Some good posts

I finally got around to reading through David Gaughran's blog--it's very news oriented, so many of the posts date quickly, but he's got a very detailed post of a promotion he did that had a lot of good tips (as do his other posts on promotion). But my favorite is a guest post about how Mainak Dhar learned everything he needed to know about self-publishing in seventh grade.

And I also liked this post by April Hamilton on the unpredictability of success. I do think that there is something of a formula for success, but it's certainly not as simple as Push Button A, Get Result B.

New writers and publishers

I've mentioned before that it really bothers me when authors have the mentality that they can't make it without a publisher. Now, often that is a result of habit, but you also see the "I need a publisher" mentality coming from brand-new writers.

In that case, I understand it more. There's a term self-published authors (especially those who are refugees from traditional publishing) use to describe the appeal of having a publisher: Validation. Typically that's said with a sneer ("He's just seeking validation; he doesn't care if he gets ripped off."), but with new writers, validation is something that is actually needed. Until you've gained enough experience to trust your own judgment, having someone say, "Yes, this is good. You aren't a self-deluded fool. You can write," is very important.

Validation doesn't need to come from a publisher, though. I had memorable validation experiences in journalism school as well as on the job, and ironically enough, throughout the whole agent/traditional publishing merry-go-round.

The ones that meant the most to me were the ones that came from my journalism professors, not the ones that came from my professional colleagues (no matter how much I respected them). That's because editors edit things to the standards of acceptability for that particular publication, not to the abstract standard of goodness the professors were interested in. The analogy I used to use was that we were making Big Macs: When you're making Big Macs, you certainly want to meet a certain standard of professionalism (two patties, three buns, no spit), but you also need a consistent product (two patties, three buns, don't get creative) and you need it finished at a particular time (meet your deadline).

The problem is that, like most cooks, most writers don't want to make Big Macs. They don't want to be Queen of the Big Macs. They know that making a Big Mac isn't very hard, and it isn't very interesting, and it's hardly an expression of their unique individuality.

So once you get a peek behind the curtain and realize that the validation from your editor is coming in the form of, "You sure made a good Big Mac!" that validation isn't actually all that gratifying. That's why more-experienced writers feel like they don't need it--they know what that kind of validation means. A reader telling you that they loved your book and can't wait for the next one to come out means more. That kind of validation means that your crazy experiments with Thai/Italian/West African fusion cuisine actually paid off.

Another reason new writers give for wanting a publisher is that they view it as their education. Instead of paying for classes or to hire people, they give up a potentially enormous hunk of future earnings to pay for the experience of getting published. That experience is supposed to teach them the ropes.

The problem I have with that is that I've worked with writers, and guess what? They weren't privy to much. They would turn something in, and then they would vanish--I never met any of the writers I edited, and I rarely communicated with them. They were kept out of the office, and they certainly never communicated with anyone in production (which I did, a lot, and yet I still didn't know everything about getting a book out). I freelanced as a writer on and off for a decade with one company, and I never met anyone from that company. Not once. I may have gone to their office once to drop something off (in which case I may have met the receptionist), but I'm not sure.

When you're a publisher, educating writers is not your goal. Getting an acceptable product out on time is the goal. Having a bunch of writers sniffing around the office getting in the way so that they can get an education (which benefits the publisher how, exactly?) does not help you get your product out on time.

Now, all this assumes that your publisher knows what makes an acceptable Big Mac. Not all publishers do. Have a look at this post (via PV): People actually sign with publishers who make their work look terrible and don't distribute it outside their own Web site.

And while you're pondering whether to sign with a publisher, here are some more questions to think about: How is your publisher coping with the changes happening nowadays? How are they handling e-books?

And who do they work with? You may have noticed a lot of fighting going on among the various e-book retail sites: If you want to stay neutral and have your stuff available everywhere, but your publisher uses IPG as a distributor, that's just too goddamn bad for you. And let's hope the people running your publishing house successfuly navigate these very dramatic industry changes, because if they don't, you are completely screwed.

