March 25, 2014
Two months into the adventure. I've spent about $600 more than I'd budgeted, and I'm about one week behind schedule. I'm waiting on my cover designer's work, then I can send the manuscript out to a professional formatter. If I get the covers by the end of March, Bloodridge, the first book in the series will be ready for its June 15 publication date and I can ship it out for promotion (blurbs, reviews, free copies). Then, onto DeathByte, which is the second in the series, due for publication on July 15. At this rate, I will be about $3,000 over budget and will get the first three (including Swiftshadow) out by August 1. I still have no idea where that extra cashish will come from, but I can always hope it will be from book sales.
Should you do this for your books? If you have tons of stamina, can suffer the uncertainty of not knowing if what you are doing will work, and have enough cash to carry it through, then maybe. It's a tough trip.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
The 7th ActFourWriters.com critique and workshop
March 25, 2014
The 7th ActFourWriters.com critique and workshop for fiction novelists is now open for applicants. Visit http://actfourwriters.com/ to see what it's all about. Then, email Brenda Barrie [brenda@brendabarrie.com] with your contact info if you want to do breakthrough novel writing.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The Future of Publishing - Part 4
June 12, 2012
About the Justice Department’s decision on Amazon and the case of publisher price fixing:
How can any publisher claim that Amazon is pricing eBooks at a loss when for DECADES paperbacks have been profitably sold at about $8.99 or less? A paperback requires everything an eBook requires in pre-sales and production, BUT paperbacks also require additional costs, including paper, printing, trucking, and distribution costs, making the break-even for an $8.99 paperback about $4.00. And, at that sales price and breakeven, they sell paperbacks profitably and give the authors about $0.28 to $0.63. Do literary agents or authors complain that this price is too low?
On the other hand, selling an eBook, which requires none of the above except the distributors’ cut (and, if an eBook is sold at less than $10.00, Amazon gives the publisher 70% or $6.99 to divvy up, there’s an additional $2.00 beyond the $4.00 breakeven for a paperback.
So, as I read this, the publishers are complaining that Amazon is only giving them about $2.00 more than they would for selling a paperback.
The publishers are full of crap on this one. For another thing, lower prices increase sales (as traditional economics states, there is a lower intersection of supply and demand). So the publishers are actually stating that they want eBooks to sell fewer units. That’s crazy and it also implies that print publishers are actually using the higher price of eBooks to support their declining paper sales. If that’s so, then no one can deny that the print publishers are engages in price fixing, by setting prices for eBooks so that each and every eBook sold subsidizes the depreciation of the print factories owned by the largest print publishers.
The justice department is right going after the print publishers for their despicable behavior. But when they’ve done that, they need to ensure that Amazon and Barnes and Noble remain competitive so there is no monopoly in any format of (e)book sales.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Poisoning the Well – The Publishers and the Libraries
April 7, 2010
“Once upon a time,” two tribes fought over which one had rightful access to the crops growing in a local field. One of the angry tribesmen took matters into his own hands, dropping a powerful poison into the well of the opposing tribe. Soon, the opposing tribe’s populace began dying. The poisoner announced his act to the leaders of his own tribe. They rewarded him. But, then the poisoner’s tribesmen started dying, since they were downstream from the opposing tribe. In the end, no one survived.
The story illustrates a principle that publishers have forgotten. Publishing is a vertically integrated business, but it is also horizontally organized. There is a food chain, with the publishers selling to distributors and libraries, who are one step closer to the retail public. But publishers also have competing product lines in hardcover, paperback and eBook lines, and to keep their hardcover business alive they have artificially priced their eBook price much higher than it should be, IMHO. I believe (and have said here before) that, as the $2.99 price Amazon permits as a basic eBook unit price becomes the de facto price, this may eventually maim most traditional publishers and could kill many of them.
Apparently, the suicidal tendency of some of the publishers goes beyond what I saw as merely irrational. On my way back to Northern California from Seattle, I read in a newspaper that some publishers have tried to limit the number of times a library may loan an eBook before having to repurchase the title. The unintended consequences of this path are the deaths of both the libraries, who can’t afford to continually reacquire eBook titles, and the publishers, who will lose the library market and the young readers who use libraries. There is an even more insidious consequence: Given the current budget problems that trickle down from the Federal government to our local governments, libraries are already being tightly squeezed, and so are public schools. Forcing libraries to spend cash they don’t have simply means they won’t have many eBooks available at all. Children who used libraries because they can’t afford to buy books will lose their access and may stop reading. Fewer eBooks means fewer readers. Fewer readers means dumber adults. Dumber adults means a less competitive country, with us all suffering as a result. Here’s a case where poisoning the well is a national security issue.
