette’s strategy is that Hachette knows absolutely nothing about retail pricing. That’s not their job. It’s not their area of expertise. They don’t sell enough product direct to consumers to understand what price will maximize their earnings. Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Apple have that data, not Hachette.

Beyond their ignorance of pricing strategy, Hachette also has a strong bias toward print books. Their existing relationships with major brick and mortar retailers gets in the way of their e-book pricing. This has been confirmed by my own publishers, who have admitted privately that they would like to experiment with digital pricing but don’t want to upset print book retailers. This puts their pricing strategy at odds with their investors’ needs, their authors’ needs, even their own profitability. In sum, they are making irrational decisions with their pricing philosophy. Hachette is making the same mistake that many publishers make, which is to think that harming Amazon somehow helps themselves.

The same presentation by Hachette to investors stressed the importance of DRM and the need to fight piracy. The presentation had very little to say about authors, which would be like an oil company giving a report to prospective investors and not discussing how its current wells are performing, the proven reserves it has on-hand, and what they are doing to discover new sources of oil. You know . . . the product they make their money from. Little is also said in the presentation about readers, possibly because Hachette doesn’t know who their readers are. Again, this is a presentation to investors by a company that doesn’t know its customers. Because they have too long relied on and been beholden to middleman distributors.

DRM, piracy, and high e-book prices are not what a publisher should be fighting for and bragging to its investors about. Many consumers aren’t even aware that Amazon isn’t the source of their e-book DRM. Publishers (and self-published authors) opt in or opt out of DRM as they see fit. Those of us who think about the paying customer first and foremost opt out, and we are rewarded with their repeat business and their advocacy. Those of us who don’t fret over piracy invest our time where it can actually achieve something. Publishers need to adopt these same policies with all haste. More importantly, they need to stop ripping off their authors and their customers when it comes to digital pricing.

We know publishers are ripping off artists and readers when it comes to e-books. Harpercollins released this slide one year ago this month:

As author Michael Sullivan broke down in this damning blog post, it shows publishers making $7.87 on a $14.99 e-book while the author only gets $2.62. For a hardback that costs twice as much at $27.99, the publisher makes $5.67 to the author’s $4.20. What used to be a fair split is now aggressive and indefensible as publishers make more money on a cheaper product while the author makes far less. Publishers are ripping off readers and writers as they shift to digital, and they are getting away with it. They are even winning the PR campaign against Amazon, a company that has fought for lower prices for its customers and higher pay for its authors.

Let me repeat: Publishers are waging a war here for higher prices and lower royalties. $14.99 is their ideal price for an e-book that costs nothing to print, warehouse, or ship. That’s twice what mass market paperbacks used to cost, which is what they are replacing. Reminds you of how cheaper-to-produce CDs suddenly cost twice as much as cassettes simply because they were new, doesn’t it?

Publishers are also colluding with one another to offer lockstep digital e-book royalties of 25%, which is indefensible. Their every actions, when it comes to DRM, to pricing, to selling direct, to offering abusive services like Author Solutions, screams to anyone with ears that they don’t care about the writers and they don’t care about the readers. It doesn’t matter what they say, it matters what they do. And what they do is charge as much as they can get away with and take as much of the split as they possibly can. And they work with their competitors and against their retail partners to pull it off.

Their own authors defend them, partly because they don’t spend any time investigating or understanding the business in which they are engaged. One Hachette author — a good friend of mine — said something to me the other day that made me realize they don’t understand how their books are ordered by retailers or delivered by the publisher. I suppose it’s okay to write books and not worry about the rest of the business, but this same author and friend had much to say about the Amazon/Hachette dispute, but without the basic understanding of how the relationship between those two companies works. Part of the blame for not knowing falls to publishers, who keep authors at bay and away from the business aspects of publishing. It was one of my primary complaints in that old blog post. Publishers need to embrace authors as business partners, and any author who hopes to make a career at this needs to be at least a little curious about how the industry works.

So we can see in their own slides that publishers do not have the best interests of their artists and consumers at heart. What about Amazon? Here we have a company that forsakes profits in order to pass along the savings to: A) Readers in the form of lower prices and to: B) Authors in the form of higher pay. That’s what we know today based on their actions. Of course, some interpret Amazon’s behavior as: “Once they are big enough, Amazon will gouge customers and take advantage of authors.” If you press on numbers, you might hear that Amazon will raise e-book prices to $12.99 one day and pay authors a miserly 25% of gross. Both of which are better than what publishers offer right now.

