Raab is on crack

Seriously:

[E]ven with charging only 99 cents for some books, [author Stephanie] Bond says she made more than half a million dollars in the last year. . . .

“When you price a book at 99 cents, $1.99, I personally think it devalues the author’s time and effort,” said Jamie Raab, the chief of Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette books.

Let's look at that again!

[E]ven with charging only 99 cents for some books, [author Stephanie] Bond says she made more than half a million dollars in the last year. . . .

“When you price a book at 99 cents, $1.99, I personally think it devalues the author’s time and effort,” said Jamie Raab, the chief of Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette books.

Well, Bond sure enough has been told! I bet she'll go scampering back to traditional publishing in no time flat!

"Effectuation"--I like it!

In my last post, I cited a Wall Street Journal story that mentioned what Saras Sarasvathy calls "effectuation," which is a thought process used by successful entrepreneurs.

I thought what was there was pretty insightful, so I wanted to look up more. Unfortunately Sarasvathy is an academic, so most of her stuff is wildly expensive and unavailable at the libraries in my area. (Let's hear it for those academic presses! I hope they finish going under soon!)

Still, there's a Web site about effectuation, this article in Inc., and there are excerpts of Sarasvathy's work around--parts of her book can be read here, for example. And a nice definition of effectuation (contrasting it with causation, which is how managers at large corporations tend to think) can be found here. It reads:

Causation rests on a logic of prediction, effectuation on the logic of control

In her book, she lays out five principles success entrepreneurs tend to rely on. These are all principles focused on things these people control, rather than abstract or expert notions of what ought to work. They are:

1. The "bird in the hand" principle: You use what you have.

2. The affordable-loss principle: You plan depending on what you can afford to lose.

3. The crazy-quilt principle: Similar to the bird in hand, but it applies to people--if you can get someone to help you out with X, then you focus on doing X, instead of trying to do Y.

4. The lemonade principle: When life gives you lemons . . . you "leverag[e] surprises rather than trying to avoid them."

5. The pilot-in-the-plane principle: You are in the driver's seat, and what you want to do and are good at is more important than, say, what genre of book is the most commercial or what marketing strategy worked for somebody else.

I think these are all good, and many of them are especially applicable to writers, who really are the pilot in the plane!

To focus on one for a moment: The affordable-loss principle puts a name on a phenomenon I've certainly noticed--when people focus on the potential for success, they sometimes decide not to do anything, because of course there's never any guarantee that something will be successful. Or, they decide to take some insane risk, because they're blinded by their dreams of bestsellerdom.

But if you focus instead on the (REALISTIC) price you will pay for failure, then that helps you make better decisions: You will risk what you can afford to lose. That helps you avoid paralysis on the one side, and ruin on the other.

My observation about successful indie writers is that they tend to experiment and to keep experimenting until they find what works. If you never do anything, you can't ever figure out what works; if you bankrupt yourself, you'll take yourself out of the game too soon to succeed.

Nothing is really wasted

If you haven't noticed, I haven't written in a while, primarily because life circumstances are not allowing it.

The funny thing is, this off time has resulted in my figuring out some plot problems in Trials that were bedeviling me, and gave me some good ideas for making the book's climaxes more climatic. So this "wasted" time, this time not spent writing, has actually turned out to be really beneficial, and when I finally get back to writing (which I will), I will do so feeling newly excited about my book.

That got me thinking about how very few things are truly wasted. For example, I "wasted" a good deal of money marketing at sci-fi conventions--and indeed, from a marketing perspective, that money was very poorly spent. But from a professional-development standpoint? Well, I probably wouldn't be doing an audiobook right now were it not for the money "wasted" at GeekGirlCon.

And remember that very successful indie writer I met earlier? This person initially put tremendous effort into social media, garnering gazillions of Twitter and Facebook followers, and then discovered that those followers were not their actual audience.

What did this writer do? Well, they started a business promoting indie books. It turns out that having a business that promotes lots and lots of other people's books affords excellent opportunities to promote your own as well!

While having big social-media presence among authors might not have directly led to sales, I'm sure it helped to build this book-promotion business--which did lead to quite a lot of sales.

