Claire Ryan's Blog, page 18

On the Amazon display problem…

I’ve written before on the problem of adblockers taking out Amazon listings. In a nutshell, Firefox and Chrome’s most popular addons are adblockers, which strip annoying ads out of webpages as they load up. They unfortunately take out Amazon’s book affiliate widget too, and this is a big problem if an author is using it to display their books on their website.

Well, I’ve been just a little bit out of touch lately because I’m building a simplified WordPress plugin that can replace the Amazon widget as well as display links to other buying options for each book. It’s a little difficult because I essentially have to pick up WP plugin development as I go along, and that’s not so easy even when you already know PHP and Javascript.

Ideally this will be submitted to WordPress as well, and released for free under the GPL license. I’ll also try to offer a little support for anyone who has trouble with it.

The functionality I’m aiming for is as follows:

Each copy of the plugin widget will take up to three books in a row, depending on the sidebar width.
Each book will have a single cover image sized at 100px by 160px.
On holding the mouse over each image, a popup will appear with a little icon for each buying option (I’ll try to include as many as I can).
In the WP admin section, the author must specify the image file for each book and the links to each buying option.
Anything left blank will not show up.

This is actually quite a bit undertaking for me, but I think it’s needed. The Ted Weinstein Literary Agency have a basic version that requires more coding than I think a non-techy person can handle, and don’t include Smashwords or Kobo. The Amazon Showcase plugin hasn’t been updated in two years. I included a section in my book on how to write HTML specifically so authors could list their books on their site sidebar without having to worry about adblockers or the like, but it’s really not enough.

I think it’s time for a better solution, hence why I’m going to make this happen. Suggestions welcome if you’ve got them.

Related ArticlesThe Use of Amazon Affiliate LinksFive on Friday: Kobo KonundrumsIndie Authors and the Problem of Piracy

The Moral Panic of Piracy

Alright, if you haven’t heard the full story yet, LendInk.com is a small ebook lending site that has been forced offline. It was a very straightforward business model – they let users register, and users listed which ebooks they had that could be lent out to other users once. Then people traded books. It was a bit like a person-to-person lending – you know, like with paper books – that could only be done once. LendInk did not keep copies of the books themselves. It couldn’t.

LendInk was still taken offline by hundreds of lawsuit threats.

Normally I hear this kind of story and assume the worst; that some big media company has taken notice of an up and coming site, and proceeded to lay the smack down in a poor attempt to protect their copyrights. I was wrong in this case. The authors did it, and they did it because someone told someone else that LendInk was a pirate site.

All I can say about this is that I am disappointed. And angry, yes, on behalf of LendInk’s owner, who seems like a nice enough small businessman, but mostly disappointed.

Moral Panic

This is what it is, in a nutshell; a blown-out-of-proportion panic over something so ridiculous that it beggars belief. This is a site that did the same thing as many other sites, that did something completely legit and was trying to make a business from it, and the author response was to run around like the damn sky was falling and then crow about it when the site was taken down! Did none of these people do any kind of reading?!

I probably have a slightly different perspective on this as a long-time computer gamer, in fact. When you’re involved in a medium that’s blamed every other week for all kinds of social ills, you tend to tread a little more carefully and read a little closer when faced with this kind of panic, because you know what it’s like to have all that undeserved anger thrown your way. It’s absolutely undeserved in this case, and the very minimum these authors need to do is APOLOGISE and retract every complaint. Short of that, they deserve every inch of the backlash they’re getting. They brought it on themselves.

It seems that Helen White and Amanda Stork were the main instigators of this insanity, but the blame falls on every name on that list. I will never buy their work, and I hope that, by reposting the list below, their names are known far and wide for this rather than their work.

On the Marketing Connection

I’ve said before that fighting piracy is a fool’s game, and never has it been more obvious than here. Consider, for a moment, what these authors did. Assume that LendInk really was an unrepentant pirate site. They expended a lot of effort, raised a lot of bad feeling, and took… one site offline. Pirates now have only a few thousand options for getting their media for free, instead of a few thousand and one. What have they really accomplished here, then?

