Hugh Howey's Blog, page 39

The Secret to Following Someone

One of my favorite movies of all-time is The Zero Effect. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Absolutely brilliant. One of the best scenes has Daryl Zero (played by Bill Pullman) explaining the trick to following someone without getting caught. It’s simple, he says. You just get where they’re going before they do. The obvious joke here is that it’s impossible to know where they’re going, which is why they need to be followed. But Pullman’s character in the film is a Sherlock-Holmes-sort-of-genius, and he expects that everyone ought to know where everyone else is going at all times. Just as a matter of course.

But we’re not all Daryl Zero. We can only guess at the future. We are resigned to follow.

A few years ago, I put forth a zany idea about where we in the book industry were heading: I thought there might come a day when agents and publishers would scour bestselling self-published books to wrangle in new talent. Doing so would allow them to mitigate risk; it would offload the arduous task of managing the slushpile by crowdsourcing it; and it would allow market research and experimentation to take place on someone else’s dime and time (the self-published authors’ and the readers’).

It wasn’t a Daryl Zero worthy prediction, even though it ended up coming true. The reason it wasn’t a great prediction was because it was too obvious. This discovery method was already taking place in other artistic forms. It was how music acts were discovered. Self-produced musicians would claw their way up, starting with gigs that lost or cost them money, all with the hopes of being seen and discovered by the right people. Musicians who wrote their own music without guidance, came up with band names, marketing ideas, logos, jacket art, even produced and recorded their own discs and handled direct-to-consumer transactions with fans.

Authors didn’t have a stage for their own gigs until e-books gained wide adoption. Once that happened, the rest was inevitable. Everything that musicians, photographers, comedians, fine artists and the like had been doing for generations was now open to writers. We could see where literature was heading because of the well-trodden path laid out before them.

By being at the forefront of this transition, Amazon has reaped most of the benefit. And not just monetarily, though that’s worth mentioning before we get to the meat of this rambling blog post. Amazon enjoys higher margins on self-published e-books. Before costs, they make 30% – 65% on every sale of a self-published work. For major publishers, their margin on e-books are likely less than 10%. They lose money on some of these transactions, just to hold the price down and ease adoption of e-readers. Their overall margin with traditionally published books might be under 5%. It certainly isn’t anywhere close to 30%.

But that’s just money. Where Amazon really wins is with the data they collect. When Amazon purchased Goodreads, it seemed to me that they were mostly purchasing the reviewing, buying, and reading habits of its users. Data like that is worth a lot of money. And its value is only going to go up in the future. This data makes it possible to recommend more items that customers will want to purchase. This is the most important trick in retail. It was my job as a bookseller. Keep this in mind, as I’ll get back to it when I posit how someone can win the next revolution in retail.But first, I’d like to digress and point out what might be an equally powerful advantage Amazon wins from their data: Not only are they seeing what customers buy, they’re seeing how authors sell. They see the next big thing before agents and publishers can. In fact, they can often see an author’s career trajectory take an upward turn before the author is even aware of it. Here is where I was wrong those years ago with my prediction. Agents and publishers aren’t going to be able to scour the bestseller lists for self-published up-and-comers, because soon they’ll find that Amazon has snagged them first. This is the power of Amazon’s vertical integration of its own publishing imprints. And it has only just begun.

I get a lot of emails from authors who are weighing publishing deals from various publishers. These emails invariably include sales numbers for reference. What I’ve noticed lately is that authors are getting offers from Amazon imprints much earlier in their career trajectories. The sales thresholds for a publisher’s interest aren’t getting more stringent. If anything, they seem to be getting softer. Amazon is simply getting the scoop. Which makes sense: they see the inflection in sales rates, incoming reviews, and read completion rates, before anyone else can.

This advantage of data is impossible to overstate. Employing hindsight (that clever genius), pundits have pointed out that Random House or a collection of publishers should have gotten into the e-reader device and direct e-book sales game early on. Rather than wait on a competitor to disrupt their business, they should have taken a page from Apple’s playbook and been the ones to disrupt. I’ll go one step further and use the power of hindsight to suggest something even more audacious: Publishers should have been the ones creating FREE self-publishing platforms. They should have created WattPad or their own version of Kindle Direct Publishing. Both offer ways to discover and profit from rising talent. Both offer ways to collect sales data from customers rather than relying on the infrequent and imprecise dribs and drabs of data that they get from retailers.

The investment costs for getting into the direct e-book sales game aren’t that enormous. It mostly takes web development and server space; publishers already owned the valuable content, all those manuscripts, which cost them a lot of money to acquire. Infinite numbers of copies of that content can be made and distributed for fractions of a penny per copy all across the word. But the chances of success in this market have dwindled to almost nothing, such is the dominance of established platforms. It is probably too late for direct sales from publishers. But there might still be time and demand to compete with a WattPad-type initiative. It would require major publishers to see self-publishing as a developmental program within their larger goal of discovering and acquiring talent.

I doubt this will happen, but it could. Aspiring writers would love to feel that they are in the Penguin Random House Development League. But the plan thus far from publishers has been to partner with vanity presses and attempt to wring money out of aspiring authors, the exact opposite direction they should have gone. The allure of quick profits got in the way of seeing what Amazon saw, which is the value of reader and author data. It’s an advantage that I don’t think can be overcome.

