Mary Sisson's Blog, page 104

Who's got your book?

Am I harping on this? Maybe so, but Kris Rusch had a post on contracts today that brought up something that I think some writers still may not be clear on, which is that publishing traditionally nowadays is actually a pretty risky thing to do.

Rusch notes that an anonymous editor wrote to her:

[R]ights sold to a publisher now could end up—anywhere. Most contracts have very broad language allowing the publisher to sell a book how they want to and at a price they want to. And with Amazon entering the publisher market (and I don’t think it’s impossible to think Google or Apple might as well), there’s no telling if five or ten years down the line an author’s book might wind up being sold, or offered for free, in a way they never anticipated or intended.

I think authors still think that if they sell a book to the publisher, the publisher will follow the traditional path publishing. And even if that is the acquiring editor’s intent, and the publisher’s intent, things are changing so fast now, there’s no guarantee of anything.

This is the thing about publishing that outsiders don't always understand: It is an extremely volatile industry. It was when I started working in it 20 years ago; it's even more chaotic now. Imprints and publishing houses change hands all the time--every single publishing house (every single one) I worked at either had been sold recently, attempted to negotiate a sale, or was sold during the time I worked there.

What that means is that Rock Solid Traditional House can suddenly become a division of New Technology Company, or Gordon Gekko can buy it and sell it for parts, or it can become Paris Hilton's new toy. Its entire mission and business strategy can change overnight, and any title that doesn't fit into the new strategy (proven winners!) can be effectively scrapped.

That rock solid house can also suddenly become a company you don't want to work for. Look at Penguin, for God's sake--it just became the nation's largest vanity press.

What can you do if you've signed over your rights to a company that suddenly turns into a very different kind of firm? What if they're no longer reputable? What if they want to do something with your book and your name that you think will harm your career? What if they decide that your kind of book isn't the kind of book they actually want to carry, but they don't want to return your rights to you or sell the contract to someone else, because that would be work.

Nothing, that's what you can do. I mean, sure, you can go to court and try to get out of the contract. You can kick and cry and scream. It's expensive, it takes a long time, and you might not like what you get, but you can feel like you've done something.

Or you can stay out of it. Hold on to your rights yourself. Be extremely judicious about signing any rights away, because you might not like what happens to them, and you might not get them back.

Smith on fear

Dean Wesley Smith has an excellent post on fear. I think it's really important for writers to get over the notion that publishing is some kind of magical black box that miraculously spits out perfect books via an arcane process that you're just too dumb to understand. If anything, I went the other way, thinking I knew more than I did when I started. But I learned, and now I have two professional-looking books out. If I had been too intimidated to start, I would now have exactly what I had two years ago--nothing.

Smith writes, "Let me be clear here. THE ONLY THING THAT WILL KILL A WRITING CAREER IS THE WRITER STOPPING WRITING." Of course, I could not agree more--although writing stuff and then locking it away so that no one else will ever see it is also an effective career-killing technique.

So, how am I doing with the writing? Not great--my sister is out of town, so family and child care obligations are pretty much nuking the week, but she should be back soon.

Lessons from a polar expedition where five people died

Yeah, I'm reading The Worst Journey in the World, a memoir written by Apsley Cherry-Garrad (God, British names crack me up sometimes) about the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, where Robert Falcon Scott died along with four other people after reaching the pole a month after Roald Amundsen did.

I want to say that I realize that Scott's reputation during the 20th century went from unrealistically high to unfairly low, and I'm not trying to pile on here. (Honestly, I feel like before people criticize explorers, mountain climbers, and the like for poor judgement, they should first give sleep deprivation, hypoxia, exhaustion, and malnutrition a shot for a month or two and see how their mental processes hold up.) I also feel like people who run down Scott tend to valorize Amundsen for contrast, and he was hardly a perfect person.

Still, Cherry-Garrad's book--which was not written to be critical of Scott at all--is a really frustrating read, and I think it does contain lessons for authors trying to navigate this new world of publishing. (Hey, if I'm willing to do it with the Transformers, clearly nothing is a bridge too far for me.)

Lesson 1: Admit what you don't know. Scott had visited Antarctica ten years before on an earlier expedition. You'd think that would have been helpful, right?

Oh, no. Scott felt like he knew exactly what Antarctica was supposed to be like. The ice was supposed to be this way, the blizzards were supposed to be that way, the temperatures were supposed to be another way. They were all supposed to be exactly the way they were when he had visited Antarctica before.