This bears repeating: The very worst that Amazon might do, in some hypothetical future, according to their fiercest critics, is still better than what publishers brag to their investors about doing today.

Instead of operating under the hope that publishers will improve their business practices in the future and that Amazon will reverse course and start harming writers and readers once they gain more market share, why aren’t we condemning publishers for being the problem right now while celebrating Amazon for all they are doing to expand reading habits and to provide for artists? Why?

I think two reasons: The first is that we equate publishers to bookstores and Amazon to the loss of bookstores, and we all love bookstores. This is fallacious reasoning, though. Online shopping has impacted all of retail. These changes were inevitable, and they are the result of consumer choice. How those changes played out could have been publishers colluding with a distributor to price digital works higher than their paper counterparts. That would have been bad. Amazon leading those changes with their pricing philosophy has been good.

The second reason for the anti-Amazon bias is that some see Amazon as the giant and little old publishers as the underdog. That’s also wrong. The publishing and bookselling arm of Amazon is likely smaller than the combined earnings of the Big 5 publishers. Amazon makes a pittance on every e-book sold, while the Big 5 make out like bandits. Also, to say that these wings of Amazon’s operations are owned by a larger entity is to ignore that the same is true for the major publishing houses. If anything, Amazon is the clear upstart and underdog here. They are new to the market, rapidly innovating, blacklisted by brick and mortar retailers, setting up shop away from the established players, and ganged up on in an illegal manner.

I’ll go one step further and state something both outrageous and obvious: If the Big 5 had gotten together twenty years ago and DREAMED UP an ideal business partnership, one that would increase their distribution, provide excellent customer service to their readers, improve the livelihood of their authors, keep their backlists viable and books from going out of print, reduce their 50% return rate from bookstores to 4%, provide next-day and even same-day delivery, all while only costing them 30% instead of the 45% they lose to bookstores, they couldn’t have done better than what Amazon did for them.

Soak that in. Publishers should have engineered Amazon from the ground-up. A company that invests in distribution networks for their products rather than pocketing profits. And instead of celebrating all the hundreds of benefits, like pre-orders and customer reviews and the savings on print runs and returns that Amazon’s algorithms provide, they are trying to figure out how to put their best resource out of business. It boggles the mind. Like those authors who fear Amazon might take royalties away tomorrow, so are happy to give up those royalties today, publishers are siding with companies that are hurting them today out of fear of their greatest ally getting even more market share tomorrow. And readers and writers are the victims of this illogical behavior.

What is the solution? As a writer, the solution is to retain ownership of your rights. This has never been more important than it is today. E-book royalty rates are going to move to 50% of net. I know from some insiders that this is already happening for top-name authors and hot new acquisitions. Selling your manuscript now for half of what it will be worth in the very near future is a bad move. It takes years for books to come to market with a traditional publisher. If that is your publishing goal, exercise a bit more patience. Hold on to that manuscript (or self-publish it) while you write the next. Let the market come to you.

The other option is to embrace a smaller press that has more flexibility. Online print book sales and e-book adoption have helped level the playing field for small publishers. They are becoming more viable every single day. These are the true Davids. They now have the tools and ability to see their works sell to a wide audience and win awards. I put them as the second best option behind self-publishing, and I include Amazon’s imprints in this category. They offer higher royalty rates and terms similar to small presses, though some have grumbled lately that Amazon’s imprints are becoming more and more like the Big 5, so watch what you sign.

For readers, keep doing what you’re doing. Self-publishing and small presses are booming because you care about great stories, not where they come from. You are the disruptive force in this industry, and I say that with every ounce of love I can muster. Keep disrupting by doing what you do best: Read. Write reviews. Share your enthusiasm. Infect others. Spread the joy of this greatest of pastimes. And we will trust that those who cater to your needs and to the needs of the artists you admire will be the ones who come out on top. All others will need to change their ways or perish. If they do the former, let’s cheer for them. If they persist in the latter, let’s not be sad to see them go.

About my biases

I am a biased dude. We all are biased to some degree. Perhaps even to a great degree. Our experiences, our upbringing, our parents, our peers, all influence the information we take in and how we choose to sort that information. It influences what we readily believe and what we vociferously doubt.