As publishers scramble to play catch-up, maybe they should consider Daryl Zero’s advice about following people. That’s what I like to do, however clumsily. I spend my time thinking about the next round, because retail is going to continue to change. Facebook will play a huge role in future retail, as a billion+ people spend much of their free time (and work time) connecting with friends and family, sharing suggestions, and placing themselves in front of ads. Google and Facebook are both sitting on mountains of data, and they are working on ways to leverage this advantage in retail. The book industry needs to think of ways to compete in this arena. Direct email campaigns are today the most powerful marketing tool self-publishers possess, but it requires getting email addresses from people who actually want to hear from us. How are publishers doing this?

They could start by offering backlist books at unbeatable prices, but only to subscribers or registered users. This would allow them to begin amassing their own big data, not just in reading habits but in customer contact info. Free e-book campaigns would be another great way of acquiring this information, especially if they could tie those free e-books to their own iPhone and Android apps in order to measure actual reading time, rate of completion, and gather reader reviews. Worrying about giving away content is shortsighted, when that content could be traded for this crucial data. Without that data, publishers don’t stand a chance competing in the arena that’s coming next.

What is coming next? I believe the future of retail is a shopping mall that caters to what we want, when we want it. Imagine walking through a virtual mall where the only other people we see are those we invite, and the only stores that exist are the ones we enjoy browsing. The future is an Amazon that knows not only that Mother’s Day is coming up, but what I got my mom last year, whether she returned it, how she rated the gift, and what my brother and sister are thinking about getting her. Future retail will suggest birthday gifts for our friends, serving as a reminder that those birthdays are coming up. We will never miss another anniversary. And we won’t be shown anything that our gift recipient has already bought for themselves. Instead, we’ll see items whose product pages they lingered on the longest. Even if they don’t add it to their wishlist, we’ll know what caught their eye.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google are all well poised to dominate in this future of retail, but booksellers and publishers could compete and carve out a niche if they threw their combined weight into the problem. There are some things physical bookstores still do better than online stores, and that’s the curation of things that we don’t know we’ll like until we see them. Online algorithms and interfaces are only so good. Until both get a whole lot better, it’ll still be more enjoyable for many people to browse a physical bookstore. The company or companies that win the next round will sort out the interface and algorithm issues first. It could be anybody. But I’m betting it won’t be the people who are hoping that change stops happening. Nor will it be the people who think most of the change has already taken place, and now they just need to hold their ground. It’ll be the people who see in advance and help steer all the change that’s coming.

The next revolution will mostly be a radical change in interface coupled with an incremental improvement in algorithms. The next interface is going to be virtual reality. Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus—a VR headset manufacturer originally funded by Kickstarter—was a brilliant move by a company well poised to become the future of the shopping mall. They have the data, our relationship trees, the ads we click on, the products we discuss, our birthdays and our anniversaries, everything needed to recommend the right product at the right time.

Facebook will know what foods we eat and enjoy, because we send them pictures of these items as well as our reviews; they just need image recognition engines and text parsers to make use of that data. They’ll know when our cars break down and that we need a mechanic or a spare part, because we complained about it on their site. Google will use maps data to know our route to and from work and remind us to get a coffee or a healthy breakfast. Amazon might know we’re going on vacation and have a product we ordered meet us there. These companies see the future, but there’s a lot of space to carve out. There are hundreds of millions of people who are going to always love a good book, and a good percentage are going to discover that all the convenience of online shopping can be married to the discovery process of a good bookstore when the two are merged by virtual reality.

Imagine a bookstore that knows your family, upcoming special dates and events, when you are shopping for yourself versus when you are shopping for your spouse. Imagine being able to “pick up” the books on display to read any page, check the back jacket, and then choose whether to buy the e-book, the paperback, the hardback, or even have some of the audiobook read aloud to you. Imagine a book trailer that pops up over the display of books, or a video window that shows an interview with or a message from the author. Or what if the books on the display change as you browse? You pick up one of Patricia Fitzgerald’s books, and the rest of her titles appear on the table, each on individual stands, to show you what else she’s written.

You could even summon a virtual bookseller to join you in your store to ask them questions. Amazon does this now with their Kindle Fire device. But imagine summoning a bookseller and being routed one who has read at least some of the books you are browsing. If you are standing in your own personal crime/thriller section, you would get a bookseller who enjoys those titles. The convenience of the machine will be married to the expertise of the human.

The company that creates this environment will begin collecting a new source of powerful data, and that’s our browsing patterns. How did we find what we ended up purchasing? How long did we linger over one book rather than another? How can we tailor our virtual bookstore for that customer’s next visit? How can we use their reading habit data so we know what they finished and what they gave up on?

Is it possible for brick and mortar stores and traditional publishers to compete in this space? I think they can. They just need to summon the willpower to make the early investments. It starts by gathering data on physical sales. Way back in 2007, Boekhandels Groep Nederland, the largest book distributor and retailer in the Netherlands, initiated an ambitious revamping of their physical stores. By working with Centraal Bookhuis, their printer, they began embedding RFID chips into every single book shipped. These chips could identify each book to remote sensors.

