How does quality shine through?

I was recently reading something about a reclusive-but-successful author, and people were commenting on how wonderful it was that some authors refuse to market and just let The Quality of Their Work Shine Through, and that contemporary authors should do the same.

I've heard this quality-of-the-work-shines-through argument before--for example, when someone decides not to proofread their book, because The Quality of the Work Will Shine Through!!! and I guess blind the reader to all the stupid grammatical errors.

The problem with deciding that you will just let The Quality of You Work Shine Through is this: THAT IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN IF NO ONE EVER READS YOUR BOOK.

Literary quality is not actually a form of light. There is no bright halo surrounding the really good books. Literary quality cannot shine through unless someone 1. knows your book exists, 2. picks it up, 3. reads it, and then 4. talks it up.

In the past, authors didn't have to market because publishers did it for them--or, at least, that was how things were supposed to work: Publishers sent books to reviewers. Publishers paid co-op to books stores for better placement. Publishers got extracts published in literary magazines. And in return, publishers got most of the money.

It wasn't that there was no marketing going on. It was just that the authors weren't the ones doing it, or at least not all of it.

It's really easy for people to think that their contribution to a success was the only one that matters. That's true of editors, marketing people...and writers! We do the writing, so we tend to think that good writing = successful book.

But if you write the best book in the entire world and then hide it, who is going to read it? If you put your book out without a cover and no support, who is going to find it? Readers aren't psychic--they don't know that a great book exists unless they're told.

Marketing isn't easy, and it doesn't come naturally for most people. But marketing isn't only for inferior writers. The notion that good-quality writing doesn't have to be marketed is simply bullshit--there's a strategy for marketing literary fiction (New York Times book review; NPR feature) that is as by-the-numbers as the marketing done for the most crassly commercial book imaginable. And the idea that so-and-so is such a superior writer that he just sits on a mountaintop next to Bob Dylan, contemplating his own awesomeness, probably came straight from so-and-so's marketing department.

That's the thing....

Lily While LeFevre has a good post on how silly the "Sign over your rights, and you'll do nothing but write!" argument is. (You know, aside from the fact that people working for traditional publishers spend a hell of a lot of time doing things other than writing. Read this and every other pre-self-publishing blog post by Joe Konrath if you don't believe me.) If you can write nonstop for 12 hours straight and not have it be complete gibberish that you have to throw out the following day, I salute you, but I can't. When I wrote nonfiction for a living, the vast majority of my time was spent conducting research--whenever I worked someplace that paid me by the hour rather than by the job, I was always surprised at how little time I spent actually putting words to paper.

Progress report

Today was kind of a bass-ackwards day for progress, in part because I really wanted to start writing again today but that just was not going to happen. So instead I listened to the MP3 files of chapters 1 & 2 of Trang, which sounded fine, and decided to go over chapter 3 one last time before converting it into an MP3. The good news is that chapter 3 was much cleaner than 1 & 2 were--let's hear it for getting up the learning curve. The bad news is that I realized I had done the metadata wrong with the MP3 files, so I had to convert 1 & 2 again, which defeated the purpose of listening to the "final" product and making sure nothing was wrong with it.

I think I'll just wait on giving everything a listen in MP3 form--at this point I'm getting too familiar with the material, and I had to start chapter 2 over again because I was tuning it out. (Because of the way today was, I had to multitask, so the moral of the story is not to multitask checking audio files with anything that requires concentration.) So far I haven't found any new and exciting glitches caused by the conversion process, but you know that the one file I don't listen to will be the one that's gibberish....

Progress report

I finished chapter 4 of the Trang audiobook, and then went over chapters 1 and 2--they're not perfect, but I think they're OK. I converted them into MP3s--that was easy to do, although I'm going to hang onto the source files in case I didn't do it right.

