Hugh Howey's Blog, page 38

Self-publishing will save literary fiction

An interesting piece on The Bookseller today about literary fiction. The worry from some agents and publishers is that unique and daring voices are going to fall silent because of the changes in the publishing industry (fewer bookstores, lower advances, less risk-taking). The idea seems to be that without the funds to support these writers, the works will never materialize, and literature will suffer a great loss.

I think the opposite is going to happen. The future of literary fiction will be owned and operated by digital natives — writers who grow up posting on blogs, debating on forums, posting on Facebook and Twitter, and all the myriad forms of self-publishing that we don’t seem to label “self-publishing.” Learning how to turn a manuscript into both a physical book and an e-book at almost no expense to the author takes a weekend of fiddling around. And that’s from someone who learned to type on a typewriter. Digital natives are going to be both literary and technologically savvy. It won’t be long (it’s probably already happening) before the next great voice is putting her work out there . . . simply because she can.

What goes unsaid but seems implied in the message that literary works will die without a publishers’ support or bookstores in which to shelve them is that we write literary works for the pleasure of publishers and bookstores. These works are rarely even written for the pleasure of the audience. The three works of my own that I consider the most literary are the three that I tell people *not* to read. I wrote them for myself. I wrote them because I had to. Because it would have pained me *not* to write them.

Works such as this have been penned in composition books by others and shelved, never to be seen. Digital natives won’t do this. They might post the entire work on a blog. They might text the entire work to strangers, one line at a time. They could craft these works on WattPad for public purview. They might typeset the work at a book crafting workshop and bind the pages into a jewel of stitched leather to be read by no more than one person at a time. They might distribute their masterpiece on thumbdrives. But they will write. It’s what we must do.

Artists have relied on the largesse of patrons for centuries. Increasingly, those patrons will become the general public. Or, as the cost of production and distribution drop to zero, artists will realize the patron has become moot. Anyone today can carve out enough time to work on their masterpiece. And that’s why masterpieces will continue to be written.

The final advantage digital natives will have is the absence of a self-publishing stigma. Soon (this is already true for many) self-publishing will be seen as the purer artform. No tampering with style or voice. No gatekeeper. No need even for monetization. Doing it yourself has all the allure of the hacker culture, the local culture, the maker culture. Doing it for a corporation has all the allure of . . . vanity, perhaps?

Great works are being penned at this very moment. They are waiting to be discovered. The problem for the agents and publishers who like to plant their flag upon such works is this: In the future, it’ll be the reader who gets there first.

The May 2014 Author Earnings Report

The latest report just went live. This was as exciting for us as the first 50K report we ran, because we had no idea which way the needle might move, if it moved at all. We are now able to look at how e-book sales move over time. As we get more of these daily snapshots, we’ll be able to gauge longer-term trends. A week from today, we will release a supplemental report to look at tenured vs. newer authors and the size of the publishing middle class. As before, our data is available for download, so anyone can play with these numbers.

 

Being Forced to Sit in the Backlist

Imagine selling two million books, having half a dozen of your novels hit the New York Times bestseller list, being inundated with thousands of fan emails every month, and then having someone call you an “aspiring writer.”

That’s what happened in New Orleans this weekend, when the planners of the RT Booklovers Convention decided to place self-published authors in a dinky room off to the side while the traditionally published authors sat at tables in the grand ballroom.

Authors like Liliana Hart, who is at the top of the game not just in the romance genre but in all of publishing, was labeled an “Aspiring Author.”

RT is a major bookselling convention, a place that publishers expect to sell boatloads of titles. The bookselling, I believe, is handled by Barnes & Noble, a company with a history of segregating self-published authors on their online bestseller lists and who has no incentive to promote authors they don’t stock. So the fault here is not with the authors in the other room; it’s with the organizers and the undoubted pressure they feel from monied interests.

So I’d like to propose a bit of a promise to our future selves: Twenty years from now, when a new generation of more tolerant and inclusive artists finds themselves in the position to organize events like this, let’s not be dicks like our forefathers. All of those authors deserved to be treated the same. You can’t force readers to line up equally at every table, but you can make sure the tables are in the same damn room.

I’m sure most of the authors in both of those rooms would agree. This career can be tough. It’s why we have to be good to one another. And yes, there are people in powerful positions who don’t yet understand the change that’s afoot. We should absolutely try to convince them to see the light and appreciate all writers for what they contribute. But more importantly, we have to make sure that when we’re the ones calling the shots, we don’t make the same mistakes.

There’s room enough for everyone. And the days are numbered for those who don’t agree.

