The Way We Publish Now

This week I saw a new item at our local dollar store—hardcover books. Well, actually one hardcover book—hundreds of copies of it, dumped in a big bin. It’s sad enough to see good books remaindered on the sale tables of Barnes and Noble, but these were being dumped for a buck a piece, along with off-brand detergent and dented cans of dog food.

What’s worse, I recognized the title. I'd seen the author interviewed by Stephen Colbert—just a few months ago.

I felt a little sick.

Kind of like the way I felt when the only remaining indie bookstore in our nearest big town closed. And the LA Times killed off their book review section. And the Borders at the mall shut its doors.

What’s going on? Have people stopped reading? Should we give up our dreams of becoming authors and take up hula-hoop decorating? Is the book dead?

Nope. It turns out the opposite is true. In fact, The New York Times recently reported that sales of books are going nowhere but up. In the US, trade titles grew 5.8% in the past three years, juvenile books grew 6.6%, and adult fiction went up a hefty 8.8%—in the middle of a recession!

So the book business isn’t really going to Hades in a handbasket. But it is on one wild ride—a ride that’s moving so fast that even industry professionals can’t keep up.

Here’s a little recap—

Back in the dear, dead days of 2009 B.K. (Before Kindle), book authors had only three options:

Option #1: Go through the long, painful process of querying literary agents, hoping to find one who could sell your work to a big or biggish publishing corporation. From the mid-20^th century until the early 2000’s, if you wrote a book good enough to snag a reputable agent, you had an excellent chance of launching a professional writing career. But the agent-funneling-to-the international-publishing-conglomerate paradigm had been developing flaws over the past few years:

• Ever-shrinking advances

• Bullying market departments seizing creative control

• Non-existent marketing budgets, except for superstars (Here’s a link to the great 2009 piece on the subject from the New Yorker for those who missed it two weeks ago.)

• Ever-more draconian contracts, demanding ownership of copyright and preventing writers from “competing” with their own books by publishing anything else, anywhere.

• “Creative” royalty-eating accounting

• Rigid genre formulas

• Fad-publishing and lemming-like overbuying: giving two or three genres dominance to the exclusion of all others, thus killing off those genres by oversaturating the market. Examples: chick lit and vampire romance.

• Dropping writers who didn’t make the wildly optimistic sales quotas established by the marketing department (as reported by the reliably inaccurate Bookscan.) Your career could be ended by an accounting mistake. The only way you’d ever be able to publish again involved changing your name and never, ever admitting you’d been published before. 

Option #2: Submit to smaller, regional presses that read their own slush and don’t require an agent-gatekeeper. This minor-league option sometimes led to the big leagues, but it had major drawbacks.

• Small or no advance

• No standardized practices—hard to tell the good from the bad.

• Difficult distribution. Usually big chains wouldn’t order from them, and many indie bookstores would order titles only as special orders.

• Tiny profit margins. With the high cost of materials, and small mark-up on paper books, they often went belly-up, owing royalties to writers and back pay to staff (speaking from experience here.)

• No marketing budget 

• No reviews in the big publications like Kirkus, NYT, People, etc.

• Titles unlikely to get the notice of Hollywood.

Option #3: Self-publish

• Oh, pu-leez. You’ve all heard the stories. “I read a self-pubbed book by my hairdresser’s son and it had no plot and typos on every page—and if I ever have to read another 50-page masturbation scene, I’m going to throw myself off a bridge.”

• Unless you wrote something sappy and inspirational like The Celestine Prophecy or The Shack, you wouldn’t even recoup costs.

• The only way you’d be able to publish again involved changing your name and never, ever admitting you’d been published before.

But a revolution started late in the year 2009 A.K.

You can read that as “After Kindle” or “After Konrath”, since mystery author J. A. Konrath sounded the first voice of the Kindle revolution on his blog A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

The A.K. era has provided many new paths to publishing, and those paths go in remarkable new directions. Sometimes they even make U-turns.

Option #1 is still the same: query agents and hope for that Big Six contract. Some people will argue with me, but I think this is still the best path to fame and fortune for the writer with a shovel-ready, trending-right-now debut novel. If you write like Raymond Carver and have a YA steampunk zombiepocalypse thriller—all edited, polished and ready to go—and a few more like it in the hopper, you just might be the next superstar. It still happens.

But this traditional road is an even rockier path than before, because:

• The big bookstore chains who worked in partnership with the Big Six to create bestsellers are going belly-up. Borders is dead, indies are evaporating, and the book shelf space in supermarkets and drugstores has shrunk drastically.