Progress report

I finished the noise removal on Chapter 4 of Trang--man, that is one loooong chapter. I think I'm going to have to do some file compression next. I haven't converted things into MP3 files yet because I want to have a chance to go over the first couple of chapters and make sure I didn't botch anything, but I'm going to have to do that soon because uncompressed sound files are really big. Anyway, I'm not quite done with this chapter because I noticed a couple of other flubbed lines: I'm having Vip speak really quickly, but he's speaking technobabble so I need to slow it down just a little bit, and then there's a line I re-recorded earlier that just does not match well--it's a case of the character voices polluting the narrator's voice.

Ah, that Goodreads weirdness....

Since I'm going to have a second pair of free days for Trang later this month, I thought I would set up a pay-per-click campaign on Goodreads.

The good news: I actually managed to do it--never a sure thing with Goodreads.

The weirdness (because there is always weirdness with them): Well, it's not really a pay-per-click campaign, exactly.

See, instead of you giving them your credit card number and them charging you for the actual clicks you get, you get charged in advance for the number of clicks you think you might get.

I mean, they try to help you with this, but...unsurprisingly, I got MANY MANY more clicks with my Facebook campaign advertising a free book than I am with my current campaign advertising a book you have to pay for. So when Goodreads is telling me, "Your budget is too high--you should lower it," I'm not sure what to do, because I doubt their little automatic guesstimator is able to take into account the fact that it's an ad for a free book. I did lower the budget, because I'm getting charged in advance, but now I wonder if the campaign won't max out far too early.

So, what happens if you pre-pay for more clicks than you actually get? I'm not sure. According to the Web site, they'll just extend your campaign until your payment is used up. The problem with that is, the book will be free for only two days, so the ads saying "FREE FOR KINDLE!!!" can't run for a week. You can put a strict limit on how many days the ad runs, but then what happens if you've overpaid? I didn't see any information about that. Standard business practice, of course, would be to refund the difference, but this is Goodreads. I'm going to let the ad run, and if it doesn't max out, I'll pop in to edit it once the free days are up.

Conclusions? Initially I was thinking that I'd be a good little scientist and not run a Facebook campaign at the same time, but now I think I'll run on both--that way if Goodreads does max out early, I'll still have Facebook working for me. Also, as seems to be the case with pay-per-click in general, Goodreads' pay-per-click service seems much better suited to a long-term campaign than a short, two-day one.

How bad is that bad news?

People who work in health care sometimes experience the following scenario:

A family has a beloved elderly relative, who we'll call Nana. Nana is not "young elderly"--she is 97 years old. Also, she is a diabetic. Also, she has suffered several strokes. Also, she suffers from congestive heart failure. Also, she has a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Needless to say, Nana is a heavy user of the health-care system. Staff at the local ER and ICU can recognize her on sight and try to keep a bed open for her at all times. People who work in the funeral industry automatically hand their cards to her family. Wherever she goes, flocks of expectant-looking vultures follow.

One day, Nana passes away.

The family is TOTALLY SHOCKED by this completely unexpected turn of events. How could Nana die!?! they shriek. They assume the cause must be malpractice and threaten to sue every health-care worker in sight.

If one of these health-care workers can get the family to calm down long enough to ask them why they are so surprised when Nana was obviously so very sick, the answer usually comes out along the lines of, Nana never died before. Those six months in an ICU? She made it through. Those 47 ER visits? She survived every single one.

The problem is that if enough bad news comes out about someone or something for a long enough time, people start to ignore the fact that the news is, in fact, very bad. If Nana holds on for long enough, it doesn't matter that she has one foot in the grave and the other on a greased banana peel: Nana is a survivor. She can't die.

I was reminded of this reading some responses to Barnes & Noble's dismal holiday sales. There has been so much bad news about Barnes & Noble for so long that some people seem to be thinking, well, this can't be that bad--they've survived crises before.

And they have, sure. They may survive this one in one form or another.

But I think writers really have to accept that, no matter how much they like the stores or long for a strong competitor to Amazon, Barnes & Noble may not make it through.

Why not? Well, you have to think like an investor. Basically there are two kinds of investors: Those who invest for income, and those who invest for growth. People who invest for income are looking for regular payments of money, like dividends, and don't care much if a company is growing or not. Those who invest for growth, in contrast, are looking to put a small amount of money into a business that is growing, and to eventually cash out a large amount of money. 