You just never know. Crabby McSlacker, who just produced a book based on her Cranky Fitness blog, writes: 

I said goodbye to Cranky Fitness back in the beginning of 2010, with no plans to return. I had tried to turn it into a part time job, but alas, couldn't get quite enough ad revenue to swing it.  But I left the blog up, and checked back in every quarter or so with an update... just in case.  Then after a year and a half (an eternity in blog time) I missed it too much.[. . .] Plus I'd reinvented myself as a Life Coach and figured it might make sense to use Cranky Fitness to let people know about that.  Quitting back in 2010 was totally the right thing to do! And yet, so was returning.[. .  .]

Did I regret all the time I'd spent on Cranky Fitness the day I quit?  You betcha!  Do I regret it now? Not one bit.  Life is weird that way.

Before you think this is all mushy Pollyannaish goo, it turns out that a willingness to be a little wasteful, as well as a willingness to work with what you have (which includes the results of previous "wasted" efforts) are both traits of successful entrepreneurs. According to the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

Research by Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, suggests that learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty is not just the key to a more balanced life but often leads to prosperity as well. For one project, she interviewed 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive business plans or conducting extensive market research.

They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls "effectuation." Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends. Effectuation also includes what she calls the "affordable loss principle." Instead of focusing on the possibility of spectacular rewards from a venture, ask how great the loss would be if it failed. If the potential loss seems tolerable, take the next step.

And this just annoys me

That Time magazine article (PDF) contains this little gem:

“A lot of the people who are debating [self- publishing] are people who didn’t have the success that they dreamed of, who are disgruntled,” says Jamie Raab, the head of Grand Central, a past target of [Joe Konrath's] vitriol.

Wow. Why, yes, it seems that quite a number of people are disgruntled with traditional publishing in general and Grand Central in particular! They seem to feel as though the system is set up to make them fail, so that it becomes impossible for them to make a living as writers. Many of these disgruntled souls have years of experience working with Grand Central.

They must all be kee-RA-zy!

Good thing that writers who haven't worked with Grand Central before are still sane, otherwise where would they be?

Some pots of gold are better than others

I was reading Passive Voice today (hey, look, a scam! and another scam!), and I saw this item about Bella Andre (aka Nyree Bellevue), which says:

Take Bella Andre, for instance. She has been published by Hachette, Random House and Simon & Schuster but has long since left the traditional publishing world to go it alone. She told me earlier this year that she made over $1 million in 2011 and recently told TIME Magazine that she’s made $2.4 million this year.

That Time article (note: PDF) also notes that Amanda Hocking got her $2 million deal from St. Martins, and Fifty Shades of Grey got a seven-figure deal from Random House.

So that seems like six of one, a half-dozen of the other, right? I mean, if you hit it big, it doesn't really matter what route you take, right?

Well, not really. E.L. James may have gotten seven figures from Random House, but the success of her book has just allowed Random House to pay out a $5,000 bonus to its employees, which, as Warren Curtly points out, means that Random House got at least eight figures from E.L. James. It's the story of Stephanie Meyer all over again--$21 million sounds like a buttload of money, until you realize that it's only a small fraction of what her publisher made.

The important thing to remember about Bellevue's $2.4 million is that, unlike an advance, it is not a one-time payment. Bellevue isn't getting $2.4 million and then seeing nothing until her next contract is signed. She has developed a category of assets that pay her $2.4 million per year. (And that comes on top of the $1 million she got from Harlequin for her paper rights and any movie money that may come down the pike.)

Right now, Bellevue is busting her butt, working 70 hours a week to crank out and promote books, which is why her annual income went from $1 million to $2.4 million. But what if she couldn't? What if some major life roll hit her, and she wasn't able to dedicate the time and energy she gives to her career right now?

Chances are that her income would decrease, sure. But would it bottom out overnight? Probably not. Her current fans would presumably lose interest if she stopped putting out new titles, but at this point, even without huge promotional efforts, new readers would continue to discover her books, especially as more and more people buy tablet computers and start reading e-books.

