Today at the breakfast table, the entire e-publishing thing flipped on me. It started with nothing more significant than a flutter, a feeling of excitement.
Now, you know – if you’ve read me – that when it comes to technology and how it affects our lives, I’m a “the glass is brimming full” kind of girl. In fact, I have to stop and make myself THINK of the drawbacks of any technology that makes my life easier or safer or more interesting.
But I confess that lately, with the doom and gloom climate prevailing everywhere in publishing, with the confusion of non-paying bookstore chains and sinking numbers and the editorial houses seeming to scramble in the darkness, I’ve been having the sinking feeling that the entire field that I spent two decades breaking in/working in was turning to ashes and nothing under me and that, a couple of birthdays from 50 I’d find myself with no significant professional experience to do anything at all. Yeah, I used to be a multilingual translator, but like music languages are something that must be either practiced or lost. And I haven’t practiced in twenty years.
UPDATE: In light of Sarah’s marvelous InstaVision interview,Eric decided to bump this post to increase its visibility.
By the way, readers who want to see all of Sarah’s posts can simply click on this category link.
Update — by Sarah — I was unavoidably away from the computer all day. Thank you to Instapundit for the link! Welcome instapundit readers!
To be honest I never thought that my job prospects were that great, at any time in my life. My degree was modern languages and literatures, English major, German minor, with an option in education. (And before you boo and hiss, this was in Portugal, and English was not a gimme major and German was a TOUGH minor, and education was just good sense, because it gave you one more option for jobs.) In addition, I took four language courses outside the college, to maximize my chances at employment, because finding jobs in the mid eighties in Portugal was almost impossible. (Not as impossible as it is for young people now, but never mind.)
In fact, when I was in my last year of college, there was a joke going around that one of our classmates, after years and years of searching, found someone willing to offer her a job. That the job was in a circus and walking the tight rope and that she had never walked the tight rope could not scare her away. Not even the revelation that she would be walking over a pit of famished lions could scare her.
It wasn’t until she was halfway across the pit and felt her feet falter that she worried. Falling into the pit, she was shocked to see one of the lions pull back its head, to show a glimpse of a human face, and even more shocked to hear, “Class of 83. You?”
When you finish a tough degree with prospects like that, you’re not going to be a wussy. But the prospect of being a 50 year old receptionist did worry me. Only…
Only, it’s not like that.
Someone commented on one of my other blogs – Mad Genius Club – that he never bought ebooks because at least paper books, for all their flaws in distribution, kept printers and truck drivers and store personnel in business. And I – and a couple of other people – pointed out this was a counterproductive way of dealing with change. One of the other commenters pointed out that change always brings more jobs. And I wanted to believe.
This morning I finally believed it, perhaps because I’m starting to see the glimmers of that change and – through a looking glass darkly – the signs of what the new pattern will be.
Now, looking into crystal balls is always hazardous, and I might be wrong about the way things will stabilize, but here are some of the signs I see:
Someone offering her services as a free lance editor/copyeditor. – Make no mistake, writers need copyeditors. I’d say I’m exhibit A, as when I’m reading I tend to fill in whatever I left out and smooth out the grammar in my mind. I need people who won’t gloss over stuff like wording, grammar and – very important – internal coherency. When Bill doesn’t realize he was Joe ten pages ago, it can be awkward. And, yes, it does happen, in a novel, usually with very minor, walk on characters.
More, and this is something that reading the Heinlein bio made me realize – writers need EDITORS. A good editor can pull an author from comfortable competence to amazing or excellent. I will say, though, that nine times out of ten (and I could explain why, given trends in employment and in publishing, but let’s let it rest) these days, books don’t get that type of editing. Even the editors you know are able to do it, don’t have that kind of time. And a lot of the editors who think they can do this, really can’t, often being failed writers themselves.
Making editors work for writers, instead of the other way around, not only will keep the power in the hands of the creators of the work (and, really, look, who else should have it?) but it will make any VERY GOOD free-lance editor incredibly sought after. Possibly leading to him/her making a good living AND improving the writer’s work permanently AND providing better reading for the consumer. Win. Win. And, oh, yeah, win.
