Tag Archives: Publishing

On “Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal”

October 17, 2011 By in Publishing Tags: , , , , 5 Comments

Seemingly everyone in the book “blogosphere” has something to say about Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal, which points to Amazon’s growing presence not just in book retailing but in book publishing (“Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. [. . .] It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction”). And that’s just its big-name efforts: it now offers a platform for any moron, including this one, to upload and publish eBooks.

Naturally, as someone mulling over options, I’ve been thinking about this stuff:

1) There are a couple of problems publishers have. One big problem is simple: they offer lousy standard royalties on eBooks. Publishers apparently offer a measly 17.5%, before the agent cut. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and so forth will offer 70% (if the author is using an agent, presumably the agent gets a cut). Big-name authors can presumably get better deals, but probably not 70% deals. So an author can sell many, many fewer eBooks and still make more money.

2) Smart authors are probably thinking about whether publishers are going to be in business at all in anything like their current form five years from now. This means authors, especially younger ones, might not want to lock in their eBooks at a 17.5% royalty rate for the rest of their lives only to discover that, five or ten years from now, virtually no one is reading paper books and virtually no one is using conventional publishers in conventional ways. If you’re a writer and you have a longer-than-the-next-quarter outlook, this makes a lot of sense.

3) On a subject closer to home, publishers and agents probably have too many false negatives—that is, people who they should offer representation to but don’t. For a long time, those people simply had no real recourse: they went away or kept trying through the rejections. Lots of now-famous writers went through dozens or hundreds of rejections. If I one day become a now-famous writer, I’ll have the same rejection story. But we don’t know about the could-have-been-famous writers who had to give up for various reasons. Today, if writers are sufficiently determined, they can start selling on their own (I may fall into this category shortly) and see what happens. Chances are good that “nothing” happens, but chances are good that “nothing” happens in traditional publishing land too. But if something happens, it would be hard to imagine that writers used to taking home 70% will happily roll over and let publishers give them 17.5%.

4) Publishers more generally are facing a classic Innovator’s Dilemma-style problem: what happens when the old model is fading but the new one is less profitable in the short to medium term? You run the risk of startups and new-model companies overtaking your business, leaving you in the position of Kodak, old-school IBM, Polaroid, everyone who ever competed with Microsoft prior to about 2004, and innumerable other companies who’ve been killed by shifting markets.

5) Since the massive bloodletting at publishing companies in the 2008 – 2009 neighborhood, it seems to have gotten even harder to get the attention of publishers, which exacerbates numbers 3 and 4, and probably drives more people toward self-publishing, thus accelerating the overall dynamic.

The major publishers aren’t daft and know all this. But they are constrained and can’t do much about it. They can’t distinguish between standard slush and what I’d like to think is my own worthwhile stuff, because if they could, they wouldn’t say no to duds and pass on hits. So this may simply be the sort of thing everyone can see coming and no one can do anything about.

EDIT: This, from Jamie Byng, is worth remembering too: “Publishing is also about finding new talent, rigorous editing, championing the books you believe in, and all that doesn’t just disappear with digital books.” The essential challenge of writing remains even if the distribution changes.

EDIT 2: Literary agent Jane Dystel:

Last week while I was following up on a proposal I had out on submission to publishers, I heard back from a senior editor at one of the top six publishing houses. This person is someone who I consider to be very smart and who has great taste. I had sent him a proposal which he acknowledged was very well done and which covered a subject he was interested in. In turning it down, he sounded discouraged and demoralized as he said that the higher ups in his company were no longer allowing him to buy mid-list titles that in the past he had been able to turn into bestsellers. Rather, he said, they were only allowing him to buy “sure things,” which I took to mean books that can’t fail.

If this story is actually indicative of a general trend in publishing, the number of false negatives should be going up and, concomitantly, the number of writers willing to try new things should too.

Links: Nicholson Baker, college students drink, college students wear short skirts (a feminist perspective), risk-taking, the "left," publishing, and more

September 2, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I’ll Have What He’s Having: Breaking bread with Nicholson Baker, America’s foremost writer of literary sex novels, by Katie Roiphe, whose book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism I admire.

* News flash: college students like drinking because it alleviates social anxiety and enables hooking up. I’m tempted to post the video someone took from a couple weeks ago when my team lost at flip cup.

* Leading off the link from above, Smart Girls Wear Short Skirts, Too: Stop Complaining About College Students.

