Ingram and the Sea Change in Publishing

Ingram wants to lead the sea change in publishing:

While digital is growing rapidly, Ingram continues to invest in print technology to maintain its leadership position in a segment it all but invented: print-on-demand. Its Lightning Source division now has 4.4 million titles and has added more titles this year than at any time in its history. “We’ve seen an explosion of titles,” Prichard said, attributing that to a number of factors: traditional publishers doing shorter first printings and reprinting using POD; the growth of aggregators that print public domain titles; more self-publishing; and greater use of POD by academic presses.

…

“We expect to take over more publishers’ back-end operations as they move from print to digital, and business models change like never before,” Prichard said. As digital publishing commands more resources, publishers will want to move the management of slow-moving titles to Ingram, freeing warehouse space and “turning fixed costs into variable costs,” Prichard believes. Serving as the back end for publishers as well as Ingram’s still rapidly growing direct-to-consumer business centered around fulfilling Internet book orders is why Prichard predicted that Ingram’s print sales will increase in the years ahead.

…Blending Ingram’s print and digital capabilities was one reason Prichard led the reorganization of the company 15 months ago, a process that combined three businesses—Ingram Book Company, Ingram Digital, and Lightning Source—into the Ingram Content Group. The move centralized all of the departments of the three separate businesses and has made it easier for customers to work with Ingram, whether for print, digital, or a mix of services.

Oh, and this is both funny and sobering.

Writer: Nine months.

Editor: What?

Writer: Nine months, working 60 hour weeks. That’s how long it took me to write my novel. That seems a bit longer and more labor-intensive than your three weeks. Yet I’m only getting 17.5% of the price that you set. Do you know what your percentage is?

Editor: Off the top of my head, no.

Writer: You get 52.5%.

Editor: Really? Huh.

Writer: To me, that doesn’t seem fair.

Editor: You don’t seem to understand that you need us. Without editing or cover art…

Writer: (interrupting) Let’s say the ebook sells ten thousand copies. Which, at your inflated price of $9.99, seems unlikely. But let’s say it does. That means I earn $17,500…

Editor: A respectable figure…

Writer: …and you earn $52,500. Even though you only worked on it for three weeks.

Editor: But you gotta admit, we made a terrific cover for it.

Writer: True. But for fifty thousand dollars, I bet I could buy some pretty nice cover art on my own. I bet I could pay a doctor to raise Pablo Picasso from the dead and have him do the cover.

Editor: Don’t forget editing.

Writer: How long does it take to edit a manuscript?

Editor: Excuse me?

Writer: In hours. How many are we talking? Ten? Twenty?

Editor: It might go as high as fifty hours, with multiple read-throughs and the line edit.

Writer: How much do editors earn an hour?

Editor: Excuse me?

Writer: Let’s say fifty bucks an hour. I think that’s high, and I also think your fifty hour estimate is high, but even if we go with both, that’s only $2500. And according to the Artist & Graphic Designer’s Market, book cover art should cost around $2000.

Editor: Don’t forget formatting and uploading.

Writer: I can pay a guy $200 to format and upload the book. In fact, I can also pay a guy $300 to create a cover, and an editor $500 to do both content and copy editing. But you’re not charging me $1000, or even $4500. You’re taking $52,500. And that number can get even bigger. If I hire my own editor and artist, those costs are fixed. You continue to take your 52.5% forever.

Editor: You don’t seem to understand. Do you know how much it costs to rent this office? We’re paying $25k a month, and that doesn’t even include utilities. I’ve got three assistants. We all have health insurance and 401k. Expense accounts. Do you have any idea what it costs to take agents out to lunch?

Writer: My agent didn’t broker this deal.

Editor: You’re missing the point!

(Assistant enters, with coffee)

Assistant: Here’s your cappuccino, Editor.

Editor: There’s another cost! We paid five grand for this cappuccino machine! How are we supposed to stay in business unless we take 52.5%?

Writer: (standing up) I think we’re done here.

Editor: Wait a second! You need us! Without us to validate your work, you’ll never be considered legitimate! You’ll just be some unknown, satisfied rich guy!

There’s more. You should read the whole thing. Hilarious and yet quite… thought-provoking.

That Boy Girl Thing

So why don’t boys read more books, and girls do more math?

Just kidding. I’m not going to attempt to answer that here, because I would inevitably just piss everybody off.

Pub Rants joined the fray, which is where I caught some amusing contribuions to the debate, such as My Writer Bloggy Woggy: The Anti-Penis Bias in Pubbying!

I’m somewhat sympathetic, except for one thing. Some study somewhere, which I should cite, but I’m too lazy, and honestly, I have other things I should be doing now than writing this blog post, have found that female readers will read books by male authors and aimed at male readers, but not the reverse. Which makes me feel just a bit less sorry for the male readers who are complaining.

It is also why, despite this evidence about females dominating both the professional and readership sides of publishing, I have had cause to regret not choosing a gender-neutral or even masculine pen name. Because I write sf, and even hard sf, and I wonder if male readers will read it.

Ted Cross brought up a related point, about “romantasy” book covers. If you don’t know the ones he means, take a look at his site.

Which brings me to the real point of this post, namely, do you think certain covers appeal more to female or male readers? And what elements appeal more to one gender or the other?

One might think that a book with a sexy female on the cover is meant to appeal to a man, and a book with a sexy man on the cover is to appeal to a woman. I don’t think it’s that simple.

I think the covers with the hunks and babes are BOTH geared to appeal to women. Books with sexy women meant to appeal to men usually show the women in a slightly different way. Kneeling at a man’s feet in a bikini, for example. (Just sayin’.)

But I also have this theory, and feel free to disagree, that books oriented more toward female readers have a close-up shot of a face or torso (person focused), whereas books oriented more toward male readers have a wider shot, showing an action scene, or gadgets (spaceship, swords, boats, cars, castles, armor, etc.)

When pre-verbal babies are show toys, girls respond better to people/faces and boys to objects trucks or balls. Unless the baby in question has William’s Syndrome, in which case, whether a he or she, that baby will fixate on a human face. Which is neither here nor there, but pretty interesting in and of itself.

Any thoughts?

Bollywood Goes Sci Fi

If you were wondering, why the Terminators sent back in time never succeeded in killing John Connor, we now know. Turns out, because most of them skipped town in order to start a new career as Bollywood dancers. And that army of iMac-styled robots from iRobot, the ridiculous Will Smith adaptation of Azimov’s I, Robot? Ditto.

I guess Wall-E is not the only robot with a secret love for musicals.

No civilization can advance without science fiction. Seriously. Look at the countries that produce science fiction and then look at the countries that produce new science. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

Glad to see Bollywood going sci-fi; it bodes well for India’s journey towards superpower. And that gun is totally what Shiva would be totin’ if he packed heat, you know it.

I guess my question is whether we’ll really see sci fi take off in Bollywood or if this is just another anomaly, like this classic, which features A FIGHT UNTO DEATH between flying saucers and hippies with guitars.

And while we’re on the subject of anomalies, I’ll bet you didn’t know (or knew, but were desparately trying to forget) that Tarzan went to Delhi.

Incidentally, Edgar Rice Burroughs was so disgusted with the way Hollywood portrayed Tarzan, that he decided to start a movie studio to produce his own Tarzan films. I can only imagine what he would have thought of the Bollywood Tarzan.