PV's version of that article has some pointers for finding decent publishers, but the fundamental problem with any publishing contract is that it sews up the rights to your book for a very long time. If you are looking at the world of publishing today and going, "Oh my God! I can't tell what's going on! I don't know what's going to happen! It's so crazy!" realize that the exact same thing is true for the publishing houses--big, small, new, old, whatever. They are all looking at the future and peeing their pants, which is why some of them have done some really stupid things and are in legal trouble now. There is no one out there who knows what's going to happen; there is no one out there who knows who the winners and the losers will be. All you have is your book--do you really want to give that up?

And if you were hoping for something actually informative....

Here's a follow-up article in the Wall Street Journal that actually has...hold your hats...reasonable and accurate background information on e-publishing. Wow.

Among the inconvenient facts that will never, ever make it into the New York Times:

For now, the settlement will force the three settling publishers to rewrite their pricing agreements with retailers, allowing retailers more flexibility to discount. Publishers could stick with the existing agency model, since they won't be able to control retailer discounting, but one executive predicted the most likely outcome is a return to the "wholesale" model, which is more lucrative for publishers than the current e-book pricing model.

And:

Near term, stronger e-book sales would be good for publishers. E-books are cheaper to produce—lacking costly printing and binding—and are more efficient to distribute, since unsold books don't need to be returned to publishers. That has boosted publishers' profits in the past year or so even as revenues have eroded from falling sales of pricier hardcover books.

Random House, for instance, reported that earnings before interest and taxes jumped 6.9%in 2011 despite a 4.3% revenue drop. Simon & Schuster's adjusted Ebitda rose 40% to $28 million in the fourth quarter from a year-earlier even as revenue fell 1%.

(Emphasis added.)

But to throw a little humor in, they quote everybody's favorite clown, Scott Turow, as saying, "Money to be made in book publishing is going to decline, and therefore the money to be made by authors is going to decline."

Because 70% of $10,000 is way less than 10% of $50,000. This lesson in arithmetic comes courtesy of the president of the Authors-Are-The-Same-As-Publishers Guild. (Motto: Math is hard! Let's go shopping!)

Same planet, different worlds

OK, I realize that I'm turning into a media wonk here, but.....

Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are running stories on the Department of Justice lawsuit/settlement and its likely impact on book prices.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's take:

The popular $9.99 price for best-selling e-books may be back in a big way soon.

A settlement announced Wednesday between the Justice Department and three big book publishers will almost certainly lead to lower e-book prices on an array of best-selling titles that now cost anywhere from $12 or $13 and more.

Most important for consumers who like to read, it could mean the $9.99 price point championed by Amazon.com Inc. when it kicked off the e-reader market with its Kindle device in 2007 will once again be common.

The $9.99 price for best sellers largely disappeared after Apple Inc. struck deals with major publishers that changed pricing models for e-books, ahead of Apple's release of its iPad and its iBooks digital store. Instead of letting retailers set prices, as they have long done in the print book world, publishers began setting prices—with best sellers usually priced either at $12.99 or $14.99.

And here's the New York Times' take:

The government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon in a powerful position: the nation’s largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.

As soon as the Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it was suing five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, and simultaneously settling with three of them, Amazon announced plans to push down prices on e-books. The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle.

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

“Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,” said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. “Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.”

It's just beyond parody! Amazon may drop prices...because it's eeeeeevil!!!! Evil puppetmaster Amazon! Poor little mega-billion-dollar publishing companies!

Call me naive, but I am happy that the DOJ is more worried about consumers being taken advantage of than it is about whether businesses are forced to make unpleasant adjustments--and maybe even shut down--in response to change. As for Amazon's eeeeevilness, my feeling about this is that the antitrust people over at the DOJ are now very focused on books. If Amazon starts engaging in predatory, monopolistic business practices, that will presumably get noticed. In fact, Charles Petit (via Rusch) points out that some of the business practices Amazon engages in now are not kosher according to the DOJ's filing--that's the problem when the feds get involved in your industry, everything they do cuts both ways. And of course people don't have to sit around waiting for the DOJ to take action--they can file antitrust suits themselves.

Hey, look! New jargon!

