What I Saw At The Revolution

This ties in with Kate Paulk’s post on Thursday. I’ve been giving it some serious thought which was deepened and made more serious by discussions at Cosine in Colorado Springs last weekend.

When it comes to publishing, everyone can agree that the times they are achanging. How they are achanging and where the change is going, though, seems different for every person who looks at it.

A long established, very smart author on one of my panels told us the reading population is simply declining, and that there will be no book readers in the future. He might be right. On the other hand, I know that people who read for fun in current times are the same percentage of people who read for fun in Shakespeare’s time. And, looking back, we consider that time a wonderful revolution, a flourishing of culture. Now you’ll say there are for more writers today than then. This is true, but I doubt the percentage of writers trying to make a living from this is any greater than in that day.

Oh, yeah, and as in Shakespeare's day more people are learning to read well because of the new technology used in jobs -- in his time printing, in ours computers. Until that talking computer is invented, our kids will have to be literate.

As in Shakespeare’s day, copyright is in flux. We won’t go there. Not this time.

Instead, let’s look at part of what’s causing the confusion. Ebooks. We’re told ebooks are selling very well indeed. Perhaps they are. No author I know sees this in his statements, but then the only reason that Mark Twain didn’t say "There are lies, damn lies, and publisher’s sales statements" is that things were done differently in his days. Let’s assume that ebooks and esales and the proliferation of electronic – much of it unbranded – material is what is making paper books not sell. (We’ll forget other reasons, such as laws that cause publishers not to keep books in inventory. Such as the fact that chain bookstores set what will be in stores over a tri-state area, regardless of what people in each city want to read. Such as... many other things that will make me reach for the Scotch if I start thinking about them.)

So, ebook sales – great, right? Anyone can publish him or herself. Amazon will soon be offering a 70% for the author deal, thereby beating anything any other house has ever done. Joy and dancing on the streets, right? Authors can publish themselves, or come out with small presses, or anything they want to. They can form cooperatives, perhaps, as has been aired in this forum, and so propagate their names and their readers....

Maybe. Before I go into it, let me give you full disclosure of what I know of this matter.
I will grant you I’ve never epublished – or epublished exclusively. However, I’ve been surfing the world of blogs, observing, since almost the very beginning. In 1998 I started writing Jane Austen fan fiction and posting it for free. Perhaps it’s being married to a techie or perhaps it is that I have a fascination with the future, but I’m very much a creature of the internet. And I’ve deduced certain things, which I’m about to pass onto you, right or wrong.

The Austen fandom experience is probably the most relevant to e publishing. As I said I started in 1998, at two places. http://republicofpemberley.com/ and http://austen.com,/ in its Derbyshire writers league.

These two places were very different. Being a purist, I was was at first fonder of ROP simply because it tended to publish more traditional stories. Its idea was to publish only stories in period, no fantasy, no modern day stories with Jane Austen characters. I liked that, because it gave me security. I knew what I would find. ROP had editing and quality control. It had a "brand assurance."

However, when I tried to write a funny/silly story – very popular with the readership, btw – that implied but didn’t show some strange – but not out of question for the time – sexual practices, I got banned. I got banned without explanation and without so much as a by your leave.

That left me with the Derbyshire writers league, which is the best example of an "open environment." You can post anything – even though you might get yelled at for it. When I started posting there, you often got ten/twenty post installments per day.
And I discovered several heartening things.

a) Even though there was no editor, cream tended to rise. Cream being defined, at least, as those things that interested the audience. Meaning, you could have horrible melodrama, but it would be popular, if well written enough and hitting the right buttons. People consistently asked for the stories I also considered "best."

b) People were willing to sift through a lot of crud. Read a few lines, move on. Till something caught. The function of the editor would seem to be usurped that way.

c) People were willing – even eager – to give money for this supposedly free material. When five friends and I started our own just-for-fun website with our fan fiction, people kept emailing to ask HOW they could donate.

Okay, that’s the good side. Then there’s the bad side.

a) Over time there is fatigue. Unless there is a serial I’m following, and unless I’m in a cheerful, enthusiastic mood, I don’t wade into the board because it’s too much trouble to read a bunch of beginnings.

b) It’s not just me. People seem to burn out on the board in two to three years.

c) I don’t know what the money situation is. This was the early days of the internet. Since then, both competition and the sheer volume of free and easily accessible fiction has increased. Why should people troll the board when there’s free romances for the kindle every day at Amazon?

So, that’s for fan fic. But what about those free books on Amazon?

Well... I’ve been downloading them for a while too. Let’s just say that – so far – I have yet to buy a single second book in a series where the first book is small press or self-published. In fact, after looking through... oh, a dozen small press or self published books where the beginning was FRIGHTENINGLY bad, at this point I hesitate to download small press or self-published. In fact, in this medium, my experience has correlated with that of reading small press or self-published paper books. They tend to be what couldn’t cut it with big publishers.

Oh, there might be a few gems in the dreck, but after a while you despair of finding them.
By the way, the experience of friends who have fallen off publishers’ lists and gone to self published or e-published seems to corroborate this. Their downloads and sales immediately become too small to count. Satisfying if you’re retired, the kids are out of the house and you have no other hobbies. But as a job? No.

Are there exceptions? Sure there are. The romance market seems to be better and the erotica market even better, in e publishing. I think – I could be wrong – that anything whose covers might embarrass you in public or at your place of work will do better on e-readers. Thus, romance, which smart women have been afraid of reading in public for years because there’s such a prejudice against it; erotica because it’s best enjoyed privately; and possibly religious books, because they too invoke prejudice. From what I understand you can make a living in epublishing in all of those. But I haven’t tried, and I’m not a great reader of any of those genres.