The Terra Nova expedition spent almost a year in Antarctica before making the disastrous run for the pole. In that time, it became painfully obvious that the weather in Antarctica is totally unpredictable. It was colder-than-expected inland. Blizzards could crop up at any time. Local weather conditions were fantastically specific, so it could be sunny and warm in one spot, and two miles away there could be a blizzard. Also, it was considerably colder than it had been at any time during the previous expedition.

Now, I am the first to admit that it's hard to plan for, This is totally unpredictable!!! But they didn't seem to try. Instead they assumed that the weather during the run for the pole would be the way Antarctic summer weather is "supposed" to be--clear and relatively warm. They left depos of food rations on the assumption that people would be able to walk about 10 miles a day, every day.

So what happened when the support parties headed back north and ran into unexpected storms that slowed them down? They went hungry. What happened when the party that actually reached the pole headed back north, were going more slowly than planned, and ran into more unexpected storms? They died--11 miles away from a huge food cache.

Let's hope no one actually starves to death here, but do you understand why it makes me nervous when people with absolutely no track record of sales make financial plans based on the expectation that they will sell X many copies of their book? This is not salaried work: You do not get a regular paycheck every two weeks. As a new writer, you don't want to set up your financial life so that if you don't sell X copies your book each and every month, you go hungry. And you really don't want to be that tragic author who perishes in the snow six months or six years before sales finally start to kick in.

Lesson 2: Leave room to fail. Cherry-Garrad makes a big deal out of the fact that Scott wasn't just making a "pole dash"--he was trying to figure out what would actually work in the Antarctic.

So, for the run to the pole, they had motor vehicles, ponies, and dogs. Before his death, Scott even arranged to have mules brought down on a relief ship so that people could try them out, too.

The problem with all this was that Scott didn't give himself any room to have an experiment fail. The motor vehicles and the ponies didn't do well, and in neither case was that some big surprise. Dogs did much better (that's what Amundsen used), but Scott didn't have many dogs because he had packed so many motor vehicles and ponies.

I feel like Scott's motivation were very noble: He was hoping that motor vehicles would provide an alternative to using and killing animals. But in 1910 the reliability of motor vehicles was just not something you could bet your life on, even if you weren't on a polar expedition--cars were still hand-cranked at that point, for God's sake.

Using ponies was also a new and untested idea. And it basically killed Scott. That huge cache of food he died 11 miles away from? It was supposed to be 30 miles further south, but the ponies couldn't make it.

So, give yourself room to fail. If you have a great new marketing idea, that's swell--don't mortgage your home. Don't set yourself up for disaster. Remember--these are experiments, not certainties.

Lesson 3: Be honest and realistic about your goals. Remember how Cherry-Garrad said that the expedition was no mere pole dash?

Unfortunately, that's not how Scott saw it: He felt like the entire worth of the expedition depended on reaching the South Pole.

The actual run to the pole was not just a disaster at the end: It was a disaster the entire way. Those unexpected storms didn't just unexpectedly turn up on the way back north, they unexpectedly showed up and unexpectedly slowed the party on the way to the pole as well. Of course rations earmarked for later in the trip unexpectedly got eaten early, because everything was unexpectedly taking so much longer.

Seeing how all their planning was proving inadequate, did they abort the run for the pole while they still could? No, they did not.

Did Amundsen? Why, yes, as a matter of fact, he did. His first shot at the pole was aborted because of bad weather. It's not that he wasn't competitive (he was), but he also seemed to understand that sheer force of will would not get him to the pole and back alive--good weather would.

Amundsen was just more realistic, and he made a ton of compromises to get himself to the pole that Scott did not. Scott put his base camp in a location that was further from the pole and actually cut off from it for part of the year (!) because it was a better location for the many scientists in his party. Amundsen, in contrast, had almost no scientists in his party. Amundsen was doing a pole dash, period.

Now obviously we can argue that Scott was a nobler person who was dedicated to the ideals of science and all that. We can argue that Scott's "failed" expedition actually accomplished more that was useful than Amundsen's "successful" one. But the problem was that Scott defined success in a certain way (reach the pole!), but he wasn't really willing to acknowledge that (this is no mere pole dash!). As a result, he was ill-situated to actually reach his goal, and then he got desperate.

