Normalizing book publishing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has another insightful blog post on the immensity of the changes in publishing. She notes that publishing used to be taking place in an environment of scarcity--only X amount of self space existed, meaning that you had to guess which books among the gazillions of unpublished books out there would sell the most if it were allowed to take up one of those precious spaces.

Now publishing is in an environment of abundance: Shelf space is infinite, so you can publish everything and see what flies!

In abundance, you can toss anything into the mix, quantify its sales, and pick winners based on sheer numbers. In scarcity, you have to go with the best of what’s available, and hoping (praying) that you don’t lose too much money on everything else.

She thinks that the change is just amazing. I think the change explains why traditional publishing is so much more like playing the lottery than self-publishing.

The other night, I was explaining my history of trying to get my books traditionally published to some people, and I realized that I was still upset about it. Being the analytical sort, I was trying to sort out why, after all this time (and after it not really mattering anyway), it still bothered me so.

And I think part of it is that the whole "You're great! Nuts to you!" thing just didn't jibe with my experience working in publishing. Publishing in New York City (not anywhere else, I know) is, or at least was, a normal sort of industry.

People from out of town would ask me, "How did you ever get a job in publishing!?! Did you know someone? Who were your connections? The Rockefellers? The Forbes?" I realize that I went to Harvard, and I had a fairly comfortable childhood--out in the fricking sticks, at terrible schools. Harvard was a serious adjustment for me.

Trust me, when I graduated, I didn't know a freaking soul in publishing. I had noooooo connections. I had no clue about careers--no clue. I went into publishing because one day when I was almost finished with my senior year (and hadn't gotten into the Ph.D. programs I'd applied to in a desperate attempt to stay in college forever) I realized that I enjoyed reading magazines and that somebody must make them.

And yet, I had a perfectly respectable career. I got jobs in publishing (and journalism) by answering "help wanted" ads, just like everyone else does in every other normal industry. Like job applicants in every other normal industry, if I was qualified and enthusiastic, I usually got hired.

People say things like, "You're not entitled to have a book published." And on one level, that's true. You're not entitled to perform brain surgery--unless you go through the training and pass the boards and get the license, at which point you are, in fact, entitled to perform brain surgery.

The problem--and I guess the source of the frustration for me--with traditional publishing is that, because of this environment of scarcity, you never reach the point where you are entitled to be published, even if you've won stuff and been published before and worked really hard on something that everyone (including the people who reject it) thinks should be published. Nowadays everyone who wants to be published is entitled to be published. Fine, you're not entitled to have a monster best-seller, but I think that if you work at it, you can indeed find an audience to appreciate and support your work. And that is a real revolution.

Spine out!

Today I found myself near a shop that is part of a local chain. I saw big signs on the walls saying "LOCAL! LOCAL! LOCAL! OMG LOCAL!" so I went in. I don't live near any bookstore other than The World's Worst Barnes & Noble (seriously, the ones in NYC were fine, but this one is awful--they sell books that look like they have been mauled by bears), but there are a lot of local bookstores and chains in my area.

In general, and today was no exception, I walk in thinking, "Local bookstore! I bet they're interested in local writers! I should scope this out for when I have more books out!" And I look around and...gosh. Around here the grocery stores and the gift shops are hugely into letting you know that a product is local--they put up signs indicating that something is from the area and all that. The local bookstores, are, to put it mildly, not. There may be a section of local travel guides and maps, but local writers...? No. "Buy local" to them just means "buy here."

But as I was wandering through the sci-fic/fantasy section (yeah, unless George R. R. Martin is local...), I did notice something interesting and potentially useful. One big complaint about book retailers is the tendency to sell books "spine out"--i.e. sitting on the bookshelf so that you can see only the spine. That's probably how you keep your books on the shelf, but writers would prefer it if a book is "face out"--i.e. sitting so that you can see the front cover. Face out makes the book more noticeable; spine out takes up less space on the shelf.