The advantages were enormous. It meant receiving books by passing the entire box through a scanner in the bookstore. It meant RFID antennas in the shelves could let customers and employees know where every book was in the store, even if the books was misshelved. Shrinkage (loss to theft) went down 60%, as the tags were more difficult to find and remove. Special order books were diverted at the receiving stage immediately and went to customers more quickly, increasing the chances of them using the store for future orders. Inventory at these stores is now done at the push of a button rather than shutting down for two days and scanning every single book. The labor cost savings have been enormous.

RFID has come way down in price, and it’s the only conceivable way for physical sales to be tracked the way online sales are. Every year that printers, publishers, and bookstores fail to adopt this technology and create industry standards for sharing the resulting data is a year of information and progress lost. Publishers could see what books are selling, in what quantities, where, and at what price (full or discounted). They could see demand for various formats. They could even do things that aren’t yet done online as effectively as they should be, like A/B testing of variations in cover art or back jacket material by supplying two different editions to two different regions. Simplifying the receiving process would result in less damaged books being comped and returned. Simplifying inventory and the ability to find an in-shop book would result in more sales.

(An aside: I was in London with Bella Andre a few weeks ago, and we went in search of one of her books for our display at the London Book Fair. The first shop we entered told us a nearby shop had six copies of the book. We went there and Bella watched as employees tore the store apart, only to come up empty. The books could not be found. Replacement copies weren’t going to be ordered, because of the six their computers said were in stock! Those six would never sell because they couldn’t be found. The problem would last until the yearly inventory came back around and the item was zeroed out. My store manager Bill and I saw this happen all the time at our shop, resulting in lost sales for us and the publisher.)

Disrupting how bookstores and publishers do business is a daunting and expensive task. Waiting for someone else to do it is dangerous and foolish. Future bookstores will be built around sales data and knowledge about customer reading habits. Right now, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are amassing such data. Publishers should be thinking about how they can get in this game. Creating writing communities to discover talent as early as possible would be a good idea. Giving away e-books using apps in order to glean reading habits, e-mail addresses, and selection algorithms would be a good idea. Integrating RFID into the supply chain as has been done in the Netherlands would be a good idea. There will still be a lot of catching up to do in other areas, but it might be time to start thinking about the future. And getting there first.

Goals vs. Dreams

My goal was to write and complete a single novel. My dream was to be an international bestselling author.

After I wrote that novel, my goal was to get my work published by any means necessary. My dream was to be offered a million bucks for my manuscript.

After I got published, my goal was to sell 5,000 copies in my lifetime. My dream was to sell millions.

While I was selling my way to 5,000 copies, my goal was to write two novels a year for ten years. My dream was to write three books a year for the rest of my life.

Looking back, it’s difficult to remember what my goals were and what were my dreams. It takes effort, especially now that the two have converged. But it’s worth doing. It’s something I feel all artists should do. I paid careful attention to the distinction between my goals and my dreams while trying to make it as a writer. The constant reminder kept me sane, kept me hungry, kept me motivated, kept me from losing my zeal. And now that distinction is crucial as I balance my encouragement to other writers. I want aspiring writers to dream; I also want them to know what to realistically expect.

It’s a dangerous thing, living our dreams. It’s easy to confuse all our good fortune for careful planning, to think that we got here because we once pictured ourselves here. My goals are the reason I’m here, but they only got me so far. My goals were realistic; luck did the rest. I still contend that anyone who applies themselves and puts in the time and effort can achieve my goals, which are listed above. But it’s unrealistic for any of us to expect my corresponding dreams. It’s also a bad idea to go around telling people to stop dreaming. We have to learn to do both, and that’s not easy.

My habit was this: I would allow myself to dream as I lie in bed at night in those long minutes or hours before I fell asleep. That’s when I would try to calm my flitting thoughts by focusing on a single narrative. Ever since I was very young, these narratives have consisted of extremely embarrassing and hubristic fantasies—dream-worlds where I could have anything I wanted. Such narratives, utterly free of conflict, induced both boredom and contentment, a combination that put me fast asleep.

I dreamed of building a space elevator and colonizing Mars. I dreamed of sailing adventures that took me around the world Joshua Slocum style. I dreamed that somehow I had written a dozen novels without my family knowing about it (thus skipping the boring bit of actually writing the novels), and out of nowhere I became an international bestselling author. In high school, I would dream of a girl moving in next door, a bookworm, and we would fall madly in love and play chess and write poetry and all the other things that explained why I rarely had actual girlfriends.

Like I said: embarrassing stuff to admit. And very confusing later in life, now that some of these idle wishes have come true. It would be easy for me to pretend that my dreams were somehow my goals and that I made them come true. But that’s not the case. I dreamed of being a bestselling author back before I’d written a single manuscript. That dream and my eventual goals share a common origin, a love of books and storytelling, but they don’t share the same odds of manifesting themselves in reality. I had realistic goals. I also had enjoyable dreams. We can have both.

