4 Things the Publishing Industry Should Change

Io9 has a great piece on 15 science fiction and fantasy books the publishers rejected. Damn. I just knew spies told publishers to reject me.

Which leads a pundit at PC World to suggest four things the publishing industry should change:

1. Stop belittling or dismissing self-publishing. By thinking of self-published books in the same way you think of proposals, you can learn to view the self-publishing market for what it is: a farm program that is the key to your salvation.

2. Think about a book in the same way that a cloud-based service thinks about its product — always a work in progress and never finished. Most nonfiction and even some fiction should be rereleased frequently with improvements, corrections and updates.

3. Stop thinking that a book is a bound stack of paper. A book has no physical form. It’s a collection of ideas. It’s intellectual property. You don’t sell tree pulp. You sell stories and information, and you should sell it in any form and in any medium that the customer desires, without fear or favor and without trying to manipulate readers with release dates on different platforms. Just release every form as soon as you can and let readers pick.

4. Kill the advance. There’s absolutely no reason to shackle yourselves with this investment. Change the model so that you invest only in proven winners. Force austerity on writers and on your own operations. By reducing the cost per author, the same money can support more authors and thereby increase chances for mega-hits.

I know of a couple of people who have found publishers this way. Boyd Morrison first published The Ark: A Novel on Amazon, after it was rejected by all the publishers. They came back pleading to publish it after it was a runaway hit. My friend Michelle Davidson Argyle found her publisher, Rhemalda, because of her success self-publishing the lovely darksome novella Cinders

In completely other news, Amazon says that ebooks now outsell print books 2-to-1.

Just a few months ago, Amazon announced its Kindle editions were outselling hardcover books. Now, the Seattle-based online retailer also announced that for its top 10 best-selling books, its customers are now buying the Kindle edition twice as often as print copies, even as sales of print books on Amazon.com continue to grow. According to Amazon’s vice president for the Kindle Steve Kessel, Kindle e-book sales now also top print sales of hardcovers and paperbacks for its top 25, top 100 and top 1,000 bestsellers.

During the first nine months of 2010, Amazon sold 3 times as many Kindle books as during the same time period in 2009.

According to Kessel, Amazon already sold more Kindles so far this year than “during the entire fourth quarter of last year – astonishing because the fourth quarter is the busiest time of year on Amazon.” The new Kindle, which Amazon introduced in July, has already surpassed total Kindle sales during the fourth quarter of 2009. The fact that Amazon dropped the price of the cheapest Kindle to $139 surely helped sales as well.

While we have not seen similar numbers from Amazon’s competitors like Barnes & Noble and Sony, Amazon’s sales seem to be ahead of the general e-book market. According to a recent report from the the Association of American Publishers, overall e-books sales grew 193 percent between January and August 2010.

I leave you with T.S. Eliot’s reason for rejecting Animal Farm. I leave it to you to determine what relevance, if any, this has to the publishing industry in its present crisis: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm without them…”

Indeed. Indeed.

7 Things I Learned About Publishing While Sightless

While my eye didn’t work, I listened to books on my Kindle. I have a paper for school due soon, so I prioritized school reading, but only a single one of the books I need to read was available on the Kindle (and for a ridiculous price). That’s sad.

Joe Konrath’s Newbie’s Guide to Publishing was available on Kindle, however. The ebook is basically his blog, hundreds of posts worth going back five (?) years. At first when I realized it was just his blog, I was disappointed, because I thought it would be a more typical book, but I quickly changed my mind. First of all, the timing was perfect, since I couldn’t read the blog, but secondly, the ebook has a clickable index and a clear, helpful organization. All the blog posts are divided by topic, not the order the appeared on the blog.

The only problem with that is that there is a fascinating storyline to the blog that emerges from the subtext. The non-chronological order obscures it. But it’s there.

The blog chronicles Konrath’s journey from traditional author to ebook revolutionary. He wasn’t always an ebook cheerleader. In fact, the majority of his posts in Newbie’s support and advocate the traditional publishing model. Go get an agent, he advises, because if you can’t, it’s probably because your writing sucks.

The change in a post where he adds up sales from his ebooks. The numbers blow him away. That is the turning point. Even then, he doesn’t go gonzo over ebooks in one fell sweep. He’s cautious, but posts from later months keep repeating the amazing success of ebooks. There are a number of excellent essays about how traditional publishers could save themselves from the ebook revolution.

It was quite interesting. I’ve already been thinking about this a lot. Michelle finished up her series on self-publishing on a cautious note. I understand where she’s coming from. She doesn’t want to be the one to shout, “Let’s go for a swim, the water’s lovely!” and then watch someone who jumps get eaten by sharks. Or just drown.

If I had a publishing contract for print offered to me this week, I might take it. Print isn’t dead. But I admit, Konrath’s arguments swayed me. I believe the ebook revolution is closer than I imagined. I would be leery of waiting too long to jump onto the print horse-buggy, because the Model-T is already on the road.

I’m going to embrace the indie model. Wholeheartedly.

It wasn’t reading Konrath that convinced me. Actually, if you will recall a while ago, I posted about a wonderful new agent who reps sf&f, and also mentioned I would not submit to her. The reason is that I already decided I was through with the submission-rejection-agent-publisher treadmill. I even wrote a post about it, but chose not to publish it. In case I realized my decision was just temporary insanity, I didn’t want to go public with something that might hurt me. Reading Konrath — on an ebook, on the Kindle — merely convinced me that it might be helpful to share my thoughts, even if a lot of people hate what I have to say.

So here are my reasons, a mix of personal and practical.