Two years ago, Barnes & Noble suspended its dividend, thereby ensuring that income investors would not be interested in the company. So it became a growth play.

The problem? Barnes & Noble's brick-and-mortar book business was shrinking, not growing.

Enter the Nook business--e-reading devices and e-books, a new growth business! That attracted $300 million from Microsoft and $89.5 million from Pearson, as well as other investment from other companies. These companies paid for shares in the Nook portion of Barnes & Noble as though that business on its own was worth more than Barnes & Noble in its entirety.

The problem is that, as we just discovered, the Nook business is doing horribly. It is not growing, it is shrinking. It is doing worse this year than last, it is doing worse than its competition, and it is doing worse in e-books than the traditional publishers who supply them.

It is difficult to attract growth investors when you are not growing, especially when others in your industry are. Not shockingly, people are wondering if those outside investors didn't make a mistake by putting so much money into the apparently not-so-valuable Nook business.

Now, a lot of things could happen here. A company could decide, "Gee willikers, no one's ever really given the Nook business a chance!" and plow a ton of money and effort into it. Despite the fierce competition in the sector, they could prevail, transforming Barnes and Noble into a wonderful online retailer that is so incredibly effective at selling self-published books that every last indie author makes a fortune!

Or, you know, they could just not put any more money into Barnes & Noble. The device business is bad--you have to compete with Amazon, which is willing to sell its devices at a loss--and the Web site's going to require some major fixing. "Don't throw good money after bad" is not some alien concept in corporate circles, and $300 million is simply not so much money to a company the size of Microsoft that they can't possibly write it off.

But what if, for some strange reason, Microsoft REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY wants the Nook? A year ago I said, "at this point any potential buyer will probably wait until B&N actually goes into bankruptcy and then snap up those assets on the cheap." That didn't happen in 2012, but just because Nana made it through her first 47 ER visits doesn't mean she's going to survive visit number 48.

Again, I don't know the future (although clearly I am not optimistic). I do not know for sure that Barnes & Noble is going to go under.

But I do think that it's wise for writers to be prepared for that possibility.

My advice? I'm so glad you asked!

1. Keep your ear to the ground. I'm not yanking my books from Barnes & Noble--they might pull through, after all. But the minute authors start complaining that Barnes & Noble isn't paying them what they are owed, I'm outta there. They are a client, and I do not work for clients who stiff other people, because I know they will soon stiff me.

2. Diversify. A surprising number of authors, especially new authors, put their book up only at Barnes & Noble--it's the name they associate with bookselling. I would say that diversifying away from Barnes & Noble is a really, really good idea these days--if you haven't done that before, do it now. If you sell well at Barnes & Noble (lucky you!) but not so well at other places, start marketing campaigns to build bases at the other retailers. Another thing to keep in mind: If you've got your book up only at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, recognize that, if you don't branch out, there's a solid chance that you'll soon have all your eggs in the Amazon basket. 

Likewise, if you do marketing or sell paper books at your local Barnes & Noble bookstore, start putting out feelers to other bookstores in your area--it can't hurt you no matter what happens to Barnes & Noble. And think outside the bookstore box, if possible. Even traditional publishers market to other types of stores, and I've seen books by local indie authors at stores that carry goods by other types of local artists.

3. Consider the industry impact. Barnes & Noble has a long history of working hand-in-glove with traditional publishers, and publishers have been predicting that the sky will fall if the chain doesn't stay in business.

Are they full of it? Quite possibly, but if the chain does collapse, less-profitable or more-unwary publishers could go down with it. The uncertainty surrounding Barnes & Noble also surrounds traditional publishing, so extra caution is needed before signing any contracts.

Progress report: Fun with noise removal edition

I was doing noise removal today--I wasn't able to get it all done and I realized that I had flubbed a line that will have to be re-recorded and compressed, but I made a good start.