Anyone have a different opinion? Please, express it here!
“Once upon a time,” two tribes fought over which one had rightful access to the crops growing in a local field. One of the angry tribesmen took matters into his own hands, dropping a powerful poison into the well of the opposing tribe. Soon, the opposing tribe’s populace began dying. The poisoner announced his act to the leaders of his own tribe. They rewarded him. But, then the poisoner’s tribesmen started dying, since they were downstream from the opposing tribe. In the end, no one survived.
The story illustrates a principle that publishers have forgotten. Publishing is a vertically integrated business, but it is also horizontally organized. There is a food chain, with the publishers selling to distributors and libraries, who are one step closer to the retail public. But publishers also have competing product lines in hardcover, paperback and eBook lines, and to keep their hardcover business alive they have artificially priced their eBook price much higher than it should be, IMHO. I believe (and have said here before) that, as the $2.99 price Amazon permits as a basic eBook unit price becomes the de facto price, this may eventually maim most traditional publishers and could kill many of them.
Apparently, the suicidal tendency of some of the publishers goes beyond what I saw as merely irrational. On my way back to Northern California from Seattle, I read in a newspaper that some publishers have tried to limit the number of times a library may loan an eBook before having to repurchase the title. The unintended consequences of this path are the deaths of both the libraries, who can’t afford to continually reacquire eBook titles, and the publishers, who will lose the library market and the young readers who use libraries. There is an even more insidious consequence: Given the current budget problems that trickle down from the Federal government to our local governments, libraries are already being tightly squeezed, and so are public schools. Forcing libraries to spend cash they don’t have simply means they won’t have many eBooks available at all. Children who used libraries because they can’t afford to buy books will lose their access and may stop reading. Fewer eBooks means fewer readers. Fewer readers means dumber adults. Dumber adults means a less competitive country, with us all suffering as a result. Here’s a case where poisoning the well is a national security issue.
Anyone have a different opinion? Please, express it here!
The Future of Publishing
February 23, 2011
Over this past weekend, I attended the San Francisco Writers Conference. I sat in sessions and soaked up lots of useful stuff, from ways to improve my writer’s tradecraft, to short courses in publicity for writers. I made connections with some literary agents and editors. It was a useful weekend. I also listened to my peers. They expressed concerns about what is currently happening in the publishing industry and how it might change their careers.
As the former CEO and publisher of an eBook company for almost a decade, I think I may have something useful to contribute in that discussion.
Everyone who watched the demise of the old infrastructure of the music business already understands what is happening. My opinion is that it provides more than an object lesson. The fate of the old lions of the music business looks to me to be the fate of the larger publishers. Yes, there are significant differences in the infrastructure of the industries, their product composition and the consumer attitudes toward change, but the lessons are there and to ignore them is to remain in denial.
Music went through several technological improvements in delivery before the major impacts hit the companies. First, we went from wax cylinder to 33 1/3 record to CD. Each of those left the record companies with no choice but to adjust their fixed asset base with massively changed equipment, and then amortize the costs across the sales of their products. Rough, but possible to survive the changes. The last, biggest change was the one of distribution, and this was the killer. Once record sales were replaced by song sales, and sold not in physical format but MP3, delivered over the Internet, the effects of change were massive. Brick and mortar stores were unnecessary. Trucks, warehouses and other infrastructure were assets the companies could no longer amortize and they became useless. Barriers to entry became a non-issue. Distribution was the only issue. Now let’s look at publishing. Each of the factors here is the same except for two: No one buys books by the chapter, and everyone uses software and possibly an eReader, if not a cell phone to read. Taken as a whole, the similarities outweigh the differences. Publishing is undergoing a change of seismic proportions.
In their current form, publishing companies won’t survive. They must jettison the unneeded fixed assets and find a way to become relevant. I’m not sure what they can do with all the trucks, warehouses and printing presses, but there is no way they can charge these off against the price of an eBook and get customers to go for it. Not when literary agents can become the publisher of record for eBooks sold through distributors such as barnesandnoble.com and amazon. Within five years, there won’t be any bookstores. The price of an eBook won’t be much above $9.99. Smaller organizations like literary agencies and writing critique groups will become the ‘publishers.’ The financial failure of Borders is proof enough of this as a forecast of the future.
