Mary Sisson's Blog, page 126

Progress report

I laid out five chapters of Trust, plus the front matter--whoo! It was easier to do this time because I just stuck the text into the Trang layout (there are some minor tweaks, but in general I want the series to have a consistent look). I did forget to justify the text in three chapters (oops), so I had to throw those away and re-print them.

Amazon vs. IPG--what does it mean?

If you haven't heard, Amazon has pulled 4,000 e-books from its site after it could not reach an agreement with Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that mostly focuses on smaller publishers.

However this shakes out, it should make you as an author more wary of the notion that it's better to have a publisher than it is to self-publish. Judging from the responses I got to Trang, I probably could have gotten it published by a small press eventually. I chose not to for a number of reasons, not the least that I was sick and tired of waiting two years for replies. Other reasons were that I knew a small press wouldn't pay me any kind of money for it, and (here we are, getting back on topic) I didn't see an advantage with distribution.

Small presses are generally pretty limited in their distribution (with some, all they do is list you in a catalog), in no small part because the big chains just want the big books. I could get myself distributed on the Web just as easily, so they offered no advantage there. Once I get some more books published, I can produce my own little catalog and sell to indie bookstores on my own.

All this is why I've predicted that small presses won't do well. (At least not the traditional ones. Writers can and do start one-person "small presses"--go here and scroll down to Pen Name's comments to see how that can work.) To survive, existing small presses will have to adapt to changing circumstances--including a world where Amazon is a lot more powerful than their distributor.

Amazon, as that story notes, wants to make more money, and so they are interested in squeezing out middlemen. If you are a small press, you're already a middleman, and if you're a small press going through a distributor, that's two middlemen right there.

Regardless of what happens with IPG, if I owned a small press I'd be looking very hard at the decision to pay a second middleman to distribute my e-books. It's not like warehousing and shipping paper books--uploading book files to retailers is pretty simple. The fact that my distributor now can't distribute my e-books on Amazon, a major e-book market, would make me look at that decision even harder: If you're going to pay a middleman, he should be making life easier for you, not harder.

I don't own a small press (not even a pretend one, although that may change). I'm an author. And as an author, I take note of the article's comment, "The only two essential parties in the reading experience, Amazon executives are fond of saying, are the reader and the author."

Stuff like that sounds really exciting and empowering and like Amazon wants foster this glorious indie-book revolution. But did you notice who's not in there? Amazon!

Oooh, I bet Amazon executives actually want Amazon to stay in that equation, don't you? Sounds like they're being a little disingenuous. Remember that Amazon is a business, and like any other business, their job is to maximize profits. Right now, they're focusing on doing that by squeezing out middlemen, which also entails treating their suppliers (i.e. authors) well.

Will they always? Well, Wal-Mart is where it is today because it squeezes suppliers. Big publishers are squeezing suppliers. Squeezing suppliers is a long and cherished method in corporate America to cut costs and maximize profits.

So writers who distribute on Amazon may well find themselves in the position of IPG one day. That's why it's a good thing for Amazon to have competition. That's also why I think authors should reach out to their fan base directly. Amazon isn't the devil, but it's also a business--it's run by people who want to make money, not run by people who have any especial love for you.

Progress report

Whoo-hoo! I did the covers for both editions, noodled with the description/jacket copy, read over the parts that had a lot of changes last time, made some more changes, and input them.

I am ready to start laying this sucker out, baby! I won't have time to work tomorrow or Friday, but that's OK....

The future of agents--should you care?

So, Joe Konrath posted a guest post by Lauren Baratz-Logsted in which she, and then he, note that they will be relying on their agent to help produce their books. Earlier, Courtney Milan (via PV) noted that she is doing the same. In exchange, the agent gets a percentage (usually 15%) of the book proceeds.

As Konrath notes, this is not an uncontroversial decision: 

A notable opponent of this methodology is Dean Wesley Smith, whom I admire and greatly respect. He feels authors shouldn't share royalties when the tasks of bringing an ebook to market can be work-for-hire sunk costs.