1. Bookstores are dying.

The main advantage of traditional publishing over indie publishing is that trad pub offers distribution to book stores. But I haven’t done my main shopping in bookstores for over two years. I did buy about $100 worth of books recently, when I went to a book signing of an author I met on Facebook, but normally — hate me if you want, but it’s true — even if I browse bookstores, I look up the price on my iphone on Amazon and order it there. Because it’s almost always cheaper.

Bookstores are dying. I am one of the people responsible. I’m sorry. I love you, brick and mortar bookstores. I practically grew up in you. But you aren’t open at 2am and you don’t have the books I want, when I want. You’re far away, but the internet is always close.

So if you don’t hold my books, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t buy them from you even if you did.

2. Remainders & Returns.

Publishers do not sell to consumers. Publishers sell to bookstores. And bookstores may slash their prices or return the books if they don’t sell in a short amount of time. The author is often penalized by the publisher and the bookstore for not “selling through” the number of books ordered, but that number is chosen rather randomly.

3. NY Times Bestsellers List

The more I learn about how this list is actually compiled, the crazier it is. If you don’t know, go find out. Crazy.

But Amazon bestseller lists are crazy too. So, to be fair, it’s not bestseller lists I object to. What bothers me is the whole idea that the most important thing is for a book to sell oodles in a short amount of time right after it appears, rather than nurturing a backlist slowly.

4. Control.

Look, I admit it. I’m a control freak. It’s not that I’m not willing to work with an agent or an editor. I think I take feedback fairly well, and I’ve worked with a couple editors in the past, without any egos getting in the way. Most agents and editors I have meet are wonderful, book-loving people who have no desire to screw me over.

But I’m not so sure about the large corporations they work for. Until now, writers had to sell the rights to their own stories, have no control over final editing changes, cover art, etc. because there was no other way to bring your book to a reasonably wide audience. But that’s not the only game in town anymore.

Publishers are looking increasingly clueless. We are in the middle of a reading revolution and I’m not impressed with how most of them are handling it. I just looked up a book by an author I love and found that the Kindle edition was priced at TWENTY DOLLARS. Are you effing kidding me?! I was going to buy both the paperback and Kindle version of this book because I love this author, but PU-LEASE. I was tempted to join the legions of reviewers who left one-star reviews saying, “This one-star isn’t for the book, but for the brainless idiot who thought $20 was a good price for an ebook.”

Do I really want to sign over the fruits of my labor to morons? Especially since….

5. Publishers are shifting sides too.

A few publishers have already switched from the traditional offset printing/advance model to an ebook/POD/high royalties model, while hundreds of new publishers have popped up that focus mostly on ebook with POD as frosting. My previous two published books were with one such well-known e-publisher.

I’m not sorry I published with them. At the time, I wouldn’t have known how to self-publish, nor would I have been able to reach the number of readers they did. I know more now, though, and I’m glad that I didn’t sell the rights to the novels I really care about to them. I did have an offer. At the time, I demurred because I still held the dream of seeing my book in bookstores, with large distribution. I’m glad now for different reasons. If my book is likely to sell to a smaller audience, aren’t I better off receiving a higher royalty rate? At the time I published my books, their prices seemed low and their royalty rate looked high. Now I can get 70% from Amazon and make more money on cheaper books.

Granted, only one medium/big publisher has switched to e-, but I’m guessing more dominoes will fall. One by one, we’ll see publishing houses either fold or change tactics.

6. A Publisher Could Drop Me At Any Time — Or Never Let Go

If I had sold my fantasy, I would want it back now, but would I be able to get it? On the other hand, if I were several books into a series and my publisher decided to stop publishing my books, what could I do? (That’s what happened to Konrath; he couldn’t sell his latest book in a series, not because the previous books had not sold, but because his print publisher discontinued the whole genre from their lineup.)

If I’m right that many publishing houses are going to be struggling, the chances increase that they might panic and yank the chains on their writers. Look at the ugly grab at e-rights.

7. I Remembered Why I Love Writing

Ever since I began thinking about publishing independently, I’ve been terrified — and terrifically inspired. This is purely psychological. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have been inspired before. True, I submitted and received rejections, but also lots of encouragement, and I truly feel, however deludedly, that if I kept patiently writing new books and submitting queries to agents, eventually, I’d hit the right combination of stars and land an agent and then, hopefully, publishing deal.

But I’m not sure I would be able to support myself writing even if I did that. Most writers can’t.

I assume I won’t sell a huge number of books by going indie either. But I think I can sell about as many as I would the traditional way — and no publisher will drop me or let my backlist lapse if that number isn’t too high. I’ll be able to sell however small amoung of books people are willing to buy and that’s fine. At least my books will be read by a few people; books need readers.

The most important thing is that I won’t have to wait years and years.

I’ve been a beta reader for quite a few good writers, most of them unpublished. And some of those books I beta-read weren’t ready to be published, quite frankly. But quite a few of them were. Quite a few were books I’d have gladly plunked down money to read, even if they weren’t my friends. And I watched as those writers submitted those books over and over, and after many rejections, put them away and tried with new books. I think it’s sad those books weren’t published just because no agent happened to “fall in love” with them. Maybe if I’d been an agent, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with them either. But as a reader, I would have bought them and enjoyed them. There are a few I did fall in love with, and I wish desperately those books were available as a complete ebook or POD, so I could have a polished copy.

I am pretty enthusiastic right now, but I don’t want to become an evangelizing bore. However, if I start trying to encourage my friends to go indie, you will know I have an ulterior motive — to buy their damn books already!