Libraries will lose their relevance as printed books become scarcer and more expensive. With neither bookstores nor libraries, printed books will be bought in short runs by the author and sold at signings conducted at restaurants and senior centers. For the most part, publicizing a new book will likely become a blogging event.
To see what will happen, no one need go farther than read T. S. Kuhn’s short monograph, published in the 1950’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He uses several historical examples, and concludes that those who cannot adjust to technology changes cease to have economic relevance.
Writers will still become authors, and literary agents will still be the arbiters of quality. But, any literary agent who can’t find a way to take advantage of the incredible opportunity offered by a time of massive change will find themselves gone from the planet.
Writers will need to learn how to be marketers. Promotion and Marketing will be their biggest post-writing activities, and these activities will be quite different from what they did pre-eBook. Some will jettison their paper publishers after getting a few titles in print and begin selling eBook titles to their established customer base. J. A. Konrath has done this and it works. Others will stick with their paper publishers and pray they can survive. Should the publisher adapt to the new world. It might work. Paper publishers currently provide the prime advantage of the stamp of quality to what goes out in print, and it is a formidable advantage for an unknown writer.
To survive, after shedding the unnecessary fixed assets that now burden them financially, publishers will probably purchase the literary agencies that are publisher of record. By itself, this changes everything. If they can’t come up with a better idea, or if they don’t begin acquiring the literary agencies that “own” the best writers, they will surely perish from carrying the weight of their current fixed asset infrastructure without the counterbalance of direct access to talented writers.
That’s my prediction, for what it’s worth.
If you’re a writer, take heart, the times may be interesting now, but the future is still bright. If you’re a literary agent, you hold all the cards if you play them right. If you’re a print publisher, the time has come to stop wondering what will happen and choose which literary agencies you want to become close with. Pick carefully; the clock is running.
Over this past weekend, I attended the San Francisco Writers Conference. I sat in sessions and soaked up lots of useful stuff, from ways to improve my writer’s tradecraft, to short courses in publicity for writers. I made connections with some literary agents and editors. It was a useful weekend. I also listened to my peers. They expressed concerns about what is currently happening in the publishing industry and how it might change their careers.
As the former CEO and publisher of an eBook company for almost a decade, I think I may have something useful to contribute in that discussion.
Everyone who watched the demise of the old infrastructure of the music business already understands what is happening. My opinion is that it provides more than an object lesson. The fate of the old lions of the music business looks to me to be the fate of the larger publishers. Yes, there are significant differences in the infrastructure of the industries, their product composition and the consumer attitudes toward change, but the lessons are there and to ignore them is to remain in denial.
Music went through several technological improvements in delivery before the major impacts hit the companies. First, we went from wax cylinder to 33 1/3 record to CD. Each of those left the record companies with no choice but to adjust their fixed asset base with massively changed equipment, and then amortize the costs across the sales of their products. Rough, but possible to survive the changes. The last, biggest change was the one of distribution, and this was the killer. Once record sales were replaced by song sales, and sold not in physical format but MP3, delivered over the Internet, the effects of change were massive. Brick and mortar stores were unnecessary. Trucks, warehouses and other infrastructure were assets the companies could no longer amortize and they became useless. Barriers to entry became a non-issue. Distribution was the only issue. Now let’s look at publishing. Each of the factors here is the same except for two: No one buys books by the chapter, and everyone uses software and possibly an eReader, if not a cell phone to read. Taken as a whole, the similarities outweigh the differences. Publishing is undergoing a change of seismic proportions.
In their current form, publishing companies won’t survive. They must jettison the unneeded fixed assets and find a way to become relevant. I’m not sure what they can do with all the trucks, warehouses and printing presses, but there is no way they can charge these off against the price of an eBook and get customers to go for it. Not when literary agents can become the publisher of record for eBooks sold through distributors such as barnesandnoble.com and amazon. Within five years, there won’t be any bookstores. The price of an eBook won’t be much above $9.99. Smaller organizations like literary agencies and writing critique groups will become the ‘publishers.’ The financial failure of Borders is proof enough of this as a forecast of the future.
Libraries will lose their relevance as printed books become scarcer and more expensive. With neither bookstores nor libraries, printed books will be bought in short runs by the author and sold at signings conducted at restaurants and senior centers. For the most part, publicizing a new book will likely become a blogging event.
To see what will happen, no one need go farther than read T. S. Kuhn’s short monograph, published in the 1950’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He uses several historical examples, and concludes that those who cannot adjust to technology changes cease to have economic relevance.