This assumes that the site is unrepentant, and obviously pirating their work. What if, like with many sites, there’s a grey area? What if the site is small-time and it’s the users who are uploading the books, which the site is willing to take down as they get requests? Would the authors still have gone after it – and, if so, do they honestly think they’d have gotten nothing but support and sympathy by victimizing a small site owner who makes no profit?

The point, really, is that you had better get your facts in order and make damn sure that you hold the moral high ground before you start sending lawsuit threats. And you never, EVER act in an unreasonable or unprofessional manner. Never display the righteous fury, no matter how much you feel it, because if it all goes south (like it has here) the ones who were screaming the loudest will get the most negative attention.

You need perspective. You need to be rational. If your books are being pirated and you’re not okay with that, then you go through the proper channels in a polite manner. Repeat this, as many times as necessary: the world will not end if some people get your book for free.

The Author List of Shame (Originally compiled by Erik Gjertsen)

Robin Helm
OG Tomes
Buck Stienke
Ken Farmer
Dawn Sinclair
Joyce Godwin Grubbs
Tony Riches
Rebecca Treadway
Lisa Kz
Mari Passananti
Melody Peugh
Stephen Dafoe
Karen Kennedy Samoranos
Gerry Huntman
Rhea Rhodan
Kai Starr (Kaichi Satake)
Anne Barnhill
Vicki Batman
James F. Ross
Scarlet Hunter
Alisha Paige
Merris Hawk
Cathie Dunn
Roscoe James
Trish Marie Dawson
Mark Patton
Sandra Peddle
Bill Wilbur
Rachel Lyndhurst
Melinda Hammond
Chrystalla Thoma
David Naughton-Shires
Electa Scott Graham
Kate McCormick
Seumas Gallacher
Juliet Cardin
Benita Brown
Julie Parker
Jenny Woodall
Pam Mangol Bitner
Liz Ringrose
Anne Polhill Walton
Lesley Cookman
M.m. Bennetts
Gerry Huntman
Prue Batten
Chrystalla Thoma
Karl Jones
Anna Jacobs
Deborah Gafford
Nely Cab
Tessa Berkley
Nan O’Berry
Sharon Cathcart
Lauren Gilbert
Naty Matos
Tory Michaels
Cerian Williams Hebert
Karen Cino
LaVerne Clark
Erin Dameron-Hill
Kissa Starling
Emily Harvale
Rosalind Smith-Nazilli
Seumas Gallacher
Paula Martin
Melanie Pearce
Jeanette Baird Vaughan
Trace Rybarczyk Broyles
Trevor Belshaw
Pam Howes
Deb Harris
Gayl Taylor
Nanette Del Valle Bradford
Ella James
Raven McAllan
Linda Gillard
Jenny Woodall
Virginia McKevitt
Morticia Knight
Judith Arnopp Novelist
Heather Nelson
Ruth Watson-Morris
Rebecca Rynecki
Victoria Pearson Writer
Maxi Shelton
David J Howe

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Five on Friday: Kobo Konundrums

Here’s your required reading for the week – and my apologies for not posting last week. I’ve been somewhat busy.

Michael Fitzpatrick on CNNMoney talks about Hiroshi Mikitani, the new owner of Kobo, and his ambition to take on Amazon.

Eric Edstrom on how to get your Goodreads reviews and ratings to show up on Kobo.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch on dealbreakers to watch out for in your publishing contracts – and if you’re not following The Business Rusch already, get over there and subscribe!

Stephanie Laurens’ keynote speech from the RWA National Conference in Anaheim.

Support indie authors!

You want to know something funny? Only one author has ever contacted me about this. As far as I can tell, she’s the only one who noticed that someone, somewhere on the Internet, mentioned her name and her book. I always do mention the book as well, just to be 100% sure that it’ll be picked up by Google Alerts if the author has them running – and they should, if they’re being sensible.