Publishing is More than Books

The disruption of the publishing industry can be seen far beyond mere books. Trade publishing (general fiction and non-fiction books) are heavily impacted and get most of the attention, but think of all the other forms of publishing that have been hammered, some of them into near non-existence. Once you start looking, you see this impact everywhere:

There’s map and atlas publishers, which have been decimated by the GPS units in our cars and smartphones.
There are the phone books that we now throw straight into the recycling bin, replaced by Google and the like.
There are the video game guidebooks that have been replaced by forums, GameFAQs, and other online resources.
The comic book industry has seen triple digit growth in digital comics, and print has seen declines.
Newspapers and magazines are getting hit hard, replaced by online versions, blogs, even Facebook.
Travel guides are giving way to TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google.
I remember when Barnes & Noble had an entire section for computer books, with several aisles dedicated to thick works on every OS and programming language. These resources have moved online. It’s hard to find such books in bookstores anymore.
Dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias have been crushed by wikipedia and quick online searches.
Trade journals and academic journals are moving to digital.
As are sales catalogs. Including trade publishing catalogs, which have moved to a program called Edelweiss (and others).
There’s also the publication of materials for other entertainment mediums, like music CD and film DVD inserts, which have been replaced by digital album covers.
Fanzines are now fan blogs.
Poetry chapbooks and literary journals are going digital at major universities.
University textbooks are both going digital and being replaced by adaptive learning programs and online resources like the Kahn Academy.

What am I missing? This list is just off the top of my head. Some of these are minor, of course. Others are entire industries. The effect the internet is having on publishing cannot be fully appreciated, I don’t think. Publishing has long been about the transmission of language and knowledge. Digital does this better in so many ways. In fact, trade book publishing is somewhat protected by nostalgia and our fondness of books (it’s certainly true for me). While we wring our hands over the disruption in trade books, entire other swaths of the publishing industry are collapsing.

James Ollier’s LIFEBOATS

This is freaking insane. Several musicians have gotten in touch with me to share their WOOL-inspired music (and even entire albums), but this is the first with lyrics that reference the silos. James Ollier just Tweeted that he wrote this after reading the WOOL trilogy. His voice is haunting. This is just my kind of music. I can’t thank James enough or praise him adequately for his work. Brilliant. Love to see this playing during the film one day.

Head over to James’s Facebook page and give it a like.

A Quaint System for Publishing

It won’t be long before we look back and marvel at how bestselling books are produced today. The system of remote production by disparate artists, followed by their discovery by publishing houses, won’t be around forever. There are too many inefficiencies, lost opportunities, and glaring weaknesses in this system. This really hit me in Berlin at the Klopotek Publishing Minds conference.

Nigel Newton, chief executive of Bloomsbury, gave a talk that seemed to originate from a decade in the past. Nigel can’t mention books or industry news without bringing up their publication of HARRY POTTER, as if there’s anything to learn from a once-in-a-millenium publishing surprise. What really floored me was a discussion we had in an executive roundtable. I mentioned the danger publishers face for building up IPs that they don’t own. And the publisher of possibly the most valuable book IP in the game didn’t quite grasp the opportunity lost.

Imagine if Bloomsbury owned the world of Hogwarts. What if a new book was coming out next week about a young girl entering her first year at the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Can you imagine the lines that would be forming? The jolt in the arm to the publishing industry as a whole? I would like to argue that not only is there a different way to publish popular fiction in the future; I’m going to try to convince you that it’s already happening.

Let’s detour for a moment and look at the way other popular storytelling mediums work. TV shows, which one could argue represent the height of storytelling right now, are created by teams of people. If done properly, more minds make for a deeper and richer story. Video games and films are produced the same way. Music acts have been put together by managing producers. Look at the way American Idol and other talent shows guide and create brands with some semblance of ownership. It is a rare case in many of these industries where a solitary figure creates in isolation and then brings their work to a producer or distributor. And yet, most books work this way. They don’t have to. And they haven’t always.

Carolyn Keene is a famous example of the power of engineered worlds. This was the pseudonym for the many authors who wrote Nancy Drew stories. The Hardy Boys series was written with a similar mechanism. Writers were hired; they were given assignments and deadlines; and they were expected to produce. They didn’t waste their time writing blog posts and filming videos with their dogs in the background. They worked. Like TV and video game producers.

The most important consequence of this was that the publisher owned the franchise. Not just the rights, but the IP itself. The current system has publishers building up the reputation of the author—the author has become the brand—which leaves the publisher powerless to direct the flow of the IP. Authors can delay. Or miss deadlines. Or stop writing altogether. They can move off to other genres, leaving billions on the table in the case of Bloomsbury. They meddle in film, TV, and video game adaptations. We generally either get in the way or don’t get enough done.

If you think collaboration is impossible when it comes to the single narrative of books, you’d be wrong. The most successful writer in the industry today, James Patterson, employs a method similar to what Edward Stratemeyer concocted for Nancy Drew. And the number of bestselling dyads includes Preston & Child, Niven & Pournelle, Charles Todd, and many others. JA Konrath has used this method of production. But the most incredible and lucrative example comes from a different sort of book. Comic books.