You know, when you write something that generates praise like, "though I can't put my finger quite on why, this book felt surprisingly unique within the genre," you know you are in the realm of Beyond Easy Categorization. There's nothing wrong with this (presuming one exists outside the traditional-publishing matrix), but it does mean that people looking for a neat categorization might get kind of stymied. So in addition to the "60's social sci-fi" thing, I have updated the Amazon, et al. tags to include the Futures Past and Present categorization as "anthropological sci-fi."

No idea if this is a category with traction, but LET'S EXPERIMENT! 'Tis what this is all about!

Reporters and their conflicts of interests

David Gaughran has a great post up (via PV) about a recent Salon story about Amazon, in which the fact Amazon donates money to charities is taken as proof that it is "a rapacious, horrible company from top to bottom" and "evil." Gee, I though the fact that Amazon didn't give to charity was proof that it is evil!

(Gaughran also has a good post up about Jodi Picoult's ignorant remarks on self-publishing. I was thinking of posting about that and changed my mind, but the thing that impressed me was that I hadn't heard of Picoult before, and I guessed from her comments that she had first been published 20 years ago. I was exactly right. I'm getting a little too good at this.)

Anyway, the Salon story was written by Alexander Zaitchik. In addition to the terrible news that Amazon does, in fact, give back, Zaitchik notes that Amazon wants to charge traditional publishers more to market their e-books. The publishers are refusing. And then--and this is how you know that Amazon is really and truly evil--instead of providing marketing services for free, Amazon is not providing the services they are not getting paid for! I know--never before in the history of capitalism has a company refused to provide a service that they weren't paid to provide! This post should be rated R because it is just so shocking!!!

Zaitchik is a freelancer who, not at all shockingly, lives in New York City. I've noted a hometown bias with other NYC-based coverage of the publishing industry. And I'll note additionally that Zaitchik has a book out, published by Wiley.

How much do you want to bet that he'd love to get another book contract?

Is this a tit-for-tat thing? I hope not. I would not be at all surprised that Zaitchik has convinced himself that every word he writes is true, and that he honestly believes that Amazon is evil, and not only because they are damaging his prospects of getting another advance check.

But they are. And that's something I think readers need to keep in mind whenever they read anything about traditional publishing--many reporters either have written or would like to write a book. The same thing is true of their editors. If you get a book published, then your profile is higher, and then you can get a job at a fancier publication, sell stories to more lucrative outlets, and maybe even quit your full-time job to write what you want.

And it's still the case that when many people think of publishing a book, they assume that they're going to need a traditional publisher. They have a dog in this fight.

It's a problem in journalism, and I think it's worse because it's often not the sort of explicit conflict that an employer can easily ban. You'll see, say, somebody get elected governor, and then, wow, half the political reporters who covered his campaign go to work in his press office. I doubt that an actual deal was struck, but I think you'd have to be a robot not to have your perceptions and therefore your coverage affected by the fact that you view someone as a potential employer.

Who hit the rewind button?

I'm feeling better and the surprise guest went home, which left me in the same place I was a few weeks ago, with the layout due back from the copy editor soon but nothing much to do in the meantime. So I shot the copy editor an e-mail to see if she was on track to get it back to me mid-April, and the answer is no, the horrible life crap she's dealing with still has her buried, but she promises I will have it in my hot little hands May 1.

On to Trials, then!

Autobots, Decepticons, and publishing

Today I was driving and I saw someone with a Transformers sticker on the car. That struck me as being so much lamer than when people actually replace the logos on their car with Transformers duplicates.

Were I to do that to my car, I would use a Decepticon logo.

Why? Lemme tell you. I am old enough that I watched the Transformers show on television when I was a child (shut up). I never much cared for the show--it was boring and annoying and mostly about selling toys, something I recognized even as a wee lassie.

The thing that really annoyed me about it was how passive the good-guy Autobots were, and how they spun their passivity so that it was somehow virtuous. The evil Decepticons would come up with some awesome new technology (which they did all the time) and the Autobots would say, Oh my stars! The Decepticons have come up with new technology, like the evil creatures they are! This is a completely unexpected turn of events, even though it happens all the time! Gosh-darn those Decepticons! They are so bad! They are always up to something! And we never are!