The secret to having both is knowing when you are dreaming and when you are planning. There are several dangers that befall us when we neglect this distinction. When we confuse dreams for goals, we set ourselves up for disappointment. But when we limit our dreams to what is realistic, we deny ourselves both joy and inspiration.

Motivation comes from inspiration. Goals are the mortals bred from the gods of dreams. Bound to this earth, mortal goals still have godlike blood flowing through their veins, and so they can do amazing, superhuman things. We shouldn’t deny them that.

Would I have spent every spare hour writing were it not for my dreams? I doubt it. Would I have persisted for three years and eight publications if I confused those dreams for goals? No way. I would have given up after the first or second novel. I allowed myself to dream. I fought for goals that I knew I could attain. (And upon attaining them, I set new goals.)

This distinction between dreams and goals is both difficult and necessary. I find myself in a surreal place these days, living inside my former dreams. And I realize and appreciate that what has happened to me is a dream shared by many others. I get emails all the time asking for advice on getting to where I am today, and here is where we all can get tripped up: There is no guarantee for these results. I’ve often spoken of the role that luck plays, and I reiterate that here. So when I give advice, I have to do so from the place I found myself in late 2011, back when I was tackling my goals, finding success, finishing the novels I started, winning over readers one at a time, and selling those 5,000 copies that I had told myself I would.

Those were goals. We can all reach them. It isn’t easy. It takes hard work and dedication. You need to read a lot, and you need to read the best books you can find. You need to push yourself to improve. You have to study. Write daily. Make steady progress.

What are your dreams as a writer? I say don’t limit them. Dream of selling ten million books. Dream of movie premieres. Don’t hold back.

Now what are your goals? How many books do you want to write in your lifetime? How many short stories do you want to publish every year? How many words are you going to write every day? Do you plan on selling 5,000 books? 10,000? These are lofty goals, but you can do it. And with realistic goals, you will have the satisfaction of completing them, conquering them, and setting new ones.

There are cynics out there who would have us not dream for fear of our feelings being hurt. There are also idle dreamers who would have us not set realistic goals for fear of having us limit our potential. The cynics go around telling people that it’s all luck and it doesn’t matter how hard you work or what you do. The dreamers say we can be whatever we want to be without explaining all that goes into overcoming the odds. Cynics say we can’t win, that the game is rigged. Dreamers say we shouldn’t keep score or everyone should have a trophy so we can all feel like winners.

I say we should be both of these sorts of people at the appropriate times. We should be happy realists. We should dream when it makes sense to dream and keep score as we track down our goals. Lie in bed at night and enjoy your fantasies. And when the alarm clock stirs you, get up and tackle your goals.

Hugs and Rainbows for South Carolina

The last conference I attended was held in my beloved adoptive home of Charleston, South Carolina. I love that city, and I love the Carolinas, where I grew up. It’s been a joy to watch the state slowly transform into a more welcoming and egalitarian place. Flags that once flew over the state capital, flags that brought people pain, have been taken down. And more and more flags of a colorful stripe have been going up. But the change is slower in some states than others. In some places, the gradual victory of love winning out over hate needs an extra push. And we see those who have not opened their minds and hearts working hard in the legislature to move us in the wrong direction.

The South Carolina House Ways and Means Committee has voted to decrease funding to schools (including my own College of Charleston) because of gay and lesbian friendly books being assigned to incoming freshmen. It’s difficult to discuss these issues without sliding into the negative, which can just entrench people in their positions. Writers Speaking Out Loud is doing a great job of amassing positive pressure to bring about change. The social mores of our country are altering, but they aren’t doing so evenly. The more outspoken we can be in support of our fellow human beings, the more pressure we can place on those who aren’t yet open to accepting people of all stripes. Our task is not to win over others. Our job is to win over others. We can achieve this through constant positive pressure and good example. It is happening. It will continue to happen.

One of my little attempts to apply positive pressure was to write a novel with a gay protagonist whose character arc isn’t defined by his sexual orientation. This is just the sort of work leading to $70,000 in funds being held back from higher learning institutions. Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy. Some who read HALF WAY HOME are offended to find the main character is gay, because I don’t see the need to place this in the book’s description or to categorize the novel as anything other than science fiction. I might as well warn people that a brunette appears in the story. To help spread the love, I’m giving the book away for free over on NoiseTrade. College freshmen (and anyone else) can download the e-book for free. This isn’t the first of a series, so there’s no attempt to hook readers and profit later. It is one of my best selling novels, so there’s plenty to lose and not much to gain.

Not monetarily, anyway. But there’s plenty of other ways to gain. Because some people will read this book and start tilting on that fence of theirs. Then they’ll watch a TV show with a gay character and they’ll tilt even more. Next they’ll learn their cousin is gay and begin to lean precariously. They might find out one of their heroes is gay, and at some point they’ll fall right off that fence. And they’ll find an army with open arms waiting to catch them.

The Silo

I found the Silo in London. And check out the poster at the bottom!

New Shirts!

We Haven’t Even Started

This is only the beginning, folks. Very few people appreciate where this is going. Projections for the future of e-books are wrong, and it’s because the people making these projections lack imagination. They seem to think all the advances in storytelling have already been made, and it’s just a question of how much current technology will scale.