So today I want to open this up. If any author wants to be included in the Five on Friday post, you just have to email me at info@raynfall.com. My only criteria is that you need to be a self-published author.

Anyway – this Friday’s author is Len Barry, and his book is called Vitamin F. It’s a strange dystopian sci-fi future where Genetic Security is a thing that exists. Read if you like stuff like Gattaca.

Cover? – Len, you need to move that title text and change the cover. Seriously, man.
Blurb? – Interesting hook, but it’s not enough of a hook. What’s the plot? What are the stakes?
Social media? – I found Twitter, but not Facebook. No other social media stuff. Maybe time to branch out?
Web design? – a free WordPress blog, but well-developed.

Have a good weekend!

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On the Subject of Special Snowflakes

Recent news has lead me to believe that there is something very odd going on in the halls of the major publishers. I think there’s a psychology aspect to their business that hasn’t been explored all that well up to this point – that of industry exceptionalism, or the idea that publishing, in and of itself, is deserving of special treatment when it comes to the online world.

I got thinking about this mostly as a result of reading various articles about the price-fixing scandal still in the works. I had to ask – why did the publishing industry think this was justified? They must have known it was illegal.

In the Beginning…

Let’s jump back a bit. The printing press was invented in 1440. Scribes have been around for much longer, obviously. Publishers have been around for at least as long as the press, meaning you’re talking about an industry that’s (a) responsible for a big chunk of human history, and (b) hundreds of years old, minimum. Compare this to the movie, music and TV industries, which are barely pushing a hundred years.

Are they right to think of themselves as being exceptional? As being too vital to allow their business to be ruined by the Internet? Possibly. Unfortunately for them, the Internet doesn’t really care.

Special Snowflake Meets Flamethrower

The lists of failed companies are littered with the corpses of those who thought that they were special, that the Internet couldn’t touch them. Kodak comes to mind immediately, as well as the various record labels who didn’t survive and had to be absorbed by the larger corporation-backed ones. The digital world is not kind, in that respect.

The record labels are actually a case in point. As Techdirt is so fond of pointing out, the record labels were not in the business of selling music – they were in the business of selling plastic discs. Their whole money-making model revolved around the sale of discs that just happened to have music on them, and they got away with it because there was no other real way to get the music apart from buying the plastic disc. The Internet, of course, makes that whole aspect of their operation completely irrelevant – people can get the music as a stream of data, no matter how hard the labels try to stop them. Apple dragged them kicking and screaming into the digital world – otherwise, the labels would have stagnated and continued to deny reality.

Book publishers are not in the business of selling literature. They’re in the business of selling books – physical, paper books. They’re not concerned about the contents of said books as long as they sell; hence why they’re happy to sign contracts for a biography of Justin Bieber (age 16 at the time). They get away with it, again, because for hundreds of years there was no other convenient way of delivering a story or information to a large audience. And again, the Internet makes it completely irrelevant; people can access facts and information for free, shared by other people in other parts of the world, and they can read stories delivered directly from the author. What’s worse, the people who normally sell their work to publishers can make more money and develop their career without any input at all from them.

The problem in both cases is the same. The industry was not orientated around what they were selling. They were orientated around the method of selling it, such that the method eclipsed everything else. No small wonder, then, that their whole business is threatened by a new, more efficient method of selling… and it’s a shame that the publishers still struggle against this instead of taking advantage of it.

There really isn’t any way out. The Internet will not disappear. Amazon will not disappear. As long as authors can get a better deal elsewhere, and the tools to self-publish are becoming more and more simplified, then publishers will be in danger of simply dying a slow death for a lack of relevancy. Movies, TV and music take a certain level of skill and investment to pull off well. They have costs that are a barrier to entry for some. Books have no such restriction; anyone can write and publish, for better or worse. While the other content industries can maintain their relevancy simply because they can afford those initial costs and invest in new technology, the traditional publishing industry has no such advantage.