• The mass market paperback is disappearing. Publishing Perspectives gives it three years to live . Mass market publisher Dorchester went bankrupt, transferred to an all e-book format—and has yet to pay royalties to its former mass market authors.

• As the Big Six acquire fewer and fewer non-celebrity titles, agents are unable to sell books they adore, and being “on submission” can be an emotional Bataan Death March.

• Now less than 1% of books published by the Big Six are by debut authors

• The Big Six are pricing ebooks higher and higher, thwarting sales of even their bestselling authors.

• As marketing departments insist on “guaranteed sales numbers,” agents are looking less at their own queries and more at the Kindle bestseller lists.

• Big Six authors are getting tiny royalties on ebook sales, and their paper books are being pulled from shelves within weeks of launch (and sent to the Dollar Store, apparently.) The average advance is about $5000, and most authors never see any royalties. You have to write really, really fast just to make minimum wage.

Option #2: Submit to Small Presses. This is the same, too. Except it's a much more appealing option than it used to be. Technology has decreased overhead and Amazon and other online retailers have leveled the playing field.

• Small companies, which have fewer cogs in their wheels, can move faster. Most are pricing their ebooks under $5.00. Most also use POD technology for paper books, so they only print as many books as they have orders for. This drastically reduces overhead, so they’re much more likely to stay in business than in the past.

• Because of low overhead they often pay much higher royalties than the Big Six.

• With online retailers dominating the book market, distributors are no longer essential to sales numbers. Every book is available for browsing with a few clicks on Amazon. A book from a tiny press has equal space with one from Random House.

• Ebook-only presses are mushrooming all over the ’Net. They are willing to take chances on new authors and innovative genre-bending because they have very little overhead. This also means they can afford to keep retail prices low.

• Genre-specific small publishers can service neglected niche markets and connect writers directly with fans looking for a particular type of fiction.

• Small presses offer professional book design, coding, paper book distribution and sometimes, more publicity than a Big Six publisher.

• But you’re still not likely to get that call from Stephen Spielberg. 

Option #3: Self-Publish. With the phenomenal success of self-pubbers like Amanda Hocking and John Locke, the stigma has been lifted. Self publishing isn't for rejects any more. It's for rebels and literary innovators. And anybody can join this wild-west gold-rush sparked by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his little Kindle. (You can also now self-pub paper copies quite cheaply through Amazon's Create Space.)

• This is no longer the “I’ve been rejected everywhere, so I guess I have to…” option that hairdresser’s son took.

• Fortunes are being made, and even mid-listers are making a living.

• Self-publishing an ebook costs next to nothing, especially if you can design your own cover and get a fellow writer to exchange editing/proofing duties with you.

• New companies like Smashwords and BookBaby provide self-epublishing services at very reasonable prices, and also supply helpful things like ISBNs.

• Agents, publishers and filmmakers are ignoring their own slush piles and trolling the Kindle self-published lists for new clients. (Yes, I mentioned this above, but my point is: although that’s not so good for queriers, it’s great for self-pubbers.)

• Big Six publishers are offering self-published stars the kind of huge advances usually reserved for literary superstars and members of the Rolling Stones. Self-pubbed Kindle stars like Amanda Hocking and Mark Edwards and Louise Voss   have taken this U-turn route back to Option #1.

• This week, Amazon opened a Kindle Indie Store just for self-pubbers, so you don’t have to compete with the Big Six guys to become a bestseller. (I’m not entirely sure this isn’t ghettoizing the indies, but we’ll wait and see.)

• Plus you just might get that call from Hollywood. The film rights to Amanda Hocking’s initially self-pubbed paranormal trilogy were sold to Media Rights Capital in March for major bucks, and I’m hearing from indie readers of this blog that Hollywood has been knocking on their doors.

Option #4: Query an agent who will help you self-publish ebooks that will stand out from the crowd

• Agents like Andrea Brown are helping their clients self-publish to bypass the high cost of Big Six ebooks. There’s been a lot of noise about this being a conflict of interest, but the authors themselves aren’t complaining. Agents know how to provide editing (which they’ve been doing for years) plus hook you up with top-notch cover and book designers. They can help with publicity, marketing and career management as well as handling film and foreign rights (a biggie).

• Publisher-agencies are a growing trend. Mark Coker at Smashwords wrote a blogpost this week  about how agencies may be the new gateway publishers of the future. 

Option #5: HIRE an agent who will help you self-publish ebooks.