I know people's synapses start to fry whenever large sums of money start getting mentioned, but there's a big difference between getting $2.4 million as a one-off hunk of money (invested relatively conservatively, that would give you an annual income of to $48,000-$72,000 per year) and getting $2.4 million or thereabouts as your annual income. A big difference. (How big? Making the same assumptions about investment return as I did earlier, you'd have to get a lump sum of roughly $100 million to pull in an annual income of $2.4 million.)

And, frankly, it just annoys me to see a publisher get 90+ percent of the pie. Screw that.

Go, Crabby!

So, Crabby McSlacker has indeed put out a book based on her Cranky Fitness blog, which I've mentioned is a favorite of mine. I just wandered over to Amazon to look at it, and holy crap, it's free right now! Even if you don't want to buy it, just go read the book description--hysterical!

End of year data dump: Counting costs

It's not to early for this again, right?

Note that I do not include the cost of a new computer (my old one was a decade old and was having serious problems, so I probably would have replaced it anyway) or organizer dues for my Meetup group (that's really a personal expense).

Spent creating Trust:

$568.75....copy editing

$9.51........proof from CreateSpace

$25.00......expanded distribution on CreateSpace

$603.26....TOTAL

Spent creating audiobook of Trang:

$69.18....microphone

$19.70....pop filter

$88.88....TOTAL

Spent marketing:

$46.23........hard copies of Trust and Trang for reviewers

$19.93........postage to mail hard copies to reviewers

$65.00........Westercon admission

$20.00........Westercon parking

$152.15......Westercon flyers

$32.04.......GeekGirlCon admission (one day)

$216.22.....GeekGirlCon flyers

$55.00.......Foolscap admission

$23.54.......Foolscap flyers

$45.00.......Norwescon admission

$675.10.....TOTAL

 

GRAND TOTAL: $1,367.24

 

Which is actually more than last year's $1,308.68.

The major costs were copy editing (which was considerably more expensive this time around because the copy editor did a style sheet and a lot of checking for series continuity) and all those science fiction conventions, which I've noted are not a particularly effective means of marketing. In fact, I debated over whether or not to include the Norwescon admission as a marketing cost, because at this point I really consider going to a con as more of a personal indulgence. Nonetheless, you can watch how I educated myself regarding the cost of flyers: The Westercon flyers were expensive because they were four color, the GeekGirlCon flyers were expensive because there were 4,500 of them, but the Foolscap flyers were cheap, cheap, cheap (if remarkably ineffective--but that had nothing to do with their cheapness).

Progress report

I dubbed in the messed-up lines and did an audio compression on chapter 2 of Trang--it went fine (and the compression took care of that pesky clipping all right), but I decided to give it a listen-through. Well, I'm happy I did--there's a character in that chapter who gives a speech early on. He's the only character talking then, so I just did it in my voice, but later on, several characters are talking, so he took on more of a character voice. It was a subtle voice adjustment, so I didn't think it mattered, but it really does: Even a subtle character voice has far more continuity (it's always soft, or it's always deep) than my natural speaking voice. So I re-recorded his speech, compressed it, and edited it in.

I'll do noise removal next. So far, it definitely seems like there's no point in doing noise removal before compression--I haven't see any drawback to waiting, and if you do it before, you just wind up doing it twice.

Beyond good and bad

M. Louisa Locke has another good post up: It's supposedly about marketing for the holidays, but it's really about figuring out how to reach readers who like your kind of book.

She writes:

Over time . . . I started to notice that fans of the books also kept mentioning that they liked my books because they were “clean,” that they could recommend them to anyone, of any age, that they were a “comfort” read, that they were “gentle,” etc. It dawned on me (head slap) that these readers were saying they liked the books because they fit the format for a cozy mystery.

The common definition of a cozy mystery is that there is an amateur female sleuth with a partner––sometimes love interest––who is in police or legal profession, a community of secondary characters––including animals, and no explicit sex or violence. My series features Annie Fuller (widowed woman supplementing her income as a clairvoyant), Nate Dawson (her romantic partner and a lawyer), a cast of interesting characters (the people living in Annie’s boarding house––including Dandy the Boston Terrier), and the murders occur off-stage while the sex stays carefully within the bounds of 19th century middle class propriety.