So, publishers of science fiction have done something very interesting--they've made the front and the spine look the same. The cover art repeats on the spine. (If the book is a small, fat mass-market book--which Trang, alas, cannot be, because CreateSpace won't allow it--then the spine is also about the same width as the front cover. Which means the spine art and the cover art are identical, but honestly, those proportions can't make the book easy to read.)

I have not given Trang a fancy spine. The full cover looks like this:

 

The only actual art is on the front.

I didn't think that mattered, but now I'm changing that opinion. If I want bookstores to stock the book, it needs to have more...shall we say, spinal flair, if only because other sci-fi books do. I don't think it should be hard--I can basically extend Titan over the spine (it can't go onto the back cover down there because that's where the bar code goes) and then put another, smaller portal higher up so that it overlaps the spine and the back cover.

 

Your savior is...Barnes & Noble?

You know, much like I don't think Amazon is either the devil or your best friend, I am truly agnostic regarding Barnes & Noble. What, deep down inside, I hope happens to them is that they fix their Web site so that it's easier to find indie books, because then more indie writers would make more money!

But stuff like this post (via PV) just baffles me. It's entitled "Why You Should Consider Buying Your E-Books from Barnes and Noble," and it says thing like, "If we want to avoid having our digital reading lives shaped by Amazon and Amazon alone, we have to support someone who can serve as a check on it. And at this moment, that’s Barnes and Noble."

You know something? When Scott Turow makes a lot of nonsensical statements about the competition Amazon faces, and when major publishers enter into nonsensical price-fixing arrangements because they are all desperately trying to preserve Barnes & Noble, I understand it. They fear the future, and Barnes & Noble represents the past, back when publishing was an industry they understood.

But when some regular Joe comes along and says, "Barnes & Noble is the only way!" I say, look around you. There are alternatives to either company. This is digital media--the field is wide open. (And I'm not the only one who has noticed--I mean, yeah, PayPal backed down, but that just means that you will have yet another way to accept payment for "Raped by Uncle Ostrich.")

And honest to God: If you are worried about what Amazon will do if it gains market share, well, why don't you try worrying about the things Barnes & Noble already did back when it had serious market share? This is a company that forced publishers to offer it special discounts on the wholesale price of books so that it could profitably underprice indie bookstores and drive them out of business. It was sued for this, and then it turned right around and tried to buy Ingram, which is a major distributor and pretty horrific at using its market power to quash other companies' competitors even when it's not owned by one of its clients. If you want to support a company that has consistently pushed the antitrust envelope and that firmly embraces the notion that publishing is an old boy's network, closed to the hoi polloi, then you really should be sure to buy your e-books at Barnes & Noble.

Learned helplessness

I mentioned having to deal with a lot of tax idiocy this year, and by that I don't mean the normal filling out of the 1040-EZ. The thing that makes this (and many!) tax season so stressful is dealing with a certain individual who has absolutely no concept that processes matter. This person is an older woman, and she waits around for some big swinging dick to come along and tell her what to do, and then she obediently does it, whatever the hell it is. Seriously--the tax advice could be "dose your home in lighter fluid and set it on fire," and as long as a man told her to do it, she'd be sloshing the Kingsford about and trying to find a match without even thinking about it.

I am by no means the only person to find parallels between this kind of behavior that is both encouraged in most women and very much indulged by some, and the way authors often are encouraged to behave and sometimes actually do behave.

Here are some myths common to both:

Don't worry baby, I'll take care of you. Never true. No matter how fancy and powerful someone seems, it's not necessarily in their interest to take care of you--and so they won't. If you are being told not to worry your pretty little head about something because Big Daddy has taken care of everything, beware! You may be getting advice from a cat!

We inhabit separate spheres. Don't you love this one? Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. Women love babies. Men love trucks. Women drink wine. Men drink beer. There is nothing that cannot be parceled off into separate gender spheres.

