Reader Nate Winchester likes to nudge me with topics, the other day it was my piece on satire, and then he dropped a couple of links in my inbox about the publishing business.
Now I don't write about about the business of books very often, the last time I wrote about the feud between mega-publisher Hachette and mega-retailer Amazon, and that's feud is the topic of the first link, a discussion between popular authors J.A. Konrath and Barry Eisler. The second link was author Sarah A. Hoyt taking a look at what she considers a fundamentally flawed business model.
I suggest reading both posts and then come back here for my thoughts.
I'll wait.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay.
Read them?
Good.
Now let's talk the book business.
I'm on that hamster-wheel-made-of-psychological-razors called being an author looking for a publisher. During my quest I've accumulated many rejections, but I've also encountered many wonderful people who work in the publishing business, but among the many diamond I've also had a few really abysmal experiences at the hands of the publishing industry.
One was a now-former agent who sent an instant auto-reply rejection letter to a personal e-mail that he asked me to send him.
Then there was a science fiction publisher, who regularly brags about how well they treat new authors, whose rep claimed that my book had been highly recommended and was being carefully considered at the top levels of the company, only to get a rejection letter from a bottom rung slush pile reader after 6 years and 11 months of chain jerking.
It's not just the unpublished losers like me who get this sort of treatment. A famous story was told by Stephen King. After the release of Carrie the prolific author's books were breaking sales records worldwide and he was his publisher's biggest seller probably of all time. Despite that his editor had to re-introduce him to the company's grand poobah's at every meeting because the people running the company literally had no idea who he was or what he did.
King soon went to another publisher as soon as he legally could. However, even that relationship eventually soured, and King is now with a third publisher, still churning out best-sellers.
Now these and hundreds of other stories show that the publishing industry, whether totally doomed or not, is in an unhealthy, dysfunctional state.
Let's look at some of the problems that I've seen, and let's not forget I'm not an expert and if I'm making a mistake let me know:
1. Retailer Woes: If the publishers are having trouble with Amazon, it's because they took the path of least resistance and allowed Amazon to crush or swallow any competition. The publishers could have fostered better relations with potential rivals like Borders and Barnes & Noble, embraced new technology, and made it easier for independent bookstores to obtain special orders as fast as Amazon, but they didn't. Now they have a leviathan at their door wanting more and more, and they don't know what to do with it.
2. Best-Sellers?: Know what it takes to make the New York Times Bestseller List?
The fact is, no one outside of the NYT is supposed to know because how the list is put together IS A SECRET.
The Times says that their methodology is kept secret to keep people from "gaming the system." However, using the same algorithms and metrics for the past few decades probably means that someone, somewhere in publishing has figured it out, and knows full well how to play it like a violin.
Which means that we have no way of accurately knowing how many individuals are buying what, and e-books, whose sales should also be easy to tally are also buried under obscure metrics.
Basically those more knowledgable than me are saying that bestseller lists are inaccurate and easily manipulated. That's not healthy.
3. Advances or Setbacks?: We all hear about how celebrities of varying degrees of fame and/or talent getting huge advances to "write" everything from their memoirs, to fiction, to fiction masquerading as memoirs.
What we don't hear is just how many of these advances pay off.
For those who don't get the jargon, an "advance" is a payment a publisher gives an author that's put against future sales of the book in question. If the book makes more money than what was paid in advance the author then qualifies for royalty payments based on sales. Royalties from a major "legacy" publisher are usually between 10-15% of the book's cover price.
Now lots of famous people get huge advances for books and I'll bet dinars to donuts that the majority of them don't pay off at all. Come on, who honestly believes fans of Snooki or the lesser Kardashians really buy any books, let alone theirs?
This comes at a time when major publishers have slashed their "mid-list" of commercially viable but not NYT qualifying books by about 90%.
How many mid-list books could have been bumped into more mainstream success with the resources wasted on a tell-all by someone no-one wants to hear from?
4. Selection: As I just mentioned the major publishers have slashed and burned their mid-lists. This means that thousands of books and hundreds of authors were dropped off into oblivion.
Now I had known that the mid-lists were being metaphorically massacred, but until recently I didn't know how far the slaughter had gone.
Then it got me thinking about the last time I bought a new book. I'm too poor for hardcover prices, but I quickly realized that outside of a tiny team of authors, I haven't bought new fiction in ages. If it's nonfiction that I need for research, or it's about a topic, like film & business, that I'm interested in, I will save up to get it. As for fiction, I usually just stock up on a lot of dead authors I find at the annual library sale, or in second-hand bookshops.
Why do I do that?
Because I find too much new fiction is too much alike. Too many, in every genre, are trying to hard to be the other book that just came out, but bigger, and if you want something out of that mould, you're better off looking into the past for some variety.
I don't really see the situation getting any better since those who are supposed to be in control of the industry don't appear to see a problem on their side of the equation.
Now I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know the whole story here. There are things I am probably not seeing, and I'd love to have someone in the industry explain how everything's just fine.
If you have any thoughts of your own, please let me know in the comments.
_______________________
This why im start my own publisher lol
ReplyDelete