• Yes, hire. Some very reputable agencies like Bookends LLC are forming separate branches that accept all comers and help them through the e-publishing process for either a percentage or a flat fee. A flat fee service—as provided by Laurie McLean at Agent Savant—feels better to me, but both seem to be working.

Option #6: Publish both e-books and paper books with Amazon’s new paper book lines. This is the new holy grail of publishing. You only get in by invitation at this point, but Amazon is making changes almost daily, so stay tuned.

• The first of these was Amazon Encore. This doesn’t provide a huge advance, but your book is printed on real dead trees and you get to sell to the 70% of readers who still don’t have Kindles. Plus your royalties are way better than if you published with the Big Six

• Then came Montlake Romance in June. Amazon lured bestselling romance writer Connie Brockway from Simon and Schuster to debut their new romance line.

• Next to be announced was mystery/thriller line Thomas and Mercer. This is where indie superstars Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath are now, having accepted reputedly huge advances and impressive royalties.

• More are coming—and we will probably be able to submit directly to them at some point.

• Major drawback: these books will be sold mainly through Amazon. Amazon would like other retailers to carry them, but many bookstores are planning to boycott these lines, because Amazon is a rival bookseller.

These options aren’t either/or, as some of the arguing in blogs and forums might lead you to believe. Most of the Big Six published authors I know are also releasing indie books. Some are also using small publishers as well.

Yes, it is scary that one corporation--Amazon--is cornering such a huge segment of the book market. Let's hope that Barnes and Noble and Apple and new start-ups will challenge their growing monopoly.

You can get a beginner’s overview of ebook publishing from the ever-reliable Jane Friedman on her blog here.

If you want more in-depth information, you can buy a great little book on epublishing from the (incredibly smart) Irish writer David Gaughran on his blog Let’s Get Digital or in the Kindle store  for only $2.99.

The publishing world has changed irrevocably in the past two years. The changes came about partly because of the e-revolution and partly because the old system was already in a state of decay. Even though we’re going to miss the corner bookshop (which may be replaced with cool coffee-house/wine bar/print-while-you wait media emporiums) the good outweighs the bad—for both readers and authors.

As Gaughran says, "[Big Six publishers] have been underestimating readers for years. If you talk to readers, their main complaint is that everything is the same, piles of books chasing one fad after the next. Readers want diverse voices, readers like works of different lengths, readers like writers who play outside conventional genre boundaries. Indie writers have been filling that need."

But the greatest thing to come from the ebook revolution may be the way it empowers writers. We now have choices. Even authors who are still publishing only with international conglomerates know they can walk away if they want to. They can demand more equitable royalties. They can refuse to take orders on what to write and how many books to churn out per year. They can publish novellas and short stories and books outside a specified genre.  

And for newbie authors—you’ve all got a chance to make the big time.

One caveat: Don’t publish before you’re ready to be a disciplined, professional writer. (See my post Three Questions to Ask Before You Jump on the Self-Publishing Bandwagon) Reviewers can be unforgiving—even of things like trite cover design, overpricing and a few typos. Amateur comments on Amazon can be cruel, and trolls are being hired to post nasty reviews and bring down a rival’s stats.

So hone your skills, build your inventory, and develop some calluses on your soul. Then set out on whatever publishing path feels right to you. The way things are going, there should be even more options very soon.

So how are the changes in the industry affecting you, scriveners? Are the new possibilities changing how you view your own career goals? Is it affecting how you write?

What Will Publishing Look Like in 2021?

In the comment thread of my post on What Readers Won’t Miss from Corporate Publishers When They’re Gone, “Ghostly Girl” asked the above question. It sure is a hot topic..

What will happen in the next ten years? Will corporate publishers stumble along into dodoland? Will bookstores become a faded memory? Will all writers become entrepreneurial self-publishers? Will everybody who’s got a novel in him/her get fifteen Warhol fame-minutes on a bloated, crap-laden Amazon.com?

Things do look dire for corporate book publishing and brick-and-mortar retail sales at the moment. Early in the week we heard the Borders chain has finally shuffled off its mortal coil, and on Thursday, Publisher’s Lunch reported book sales suffered another huge monthly drop—especially for adult hardcover and mass market paperbacks.

This has made the future of publishing a hot topic of discussion everywhere I go. On Wednesday night, a friend in my critique group asked what the Barnes and Noble of the future might look like. Most said “Barnes and Who?” or “What’s a bookstore?”

