Writing On Your Palm

00/01/31 - The Freedom of Publishing

First off...

Lousy Rotten Stinkin' Complaints Dept: I have received numerous complaints this week about the new typographical quote marks I've been using (“”). While I think they look better and more professional, and while they show up fine in Internet Explorer and iSilo, it seems some systems (notably AvantGo) are too braindead to properly render these standard HTML elements. So, for the benefit of those of you still using AvantGo (even though iSilo/iSiloWeb works just as well and takes up much less memory, hint, hint), I'll be devolving back to the AvantGo-friendly straight quotes. In the spirit of this column, I could go off on using inferior, incapable technology when there's a better alternative, but I won't. Here the rant endeth.

Okay, on with the column...

Word on the street is that some folks in the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) are fighting ePublishing tooth-and-nail. They claim eBooks are mere vanity publishing, but without even the cost of a print run. Such unmoderated ePublishing can only lead to a flood of crap, they say, where any half-educated yokel with a computer can put his masterwork out for all to see. ePublishers and eWriters say the print writers are terrified that if eBooks are successful, the practice of working without an advance will spread to print. Since print books almost never earn out their advance, this would mean significantly less money for print writers. Again, and it must sound like I'm beating a dead horse, what we have here is a failure of vision. While the SFWA folks are right that ePublishing doesn't have the "content filter" of print publishing, they neglect the fact that the print publishers have left most of us with no other choice.

I'd like to share an excerpt with you from a post by Spider Robinson, a moderately successful science fiction writer. He posted this in 1997:

As concise a statement of the problem as I can provide:

The publishing business has, in slow stages over the twenty-five years I've been writing, essentially been captured by the same kind of vampires that ruined Hollywood. Freebooters, parasites, looters...oh, come out and say it: SHAREHOLDERS, and their chieftains and goons...who want only to milk the industry--ANY industry--for the maximum possible short-term return, and don't mind at ALL if they bleed it dead in the process, so long as they personally get sufficient advance warning of the crunch. People who--for reasons I will NEVER comprehend--actually WANT to be Very Rich. (People, in other words, who either don't know or don't care whether they themselves are happy or not...as long as they have all the marbles.)

They have the same swing-for-the-fences mentality that is screwing up cinema. All we want here are zillion-dollar superstar blockbusters...and a few "little" pictures in which to groom the superstars of tomorrow. Nothing in between; no second features. In like manner, many of the people making decisions in publishing today would like to have a list consisting of nothing but Clancys and Parkers...and a handful of talented newcomers who might be the NEXT Clancy or Parker, but meanwhile are willing to work for first-novel prices. (I hasten to add that I mean no slightest disrespect to either Tom Clancy or Robert Parker; I picked them because I respect them both highly, and buy their new books on sight.)

This isn't the editors and publishers themselves I'm talking about, either. Many if not most of them love good books, even now. But their policies are being made for them by the conglomerates that swallowed them up in the last decade or so. Men and women who got into the business for the fundamental purpose of publishing (at least some) books they were proud of, are now working for people whose ONLY guiding principle is the mantra, "Place yourself between the talent and the money." The ultimate, industry-shaping decisions are being made, as in Hollywood, by people who don't give a toasted DAMN about the PRODUCT, much less the producer-slaves. What they want is simple: HUGE profits, NOW. Blockbusters...and good first novels, or hacks who are willing to work REAL cheap.

What they DON'T much want anymore are MID-LIST writers. Quirky scribblers. Ones with faithful but not mammoth audiences. Ones difficult to sum up to a salesman in Paducah with a one-sentence soundbite. Ones PEOPLE magazine isn't talking about. Ones whose books haven't been a sma-shit (no, that's not misspelled) movie yet. Ones whose works not only reward, but REQUIRE a high-school education and some imagination. Ones who sell well...but not VERY well--or not all in one big lump, but over time.

They'll keep a few around, for show...but only if they're willing to accept a little serious downsizing.

I'm not the only one squawking. At least one colleague recently circulated an urgent open letter similar to this one, triggered when he learned that after over 25 years of award-winning publishing, he can literally no longer sell a book in New York--even to editors who like his work. The sales figures for his last book (and ONLY his last book) just weren't good enough...

Upon reading this, I suddenly became very interested in things I'd never paid any attention to, like my own sales figures and print runs. I was fairly cheered by what few numbers I could find, lurking under concealment on assorted "royalty statements"; my printruns were routinely well over 100,000 copies, always sold well enough to call for at least a second printing, always hit the Locus sf Best Seller list. The rent always got paid--often on time. But lately there has been all sorts of Bad News in the publishing biz, talk of "cutbacks," so I resolved to keep a weather eye out, or peeled, or whatever it is you're supposed to do with a weather eye...

Guess what I just found out? Tor, citing "industry retrenchment," only printed up less than ONE QUARTER AS MANY copies as usual of the latest Callahan paperback, CALLAHAN'S LEGACY.