But the advances have barely begun. I’d like to take you on a brief tour of our reading future to give you a glimpse of how much growth and possibility are left. When we look back on the advent of the e-reader, we’ll realize that in 2014, we were using the music equivalent of a Sony Minidisc Player, that the click-wheel / black & white iPod hadn’t been invented yet, and certainly not the iPhone and all that came after.

It is often said that e-readers can’t replace physical books, because books have a certain heft and tactile feel and even a smell to them. Well what if those people are eventually wrong? We will one day build an e-reader that’s indistinguishable from a physical book, and I believe people alive today will live to see such a device.

Google recently applied for a patent for a contact lens that contains a camera and a screen. These devices might be a decade or two off, but they will come. When they do, they will transform our lives as soundly as the smartphone has. These devices will create a science fiction world that’s difficult to imagine, but will come as gradually and be just as readily embraced as the science fiction world in which we currently live.

The above is an example of Augmented Reality. It’s a blend of our world and a virtual reality one. We already see these examples of books that can come alive on our tablets, but the true power will be unlocked first with glasses that cover our vision and later with contact lenses and finally with surgical implants. Anywhere you look, information can be laid atop what you are seeing. An arrow in the sky or on the sidewalk can lead you to an address or business you are looking for. A blinking icon will appear over real-life people in your contact list, so you can spot friends in a crowd. Advertisements will fill our visions and be catered to us, so we only see the ads that apply to us and only those we choose to see. Again, many people alive today will witness this world. It’s in the lab, being built as we speak.

What does this have to do with books? The marvel of this technology is that the overlay device has a camera pointing out at the world we are looking at. This allows our head movement and the movement of objects to be tracked, so the augmented reality overlays neatly and tracks physical items in our vision. That’s how the book in the video above works. When you shake the book or move the tablet, the animation sticks seamlessly in place. Otherwise, the illusion wouldn’t work.

Now imagine you have a book in your hands. A beautiful hardback with faux leather and a silk ribbon bookmark. There is no technology in this book. It’s just paper, the finest quality paper and binding money can buy. And every single page is perfectly blank. There is nothing written in the book. But you carry it everywhere you go.

When you open the book up, what do you see? The last page you read. Text is overlaid in your vision by your glasses or your contacts or implants. The quality of the text is just as high as a printed book. The words stick to the page. Even when you curl a page to turn to the next one, the text bends and warps just as you’d imagine. There is no way to distinguish this book from the printed kind. And yet it has many of the benefits of an e-book. Unlimited storage in the cloud. Immediate purchase of any book you want. Scalable fonts. And more.

You can watch video on any page if you like. You can look up words and make highlights. You can even write with your finger, and the camera captures the text you are drawing and adds the notes in the margin. You can turn footnotes and endnotes on or off. And if the book you’re reading is longer than your printed tome, it’ll direct you to turn back to the beginning when you run out of pages. Two people could read on the same book simultaneously, even if they were different books. You could read on a wall or on the ceiling. The magical uses are endless. I haven’t even scratched the surface.

We won’t have to wait for this end-game of implanted contacts for book buying and reading to be affected by looming technology. There will be a steady stream of marvels before then. Color e-ink will make for a huge leap. As will waterproof e-readers and those with better refresh rates and form factors. The technology is in its infancy. There will be a bump every time it is significantly improved.

Other developments will come from outside the book world. The biggest one on the immediate horizon is the self-driving car, which is less than a decade away. Consider how this will change our media habits: All of our commuting hours will now be open for the consumption of entertainment. Sure, most people will use this time to improve themselves and their lives with Candy Crush and all sorts of inanity. Others will watch TV or films. But many people will do what you see subway and train commuters doing: They’ll read.

Self-driving cars will bring the next quantum leap in reading. Sales will spike. The development of high speed trains will likewise impact our industry. And the moving world will favor books that can be delivered instantaneously while taking up no physical space and weighing nothing. The spread of literacy and wealth around the world will be another source of amazing growth. You better believe all this is going to have an impact.

And these are just the things I can foresee. How many others will surprise us? I’m guessing many more. And I can’t wait.

 

The Yellow Light Reversion Clause

The economics of book publishing have shifted and will never be the same. Both the physical book, with print-on-demand, and the e-bo0k, with its infinite supply, have created a world where the written word is forever available for commercial transaction. Hundreds of years from now, anything written today will still be available for sale. At that point, of course, the works will be in the public domain. But what to do until then?

The current book contract in all its lovely boilerplate no longer makes sense in light of a work’s permanence. Such contracts are an outdated mechanism. New contracts are needed. Authors will still care about their works decades down the road in ways that publishers most likely won’t. Many publishers view backlist as competition to frontlist. Dusty tomes do battle with the shiny and new. If the purpose of publishing is to blow out the release and hit the grail of lists—The New York Times—then lowering the cost or in any way promoting a decades-old story can only harm this goal. The beloved author today becomes the pariah of tomorrow.