My response to Dean is: I have to try it before I can judge if it works or not. I also believe (I may be wrong) that Dean and his equally smart and savvy wife Kristen Kathryn Rusch are incredibly prolific authors who have many pieces of writing that aren't yet available as ebooks even though they own the rights.

Well, come on Dean and Kris! These are all properties that could be earning money, and every day they aren't live is a day you missed making some dough. If you gave an estributor [his term for an electronic book distributor] a cut and they get these live sooner than you can, you'd be earning more.

 

If you read Smith and Rusch's blogs, you are snickering. If you don't: Smith and Rusch stopped using agents before they started e-publishing. They stopped using agents because their agents stole from them. A chirpy "come on Dean and Kris!" is not going to change their minds.

But for newer writers, all that is really just a diversion from the larger question: If all these writers are using agents to produce their books, then shouldn't you?

I'm going to point you again to Konrath's argument why Smith and Rusch should consider using an agent: Because Smith and Rusch have an unpublished backlist of something like 100 titles. That's a lot of books.

Hmmm, and have you noticed something about Konrath and Baratz-Logsted and Milan? They are all established authors. They all have unpublished works! They all have a fan base! They all have been in the business for years, if not decades!

Does that describe you?

You have to look at this from the perspective of the agent. Wouldn't you like to get 15% of Konrath's income? Hell, yeah! It's totally worth it to bring your A game to service somebody who could earn you $15,000 in a single month!

As a writer, are you worth that much to an agent?

Chances are, the answer is no. Chances are, an agent is going to treat you very differently from the way they treat Joe Konrath.

You see this in the financial-services industry. People look at certain things rich people do--for example, invest in hedge funds--and say, Gee, I'd like to be rich, why can't I invest in a hedge fund? But the fact is that nobody gets rich by investing in a hedge fund--you have to already be rich. The reason is because hedge funds are as risky as hell, so you have to be the kind of person who can comfortably lose every last dime you've invested in order to get into one. Rich people buy $4,000 watches, too--but buying a $4,000 watch won't make you rich. It's correlation, not causation.

Joe Konrath can get an agent who will throw her body across mud puddles so that he doesn't get his shoes dirty. Amanda Hocking can get a $2 million book advance. That's not how they became successful--they can do these things because they already are successful. They became successful by writing a lot of books and selling them at a reasonable price.

I know there's a mentality that if you want to be successful, you should mimic successful people. But that's too simplistic: You need to figure out what's appropriate for you where you are now, not where you'd like to be in 10 years. Aspirational thinking (I want to be rich, so I'll act like I'm already rich!) is a God-send to the flim-flam artists of the world. Nobody starts at the top--they work their way up. You need to imitate the "working their way up" part, not the "what they do once they're up there" part.

Doing a paper edition

This is one of those Passive Voice posts where the original post--about producing paper edition--is definitely worth reading, but the information in the comments sections is just as valuable.

Progress report

I finished inputting the edits--whew! That took longer than I thought, so I'm not doing the rest today, but that's all right.

Who must do the communicating?

I've mentioned that my first job out of college was with a children's publisher, and it was not an easy transition. One of the major shifts that had to happen in my mind-set was the question, Who carries the burden of understanding?

When I was an undergraduate, working toward my fancy honors degree in English literature, I knew the answer to that question: It was the reader's job to understand what the writer meant. I was quite dogmatic about it. Don't know what that word means? That's what a dictionary's for, idiot! Didn't understand the book the first time you read it? Read it again!

I got very frustrated with my classmates, who for the most part were not English majors. They read for entertainment--they didn't want to have to use the dictionary or read something three times to understand it. I had nothing but contempt for them: They were lazy bums.

Fast forward one year, and there I was, writing for kids. Wow. Yeah, kids. I read a lot as a kid, and it's not like I was going to good schools, so I could definitely relate to the fact that here was an audience that (through no fault of their own) knew absolutely nothing but that wasn't stupid.