Writers will still become authors, and literary agents will still be the arbiters of quality. But, any literary agent who can’t find a way to take advantage of the incredible opportunity offered by a time of massive change will find themselves gone from the planet.
Writers will need to learn how to be marketers. Promotion and Marketing will be their biggest post-writing activities, and these activities will be quite different from what they did pre-eBook. Some will jettison their paper publishers after getting a few titles in print and begin selling eBook titles to their established customer base. J. A. Konrath has done this and it works. Others will stick with their paper publishers and pray they can survive. Should the publisher adapt to the new world. It might work. Paper publishers currently provide the prime advantage of the stamp of quality to what goes out in print, and it is a formidable advantage for an unknown writer.
To survive, after shedding the unnecessary fixed assets that now burden them financially, publishers will probably purchase the literary agencies that are publisher of record. By itself, this changes everything. If they can’t come up with a better idea, or if they don’t begin acquiring the literary agencies that “own” the best writers, they will surely perish from carrying the weight of their current fixed asset infrastructure without the counterbalance of direct access to talented writers.
That’s my prediction, for what it’s worth.
If you’re a writer, take heart, the times may be interesting now, but the future is still bright. If you’re a literary agent, you hold all the cards if you play them right. If you’re a print publisher, the time has come to stop wondering what will happen and choose which literary agencies you want to become close with. Pick carefully; the clock is running.
Plotting Your Story Using Screenwriting Tools: Soth versus Schechter
Publishers will want to wrangle every last penny of revenue from anyone’s first novel. One of their best sources is the movie that can be made from a novelist’s first publication. The major reason is that movies drive incremental book sales for the author, years after the book has backlisted.
With that as their reasoning, for decades, book publishers now tend to read every potential book with their eyes imaging it in a movie theatre. The inevitable result is that novelists have started studying screenwriting to ensure they can fulfill the publisher’s unstated demand: Could a movie be made from this manuscript?
Since the most important way to develop character is through dialogue and stage direction of the character (what they do when they feel something), screenplay writing skills have become increasingly important. Teachers like Eric Witchey use tools like E-D-A-C-E (Emotion leads to Decision leads to Action leads to Conflict needs to another Emotion), and A-B-C (agenda leads to backstory leads to conflict) where dialogue and behavior driver character development.
My literary agent returned from meetings with NY publishers with a third and fairly new requirement for fiction manuscripts, based on what they feel is commercial: Eliminate all set-up and backstory (except what can be medicine-dropped into the dialogue of the characters), and have the story be solid action with no breaks. This is what you see when you’re at the movies.
There are two superb teachers of screenplay writing, Chris Soth and Jeffrey Alan Schechter. Soth (www.milliondollarscreenwriting.com) has a PDF eBook called Million Dollar Screenwriting: Make Money with the Mini-Movie Method, available from his website for less than $50. Schechter wrote a PDF eBook called Totally Write Guide to Bulletproof Screenplay Structure Guide, which he made available from his website, but it was later turned into a software product called Contour, available from Mariner Software (http://www.marinersoftware.com/products/contour/) for less than $50. Each one has a system that is far advanced past the old three act structure that Chris Voglar (The Writer’s Journey) suggests for story development. The objective is to produce two-minute scenes, ideal for a movie.
I reviewed Schechter’s system and started using it several years ago as a result of a conversation with Dennis Phinney of ActFourWriters.com. Linda Rohrbough (a former ActFourWriters.com member) suggested Soth’s system and I examined it last year. While there were similarities, I found the mini-movie system offered a simpler design to my plot. But, it wasn’t complete. When I cross-indexed the two systems, I finally had a product I could use, complete with a way to justify the times when I would have to break the rules. I developed a Microsoft Excel workbook that you can use, complete with the cross-index embedded within, called BLANK Outline and Grading Sheet.xls.
I use the tool to craft the early stages of my story. The instructions are simple. Enter your chapter and page number and the Description of the scene into columns A, B and F, and ensure they correspond to the aspect of your novel’s theme related to the scene in column G. Do this for all 44 plot points, all 8 mini-reels. Each scene should be about two minutes of real-time action in a movie, since the 44 plot points would then become an 88 minute movie. The other way to see it is that all 8 mini-reels would become a 96 minute movie. Examine the spreadsheet and do the math. It works. In effect, your time line becomes what a movie of your story would require in terms of minutes.