That's right, a book which carries in it printed acknowledgment of all 60,000+ of you alt.callahans members out there plus all the related forums, channels and groups was not printed in sufficient numbers for HALF of you to buy a copy, should you be so inclined.

(For the full text of Spider's message, check out Volume 17 of JMS on Writing.)

The the three years since Spider's warning, things have gotten worse. The "Hollywoodification" of publishing is nearly complete, with more mega-buyouts consolidating publishers until only the largest still survive. There are now only two types of writers that can reasonably expect to get published on paper:

1. Mega-superstars with names like Grisham, Clancy, King, Crichton (these people don't need first names)
2. Hacks who can pound out a book in three weeks that either extends some hackneyed franchise or "dramatizes" whatever tragedy is currently all over the news

For the rest of us, the "quirky scribblers" that Spider mentioned, the publishers have no time. They can't afford to risk taking a chance on an unknown (or lesser-known) writer who might not belt one out of the park. It is the death of the midlist. If your new book doesn't sell out its print run in a month, there will be no second print run, and likely, no second book.

Fortunately, just as the old ways are taken away from us, a new way has arisen. It requires a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at the way books are written, published and distributed, but we might yet be able to ride the phoenix that is rising from the ashes of the brick & mortar publishing industry.

I doubt very many readers of this column will disagree with me when I say that ebooks are the future of publishing. What many do disagree about is what that future will look like. For most of the people I've talked to, it looks remarkably like the print publishing world of five to ten years ago: lots of publishing houses, some big, some small, most somewhere in between. Writers submit their works to editors, or perhaps intermediary agents, and the editors decide which books the house will publish. The works get edited and polished, the writers get advances, then the works are posted with online bookstores, secured by digital encryption so that each book goes to exactly one customer. Once the advance is earned out, the author gets a tidy little royalty statement every six months.

This is a nice, comfy little scenario, but it won't happen. Ebooks are a different breed of media, and they require a paradigm shift. The old ways don't work today for print; what makes people think they'll work tomorrow for ebooks?

First the bad news. This brave new world will likely see the fall of the "professional" novelist. I'm not saying that people will stop writing novels (perish the thought!) or that they'll stop getting paid for them, but very, very few will make a living exclusively from writing novels. (One could make a credible argument that this is already true for print.)

Here's how I think it's going to work. You write a book. You edit and polish it yourself, or hire a contract editor to look it over. When you're confident that it's as good as you can make it, you self-publish on the web. This can be done by getting contracts with ePublishers (which are really more like online bookstores than brick & mortar publishers) or it can be as simple as putting the books on your own web site with instructions on emailing you payment via something like PayPal. Once your book is out there, you promote it yourself on the various newsgroups and discussion forums where your readers are likely to hang out. You might even try to get it placed with eReviewers who can recommend it to their readers. People buy it, you get money directly (and much more than the 6% you'd get from print) and the world keeps on spinning.

Notice that this scenario differs quite a bit from the one before. There are no advances, no royalty statements, the writer often hires the editor rather than the other way around, and the writer at different times wears the hats of the writer, agent, publisher and sometimes editor. There's also very little in the way of a "content filter", as editors/publishers are often referred to today. There are no safeguards in place to make sure the book in question is really readable and worth the time of the buying public. (Notice I also neatly left out the concept of Digital Rights Management; see last week's column for my thoughts on that.) In this model, the readers decide what they will and will not buy, and getting their attention in the first place is almost entirely the writer's responsibility. Novelists of the 21st century will have to be salespeople as much as storytellers, drawing traffic to their own websites. Given the inevitable competition, this will get harder and harder, even with the advent of smart search engines, and those not adept at marketing will have a hard time selling their work. For most, the income from ebooks will not be anywhere near what it takes to pay the bills.

And you know what? That's okay.

As we continue our transition as a society from the Industrial Age into the Information Age, a lot of things will change, and among them will be the nature of work and making a living. While things will stay pretty much the same in the service industry (a fry cook will continue to be a fry cook), the vast majority of new jobs in the 21st century will be information-based. Many of these will be by-project assignments, and most people will have several "job titles". Today's grade-schoolers will derive their income from a half-dozen or more different sources when they enter the workforce, from contract projects to investments to income sources we don't even have today. For them (and you, if you ride the wave), the income from moderately successful ebooks will meld right into the rest of the mix that makes up their overall compensation. In the Information Age, we're going to see a decrease in specialization as more people wear more hats. For instance, I'm a novelist, a columnist, a webmaster, a nonfiction writer, an epublisher, a technical consultant... Some of these make money, some don't. I enjoy all of them, and together with my investments they provide all the money I require. I think this will be the case for more and more people as we move deeper into the information economy, perhaps to the point where many people no longer have "day jobs" as we have come to think of them, and asking children the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" no longer makes any sense. In such a world, novelists won't have to sell enough novels to support themselves. The focus will less on paying the rent and more on saying what you want to say.

So what do you think? Will there be a revolution in publishing, or will it be more of the same? Am I a visionary or a lunatic (or maybe both)? Inquiring minds want to know at jkirvin@yahoo.com.

Jeff Kirvin