The new publishing business model

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Please, Elfwreck, see my blog post Give Me a Brake! Most, if not all, of the errors cited would have passed both spellcheck and grammarfix. Part of the problem is that authors do rely on spellcheck and grammarfix and assume if something passes those "tests" it is correct.

A professional editor cannot read a standard-size novel for grammar and spelling in 1 to 3 hours; perhaps an amateur, but certainly not a professional of any caliber.

An editor can't read a manuscript in that time, but could skim through it, and potentially do a find-and-replace search for any of those errors that seem common. (Can't replace all instances of "no" with "know," but could search for "I no" or "we no" and replace those with "I know" and "we know.")

A quick 1-3 hour overview wouldn't fix all errors, but it could move a book from give-up-reading to occasional errors. Could potentially make it submittable to an agent or slushpile. Although I suspect that most books with grammar & spelling that bad, also have story continuity & characterization problems, some probably don't, but an agent isn't going to bother looking at any book whose first four pages make him wince.

:: ponders trying to convince would-be authors that they should pay $100 to have their book edited so that *maybe* an agent will consider it ::

Yeah, I think you've convinced me; the idea itself (publishers offering paid editing services) has some validity, but the practical side of it seems unworkable. The ones who would actually gain from it won't be convinced to use it, and the ones willing to pay for it are likely to have works that even good editing won't improve enough to make them worthwhile.

There are plenty of amateur books that would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing. There are a lot more that would need 6-10 hours to make them coherent & readable at all, and there'd be no way to making a pricing system that could tell those apart.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I see a parallel between this topic and people who remain in slushpiles-- they are convinced that they have a great book, and no matter how often the professionals who spend their lives day in, day out tell them that they don't (probably politely at first, probably less so after many repeats) they are sure that if they just keep repeating it over and over, the pros will change their mind. Here, pro editors and publishers are telling you why your business model just won't work, but you remain convinced that if you keep telling them over and over (ignoring their reasons given) they will eventually come to believe that your plan is as brilliant as you think it is.

Whereas there is nothing wrong with the current publishing model, nor the fact that it allows a great many potentially good books to languish in slush piles?

I do see your point, and it is not unexpected, nor unwelcome. Professionals usually have a vested interest in the status quo, which is why I'd expect to hear dissenting comments on a new business model. Many authors are also familiar with hearing "no" from publishers numerous times, until they get picked up by the one who says "yes" and publishes their book. And I'll point out that there have been a few positive comments on this model from others.

At any rate, this is just a discussion about an idea. When old business models are struggling under a changing market, new models must be considered and evaluated, lest the entire industry decay or collapse. There is certainly room for other ideas, and for further development of this idea, which you or anyone else are free to suggest.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

:: ponders trying to convince would-be authors that they should pay $100 to have their book edited so that *maybe* an agent will consider it ::

There are plenty of amateur books that would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing. There are a lot more that would need 6-10 hours to make them coherent & readable at all, and there'd be no way to making a pricing system that could tell those apart.

Never say "never." The price-point you suggest would sound reasonable to me, for instance. Of course, that's a relative thing... it would seem expensive to some, and cheap to others. But I believe it would be do-able in some organization (though maybe not any existing ones).

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Whereas there is nothing wrong with the current publishing model, nor the fact that it allows a great many potentially good books to languish in slush piles?

I simply lack your optimism that there are a "great many" good books in the slushpiles.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I simply lack your optimism that there are a "great many" good books in the slushpiles.

Yes, it's obviously an open question, and a subjective one at that. I guess my feeling is that it would be good to give more potential books a chance, if a system could be devised to allow it. And as it has been pointed out that current publishers are barely able to sort through the slushpiles to find those gems, it follows that any system that can sort through the piles more thoroughly, and help to better some of the works pulled from the slushpiles, will be able to produce more of those gems.

Or, at least, pretty colored glass... there is room in this world for costume jewelry, too.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

As this question sort of got passed up, I'd like to bring it up again: Is there some part of "impartial third-party post-filtering, instead of publisher pre-filtering" that does not make sense?

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Is there some part of "impartial third-party post-filtering, instead of publisher pre-filtering" that does not make sense?

Finding people willing to do it?

I know I wouldn't be willing to wade into an ocean of published slushpile just to look for the rare gem buried under the turds. And I don't think very many other people would be, either. There are far more good, published books already available than I could ever read in a lifetime-- so why waste time filtering through offal?

[Fat Abe]

Rather than submitting a novel to a professional or semi-professional editor, why not submit one chapter to a consumer committee, comprised of readers with an interest in the genre(s) the novel falls into? This provides the first tier of filtering, which should remove 90 percent of the dreck that is below generally accepted publishing standards.

Another idea is to program an artificial intelligence engine, which can analyze the writing for poor sentence construction, redundancy, or cliches. It could also look for a cohesive style, on a paragraph to paragraph basis. Most people write to communicate, great authors write to express. "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." -- Elmore Leonard. But if it sounds like gibberish, take a language class. The AI engine could easily tells us if the proficiency level of the writing was between kindergarten and eighth grade. Amazingly, this could eliminate quite a few manuscripts.

Alas, since there are no perfect solutions, we wind up with the same old publishing model we've had for centuries. You send a manuscript to a publishing house, and you, most likely, receive a rejection letter. Here are some responses that were lifted from

http://frankfiore.wordpress.com/2009...ction-letters/

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence

‘for your own sake do not publish this book.’

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

‘… overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.’

Believe it or not, Ripley!

Teresa (unknown last name) posted an essay entitled, Slushkiller, with a funny list of bad writing filters:

"Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, dire straights, nearly penultimate, incentiary (sic), ... "

Source: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight...es/004641.html

She really knows what she is talking about. Lmao. Well, don't give up. Just because no one has formulated a business plan for a profit-making internet-based manuscript clearing house does not mean it can't be done. Most of the best writing today is sitting in email servers. Funny, off-beat, unbelievable. Harvest that, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Finding people willing to do it?

Are you familiar with the Neverwinter Nights 1 community?

Suffice to say it's been clearly demonstrated that it /can/ work. And there are ways to incentivise this as well - reserve a few percent of the revenue stream for the sorters as shop credit, distributed based on accuracy.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Are you familiar with the Neverwinter Nights 1 community?

Suffice to say it's been clearly demonstrated that it /can/ work. And there are ways to incentivise this as well - reserve a few percent of the revenue stream for the sorters as shop credit, distributed based on accuracy.

I am aware that it the title of a video game-- and I assume that it is a reference of some sort to open-source software or to fan creation of game expansion packs, which has been around since at least since Doom (which was just about the last game I played back in college before finally no longer being able to hold an interest in games.)

So, to clarify, you are proposing maybe having reading recommendations being made by people who have the free time to read through piles of bad manuscripts in exchange for credit to buy stuff at a web site? And this is a demographic who's judgment you think people will find compelling? I can see the books now, proudly emblazoned with "Chosen for you by the elderly, by unemployed teens who live in their mother's basements, and by sweatshops in India!"

[DawnFalcon]

No, I am referring to the community - specifically Neverwinter Vault, but other sites (mainly in other languages) also exist. It has an extremely successful peer-review system.

(roughly; 6000 modules, 1250 characters, 650 monsters, 7500 hakpacks, 500 3d models, 650 movies, 5000 scripts and presets, 6000 portraits, 800 sound packs and a couple of thousand miscellaneous files: many of that mass of files having multiple versions!)

They proved highly successful in selecting and popularising, via a simplistic peer system which could easily be radically improved by today's social networks and trust systems, the decent content from the dross!

So...while I think it's a large task, neither do I mock.

[neilmarr]

***There are plenty of amateur books that would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing. There are a lot more that would need 6-10 hours to make them coherent & readable at all, and there'd be no way to making a pricing system that could tell those apart***


I'm terribly sorry, Elfwreck, but you have no idea of what goes into editing. A 'couple of hours of basic editing', 'Six-ten hours to make them coherent and readable'? (Is that all you expect from a book -- coherent and reqadable?)

A careful read for assessment only of an average length novel will take ten or twelve hours.

If it's good enough for editing, it then comes down to the 'how long is a piece of string?' principle.

Few manuscripts can move with a line edit or even with a good copy edit. A light edit over and above copy edit will take twenty-thirty professional working hours.

Many manuscripts -- the vast majority in the case of first-timers -- will need heavy work and sometimes will involve hundreds of working hours. Bits and pieces presented as fact must also be thoroughly checked along the way. Also there's the vital question of continuity which many authors screw up terribly: someone described as tall you might find several chapters later struggling to reach a can of beans on a supermarket shelf.

This work, of course, is often spread over a matter of many months as updates to drafts and made to produce new master working copies of an ms, because the author is part of the editing process and must, himself, make changes and develop and re-structure as per his editor's advice.

This new author input itself is often flawed and needs more editing and rewriting and resulting adjustment to other parts of the manuscript. To save time, it is not at all unusual for an editor to write new passages or even chapters himself. I do that more often than I like to, but many authors dealing with an editor for the first time run out of steam during the editorial process and prefer to hand over much of the donkey work.

And after all that you've got careful proof reading of the polished final edited draft before print. This involves several hawk-eyed people. Most will move almost as fast as they might with a recreational read, so let's say eight hours for this job.

Then the bound proof (the ARC) arrives from the printer and must be painstakingly proofed again for typos and print-generated error, looking for such simple things as a reversed apostrophe or a hard-to-spot double space between words. That takes about the same as a pre-print proof read.

And still mistakes will slip through the net. At the bigger houses, largely because the editor doesn't get involved in the closing stages and the clean-up is left to inexperienced assistants or even untrained interns.

By the way, an ebook should go through exactly this process with the exception of proof reading the bound proof hard copy. What you should do instead is to proof read each format version. There are so many of those these days (nine, I think) that we rely on third party conversion (say through Smashwords) cannot check what would amount to 900 versions of books in our current SW catalogue (9,000 hours?), and can only guarantee our own PDFs and ePub that is converted and proofed in house.