At the same time, the few negative reviews I got mentioned the tameness of the romance, frustration that the mystery pace wasn’t fast enough––which also seemed to suggest these readers were looking for a book with either the more explicit sex of an historical romance or the tension of a thriller. Clearly I needed to make sure that the potential audience for cozy mysteries would find my books, and those who wanted something more racy or thrilling would look elsewhere.

This is precisely why I think it's important to read reviews and listen to reader feedback--not so you can beat yourself up over your shortcomings as an author or so you can say, "Well, that reader was stupid," but so you can figure out how to reach readers who will like your book. If Locke were insecure, she might have responded to the criticism by striving mightily to make her next book racy and violent (which--no, I just don't see that working for her); if she were dismissive she would have just bemoaned our violent and racy times.

Instead, she had the emotional distance and analytical propensity to realize that her book had this quality of coziness that divides mystery readers, and that if she appropriately labeled and categorized her book, it would get her more happy readers and fewer miserable ones. It also helped that she didn't think in terms of value judgements like "good" or "bad." Think about it: Is the quality of coziness good or bad? That's clearly an absurd question, because whether coziness is good or bad is strictly a matter of taste. And taste varies mightily among readers, even those readers who like mysteries.

Thinking about your book this way is a little like reaching the point where you realize that romantic relationships don't typically fail because one person is right and the other person is wrong: They fail because the two people are a bad fit. You want to attract a reader who is a good fit with your book--that's what really matters.

Biennial data dump: What sold when & where

I put Trang up in January 2011, so it's been almost two years since I began e-publishing. I recently decided to actually look at all my sales reports (a first for me). My sales have never been stellar, but I thought it would be interesting to break down what sold when and where. These percentages are on a per copy basis, not a revenue basis, but I did not count freebies.

These sales are limited to e-books, and for good reason--I have sold almost no paper books.

Untill this month, my books have been available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, which distributes to a variety of retailers (I've been on expanded distribution most of the time). The Smashwords data complicates things, because at least in the spreadsheets I downloaded, they don't tell you the exact date of when a sale through a retailer occurred--they just give you the year. So sales data within a year is approximate.

So what's selling where? Everything's pretty much selling on Amazon--89% of sales there; 11% on Smashwords (through a mix of retailers). Barnes & Noble has yet to sell a single copy.

Which title sells more? I have two titles out, Trang (which has been out since January 2011), and its sequel Trust (which has been out since June 2012). Trang accounts for the lion's share of my sales--fully 76% of copies sold are Trang, only 24% are Trust.

So Trust was kind of a bust, right? Oh, no. Before you decide that, you have to ask...

When did you sell your books? The short answer is: After June 2012. Obviously all of my Trust sales occurred after that date, since that was when Trust was released. But surprisingly, approximately 45% of copies of Trang were sold after June 2012, meaning that I have sold almost as many copies of Trang in the five months following the release of Trust as I did in the 17 months before the second book's release. I have also sold more copies of Trang since Trust was released than I have copies of Trust. Overall, approximately 60% of my sales have accrued since the release of Trust last June--and only about 10% of my sales took place in the first six months of 2012.

Well, what about promotions? Hard to say. I put Trust on sale in its first month of release and it did fairly well that month, but then again sales probably would have been relatively strong at release anyway. And its impossible for me to tease out the effect of promotion like con flyers (although sales were not particularly strong in July and August, when I did my most aggressive efforts) or putting a Smashwords coupon on Kindle Boards from the effect of simply having a second book out (which implies to readers that I'm actually going to finish the series). It's not like I did absolutely nothing to promote Trang before June 2012, but my focus was certainly different--I ran an ad and sought reviews (and while I don't think that particular ad worked, I still think reviews are important). I can say that putting Trang at 99 cents with no other promotion had a negligible impact--I didn't actually sell no copies during those five months, but I sold very few.

What edge are you cutting?