I notice this a lot because I am both handy and, you know, a dame, which is kind of mind-blowing for some people. I once was stopped at a KMart by a woman who saw that I was buying a replacement toilet seat, and she wanted to know...well, basically she wanted to know if it was possible for a woman to replace a toilet seat. I am not talking about an actual toilet (although I replace those, too), I am talking about a toilet seat--two screws and you're done. I'm pretty sure a monkey could replace a toilet seat. Blindfolded. A friend of mine was buying furniture at Ikea, and another woman told her that she couldn't buy furniture there because she didn't have a boyfriend. Dead serious--there was no connection between those two thoughts, just the automatic assumption that you can't use an Allen wrench if you don't have testicles. (Helpful hint: When assembling furniture, even men use their hands.)

So, yeah, without question I'm better at writing than at doing cover art, but you know something? I'm not afraid to try. I'm not afraid (or too good, or whatever) to poke around in that sphere. At some point I may hire people to do certain production tasks for me, but when I do that I'll have a decent idea of the amount of work required and whether it's worth the price.

You can't make it without me. Wow, seeing a lot of this lately. Change is always stressful, but when your only game plan has been to latch onto someone like a remora, it becomes devastating when that someone moves on. If you identify as a BigPub House author rather than as an author who happens to be published by BigPub House, then it becomes very easy to put BigPub House's interests before your own.

What does this all boil down to? Dependency. People get used to being dependent, and some people just love it to death! But when you turn yourself into a dependent, you aren't simply making yourself vulnerable--you are choosing not to grow. That relative I was talking about in the beginning of this post? She has been 15 years old her entire life--I use tactics gleaned from advice for negotiating with teenagers to deal with her, and she's a senior citizen. Be afraid, be very afraid.

How market dominance is different from anticompetitive behavior

You know, I'm just grateful that the antitrust thing didn't happen before I sent the Trust layout to the copy editor.

Anyway, the whole brouhaha has been kind of interesting, because it's brought out a lot of people who don't know much about self-publishing. So there's concerns that the end of agency pricing will force down book prices (not necessarily), that lower book prices mean less money for authors (only if you don't self-publish), and that it will result in a precipitous decline in quality (not necessarily, because writers can hire help). (And gosh, isn't this the sort of helpful reassurance and advice for writers that you might expect to hear from the president of the Author's Guild? Maybe he's too busying looking for Abba LPs and Toto 8-tracks.)

One thing I thought needed more clarification than can be provided by a simple link is the difference between market dominance and anticompetitive behavior. Obviously, it's easier to engage in anticompetitive behavior if you dominate a market, but the two things aren't the same.

Let's take an example from Scott Turow's amusing little diatribe: Amazon controlled 90% of the e-book market by the end of 2009. Now its share is 60% of the e-book market.

Unlike Turow, I try to not automatically regurgitate information that has been spoon-fed to me by large publishers. Therefore, I will note that nobody knows how big the e-book market is, which means that it is impossible to determine with any accuracy who controls how much of it. (I'm crossing my fingers that the discovery process will result in some good data.)

But for the sake of argument, let's say that those numbers have some basis in reality (perhaps by "the e-book market" he means "the market of e-books produced by large publishers who provide me with talking points"). Well, Amazon dominated that market for about five minutes. And then it lost a huge chunk of market share!

Turow looks at this and says, Yay! Price-fixing did the trick! David Gaughran looks at this and says, Um, hello? At the end of 2009 the Kindle was basically the only e-reader on the market. Now there's the Nook and the iPad.

Honestly, I think Gaughran's much closer to the truth, but even if you buy Turow's argument, the fact is that competitors came into a market that was almost completely dominated by Amazon, and they quickly reduced Amazon's market share by one-third. If you are wondering why, oh why, the Department of Justice doesn't investigate big bad Amazon for anticompetitive practices? It's because Amazon didn't try to exclude competitors. Instead, Amazon allowed competitors to enter the e-book market and take away market share. That is not anticompetitive behavior.

Now, you might argue (and I'm sure the large publishers will) that thanks to all those self-publishers out there, large publishers no longer dominate the supply of e-books. Maybe so, maybe not--the absence of data on e-book sales makes it impossible to know.

