Mary Sisson's Blog, page 117

Oh! Oh! Oh!

If you didn't know, Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog got hacked (don't try to go there, it tries to give you viruses). So, she's put her latest post up here.

And it's a doozy! She's talking about royalty statements, because she's one of the folks who realized last year that her e-book royalty reporting must be hugely off (of course I can't link back to her old posts right now, but since she's selling self-published stuff as well, she's got an idea of how much she should sell, and they're saying she's only selling a fraction of that). So everybody got upset.

And guess what one agency did? (I'm going to quote at length, in case she gets hacked again):

The agents disappointed me the most. Dean personally called an agent friend of ours whose agency handles two of the biggest stars in the writing firmament. That agent (having previously read my blog) promised the agency was aware of the problem and  was “handling it.”

Two weeks later, I got an e-mail from a writer with that agency asking me if I knew about the new e-book addendum to all of her contracts that the agency had sent out. The agency had sent the addendum with a “sign immediately” letter. I hadn’t heard any of this. I asked to see the letter and the addendum.

This writer was disturbed that the addendum was generic. It had arrived on her desk—get this—without her name or the name of the book typed in. She was supposed to fill out the contract number, the book’s title, her name, and all that pertinent information.

I had her send me her original contracts, which she did. The addendum destroyed her excellent e-book rights in that contract, substituting better terms for the publisher.  Said publisher handled both of that agency’s bright writing stars.

So I contacted other friends with that agency. They had all received the addendum. Most had just signed the addendum without comparing it to the original contract, trusting their agent who was (after all) supposed to protect them.

Wrong-o. The agency, it turned out, had made a deal with the publisher. The publisher would correct the royalties for the big names if agency sent out the addendum to every contract it had negotiated with that contract. The publisher and the agency both knew that not all writers would sign the addendum, but the publisher (and probably the agency) also knew that a good percentage of the writers would sign without reading it.

In other words, the publisher took the money it was originally paying to small fish and paid it to the big fish—with the small fish’s permission.

Yes, I’m furious about this, but not at the publisher. I’m mad at the authors who signed, but mostly, I’m mad at the agency that made this deal. This agency had a chance to make a good decision for all of its clients. Instead, it opted to make a good deal for only its big names.

Just infuriating!

It's a pretty well-established fact in economics circles that agents and the people they work for don't actually have financial interests that are in perfect alignment. In publishing, that gap is more like a yawning chasm--an agency needs to protect its relationships with publishers and its bestselling authors. Everyone else (as you see!) can go take a hike--and that especially includes new and unknown writers.

Progress report (learning curve and fan art edition)

I have input the corrections up to page 198--the book is 375 pages long, so that's a good chunk, and honestly if I do any more today my eyes are going to fall out.

It is going much faster than last time because I made fewer mistakes with the layout. Art mistakes screw everything up, so they take forever to fix. I was careful about widows and didn't use chapter ornaments, so the mistakes are literally small things (like missing words) that don't ruin everything from that point forward. I also carefully checked the things I screwed up a lot on last time, like "Five-Eighths," before sending the layout to the copy editor, but then I managed to spell Gingko's name "Ginko" for about half the book, so it didn't help much. There's only so much you can do with me....

Anyway, let's hear it for progress up the learning curve--on the whole it is taking a lot less time to lay out Trust than it did Trang, in no small part because I'm doing it just one time, not two-and-a-half.

What else? I ordered the con flyers. As I suspected, four-color flyers are pricey, but I want them to look professional, so.... Eventually I should try to figure out something that looks nice but is cheap to produce.

11th Hour was really good at that sort of thing. She could come up with stuff that was striking and very detailed:

But if it was a situation where people would just be running stuff off on a copy machine, 11th Hour would do something like:

That's actually six separate little posters there. (All this is from her fan art Web site, which I'm glad to see is still being kept up.)

So I need to study those suckers and try to figure out a way to do something similar for Trang and Trust....

Are you a success? Are you a failure?

Yesterday's thing with Amanda Hocking resulted in a lot of discussion about success and failure, and what constitutes each. And I have to say, one of the things that is nice about self-publishing is that you yourself get to determine what is a success and what is a failure.

Obviously, there's a dark side to this: If you're a delusional narcissist, then you can spend an absurd amount of money, get absolutely no results, and be completely pleased by it all. (I'm not kidding: I met a woman once who, when she found out I worked in publishing, told me about this guy who had paid to have a novel ghost-written. He was up front about the fact that, no, he didn't actually write it, he had paid someone else to write it, and the book sucked. Yet he was totally proud of himself.)

Let's say that you're not crazy, and instead you're a reasonably good writer who has produced a reasonably good book. But your editor jumps ship, and your work is abandoned. Or, you sold a publisher a vampire romance, and they decide that vampire romances aren't hot any more, so they're not going to print it, but they're not going to give you your rights back. Or they go bankrupt and the rights to your work are seized as an asset. Or your book just doesn't sell a huge amount in that three-month window, so your name is mud. Or, or, or, or, or, or.

My point is, it's really easy to get pegged as a failure in traditional publishing. It can happen for any reason, or for no reason at all, and the person who was championing you at the beginning of the month can be dumping you at the end of it. That's mainly because of the lottery aspect of it all--chances are you're a losing ticket, so people are primed to ditch you and move on to someone else.

What's nice about self-publishing is that you can be a success with sales that in traditional publishing would be considered a failure. You can also be a success with a time frame that is unacceptable in traditional publishing--trust me, traditionally-published authors don't get to decide to hold off on marketing until they have more books out. In self-publishing, there are do-overs--you can fix the cover and the description and even take down the book and rewrite and put it up again under a different name if you are so inclined. There's no one else deciding when to give up on your book--that's up to you. 