Writers who are just a little more established than I sharing expertise with each other on how to sell better, how they’re selling, how they’re publicizing.
One of the things that surprised me when I came into the field was how often, beneath the collegial attitude, there were deep rifts and jockeying for position in publishing. I think part of this was the “no room at the top” feeling caused by the fact that there were only so many publishing slots – often diminishing in number – and to make it in, you knew someone else had to be kicked out. Also, the often random way that the scant publicity/editorial interest fell created a “teacher’s pet and the rest of the class” atmosphere.
Epublishing with small presses or even self publishing seem to be breaking that. All of a sudden we are genuinely colleagues, sharing tips on how to survive. Perhaps this is just the conviviality of victims of ship wreck, huddled atop the grand piano, while the Titanic of publishing sinks, but I don’t think so. I have a feeling these bonds will grow and expand. Perhaps one say our organizations will actually be effective! And this is important because – no offense to y’all out there, but – writers are powerfully weird critters. A writer on the extreme left of politics and one on the extreme right, if they don’t immediately try to kill each other, will find they have more in common with each other than with their own families (unless those families are ALSO writers.) This going around with entire worlds in the brain leaves a mark.
I have yet to see someone offering to be an effective publicist for epublishing. Note, I said “effective.” Not so long ago, I looked madly for a publicist, but after interviewing five hired none. At least in the level I could afford, everything they proposed doing revealed less knowledge of the internet than I have. (Note to all – SPAMMING people with random messages about a book they might or might not want to read is NOT marketing.) Also, less knowledge of the world in general. Recommending I do articles for literary journals, to publicize my work, was probably my favorite suggestion, considering that doing articles for literary journals is a career in itself.
I’m sure, though, that right about now there are four or five laid-off PR people looking at the screen and going “Uh… I could do that. And given how many self published people there are, I could… uh… get two thousand clients, charge them a percentage of their earnings, and….”
And I’m sure there are other niches in marketing/editing/publishing/book doctoring that I haven’t even thought about and that will come to life over the next year, causing me to go “oh, now, that’s really clever.”
I know that a lot of artists are already finding niches in cover/book design/site design, etc.
Oh, yeah, and my colleagues are talking about the marketplace’s hunger for “content” – i.e. for story. I’ve spotted that too. I’m getting emails asking me to continue my Musketeer Mysteries, for instance. (Actually borderline threatening. Mission accomplished. I’m negotiating to get the first out as an ebook SOON, and after that I will continue the series with book six – since the publisher won’t give me back the rights to books two through five, and no, I don’t want to talk about it.)
Mind you, this will not alter some jobs in publishing. Traditional publishers/editors will always exist. Paper books might become more of a prestige thing, like hardcovers in a time of mass market paperback predominance, but they’ll be there. After all, it’s devilish hard to get your kindle edition signed, much less to will the signed copy to your kids. You can have my signed Pratchetts when you tear them out of my cold, dead hands. Ditto for my signed Bradburys. I’m just sorry I never got a signed Heinlein!
Agents, too, whether they transition to publicists or not, will exist for a good long while yet. Having just got my first contract for a foreign edition of one of my books – Japan, squee! – I can attest this is something I couldn’t possibly have done on my own.
But the field is opening, expanding, and offering a lot of other chances.
As for writers? Well, while there are books I’m not willing to let go small press or e-only – not yet – that is changing, too, and ask me again in three years and it could be quite different. For years now, being published anywhere but by the big boys/gals was an admission of failure. Just the lifting of that taboo is huge. As is the fact that being self-published is not the end of the world, anymore.
My second-worst year in psychological terms, i.e. the only year worse than the one when my first book crashed and burned, was the year when I wrote seventeen proposals. Seventeen. Proposals.
To the uninitiated, a proposal in my genres (not in Romance, I gather) consists of an outline that can range anywhere from ten to fifty pages, plus the first three chapters of a book.
The outline is not so much of a problem. Publishers are okay with it changing, when/if you write the book ten years later (sometimes.) But the chapters were death. For me to write sample chapters, I need to nail the voice. I’m not exaggerating when I say that once I’ve written three chapters, in terms of work, the book is half done.