But I disagreed. I predicted Barnes and Noble will survive—in a rather different configuration—maybe a combination of a much-expanded Starbucks café and an Apple-like outlet, displaying a variety of Nookish products, X-boxy things, coffee-related paraphernalia—and one book.

Written by Snooki.

Turns out I might be something of a clairvoyant. In that same Thursday issue of Publisher’s Lunch there was also news of a big-money auction of a hot new literary property, shorthanded as, “Pippa Middleton’s Pilates Coach.”

So. Maybe publishing isn’t so moribund after all. At least some Big Six guys are still partying like it’s 2009.

I had to look into it. Pippa Middleton’s Pilates Coach sounded like a brilliant satire of our shallow, celebrity-obsessed culture—maybe some uproarious comedy about fictional idiots spending millions to learn Pilates from the coach, “who’s coaching the girl, who’s related to the girl, who danced with the son of the Prince of Wales.” (Paraphrasing the classic song from 1927.) 

But a quick Google showed the celebrity-crazed idiots aren’t fictional. And the book is not meant to be funny. And it’s coming soon to a Barnes and Noble near you.

To further confirm the accuracy of my crystal ball, Kris Rusch reported the same day that Barnes and Noble is drastically reducing its book inventory in order to put in more toys and electronics. She’d heard from friends at Barnes and Noble who said they “were notified at our B&N location this week that in the next couple of weeks we will be receiving a ‘massive returns download.’ To coincide with this outflux of books we will be adding 3 more of the massive toys and games displays, as well as expanding gift and the digital presence.”

Toys, games, Nooks, and—an “outflux” of books. 

The books left will no doubt be written by the girl who danced with the boy who danced with the Pilates coach of the chauffeur of the Prince of Wales. Or whoever is current incarnation of Snooki.

This is how corporate publishing/bookselling will survive. As long as there are royals, vulgar bimbos, and aging rock stars with debauched tales to tell, people will buy their stories.

Thing is, people who buy Snookibooks aren’t big on other types of books, so they probably won’t invest in e-readers.

They will be kind of like the people who watch broadcast TV—the ones who don’t need to buy cable, because it’s stupid to pay money for some high-falutent Mad Men or Game of Thrones when you can watch America’s Got Broads who can Crush Beer Cans with their Boobs…for free.

So Snookibooks will have to be in paper. In bookstores. On that one shelf between the Xboxes, Nook carrying cases and Starbucks coffee mugs.

In fact, I see publishing following in the footsteps of television in many ways. The Big Six will be like the broadcast networks. Paper books will be the So You Think You Can Dance with the Biggest Loser/Big Brother fare. Plus there will be a few token Jonathan Franzen/Safran Foer tomes standing in for the Good Wife/Glee win-a-few-arty-awards broadcast offerings.

I think a few other very popular books will probably still be produced in paper as well.

In an article in the July 17th Boston Globe, Amanda Katz wrote about people who buy books in paper after they read the e-book. She reported a conversation with the general manager of the Harvard Book Store, who observed, “People come in and say, ‘I read this on my iPad, and now I want to own it’…as if somehow having it on their e-reading device is not really owning it.” (Italics are mine.)

So what books will people really want to “own”? 

Here’s what I predict—

Top-Selling Superstar Books in Hardcover, Suitable for Gift-Giving: An awful lot of people give books for holiday, graduation, and birthday gifts. You can’t give somebody a Kindle download and wrap it with a bow. So the biggest bestsellers will probably still be available in paper for quite a while.

Humor Books: You can’t leave your Kindle in the bathroom for your guests to chuckle at the latest Garfield offering, so it’s gotta be in paper.

Coffee Table Books: The paintings of Gustav Klimt in Kindle black-and-white are not going to have the same impact. High-ticket art books will stick around.

Impress-the-Guests/Keepsake Literary Books: That lovely leather-bound copy of Leaves of Grass can’t be replaced by electrons.

Bibles and other Iconic Religious Books. Thumping a Kindle is unlikely to give the same satisfaction.

Decorator Books: Books make a room feel cozy without being cutsie. I suppose people will start making faux-book 3-D wallpaper, but it won’t be the same. So books will become a premium decorator item. I predict used bookstores will become much more upscale as hardcover books become rare collectibles.

Books for Small Children: Patting the e-Bunny probably won’t amuse your 2-year old in quite the same way. And until they get holographic, an e-book is not going to replace the pop-up book.

And of course, Snookibooks: I include those big-advance political books published to be bought up by PACs in this category. Schlock never dies.

And as for everything else—that will of course be in ebooks.