So it’s all hearsay.

So... what did I see at the revolution? Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Your best bet for a successful and long publishing career is STILL traditional publishers, no matter how addled.

If we’re lucky, they’ll get a clue and get it soon enough. If we’re lucky, they’ll realize the way of the future is for them to become sort of imprimaturs of quality. Branding companies, if you wish. "So and so stands behind this book." Kind of like the funny labels on Port Wine bottles saying "Purveyor of Port to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II" yeah, like that.

If we’re lucky, a few celebrities – oh, I don’t know, Bill Gates? Stephen King? With culture-wide recognition will start their own brands.

Publicity should be part of the publisher’s job in the future. Easy enough. They won’t be PRINTING books, or not many of them.

I’m not reassured by the fact most big houses are offloading publicity to the author. Frankly, it would make more sense for them to offload paper-printing.

And what happens if they don’t get a clue soon? Well... we’ll all be writing the romance between two very religious people who like to have explicit sex...

UPDATE -- I wrote this last week but after the whole Macmillan/Amazon Kerfuffle, I have come to the conclusion this is not a rooster fight over two companies -- it's a rooster fight between two business models -- ebook and paper book, bottom up pull and top down push. And I've decided to add some thoughts to this:

First, Baen has it largely together on the ebook model. (The publisher has been heard to say "We sell stories. The physical means of delivering them is irrelevant." A button on Amazon and other esellers for the Baen ebooks would help. OTOH I have no clue how that works money wise, so I'm NOT sticking my big nose in.)

Second, I’m a Kindle owner/reader. I am NOT going to pay hard cover prices for an ebook. Not a DRMed, already out one at any rate (earcs are different). Frankly, though, I'm not paying hardcover prices for hardcovers these days. I'm either not buying them, buying them used or waiting for the paperback. Things are tough all over. And when I buy hardcovers, I do so because I already read and love the e-version. (Sigh. Unfortunately for my budget this happens far more than it should. Then I get the hc signed and have to buy a pback for the boys to maltreat.)

Third, yeah, yeah, paper books will be with us forever. In SOME form. (Just like snail mail is still with us, but most of us don’t use it that much anymore.) The question is... what form? Books have quite outstripped the reasonable price (defined as a chicken or a six pack of beer. Heck, some DVDs are cheaper.) I buy hard cover only when I like the ebook, and only for "love and cherish" purposes. This -- I think -- will continue to happen at least for a while. But our kids are comfortable with e-only. And the kindle is easier on my eyes than real books (or glowing screens which for me personally is the ipad’s downfall.) And I don't read many books with illustrations. And I read not just books but news on my kindle while traveling.

Fourth - Overall, the important thing to remember is that you can't put the genie of tech back in bottle once you take it out. History is littered with the corpses of industries that tried. Right now most publishers -- Baen excepted -- are busy trying to corral the genie and or throwing away the baby and rocking the bath water to sleep. So much the worse for readers and writers because for now we still need publishers as "brand guarantee." As noted above most – not all, and there are specific exceptions – self published ebooks are at the same level as most self published books. Not very good. But if publishers keep thinking their importance lies with printed pages and not the branding/publicity (both of which they seem to be cutting back on from already really low levels) this will change. Companies that adopt a model of branding/publicizing and keep the print only as "on demand" (or perhaps leather-tooled really prestige editions) will make it. Again, you can’t un-invent and un-disseminate tech. Coulda shoulda wouldluvta is great, but it’s not realistic. If wishes were horses, we’d be up to our necks in manure.

If I had to guess, some big publicity agency or even literary agency will get the idea of what’s needed sooner or later, and get HUGE by filling a vacant niche that fits with the "way of things to come." (Heck, Baen might do it. If I had a million bucks lying around right now I'd stake them and try to convince Baen to do it) The traditional publishers (Baen excepted) will be left to jump on the bandwagon or flail around helplessly till they die (and some will do one, some the other.)

[Oh, and on Amazon controlling distribution and this being a downside for epublishing. Oh, my stars and garters. Right now, this function is being filled by distributors and big store managers and (to an extent) by publisher "push" -- i.e. how many books they are willing to print and PUSH onto store shelves by a variety of means. (Hint, have you noticed there aren’t many "surprise bestsellers" anymore? They used to happen all the time. Not so much now.) Many, many reputable, big-publisher-accepted and printed books get almost no distribution. The distributor not thinking it will sell is the main and most frequent reason but accidental skipping happens too. (The month my first Baen book came out, the entire line of Baen books was accidentally "skipped" by a major distributor.) One man’s decision. (And I'm not saying it's a wrong decision, btw. Distributors and big traditional publishers need economies of scale. They need to think x amount of widgets will sell. Of course, in the normal course of things, they would be wrong, some times.) One accident. A whole set of books that never sells because it’s not on the shelves to sell. Right now we have one of the most top-down distribution models ever for books in possibly the most "taste and style" fragmented society in human history. Which is why we’re ripe for epublishing. That and because it's easier to make money on "small printruns" with epublishing. So if you and a thousand of your closest friends want to read about zombie vampires with an udder fetish there's a chance a writer can make decent amount writing those (not me, please. Ew.) Also, ask some author about tax laws on inventories that result in books being pulled out of print before they have time to catch via word of mouth. You’ll get an earful. If ebooks did nothing else, they would circumvent that and give the "surprise bestseller" a chance. (Perhaps vampire zombies with udder fetishes -- ew ew ew ew ew ew -- is an idea whose time has come.) So you see, sometimes it’s a good thing that the genie can’t be put back.]

Thoughts? Opinions? Rotten tomatos? Greasy cloaks? Orange peels? Don't just sit there.