Business does not respect tradition. It certainly doesn’t respect those who try to hold back the marketplace for selfish reasons. I fear that the big publishers thought themselves special enough to break the law in order to maintain the status quo in their favor – but I also know that, in the long run, it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. The Internet is a great leveler – and it’s also a great flamethrower when it comes to special snowflakes.

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How a Traditional Publisher Can Harm an Author’s Career?

Mark Coker, the owner of Smashwords, does make a good point with his article on traditional publishers. Okay, him running the main source for independent authors is something of a bias, but I think his argument has merit: that trad publishers move too slowly and price too high for the marketplace, and this represents an obstacle for authors during their career when they’re faced with indies who can release their books on a much faster schedule at a more attractive price point.

This is a problem of the marketplace, of course. Today I’d like to look at some examples of how a traditional publisher can just harm an author’s career outright.

The Harlequin Lawsuit

The big news from last week, apart from the Pearson acquisition of Author Solutions. Harlequin, the big romance publisher, made an agreement with authors to net them 50% of the net as royalties when they sold or licensed the books out to other companies. Not a bad deal, if you’re selling or licensing a book for $4 for a retail price of $8 – that means the author gets $2 and Harlequin gets $2. But Harlequin licensed the books to a Swiss subsidiary, that they wholly owned and controlled, for peanuts – meaning the author got 24 to 32 cents, Harlequin gets 24 to 32 cents, and the Swiss subsidiary sells it for a whole lot more profit that goes straight back to Harlequin.

They set up the system specifically to get out of paying authors the proper royalty rate. It looks very much like Harlequin screwed a lot of authors out of money – it may be legal, but it’s not right, and how many of those authors had to do without much-needed cash? I honestly don’t think it gets much worse than this from the majors.

They Just Don’t Get It

A good friend of mine is of the opinion that if you sign a contract, you better know what you’re agreeing to, and there’s no point whining about it later. But a lot of the contract terms of major publishers are either unfair or simply outdated, and they are all about protecting the publisher at the expense of the author. What happens, then, when the publisher outright breaks the terms of a contract? It happened to Sebastian Marshall, a businessman who essentially gave Simon and Schuster the boot when they didn’t pay him on time, gave no consideration to his marketing ideas, and essentially treated him as a useless appendage to the whole process. His response was to throw everything out and self-publish, then dare them to come after him for it. Ballsy, but… where could his book have been now, if they had held up their end of the bargain? Where would his career have been?

Restricting Outlets

Okay, libraries don’t come up all that often, but here’s an interesting fact: you can check out ebooks from libraries. Crazy, huh? It does make sense to be able to offer digital versions of the paper books – but that’s only if the libraries can afford it. It’s not like buying a single paper copy, remember. They have to license the book instead.

Guess what costs a truly crazy amount of money? Yeah.

Random House just put the price of each ebook licence by 300%. Most other publishers won’t even offer their full catalogue. Libraries are one good way for readers to try a book they’ve heard of at no cost – but an author with a mainstream publisher might as well forget about seeing their work there in digital form. The libraries simply can’t afford it, so marketing for them there. An indie, by comparison, could just offer their ebook for the libraries’ digital archive, or give them a few physical copies for free.

The DOJ Price-Fixing Scandal

Look, you can say what you like, but I’m convinced that they colluded to keep ebook prices high. They had to, because ebooks were set to cannibalize the very profitable hardcover sales – and Amazon controlled those prices, and had been relentlessly pushing the $9.99 or lower price point. The Department of Justice wouldn’t have jumped in here against the majors unless they had some pretty big evidence to back it up, and by all accounts, they did. Three of them have already settled.

This was a pretty rotten move on their part. The publishers wanted to make sure that hardcover sales were protected, of course, but they did it at the expense of their authors. Authors need every sale, even if the price isn’t right, because they need the exposure (unless they’re a bestseller already, of course). That the majors did this says, in not so many words, that they’ll happily toss their authors under a bus and break the law if it means getting control of the market from Amazon.