But one of the reasons the publishers decided to get together with Apple and fix prices is that they were afraid that Amazon would "pit authors against publishers" and make self-publishing attractive. So the fact that Amazon went ahead and did that and now there are all these self-published e-books out there happened in spite of traditional publishing's efforts to prevent it.

In other words, the fact that traditional publishers may no longer have a dominant e-book market share doesn't mean that they didn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. If an illegal scheme backfires--I try to rip off your granny, but she's too smart for me--that doesn't somehow make it legal. Likewise the fact that the price-fixing scheme they hit upon guaranteed lower margins for publishers and a 30% profit margin for Amazon doesn't mean that they didn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. It just means that, in addition to being unethical, they weren't very smart.

Borrowed from life vs. dominated by life

My sister bought me a membership to a local theater group that give me free admission to four shows a season. It's been a nice gift, although the problem with any local theater group when you do not live in a locality that draws talent from across the globe is that sometimes the local talent is talented, and sometimes it's...that other thing.

So I tend to avoid the shows that require large casts. Today I saw a two-man show that was excellent; a month ago I saw a one-man show that was so boring I managed to hit upon a solution for a home-improvement problem that had been bothering me.

The problem in the latter's case was not the actor; it was the script. Both shows were about real, historical people. But the excellent show was a story, and the boring show was just, you know, a story.

"Like, I met this guy once? And he was like, really interesting. He, like, grew up in Austria. And when the Nazis came, like, in 1939 or whenever they came to Austria, he was, like, 18, and he was like, NFW. I'm not sticking around here. He wasn't Jewish or anything, he just thought these people were appalling. So, he was a big hiker, right? So he walked from Austria to someplace in France where he got a boat ride to the UK! Then he moved here, to the US, and he's stayed here ever since."

Stretch that out for two hours, and you've got the boring play.

Now, I read the playbill, and the author of this play met the person the play is about in real life and blah-de-blah-blah and this really happened--it really happened--and the person was really real. And the author felt like he couldn't embellish or alter this person's story in the least, because they were a real real really real real person who most people didn't know about.

Well, you know something? The guy I was talking about three paragraphs up is a real person, too. What difference does that make? You don't want two freaking hours of me saying, Oh, yeah, this guy was cool.

Now, the excellent play was also about a real (really really real) person. It's also about a totally made-up person: Of the two characters in the play, one is a historical person and the other is an invention, who is something of a composite of some real people, plus a generous dash of I need to make this play work.

So guess what? The invented character has an arc: He learns from the real-life character and goes from being a Padawan to a Jedi. He's also a great foil to the real-life character: He's got a fantastic backstory, which is used to pull out revelations from the real-life character, as well as to illustrate the way the real-life character used and was affected by his own life experiences.

An arc and a foil--that is just too much to expect from someone in real life. And that's the point!

If you want to write about real life, do the research and write non-fiction. You will have to deal with stuff that doesn't work so well in a story (John Nash was a real dick, for example), but that's non-fiction--you have to be disciplined and tell the truth, even when it's unsavory or inconvenient.

When you cross the line into fiction (even "based on a true story" fiction), cross the line. Just go for it. I don't respect the truthfulness of the guy who wrote the boring play--I think he's a punk for not having the courage to write an interesting play. The discipline with fiction isn't the truth: It's the story. In fiction, the story comes before all.

Progress report

A teeny-tiny bit of progress to report: I revised the promo/jacket copy for Trust. Unfortunately my time and attention right now is mainly being taken up by some tax-related idiocy, which was really, really NOT what I was hoping for....

Different flavors of creativity

Oh my God! A non-rant! This is a very cool article about creativity (you have it, you can cultivate it) in the Wall Street Journal. Helpfully, it distinguishes between the situations that require insight--where you should relax and distract yourself and let your subconscious do its thing--and those that quite you to just keep plugging away.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.

What is not going to happen if agency pricing ends

Because publishers used a system called agency pricing to raise e-book prices, there are now several people speculating that if agency pricing comes to an end, traditionally published e-books will drop precipitously in price, destroying the price advantage that indie e-books have.

To which I say: Not so fast.