And then they would go whine to Optimus Prime about it, instead of taking a blowtorch to him for allowing them to (once again!) face a new Decepticon technology completely unprepared. Eventually, Optimus Prime would slowly crank out some pathetic me-too response. And everyone would act like this was some form of real leadership, when in the real world all the Autobots would be constantly calling up Megatron with offers to defect.

Anyway, I realized (and I am fully aware that this probably means I'm spending too much time thinking about this) that something similar is happening in publishing. There has been a big technological change (e-books) and a company (Amazon) has positioned itself to take maximum advantage of it. And the response of the traditional companies has been to say, Gosh-darn that Amazon! They are so bad! They are always up to something!

The thing that irritated me about Transformers when I was a kid and stuff like this now is this assumption that doing something = being bad. Action = evil. Change = evil. Progress = evil. People who do things mess stuff up. They disrupt the status quo. They complicate life. Everything was nice and predictable until the Decepticons/Amazon came along and threw a wrench into the works!

And you see that attitude among writers as well. I just finished reading Darcie Chan's Mill River Recluse. It's fine if you like sentimental books (which are not really my thing), and I don't remember finding a single typo--the manuscript was obviously very clean. The e-book, however, is a hot mess: no table of contents, the chapter ornaments are all over the place, and it feels like no two paragraphs are formatted the same way.

The book has been up for almost a year. It sold 400,000 copies before Chan started getting national press coverage, and I'm sure it's sold many more since then. Even though it's still priced at 99 cents and she's still getting a crappy 35 cents per copy, she's made six figures on it. Yet she can't be bothered to format the damned thing, and of course there's no paper copy available.

I feel like, here is somebody who is really and truly committed to certain ideas about publishing. For starters, there's the notion that writers shouldn't concern themselves in the slightest with anything other than writing--they shouldn't even stoop to hire out work. There are also two other concepts in play, which are closely related to each other: e-books aren't real books, and self-publishing isn't real publishing. Since they aren't real, it doesn't matter if your product sucks--and even if they were real, having a product that sucks is OK, because your little piece of it (the writing) is fine!

It's like these people live in a world trapped in amber, where writers are under no obligation to learn, understand, and adapt to the realities of publishing. All the changes happening are just the Decepticons running around, like the pesky little critters they are, doing their evil nonsense because they just can't leave well enough alone. You can be like Optimus Prime and kick back, satisfied with yourself because you have done the bare minimum to adjust--or because you haven't.

To which I say: All hail Megatron!

E-book subscription sites

F+W Media and Sourcebooks are both starting e-book subscription sites. F+W is focusing on specialty titles--you get unlimited access in return for a hefty ($199 per year) fee, so it's basically like a paid research library. Sourcebooks is focusing on romance novels, and it's much cheaper ($9.99 for six months), but the number of titles you can access is quite limited--it's more like a book club, with a discount program thrown in.

Both services rely on curation to appeal to readers. F+W is appealing to a fairly thin slice of deep-pocked institutions and businesses that feel they must have access to these books. Sourcebooks is appealing to fans of its writers.

Whether these services are going to work or not, I don't know--that's going to depend on whether or not enough people think they provide a good value. But they are both examples of the experimentation going on with online e-book retail.

How to be edited

One reason I’ve seen people put forth to stay away from self-publishing is the need for editing. People believe that they must be edited before they can put something out. This ties into a question new writers often have—how do you know when something is ready? 

I used to be an editor, and I still wouldn’t put something out that hadn’t been edited (and I mean edited, not copy edited, although obviously I’ve seen the light on the latter as well). The question is not, Should I get edited? The question is, How can I find a good editor? 

An editor is not an accountant or a doctor—an editor goes through no specialized training and does not get licensed. New writers tend to think of an editor as “the person who makes your writing good,” but honestly, that’s not the editor’s job. The editor’s job is to make your writing consistent with their employer’s standards, whatever those standards might be. You might write a great mystery novel, but to the editors of both Highlights and Penthouse Forum, your work is unacceptable. And unfortunately writers and editors both can get into some very bad habits working for places with lousy or peculiar standards. 