Reversion clauses are meant to protect the author’s interest by assuring the work will return to them once it has sufficiently withered on the vine. But these terms are ludicrous and growing more so. I’ve seen contracts where a work remains with the publisher so long as it sells 100 copies in two reporting periods. That’s 100 copies in a full calendar year. A publisher could order that many e-books for themselves at the last moment and retain rights to a work until the author dies, and then another 70 years after.

Again, these injustices meant little when a book had a three-month lifespan on a bookstore shelf before going out of print. The same terms are a slap across the face today. And while I believe hard limits on the terms of license are inevitable for the publishing industry (say, five or seven years), such a shift is likely too bold to take place all at once. Which leaves us at an impasse. And so why not make up an entirely new clause for book contracts?

For an industry not used to modifying boilerplate, this may seem extreme. Even heretical. I point to the United States Constitution and its many wonderful amendments (and some shameful) as precedent. What if instead of a hard limit or a set date, publishing contracts had a Yellow Light reversion period. It might go something like this (with added legalese, of course):

If the work in question does not sell 1,000 copies in a single reporting period of six months, the author is granted the right to set the price of the work and to request and approve of a change in cover art. If the work does not sell 1,000 copies in the following reporting period of six months, the rights revert completely to the author.
The publisher must also approve of the cover art, and the price of the work cannot be raised so as to reduce the work’s chances of meeting this sales threshold.

The point of the clause is to give the publisher a chance to revamp the work or invest in its promotion. Any publisher confident of its ability to increase sales should be willing to sign a contract containing such a clause. As publishers get more accustomed to promoting digital and POD works, this should be a non-issue. (For a publisher with direct access to merchandising opportunities like Amazon, this sort of clause would be a no-brainer). Agents and publishers would of course negotiate the exact sales threshold. 1,000 copies in six months might be far too low. (And let’s hope that before long, six months would be equal to six reporting periods).

There are other ways to concoct such a clause, all meant to give the publisher time to steer the work back toward readers. It should make fairer reversion clauses more palatable to publishing houses. And it will give authors and agents peace of mind that their work will either continue to perform, or revert back to those who care most to see that it does.

Bella’s Bookshop

There are no bookstores in Jupiter Florida. Our local Books a Million shuttered a few months ago. You can head south 20 minutes and find a Barnes & Noble, and that’s about it. The question is whether or not this town of 60,000 needs or would support an independent bookstore. There is a very small college in town. A good number of the residents are seasonal. The median age is quite high. People are quite used to jumping on 95 and heading to Palm Beach Gardens for all their shopping needs.

I do think a bookstore could work, but it would need to be a destination. I have a few zany ideas that I would implement if I were setting up a bookstore from scratch. They come from my own wishes as a reader, a shopper, a writer, a former bookstore employee, and a member of the community. Read on to see what I would do with “Bella’s Bookshop” (because all great bookstores need a furry mascot, and my pup would be a constant fixture around the store. And also: Alliteration.

