Mary Sisson's Blog, page 99

The advantage of bright lines

So, Joe Konrath has a post on the paid-reviews scandal that displays, in my opinion, a pretty unhelpful approach, which is to say that it's a slippery slope and that everyone is imperfect. Both things are completely true, and they are also precisely why people do things like draw up ethical codes--if we were all saints, codes, taboos, and laws would be unnecessary.

The notion that those who are (very publicly) trying to state what is and is not OK must be a pack of hypocritical, glory-seeking, witch-hunting assholes is something that in my opinion can very quickly turn into "taking someone else's inventory." That's a term popular in Alcoholics Anonymous-type organizations, because people who are massively fucking up their lives do it a lot. You know, "Well, OK, maybe I did get drunk again, and maybe I stole your car and drove it through your living room window and killed your dog, again, but you're fat!"--that sort of thing.

For example, Konrath points out that The New York Times, which reported the story, has a pretty questionable ethical relationship to publishing. I agree--this is a paper that has repeatedly printed fantastical misinformation about the industry--but that's completely irrelevant to whether or not the paid-reviews story was accurate or important. Certainly The New York Times is on the lookout for negative news about self-publishing; this time, they actually found something significant, instead of having to make something up again. This is why this particular story is having an impact that their fright pieces did not.

I'm sure there are people who will use this sudden interest in ethical reviewing cynically and others who will be unfairly dinged. But things are so scammy when it comes to reviews right now that I think there is real value to making overt public statements regarding what kind of behavior is unacceptable. If you are new to publishing and have never really grappled with these issues before, you look around, and you see that Kirkus Reviews wants to you pay them $450 for a review and Publishers' Weekly wants $150. After that, if someone asks you for "A 'fair' donation" in exchange for effectively letting you into a cooperative, it sounds really reasonable and not at all shady. If there's no blowback on all this (and there should be, especially on places like Kirkus and PW), if no one takes the time to point out how this sort of thing damages all writers and no one notes that it's really pretty easy to name-and-shame people who do this (and there are people who feel so strongly about this that they will indeed name-and-shame), paid reviews will become the norm. Coughing up $20,000 for fake reviews will become no different than coughing up a similar amount on advertising--hell, yeah, it's pricey, but if you're lucky enough to be able to afford it, why wouldn't you?

Combating paid reviews

Anne R. Allen has a good post/collection of links about the paid-reviews scandal. She points out that certain types of gatekeeping (in her examples, the requirement that a book have a certain number of 4- or 5-star reviews) can encourage abuse, which I have noticed, too. That's a tough one, because people typically set these systems up with the hope of weeding out bad books, but then if the system is easy to game....

When a publisher goes under

Remember that Rusch post where an editor mentioned that your traditional publisher could get bought up by one of the tech players? Amazon just bought some 1,000 titles from the publisher Dorchester (via PV), which closed earlier this year.

Note that when Dorchester went under, rights to their books did not automatically revert to the author. Instead, they went up for auction. An auction that had all of ONE bidder. It appears that this bidder will allow the writers who don't want Amazon as their publisher to get their rights back, but guess what? They didn't have to do that.

Did Amazon buy all of Dorchester's titles? I don't know. What would have happened if the auction hadn't attracted any bidders? I'm guessing limbo....

Control: It matters

Kris Rusch has a really scary post on the contract (actually a Terms of Use agreement, wow) that you have to agree to with a certain e-publisher.

We can quibble about whether or not a certain royalty is a good deal, but honestly, I feel like the primary advantage of self-publishing is simple: You don't give up ownership of your work. That is something that sounds very simple but that puts you in a far greater position of power.

And another thing....

This is an addendum to my previous post: Just like the stuff you write is text, not you or your soul or your baby or whatever other metaphor people use to indicate that they have overidentified with their writing, your business is not you, your soul, or your baby. It is a financial investment.

More specifically, it is a long-term, high-risk investment with poor liquidity. There is certainly a place for something like that in your portfolio, but you should NEVER have 100% of your money in a long-term, high-risk investment with poor liquidity.

People say "I plowed every last dime back into my business!" as though this were a marker of great virtue, when the fact of the matter is, from a personal-finance perspective, that is no different from saying, "I plowed every last dime into my collection of antique cars!"

It can be difficult-to-impossible to find a buyer for any business. And writers in particular have traditionally gotten screwed when they sell their rights. If your business is making money, you need to 1. pay yourself, and 2. use that money to diversify the hell out of that business. If that leaves you with less to spend on your business, that's fine--a little spending discipline never hurt anyone.