Also, some editors just aren’t very good—they want changes that make your work less entertaining and harder to read. I had a particular animus against editors who were vague. They would ask, “Could you make this better?” which got them an instant, “Could you be more specific?” Vagueness to me indicated both laziness and a cover-your-ass attitude—an editor who expressed a vague dislike for whatever you turned in felt like they were insulated from failure (which they weren’t). 

To be of any use, an editor must have opinions—clear opinions about how to improve a piece of writing. They are just opinions, even when they are gatekeeper opinions, which is why so many bestselling books first went through endless rounds of rejection. But opinions are an editor’s stock-in-trade, and a good one has lots of them that they can express clearly to you. 

How do you find someone with opinions about your writing? Obviously, I am fond of critique groups (free!), but writing classes and workshops are also good places to go. But don’t just get the group read of your first chapter: Treat these places as editor auditions. 

You want to find people to edit your work who are not afraid to be brutally honest—no, it’s not fun at first, but you will come to value it. (Maybe it’s just me, but I think that my feeling vaguely insulted is a sign of a quality edit.) That said, you want to avoid sociopaths, abusive and insecure writers who will screw with you to make themselves feel better, and people who hate your genre. Look for someone who shows some enthusiasm for your work, even if they are critical of the specifics—if they love your kind of book, they’ll be more likely to help you create something that appeals to people who love your kind of book. 

And take feedback seriously. I think everyone has met the wanna-be writer whose work would be a thousand times better if they would just drop bad habit X and embrace good habit Y, and they never do. No matter how many people tell them the exact same thing, no matter how many times they hear it, they exist in an impermeable field of delusion—they would rather write badly than work at it. That’s them; it doesn’t need to be you. 

Other ways to find editors are to hire people or to sign away your rights and a chunk of your future earnings to a publisher who will hire people. That might be what you have to do, but remember, just because you’re paying for it doesn’t make it good. All the horrible, crappy editors I had over the years—all of them—were professionals. Respected professionals with years of experience (goldbricking). They all got paid to go, “Could you make this better? No, I can’t be more specific right now—I have to go get a manicure.” It was always a crapshoot with the professional editors because I was just a working stiff and I could not audition them. Nowadays, I just don’t tap the horrible amateur editors. 

Speaking of horrible amateur editors—try to make sure you’re not one. If you are able to find people who are willing to edit your work for free, guess what? You’re going to be paying them back by editing their work for free! (Nothing is really free, sorry.) 

But guess what else? You’re going to get paid back a second time. That’s because as you develop your editing skills on other people’s work, you become a better editor of your own. If I notice in three manuscripts that the opening drags because we don’t get to the main plot until chapter 15, I’m going to cut to the chase in my own book. If I read a bunch of repetitive descriptions that drive me crazy, the next time I look at my own prose, I’m going to be chopping excess adjectives. 

Eventually, if you edit enough, you may even reach the exalted state where there is no difference to you between something you write and something somebody else writes. That kind of distance from your own work is precisely what you want—it’s like writing Nirvana. (You’ve heard about how you should stick a manuscript in a drawer and forget about it for an eon or so? That’s an exercise to help you develop this distance.) If you can get there—or at least close to there—then of course you’ll know when your work is ready, because you’ll be judging it by the same standards as you do everyone else’s.

Google was going to save indie bookstores, but it changed its mind

Google is going to stop providing e-books to indie bookstores.

I'm not shocked, because they were going at this in a totally half-assed way. I mean, if you can't be bothered to set up your Web site so that an author can actually upload a book, how committed can you be?

And honestly, I think this is probably good for indie bookstores. The whole idea of making it so indie bookstores can compete more directly with Amazon is, in my mind, completely wrong-headed. If you are a bookstore, you don't want to compete directly with Amazon. Barnes & Noble is competing directly with Amazon, and it's not exactly working out for them. You want your own niche--let Amazon have theirs. Maybe you can sell e-book cards, if they fit in your niche.

Be aware of everything you can do

I like this post by Dean Wesley Smith--being Smith, he characterizes it as long-term thinking about self-publishing, which is GOOD, and short-term thinking, which is BAD.