When you are finished, write the manuscript. When it has gone through all of the critiques necessary to complete its improvement cycle, review it against the Excel workbook and make corrections to the workbook so they correspond in all aspects (page number for each chapter, and all plot point descriptions. Send the workbook out with the manuscript to your test readers, and ask them to enter letter grades (column H) and comments (column I), enter evaluations (letter grades and comments) for every principal character (rows 66 through 7), and grades and comments for every aspect of the manuscript (rows 92 through 167). When you receive the returned workbook, review their comments and make your final changes.
If you are working on plotting a novel and want to use the BLANK Outline and Grading Sheet.xls, you can download it from my web site (http://dskane.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BLANK-Outline-and-Grading-Sheet.xls).
With that as their reasoning, for decades, book publishers now tend to read every potential book with their eyes imaging it in a movie theatre. The inevitable result is that novelists have started studying screenwriting to ensure they can fulfill the publisher’s unstated demand: Could a movie be made from this manuscript?
Since the most important way to develop character is through dialogue and stage direction of the character (what they do when they feel something), screenplay writing skills have become increasingly important. Teachers like Eric Witchey use tools like E-D-A-C-E (Emotion leads to Decision leads to Action leads to Conflict needs to another Emotion), and A-B-C (agenda leads to backstory leads to conflict) where dialogue and behavior driver character development.
My literary agent returned from meetings with NY publishers with a third and fairly new requirement for fiction manuscripts, based on what they feel is commercial: Eliminate all set-up and backstory (except what can be medicine-dropped into the dialogue of the characters), and have the story be solid action with no breaks. This is what you see when you’re at the movies.
There are two superb teachers of screenplay writing, Chris Soth and Jeffrey Alan Schechter. Soth (www.milliondollarscreenwriting.com) has a PDF eBook called Million Dollar Screenwriting: Make Money with the Mini-Movie Method, available from his website for less than $50. Schechter wrote a PDF eBook called Totally Write Guide to Bulletproof Screenplay Structure Guide, which he made available from his website, but it was later turned into a software product called Contour, available from Mariner Software (http://www.marinersoftware.com/products/contour/) for less than $50. Each one has a system that is far advanced past the old three act structure that Chris Voglar (The Writer’s Journey) suggests for story development. The objective is to produce two-minute scenes, ideal for a movie.
I reviewed Schechter’s system and started using it several years ago as a result of a conversation with Dennis Phinney of ActFourWriters.com. Linda Rohrbough (a former ActFourWriters.com member) suggested Soth’s system and I examined it last year. While there were similarities, I found the mini-movie system offered a simpler design to my plot. But, it wasn’t complete. When I cross-indexed the two systems, I finally had a product I could use, complete with a way to justify the times when I would have to break the rules. I developed a Microsoft Excel workbook that you can use, complete with the cross-index embedded within, called BLANK Outline and Grading Sheet.xls.
I use the tool to craft the early stages of my story. The instructions are simple. Enter your chapter and page number and the Description of the scene into columns A, B and F, and ensure they correspond to the aspect of your novel’s theme related to the scene in column G. Do this for all 44 plot points, all 8 mini-reels. Each scene should be about two minutes of real-time action in a movie, since the 44 plot points would then become an 88 minute movie. The other way to see it is that all 8 mini-reels would become a 96 minute movie. Examine the spreadsheet and do the math. It works. In effect, your time line becomes what a movie of your story would require in terms of minutes.
When you are finished, write the manuscript. When it has gone through all of the critiques necessary to complete its improvement cycle, review it against the Excel workbook and make corrections to the workbook so they correspond in all aspects (page number for each chapter, and all plot point descriptions. Send the workbook out with the manuscript to your test readers, and ask them to enter letter grades (column H) and comments (column I), enter evaluations (letter grades and comments) for every principal character (rows 66 through 7), and grades and comments for every aspect of the manuscript (rows 92 through 167). When you receive the returned workbook, review their comments and make your final changes.
If you are working on plotting a novel and want to use the BLANK Outline and Grading Sheet.xls, you can download it from my web site (http://dskane.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/BLANK-Outline-and-Grading-Sheet.xls).