* Reaping the Rewards 0f Risk-Taking, which includes this bit about how many nations lack “a social environment that encourages diversity, experimentation, risk-taking, and combining skills from many fields into products that he calls “recombinant mash-ups [. . .]” ” This is the kind of stuff I want to do and promote in both the fiction I write and classes I teach.

* College football as seen by a (British?) person acting as an anthropologist.

* Born, and Evolved, to Run.

* Articles like Why won’t America embrace the left? annoy me because they’re dumb. Michael Kazin wrote a book about the left, leading to his interview, in which he says things like, “Americans want capitalism to work well for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and everyone’s not going to be able to do well at the same time.” That’s not really true: capitalism is about a) finding something you do that you want to do and b) producing goods and services other people want enough to pay or barter for. If you don’t make something users want, you have to make something else. Maybe users should want different things, but that’s a separate argument. He also says things like, “The ideas are that if you work hard you can get ahead and that it’s better to be self-employed than employed by the people.” But think of how many Americans have immigrant parents or grandparents for whom that is exceptionally true. Mine fall into that category. Kazin mostly sounds like someone who’s never actually run a business.

If the left believes people like Kazin, we shouldn’t be surprised that America won’t embrace it. But there are smart people on the left, like Tony Judt, and maybe they aren’t getting enough airtime.

* There’s a fabulous interview with Mark McGurl in which he discusses The Program Era, I book I would’ve liked to write in detail about but got so involved with that the writing in this space went away. But you should still read the book! Especially if you’re a writer or would-be writer.

* By the Time A Self-Published Author Hits it Big, Do They Really Need a Publisher? Answer: probably not. Yet. Keep an eye on this space: you may yet see me wade into the self-publishing pool. And:

For publishers, here’s the nightmare publishing path for authors of the future: Author signs with traditional publisher for first book, author hits it big, author says thankyouverymuch I got this now and self-publishes from then on out.

* Speaking of publishers, “Amazon.com is so well positioned to sell digital files that one glance at their list of Contemporary Fantasy bestsellers shows one unsurprising fact: It’s not dominated by books put out by New York publishers.” That’s from “The rising ebook wave,” which I might be joining in the next six months to one year.

* When To Ignore Criticism (and How to Get People to Take Your Critique Seriously).

* The “overlearning the game” problem.

* The Tyranny of Silly Expense Control Rules; notice the comment from yours truly.

* The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time. A lot of academics in the humanities appear to be completely missing this.

Links: Nicholson Baker, college students drink, college students wear short skirts (a feminist perspective), risk-taking, the “left,” publishing, and more

September 2, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I’ll Have What He’s Having: Breaking bread with Nicholson Baker, America’s foremost writer of literary sex novels, by Katie Roiphe, whose book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism I admire.

* News flash: college students like drinking because it alleviates social anxiety and enables hooking up. I’m tempted to post the video someone took from a couple weeks ago when my team lost at flip cup.

* Leading off the link from above, Smart Girls Wear Short Skirts, Too: Stop Complaining About College Students.

* Reaping the Rewards 0f Risk-Taking, which includes this bit about how many nations lack “a social environment that encourages diversity, experimentation, risk-taking, and combining skills from many fields into products that he calls “recombinant mash-ups [. . .]” ” This is the kind of stuff I want to do and promote in both the fiction I write and classes I teach.

* College football as seen by a (British?) person acting as an anthropologist.

* Born, and Evolved, to Run.

* Articles like Why won’t America embrace the left? annoy me because they’re dumb. Michael Kazin wrote a book about the left, leading to his interview, in which he says things like, “Americans want capitalism to work well for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and everyone’s not going to be able to do well at the same time.” That’s not really true: capitalism is about a) finding something you do that you want to do and b) producing goods and services other people want enough to pay or barter for. If you don’t make something users want, you have to make something else. Maybe users should want different things, but that’s a separate argument. He also says things like, “The ideas are that if you work hard you can get ahead and that it’s better to be self-employed than employed by the people.” But think of how many Americans have immigrant parents or grandparents for whom that is exceptionally true. Mine fall into that category. Kazin mostly sounds like someone who’s never actually run a business.

If the left believes people like Kazin, we shouldn’t be surprised that America won’t embrace it. But there are smart people on the left, like Tony Judt, and maybe they aren’t getting enough airtime.