(I was actually quite cheered when hearing of Heinlein, in this phase of creation, lying on the sofa moaning so alarmingly that Ginny thought he was ill. I’ve never done that, exactly, but I often get myself in such a nervous state that I catch whatever bug is coming through town at the time. Also, my husband – bless him – is a tower of strength. I don’t know what men with less patience might do when I come downstairs for the third time that day and announce I’m giving up writing because it all reads blah and I’ll never be able to write another book again, never, ever, ever.)
The year of the seventeen-proposals was soul-crushing, particularly because I knew a lot of those I’d never be able to write and be paid for. And once the characters had come to life for me, I wanted to write them, so it was like… breaking off little pieces of myself.
Yes, I know that sounds melodramatic, but truly, truly, it left me completely drained and feeling like I’d aged ten years in one.
Now, well… a couple of those books are on to be finished as soon as I get a month or so. So they might never sell, so what? I’ll put them up in ebooks. Even if they sell slowly, they won’t go out of print, and they’re bound to earn enough, over time, to justify my bother. And in the future I have that outlet for any books that want to be written and aren’t that “commercial” as the publishers see it.
That alone might save my sanity. But, as more and more readers come into an expanded market and as the economies in the process of producing an ebook mean a larger share per-book for the author, I think we’re about to see an explosion in the market for stories…
And all of a sudden I saw all this, and I got really excited. Come on! There’s a new reality shaping up. There’s all sorts of cool chances.
Walk that tight rope. It’s all right and tight. Class of 85 down here. You?
Crossposted at According To Hoyt
Comments
28 responses to “The Tight Rope Over The Lion Pit”
I’d say I’m exhibit A, as when I’m reading I tend to fill in whatever I left out and smooth out the grammar in my mind.
I do the same thing and it really bothers me. I have to re-read my stuff with a fresh mind to catch a decent proportion of the errors.
Fortunately I’m one of those very rare birds who is not in love with my own work (at least in the production phase). In my engineering work when I’m in the test phase I try just as hard to find all the routes to failure as I did to find the road to success in the design phase.
Normally you don’t let designers test their own designs.
Of course in the design realm there are incentives. People can die if failure modes are not properly evaluated. It concentrates the mind. I try to bring that same mind set to writing.
Sarah,
I can put you in touch with a moderately successful self published author Sgt. Mom.
I have done posts on her work here in co-ordination with her.
http://www.bloggernews.net/1author/juliahayden
Sgt Mom on Amazon
M. Simon,
actually, if she’s okay with it, send me her address to the one I have registered with the blog. We’ve frequented overlapping blogs for years, so I’d like to know her better.
(And why do I ALWAYS end up in spam? I even started putting in an email, in an effort not to have to go in and spring myself out of spam… Is there any way to whitelist myself? I remain technologically de-clined.)
White list: contact Eric.
I have sent an e-mail to your “ta….” address.
I remember a discussion with John Ringo (Baen SF author) and Toni Weisskopf (editor at teh time at baen), online, where the upshot was that they were well aware that viable e-readers would cause pressure issues, but promotion, copy-editing, story-editing, cover art, etc. were all things that a publishing house, no matter the format, could provide as a valuable service to the authors.
In the meantime, to readers, a good “publisher” would provide a degree of vetting that the book had been gone over, and were coherent, and consistent. I.E. Professional, not just competent.
Would it be the SAME ecosystem? No. Would “publishers” have to work harder due to more competition and flexibility in people releasing books? Yes.
Of course, reading Stephen King’s work after the point he was too popular for someone to say “No, you’re being too wordy” doesn’t help my argument about the value of publishing houses having editors, neh?
DG
Baen is one of the houses that actually DOES have value-added — it has a brand. It is the ONLY house working today in sf/f where people will buy because of the publisher. This is because they’re a cohesive and independent publisher, whose brand has “personality”. So, say, for a new or not very well known writer, they’re value added, because they increase exposure. I’ll continue working for Baen as long as they’ll have me.
…. I’ll take your opinion on how extensive the brand-making is in the rest of the biz as expert opinion. 🙂
That said, I can see that they’ve tried really, really hard to make sure that they solidify their brand both in what they offer writers, and in terms of what readers can expect.