The Future of Publishing – Part II
April 3, 2011
This weekend I attended yet another writers conference. While I learned things I can use and enjoyed the camaraderie of the faculty and writers there, something I found there surprised me: Some of the literary agents had already determined how to respond to the vast sea change now beginning. A few, to be sure, are still perplexed or totally lost. But a surprising few have decided to charge for extra services they deem important as we move to a world where the new role of literary agents has still to be determined. For example, one agent now offers to assist writers in exploiting social media to promote the role of the writer as a brand. Another offers editing services for the manuscript, not just correcting grammatical errors but also providing advance notice on the writer’s “speed bumps” needing correction. It’s a plethora of services. If you are self-publishing, here is the stuff you might need to replace the traditional print publishers and the roles they value-added to your book.
If you are a writer, it’s as if you were an alien landing on this planet, preparing to find humans you have to conquer and instead, you find pre-packaged meat wating for pick-up. Bad metaphor, perhaps, but accurate none the less.
Literary agents will offer you a supermarket’s worth of services to entice you to pay fees. It’s actually very good news for writers. It’s even better for the larger literary agencies still wondering what they should do to prepare themselves for the brave new world. I propose this one: A larger literary agency (ten agents or more) will have to expand to survive. Smaller agencies have no chance of survival and in the end will band together to form a critical mass. Twelve agents is the size to offer robust survival and the larger the better. But that still doesn’t offer a business model. It just states the critical mass for continued synaptic activity. So, assuming the agency you pitch to is big enough to survive and continue serving you as a writer, what should you want, what should you expect them to do? I believe they will need to do two things. First, exploit the beand that is your writing. Without a brand, without reader expectations that each of your books will offer something uniquely “you,” nothing good will happen. Some agents already know how to do this. Agencies that don’t have this skill in their repertoire should acquire an agent who can provide it and find a way to compensate them for it. Second, for those writers whose work they feel deserves to be published, they should offer the writer a path to publication if they cannot make a deal with a traditional publisher. Yes, agents will have to be the “publisher of record” for writers they believe in when they cannot find a traditional publisher to do the heavy lifting. AAR (the Association of Authors Representatives) claims this is a violation of their code of ethic. AAR’s code of ethics was written before the tsunami of change now rolling over publishing. IMHO, it’s no longer relevant. Parts of it are reasonable, but for the survival of the industry, literary agents have no choice but to become publishers. To decline their destiny might leave readers with a sense of having been abandoned. If the print publishers die from their huge fixed asset base of irrelevant-to-the-eBook-world investments (trucks, warehouses, printing presses for creation, storage and transport of paper books), who will replace them? The eBook publishers now in existence are a good start, but they offer little in the way of service that literary agencies provide. And they agencies offer no publishing services and won’t work with the eBook publishers since they don’t offer writers advances. Mexican standoff. Hmmmmnnn.
So, then, what’s they optimal organization for a literary agency and how would their behavior differ from what they now do? The agency would continue trying to sell to traditional publishers. Where they couldn’t sell to a traditional publisher, they would have a bank credit line to provide them with the cash to prepare the author’s manuscript, develop cover art the book needs for publication. They would obtain copyright in the author’s name, obtain an ISBN number, and coach the author on crafting their brand. They would assist in obtaining publicity for the book, and assist in obtaining reviews of the book.
When sales of the book come in from Amazon and other sources, the first revenues would pay the agency back for the services they advanced, including interest on the bank credit line. After that, revenues would be split in a traditional way. Assuming the cover art, editing and other prepublishing costs total about $3,000 for a new eBook, and it takes a total of three months from contract to publishing date for the title to hit the market, the advance would probably not be repaid until the book had been out for about two months. The advance would accrue about five months of bank interest, which is not much. If the book is priced at $2.99 retail with Amazon, the agent and author would receive 70% of the sale, or $2.09. Assuming the $3,000 in prepublication costs plus about $100 of interest expense, it would take about 1,500 unit sales to cover the advance. The agency would keep the advance repayment, and then for subsequent sales, the author would receive their 85%, or about $1.75, and the agent would keep about $0.34 per unit sale.
To be fair, we have to compare this model with the traditional print publishing model. Which one is better on a per unit sale; eBook or hardcover? Since, for traditional publishing of a hardcover book the publisher sends about 15% of the net to the agent and author to split, and the net on a hardcover is usually about $10, on an eBook less than the agency model I’m proposing here would net the agent and the author. Surprised? Well, in the past we’d expect print publishers to provide expertise in publicity and marketing, but no longer. Literary agents often help out these days doing those things. BUT… for the most part, it’s left to the author. In the future, we can expect some of the better literary agents to teach their budding authors a few of the tricks of the trade, as value-added for the agent-author relationship. If you are looking for an agent, be sure to ask them what they’ll provide to improve the relationship and your chances of becoming a commercial success.