* There’s a fabulous interview with Mark McGurl in which he discusses The Program Era, I book I would’ve liked to write in detail about but got so involved with that the writing in this space went away. But you should still read the book! Especially if you’re a writer or would-be writer.

* By the Time A Self-Published Author Hits it Big, Do They Really Need a Publisher? Answer: probably not. Yet. Keep an eye on this space: you may yet see me wade into the self-publishing pool. And:

For publishers, here’s the nightmare publishing path for authors of the future: Author signs with traditional publisher for first book, author hits it big, author says thankyouverymuch I got this now and self-publishes from then on out.

* Speaking of publishers, “Amazon.com is so well positioned to sell digital files that one glance at their list of Contemporary Fantasy bestsellers shows one unsurprising fact: It’s not dominated by books put out by New York publishers.” That’s from “The rising ebook wave,” which I might be joining in the next six months to one year.

* When To Ignore Criticism (and How to Get People to Take Your Critique Seriously).

* The “overlearning the game” problem.

* The Tyranny of Silly Expense Control Rules; notice the comment from yours truly.

* The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time. A lot of academics in the humanities appear to be completely missing this.

Why publishers are scared of ebooks — the standard reasons and Amanda Hocking as symbol

March 10, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Amanda Hocking, the now-famous indie writer, has an interesting post where she says, “Here’s another thing I don’t understand: The way people keep throwing my name around and saying publishers are “terrified” of me and that I really showed them.” They aren’t terrified of her, specifically, as an individual (which she notes), but they are scared of her as a symbol and what she represents: a world where you don’t need publishers as much. She just happens to be an early example of how to make it financially via ebooks. At the moment, publishers have one big advantage that no writer, no matter how skills, can replicate: distribution. If you take that advantage away, a lot of the raisons d’état of publishers goes away.

Later, she says: “And just so we’re clear – ebooks make up at best 20% of the market.” But that’s up from virtually nothing in 2006. In 2001, discs sold on shiny platters made up the vast majority of the music business. In 2011, the “music business” as it existed from the days of the first records until about ten years ago is gone. You still need a big record label if you want to be Lady Gaga, but almost no one else does. Music industry profits have never recovered. This is great for people who want to listen to music but not so good for people who want to make money from music, especially if they can’t actually make music themselves. Media executives, including publishers, know this, which is why they’re watching what happens in book-land so carefully.

“Nobody knows what makes one book a bestseller. Publishers and agents like to pretend they do, but if they did, they would only publish best sellers, and they don’t.” That’s the scariest thing of all: no one knows. This has long been a truism in lots of forms of art. William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade came in 1982, if I recall correctly, and he said almost the same thing about movies: “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Or, Scott Adams, if you prefer someone with even less movie experience than Goldman or me:

Evaluating whether an idea is good enough for a movie is a bit like an automobile expert saying a certain brand of car doesn’t taste good. It’s absurd. You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don’t understand what a movie is or what an idea is.

Movies have a slight advantage in that making movies technically pretty (which requires foley artists, on-set locations, lots of actors, careful detail to light, and lots of other stuff) is still pretty expensive. A lot of people also still go to movie theaters, so that advantage hasn’t completely disappeared. With books, all you really have is the book.

There are probably lots of undiscovered bestsellers out there, which, if writers get tired of submitting to agents and all the rest, they can now relatively cheaply and easily put online and let the market sort it out. Again: if enough people succeed at this, publishers go away.

Big publishers might be dying in the way Paul Graham describes Microsoft being dead. Microsoft will continue making lots of money for the foreseeable future, but it’s no longer leading anything in tech. (Enough people misinterpreted him that he wrote the Cliff’s Notes version too.) They’re not dying in the sense that whoever owns Alfred A. Knopf is going to be gone tomorrow, or the day after. But if their relevance starts to slip, they could fail with surprising speed. Look at what happened to Blockbuster: Netflix undermined them, and within a decade of Netflix on the scene all the Blockbusters near me have “going out of business” signs on them.

Back to Hocking: “Traditional publishing and indie publishing aren’t all that different, and I don’t think people realize that.” They might not be as different as some make them out to be, but from the perspective of shareholders they’re very, very different, in that shareholders can make money off publishers in one model and they probably can’t in the same way in the other. From the perspective of the writer, she’s certainly right, as she goes on to say: writers still have to put in an enormous amount of time and effort. As I’m only too aware.