The problem, really, is that a lot of this is simply bypassed by becoming an indie author. Indies have one problem: they need to get the word out about their books. Outside that, they are in control and they answer to no one but the services they deal through. If they torpedo their career, it’s by their own hand. The traditional publishers, however, seem hell-bent on making sure that no one can buy their authors’ work in ebook form for a reasonable price, and making it clear that their authors are entirely expendable in every way.

That’s no way to treat a business partner. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again now: there are dark times ahead for the majors if they keep this up.

Related ArticlesThe Brave New WorldBeware of Author SolutionsThe Whys and Wherefores

The Author as Customer

So, Penguin’s parent company bought Author Solutions. And now, BookCountry’s services page has been taken down for an “upgrade”. I’m going to draw the obvious conclusion and saw that BookCountry’s services are going to be Author Solutions’ services, as served through their various imprints.

Once everyone got over the shock of a company like Penguin being mentioned with Author Solutions in the same press release, the opinions started to fly thick and fast. I, unfortunately, fall into the camp of people who are less than impressed with this whole thing; it looks like a money grab to me, if anything. There’s a lot of cash in getting authors to buy overpriced services with an option to snatch a chunk of their profits if their book is a success too. David Gaughran over at IndieReader sums up my opinion on it all, with an extra side helping from Emily Suess over at her excellent blog.

I got to thinking about one aspect of it after reading Porter Anderson’s article over on Jane Friedman’s blog – that of the author as customer.

Bear with me on this…

In the traditional publishing paradigm, authors are a part of the production process. They are the starting point; the raw materials department, as it were. They represent the author as supplier, as business partner, to the publisher; people who have a working relationship with the publisher that is ideally mutually beneficial. They are not easily replaceable, if their product is in high demand (Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, etc.).

Of course, you also have the new entries to the market who are trying to make a name for themselves, who want to build their brand awareness. The publishers have a large customer base (bookstores), making them very attractive as potential business partners, even though the terms are not as favorable as they could be.

Self-publishing, of course, blows this out of the water. The suppliers now have a method of refining their product and selling it into the market in direct competition with the legacy players, frequently for far less. How often has this very scenario played out in other industries? For suppliers who are not already in business arrangements with the publishers, a whole new world of money-making opportunity has presented itself. Of course, the suppliers who can’t or don’t want to get out of their arrangements will moan about the product being devalued, but who cares what they think? Certainly not the consumer, who now gets the same product for less. Certainly not the new players, who are making good money, nor the service industry that has sprung up around them to aid in this new, greater efficiency.

This is business, nothing more. Business changes. There are no tears for those who cannot adapt.

Changing Views

Not all adaptations are what we expect. Not all are good, for a given definition of good. The big problem here is that Penguin are adapting in one direction that’s completely opposed to their usual business. This is a fundamentally different view than what has governed the original publishing paradigm – it positions the author as customer, not as business partner.

Consider the dichotomy of it:

The author sells their work to Penguin for an advance and royalties. Penguin and the author both have a vested interest in having their work sell.
The author buys a package from Author Solutions, giving up a chunk of cash, a large part of the royalties, and their rights. Only the author has any vested interest in having their work sell.

The problem, as I’ve said before, is that this represents a complete turnabout in who is being sold to.

…it’s blindingly obvious that iUniverse [an Author Solutions imprint] has no incentive to sell the books. They get far more money from the authors themselves, and it’s clear that their business model is geared towards that alone. I am sure of this because it’s already well known that the iUniverse sales team calls authors, not bookstores, to sell them on their products. Their website is geared towards selling to authors. By all accounts, every Author Solutions subsidiary works on the same model, and this puts them at odds with the purpose of the author in selling books to readers.

Penguin as a company have always sold to big chain bookstores, who are slowly dying off. They, like all the other large publishing houses, know nothing whatsoever about selling to actual readers. But authors, now; they understand authors. They have many business relationships with authors, with years of experience to help them out. Suddenly, this makes the acquisition of Author Solutions very clear – it’s not as big of a stretch to reorientate their business to sell to authors, instead of buying from them, as it is to learn how to sell to a demographic for which they have no prior knowledge and for whom Amazon is such a giant competitor.