Good luck, all my fellow writers!
This weekend I attended yet another writers conference. While I learned things I can use and enjoyed the camaraderie of the faculty and writers there, something I found there surprised me: Some of the literary agents had already determined how to respond to the vast sea change now beginning. A few, to be sure, are still perplexed or totally lost. But a surprising few have decided to charge for extra services they deem important as we move to a world where the new role of literary agents has still to be determined. For example, one agent now offers to assist writers in exploiting social media to promote the role of the writer as a brand. Another offers editing services for the manuscript, not just correcting grammatical errors but also providing advance notice on the writer’s “speed bumps” needing correction. It’s a plethora of services. If you are self-publishing, here is the stuff you might need to replace the traditional print publishers and the roles they value-added to your book.
If you are a writer, it’s as if you were an alien landing on this planet, preparing to find humans you have to conquer and instead, you find pre-packaged meat wating for pick-up. Bad metaphor, perhaps, but accurate none the less.
Literary agents will offer you a supermarket’s worth of services to entice you to pay fees. It’s actually very good news for writers. It’s even better for the larger literary agencies still wondering what they should do to prepare themselves for the brave new world. I propose this one: A larger literary agency (ten agents or more) will have to expand to survive. Smaller agencies have no chance of survival and in the end will band together to form a critical mass. Twelve agents is the size to offer robust survival and the larger the better. But that still doesn’t offer a business model. It just states the critical mass for continued synaptic activity. So, assuming the agency you pitch to is big enough to survive and continue serving you as a writer, what should you want, what should you expect them to do? I believe they will need to do two things. First, exploit the beand that is your writing. Without a brand, without reader expectations that each of your books will offer something uniquely “you,” nothing good will happen. Some agents already know how to do this. Agencies that don’t have this skill in their repertoire should acquire an agent who can provide it and find a way to compensate them for it. Second, for those writers whose work they feel deserves to be published, they should offer the writer a path to publication if they cannot make a deal with a traditional publisher. Yes, agents will have to be the “publisher of record” for writers they believe in when they cannot find a traditional publisher to do the heavy lifting. AAR (the Association of Authors Representatives) claims this is a violation of their code of ethic. AAR’s code of ethics was written before the tsunami of change now rolling over publishing. IMHO, it’s no longer relevant. Parts of it are reasonable, but for the survival of the industry, literary agents have no choice but to become publishers. To decline their destiny might leave readers with a sense of having been abandoned. If the print publishers die from their huge fixed asset base of irrelevant-to-the-eBook-world investments (trucks, warehouses, printing presses for creation, storage and transport of paper books), who will replace them? The eBook publishers now in existence are a good start, but they offer little in the way of service that literary agencies provide. And they agencies offer no publishing services and won’t work with the eBook publishers since they don’t offer writers advances. Mexican standoff. Hmmmmnnn.
So, then, what’s they optimal organization for a literary agency and how would their behavior differ from what they now do? The agency would continue trying to sell to traditional publishers. Where they couldn’t sell to a traditional publisher, they would have a bank credit line to provide them with the cash to prepare the author’s manuscript, develop cover art the book needs for publication. They would obtain copyright in the author’s name, obtain an ISBN number, and coach the author on crafting their brand. They would assist in obtaining publicity for the book, and assist in obtaining reviews of the book.
When sales of the book come in from Amazon and other sources, the first revenues would pay the agency back for the services they advanced, including interest on the bank credit line. After that, revenues would be split in a traditional way. Assuming the cover art, editing and other prepublishing costs total about $3,000 for a new eBook, and it takes a total of three months from contract to publishing date for the title to hit the market, the advance would probably not be repaid until the book had been out for about two months. The advance would accrue about five months of bank interest, which is not much. If the book is priced at $2.99 retail with Amazon, the agent and author would receive 70% of the sale, or $2.09. Assuming the $3,000 in prepublication costs plus about $100 of interest expense, it would take about 1,500 unit sales to cover the advance. The agency would keep the advance repayment, and then for subsequent sales, the author would receive their 85%, or about $1.75, and the agent would keep about $0.34 per unit sale.