Agency pricing just means that the publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the retailer takes a cut. That's all. Large publishers can and do offer e-books for 99 cents. They just don't do it very often, because they can't afford to.

Why not? High costs. How high? Well, let's take as gospel this back-of-the-envelope calculation by the Wall Street Journal and say that, in order to cover their costs and make an acceptable profit margin, a large publisher must make at least $9 ($9.09, but we'll round) on an e-book.

In the traditional book retailing model, the retailer pays a wholesale price to the publisher, and then the retailer can set the sale price however they like.

The publisher still sets a price--but it's the wholesale price, not the retail price. If the publisher needs to make at least $9 on each e-book sold, then the wholesale price is going to be at least $9.

That puts a floor under the price--the retailer can price the book below $9, but they're going to lose money.

They might do it anyway: Agency pricing was forced down Amazon's throat because they were buying e-books from publishers for $13 and selling them to the public for $9.99. They took a $3 loss on e-books because they wanted to spur the sales of a weird new gadget called the Kindle.

That was a couple of years ago, which is an eternity in e-book land. The Kindle is no longer weird and new--it is one of Amazon's best-selling items.

So, I'm going to guess that nowadays, Amazon is a lot less likely to be willing to take a bath on e-books. Indeed, Amazon now sells Kindles at a loss to drive the sales of e-books, so if they start selling e-books at a loss, too, they're going to get into big trouble--they need to make a profit somewhere.

Amazon may well retail a hot new best-seller for a few bucks cheaper than the competition (as they do with paper books), but I don't see them taking a book they paid $9 or $13 or whatever wholesale price publishers want to charge ($20? $25? $40?) and marking it down to $3 or 99 cents. Taking a $6-$12 loss on each copy of a book that sells millions of copies is going to be tough even for Amazon to keep up.

The cost structures of indie and traditional publishing are just so different that it creates a huge gulf in the prices they can charge--and those cost structures won't change in a hurry. Look at that number that caused so much drama: $9.99. Amazon was selling e-books for $9.99, and publishers panicked. Meanwhile, over in indie publishing land, $5.99 is seen as quite expensive, and people are afraid to sell stories for 99 cents.

Which makes it less likely that Amazon will drastically cut prices on traditionally-published e-books: They have this huge library of indie books now that, for the most part, sell for less than $4.99. And they make money on those cheap books! They don't need to take a $10 loss on some traditionally-published book in order to convince people that it's worth it to invest in a Kindle. They can offer a ton of $3 books instead--and make a profit!

Scott Turow has never heard of Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber

Scott Turow, who is president of the Authors' Guild, posted this astonishing bit bewailing the Department of Justice's likely upcoming lawsuit against some large publishers and Apple as a result of their collusion to fix prices in order to slow down the adoption of e-books.

Where to begin? Well, of course, I began over here with:

Amazon’s predatory pricing would shield it from e-book competitors that lacked Amazon’s deep pockets.

Like Apple. THERE’S a cash-poor company. [I'll add that he also mentions Google, which is of course desperately poor.]

Bookstores were well along the path to becoming as rare as record stores.

Which is why the number of indie bookstores are up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/independent-bookstores-add-a-new-chapter/2011/08/12/gIQAfMh9LJ_story.html

Like rock bands from the pre-Napster era, established authors can still draw a crowd, if not to a stadium, at least to a virtual shopping cart.

Whereas poor Lady Gaga is forced to sit at home, all alone, with no fans and no money.

And publishers won’t risk capital where there’s no reasonable prospect for reward. They will necessarily focus their capital on what works in an online environment: familiar works by familiar authors.

Which is why Amanda Hocking labors in obscurity as well.

Jesus, does he even read what he writes?

 

Aaaand I'm going to continue here with:

We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded in adopting the agency model for e-book pricing.

Given that Steve Jobs bragged about it, I think it's pretty much public knowledge.

We do know that collusion wasn’t necessary: given the chance, any rational publisher would have leapt at Apple’s offer and clung to it like a life raft.