What Now?

My first instinct was that this was not a good deal for Penguin. They didn’t get Author Solutions or the imprints for the brand power; anyone who’s anyone already knows their reputation. They certainly didn’t get them for the quality of their services or their work force, if Emily’s careful complaints tracking is any indication. So what gives? Penguin was already offering publishing services through BookCountry. Why not expand that, rather than bring Author Solutions and its terrible reputation down on top of them?

I think I know why, now. We’re back to the beginning, to my guess about BookCountry. Penguin wasn’t going to expand its publishing services through BookCountry when ASI and its imprints already had a giant, money-making machine already churning out banknotes. The whole point of the acquisition was plugging Author Solutions into a ready-made audience in BookCountry, and using the legitimacy of the Penguin name to boost Author Solutions’ sales even further. It’s not about breaking into international markets, or innovation (excuse me while I laugh at that). It’s about the way that Author Solutions makes money, by selling overpriced packages. This is the same reason why I think that there will be no significant changes to the business, as some people hope. Why would Penguin bother to tinker with a machine that already makes money? The changes that they would have to implement, as many people hope, to clean up ASI’s reputation will be large. If they were going to do that, it would have been easier and less onerous to just build a new division with a clean slate.

That said, my opinion that this was a bad deal still stands. Here’s my reasoning: ASI makes money on new authors who don’t know any better. That really can’t last. How long do they have before the knowledge of how to publish on Amazon – or Kobo, for that matter; the process is even simpler there – becomes even more widespread? How long before they’re simply crowded out by the service industry of true self-publishers, who can provide covers and editing for a much more reasonable price? Their whole business model depends on ignorance, in an age where knowledge is easy to find if you have even the vaguest idea of what you’re looking for. In this respect, ASI needs Penguin a lot more than Penguin needs ASI, as the legitimacy of the Penguin name means those high prices can be justified a little while longer.

I think Pearson made a bad decision here, in the long run. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: the major publishers need to do something radical to connect with readers, not bookstores and not authors. Tor and Baen are the only two I know of who have any idea of what they are doing. As for the others, the author as customer is simply not a long-term viable solution when that particular customer base has their choice of cheaper, better quality alternatives.

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Five on Friday: When Big Companies Attack

Here’s your required reading for the week.

If you haven’t heard it by now (what’s it like, living under that rock?), Penguin’s parent company, Pearsons PLC, has bought Author Solutions. Yes, THAT Author Solutions I won’t link to because of my deep and profound contempt for them.

Harlequin have been sued by class action over unpaid royalties.

 The Passive Guy and Dean Wesley Smith on blurb-writing.

Meghan Peters from Mashable on how to host a Google+ Hangout for your fans.

Support indie authors!

Today’s author caught my eye because of the cover of her debut novel. Clare Davidson is the name, Trinity is the book in question, and I think you’ll agree that the cover is pretty awesome.  The book is a fantasy quest story about a young girl who is the embodiment of a goddess – you know, danger, excitement, all that good stuff. I don’t normally post the covers, but I think I will in this case. First of all, let’s get the marketing rundown.

Cover? – See for yourself. It’s got my two thumbs up.
Blurb? – It’s got a hook, but it’s not enough of a hook. It needs to be longer and maybe a bit less vague.
Social media? – All available and up to date. She’s actually the first I’ve found who uses Google+. She gets a like, a follow, AND and +1 from me.
Web design? – a proper domain with a custom design. Waaay over the top for my own peculiar taste, but very much in character with the book. Clare knows what she’s doing there.

Not much needed for improvement here – great to see an author getting a good start. Everyone have a good weekend!

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Research and Development

How does DIY publishing pay for research and development?