It’s almost as if they looked at what was possible with ebooks, read the ben bova book on the topic, and made some solid guesses that what happened to typesetting was going to happen to publishers, and decided to position themselves to stay in business.
Heh.
And in this case, I feel dumb for not having made the connection before. Author, name of Hoyt?”
Heh.
Anyway, pleased to meetcha. Rarely hung around cons as they’re a bit out of the way for an ex-nuke in Charleston with kids. Only claim to fame other than trying to be rational in the politics end of the bar is an illo or two in one of John’s books.
DG,
Ex nuke? Me too. Pleased to meetcha.
Yup. Competent steam plant mechanic once I had time to wrap my head around the manual and the part, but far too slow for anyone’s taste – including mine – the first time doing a job.
Much better with computers. And teaching.
You know how it is when you enlist. Admit you can change out an oil filter and who cares if you took several years of EE. “Needs of the Navy” and all that. 🙂
Mind if I get your actual emails? Mine’s dgarsys at gmail.
If this ends up being a repeat post, I apologize.
Glad to meet another nuke. Can’t say I was the best MM – computers were my forte, but you know how it is. Admit to the recruiter you can change out an oil filter and who cares about two years of EE in college if they’re anxious to get mechanics. 🙂
Mind if I get your emails? Mine’s dgarsys over at gmail.
Sarah,
Something must have been in the air, because yesterday I came to the same realization. We are moving soon and my wife has told me I can only bring 1 box of books to the new home. Now you have to understand, I have nearly 2,000 books in a library in a basement. They are old friends. It has been a struggle to put it mildly.
But then yesterday I went to Baen’s Bar thanks to you being on Instapundit and reacquainted my with the site. I found that I can download digital versions of some of my favorites that have been out of print. Buy some that are old favorites, and get the new books with more money going to the author for my Kindle.
Wow.
All of a sudden I had a way to take my friends with me and not fight with my wife. Now my original Heinlien’s and Travis McGee’s will be with me till I draw my last breathe, but the 1700 books that I collected now can be easily replaced and are portable.
If I want to read the Ross Thomas collection again, odds are it will be available digitally to download or buy.
The topper was the webscription site at Baen. That is the future in my eyes. $15.00 a month and get 5-8 new releases. That will satisfy my reading needs and expose me to new writers.
Other genre’s and publishing houses will follow this model and all of a sudden their back catalogs will become much more valuable.
Where have we seen this before?
You haven’t read David Weber’s Out of the Dark. UGH. The publisher in this case dropped the ball. They apparently read Weber’s past sales instead of the book. It reads as the ultimate deus ex machina plot.
Sarah, I’ve only just recently encountered you, but I find you very sweet and charming. (And married too, I know, but this is just a cyber-flirtation.)
Anyway: My feelings have also recently changed about “ebooks”. At first they were only a kind of weird experiment, with reading devices that were underpowered and too-expensive. The business model didn’t seem to be there, either. Stephen King, who has been known to take a flyer of two on new business models, tried it an dumped it.
On top of this, there was the stigma of ‘vanity publishing’ about ebooks. They were for writers who couldn’t get the attention of ‘real’ publishers.
But that’s gradually changed. I remember when only a handful of people listened to music online. Then an even smaller number listened to MP3 files on a device. Today, of course, people overwhelmingly listen to music on iPods or similar devices.
The other day, Amazon announced that the Kindle was their best-selling product ever. To me, that means the mainstream is ready for this. Sure, Borders Bookstores died for a lot of reasons. But remember, Tower Records was once the canary in the coal mine for the digital music age.
I think the writing is very much on the wall. Er, tablet.
I avoid ebooks because of the DRM. These long posts that don’t even mention DRM puzzle me. Are you not aware that it exists? Does it not bother you at all?
Tom Royce:
I’m sorry to go off topic here but if you value Travis McGee, Robert Heinlein *and* Ross Thomas I really need to know who else you read.
I don’t want clutter up this thread but if you could hit my LibraryThing account and leave a few suggestions I would really appreciate it.
http://www.librarything.com/profile/robrambusch
If you can’t, no worries, but congratulations on your excellent taste!