But I can picture us reading our Kindles and Nooks while sitting in the Starbucks inside the Barnes and Noble, because, let’s face it, people like the feeling of a bookstore.

So when I look in my crystal ball, I’m seeing a few bookstores sticking around. There will be the Barnes-and-Noble one-Snookibook model, and the upscale collectible bookstore. 

I also see the survivor-indies still hanging on. Those are the ones that have weathered the last century’s bookshop assaults: first from Costco/Walmart, then the Big and Nasty chains, and then from Amazon.com. These are the tough little guys who survive partly on greeting cards, crystals, games, and/or coffee—and mostly on damned good service.

And what about the corporate publishers? Will they be part of the vast non-Snookibook market? 

Mark Williams of Mark Williams International (the quiet half of bestselling author “Saffi Desforges”) sees things going this way: “It cannot be long now before the Big Six start taking on authors on an e-book only basis. Offering all the traditional editorial services, translations and access to the full range of e-markets, but without the cost of paper production. If they get realistic about royalties they could yet survive the Transition and emerge stronger.”

He’s probably right. If the corporate guys finally figure out they can make more money without their heads crammed into their derrières, they’ll probably figure out how to cash in and take control of the e-books.

But while the corporations try to make their creaky way out of the 19^th century, I see a huge growth in small presses. There are hundreds of small publishers mushrooming up everywhere on the Interwebz. (Just Google “small presses”.)

I also see the emergence of the collective small press—groups of writers in the same genre banding together to form their own brand.

Like independent cable TV companies, small and collective publishers can each address a different niche. With e-books, their overhead will be almost non-existent, so they can afford to put time and energy into building brands and promoting writers.

We already have Ellora’s Cave for Playboy channel-type erotica, and I’m sure there will be another for “characters welcome” caper stories, another for FX-style noir and dark thrillers, women’s fiction presses for the Lifetime TV crowd, etc.

Some will come and go, but the small publishers who become established will be the new "gatekeepers” for readers who want professionals to sort through the vast number of books on offer.

Literary agencies who have become facilitators for self-publishing may expand to become this kind of branded-niche wholesaler.

Midsized and University presses might play the part of the premium cable networks as literary stars and Pulitzer prize-winners are dropped by their corporate publishers and/or seek homes outside of the déclassé corporate Snookibook-world. As Pulitzer-winner Alice Walker said when she moved to a small press, “As water is to flowers, independent publishing is to democracy.” 

Smaller publishers aren’t just smarter, they’re cooler. 

And of course some superstars will create their own franchises/networks. Joe Konrath’s indie superstar turn might be compared to Keith Olberman’s TV network. Konrath Inc. is certainly a brand that needs no gatekeeper or umbrella (My crystal ball isn’t quite so sure about Olberman, since my satellite company doesn’t carry his network.)

Other branches of the industry will jump in and fill the void as well. Amazon-the-bookstore becoming Amazon-the-publisher is rather like Direct Satellite TV becoming the producer of Glenn Close’s Damages. Both in TV and publishing I see the retailer controlling the product in a much bigger way. (If that is good or bad, I don’t know.)

The innovation and creative spark that fuels all this will originate with the indies. Yes, there will be tens of thousands of us—all doing our thing on Amazon like amateur filmmakers on YouTube. Some will become breakout superstars who get their books on that hardcover gift shelf at B & N; some will find a steady income with small e-publishers or collectives; some will establish their own brands, and most will fade into obscurity. But at least we’ll all have a shot at our Warhol minutes. A way better shot than we had in 2009.

So I think we will still have corporate publishers, bookstores, and paper books in the next decade—all quite different from the ones we have now, but traditions will be preserved, at least in appearance. People hate change.

So what about you, scriveners? What do you see in your crystal ball? Do you think bookstores will dodo off to extinction before 2021? Do you think publishing will reconfigure but not really be all that different, like the TV industry?

BTW, if you scroll down, you will see I made an Awesome Announcement on Friday. Yes! I’m going to be back in print. And yes, I love small publishers. <3

And next week, I’ll have yet another Awesome Announcement! This one is concerning an exciting addition  to this blog. I’m totally jazzed about it.

In two weeks, we will have a guest post by the incomparable Samuel Park, whose literary novel, This Burns My Heart  has been getting rave reviews from all the most prestigious literati--and is one of Amazon’s top picks for this month. Come read Samuel's words of wisdom on August 7^th.

And if you’re going to be in California in September, there’s still time to get the early bird discount for the Central Coast Writers' Conference. Deadline: July 31!