I've mentioned that you have to be careful with noise removal when you have multiple characters talking--you don't want breath sounds between characters, but you do want to leave them in while a character is talking. The problem this time around is that Patch's dopy voice apparently invited some heavy mouth breathing. So with him I'm using a very slight noise removal so at least he doesn't sound like he's having an asthma attack in the middle of a briefing. (And no, his lungs haven't been ruined by smoking pot--he uses a patch, of course!)

When I did the computerized voice that follows Philippe on his trip to Titan, I went ahead and took out all the breath noises, leaving hard cut-offs between words, and it sounds appropriately artificial. I'm going to do the same thing with the Magic Man. In theory, all the translated voices should sound artificial, but I think that would drive people crazy, so the translated voices will just be relatively calm and generic. The exception is going to be the Magic Man--I think it makes sense to make his voice fairly...uncomfortable. Listening to him shouldn't be pleasant.

Something to think about

When folks talk about Barnes & Noble's horrible holiday sales, a common theme is complaints about the Web store.

While a lot of times people complain about companies that still sell well, in this case I think Barnes & Noble's bad Web site is really hampering them. According to Mike Shatzkin, their 13.1% increase in e-book sales is far below what it should have been, despite being the company's best number by far. (I can see that--it's way below the 34% growth reported by traditional publishers, and of course if Barnes & Noble experienced 43% growth last year....)

Barnes & Noble Web store's design has been taken apart pretty thoroughly. But instead of focusing on improving the layout of its virtual store, Barnes & Noble followed the strategy of getting Nooks into other brick-and-mortar stores.

At this point, that's definitely looking like a critical mistake (and given how holiday sales went, I bet many of those retailers wished they had carried the Kindle instead). I also would say that it's symptomatic of Barnes & Noble's habit of simply not taking e-commerce seriously. This is a company that, back in the day, revolutionized book retail, but they don't seem to be willing to do even basic and obvious improvements to their online retail outlet (and of course they're busily pulling books out of their brick-and-mortar stores, therefore losing the expertise they had).

Passive Guy argues (convincingly, in my opinion) that the bad Web store pollutes the entire brand. Even if it just pollutes the e-book buying experience, that has serious ramifications: It takes ten seconds on Google to figure out that you could be reading Kindle books on your Nook, and one click more to realize there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to allowing Nook readers to NOT buy their books from Barnes & Noble.

From the Annals of Wishful Thinking....

Or maybe the Annals of Paper Fetishists. Because this really kind of baffles me--it's an article in the Wall Street Journal about how nothing's going to change in the world of books. You know, e-books are just a fad, and paper will remain ascendant, that sort of thing. It's not even by someone who works for a publishing house--he just really hates the Internet, and I guess e-books shall not be safe from his wrath.

Of course he does the usual thing: He conflates e-readers and e-books, he makes the claim that tablet buyers won't go on to buy e-books, he seems to think that the early adapters are the only adapters, and being no amnesiac, he argues that a 34% increase in the sales of e-books (by traditional publishers only, of course) only appears to be growth at "a healthy clip" and is actually "a sharp decline."

But the main claim of his that I haven't addressed ad nauseum in this blog (and Passive Guy does a nice takedown of it all here) is that people LOVE paper books. They just LOVE them. Any book they really think is worthwhile, they will buy in paper, because they LOVE LOVE LOVE paper.

How attached are Americans to old-fashioned books? Just look at the results of a Pew Research Center survey released last month. The report showed that the percentage of adults who have read an e-book rose modestly over the past year, from 16% to 23%. But it also revealed that fully 89% of regular book readers said that they had read at least one printed book during the preceding 12 months.

You know what? The other day I finished not one, but two (gasp!) paper books. Yes! I read e-books and paper books!

Of course, I didn't buy the paper books--I got them from the library. I live near a library that is part of a system that has a really wonderful Web site. It's kind of like Netflix for books--you can easily put any paper book from the entire system on hold at your local library using that Web site. They'll even e-mail you when it's ready!

