Mary Sisson's Blog, page 88

It's like a disease

Tonight I went in for a massage. Usually I kind of snooze, but the masseuse found out I was a writer, and we were off! The next thing I know we're discussing royalty rates, corporate mergers, the whole shebang.

Oddly enough, it was quite relaxing!

This is awesome

This (via Isobel Carr) is a very funny article in Cracked (and, not to display my advanced years, but who the hell ever expected Cracked to be an exciting and original source of humor in the digital age? When I was a kid, it wasn't even the better of the two Mad knockoffs) that is also very true.

He brings up writing:

Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things.

But really, does that matter? Is "writing things" all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a "writer"?

For the love of God, yes.

And lists all the ways you can ignore criticism (take it as an insult, shoot the messenger, focusing on tone to avoid content, pretending improvement is selling out). It pretty much rocks.

Of course I had to say a little (OK, a lot) more

Yeah, you knew that this dinky post on the analysis of E.L. James' book deal would not be enough for me.

To boil it down, Shawn Coyne guesstimates that James made $58.5 million from her deal with Random House, which sounds pretty good until he guesstimates that she could have made $61.25 million on her own.

He assumes that, on her own, James would have sold only 8.75 million copies (25% of the 35 million copies she sold with Random House), and that they would all be e-books (instead of a mix of e-books and paper books).

Obviously Coyne makes a solid ton of assumptions here about everything--James' royalty rate, Random House's production costs, you name it. These are guesstimates, not real figures.

So let's play with them! Let's say that, on her own, James sold exactly as many e-books as she sold with Random House. After all, Coyne argues (and I agree) that a traditional publisher doesn't really bring a serious advantage to the e-book playing field.

Coyne assumes a 50/50 split between paper and e-books, which leaves James selling 17.5 million e-books.

She would make $122.5 million.

In Coynes' 25% scenario, James makes $2.625 million more if she self-publishes and never sells a paper copy. In my 50% scenario, she makes $64 million more.

Yes, yes, yes, this is all pie-in-the-sky stuff. It's assumptions piled upon assumptions. But that extra $2.65 million comes from a pretty conservative set of assumptions, just like my guesstimates about Stephanie Meyer's earnings versus those of her publisher.

Someone might read Coyne's post and think, Well, James sold 35 million copies! For that kind of exposure, I'd take a $2.65 million haircut, especially since I'm still getting $58.5 million!

But would you take a $64 million haircut? Or maybe some number in between--$20 million? $30 million? $40 million?

I really want for writers to think about their earnings potential in a much more serious way, because the money is there. Hit books really do make obscene amounts of money, but like Klayman, the vast majority of writers are happy if they can afford a bagel with lox for breakfast every day.

Recently Marvin Miller passed away. He was the man who radically altered how much sports players are paid. When Miller took over the baseball player's union, the minimum salary was was $6,000 a year, and a third of players were making less than $10,000. Can you imagine the change in mentality that had to happen for anyone to even envision a future where a baseball player would sign a $252 million contract? Can you understand why so many baseball players--not the team owners, not the fans, but the other baseball players--were so angry when Curt Flood likened the reserve clause to slavery?

It takes a certain amount of nerve to say, "I am worth $122.5 million. Don't you dare give me less." We're socialized not to make these kinds of demands--writers are supposed to be poor.

But guess what? If your book makes $122.5 million, you are worth $122.5 million. Or more--Coyne estimates that Random House made $163.5 million off of James. Why does that company deserve that money more than she does? Because they're not embarrassed to have it?

When is that going to happen?

It's no secret that I think the notion that e-book sales are leveling off is simply an example of what happens when you draw conclusions from bad data--i.e., surveys that count only publishers and not indie writers. (And if paper-only deals with publishers become the norm for successful writers, this bifurcation within the industry will become even more pronounced.)

So it was interesting when Passive Voice posted a projection of e-book sales that purports to show that they will soon plateau.

The first problem that I saw was that the actual data points show slow uptake, followed by faster uptake--no actual data shows a leveling off, that's all the "projection" part of things. Now, when I was a reporter, I had a policy of ignoring projections, because they're usually just bullshit invented to dupe the credulous. But I don't know that much about statistics, so I thought that maybe these guys were at least using some kind of respectable methodology. But someone with more expertise said, No, the leveling off is just bullshit.

Nice to know the world hasn't changed that much after all.

Anyway, other folks also stepped in on the comments section to critique this projection, and I think those comments are well worth the read. Jim Self pointed out that e-books are not devices (and in fact can be read on devices people have bought for other reasons), so expecting e-book adoption to follow the adaptation curve of new devices is a little silly. Another commenter points out that, if current pricing tends continue, a bare-bones e-reader may soon cost less than a hardcover book.