Marvel is the perfect example of the power of owning IP. They can continue to produce, plugging in new writers as others come and go. They now oversee most of their film adaptations, which make billions at the box office. Marvel is owned by Disney Studios, another example of this power. And to really highlight the lost opportunities and how this transition will work, Disney recently acquired the Star Wars IP from Lucas. The originator’s hesitancy to exploit the film potential is now another trilogy in development, with another three origin films also slated for release. And I’ll be one of the millions who lines up to see everything they produce.

Can artistic projects be ruined by too many chefs? Undoubtedly. They can also be ruined by artists who lose their way, their inspiration, their focus, their drive.

In my fourth month at New Harpercollins, I’m going to do something both old and new. We’re going to hire a handful of talented writers who work for us. They come to the offices, sit in a room, and they don’t procrastinate. They are going to begin outlining a brand new IP. It could be an epic fantasy world, or a complex web of romances, or a gritty western, or a new spy hero, or technical thriller . . . but I’m going to go with a science fiction universe.

They’ll brainstorm as if they’re making a game world. A world rich with history and texture. And then we’ll outline the entire rough plot of the universe, figure out its heroes and villains, and structure the novels to come. With a dozen authors working in teams, the goal will be a new novel in this universe to release every two months. The investment will be for a dozen novels over two years, similar to how TV shows are given a chance to take root. If there is no traction during the releases, we’ll pivot or look at our marketing strategy. If no traction after two years, we’ll launch another world. Or we could employ a “pilot” model as TV does, though I think it would be better to publish a trilogy rather than a single book.

The goal is to build a vast library of material to draw from. Writers can come and go. These writers will be earning a solid living, working in dynamic teams, enjoying stability but also some creative freedoms. Publishers could exploit their most popular universes with film, video games, apps, comics, TV shows, cartoons. Decades from now, one of these worlds could have the richness of the Marvel universe. And the publisher would own that universe.

Again, the top earning worlds today work much like this. It makes the old system of waiting to discover a story, building that author’s brand up to the point that they have all the power, and then being unable to profit from the IP seem awfully quaint. It’s such a powerful idea that I’ve toyed with testing it out. A group of creatives could do this just as easily as a publishing house, as long as the IP was controlled by a company and not the artists, so the latter could come and go as they see fit. Hell, I’ve already got a new universe in mind. It’s fun to think how much more awesome that universe would be if it were in more minds. And how great readers would have it if books were rolling out every two months.

Amazon and Hachette Go to War

Several of my friends are caught up in this battle between Hachette and Amazon. My heart goes out to them and to the readers who are impacted by this. The same thing happened to me last year as Simon & Schuster and B&N couldn’t agree on co-op money (the dollars spent to ensure high visibility placement of books in stores). While on book tour for WOOL, you couldn’t find the title in 99% of Barnes & Noble stores. It was a crushing feeling. And now it’s happening again.

What I find fascinating is the increased coverage this time around. The NYT and Publishers Weekly have published scathing reports accusing Amazon of being a bully. I would have loved some of that directed at B&N last year. You see, Barnes & Noble was holding authors and readers hostage in order to wring more cash out of publishers, because they are having a hard time making that money by actually selling books. They got a pass for this. What is Amazon up to?

The best guess is that e-book discounting is at the heart of the negotiations. Amazon wants the ability to discount e-books as low as it likes, even losing money on the titles if they choose. The publisher (and author) get their full cut, but Amazon takes a beating. This is likely to out-compete other e-book distributors and to continue the adoption of e-books. Publishers want to keep e-book prices as high as possible. In dealing with my own publishers, I have learned that most of this pressure comes from brick and mortar bookstores, who are left out of the e-book revolution. (The PW article backs this up).

Bookstores threaten to not carry a publisher’s books if they price the e-book too low. Publishers demand that Amazon charge more for their e-books or limit the discounting, even though it doesn’t impact how much publishers or authors earn. So what you have is a company fighting for lower prices for customers, while keeping the pay for publishers and authors the same, and they are evil. While B&N holds publishers hostage just to rake in more cash to present customers not with what bookstore employees wish to highlight, but what they are paid to highlight. The backwardness of this PR war are baffling to me. Until you look at where it originates: PW is a weekly rag for bookstores. The NYT made their stance known when they stopped including the e-book bestsellers in their Sunday Book Review. The masses get their info from the traditional machine, and so they side with mafia tactics on the one hand and cry out against a distributor trying to keep their prices down.

The real losers are the authors and readers, of course. I hope this gets resolved soon. It’ll be a great day when publishers realize they stand to lose a lot by allowing bookstores to dictate their business decisions. Especially when it’s the large chains that put so many mom and pop joints out of business over the past decades.

The Next Author Earnings Report

More Mail Time!

Picture Book Update!

More of a tease than an update, I’m afraid. Nidhi Chanani just sent over the rough sketches for our children’s picture book collaboration, and I’m doing a happy dance in Berlin. So crazy to see this character come to life, just in her sketches. I really believe in this story, but I knew it would take some spectacular artwork to make the book shine, and Nidhi is exceeding expectations. You all are going to love this book. I can’t wait to show it to you.