Honestly, I see that most often with writers who really, really want to be popular--they want big sales! and their name in lights! and fame and fortune! But they also want to write whatever they want, whether or not that's something anybody wants to read.

You can't, OK? Even with self-publishing, we're still operating in a market. Certain types of literature are more popular than other types of literature.

If your goal is to tell Danielle Steele to suck it, your abstract poetry is not going to get you there. I would guess that most people who write bestsellers think long and hard about what most people want to read before they write--I've certainly read and heard memorable interviews with ones who did.

If you don't want to write within those sorts of constraints, that's great--neither do I. But I also never assumed the Trang books would be big commercial sellers. In fact, the whole point of writing Trang for me was to move away from making Big Macs. I'm not going to freak out and do something stupid because there isn't a McSisson's on every corner with a sign proclaiming how many billions I have served--if I wanted that, I would have written a very different book.

Another nice review

New Podler reviewed Trust, and said some very nice things, yay! It does delight me to know that I made a reader stay up too late--I do that all the time reading books (or nowadays, watching streaming video) that I like....

Beta-y thoughts

Yeah, everything's sort of gone off the rails, writing-wise--family obligations, random life stuff, cat in the hospital. (He's home now and doing fine--apparently he's just going to periodically get urinary-tract blockages whenever a thunderstorm freaks him out, nothing to be done about it, just try not to let him go into renal failure and die. Um, OK.) I've got some more child-care obligations coming up, but hopefully I'll be able to get work done tomorrow and later in the week.

I also ordered a new computer, so hopefully I won't be having to deal with all the freeze-ups and drama of my ancient machine failing to cope with change. Of course, I'll have to deal with the drama of putting everything I need onto a new computer, which is why I prefer not replacing them, but such is life.

Anyway, something I've been thinking about is doing decorative chapter ornaments for the Trang and Trust e-books. I've been seeing more and more of them in the books I've been reading. It's cute, it seems to work even on my phone, and it sounds pretty easy to do--just insert a little centered graphic instead of "* * *". Needless to say the graphic would be a tiny little black-and-white portal....

Risk management: Lessons from personal finance

Jim Self noted on my post about Kris Rusch's hybrid publishing approach that what works for an author with lots and lots of books may not work so well for someone with just a few titles.

That's very true, and it's definitely something to keep in mind as you try to figure out what's going to work for you.

The thing to be aware of is that signing over your rights to a traditional publisher is actually a fairly risky proposition these days. Formerly respectable publishing stalwarts are getting into trouble, making bad decisions, and getting into even more trouble as a result. This is going to get worse, not better, over the next few years--and remember, if your publisher goes bankrupt, you don't necessarily get your rights back.

So, giving your rights to a publisher is a gamble wherein you risk the rights to your book in return for the potential reward of a larger audience. It's a gamble that may pay off, like it did for Amanda Hocking, or it may not pay off, like it didn't for Joe Konrath, or it may pay off here but not there, like it did and it didn't for Rusch.

Are any of them really hurting as a result of their gambles? No. Why not? Because they still have plenty of self-published titles out there.

What this reminds me of is how people (you know, in a perfect world) are supposed to manage their personal finances: First, you figure out what your basic living expenses are. Then you take enough money to cover three to six months of living expenses, and you put it someplace where it is both VERY safe and readily accessible. This is your emergency fund.

Now, this is not a strategy without controversy, because there are people out there who say, That's a waste! You should plow every last dime into investments with a high rate of return! You can always use your credit cards to pay for stuff in an emergency!

Of course, that last assertion is making anyone who remembers 2008/2009 laugh and laugh. Personally, I feel that the emergency fund is a good idea. I also think it's a good idea to be very hesitant to, say, quit a well-paying stable job unless you are really, really sure you'll be able to still cover your rent and pay for groceries with whatever you're going to be doing instead.

You can take risks with money that's not in your emergency fund. You can pursue your financially-risky passion in your spare time.

And you can gamble on traditional publishing with your "extra" books, i.e. the books that aren't generating the revenue you need to pay for your basic living expenses. Say you're Lindsay Buroker, and you're making a living--not a fortune, but a living--off your self-published books. Sensibly enough, you don't want to risk that income by signing away the rights to the majority your books. But, later on, after you've got more books and a larger income, well, maybe then you'll gamble on a couple of titles--why not? If a publisher makes them implode, you'll still be able to make a living off your core of self-published titles.