This is the question posed by Porter Anderson over on Jane Friedman’s blog this week, and I find it fascinating on many levels. The general idea of the article – and I do recommend reading it all – can be summarized in Porter’s closing:

Do you see a natural investment opportunity and apparatus in place for supporting new talent and the new works of existing authors in a self-publishing setting? Aside from the individual trial-and-error that each self-publishing author funds for him- and herself, where’s the R&D in a DIY industry?

This leads on from another article that raised any number of hackles from Eugenia Williamson in the Boston Phoenix called The Dead End of DIY Publishing, whose main point was exactly this. New authors are (apparently) nurtured by the money that comes from bestsellers; indie publishing has no such process. So why is this so interesting? Well, to me at least, they’re asking the wrong questions.

What is R&D?

Alright, bear with me here. In theory, the majors use their bestseller money to take chances on, as Porter calls them, “the young and the feckless, the debutantes and the dodgy, the genre-challenged and the passion players”. Research and development of new authors, yes?

Except this isn’t R&D. In any other business, this would be called utter lunacy of the kind that might get people fired. Think for a minute about what this implies: the majors take money made on one product that’s sold well, and sink it into dozens of new, untested products on the off-chance that one of them will turn a huge profit to cover all the losses. What other business operates like this, on a wing and a prayer?

Research and development means exactly what it means. New products are researched, markets are tested, reactions are gauged. Its very purpose is to make sure that the company in question develops viable, marketable products, and an R&D department that consistently fails at that and has the company release duds is one that will swiftly be out of a job. So, unless the various heads of the major publishers are actually dumb as a box of rocks, this idea that they spend their bestseller money on a bunch of outside bets is ridiculous.

No, let’s assume that they know what they’re doing. They are owned by large corporations with shareholders, who generally don’t put up with people playing fast and loose with their money and are incredibly risk-adverse. I think it’s far more likely that they take their bestseller money and spend it on the books that are certain to sell, like the latest Stephen King or whatever Kim Kardashian is pretending to have written herself, and then bank the rest. They pick up the books that they think will turn a profit, and they mould those books according to their market perceptions. Artistic concerns, such as nurturing new and interesting talent? A very, very minor consideration, no matter how much the agents or editors love a particular work. Business is business, and profits come first.

So what about the indies?

There seems to be a somewhat worrying thread running through this whole thing: the notion that fewer big lump sums means less of a chance for new and interesting books to get into the limelight. I can only assume that this is the case, as there isn’t really anything more that the majors can offer except bigger initial exposure. This, of course, is blown out of the water by the fact that their job was never to bring those new and interesting books into the public eye; their job is to make profits, pure and simple. But the first part of the equation is equally flawed; who could think that new and interesting books won’t get into the limelight because of self-publishing?

Indies are a diverse bunch, but at least they understand this much: there are no more restrictions. There is no more reason for anyone to say no, your book is not worthy. There is only “Press here to publish’ and the response of the world at large, and every work stands or falls on its merits and the marketing efforts of the author. It means some of them will sell only a little. It means some of them will catch the imagination, and they will become superstars.

The question itself – where does R&D come from, in self-publishing – is meaningless. It’s asking the wrong question. R&D itself doesn’t make sense, in this world without borders. Research and development happens when someone takes something and builds upon it; each author does this for themselves, on their own work, or they borrow and remix ideas from other authors they know who write in the same genre. Release a book, get reviews, watch sales, watch traffic data, write something new. There is so little risked, with every title, that self-publishing can do what traditional publishing cannot: provide an avenue for the young and the feckless, the debutantes and the dodgy, the genre-challenged and the passion players to reach an audience that they never would have been able to before.

Of course, it’s debatable whether those strange and new projects will succeed in the market, but that is hardly different from the traditional paradigm. The point is that they don’t need to rely on the fickle nature of a gatekeeper any longer.

In Summary

Self-publishing is still maturing, but this idea of it needing some kind of mechanism for research and development like the traditional industry is simply ludicrous. The traditional mechanism is, frankly, a pretty terrible one for the purpose of nurturing new talent as its primary aim is all about the money.