I’m not the only one saying this. Here’s what Kevin Kelly says: “I don’t think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go. It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.” It’s scary because $.99 isn’t going to support cushy Manhattan offices, long lunches, interns, marketing departments, and everything else modern publishers do. It’s not going to support 5–10% growth every year, which most investors assume before they part with their money. As mentioned elsewhere, publishers can see what trend lines are like and they’ve all read The Innovator’s Dilemma, like everyone else who does anything business-related. The upshot of the book is that incumbents often recognize disruptive technologies and products and then fail to respond to them effectively anyway. Think of Microsoft and the Internet, or record labels and the Internet, or newspapers and the Internet. Yeah, I keep using “the Internet” as an example, but you can see this in other areas, like American car companies when the Japanese first entered the U.S. market. Microsoft is probably the best example, since the famous “Cornell is WIRED!” e-mail alerted them to the threat, and they responded with Internet Explorer.

Today, 17 years after that e-mail was sent, I’m typing this on an iMac, Google and Facebook are arguably the dominant Internet players, and Microsoft failed utterly to foresee the importance of search, like a lot of other people. Publishers know that they can’t really compete with $.99 – $2.99 ebooks, and that, in most genres, readers just aren’t that picky. Publishers know the sound of a market shifting underneath them because some of them have been to Harvard Business School or hired people who have been to tell them about the history of companies failing to adapt to new models and environments. That’s scary.

I pay some attention to this stuff because I’m about to take the latest plunge in the crocodile pit that is agent land. If I fail, sometime in the next two years or so I’ll probably say, “Screw it, I’m self-publishing.” Chances are, I’ll be the person who wastes a lot of money and time doing so, but that’s also true of traditional publishing. There’s still that small chance I’ll succeed. Although I’m hardly the best judge of these things, I think I would want to read my own novels, and at some point, I won’t have anything to lose by not self-publishing, if the choice is between that and letting my work sit on my hard drive. There might be other people who want to read my work too. Publishers don’t know. I don’t know. But Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple will make it easier for me to find out than Alfred A. Knopf ever did.

The Library of America and literary canons

April 8, 2010 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Newsweek asks: has the Library of America jumped the shark? If so, you won’t find a good argument for it in this article: there’s a lot of innuendo and little of substance about who deserves to be in the “canon” and why. But the last paragraph gets a (very) little bit deeper:

Kidding aside, one sympathizes with the directors of a publishing venture increasingly dependent on the idea that great American writers just can’t die fast enough. In such a situation, conventional publishing goes head to head with curating, and financial concerns go to war with esthetics, which, depending on how conservative one cares to be, can argue for little or no growth at all. And of course all this plays out against a literary landscape where the idea of a literary canon has been pretty much shot to hell anyway, so maybe no one should care who gets into what anymore. Or maybe they should just turn the whole thing into a—you knew this was coming—lottery.

Shelfari (mostly) agrees with my comments and says:

For me, when the LOA started adding people like Lovecraft, Dick, and Powell (or personal favorite Nathanael West) was when it started getting lively and interesting. I’m glad they do beautiful editions of titans like Lincoln, Whitman, and James, but I’m far more glad that they haven’t just been passive about transmitting the canon, as it was spoken to them from above.

Agreed. I can’t think of anyone I’d love to see included, except perhaps Robertson Davies, who is Canadian (but Canada is part of North America, right?), and Elmore Leonard, who is still alive. Regardless, I’ve been impressed with a lot of the recent picks, like Philip K. Dick, who deserves his spot; tomorrow I’m going to hear a scholarly lecture on his work at the Arizona Quarterly Symposium, and I’ve heard talks on him elsewhere in academic venues. Maybe Jack Vance will be next, although he’s not been as cinematically popular as Dick.

Oh, and one other small note about the LoA: I tend to write in my copies.

What's Going on With Amazon and Macmillan?

January 31, 2010 By in Links, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

The book blagosphere has been buzzing with the news that Amazon, a big website to which I link in most of my posts, isn’t selling any titles published by Macmillan, the smallest of the big publishers in the U.S. The dominant question in all this is “why?” There’s been lots of speculation, much of it not worth linking to, but Charlie Stross has written a handy outsider’s guide to the fight, which is actually about how the publishing industry will shake out as a book makes its way from an author to you, a reader.