Gosh, did you know that collusion is a perfectly rational response to competition? Just like fraud is a perfectly rational response to the need to raise money! Of course, it doesn't make either activity any less illegal, because what is in the short-term interests of an individual company isn't always in the long-term interests of society at large.

In addition, Turow seems to think that colluding with Apple to fix prices somehow isn't collusion. I'm sorry, but when Apple invites you to do something illegal, it doesn't magically become legal because the offer came from the Wizard of Cupertino.

 

In addition to venting about Turow's chop-logic, I really wanted to talk about an analogy that Turow draws that I feel is very apt: He compares authors to musicians.

If you didn't know, once upon a time, a musician needed the support of a record label to become well-known. Record labels unquestionably abused their power, but they were the only real option, so musicians sucked it up and signed crappy contracts and took whatever they were given.

Then digital came along. Record labels did horribly, record stores shut down, and that was that.

What happened to the musicians? Well, artists like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber looked at something called YouTube and said, "I can make that work." And it wasn't just them: Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Adele and many others have found large audiences and certainly aren't hurting for money. They didn't just rely on a label, of course, they had to hustle and get creative: OK Go and Cee Lo Green have been very open about how they make money in this new world.

But according to Scott Turow, these commercially-successful artists just don't exist--Napster wiped out the music industry back in 1999, and no musician has made money ever since.

In Turow's mind, the fact that technological change was hard on record labels means that it necessarily hard on musicians. But they're not the same thing, and what hurts one doesn't have to hurt the other

Likewise, authors are not the same thing as publishers, or for that matter, bookstores. Since he seems to be unclear on this fact, I'll point out again that Turow is president of the Authors' Guild. Authors write books, and then they need to sell them.

Now, if he were a little more reality-oriented, Turow might throw himself into helping authors navigate the changes that are happening to publishers and bookstores, so that authors can still sell the books they write. Nowadays authors have to hustle and get creative and not expect everything to stay still, but they can indeed sell books and make a good living.

Think of Madonna: She's not still waiting around for Sire Records to recover; she's moved on.

Turow, on the other hand, is still with Farrar Strauss & Giroux, which published his first novel in 1987. I'm sure at this point that if anything bad happened to FSG, Turow would feel like a member of his family had just died. And unfortunately, he can't understand that not everyone is served by their publisher the way he has been served by his. He can't understand that what is in a publisher's interest isn't necessarily what is in an author's interest--in fact, screwing authors is a good short-term strategy for publishers to make money.

Worse yet, Turow doesn't even realize that publishers are capable of doing wrong. Yes, publishers might be worried about Amazon and unhappy with their bottom lines, and the executives involved may be desperate to save their jobs. They might have received a very tempting offer from that beguiling devil, Steve Jobs. That doesn't make what they did ethical or legal. They could have tried competing or adapting; instead they tried price fixing. When faced with adversity, they chose to break the law. That was their choice, freely made, and I will shed no tears when they pay for it.

You asked for it, you got it--a lawsuit!

So, if somehow you couldn't hear my insane cackling, the U.S. Department of Justice is totally going to sue the tar out of five major publishers and Apple for fixing the prices of e-books. (If you can't read the Wall Street Journal, the Passive Voice has excerpts, but you're missing some funny bits.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, I'm sorry. But: HA. I mean, they collude on prices. Steve Jobs makes a public statement about how publishers colluded on prices. [ETA: And there was a whole story in the New Yorker about how they colluded, and how they knew they could get into trouble for it--amazing!] And somehow--this is a very mysterious process indeed--they got into trouble for price fixing!

Life is so unfair!

Now, if you've been reading the propaganda generated by traditional publishing, you're going, Wait a minute, isn't Amazon the one that exercises evil monopoly powers that would draw the ire of the DOJ?

Well, no, it is not. And indie bookstores are actually doing fine.

But of course, that's what traditional publishers have been claiming in the talking points they create for their dupes. (ETA: And oh my God, speaking of dupes.) And the really hilarious part is--that's what they claimed in their arguments to the Department of Justice! Note that, once again, large publishers and Barnes & Noble are working in...oh, what's the word...it starts with a c....