The projection also assumes what the author calls "a relatively stable publishing industry" over the next three to five years, which is amusing because the industry is anything but stable now. The only thing publishing is relatively stable to is the drama surrounding the brick-and-mortar book retail chains, and of course if more of those go under, that's going to rebound onto the publishers in a big, bad way. Any crisis in the traditional publishing/bookselling end of the industry is going to make paper books less available to readers, which will presumably motivate more people to figure out how to read stuff on their tablets and phones.

The other assumption of stability that I take issue with is that the overall market for books is static. That is simply not true. The introduction of the paperback drastically expanded the overall book market, and I think e-books have similar potential because they are so easy to buy.

Will e-books eventually level off? I guess--paperback sales did, after all. But that took decades! We have no idea where the ceiling is on this, and to be honest I feel that a lot of the "e-books are plateauing!" stuff is coming from people who are terrified that the authors they now exploit will run off and go indie just like Aunt Edna did. And I hope they do!

Gotta run...

But first I have to post this link to an analysis of how much more Random House made than E. L. James. And it doesn't mention that she pays for her agent out of her cut, too!

Progress report

I wrote today! Yes, miracles do happen. 940 words, plus some tweaking of what came before.

Amazon vs. blind and deaf school kids--hmm, could be a PR problem

Apparently there was a protest by the National Federation for the Blind at Amazon headquarters, because its proprietary Mobi format is not as accessible as it could be. They've really got Amazon by the short hairs on this one because the company is trying to promote its e-books in schools. (The ADA? What's that?)

I'm glad to see people putting the screws into the e-book providers, because e-books have such great potential to make so many more books accessible to the visually impaired--no need for special formats or expensive Braille editions. I mean, I understand someone not wanting to cough up the money to create a Braille version of their book, but if it's a matter of making Mobi files compatible with plug-in Braille displays so that blind and deaf kids can learn at school--come on, they can do that. Do they really want to be the bad guy in the latest remake of The Miracle Worker?

Progress report, talking funny edition

I had the girl yesterday, but today I finished off Chapter 2 of Trang. I made a point of listening to what was there before and matching my voice to it--it's not like there aren't a couple of places where it's fairly obvious (at least to me) that things were recorded at different times, but this last batch actually matches pretty well.

The other thing I was playing at was noise removal. One of the issues I've been having is that I sometimes exhale with the last word of a sentence ("Have a nice dahhyhhhhh"--among my other vocal shortcomings, I also have a breathy voice). That makes it hard to cut out the breathing sound without having a really obvious cut-off (you either have a partial breath sound, which sounds really weird, or you lose the last letter of the word, which is obviously unacceptable). But I realized that you can set noise removal so that it only decreases the noise instead of eliminating it. I still have a couple of obvious cut-offs from earlier, but this time I was able to eliminate the problem breath sounds without making conspicuous cut-offs by taking this more subtle approach.

What's really interesting is that when a character voice is speaking, it sounds more natural to leave in the breath sounds, because that's how people talk. But when you switch between character voices, it makes it so much harder to follow if you leave the breath sounds in. I think unconsciously you think the character is taking a breath to talk, and then it's confusion when a different character or the narrator suddenly starts talking--it's like, Where did that guy come from?!

Jim Self mentioned that Joanna Penn has interviewed podcasters/audio book people, so I was looking at that, and this interview with Brendan Foley amused me. He said:

You . . . become aware of how localized your speech is. As an Irish man I gave the UK director and sound man a few giggles when pronouncing tree hundread and tirty tree!”.

Oh, God, can I ever relate. It's been a quarter of a century since I lived in California, but my audiobooks are going to be Cali accents on parade!

Progress report

I finished the noise removal on chapter 2 of Trang. But I'm thinking now that there are a couple of spots where I want to dub in--in one place "of" sounds way too much like "and" (I tried pasting in another "of" from elsewhere in the chapter, but it doesn't really work), and in one place a character interrupts, and it's not in his voice but really needs to be.

The last one is a place where I pronounced "sloshed" as "shloshed," the result of a lifetime of making fun of the way drunk people talk. ("Wha sheems to be the problem, oshifer? I'm sotally tober!") I considered leaving it "shloshed," and if it was Shanti I probably would, but it's Philippe, so, sadly, no.

Raab is on crack

Seriously:

[E]ven with charging only 99 cents for some books, [author Stephanie] Bond says she made more than half a million dollars in the last year. . . .

“When you price a book at 99 cents, $1.99, I personally think it devalues the author’s time and effort,” said Jamie Raab, the chief of Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette books.

Let's look at that again!

[E]ven with charging only 99 cents for some books, [author Stephanie] Bond says she made more than half a million dollars in the last year. . . .

“When you price a book at 99 cents, $1.99, I personally think it devalues the author’s time and effort,” said Jamie Raab, the chief of Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette books.

Well, Bond sure enough has been told! I bet she'll go scampering back to traditional publishing in no time flat!