Bella’s Bookshop would start with the kids. A vibrant and fun children’s section with bean bags, reading and writing stations, and a commitment to the Battle of the Books and NaNoWriMo Young Writers programs. I would want one employee who stays in touch with local schools and teachers to make sure we have the books they need and assign for class, that parents are aware of our after-school programs, and that kids feel welcome hanging out as long as they like.
A focus on literacy. I would have a section of books for people who hate reading. These would be gift ideas for readers trying to turn family and friends who don’t read onto books. Know a guy who likes to gamble and refuses to read? Try Bringing Down the House. Know a relative who swears off books but loves their dog? Get them The Art of Racing in the Rain. There’s a book for everyone. There’s a reader in all of us.
A well-paid staff that reads and recommends. I would rather have fewer employees who all get enough hours and pay to support themselves than a ton of part-time people. (And yeah, I know how difficult it is to run a small business and pay employees well, but it helps when the manager (me) can afford to not take a salary).
Staff recommendations are the engine that power robust sales. I would have employees write at least one recommendation a month, with shelf talkers placed everywhere that book is shelved.
Online recommendations. Related to the above, I would have the employees post the same reviews to several online locations (Amazon, Goodreads, B&N), with a standard intro to each review promoting the qualifications of the reader as an employee of Bella’s Bookshop in Jupiter, Florida. So online shoppers in New Jersey learn that our recommendations rock. And to visit us next time they pass through town. (This attitude of giving freely even if it seems to run counter to our bottom line would permeate the bookshop).
I would want a stellar cafe with the best fresh-ground organic coffee in town (and a drive-through window, where you can get a newspaper, magazine, or order a book while your coffee is being made). We would feature my homemade cheesecake and choc-chip cookies, and my mother’s coconut and 7-layer choc-cake recipes. The cafe would have a handful of tables and an outdoor patio for the awesome and busy Jupiter winter season. The cafe would serve a selection of doggy treats and have water fountains and shade outside for visiting pups. But the real reason for the cafe would be because of my favorite spot in the entire store. Our…
…Writing Room. Separate from the cafe, this would be like a Starbucks lounge for people who want to sit and use our WiFi or get work done in a quiet space. There would be a selection of writing reference books for people to paw through (thesaurus, guide to agents, grammar guides, etc.), writing prompts and encouragement on our community whiteboard, a running collective word-count everyone can add to, a bulletin board to announce the newly published, and a case for displaying published works that were partly written right there in the room (and for any award announcements from our writers, young or old).
Weekly writing workshops in the Writing Room. My favorite. We would have some for all ages and all skill levels. Our staff would teach some, but we would also invite in local writers and teachers.
The writing room would also have a couple of computers. We would have a Mac for writers who don’t own one to be able to self-publish to the iBookstore. We would also sell an affordable in-house guide to writing your best work possible, as well as a guide to publishing, however you choose to go about it.
Reading groups. We would reach out to our regular readers and help them form regular groups, which could take over our writing room for monthly gatherings. I would want to have a few, so the SFF crowd could have a group, the general fiction crowd, the non-fiction crowd, whomever.
Two author events a week, Wednesday and weekends. Local authors, big names, groups of writers, our in-house success stories.
A bay of shelves for self-published works. This would include classics that readers don’t realize were originally self-published. It would also feature our Mavens program. Mavens are our adventurous readers who discover great unknown works. When they recommend a self-published work that we love and feature in the store, they get a $15 gift certificate, and their Maven Bio and personal recommendation is featured as a shelf talker below the book. So you get to know that Donna Maybell discovered this work and what she loves about it. The Maven of the Month is the community reader who brought the best works to our attention. And employees would be expected to give these recommendations a try along with their other reads.
We would sell e-readers that provide a financial kick-back for books purchased on those devices. We would also work with authors and publishers to bundle e-books with print books in an affordable manner (giving the e-book away where possible).
We would stock Amazon published books. Why? Because it’s Amazon’s distribution and online retail divisions that hurt physical stores, not their publishing wing. The latter is a miniscule portion of Amazon’s profits. Refusing to stock these books hurts the reader and author without impacting Amazon one bit. The best way to hurt Amazon? Sell their books and pocket that 40% of the list price! I would view Amazon Publishing as a partner, just as I would view any publisher.
Education about our bookstore and programs. I would want readers and writers to understand our purpose with the bookstore and to know where their money is going. They would understand what our employees make as a salary and how that compares to the industry average. We would post our profits every year, so shoppers feel like they are a part of our success. They would know what our managers make. How much we donate to charity and which charities we support. And fun facts, like how many words have been written in our Writing Room, how many books patrons have published, how many books young readers have read, how many books our book clubs have discussed, and how many writers have shown up for events. All things to celebrate.
We would shelve the finest books in all genres, from the classic must-reads to the new releases. We would also feature a shelf of books that defy explanation. Quirky books that are in-between.
NO RETURNS! We would not return unsold books to publishers. I would ask for a 50% – 55% discount from publishers with a guarantee of no return. When books are at the end of their shelf life, they would be moved to the “Rescue” section. Here, a brief sign would explain our commitment to publishers and to the environment and that we do not return books. Please purchase these great reads at a 35% discount. If they don’t sell in a certain period of time, these books would move to our used book section and our remaindering section.
Used and remaindered books. There are amazing discounters out there that sell hardbacks for cheap. I would rather these books find readers than be recycled into pulp. So our used and bargain section would be a huge component of the bookstore.
We would take advantage of bulk ordering and feature promotional packages. Many new releases offer custom cardboard stands if you order 12 or more copies. We would do this and put a customer’s name on the back of any stand or poster they call dibs on. These are fun for displaying a young reader’s favorite books or putting posters on bedroom walls of something besides musicians and sports stars. (We often had customers asking for these items at our bookstore).
We would definitely have an Espresso Book Machine. Yes, I know how much they cost. I would use the machine not only to support our catalog, but to provide a printing service for community businesses, writers, publishers, and teachers. Also for education on print-on-demand and to get kids excited about the publishing industry. Also: gadgets.
Every other year, we would have a Bella Bookshop cruise out of Fort Lauderdale. Gorge on buffets, read all day, write all night, and hang out with book lovers. Group discounts would make this a bargain, and of course, we wouldn’t have the ship to ourselves. But if we got a few hundred people to sign up, we would make up a nice chunk of the cruise.
I would apply for grants based on our education and literacy efforts and appeal to community members and elected officials to support our bookstore as they would a library or learning institution. Our commitment to transparency would assist these efforts. If we are profitable enough, we wouldn’t ask for anything. If we become more profitable, we would expand, raise salaries, lower prices, or give more to excellent charities. Whatever we decided, our shoppers and our community would know. Heck, we might take our profits and install a dog run/dog park so Bella can wear out your pup while you shop!

If this sounds like an unreasonable list, you only have to visit amazing shops like The Tattered Cover in Denver or Powell’s in Portland to see all that a bookstore can be. Our challenge will be to scale those shops down in square footage and make the plan work for 60,000 residents rather than 600,000. Is that possible? I think so. In fact, I think a number of people in Palm Beach Gardens would drive up to visit our store. As well as people in Stuart and Hobe Sound driving down.

We wouldn’t sit still, either. One of our side projects would be to render our store in 3D in anticipation of Oculus Rift and other Virtual Reality devices. The idea would be to allow people anywhere in the world to visit our store. And when we do author events, the entire world would be able to attend. When we do writing workshops, those would be broadcast everywhere and saved on our YouTube channel. Our reading groups would have online members and discussions as well.