The bad news is that Stross’ post is almost impossible to excerpt effectively, but I’ll try:

Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer.

Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.

From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore.

From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler.

From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. They do this by buying wholesale and selling retail, taking up to a 70% discount from the publishers and selling for whatever they can get. Their stalking horse for this is the Kindle publishing platform; they’re trying to in-source the publisher by asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher isn’t merely selling them books wholesale, but is sublicencing the works to be republished via the Kindle publishing platform. Publishers sublicensing rights is SOP in the industry, but not normally handled this way — and it allows Amazon to grab another chunk of the supply chain if they get away with it, turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.

The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Read the rest on Stross’ blog.

This makes me feel slightly dirty for having bought a Kindle recently. On the other hand, this… thing… is between giant corporations, both of which are working to extract as much money from me as possible. If I had to root for either Macmillan or Amazon, I’d chose the former, since the prospect of Amazon as the middleman between virtually every reader and every author is unpalatable. But with the iPad en route, the Barnes and Noble Nook at least in existence, and other eReaders on the way, the prospect of Amazon’s dominance looks far less likely than it did. That’s probably why the company is so desperate at the time.

Do editors still edit? A response in part based on Mark McGurl's The Program Era

October 2, 2009 By in Books, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Betsy Lerner tries to answer this reader query: “Is it true that editors no longer edit, and if so, why?” Her basic answer: “I think most do, and some quite brilliantly.” But it’s hard to say beyond anecdote: I’ve read various answers that range from hers to simply stating “No.” One letter to the editor in The New Yorker has a perceptive comment on the issue—the author is responding to an essay about Mark McGurl’s The Program Era:

The days of editors like Maxwell Perkins shepherding talented young writers through their early years are long over. With publishing houses now expected to turn profits of around fifteen per cent, as opposed to the three to four per cent of Perkins’s day, what editor can afford to give a latter-day F. Scott Fitzgerald the devotion, time, and professional advice needed to hone his talents? Creative-writing programs have stepped in to fill this void by teaching young writers, in effect, to be their own editors––an essential skill in the current publishing climate.

In the absence of hard figures, it’s difficult to tell whether this is true, and if it is, how true it is. McGurl does write about the “… wide distribution… of elevated literary ambitions, and the cultivation in these newly vocal, vainglorious masses of the habits of self-conscious attention to craft through which [their writerly ambitions] might plausible be realized…” I doubt this makes editors superfluous, but it might mean that, in the face of layoffs, increased workloads, and so forth, editors might be more likely to rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the skills that universities and other writing programs cultivate. Granted, this is based on speculation from someone peering in through the glass rather than someone with direct experience inside of publishing, but it at least seems plausible.

Furthermore, it might be easier for writers to learn some of what editors once might have provided because of the wide availability of pretty good books on the craft parts of writing. This doesn’t mean reading such books will automatically make one a good author, or that any book can substitute for good secondary readers (or editors), but they still might occupy a small part of the function professional editors once held.

(Incidentally: The Program Era is a wonderful book I keep meaning to write a post about. One reason I don’t is because there’s so much to talk about that I get overwhelmed. At some point, however, I’m just going to write that post, completeness be damned.)

Philip Greenspun's Why I'm Not a Writer and Hacker News

August 23, 2009 By in Academia, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

I submitted a Hacker News (HN) link to Philip Greenspun’s essay Why I’m Not a Writer, which begins:

I’m not a writer. Sometimes I write, but I don’t define myself as a career writer. And that isn’t because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of an obscure writer. It is because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of a successful writer.

He’s right. The garret lifestyle is one reason (there are many others too) why so many writers are now affiliated with universities, as detailed in Mark McGurl’s excellent book The Program Era. In fact, university affiliation has become so pervasive that Neal Stephenson told this hilarious story on the subject in a Slashdot interview:

[… A] while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another “And which distro do you use?”

I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”

“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

“Yes, but what do you do?”

I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—I’d already answered it!

“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.

“From…being a writer,” I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn’t snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

In the HN thread, another poster named Quantumhobbit linked to Orson Scott Card dealing with the same subject. As Quantumhobbit says, “Basically his advice is make sure you have another source of income, such as a rich uncle, before you decide to become a full-time writer. There is no guaranty that you will make enough to support yourself, even in genre writing.”