That's his opinion--I feel like Smith sometimes doesn't recognize that people without a backlist of 200 books are going to have to do things a little differently than he does. But I think it's important to keep in mind that this is a long game and that there are many different outlets for your work. Even if you're not selling directly off your Web site or to bookstores or selling audiobooks or even paper books now, that's all stuff to keep in mind as a next step.

Amazon needs a new media-relations department

Yeah, I'm on a blogging tear today. Mostly because 1. I am feeling better, and 2. an out-of-town relative has decided to execute one of her trademark no-warning week-long visits starting tomorrow, so I'm screwed as far as doing anything except looking after Her Highness for the next several days.

Anyway, the Seattle Times is doing an entire series on how Amazon is the Antichrist. Amazon doesn't pay taxes. Amazon doesn't give back. Amazon abuses workers. Amazon is destroying publishing.

The last one caught my eye, of course, and it was very interesting. I'm the first to acknowledge that Amazon (or really, e-book technology) is destroying publishing, or at least the traditional publishing industry. The question boils down to, is that a bad thing?

Now, if you're the New York Times, and you're based in New York City, where the traditional publishing industry is headquartered and where it employs many, many people, the answer is: Of course! On the face of it, it is clearly a very bad thing!

But the Seattle Times is based in (you guessed it!) Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered and where it employs many, many people. If Amazon eats traditional publishing, that's probably going to be a significant net benefit for the Seattle area--more jobs, more construction, more money.

And the Seattle Times article on publishing doesn't follow the talking points: There's no mention of Amazon destroying indie bookstores or literary culture. There's some talk of Amazon's potential to have a monopoly on e-books, but it's much more balanced than what the New York Times has been offering.

Yet the article is very negative. The focus is on Amazon's disputes with publishers and IPG. At least the article focuses on players who are in fact losing out as a result of the changes in publishing, which is more than one can say about the New York Times articles, but (and this is very strange) these losers aren't local. One company is in North Carolina, one is in Chicago, one is in Massachusetts, and the experts are all from NYC or New Jersey. No one is from Seattle. Seriously, when I was reading the article, I kept looking for the Associated Press byline, it was that non-specific as to locality.

And Amazon refused to comment for the article.

Sigh. OK, as a former reporter, I'm going to explain something to Amazon:

Dear Amazon,

When you don't talk to the local newspaper, the editors get mad. They get mad because they feel like you don't appreciate them--you could be pals (or as palsy as you can get with newspaper people), they could help you, but you treat them like dirt instead! It pisses them off! When they get mad enough, they decide to do things like run an entire series on how you are the worst thing ever. (Seriously, have they gotten your attention yet? The next step is mooning.)

And when you don't talk to the reporters on the local paper, you lose your chance to tell your side of the story.

Yes, Amazon, you are destroying publishing. The key to getting a positive spin in stories is to explain how you are replacing it with something much better!

There is one author and no consumers in that story--and the one author is, of course, enormously positive, because that's someone who is benefiting from the new order. You need to feed the Seattle Times more people who are benefiting from these changes--ideally people located in or near Seattle. If the members of your media-relations department weren't all too busy buffing their nails and drinking their lunches, they could have hooked that reporter up with quite a few more authors. Local authors. Local authors who have created self-supporting writing careers almost instantly because of e-publishing--I can think of one right off the bat, and I'm sure there are more.

I know your media-relations staff are right now telling you that they didn't have a chance, the Seattle Times is so mean and biased, boo-hoo-hoo. Seriously, fire those idiots. When I was a reporter, I covered a company that was convinced that the publication I worked for was out to get it (they had a very elaborate conspiracy theory going on--seriously, I was concerned). I covered a company that deliberately concealed good news about itself, and then they pitched a fit because my psychic powers did not enable me to see through their lies and write stories about it.

This was never constructive. It never resulted in positive coverage. What results in positive (or at least more balanced) coverage is talking to the fricking reporter. Make her life easier. Help the nice lady out. Give her access, and tell her your side of the story. She can't pass your story on if you don't tell it to her! (All those complaints in the story about how Amazon doesn't communicate? She found those plausible for a reason!)