Since you don't get punished for "failure," you can earn what you earn--you don't have to make X amount of money or your career is over. It's easier with self-publishing to get to the point where you can write books for a living, but if you don't, so what? I was talking to one writer who doesn't make nearly enough to earn a living, but who puts all the money earned from self-publishing into a vacation fund--voila, instant motivation! And instant success!

Progress report

So, I input the copy editor's corrections for only the first two chapters (which I put up here) because I wanted to finish that guest post. It should appear on To Read or Not To Read on May 17th. Shockingly, it's about cussing--specifically the cussing in the Trang books and why it's there. Sadly, this is a topic I've been meaning to blog about for a while....

The contractor is coming at the crack of dawn tomorrow to fix stuff on the house--hopefully I'll drink enough coffee to be appropriately wired to input corrections.

Thought processes I can respect

A few months ago, Lindsay Buroker was offered a publishing contract with an Amazon imprint, and she turned it down in favor of continuing to self publish. And I really liked her thought process, because she was very logical and methodical, giving a lot of thought to what she was doing now, how she felt about it, and whether or not she'd be able to keep doing what was working for her if she got a contract. She wasn't impulsive or irrational or all "zOMG! It's Amazon! I'll sign whatever they give me without even thinking about it!" She took a long look at her situation, she thought hard about it, and she did what was appropriate for her.

And I thought about blogging about that, but then I thought, well, everyone knows I'm favor of self-publishing, it will just look like I'm congratulating someone for making a decision I agree with, as opposed to liking the thought process behind that decision.

Today, however, PV posted something about Amanda Hocking that raised the question of whether or not Hocking was happy with her experience with a traditional publisher. And Hocking dropped by to clarify that, yes, she's quite happy.

But unlike some people who seem to think that they (and all writers) are indistinguishable from their publisher, she notes that 1. she's still making good money self-publishing, so she can tell her publisher to piss off whenever she pleases, 2. her publisher is going to treat her very well because it's going to be a public-relations disaster if they don't. It's what impressed me when she first made the decision to sign with a publisher--she's very clear-eyed (I'll make less money, but I'll reach a bigger audience; there's risk, but it's manageable) and hard-nosed (I'll still have the revenue stream from self-publishing), which is what she needs to be.

And you know, once again, I'm liking the thought process. For starters, there is one--it's not this automatic assumption that she can't write a good book without a publisher or that she needs a publisher to take care of her or that This Is Just How It Is Done and You Don't Even Need To Think About It.

Just like Buroker, Hocking took a long look at her situation, thought hard about it, and did what was appropriate for her. And even though the two of them came to completely different conclusions, I can't argue with either one, because each of them did what was right for her--and neither thinks someone else is going to take care of them.

Trust sample chapters are up!

Here they are, on a nice new page: http://www.marysisson.com/trust/

If you see any typos, lemme know!

Trust has arrived!

Trust is back from the copy editor! Huzzah!

I'm going to make the release date June--hopefully I'll get it out before then, but I figure it's better to have it out a little ahead of schedule than behind....

So, about Books-a-Million

Books-a-Million is probably going to go private. That, if you don't know, is Not A Good Sign. It doesn't necessarily mean impending bankruptcy, but it means that the company isn't of enough interest to the investing public to make it worthwhile to have it listed on a stock market.

I do think that independent bookstores can find a specialized niche (in fact, if they haven't already, they probably went under a long time ago). But the chains...not so much. Their pitch was always low prices and large selection, and Amazon just cleans their clock on that.

And does it matter? Well, watch this video about the Romantic Times conference to the very end. (I know, I'm making you look at scantily-clad male models. That is because I am a sadist!) They talk about one publisher that was making 30% of their sales from Borders, which went under. Everyone despaired, but they wound up making that money back in e-sales in one day.

I fixed it!

I don't know if you've noticed, but my domain name has never been quite properly mapped to this Web site. Everywhere you go, marysisson.com follows you, never actually changing as you move from page to page, or even when you leave the site altogether.

And I fixed it! I actually fixed a technical problem dealing with Web stuff. And in so doing, I appear to have fixed the issue of having content appear on a subdomain of the hosting company (which, as it turns out, just looks bad, it doesn't affect Google searches).

Speaking of domains and stuff, in addition to dropping prices, my Web host is now offering a free custom domain name, so yeah, things just keep getting cheaper. (I can't switch mine over and get a refund on what I paid, but if I want to use a pen name that leads here, that will be free.) I realize that, were I more Web-savvy, I could save even more money by moving to a different host (people seem to like site5), but Squarespace required zero expertise to get started, and zero expertise was what I had....

I got called wise!

Tom Simon, who wrote that hilarious history of publishing, quoted me in his blog. It's actually a comment I left at the Passive Voice (of course--well, it makes me feel better about the times I've quoted my own comments from PV).

Anyway, it's pithy, it's what I think, and it impressed Tom, so I'll quote myself again here. This was in response to someone saying that she was getting lots of contrary advice about self-publishing vs. traditional publishing and had no idea what to do.

My attitude is to look at what happens if you make the wrong choice.

If you self-publish and you do something wrong, you can fix it. If the entire self-publishing industry implodes, you still have the rights to your work, so you can still go sell it to a traditional publisher.

If you go traditional and something goes wrong, you are completely screwed. You’ve signed away your rights, you don’t have control over how your work is marketed, etc., etc. If your publisher goes under, it’s going to take a long time and a lot of legal work for you to be able to re-sell that work, assuming you ever can. Is it worth to you to take that kind of risk in return for some editing and cover art?