Their e-book setup is a lot clunkier. They may have improved it lately, I don't know, but the last time I tried it, it involved downloading special software (that was with my old computer--will it work with my phone? Dunno) and it was generally a huge pain in the butt. Everything I read about the restrictions publishers are putting on libraries' use of e-books makes me think that getting e-books from my library will continue to be a pain in the butt.

So when I get books from my library, I get paper books. Paper books have been around a long time, so my local library system has had a long time to set itself up to make it super-easy to get your hands on them.

I don't read paper because I LOVE it. I read paper because it's convenient. There's a whole lot of paper books out there, and they've been around for a really long time, so they're easy to get a hold of--I go to someone's house, and hey! There's a bunch of paper books sitting around! Maybe I can borrow one!

When those systems aren't in place (which is the case for most indie writers), I get the e-books instead. I don't LOVE digital because it's digital--I LOVE that it's convenient. I don't LOVE paper, but I do LOVE my local library because it does such a good job making paper convenient. Maybe someday they'll be able to do the same with e-books, and then I will LOVE getting e-books from them instead.

I also recently bought some paper books. One was for me because it was written by a friend with a tradpub deal, so I assume she's getting screwed on the e-book royalties. The others were gifts for friends and relatives. These are people who don't have e-reading devices--or maybe they do, I'm not sure, and I don't really know how you go about buying a gift e-book for someone, so I get the paper books.

Paper's long history works in its favor in that scenario as well: A paper edition is the safe choice for a gift. No one is going to tell me that they can't read it because they don't have the right equipment. (In addition, paper's higher price is actually an advantage in that context--if I buy you a $20 book, that's a nice little present. If I buy you a $3 book, you're going to think I'm cheap, so I'll have to figure out something else to buy you, and honestly I just don't have the time.)

We've been relying on printed paper for more than 500 years now. The fact that a non-paper technology now accounts for a sizeable hunk of the book market is actually really remarkable considering that, for centuries, paper was the only game in town. But people aren't just going to suddenly drop the old technology completely, not when so much of our infrastructure is dedicated to it.

Nice!

Dean Wesley Smith notes that 45 of the 300 six-figure traditional-publishing deals reported to Publisher's Marketplace were books that were originally self-published. Just more evidence that self-publishing doesn't cut you off from anything these days....

Progress report

I was watching a kidlet for a couple of days, but today I was able to edit Chapter 4 of the Trang audiobook. I only had to re-record a few things, so I did that, put them in, and compressed it. That just leaves the noise reduction to be done.

As I mentioned, there are a lot of character voices in this chapter. I was poking around looking for advice on those--don't bother. Person A explains that they HATE character voices, Person B explains that they LOVE character voices, and Masturbating Romance Reader explains that women shouldn't do audiobooks at all, because female voices just don't "work" for her. (My feeling is that I have so many characters and so much dialog that I really have to use character voices, otherwise it's too confusing. And I do NOT want to know whether or not my voice "works" for you, thank you very much.)

There's that other shoe!

Remember how Barnes & Noble said they were going to miss their numbers? They really did, badly. Holiday sales were very bad, worse than people expected even with the warning.

Mostly this is because of craptacular Nook device sales--although excluding the Nook, sales at the stores were down 3.1%, which is bad, but not as bad as the 10.9% decline you get when you throw the Nooks in.

The Nook business overall (devices + e-books) was down 12.6%, but sales of e-books and the like were actually up 13.1%. So the device is the real albatross around the neck of the Nook business, but the brick-and-mortar business is declining just fine on its own. (Apparently people don't bother to go to the bookstore any more. Gee, I wonder why?)

Over the past three years, the Nook business has lost $733 million. The main problem isn't that they're losing money (which is often the norm for a new business), it's that Nook sales are tanking as other tablet/e-reading devices are doing fine. So they are failing to compete effectively, which is Not Good, and the old cash-generating business is faltering, which is also Not Good.

Progress report

Happy New Year!