I unabashedly support Amazon. I have for longer than I’ve been a full-time writer. When I worked in an independent bookstore, I used Amazon’s third-party sellers to secure out-of-print books for customers. I also steered customers to Amazon for used textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars less than I could get them from the publisher. My thought was that Amazon did some things better than we could, and we did some things better than they could. I knew we could coexist.

Before I started at that bookstore, Amazon didn’t even exist in our computer system as a vender. I had to create that entry. It didn’t take long before the receiving crew knew that any box with a smile on it went straight to me. I was the only employee who used them in the years that I worked there. I was the only employee that spoke up in defense of them. As far as I know, I’m the only person even now who points out that Amazon is crushing big box discount bookstores to the great benefit of independent bookstores.

The point is that my bias does not come from the number of books I’ve personally sold through Amazon. That bias was in place long before, and it was only strengthened in working for a small bookstore. I’m sure there are those who disagree with my opinions who would love to discount what I say about publishing as having some monetary motivation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When Data Guy and I published our first report on AuthorEarnings.com, we took a massive risk in upsetting people at Amazon for revealing as much of their sales data as we could scrape. Data Guy remained anonymous partly because of this possibility.We did what we thought was right, not what we thought would benefit us. At great expense, I hosted the information away from any listing of my books. There is no self-promotional aspect to my punditry. I would make far more money investing this time in writing fiction, but I care more about change than I do about dollars.

I have a history of working against my own interests. There are major e-book distributors that I don’t publish with at all because of their policies. One of these distributors would pay me, at a minimum, six figures a year. I forego that money out of principle. How many anti-Amazon authors demand that their books not be available on Amazon? I know of one publisher who made that decision, and they have seen growth since they made that choice. I have respect for anyone who stands by their principles, even if I disagree with those principles.

I don’t know many authors who would forego six figures a year based on their principles. It helps to have an awesome wife and agent who feel the same way. As a team, we have turned down more than one 7-figure deal that didn’t improve contract clauses. My agent and I stated as a goal, when I signed on with her, that we wanted to help publishers make progress in these areas. That’s my bias right there.

I’ve also seen those who disagree with me point out that I publish with major houses. They ignore the fact that I only do this when it means progress on major contractual policies. I’m happy to work with publishers. I’m dying to see them partner with more authors. I don’t want to see them go out of business. Which brings me to the final fallacy I see when people disagree with my stance and attack me rather than showing me where I’m wrong:

I didn’t get into self-publishing because I was rejected at major publishers. My first manuscript was out to agents and small presses for two weeks before I got my first request for a partial read. A week later, I had two requests for full reads. A few days after that, I had my first offer. I didn’t wait to hear back from agents. I had to send replies to a few who expressed interest to let them know I already had an offer. I published with a small press and was offered a contract for the sequel. That was when I decided to self-publish. Since then, I have turned down offers from agents and publishers alike. I am not trying to wreak vengeance on those who dissed me. It never happened. I’m advocating for change before I will partner with them. And I advise other writers to do the same.

It sucks that any of this bears mentioning. But I plan on working with partners in the future whose ideals align with my own. If that keeps pushing me closer and closer to working with distributors like Amazon, it makes it more difficult — not easier — to speak out in their defense. Such opinions only hold weight if they are impartial. I look at my success on these platforms as being aligned with my biases, but the causality is opposite what some claim.

I throw all my weight into the platforms that I admire the most. When I link to products, I link to those sources. When I publish, I focus my energies in one direction. I pulled my books off another POD distributor because of their onerous fee structure and website GUI. I don’t advocate for Amazon because I make money through their services, I make money through Amazon’s services for the very same reasons that I advocate for them. Similarly, when I worked at an independent bookshop and partnered with Amazon, our sales numbers went up every year during the worst of the recession.

WOOL: The Graphic Novel

Release day!

The first issue of the WOOL graphic novel is here. So excited to see this out in the world. If you pre-ordered, you’ll notice that the first issue was delivered to your Kindle or Kindle App today. The next five issues will hit every two weeks. Once they’re all out, a collected graphic novel will be released.

In addition to the virtual editions, individual paper comics should be hitting stands before too long. Can’t wait to see those. And now, to whet your appetite, I’ve got some of the first rough sketches Brox made as he was reading the novel and thinking about these characters. Enjoy. More sketches after the break. First, Holston and Solo:

Your typical IT worker and a porter:

 

 

 

Courtnee and Jenkins: