Scott Turow: The Slow Death of the American Author (NYTimes)

[taustin]

Originally Posted by Catlady

How many times does it need to be pointed out that publishers do more than just EDIT?

Until either the people who don't understand that get it, or the people who do get bored.

[Ken Maltby]

It should be obvious by now that some publishers do more than others. That not all
authors are treated to the same service from a publisher, as other authors using the
same publisher. That it turns out that it's the publisher who ends up deciding how
much of a books proceeds are needed to cover the "services" provided by the publisher.

It may be that a number of the "services", including editing, that are touted as in the
publisher's province, can be available to an author outside of the BPH, perhaps at some
point, in a more effective and less expensive fashion. Some authors may come to find
that there are what they may have expected from the BPH, to be available from
separate service providers.

I wonder how many authors might come to ask themselves, How much of my book's
returns goes to pay for services at the BPH that I don't need or use? How much went
to pay for services to support a more favored author's project?

Luck;
Ken

[Sregener]

Originally Posted by Catlady

How many times does it need to be pointed out that publishers do more than just EDIT?

I don't think anyone thinks that. Cover design, promotional materials, marketing, page design. Those things are pretty obviously in the purview of the publisher. But it's a stretch to say all those things add up to the hours an author spends before that point.

Not to say there aren't a few authors out there (Scott Turow may be one of them, though I never felt he deserved it) who get the red carpet treatment. But they are the very rare exception, rather than the rule. And exceptions don't do much to skew the average.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

I wonder how many authors might come to ask themselves, How much of my book's
returns goes to pay for services at the BPH that I don't need or use? How much went
to pay for services to support a more favored author's project?

Luck;
Ken

Or to pay for glitzy MYC offices, or the security guards or the janitors or the copiers or the lawyers working the mergers or go straight to the Multinational's swiss bank account.

Once upon a time publishing was a "magical" mystery that took place in a black box where manuscripts went in and occasionally books and royalty checks came out. Those in the know weren't talking; they were the "sacred" gatekeepers and happy to keep it that way. But those days are over. These days there are no secrets and those that know are talking.

The pushback against Turow and traditional publishing isn't because people don't know what is involved in getting a book to market but rather because they now know *exactly* what it takes.

Many authors are firing up their spreadsheets and figuring out for themselves what it costs to contract freelancers (laid off from the BPHs) to provide the exact same quality service as the BPH-contracted formatters, cover artists, proofers, editors... And when they tally the value of those services and weigh them against giving up 85% of the book's proceeds for a century and more...well, the numbers don't add up.

There is this perception that indie publishing is the domain of newcomers and wannabes and there are certainly a lot of them. But the real indie publishing revolution and the bulk of the pushback is coming from experienced, previously-published authors who *know* what trad-pub did for them (or *to* them) and are finding the new model more to their liking. The biggest winners are the authors who the old model neglected and marginalized.

Look to the examples in the SALON piece above. Not a one is a wide-eyed, wet behind the ears slush pile reject. Those people *know* the value of traditional publishing contracts and they know the price attached to the BPH services is simply too high to bear for them.

Turow is a different creature, of course; he is nicely covered and if he ends up surrendering 75% of his work's revenue, he is still well rewarded. His books get promoted, for starters. His books don't get buried on a back shelf, spine-out, two-to-a-store for three month before getting returned for credit towards the next celebrity ghost-written "masterpiece". For him, the old system works fine and his biggest concern is that the BPHs are getting squeezed and they might just start treating him like the other 99% of the published authors his guild pretends to represent. And he is right to worry. Any day now, he'll cough up a book that doesn't quite meet quota. And the beancounters will look at the ledgers and stick a little red flag next to his name and the next time his agents sit down to negotiate... Who knows? Maybe that is where his luddite angst comes from; maybe his last advance wasn't quite up to his expectations. Or maybe the last BPH contribution to the AG coffers was a bit light...

The American author isn't dying. He is simply a freelancer who is tired of beging for piecework and scraps and is setting up shop on their own. And discovering that modest success is a heck of a lot better than no success at all. Look around, that story is all around us; in the blogs, in the news, in the ebookstores and their press releases. (B&N, of all outfits, is bragging of their indie sales!) And the story is also in the words and deeds of the BPHs and their execs.
They are nowhere near as clueless as Turow. They all have their exit strategies in place; just ask Pearson...

[latepaul]

On the subject of time and effort put in by publishers someone posted the response above but Charlie Stross's original post on self-publishing he estimates it at 1/3rd of the writing time:

So, I estimate a book takes roughly 2 months of publishing company employee labour to produce. Plus another 4 weeks of author eyeball time (which is that part of the publisher workflow the author undertakes — see previous paragraph).

When you add it all up: if I'm as efficient as a trade publisher, it would take me roughly 3 months to produce a book that also took me 6 months to write.

However taken together with Linda Nagata's response it seems the answer is "it depends on the writer and the book."

[fjtorres]

There's a thousand-and-one stories like this out there:
http://indiereader.com/2013/04/next-...-self-publish/

2. They send you the second half of your advance 6 months late because they “forgot.”

3. They don’t answer emails asking basic questions you need to know so you can plan a marketing strategy (ie: Will the book be available in bookstores? Overseas? In e-book form?).

4. When they send you the edited version of your manuscript, the editing job is so bad, you have to hire your own editor to fix the mistakes (at your own expense, of course!).

5. They won’t commit to a publishing date.

9. They say it is not in their “business model” to get your book into major bookstores. (See numbers three and eight.)

10. They eventually admit that they did not get your book reviewed by any major reviewers, including Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal.

Nothing there you won't see all over.
People are talking openly now because they no longer have to grin and bear it.

Turow sees nothing wrong, but then Turow doesn't have to deal with publishers that "forgot" to pay.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Nothing there you won't see all over.
People are talking openly now because they no longer have to grin and bear it.

Turow sees nothing wrong, but then Turow doesn't have to deal with publishers that "forgot" to pay.

The internet makes piracy easy, and that's bad for arists, be they authors or musicians. However: the internet also makes self-distribution and self-marketing easy. There are more and more authors every year. I see many that write fantasy, mystery and crime, and started only a few years ago. Some of them publish eBooks exclusively, by themselves.

When going through a pulisher and store, an author gets a very small cut of the price of a sold book. These authors live in the digital age. They could self-publish their eBooks, and set up their own web stores. Then, they'd get a much higher amount of money in the end, and if a publisher wants a paper version in stores, he can come to the author, instead of the other way around.

It's not the authors that are dying: it's the publishers.

[DiapDealer]

It's not the authors that are dying: it's the publishers.

And possibly the publishers' select pet cash cows (if they don't pull their heads from out of their nether-regions before it's too late).

Lament how you would like it to be all you want (rhetorical you). But the smart money is being spent on the way it is--and the way it's going to be. Technology isn't killing anything. Nostalgia and complacence, however, are going to be slitting throats willy-nilly.

[fjtorres]

Heh, it looks like Turow inspired a *lot* of folks.
As always, Ms Rusch does it in detail and style:
http://kriswrites.com/2013/04/10/the...nti-published/

A few choice quotes:

The problem with Turow in particular, and a handful of others in the same circumstance, is that they were bestsellers from their first novel. Which makes them rather like that Coach Barry Switzer quote: “Some people were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.”

From Lawrence Block:

My default response, when someone asks how to get an agent, or how to find a publisher, or any writerly version of what-do-I-do-now, is to suggest publishing it oneself. That’s a course I never would have recommended to anyone, except perhaps the occasional dotard who’d penned a memoir he hoped his grandchildren would read. And now I’m urging it upon everyone—writers whose publishers have dropped them, writers who never had publishers in the first place, writers whose early books have gone out of print.

Will everyone have a good experience with self-publishing? No, of course not, nor will every book show a profit. But it has never been so easy for readers and writers to find one another, and for any book to find its proper audience.

Quoting Elizabeth Naughton:

She writes:

…when deciding what to do, I had to take a lot of things into consideration. Book stores are closing, store shelves are shrinking, and my print run between ENRAPTURED and ENSLAVED (only six months!) dropped by 20,000 books. There was no guarantee Wal-Mart (who was the biggest buyer for my print books) was going to pick up the next book in the series, and at 4% royalties (most people don’t realize authors get reduced royalties from sales at Wal-Mart, so at a $4.99 sale price, I make less than 20 cents a book on my Wal-Mart print sales) I couldn’t come up with a valid reason to take a crappy contract JUST to say I was “traditionally” published. Especially when I looked at the fact the MAJORITY of my sales were coming in digital form. If there’s one thing I want readers to understand, it’s that this was not an easy decision for me to make, but at the end of the day I realized that if I wanted to continue writing this series (which I do!), I couldn’t do it for free anymore.

She decided, as so many of us have, that the only way she’ll accept a traditional book publishing contract these days, is to have a “contract would have to be enticing enough to draw me away from the income I’m now making.”

That income? It’s exploding for her:

To give you an idea of how my life has changed since I began self publishing, in 2011 (traditionally published only) I reported a negative income on my taxes. In 2012 (after I began self publishing–and it’s important to note that the majority of my income that year came from self published books, NOT my traditionally published books), I reported six figures. In 2013, we’re projecting I’ll be approaching the seven figure mark. To me, that’s a HUGE difference.
It’s important to note that she hit the New York Times bestseller list with her self-published work, not with the traditionally published work. We’re seeing this phenomenon more and more these days. That whole meme that traditional publishing puts out there, the one that says they’re the only way into bookstores and the only way to hit the bestseller lists? That meme isn’t true at all.

Plenty more at BUSINESS RUSCH.
Worth a weekly visit just to see what the established *writers* are seeing and what they're doing when it comes down to betting their livelihood.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The internet makes piracy easy, and that's bad for arists, be they authors or musicians. However: the internet also makes self-distribution and self-marketing easy. There are more and more authors every year. I see many that write fantasy, mystery and crime, and started only a few years ago. Some of them publish eBooks exclusively, by themselves.

Exactly so, but the thing is... it's not *just* digital distribution that the internet facilitates. The internet also allows for independent printing and distribution of pbooks.

B&N and the department stores may not (yet) carry indie pbooks but Amazon does. And new ventures are emerging to get indie pbooks into indie bookstores and other interested venues.

One thing I've learned is that very small print runs (hundreds to thousands) are affordable to self-publishers (a few bucks a copy). That is why the emerging term to describe the migration of established authors away from traditional publishing is "Indie" publishing, rather than self-publishing: there is an entire support industry of *honest* service providers popping up to assist independent authors. (And no, author solutions and its siblings are not on that list.)

[BearMountainBooks]

Thanks for some good links and stories from authors. Lots of great information out there.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

There's a thousand-and-one stories like this out there:
http://indiereader.com/2013/04/next-...-self-publish/


Nothing there you won't see all over.
People are talking openly now because they no longer have to grin and bear it.

Turow sees nothing wrong, but then Turow doesn't have to deal with publishers that "forgot" to pay.

Well, almost the first thing I noticed was that the complaints at the link concerned a "small press." Not a major publishing house.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

It's not the authors that are dying: it's the publishers.

And the best seller authors. It's an interestign parallele to television. Before cable, there were three television networks who controlled nearly all programming. Cable fragmented that, and hundreds of new networks were created, with the better run ones making original programming. The internet has continued that process, and there are not more megalithic networks with so much control over the market that they can create popular fads.

Bad for the big networks, but infinitly more diversity for the audience.

Same thing is happening right now to writing. The big, big names, who are big names partly because they're very good writers, but also partly because they were made the big names by the marketing power of the big publishers, the bestsellers, they are in big trouble, the same way that the TV stars of the most popular shows can't expect to get paid as much because the highest rated show on TV now has a fraction of the audience of a mediocre show from 30 years ago. The publishers are in trouble. But the little guy, the nobody author, has opportunity that never existed before.

And we, the readers, have access to a diversity of available books that was unimaginable even ten years ago.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

And possibly the publishers' select pet cash cows (if they don't pull their heads from out of their nether-regions before it's too late).

Even that is hopeless. People can't buy books they've never heard of. The more diversity there is in the market - the more different books people can find - the less they'll read what publishers want to sell and the more they'll read what they want. The most popular shows on TV today get ratings that are a pale reflection of the ratings that shows that were canceled after six episodes for poor ratings, 30 years ago.

I suspect the total number of books being read right now is increasing, because there's something for everyone out there now. But even if it's the same, the money generated it going to be spread out over a lot more authors. The big names aren't going to be anywhere near as big in the future.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Well, almost the first thing I noticed was that the complaints at the link concerned a "small press." Not a major publishing house.

That particular one, yes.
The BPHs' sins are bigger in scope and get more press so I didn't think it was necessary to beat those horses some more.
I was trying to point out it isn't just the big boys (Harlequin, Penguin, et al) that run roughshod over authors.
(We had the Hydra mess a couple weeks ago and there's the ongoing "Julie of the wolves" fight as recent examples.)

In the KKR piece she points out one (nameless) operation that went from tolerable terms to intolerably bad overnight without any changes in personnel. Which means the issues are industry-wide and likely to bite anybody at any time; there are no inherently good guys in an industry in turmoil.

It all comes down to the existing infrastructures and processes being geared to a different era and people trying to preserve them past their shelf life.