But the most interesting response comes from Gwern, who said, “I note that [Greenspun’s essay is] from 1996, when the bubble was getting hot; are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?” In reply, I said:

I think that the date of Greenspun’s essay is indicative of how little has changed, rather than how much. Most writers didn’t make very much money then, and they still don’t, which many people don’t seem to realize; one writer friend who also teaches university classes recently wrote to me and said that a colleague had asked, in all seriousness, if he was rich now that he’d written a book. Writers often work like astronauts to achieve relatively modest financial success, which people like the poster in the original HN thread might want to know before getting started in earnest at trying to write for the book market. Take a look at these posts from a guy who works in the sales department of a major publishing house regarding current advances for most types of fiction.

“are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?”

Depends on what you mean by “panned out” and “screwed”; I can’t really tell from the nature of the question. If you mean, “Do I think writers can make enough from the Internet to support themselves?” the answer is yes; if you mean, “Will many of them do so, especially relative to the number who would like to?” the answer is “no.” In fact, I even wrote a blog post at Grant Writing Confidential on the subject of how unlikely it is for people to make money from blogging.

(Note: the above is slightly edited from the original.)

Gwern replied:

But to expand on what I meant: I remember that back in the dot-com bubble, the bubble Greenspan wrote that essay in, there was a lot of enthusiasm and hype about how the future would be so much better for authors and artists than the old world of offline publishing – the Web would empower creators, cut out the middlemen, and channel tons of money to them, via the magic of 0-cost publishing, micropayments, and other things like search engines or aggregators. Greenspan’s essay seems to buy into that zeitgeist, albeit relatively modestly.

Of course, that vision has largely come failed to come true (spectacularly so in the case of micropayments and agents). I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it’s being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved.

That wasn’t my point, but if I’d been smarter it would’ve been. Half the 1996 equation Gwern describes has come true: the web has vastly empowered writers’ ability to reach readers (and consultants’ ability to reach clients). But it definitely hasn’t channeled vast amounts of money to most writers, and many kinds of writers—like professional journalists—are being laid off en-masse.

In the world of the web, as in the 1849 California gold rush, the people who make real money aren’t the people panning for gold, but the people selling equipment to and building infrastructure for the people panning for gold. So too with online writing: Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, which drives this blog, probably makes or will make far more than anyone writing on it.

All of this could probably be appended to advice for a very very beginning writer. I think that knowledge for its own sake is valuable, even, or maybe especially, for artists.

Literary fiction and the current marketplace

July 25, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Literary agent Betsy Learner posted on the business of selling novels. I’d shorten this quote if I could, but what Lerner writes is too compelling for paraphrase or a one-sentence excerpt:

A lot of painful conversations lately about literary fiction and its demise.

Was it ever any different?

When I was an assistant at Simon and Schuster 25 years ago, there was exactly one literary fiction editor. And his position was rumored to be precarious as a result of focusing exclusively on the literary stuff. (In fact, he was let go a year later.) Of course, this was especially true at a house like S&S where monster political and celebrity books ruled. I can still recall an anxious conversation between a senior editor and a publicist because they couldn’t remember if Jackie Collins preferred white roses or red.

I understood at that tender age that to focus entirely on fiction was to jeopardize my hope of becoming an editor.

This implies that nonfiction is the more secure field, which jives with what I’ve seen on many literary agents’ websites and blogs; there seem to be almost none who work solely with fiction but many who work exclusively or almost exclusively with nonfiction.

Which makes me wonder: why? Part of the reason might simply be that more nonfiction books move through stores in a given year than fiction, but I wonder also if part of the reason is that nonfiction simply has a shorter shelf life. I can’t imagine many pop nonfiction titles from, say, the 1930s to the 1960s are still read much because whatever fields those authors covered have changed sufficiently that their work is no longer useful save in a historical sense. Obviously, there are exceptions—both presidential candidates in the recent election cited Niebuhr Reinhold as an influence—but the general trend seems to hold.

But the novels of Bellow, Roth, and so forth are still fresh as the day they were published; I have ancient copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King that are delightful. My used copy of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy is an original hardback. New copies of those works still sell. That’s a boon for readers but probably not so good for new writers, who have to compete with the masters. The result: a literary marketplace where it’s harder to break in as the length and number of established predecessors grows, leading to an equilibrium that favors nonfiction over fiction. “Monster political and celebrity books” flare brightly like supernovae while the literary stars are dimmer but give persistent light for those who would see them, while writers become more dependent on university and other forms of patronage to make it in a marketplace that, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t much value their work in a financial sense.