My sister gave me a Kindle this Christmas, and I have to say I was agnostic at first. For one thing, the experience of using an e-reader is not, to me, as satisfying as a hard copy. On the other hand, I see people around me content to view movies on a cell phone screen, so I guess you decide what you’re comfortable with.
My other concern was, and is, the issue where Amazon or whomever can pull content from your reader without your consent, as happened with a digital copy of 1984 (damn, my irony meter just broke).
However, my profession requires extensive travel and it’s always a balancing act between socks and underwear and books when packing to go overseas. Then there is the trouble and expense of sending books back and forth. But what about books I already have, but would never bring with me because of space and weight?
Theodore Momssen’s five volume History of Rome can be downloaded for about a dollar, as can Gibbon’s six volume Delcine and Fall of the Roman Empire. Likewise Thucydides, Herodotus, Suetonius, Tactitus, Xenophon, Polybius, the list goes on and on. Homer, Stevenson, Dumas, Pyle, Wodehouse, there is a huge body of work available for download at a pittance.
So far I have not purchased many new works, being still far too enamored of the chance to carry a library of old favorites with me. And even had I paid out of pocket for the Kindle, the value of what I have downloaded to it for pennies is far beyond the cost of the reader.
May I smugly point out that I predicted this exactly back in 2008?
I wanted to comment on what Sarah said earlier:
[Baen] is the ONLY house working today in sf/f where people will buy because of the publisher.
Sarah is absolutely right. Hands up, anyone who’s surprised. 🙂 I’m one of those people she’s talking about — I have bought books solely on the grounds that Baen published ’em, and therefore I thought I might like them. Well, OK, and the fact that I was able to read the first quarter of the book online and got hooked. 🙂 I believe that’s how I ended up buying Draw One in the Dark — I read the first quarter of the book and had to find out how it finished.
Oh, and another thing: Baen is, so far, the ONLY publisher I would even consider buying ebooks from, because they “get it”: they offer their ebooks in multiple formats, with no digital copy restrictions on the files. I can read the books I bought on my desktop, my laptop, and my smartphone (no Kindle yet), and I don’t have to jump through “authorization” hoops to do so.
I have even — gasp! — given a copy of one of my ebooks (Agent of Change, by Steve Lee & Sharon Miller) to a friend, with the firm understanding that this was a LOAN, and he was to delete it when he “gave it back” to me. It worked — he liked the book so much he bought the whole series (12+ books). If Baen had had DRM on their ebooks, I would have been unable to do that.
Once other publishers catch a clue and I can buy more ebooks without DRM, I’ll buy from them, too. If this has already happened (I’m out of touch with current events in publishing), I’d be happy to find out. But until more publishers let me buy ebooks without DRM, I’ll continue to give Baen my entire ebook-buying budget.
Heh — I wrote that before going back through this blog’s archives and spotting the “What Baen Does Right” post. The fact that I echoed several of Sarah’s points from that post in my own comment was not deliberate — it’s just proof that Baen is, indeed, doing something right, and both authors and readers have noticed it.
The big houses serve a purpose in that they screen, they winnow, they choose. And once they have done their thing, we readers get to do it all over again. Reading time is precious; how do we assure that we spend it wisely? If everyone epublishes with little cost, the price of offering a piece drops a little, but the price of picking the good stuff explodes. Since the cost to the reader is the sum of those two costs, his cost may well significantly increase. At least you writers have the musicians blazing the trails ahead of you and taking some of the arrows.
My biggest concern was alluded to in the comment above – how do we get autographs on copies of the books? The best I can figure is that for organized signings, the publisher could send postcards of the front cover for signing. Or, the author have a supply. I don’t know. It’s my biggest concern with the e-reader at the moment. Thoughts?
Things are going to change. A lot. I think Peter Hamilton nailed it in his novella ‘Misspent Youth.’ In it, one of the main characters had decades earlier invented a form of cheap digital storage of such density that anyone can virtually every piece of information, be it laundry list, movie, book, or song, in their pocket and never have to delete anything. (This eventually leads to the storage of entire human minds and immortality later in the same universe.)
Combined with very high speed communications, this renders copyright a quaint concept with no place in the real world. Artists become far more dependent on direct patronage by their fans. There is a lot of other consequences but the most important for the moment is that making a living as a writer becomes highly dependent on the ability of consumers to directly reward creators who please them.