It's a tough old job, Elfwreck, and it takes time. My two associate editors and I have well over a century of experience behind us as professional writers and editors and we manage to publish just twelve novels a year, working long, long hours and with only the best authors we come across.

Now do you see that two to hours working on an ms from an amateur is a tad less than realistic? Even reading through the twenty or so submitted synopses and sample chapters we receive every week takes much, much longer than that -- just to reject/decline in all but a tiny percentage of cases.

Best wishes. Neil

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

An editor can't read a manuscript in that time, but could skim through it, and potentially do a find-and-replace search for any of those errors that seem common. (Can't replace all instances of "no" with "know," but could search for "I no" or "we no" and replace those with "I know" and "we know.")

So then the problem becomes "I know longer" and "we know longer". You can't do a global find and replace for homonyms -- curing one problem creates a companion problem.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

A quick 1-3 hour overview wouldn't fix all errors, but it could move a book from give-up-reading to occasional errors. Could potentially make it submittable to an agent or slushpile. Although I suspect that most books with grammar & spelling that bad, also have story continuity & characterization problems, some probably don't, but an agent isn't going to bother looking at any book whose first four pages make him wince.

A quick overview wouldn't fix enough errors to move a book from give-up-reading to occasional errors. You can't readily catch mixed metaphors, convoluted sentences that include past, present, and future tenses, character changes (e.g., Jan at the beginning was female and 15 pages later is male), repeated sentences and paragraphs, and myriad other problems that exist.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

:: ponders trying to convince would-be authors that they should pay $100 to have their book edited so that *maybe* an agent will consider it ::

Yeah, I think you've convinced me; the idea itself (publishers offering paid editing services) has some validity, but the practical side of it seems unworkable. The ones who would actually gain from it won't be convinced to use it, and the ones willing to pay for it are likely to have works that even good editing won't improve enough to make them worthwhile.

There are plenty of amateur books that would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing. There are a lot more that would need 6-10 hours to make them coherent & readable at all, and there'd be no way to making a pricing system that could tell those apart.

There is no book that "would be greatly improved by a couple of hours of basic editing." If you hire a professional editor to do no more than 2 hours of work on your 300-page manuscript, you have wasted your money and the editor's time. Six to 10 hours requires a reading rate of 50 to 30 pages an hour for that 300-page manuscript. Try doing a real edit, not a cursory edit, of a manuscript (not of an already edited book that has been published by a known publisher) at that rate and then go back over the same material at the rate of 5 pages an hour. You will be amazed at what you find that you missed -- and even at that rate you will still miss some things.

There also seems to be a misunderstanding of how a professional editor works. The PE doesn't just read the manuscript and correct misspellings and runon sentences; the PE tracks, for example, characters and action, which requires using a PE-created stylesheet. If you called a character Jaenski in chapter 1, the editor needs to track that so that the PE knows to change Jaensky in chapter 5. If you describe Jaenski as a multihued lizard with 16 vampirish fangs in chapter 3, the PE has to track this so that in chapter 10 your description of Jaenski as a green-yellow lizard with 10 fangs can be corrected. If you write that the war occurred 6 eons ago in chapter 2, the PE has to note that so that in chapter 16 a character doesn't talk about the war that occurred 7 eons ago.

The above are just a few examples of what a PE brings to the table. To track all these things takes time. It simply cannot be competently done in 6-10 hours.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

As this question sort of got passed up, I'd like to bring it up again: Is there some part of "impartial third-party post-filtering, instead of publisher pre-filtering" that does not make sense?

I haven't addressed this because on the surface there is no problem. However, you haven't defined what makes a third-party impartial and what skill set(s) that third-party would need to properly evaluate a manuscript.

The biggest problem I see is what occurs after the third-party finds that gem-in-the-rough? Suppose the third-party told you, Steve, that your manuscript had great potential -- basically it was an interesting story and fairly good characterization, but it needs the help of a professional development editor and a professional copyeditor (they are not the same and do not perform the same function).

Now you ask what that would cost. The response is that it would be in the thousands of dollars, and no, it will not guarantee you that an agent or a known publisher will pick up your manuscript or that you will sell 10,000 copies over the Internet.

What do you think most authors would do?

If your intent is that the gems-in-the-rough found by a third party would now find a publisher, isn't that what agents do? How is this idea different in this case from the current agent scenario?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Actually, you have this part backwards: The idea would be for the author to have a publisher-cum-service bureau provide services on their manuscript, according to the author's desires and pocketbook... then the book is released by the author. Only then do third-parties evaluate the book for a P2P site or portal, letting consumers know whether or not it is worth reading.

This is why I say the author assumes all risk: They may pay for services by the publisher/service bureau, but it does not guarantee their book will sell. The author can choose the service bureau according to their track record of successes ("x% of authors who purchase our editing-proofing package see a Y% return on investment in sales"), and the service bureau is free to turn down a job they don't think they can do... or take the money and do something with it anyway.