The publishers have denied acting jointly to raise prices. [Too bad Steve Jobs said they acted in collusion with Apple, huh? ETA: Not to mention that story in the friggin' New Yorker--how dumb are you people?] They have told investigators that the shift to agency pricing enhanced competition in the industry by allowing more electronic booksellers to thrive.

William Lynch, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, gave a deposition to the Justice Department in which he testified that abandoning the agency pricing model would effectively result in a single player gaining even more market share than it has today, according to people familiar with the testimony. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

Prior to agency pricing, Amazon often sold best-selling digital books for less than it paid for them, a marketing stance that some publishers worried would make the emerging digital-books marketplace less appealing for other potential retailers.

The punch line? "The publishers' argument that agency pricing increased competition hasn't persuaded the Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said. Government lawyers have questioned how competition could have increased when prices went up." [Emphasis added, because it's hilarious.]

I bet they have!

I also bet that when the DOJ lawyers talk about competition, they mean competition with publishers--you know, like if there was competition with publishers, they couldn't fix prices. But when publishers talk about competition, they mean competition with Amazon. They want to see a lot more of that, because they think it will make things easier on them.

But honestly, while I think there will be a lot more competition with Amazon to sell e-books, I don't think it's going to help publishers at all, because I don't think the competition will focus on books that come from traditional publishers. Why deal with their up-front costs?

So, yeah, it's all looking bad for publishers. For the record, it's looking much worse for publishers than it is for Apple. Apple has a ton of cash floating around--that's cash that could have been paid out as dividends to shareholders, but c'est la vie! More important, Apple entered into this pricing scheme to help out its iBookstore, but the iBookstore flopped anyway, and that still hasn't affected Apple's bottom line in any kind of serious way--they're a device company, and as long as people snap up iPhones and iPads, they're fine.

For publishers, well, their pockets are not as deep as Apple's (nobody's pockets are as deep as Apple's). And the pricing scheme was more important to them, because it pumped up margins on e-books, which have become a major product.

In addition: Hello, they pissed off Amazon! And what did Amazon do? Oh, it found a whole new slew of suppliers! It turns out that products from these suppliers sell like crazy! And--this is key--Amazon almost always makes money off these suppliers, even when they sell stuff for 99 cents! Oh, and look! Now the suppliers increasingly don't want to deal with traditional publishers!

The irony is delicious, is it not?

Funny and true

This is a hilarious article instructing bosses "How To Completely, Utterly Destroy an Employee's Work Life."

What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making progress in meaningful work.

People want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so. Knowing this progress principle is the first step to knowing how to destroy an employee’s work life.

The thing is, if you're wondering why so many authors seem really angry at traditional publishing, well, that's it. That's what's been happening to them.

Whoo!

OK, the Trust layout is corrected and on its way to the copy editor! Whoo!

Nice to know I'm not going to have to deal with that thing again for at least another two weeks! In the meantime I'm going to relax a little, read Proust (the problem with a harder writer like Proust is that you can't read it at the end of a long day working--it takes too much energy), work on some house stuff...and do book stuff. Since I have a page count now (375 pages), I can finish the cover, plus I really want to noodle with the description some more. I feel the description is kind of a conundrum, because of course Trust is about what happens after the climactic events in Trang, but right now the description is, "In the first book THIS HUGE SPOILER HAPPENED. HAVEN'T READ THE FIRST BOOK YET? OH WELL--SUCKS TO BE YOU" so I want to see if it's possible to finesse that a bit.

Progress report

Corrected the layout up to page 335--it's all proofread, so things are looking good for actually getting this done and in the mail tomorrow.

I have to say, pushing through like this really makes me think about hiring out the layout. But 1. I don't have to do this very often, 2. if I didn't have to make this big push, I'd be enjoying it more, and 3. I just don't know how that would work as far as making corrections is concerned. I also like having a copy editor proof the layout, because it's a twofer--you get typos and layout errors caught. Definitely, though, if you are new to self-publishing, be aware that laying out a paper book is easily the most time-consuming part of production.