(We’re pretty much there already for prose. The first thing I did with my Nook was add a 16 GB memory card for less than $25. I have hundreds of novels on there and have used only a few percent of the capacity.)
In spite of all this, Hamilton has no place I can find on his site enabling people to send him money. I’m unwilling to spend $5 to give him $1. Perhaps someday he’ll realize he has written his future and now must live in it.
Concerning ebooks and e-publishing, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem that will perpetuate, at least for the immediate future, the significance of conventional / paper publishers and their imprints: name recognition.
An established writer has a base of fans who are already familiar with his style and strengths. Those fans will “follow” him from paper to pixels without much resistance. But the new writer first breaking into publication has no such fan base. Given how easy it is to self-publish electronically, people who can’t write for sour apples will do so in huge numbers, which will, of course, make it far more difficult for readers to find the good stuff and avoid the trash. After all, everyone thinks he can write; everyone thinks he has a story to tell. And the overwhelming majority of us are dead wrong.
The conventional publishing house implicitly sets a mark of acceptable quality on the books it chooses to publish. Those books have passed through some sort of crap filter; someone, somewhere, deemed them worthy of committing to print, thus betting on their marketability. Granted that a lot of crap gets through those filters, too, at the very least the torrent is dammed down to a trickle. More, over time each imprint acquires a particular “quality patina:” the extent to which a given reader can trust in its editors’ judgment.
There are approaches to this problem that appear to obviate the need for the conventional publisher and his crap filter of uncertain effect: free samples, promotional / “loss leader” ebooks; the emergence of review sites that slap their seal of approval on ebooks and their authors. But overall, the e-publishing field offers challenges, both for writers and readers, to which the answers are yet incomplete. This is of particular importance to the writer who hopes to make his writing an important part of his income…which is to say, to just about all of us.
“Given how easy it is to self-publish electronically, people who can’t write for sour apples will do so in huge numbers, which will, of course, make it far more difficult for readers to find the good stuff and avoid the trash.”
I’ve thought about that too. Four points:
1) People without a lot to say generally won’t make it through a whole book. Hey – writing is real work! A few may burp out the one, like a hairball, but that’s it.
Books are already prolific. They’ll become a bit moreso, but I don’t see content glut becoming much more of a problem than it is now. Let’s face it, we’re already there.
2) People actually DO judge a book by its cover. It’s a law of the jungle: A great cover says that the author or publisher (which may be the same person nowadays) had enough faith in his product, and enough taste, to put some money where his mouth was.
This is the same reason publishers print rave reviews (if any) right on the cover. Readers want assurance of some sort that they’re no wasting their money or time.
3) Marketing. Same as point two: People want to know you believe in your product, and they want someone they already trust (Oprah will do nicely) to vouch for it.
4) The worthiest among the self-published will find publishers. The great glory of self-publishing is that nothing great has to sit in a slush pile because the author has no clout with publishers. (It’s been postulated that self-publishing IS the new slush pile, since slush piles seem not to exist anymore.) Anyone with a great product they believe in can be heard.
Once an audience is found, publishers will come ’round. In droves, because you’re not in a slush pile. You’re an author with an established audience which they, perhaps, can grow. This is a story I have already heard, more than once. As per John Scalzi, f’rinstance (1 min 42 secs in).
Mr. Snitch has it exactly right – self-published and ebook writers ARE building their following through putting their books out there instead of going the traditional publishing route. Every book/ebook out there is a chance to gain another fan for a dedicated and focused indy author.
Sgt. Mom (Is it okay if I email later?)
There is another important point — publishers have been betting all their cookies on bestsellers. Bestsellers have the best incentive to go solo. The traditional business model, ipso facto just collapsed.
Sure… I’m out in the wilds with no internet but a cellphone with limited capability -if your email goes to the spam folder I can’t access until later in the week!
It has been a lifelong dream of mine to be a writer. I have started more than one novel. I have purchase books on how to Write a Novel and I keep hearing it is a waste of time now that people read everything off the computer and publishing is going by way of the “do-do bird”. Can you give me some ideas and encouragement?