March Links: The Watchmen, Orwell, and Goldengrove

March 17, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “From Comic Book to Literary Classic:” Does The Watchmen deserve all the hype? The WSJ asks. Their answer is mostly “no,” a verdict I concur with.

* Speaking of Watchmen-related hype, Ta-Nehisi Coates summarizes my feeling toward movies:

I think I’m mostly done with comic book movies, and big budget movies in general. I don’t think (with a few exceptions) that they’re made for me. Which is fine. But the more comic book movies I see, the more I value the imaginative space created by books.

(For more on this, see Why are so many movies awful?)

* Orwell wasn’t a mensch or a lout or an ideologue in the normal sense, and trying to define him is as much a challenge today as it must have been in his time. Julian Barnes tries to make some sense of him in “Such, Such Was Eric Blair:”

All prophets risk posthumous censure, even mockery; and the Orwell we celebrate nowadays is less the predictor than the social and political analyst. Those born in the immediate postwar years grew up with the constant half-expectation that 1984 would bring all the novel described: immovable geopolitical blocs, plus brutal state surveillance and control. Today, the English may have their sluggardly couch-potato side; their liberties have been somewhat diminished, and they are recorded by CCTV cameras more often than any other nation on earth. But otherwise 1984 passed with a sigh of relief, while 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall brought a louder one.

Orwell believed in 1936 that “the combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.” That “never” was a risky call. And on a larger scale, he believed throughout World War II that peace would bring the British revolution he desired, with blood in the gutters and the “red militias…billetted in the Ritz,” as he put it in private diary and public essay. And after the revolution:

The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten….

One out of four on the vision thing; and tractors were hardly a difficult pick.

I’ve mentioned his collected Essays before and will no doubt again; even when they’re infuriating, they’re enormously clever.

* Jacket Copy reports that, 27 years after John Cheever’s death, the man is everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except for my bookshelf: I’ve never read his novels, which are on the ever-expanding “to be read” list. This week’s New Yorker also has an article about Cheever. It includes this bit:

“How lonely and unnatural man is and how deep and well-concealed are his confusions”—no wonder Cheever’s fiction is slighted in academia while Fitzgerald’s collegiate romanticism is assigned. Cheever’s characters are adult, full of adult darkness, corruption, and confusion. They are desirous, conflicted, alone, adrift. They do not achieve the crystalline stoicism, the defiant willed courage, of Hemingway’s.

Really? I’m not sure I agree with the premise that Cheever is slighted in academia, and even if I did, I don’t think I’d buy the reason stated.

* The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, calls Cheever The Audubon of Suburbia:

“Cheever: A Life,” arriving as it does with the publication of Library of America editions of Cheever’s stories and novels, edited by Mr. Bailey, seems intended to spur a rediscovery of the author. It won’t be the first, or the last. Cheever occupies a secure place in the literature of the American dream, forming the link between Fitzgerald and Updike. The formidable achievement of his short stories alone ensures that he is destined to be the subject of periodic rediscovery, reassessment and biographical shading-in.

* Maybe I will read Francine Prose’s Goldengrove:

Prose’s book is filled with characters who comprehend their experience of the world through the lenses that art–high art, popular art, and everything in between–offers up. Even though Goldengrove tells a sad story, I found great comfort and pleasure in reading about these characters and their attachments to and imitations of art, and appreciated Myers’s identification of this kind of activity and attachment as a subject of the novel. “We learn what we were like as children from such books as The Mill on the Floss, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and Goldengrove,” he says. Our experience of art is as much a life experience as anything else.

I didn’t care for The Mill on the Floss, but the overall point is well-taken.

* The best article on Kindle economics and bookstores that I’ve seen: Digital readers will save writers and publishing, even if they destroy the book business.

* Speaking of book publishing, MobyLives reports:

Exact data on how the used book market is eroding the market for new books is hard to come by but the consensus is — it ain’t helping.

The Wall Street Journal predicted in 2005: “While the market’s size is still modest — about $600 million, or 2.8% of the $21 billion that readers spent on consumer books in 2004 — it is growing at 25% annually. Jeff Hayes, group director for InfoTrends Research Group, suggests that it could reach $2.25 billion in U.S. sales by 2010, or 9.4% of a projected $23.9 billion in consumer book sales.”