The heart and soul of self-publishing is freedom. This alone makes it far more amenable to new ideas, new stories, new genres. The freedom to tell any story to the whole world, for better or worse, is worth more than any advance.

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The Business and the Art

I think we all know that there’s two halves to making a living as an author: the business and the art. The art, of course, is the basic skill of writing; the forging of narrative out of raw inspiration, which takes years of practice to truly master. The business, however, seems to be far more neglected of late.

I spend a lot of time talking to independent authors. Traditional authors have the advantage of being more ‘hands off’ when it comes to the business side of things, but the indies have no such luxury. The problem I see, very frequently, is that indie authors have absorbed a lot about writing as an art, but not so much about writing as a business.

The Cover

I know, I know, I keep talking about covers. I honestly can’t help it. I keep seeing covers that look very much like they were put together by amateurs with vague ideas of graphic design or proper illustration. Let’s be honest here – nothing screams ‘this book is bad’ more than a bad cover. People know it, even subconsciously, and they do respond to it. So, right out of the gate, indie authors shoot themselves in the foot by thinking that their amateur efforts are good enough for their work.

Let me say this very clearly: They are not, and it’s obvious.

Traditional publishing houses have graphic designers for a reason. Indies need to do the same.

Solution: go to ConceptArt.org, and post your cover in their Critique section. After it’s been painfully shredded several times by the professional designers who like to hang out there, pick over the main critique points and redo it until it’s somewhat up to their standard.

The Inside

You probably know this already, but it bears repeating: edit your work. Take notice of criticism offered fairly. Have several someone elses read it. Indies know other authors, don’t they? You can’t swing a lolcat on the Internet without hitting a new writing community. Then, hire a copyeditor to clean it up, and make sure you hire a technician to format it for the ebook and a graphic designer to lay it out for the print version. If you don’t know what to look for, ask for a professional opinion.

Solution: wander around the Writer’s Cafe on Kindleboards and pick up the services you need there.

The Mindset

This is rather more difficult to quantify, but here goes… Traditional publishers look at books in terms of profit and loss, marketability, sales figures, returns. It’s not personal. It’s business. The art itself is a product, a means to an end.

And so we return to the Author’s Dilemma: The creation of art is a personal, heartfelt thing that’s difficult to quantify. The selling of it is detached, mercenary, and all about the numbers. Indie authors must somehow maintain both concepts at the same time. Here’s what I said about it before.

The dilemma is this: you, the author, must be invested in your work. You put it out there with the knowledge of your years of practice, with the hope that you told the best story possible, with the belief that it has a tremendous amount of value. At the same time, you also have to not be invested in it; to view it dispassionately as a product to sell, with a precise value that can be judged on profits and loss and in the response of your readers. You have to be prepared to accept that some people place no value on it at all.

Traditional authors have it easier in this respect. They can simply be the author-as-writer, and leave the business side of things to the publisher. The publisher then pokes and prods them when business-related things impinge on art-related things. Indies must be the author-as-entrepreneur, both artist and seller at the same time.

Solution: Personally, I favor compartmentalisation. It’s a neat trick if you can manage it. There is writing time and there is selling time, and the two do not overlap. When you write, it’s all about the art, and the personal; nothing but the pure telling of a good story. When you sell, it’s all about the product; how well does that good story resonate with readers, how marketable, how many reviews, how many sales. Lessons from one carry over into the other, but the two must be kept separate.

I would say that there are many independent authors who understand that their books are a business. They will always do well. But I see too many indies who sport a less-than-professional attitude, covers that are ‘good enough’, and books that are little more than a typo-ridden first draft, and who then wonder why their work doesn’t sell. I always feel like saying this is why, this is what you need to do, why is it that you can’t see it?

And so it goes. Ignorance abounds, in this respect, and there is no excuse for it any more. Indie authors, look to your business as much as your art.

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A Quick Note

No Five on Friday this week, I’ve taken a few days off. Normal service will resume on Monday.

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