I recorded Chapter 4 of Trang--that's the chapter where we meet the soldiers, which means a lot of character voices. I'm using a relaxed stoner-dude voice for Patch. I always find it difficult to switch from an uptight voice to the stoner-dude voice, though--at one point I just had to pause recording and take a moment to get into that stoner-dude space.

A sad but illuminating read

I recently finished Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Wow.

Basically it's a story of a company making the difficult transition from being a mom-and-pop to being a large public corporation. But from the point of view of the writers and artists, it's a story about getting screwed, very, very badly.

Now, the comics industry has evolved, so these days people are much more likely to get an ownership share of what they create. But that didn't used to be the case--it used to be that, if you wanted to work in comics, you had to work as a hired hand--and what's alarming about it is how normal that seemed to everyone.

In fact, there are a couple of places in the book where people--sometimes other comics people--express surprise at the notion that the creator of a character would dare expect an ownership share! After all, they didn't contribute anything!

Wow. Wowowowow.

And very enlightening, no?

What does a person mean when they say that the creator of a character didn't contribute anything to it?

Well, for starters, I think there's that very human tendency to give yourself credit for anything that is successful, even if your involvement was tangential. That's definitely a major issue in comics--often you've got one person coming up with the character with input from others, and then still other people develop it. So if you contributed, say, the money, you might well say, "I contributed the money! You, the creator, didn't! My contribution is the only one that matters!"

The other thing is I think an important insight to the corporate mentality: For-profit corporations exist to make money. Ergo, it's easy for people working at corporations to assume that the only thing that counts for anything is money.

I remember at one point someone was confused because some corporation was claiming that they needed to restructure because they weren't getting enough "respect." The person found that baffling, because why the hell would you undergo the trouble and expense of restructuring in order to get respect? That sounds neurotic at best. And I had to explain that, in business speak, "respect" means "money from investors." A "good" business is a profitable business--it doesn't matter if they make money by poisoning small children, as long as they are making money, they are "good." If they are making more money, they are "better."

If you are in an environment where the only thing that is recognized as positive and worthwhile is money, then it can become very, very easy to dismiss other kinds of contributions. That's why one person can create (out of thin air) a character worth billions of dollars, and another person can, with complete honesty, express their sincere opinion that the first person did not contribute anything to that character.

Many of Marvel's artists and writers experienced true poverty, and in some cases they got desperate enough to sue. Marvel defended itself very aggressively (and why shouldn't they, these people had contributed nothing), and even went so far as to countersue people for amounts of money that were piddling to Marvel but doubtless ruinous to those people. They don't apologize for this--they regard these people as thieves who are trying to get something for nothing.

The only thing protected people was insisting on having fair contracts. That was it. Anyone who expected largesse at any time from any of Marvel's various owners got the shaft. Of course they did. They hadn't contributed anything!

Color me skeptical

I've gone back and forth on Barnes & Noble's prospects, but some news came out recently that really is making me down on the whole Nook business.

Namely, Pearson (owner of Penguin) is taking a five percent ownership share in the Nook business.

It's not just that I think Pearson is making a host of dumb decisions lately. Or that I think their rationale for doing this (securing better distribution for their educational materials?) is basically nonsensical, or that I think they're really shoring up Barnes & Noble because they're hoping nothing will ever change in bookselling.

It's also because Barnes & Noble also announced that holiday sales sucked for the Nook business (which, it should be noted, includes both e-books and e-readers), and that the company is going to miss its numbers. According to Publisher's Weekly, twice as many Nooks sold this Thanksgiving weekend than last--which parallels Amazon's report of stronger Kindle sales that weekend--but still, Barnes & Noble is not going to meet their revenue projections. (And I know it's not been a great holiday season for retailers in general, but Amazon isn't saying that they're going to miss their numbers.)

I've mocked Barnes & Noble for being rather creative in how they present themselves to the market, and I think you see the fallout from that sort of creativity here. Either Barnes & Nobles projections were bullshit designed to keep investors from running away, or the company has been doing a horrible job selling e-books and e-readers. Or both.