"My poor planning stole my retirement"

This is an article in the Wall Street Journal about small-business owners who are having to defer retirement "because" of the recession.

Since self-published writers are, in essence, small-business owners, I would like you to read that. And then read it again.

And then read my blog post about why you shouldn't lock yourself into best-case expectations.

Of course I feel bad for these people--I also feel bad for the people who died on the Terra Nova expedition--but when people do things like start a business with the expectation that they will be able to sell it at a certain price at the exact time they wish to retire (which they also magically know in advance), I also feel like they should have had the phrase, "Man plans; God laughs" explained to them at some formative point in their lives.

I loved being my own boss--it was worth the price to me. But there was, indeed, a price. I did not have a predictable income. How unpredictable was my income? Well, there was a certain fat month and a certain lean year where I made pretty much the same amount of money.

I was able to swing that sort of thing because when that fat month came along, I did not assume it would be repeated. I always set my financial life up on the assumption that disaster was about to strike.

I did not buy a dream house. I did not saddle myself with an attractive deadbeat. I did not assume that I "needed" a costly [whatever]. I did not buy expensive doodads or take expensive trips "because I'm worth it." It was more important to me to be able to sleep nights.

Since I am naturally risk adverse, it was a real adjustment for me (hence the sleepless nights) to shift from having a salary to freelancing. It also took a much higher level of financial organization. If you're on salary, every week or every two weeks a specific, predictable amount of money just shows up.

That's very nice. It's really easy to get used to that.

When you have your own business, THAT IS GONE. You have no safety net. No one owes you anything. Your work can dry up for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And your life may change--that lean year was not the fault of my clients, it was the fault of my own life circumstances that prevented me from doing paid work.

Your book sales are going to fluctuate. Your genre may have its day, and then, suddenly, its day is over. You may not be able to crank out books at the rate you used to. You may be the flavor of the week, but that just means that next week, the flavor will change.

Don't assume the fat months will last. Protect your core. 

Ed's on the warpath

Oh, well, looks like there's another reason to not buy reviews....

The amazing evaporating backlist

This (via PV) outlines how print backlist sales are plummeting thanks to e-books. This does not bode well for traditional publishers, since the backlist is the industry's old reliable cash cow. You don't have to spend money marketing the backlist, and if the book is old enough, you don't even have to buy the rights, because it's in the public domain. If it's used by schools, then you have a captive audience that literally has to buy it.

But what if they don't? What if they can go to Project Guttenberg and get it for free? This, I think, is going to be the main challenge posed to publishers by e-books--not the pathetic and obvious lie that e-books cost a lot to make, but the fact that e-books are making it so that publishers can no longer monetize the public domain.

Of course, they can always rip off authors, so there's hope for Penguin yet.

DAISY, DAISY, give me an answer, do

So I did a little poking around into DAISY, and I don't think I'm going to do it. It seems easy enough to convert something into DAISY--there are add-ons for Word and OpenOffice that will save something as a DAISY file--but once you have the file, what then? You can't put it up someplace yourself for people to buy--or if you can, they're keeping that information mighty quiet.

The other thing is that a lot of the things DAISY was designed to do, e-readers can do now. Kindles read books aloud, and apparently Apple devices can make Braille. If you're on Smashwords, someone can buy the .DOC version of your book and convert that into DAISY themselves, and hopefully soon they'll be able to do that with an ePub file. To be honest, I hope that DAISY becomes outdated and unnecessary as e-books become more adaptable.

Dribs 'n' drabs

The Passive Voice has a profile of the head of HarperCollins. There's a lot of self-serving nonsense but also some interesting nuggets: According to the article, more than half of HarperCollins' revenues on fiction books sold in the United States come from e-books, almost half of revenues from its Avon romance imprint are from e-books, and the company expects that more than half of all its fiction revenues will come from e-books within 18 months.

Note that these are revenues--i.e. the actual dollar/pound value of books sold--not the number of books sold. Since e-books usually sell for less than paper, that means people are buying more books--a lot more. Quoth the article: "While sales of HarperCollins's paper books are flat year on year at about £120m, according to Nielsen Bookscan, digital titles are up 250% and now account for 20% of UK income."

And this is a useful post from Crabby McSlacker on managing your time when you're working for yourself--the flip side of flexibility is lack of structure, which can be a challenge. Plus, she has pretty pictures from her vacation in Scotland!