If you follow this strategy, would it ever make sense to sign away the rights to a title if that's the only book you've got? Perhaps surprisingly, I say yes. For example, you could do what John Locke did and keep the e-rights (along with that revenue stream) while signing away your paper rights (which perhaps a publisher could do more with). Or if you have a runaway hit and you're offered such a huge advance that you could invest that money and live forever off the interest, you might do that. (Just keep in mind that you could still be shortchanging yourself.)

But no matter what, you have to protect that core revenue. You have to make sure you can always get by.

No-progress report

One of the cats had to be rushed to the hospital today (hopefully he should be all right), so, yeah, the writing didn't happen.

Weepy Girl and the People Who Scream at Her

Do you know what's not a good way to create drama and excitement in your novel? Having a bunch of people scream and cry and curse and slap each other around for no particular reason.

I keep reading variations on the ur-text known to archaeologists as Weepy Girl and the People Who Scream at Her. (Weepy Girl was originally an ancient Sumerian drama, hence the play format.)

 

WEEPY GIRL: Good morning, Abe!

ABE USEUR: YOU FUCKING BITCH! (throws pot of boiling hot coffee on Weepy)

WEEPY GIRL: (weeping) What are you doing? Why don't you like me? I just want to be your friend, Abe!

ABE USEUR: FUCK YOU, YOU CUNT! (he beats Weepy with the glass coffee carafe until it shatters, cutting and bruising Weepy in the process)

WEEPY GIRL: (weeps harder) Why don't you like me? (runs away, finds an isolated corner, sits there to weep) I just want to be his friend!

VIV SCHUSS: Weepy! You've been beaten horribly! What happened?

WEEPY GIRL: (weeping) Abe beat me, and...and...why doesn't he like me, Viv? I just want to be his friend!

VIV SCHUSS: Why doesn't Abe like you? Because you're a worthless, evil, hideous piece of shit, that's why!

WEEPY GIRL: (weeps harder) Why don't you like me, Viv? I just want to be your friend!

This continues for, oh, 400, 500 pages....

 

OK. See the problem here? There's a lot of violence and screaming and crying and "drama," but guess what's missing? Sympathetic characters.

Unless you're a psychopath, you aren't going to sympathize with Abe and Viv. They are thoroughly evil and impossible to like. A reader can take them in small doses (think Harry Potter's adoptive family), but no one is going to want to spend lot of time with them. And if you're trying to present some kind of arc with those characters, that's going to be a lost cause--I don't think anyone with any life experience is going to be happy to see Weepy reconcile with Abe, because we all know it's just a matter of time before he beats the crap out of her again.

What about Weepy? You know the writer is trying so hard here to make her sympathetic--she suffers and suffers and weeps and weeps. And it just fails. Why? She has no spine. It's not just that she's weeping all the time (which, yes, she may have no other options), it's that she wants to be friends with her abusers. She doesn't resent them, she's not eager to leave the situation, she's not plotting her revenge, she doesn't even think that they are doing something bad. Unless Weepy is a child under the age of 10, and Viv and Abe are her parents (and maybe not even then), that's just not a realistic portrayal.

Progress report

I wrote 960 words today before the power went out. The high temperature was a whopping 75 degrees, so you can understand why the power company was so overwhelmed.

Oh, Penguin

Penguin is purchasing notorious vanity press Author Solutions, the umbrella company that runs AuthorHouse, DellArte, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, West Bow, and Xlibris. (Want some fun? Google each of those names, followed by the word "scam.") This is apparently to go with Penguin's Book Country. Apparently their new strategy is, If you can't beat self-published writers, rip 'em off!

(And honestly, I'm a little astounded that Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware is all, "Oh, this is fine, as long as Penguin does something about the fact that, with Author Services, you get nothing in return for your money, you don't get paid, they lie all the time, and they're trying to rip you off with overpriced, poor-quality services." But then again, it's not the first time Author Solutions seems to have confounded her. I think that to her, self-publishing is all kind of scammy, so why attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff?)

This I agree with:

It "constitutes tacit recognition that the legacy publishing model is severely challenged and may not work sometime in the foreseeable future," said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York-based publishing consultancy.

I bet Penguin has thought carefully about this new strategy. Let's see what the CEO said!

“It’s early days. We haven’t thought in detail about Book Country,” said Penguin CEO John Makinson on a press conference call.

Oh, yeah. This is going to go great.