Just can the whole department and start afresh. Let's put it this way: You can't possibly have worse media relations than you do now.

(You know, I was thinking when Amazon swanned Joe Konrath & Co. around like kings that they were very savvy public-relations players. But I guess they were just very savvy author-relations players.)

How much is Meyer worth?

The addendum to my last post got me thinking about comparing Meyer's paycheck to what she's earning her publisher. As I said, Forbes estimates that Meyer made $21 million between May 2010 and May 2011. That would be from all sources--movie money and what have you.

That sounds like a lot, but Lagardere estimates that the Twilight books made the company $160 million in 2010.

Oh, I'm sorry--they're not saying that, in total, the Twilight books made the company $160 million. No. They're saying that when the Twilight books were selling exceptionally well, they were bringing in $160 million per year more than they brought in in 2011, a year when Twilight sales fell to more normal levels, whatever those may be.

We don't know the baseline of Twilight sales here. They could still be bringing in $160 million, and in 2010 they brought in $320 million. Maybe they're just bringing in a paltry $21 million, and in 2010 they brought in $181 million. We have no idea.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there was only (or "only") $181 million of Twilight money sloshing around in 2010 (and we'll pretend the Forbes figures run from January to January, not May to May). $21 million went to Meyer; $160 million went to her publisher.

She made less than 12% of what her publisher did. Probably much less, because we're pretending that Twilight didn't sell a single copy in 2011, and Largardere doesn't claim that. And of course, Meyer's take from the books was presumably less than $21 million, since that number includes movie money.

Something to think about, eh?

How much does that cost?

When I was a business reporter, I spent a lot of time covering health care. From a business perspective, health care is fascinating, because just about everyone is uncomfortable with the fact that it costs money.

In fact, people are so uncomfortable with the fact that health care costs money that we Americans have invented a little myth for ourselves: In other countries (far, far away in Foreignia--and especially Europe) health care is free.

It's free! Just like that! It's magical and free and provided by elves or hobbits or maybe those guys who ride around the French countryside on bicycles wearing berets and carrying loaves of bread in their basket.

Amazing, isn't it? And completely untrue. Of course health care costs money, in Europe and everywhere else. People in other countries just pay for it in different ways than Americans do--they primarily pay for it through taxes instead of through employer-sponsored insurance.

Now, we can certainly question whether or not employer-sponsored insurance is the best way to pay for health care, and we can talk about other ways to pay for health care, but the fact remains: Health care has to be paid for.

Ditto grocery bags. (Did I just confuse you? Hang on, this all ties together.) Around here people have been considering laws to add a fee to or to altogether ban plastic grocery bags. And the opponents of these measures say, Hey, poor people can't afford to pay for grocery bags!

But of course poor people are already paying for grocery bags--your grocery store pays for the plastic bags and passes the cost along to customers (including poor customers) in the form of higher prices for groceries. In fact, the companies that sell plastic bags to grocery stores make so much money that they can afford to spend quite a lot of it funding opposition to fees and bans on their product!

Ditto publishing services. Yeah, I've spent money to self-publish. You do. And while I think there are ways to make your start-up costs way lower than mine (do you really need a Website right off the bat? a paper book?), the fact is, this is a business that requires an initial investment. Publishing always has--it takes a lot of time (and time is money) to write a book in the first place.

But I know what I've spent. I spent $280 to copy edit Trang. He did a great job. So, guess what? I never have to spend another penny on that.

Compare that to the traditional publishing model, where even if your sales are being accounted for accurately (and there's no guarantee of that), your costs are potentially infinite. The more books you sell, the higher your total costs, because you are paying a percentage of your sales.

When you read how someone like J.K. Rowlings or Stephenie Meyer is worth a bazillion dollars* to their publishing house, that means that, in exchange for those publishing services--line editing, copy editing, layout, proofreading, cover art, printing, formatting, distribution, marketing--they have paid their publishing houses a bazillion dollars. (And we laugh at the people wanting $100,000.)

Was it up-front costs? No. Did it work out for them? Sure! Was it free? Oh, hell no.