And that's when I realized where the burden actually lay: It lay on the writer. I had to make my writing very clear. I could not throw out some half-coherent mumbo-jumbo and say, "Well, stupid, figure it out!!!" to an 8-year-old at a school where the teachers are all high and the students are all reading two levels below their grade.

It also meant that I needed to write like a person who was very literal-minded, because that's what kids are. (I remember being horrified by a Soup book in which the kids throw rocks at a guy's house and he runs out "with blood in his eye." I thought they had put his eye out with a rock, and I was totally shocked that neither the kids nor their parents felt particularly bad about it.) That's why I worry about little things, like where I put the word "only" in a sentence--I don't take for granted that the reader can figure out what I mean if my words are in the wrong place.

This concept that the burden of communication lies on the writer, not the reader, is a very controversial one outside professional writing circles. (Inside professional writing circles, it is a given, because if you cut yourself off from the majority of readers, your stuff will never sell.)

One group that does not accept this notion is academic writers. If you want to get promoted in academia, you have to make everyone feel like you are smart and they are stupid (or perhaps they can smugly feel like they are in the same elite circle as you). The result is that a premium is put on obtuse writing. As a result, nobody reads academic writing unless they have to. People read it because they are forced to, by their professors or because of their line of work.

Would-be writers often have gone to college and been told, Hey, you reader, you must work very hard to understand these books, otherwise you're a failure. And they think they can turn around and do this to their readers. But guess what? Readers don't have to read you. You're not in that position where you can assign your book to a reader, and they have to buy it and read it and regurgitate it on an exam, or you give them an F. You don't have that kind of power (which is probably a good thing).

Another group that struggles with this idea is what you might call the talented amateurs. They write for people they know, who love them. That's great--I do that too. When I write my loved ones I use shorthand and don't worry so much about grammar and put the word "only" in wherever, confident that the person reading it can and will do the work to understand what I'm saying. And they do--it works great!

But readers are another matter entirely. Readers don't love you--they don't even know you. Even if they say they love you, they mean that they love your writing. Because readers do not love you on a personal level, they are not going to do the work to compensate for your shortcomings. They'll just put your book down and not pick it up again.

Now, I will agree that poetic language often isn't that clear on a literal level (although it can be). But I'll argue that the good stuff makes plenty of sense on a thematic and emotional level.

And people use the, "It's poetic!" argument to justify murky writing about subjects that really shouldn't be unclear. If you're describing how a building that is about to be robbed is laid out, or you're trying to communicate some background information that will be important later, that kind of thing needs to crystal clear. You're not talking about some ineffable emotional state or something like that. You're just delivering information the reader needs to understand your story. The harder you make it to understand this information, the harder it is for the reader to become emotionally engaged in your story. And a reader who isn't emotionally engaged is a reader who will cut you no slack at all.

Progress report

Done with this read! Whoo! Tomorrow I will input the changes, print out the few bits that had more-significant edits, and work on the cover and the description. After that, I start laying things out!

Progress report

Eight more chapters down--I am now up to chapter 20!

A quick note about promotions and Amazon

The Passive Voice has a post by author Tony Jones on getting his traditional publishers to offer his books for 99 cents. He notes:

Explain Amazon. Remind publishers that when someone buys one of your books for $.99, Amazon gets smarter about that consumer. Chances are, Amazon is going to start recommending other books by that publisher — full-price books — to that reader. Sales are sticky on Amazon, so even a $.99-sale that nets only pennies for the publisher will develop a connection between that reader's Amazon account and that publisher's other titles.

 

Earlier, there was a looong discussion about Amazon in the comments that went off on several different tangents. One I think is well worth reading--dig down through the comments here until you find Passive Guy's 4:00 p.m. comment (his are red), and read through the rest of that thread.

It's people talking about the KDP Select program on Amazon, and how apparently if you do a freebie through that channel, Amazon counts those as sales and starts using that data to recommend your title to other people who bought similar books.

Good to know if you are hoping to make an informed and rational decision about KDP Select....