To be fair, we have to compare this model with the traditional print publishing model. Which one is better on a per unit sale; eBook or hardcover? Since, for traditional publishing of a hardcover book the publisher sends about 15% of the net to the agent and author to split, and the net on a hardcover is usually about $10, on an eBook less than the agency model I’m proposing here would net the agent and the author. Surprised? Well, in the past we’d expect print publishers to provide expertise in publicity and marketing, but no longer. Literary agents often help out these days doing those things. BUT… for the most part, it’s left to the author. In the future, we can expect some of the better literary agents to teach their budding authors a few of the tricks of the trade, as value-added for the agent-author relationship. If you are looking for an agent, be sure to ask them what they’ll provide to improve the relationship and your chances of becoming a commercial success.
Good luck, all my fellow writers!
Indies versus Trads.
April 3, 2011
Interesting…The McKoys versus the Hatfields. The North versus the South..The families of Romeo and Juliet. War. And now the Indies versus the Trads. Wazzufak?
The Trads aren’t a drug dealing, weapons using gang. They’re the writers who became authors using the old print publishing model. Almost all of them are lost somewhere in the vast no man’s land of midlist. The Indies, in contrast, are an endless stream of writers looking for some way to get enough critical mass to sell their self-published works in the brave new world of publishing. I don’t fit into either category at this time, so I guess I’m currently an innocent bystander. As such, I have no place in either camp. My first impression is, they hate each other. The indies, led by J. A. Konrath, Barry Eisler and Amanda Hocking, have demonstrated it is a viable direction, one where a writer can be successful. The trads are fearful that when the “train leaves the station,” they’ll be left without any vehicle. Pick a side. Grab a weapon. Fight for your life as a writer.
How to choose? In the eyeball war, it’s the content that’s important. Fellow readers what do you think? Over the next few years, what’s the best path to follow?
Interesting…The McKoys versus the Hatfields. The North versus the South..The families of Romeo and Juliet. War. And now the Indies versus the Trads. Wazzufak?
The Trads aren’t a drug dealing, weapons using gang. They’re the writers who became authors using the old print publishing model. Almost all of them are lost somewhere in the vast no man’s land of midlist. The Indies, in contrast, are an endless stream of writers looking for some way to get enough critical mass to sell their self-published works in the brave new world of publishing. I don’t fit into either category at this time, so I guess I’m currently an innocent bystander. As such, I have no place in either camp. My first impression is, they hate each other. The indies, led by J. A. Konrath, Barry Eisler and Amanda Hocking, have demonstrated it is a viable direction, one where a writer can be successful. The trads are fearful that when the “train leaves the station,” they’ll be left without any vehicle. Pick a side. Grab a weapon. Fight for your life as a writer.
How to choose? In the eyeball war, it’s the content that’s important. Fellow readers what do you think? Over the next few years, what’s the best path to follow?
Thursday, March 15, 2012
BEA 2011 (Book Expo America) and the Future of Publishing
May 28, 2011
Last week I attended the BEA in New York City and found it to be the heart of publishing, as it always has been. But the heart is not well. This BEA had fewer attendees and fewer authors doing autographing for bookstores. While eBooks were featured with their own arena, the topics in eBooks were somehow out of sync with my beliefs about the reality of the eBook tsunami. All in all, I found the experience alarming. One trad (paper and print books) publisher stated that they hadn’t figured out yet how to merchandise eBooks. That statement seems very troubling to me (as a former eBook publisher).
The trads people still maintaining their attitude of exclusivity. The indies are pushing their new author-centric models, and most literary agents are now either toying with the new models or exiting the business. So, nothing has been resolved. When I attended a session by the BISG (Book Industry Standards / Statistics Group), someone asked why they didn’t supply a breakdown of sales by price, especially for eBooks. The panel replied there was certainly a wide range of eBook prices. That’s a non-answer, and it is probably the most important question there is. Prices on eBooks range from $0.99 to $17.99, and those at the low end seem to be outselling their higher-priced brethren by multiples. Is this because of the continuing economic recession? And regardless, will the lower prices for Amanda Hocking’s and John Locke’s currently available eBooks become the standard price for an eBook? Why didn’t the BISG take this issue on? At the BEA, Barry Eisler, who I’ve known for over a dozen years, reconsidered going indie. Seems Amazon offered a much better deal than the trad he turned down about a month ago, and, of course, Amazon is likely to be the big survivor of the eBook tsunami. While I was disappointed he reversed direction, I do understand his objectives in doing so.
As we move through the coming year, I wonder how long it will be before the trads adjust their aim and hit the target. It’s no mystery and it should be pretty obvious. Lower your eBook prices and increase your sales!
If you’re in the business of publishing, what do you think?
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