I recently read Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model by model/sociologist Ashley Mears. It's an interesting, if rather dryly-written, book about the economics and culture of fashion modeling. (And I was surprised reading it to realize that I know the male model "Michel"--he comes off as way more of a freak in that book than he is in real life, I think because English is not his first language. If you write nonfiction, please note how simply changing someone's name is not nearly enough to protect their identity.)

Anyway, Mears points out that there are two major schools of modeling: Commercial modeling (catalogs, advertisements) and editorial modeling (fashion shows, magazine shoots).

Commercial modeling is seen within the industry as, you know, commercial. Hot babes do well. But it's also regarded as Not Art--the idea is to appeal to Middle America, not challenge it. You or I probably have just as good an eye for a commercial model as anyone in the industry.

Editorial modeling is seen more as an art form. Those seriously bony girls with light-green, shiny skin and no eyebrows? They are editorial models. They are considered high fashion and on the cutting edge. While commercial models are pretty and sexy, editorial models are edgy, avant-garde, belle laide, and many other French terms for funny-looking. While commercial models are supposed to appeal to Middle America, editorial models are supposed to prove that whoever is trumpeting them is a true artist, with a unique and fabulous eye.

Which, as Mears points out, means that editorial models are suppose to appeal to other people in the industry.

Given how cutting-edge editorial models are supposed to be, how they are supposed to challenge conventional notions of beauty, which group do you think is more diverse?

. . . ?

Commercial models. Yuppers! People actually do market testing with commercial models, and it turns out that Middle America is actually a pretty diverse place! If you're pretty and sexy, no one cares much what your racial or ethnic background is!

Editorial models, in contrast, tend to be white, white, white. And really anorexic. (Apparently there are no really good non-white models in existence. It's kind of funny to watch the RAGE boil out of Mears' academic prose in response to that one.)

It turns out that if you have this small little gaggle of people who all socialize together and who are all constantly judging each other's taste, that taste becomes really homogenized--even if these are people who pride themselves on seeing the world differently!

I think that's a big part of why you get homogeny in movies and commercial books, too--it's not just the financial expectations that make everyone in the industry seek to produce clones of the latest hit. It's that tendency to move as a herd--everyone's in the same city, they have worked or will work together, and they do tend to socialize together. Consciously or not, they don't want to piss each other off, and that makes even their "edgy" decisions very, very safe--within their world, anyway.

Well, exactly!

This by Mike McIntyre (via Lindsay Buroker) is just spot on: "More than a quarter of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels have Amazon ratings of less than 4 stars." Among the under-4s are Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and Tender is the Night, which happens to be my favorite book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

McIntyre writes:

It amuses me that if Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce were still alive and wanted to run free promos, they'd need special dispensation to get shout outs from Pixel of Ink and Ereader News Today.

It amuses me much less, since I just put Trang into KDP Select and was hoping to promote its free days. What's especially annoying to me is that some of those places won't even let you buy advertising if your book is under four stars (or 4.2 stars--how they determined that was an acceptable level, I don't know).

And gee, yes, I am close to four stars, so I could just get a couple of my friends to give the book five stars and get over the hump that way, but no, no, no, I have to be ethical.

What was it Anne R. Allen said about combating paid reviews? Oh, yes:

Encourage review sites to change their policies if they require books to have a certain number of 4 and 5 star Amazon ratings to be featured. Sites like Pixel of Ink and Digital Book Today are great—but they insist on 10 four-or five-star Amazon reviews for a book to be considered for review. Not easy if you're a new writer launching a new book. Easy if you're a fat cat who uses a review mill. Because these ratings can now be purchased so easily, the arbitrary barriers do nothing but exclude new authors who don't cheat. 

Progress report

It wasn't raining (!!--how can that be?) so I recorded chapter 2 of Trang. One thing I noticed with the first chapter was that if I re-recorded a line at a later time, you can kind of tell, even with the compression and whatnot (I'm guessing it's because of a million little factors, like how close I am to the microphone and how messed up my sinuses are at the moment). So I gave chapter 2 a listen right after I recorded it and tried to do the necessary re-recording at more or less the same time. We'll see if that helps. I am clipping a lot with one character voice--he's an intoxicated loudmouth--but I'm hoping that compression will clean that up.