For those with VR headsets, you could browse our store as it exists and is shelved any week. This would cut down on all the clutter online and let you see our expertly curated selection. If you want a book, rather than ship it to you, we’ll direct you to Amazon with our affiliate code. I would beat up Amazon for an even higher referral percentage in exchange for directing our shoppers their way and for carrying their books. This would save us the work of packing up books, save our shoppers money, and save the environment with less double-shipping of merchandise.

Virtual Reality shoppers would also be able to see a customized version of our store based on their past purchases. I would work with Amazon to help build this engine and license it to other bookshops. VR would combine the thrill of book discovery that shops provide with the ease of purchase and delivery (and pajamas) that online shopping lends. We would even get to the point where you could summon a bookshop employee to enter your VR world to give you recommendations (like on the Kindle Fire) or help you find a title or a gift idea.

That’s my vision for a bookshop that makes sense now and one that could grow into tomorrow and be global both with VR and broadcast events and workshops. Would you put on pants in order to come shop with us?

Is Amazon Saving Indie Bookstores?

I posited this during my keynote speech at the inaugural PubSmart conference here in Charleston, SC. And nobody threw anything at me. A few people came up afterward and wondered if there might be some merit to the idea. My thinking is this: The true enemy of independent bookstores has been the large chains like Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Waldenbooks, not online shopping. There was even a movie about this. Since the rise of Amazon, we’ve seen some of these chains shutter and many of the B&N stores close. Meanwhile, independent bookstores are experiencing near double-digit growth for three years running.

Is it possible that Amazon more directly competes with the large chains, and the independent stores are rising to reclaim their role in reading communities? I think so. Shoppers looking for discounts, or who know exactly what they need ahead of time, are using mouse clicks rather than driving to the big chain.

It’s also possible that the “shop local” movement, which is partly a response to the rise of discounters like Amazon, vastly benefits independent bookshops more than large chains. I know this works for me. I pay full retail for hardbacks at a mom-and-pop place but balk at 20% discounts from chains. Are there more shoppers like me?

Major publishers lambast Amazon, because they think the large chains are their main hope for the survival brick and mortar bookshops. Independent bookstores (like the one I used to work in) go right along with the stone-throwing, assuming what’s bad for B&N and Borders must be bad for them as well. And yeah, I saw people scanning UPC codes and taking pics of books to buy online later. I also saw our sales numbers improve every year, partly because of our reorganization of the shop and our focus on customer service, but more because of the shuttering of WaldenBooks.

Amazon is knocking out the big predators. The indie bookshops are filling up some of that space. Meg Ryan should be orgasmic.

Give that Piece a Second Chance

In the past, I have advocated for fewer imprints. Allow me to reverse course as I suggest a new imprint idea that should be added at every major publisher. Call it Resurrection or Second Chance or Renewal. The idea is simple: Publishers are sitting on piles of quality material that they paid good money for. Some of those investments didn’t pay off. But it may not have been the fault of the text. Give that piece a second chance.

Self-published authors do this all the time (though probably not as often as they should). If a digital book isn’t selling well, there’s minimal cost and zero risk in repackaging the work and giving it a second go. Every editor has a list of books a mile long that they truly believed in, loved to death, but didn’t quite make a splash. Too often, this is blamed on the book or on consumers. Nearly as often, it is the wrong cover art, the wrong metadata, the wrong blurb, the wrong title, or simply the wrong time.

For the cost of cover art and an upload, a piece of valuable property can be brought out of the vault and sent out to customers. I imagine a spirited meeting once a month over coffee and scones, where editors can make their case for a book at least two years old that didn’t sell as expected. Perhaps they would want to look primarily at books for which they paid large advances, as the earnings are already in the red (so more of what is made would be kept in-house). These are probably the books they cared dearly about when they first saw them. Another $5,000 for a digital-only release is a drop in the bucket.

I would make these releases (and this imprint) LOUD. I wouldn’t shy away from the notion of giving a work a second chance. Implicit in this act is a belief in and an appreciation of this work. Shout to the book world that people missed something great. If the title is changed, make sure people know what the old title was. This isn’t an attempt to dupe or deceive. It’s just about taking great works, already owned, and seeing if a few tweaks and a new climate will help them prosper.

For the publisher brave enough to make this a real focus, the advantages would be extraordinary. Imagine saying to agents and authors during the negotiation process that you are the only publisher (or the first publisher) who will never give up on a work they believe in. What other publisher will tell you that? Think of the PR of such an imprint at minimal cost. A huge gain would be made to hear from publishers that sometimes, when a book doesn’t do well, it isn’t the text’s fault.

I would aim for twelve books a year from an imprint like this. There’s no editing to perform. No printing costs. No distribution costs. Edit that metadata, digitally re-shelve the e-book, and slap a new cover on it. Let the author know the book is being given new life, so their marketing efforts can be kicked up. And then, if a book shows promise in e-form, get the sales force behind the work. Maybe it’s time to dust off the printers.