How to not sell indie books

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to go blind, but God help me, the Passive Voice had a post today that got me all riled up. Somebody at Ebook Friendly felt obligated to post tips on how to find self-published books at Barnes & Noble.

You know something? When the civic-minded feel an obligation to post pointers to help people find things in your store, your store is badly organized. Honest to Pete, you think B&N could hide the books on its Web site any better?

And HOW can you find self-published books? By looking in the section for books published via PubIt or Smashwords, of course! (Quoth Bridget McKenna: "Wow! Our very own ghetto! I’m so proud…")

Seriously? Yeah, people don't search for books by genre or anything silly like that, they search for books that have been published a certain way, that's totally how they do it. It just amazes me how poorly B&N understands its own customers--you're not selling to school districts, who really do care who the publisher is, you're selling to the general public. Don't they even talk to the floor staff in their own stores? How many people come in looking for a book that was published a certain way versus people looking for a mystery or a book by a particular author or a book like those written by a particular author?

You know, people were snarking on the B&N CEO because he doesn't have much of a background in bookselling, and I thought that was kind of silly. But I may have been totally wrong....

Trust the process, not the publisher

Yeah, my eyes are about to permanently cross, but I have to spend some more time in front of the computer because I keep seeing people express the opinion that if one of the Amazon publishing imprints wants to sign you, well--whoo-hoo! You're in Fat City! Just sign right on--you'd be CRAZY not to!!!

Think back to two years ago, and people would have been responding that way to an offer by a big publisher or an agency. Think of what a mistake that would have been.

I say this as someone who has been screwed over by some of the finest names in the industry: Do not assume that a place with a good reputation and a fancy name is going to serve you well. They may. They may not. You don't know.

You have to develop a process you can trust to help you make a good decision, and then you trust that process. Do not trust names. Trust processes.

This is part of thinking like a businessperson. If I am thinking about investing money into a company, I need to know whether this company makes money or not. How do I know? I look at their books. How do I know their books are any good? Well, there are standard bookkeeping processes, and I would look for evidence that those processes have been followed.

If those processes have not been followed, I cannot trust the books. It doesn't matter if, on a personal level, I think the people who run that company are very honest. They can be perfectly honest and still have been making horrible mistakes!

People are fallible--they get sick, they get distracted, they discover cocaine. You can't depend on someone being a rock forever, because people are not made of stone. People also move on: Right now, the person in charge of Amazon's publishing contracts may be Bob Cratchit--kind, generous, honest, always looking out for the other guy. But Tiny Tim got sick, so Bob has to take some time off. Now Ebenezer Scrooge is in charge. Uh-oh!

You also have to be realistic about who you are. If Joe Konrath gets a great contract with an Amazon imprint, that's terrific--for him. It also has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the contract you get offered will be any good. Remember, Joe Konrath makes $100,000 a month these days, so he's getting treated very well--even a small percentage of his income is some serious coin.

Instead of assuming that Amazon or whoever is going to take care of you, you need to get some processes into place that will make sure they do. I would argue that you probably should have a qualified lawyer go over any contract. You also probably should take some time to figure out what you want from your career and how you think a publisher could help you achieve that. Try at least to form an opinion of what a good contract for you would look like. Decide now what you're not willing to give up to anyone, for any amount of money.

I find it almost frightening how quickly some people have moved from assuming that Big Daddy Traditional Publishing will take care of them to assuming that Big Daddy Amazon will take care of them. It reminds me of how some people skip from relationship to relationship to relationship without ever creating a better quality of relationship. Those people always assume that this time it's going to be different, but it never is, because they're always doing the same damned thing.

Read an e-book week!

Things are a little frantic here--I told the copy editor I'd get the layout to her March 9th, and I'm realizing once again just how long it takes to input corrections into a layout. It's not like a manuscript--every little change changes everything else.

But enough about my problems! It's Read an E-Book Week over at Smashwords, which means it's time to get Trang for free! Here's the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42407, the coupon code is RE100, and it will be on sale from March 4-10! Go get 'em!