And as you may have guessed, I am at this point regretting having one character be an assistant undersecretary of technology trade standards and having another named Shridar Bhattacharjee. (Oddly enough, I kept getting that name right and then screwing up "Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!")

If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas

I mentioned yesterday that I think all the deals with Author Solutions are going to backfire badly, and while I'm in Cassandra mode, I wanted to toss out another possibility: I think it's likely that a company that consistently screws its clients is not going to be shy about screwing the companies that buy or do business with it.

Look at what's happening over at Hewlett-Packard: They are taking an $8.8 billion writedown (wow) over their acquisition of Autonomy, which is basically an admission that they paid $10.3 billion for a company that was really worth only $1.5 billion.

That kind of thing isn't really that uncommon, although the size of that particular writedown is certainly impressive. The accounting practices at public companies are much more tightly regulated than the accounting practices at private companies, and as the Autonomy case demonstrates, an awful lot of money can be created or hidden via seemingly arcane practices like when and how to recognize revenue.

And while there were longstanding questions about Autonomy's accounting practices, there don't appear to have been allegations that the company was ripping off clients, which is more than can be said about Author Solutions. Author Solutions claims a mere 4% profit margin, and I do wonder how much of that margin comes from "accidentally" withholding half of the royalties its writers are due.

But publishers always treat writers like crap! Surely Author Solutions will treat large publishing houses with honestly and respect!

You know, like they did Simon & Schuster! The New York Times writes:

One odd twist of the deal is that Author Solutions was purchased by the British publishing giant Pearson in July. Pearson has made Author Solutions part of Penguin, a Simon & Schuster competitor. But since Simon & Schuster was already far along in the planning with Author Solutions for the new brand, it decided to go forward anyway....

Wow. When the Times is skeptical of a New York publishing deal, you know it must smell to high heaven.

Progress report

I didn't actually make any progress today (there's random crap going on, and to be honest I'm still recovering from the extended sleep-deprivation experiment that was Thanksgiving), but I decided to go through and tally up my total word count on Trials, and it is:

25,600 words.

Not too shabby, right? That's roughly a quarter of the book, or the length of a novella. Just proving to myself that even if it doesn't feel like I'm getting a lot done, if I just keep plugging away, I will eventually get a lot done.

Criminals!

Recently an elderly relative received an alarming phone call from someone purporting to be from Microsoft. She had a terrible virus on her computer, this fellow told her, and for the low, low price of $250, he would take control of her computer remotely, fix the problem, and download a bunch of software onto her computer to make sure it never happened again!

She was incredibly grateful that this man alerted her to this horrible problem--she knew that her computer was old and buggy, but she had no idea things were that bad--so she promptly gave him her credit card number and let him download whatever he wanted!

Then she told the younger generation about it, and we made her unplug her Internet connection, get a new computer, and inform her credit-card company that she had been defrauded and needed a new card.

We're hoping that the credit-card company can sic the police on this guy so that he doesn't steal from any more seniors, but other than that, we're pretty much just focusing on the this-elderly-relative-needs-more-supervision end of things.

Imagine, though, that the guy running this scam actually worked for Microsoft. The Surface bombed, Windows 8 was a nonstarter, and Microsoft thought, "Screw it--the tech industry is just too hard! All that innovation is really expensive and doesn't always pay off. I know! Let's buy a company that specializes in ripping off addlepated and tech-adverse senior citizens!"

So, they did, and this guy who charges elderly people to install malware on their computers wasn't lying when he claimed he worked for Microsoft and went through the whole charade (which he did) of consulting with his boss in Seattle.

Well, in that case, we probably wouldn't just leave it in the hands of the credit-card company. In that case, we'd be looking at Microsoft's $227 billion market capitalization and its $72 billion in annual revenues and its $66 billion in cash, and we'd be discussing a lawyer seeing if we couldn't get a piece of that--not because we are especially greedy (although I certainly wouldn't turn down a piece of $66 billion), but because we'd be royally pissed that some allegedly reputable company had stooped to this kind of patently illegal fraud.

Which is why I think the whole strategy of traditional publishers allying themselves with Author Solutions is going to blow up in their faces. As Victoria Strauss (via PV) mentions, it's no secret that Author Solutions is a scam press. In the past, writers ripped off by the company might have just decided to lick their wounds and go home--after all, self-publishing has always been kind of a scammy business, right? And these scammers are often hard to locate and rarely have the assets to make a long legal fight worthwhile.

But when you're getting ripped by a company like Penguin (owned by Pearson PLC, with a market cap of $15 billion, annual revenues of $10 billion, and $1.6 billion in cash) or Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS Corp, with a market cap of $25 billion, annual revenues of $15 billion, and $1.5 billion in cash), that math starts to change. Suddenly, the guy who ripped you off is really easy to find, and he's got a freaking ton of money! Plus, business newspapers love a good scandal, and a public company has a lot to lose when its reputation gets tarnished--investors start to avoid it, which makes it much harder to raise money--so they are quite motivated to pay someone to shut up about their questionable business practices.

So, why would a "reputable" publisher set itself up for the kind of bad publicity and legal hassles you get when you start ripping off little old ladies? Ah, well, that I think is another case of large publishers having gotten so into the habit of crossing an ethical and legal line that they've forgotten it ever existed. I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that Harlequin, the publishing house of "Authors shouldn't be able to make a living" fame, is the target of a really impressive class-action lawsuit. And if you read today's blog post by Kris Rusch, just as an aside she mentions:

I certainly wouldn’t be earning a living [writing for traditional publishers]—a reasonable, above-poverty rate living—any more. In the last few years, I earned about one-quarter of what I used to earn in my bad years. The advances have gone from survivable to insulting. And now publishers are fudging on royalties owed....

Recently a friend started contract negotiations with a medium-sized publisher that I’ve worked for. The contract the friend forwarded me was shockingly bad, worse than any I’d seen in the last year, grabbing every right, including rights to all of my friend’s future projects. The contract only paid for the first project. The rights to the other projects could have been tied up for decades without payment because this once-honorable publisher got greedy.

Greedy and lazy. Greedy and lazy.

Business-y links

I had the kid today, but Passive Voice is totally on fire, so I thought I'd link:

Simon & Schuster is entering the vanity press business, partnering with none other than Author Solutions, now owned by Penguin and soon to be owned by Random House. So, that's like three major publishing houses deciding that straight-out ripping off the ignorant and naive is the proper way for a respectable publishing house to earn revenue nowadays, and if Simon & Schuster merges with HarperCollins, it will be four. [ETA: David Gaughran has an excellent post on just how bad Author Solutions is. If you want to work for a company that will refer to you as a "fucking asshole," I respectfully suggest that you take the tens of thousands of dollars that they will bilk you out of and invest it in therapy instead.]

Harlequin's authors are still suing it, and if you're wondering just how scummy Harlequin is, the original article lays it all out in loving detail.

(I'm going to link to my old "Trust the Process, Not the Publisher" post now. No reason.)

Anyway, last Christmas, everybody and their dog got a Kindle; this Christmas, the dog is getting two. And someone is getting tired of hearing Jonathan Franzen whine about it.

Getting away from PV for a moment (shocking, I know), I'd mentioned earlier that Lindsay Buroker was posting about diversifying away from Amazon. How has that gone for her? Pretty well! She says:

In these last few months, I’ve reached a point where I could make a modest living as an author even without Amazon.

She credits having free books available with goosing sales at other retail outlets, as well as international sites.

So it is possible to diversify, and I find it notable that the people who think it's really important to do so (Buroker, Kris Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, me) are all people who have a significant history of self-employment and dealing with clients. And in an amazing coincidence, we all seem to think about this issue the same way--i.e. we all get REALLY REALLY REALLY nervous about being dependent on a single source of revenue. As Buroker writes:

I wasn’t too concerned about this until I started thinking about becoming a full-time independent author, AKA ditching the day job. I didn’t want to depend on one revenue stream, not if that money had to pay all the bills. As lucrative as Amazon can be, one never knows when they might switch the tables (dropping to a lower royalty rate or putting your account on hold for some reason or another), and then where would you be?